Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Don’t bother, thanks,” she said. “They’ll drip on the rack.”

Jake smiled. “That’s what Sophie says.” He took a seat at the kitchen table. Outside, it was drifting into deep blue, and moths were beginning their totentanz against the back-door lightbulb.

“How is she?”

“Not bad for an old lady who just had a goddamn thing the size of a pipe wrench stuck in her body. Amazing what they can do nowadays.”

“Yeah, amazing.” She turned off the hot water, racked the egg pan, and faced him, leaning against the sink. “Was she upset about this afternoon?”

“Upset? Sophie’s hard to upset. Something don’t go right, she puts it out of her mind. You think of what she’s been through, it’s probably the best thing.”

Marlene pulled out her pack and stuck a sandy, crumpled filter tip in her mouth. Jake lit it and lit a panatela for himself. “Yeah, no point in carrying all that stuff around with you, except if you plan on doing something with it. And, speaking of the past, does she know about you?”

“She knows I wasn’t teaching in a girls’ school,” he said after a brief pause. He was watching her closely.

“But not that you were Jake the Baker.”

“Huh. You’re some detective. Where’d you hear that?”

“Around. Does she?”

“That? No. Why, you going to tell her?”

“No, of course not. You did a good thing for me and my kids today. I owe you. But as a matter of curiosity, and because I got a stake in it, what kind of paper would it be that Salvatore Bollano wouldn’t like to see on the TV?”

Jake released a long stream of cigar smoke and studied a large gray moth battering against the kitchen window. He took a deep breath and let it out. “You know I worked for Sally back then?”

“Uh-huh. What as, exactly?”

“I kept the union in line, made sure Sally got his cut of the dues, took care of the pension funds for him. Moved money from here to there and back. Like that.”

“And put guys in ovens?”

Jake chuckled. “You don’t want to believe everything you hear, Marlene. Anyway, a lot of cash moved around, and there were markers, little pieces of paper that said who got paid what-like receipts, you know? The guy’s initials, the amount, and who cleared the payoff. That was usually Sally himself, but me, too. We called them tags. Like a guy would say, ‘Tag so-and-so for fifty G.’ ”

“A guy like Heshy Panofsky?”

Jake raised his eyebrow and smiled. “Oh-ho! Now I see why Sally sent that kid around to see you. No, as a matter of fact, Panofsky was at the other end. He was a cutout, if you know what that means. The politicians didn’t want to know from where the dough really came. But they get it from Panofsky, they could tell themselves it was clean.”

“So Panofsky collected money from the Mob and paid it out. I figured that out already.”

“Uh-huh. He would keep track of it in a book he kept locked up in his office. The tag book, they called it, like a ledger. Initials, dates, amounts, the whole megillah .”

“That’d be an interesting book to read.”

“Interesting, yeah, but not healthy,” said Jake, and Marlene asked the inevitable next question: “This has something to do with why Jerry Fein got killed, doesn’t it?”

Jake’s face darkened, and he looked again at the window. The moth was stationary now, exhausted, longing for the light. “That’s a whole different story. You don’t need to know about that.”

“Oh, Christ! Jake, tell me you didn’t do him!”

Jake looked at her, meeting her eyes. She thought, What is it about me that attracts the bad boys of the world? What do they want from me? Why do I like them? Thinking thus, it seemed like a long while before he answered.

“No, I didn’t do him. Little Sal and Charlie Tuna did him. I knew about it, though. I found that scumbag Nobile for them.”

“For the key.”

“Yeah. The key.”

“Was Panofsky involved?”

“Nah. They wouldn’t involve Heshy, a thing like that. He was their gate into legit stuff. They wouldn’t want him to get his hands dirty. Did he know about it? Hell, yeah, he knew about it. Had to.”

“So, why, Jake? Why did they kill their own lawyer?”

“Why? Because he found out who framed him on the jury tamper. Thing about Jerry, see, he played it straight up. He gave you his best shot, and he was good. But Sally, on that Gravalotti thing, his own ass on the line, he wasn’t gonna take no chances. So he tells Heshy, put the fix in, Heshy, get to a juror, a couple of jurors. So Heshy does it. But he works it so that when it comes out, Jerry looks like the one done it. And he, I mean Heshy, makes sure it comes out.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Marlene.

“Hey, what do I know? But Panofsky had this hard-on for Jerry Fein. It was a known thing. Everybody but Jerry knew it, but Jerry, he couldn’t take it in. He brought the guy into the firm, covered his ass, he’s making a good living. . what’s that thing about punishment, something about a good deed?”

“No good deed goes unpunished.”

“Yeah! That was them.”

Marlene thought for a moment about what she’d learned from Abe Lapidus. Heshy’d done the frame, Fein had taken the fall to protect Bernie Kusher, but then found out that Heshy had screwed him. He’d be mad as hell, but. . She turned a puzzled face to Jake. “But. . okay, say Jerry found out about the frame. He threatens to expose Panofsky. What’s that got to do with the killing? Bollano killed Jerry as a favor to Panofsky?”

“Nah. No way. No, that’s something I could never figure out. Sally was really mad at Jerry, really mad, and Sally, you know he was usually a bucket of ice about business. No, this was something else, something personal. Because it looks bad, guys in that business don’t usually knock off their lawyers. Lawyer’s no danger to them, because of that rule-they can’t rat them out.”

“Right, client privilege. So, tell me, what was the paper you’re going to scare Big Sally with?”

Jake shrugged, raised his eyebrows. “Oh, that. Hell, that was mostly bluff. I handled a lot of paper for Sally, he don’t know what stuck to my fingers. Tags and stuff. I got some stuff with my lawyers, anything happens to me. . you know. But the tags ain’t worth much without the tag book.”

“And I presume that’s gone by now.”

“Hell, yeah! I mean, they’re not stupid. After Jerry went, Panofsky cleaned out the office, dumped Jerry’s secretary, got rid of Bernie Kusher-”

“I thought Kusher embezzled some money and took off.”

“The way I heard it, Heshy was about to rat him out, but Bernie beat him to the punch. He cleaned out the safe, all of Sally’s payoffs for the month, had to be seven, eight hundred large. Heshy had to loot the trusts to pay it back, which he stuck on Bernie. Neat trick, when you think about it. Always a joker, Bernie.”

Not a million, though, thought Marlene. Some of the trust money had stuck to Heshy’s fingers. She said, “Yeah. Speaking of funny, aren’t you worried about Vinnie Fresh? He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who you blow his ear off he’s going to laugh and forget about it.”

Jake ground out his cigar and laced his hands behind his head. “Well, I tell you, Marlene: one, I’m seventy-two. If not this, it’ll be the prostate or some other damn thing. I never figured to last this long in the first place. Practically everybody I came up with is dead. All this with Sophie-it’s a bonus I never expected. And two-these guys they got today, they ain’t the same as guys like me. They ain’t tough the same way. I’d’ve pulled a stunt like that on the beach, in the old days, I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. I’d be feeding the crabs. We used to get any shit, boom! Come right back at you, none of this fucking around. So, I ain’t worried. I can take care of myself. Believe me, Salvatore knows that better’n anybody alive.”