Stephen Solomita - A Piece of the Action

“If you become a cop, Stanley, sooner or later people are gonna offer you money. What you gotta understand is that, as far as the Department is concerned, there’s clean money and dirty money. The boss in the coffee shop won’t let you pay for lunch? That’s clean. That’s expected. Likewise for the mechanic who tunes up your car for half-price. But don’t take money from a burglar. Or a dope addict. Or, God forbid, a rapist. That’s as dirty as it gets. You know about the pad?”

“No.”

Uncle Pavlov had gone on to explain the setup. Every precinct had a bagman who collected from the bookies and the pimps. The captain took the biggest piece, then the lieutenants got theirs, then the sergeants, then a few detectives.

“Beat cops like me get nothing,” he concluded.

“You’re saying that the money just comes along like your paycheck?”

“See, that’s the thing, Stanley. Is the pad clean or is it dirty? Not everybody participates. In fact, if the captain’s clean, there ain’t no pad. If the captain’s clean, then it’s every cop for himself. By the way, I’m sure you heard that gettin’ transferred out to Staten Island is a horrible punishment for a cop. Ask yourself why that should be? A lotta cops live on Staten Island. There’s no violence out there. You could do your tour without worrying that someone’s gonna toss a brick off a roof. So I ask ya, Stanley, why is gettin’ transferred out to the boondocks a punishment?”

“Because there’s no money out there. No pad.”

“Congratulations, my boy, you’ve just won a free trip to the real world.”

What had stuck in Moodrow’s mind was the part about “not everybody participates.” He’d never given it much thought while he was fighting his way into the detectives, but he’d expected to have a choice, to think about it before it was shoved into his face. Sure, people wanted to make bets. They wanted to get laid, too. But when these same people got in over their heads, the bookies sent guys with baseball bats to do the collecting. And the pimps weren’t any better. They controlled their stables with anything that came to hand. Fists, chairs, lit cigarettes, razors, knives. Anything.

Moodrow had seen it close up. It was always a beat cop who arrived first when the bookies got through collecting. A beat cop who picked up the pieces and loaded them into an ambulance. Besides, the story Moodrow kept hearing was that the bookies and pimps were employees. They worked for bosses who also distributed the heroin that’d hit the Lower East Side like a biblical plague.

What it needed was sorting out. No matter what the cops did, even if they never took a dime from anybody, the gambling and the whores would still be there. You couldn’t stop it and the politicians would never legalize it. The cops were the regulators, the only regulators. It wasn’t what they were set up to do, but if they didn’t do it, the situation would be a lot worse.

“You in dreamland, Stanley?”

Sal Patero was smiling. He had no inkling of what was going on behind the swelling and the bruises on Moodrow’s face. Fighters are trained not to show an opponent what they’re feeling. A triumphant grin might inspire a beaten fighter to give it one more try. Showing fear or pain, on the other hand, encourages an even greater beating. If you were smart, you learned to show nothing. You learned, for instance, to hold yourself erect after a left hook just turned your liver to jelly.

“No, no. I’m here. I was just thinking.”

“Have something to eat. It helps prevent that condition.”

The waiter was already standing by the table. He took their order, veal for Patero and the shrimps in hot sauce for Moodrow, then disappeared into the kitchen.

“I was thinking about what we’ve been doing all morning,” Moodrow said.

“I was afraid you were gonna say that.”

“The thing of it is that if you’d given me a choice, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Whether I would’ve gone into it or not. But now that I’m already in the soup, I wanna try to understand what I’m eatin’. So’s I don’t get indigestion.”

“Keep goin’, Stanley.”

Patero was obviously irritated, but Moodrow wasn’t really concerned about Patero. Pat Cohan had set this up and unless Pat Cohan decreed otherwise, they were stuck with each other.

“This is the pad we’re doing, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re the precinct bagman, right?”

“Don’t make this into a cross-examination, Stanley. I don’t feature being interrogated. Especially by you.” Patero’s ears were red, the veins along his temples swollen.

“How often do we have to do this?”

“Whenever I say so.”

“C’mon, Sal. I got a right to know. Is this it? Eight hours a day, five days a week until I earn my pension?”

“You want out? There’s ten thousand cops who’d give their right arms to be in your position. You want out, just say the word.”

“That’s not what you told me this morning. This morning you told me if I had a problem, I should take it to Pat Cohan.”

“Fuck Pat Cohan.”

“Ya know, Sal, you should try to put yourself in my position. Five years I’m a cop and the most I ever got out of it was a free hamburger. I’m a detective for five hours and I’ve committed five felonies. Five counts of bribery, if not outright extortion. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming you. But I think I got a right to know what’s going on. You haven’t even told me what my piece is.”

Patero stared into Moodrow’s eyes for a moment. “You tryin’ to tell me that Pat Cohan didn’t spell this out for you? That’s impossible.”

Moodrow leaned over the table. “He didn’t tell me shit.”

Instinctively, Patero sat back in his chair. There was something unpredictable about Stanley Moodrow, something he didn’t care for at all. “Pat Cohan is a prick.”

“This I already know.”

“He wants to see what you’ll do. Before you marry his daughter. In a way, you can’t blame him.”

“But what does the pad have to do with it?”

“You grew up here, on the Lower East Side, right?”

“So?”

“Me, I grew up in Red Hook, near the docks. My father was a longshoreman. When I was ten years old, someone put a hook through his head. Left him in the hold of a banana boat. I never found out who did it. I never even found out why it was done. That’s the way life was in those neighborhoods. Still is, for that matter. Anyway, right after I came into the job, I married a Jewish girl from Forest Hills, Andrea Stern. I loved the hell out of her, but our marriage didn’t work out.

“Andrea grew up in one of those apartments on Queens Boulevard, the kind with the fountains in the lobby. That’s what I liked about her. She was innocent, a child with a woman’s body. In fact, I was so crazy about Andrea that I didn’t give a lotta thought to what was gonna happen after we got married. Which I should’ve, because it turned out she couldn’t take Red Hook. She tried like hell, but it was too much for her. Too rough in every way. Meanwhile, I’m makin’ four thousand dollars a year and there’s no way we can afford to go anywhere else. When Andrea offered to find a job, her parents went through the roof. They couldn’t live with the disgrace of their daughter having to go out to work. They offered to give us money.

“I don’t wanna make a long story outta this, but the moral is I should’ve thought things out before I got married. Only I was too much in love to think about anything but the wedding night. You? You’re in the same boat. Or, at least, that’s what Pat Cohan believes. You and Kathleen come from two different worlds. Her world is easy to get used to. Yours ain’t.