Stephen Solomita - A Piece of the Action

Pat Cohan suddenly relaxed. He leaned back and tried, unsuccessfully, to run his fingers through his stiff white hair. “Sal, the public sees dope as worse than murder, worse than rape. We’re under tremendous pressure to do something about it. Think for a minute. Drugs are federal. The FBI goes after drugs. The FDA goes after drugs. Suppose the feds really turn up the heat. Suppose they put a hundred agents in Manhattan. Suppose they analyze our paperwork and discover that arrests for heroin are virtually non-existent in a certain section of the Seventh Precinct. Suppose …”

“Accacio understands that, Pat. He told me he didn’t care if we busted every junkie in his territory, because they come right back to the needle as soon as they get out of jail. He doesn’t care if we bust a few of his street dealers, either. All he wants is enough advance warning to keep the people close to him out of it.”

“That way he protects his dope, right? That way he makes sure we never seize enough to really hurt him.”

“Pat, we could do this all night. My problem is I don’t see an easy way out of it, short of committing suicide. We’re in too deep. If Accacio drops a dime on us? I don’t have to draw no pictures, do I?”

“Stop right there, Sal.” Cohan set his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Are you tellin’ me the little greaseball actually threatened us?”

Patero shook his head. “You know, it’s funny, Pat. You didn’t turn a hair at the idea of covering up a homicide. But now you’ve got your balls in an uproar because Accacio dared to challenge your authority. It sounds like you’ve got things all backwards.”

Pat Cohan ignored the jibe. “What you said before? About Accacio dropping a dime on us ? Well, Sal, I’ve never met the man, have I?”

It was Patero’s turn to blush and Pat Cohan watched the process with satisfaction.

“We’re the cops, Sal, remember? There’s twenty-four thousand of us. Prostitution? Gambling? The last I heard, they were called vices. And we own the Vice Squad. What we could do, if we wanted to, is hit every one of Accacio’s outlets on the same night. Teach the wop a lesson. If we wanted to.”

“He could still give my name to Internal Affairs.”

“Nobody cares about the pad, Sal. The pad is clean. Plus, the one thing we are in the Department is loyal. If Steppy Accacio breaks the faith, I’ll see to it that he never operates in New York City, again. Never. ”

“I appreciate that.” Patero, much to his surprise, felt a wave of emotion roll over him. It took him a moment, but he finally recognized the emotion as pride, not gratitude. He was proud of an NYPD that protected its own, proud of a Pat Cohan who put loyalty before everything else, proud of himself for being part of the process. “I mean it, Pat. It makes a difference.”

Pat Cohan cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. “Meanwhile, we haven’t been threatened. All it is, when you think about it, is a simple request. So, let’s consider it. How much are we talking about here?”

“Right now, we’re gettin’ a grand a month out of Accacio. Six hundred for you, four hundred for me. We help him out and he’ll double that, for starters.”

“Can we do it? Assuming we want to do it. The Narcotics Squad is pretty clean. If anyone’s taking, they’re keeping it to themselves.”

“Pat, I’m a Boy Scout. I come prepared. Ya know Wolf? The Jew in Safes and Lofts? Well, he’s in my pocket. Been there for more than a year, so I know he ain’t gonna fold. What I wanna do is transfer him over to Narcotics. Nobody’ll think twice, because I been under pressure to beef up Narcotics, anyway. Wolf’ll be my ears inside the squad. Accacio says all he wants is information, so information is what we’ll give him.”

Pat Cohan relit his cigar. “The thing is we can’t stop it. I mean the dope. Maybe if we’d started right after the war, when it was still small, we could’ve done something, but now it’s out of control.”

“For once, I gotta agree.” Patero sat up in the chair and crossed his legs. “The only thing we can do is regulate it.”

“Tell ya what, Sal. You go see Accacio tonight. Tell him we accept his offer, but it’ll take some time to set things up. Which it will, of course. Just make sure you tell him we’re expecting the first payment now. That’ll give us a month to make up our minds.”

They were silent for a moment, their silence constituting a kind of agreement. Pat Cohan, satisfied with his decision, let his thoughts wander lightly over his possessions-his home, his numerous bank accounts, his sad, sick wife, his only daughter. They finally came to rest on what had been bothering him all along. Stanley Moodrow.

“Let’s talk about Stanley for a moment,” he said.

Patero sighed, shrugging his shoulders. “I already clued you in, Pat. Stanley’s not a bad kid, but these things we’re doin’ ain’t right for him. And it ain’t his fault. It’s yours. You rushed him along too fast.”

“But he hasn’t actually refused to cooperate?”

“Do I have to go through it again? I gave Stanley a list of burglaries. I told him to include all of them in Zayas’s confession. He didn’t do it. Detectives, third grade, are not allowed to make their own decisions. It’s that simple. Plus, even if he did go along on the collections, I could see he didn’t like it. He asked to be put in one of the squads. Pat, I know you got a special interest here, but I ain’t got the time to be your future son-in-law’s psychiatrist. Either straighten him out or get Kathleen to find another boyfriend. Meanwhile, there’s somethin’ I ain’t told ya, somethin’ I didn’t wanna talk about over the phone.”

Pat Cohan sighed. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Ya remember the spic who got iced on Pitt Street? In the whorehouse?”

“I’m not senile. Yet.”

“Well, Stanley asked me about him this afternoon.”

Cohan’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. He rejected his first thought, that Stanley Moodrow was one of the headhunters from Internal Affairs, because it was too gruesome to contemplate.

“It ain’t what ya thinkin’,” Sal continued. “The spic, Melenguez, was a friend of one of Stanley’s neighbors. All Stanley wants to know is how it happened and where the investigation’s goin’. I told him I’d check on it and get back to him.”

“This is what happens,” Cohan grunted, “when you put a cop in his home precinct. Cases become personal. It destroys perspective.”

“The perspective here is that we’re not doin’ shit to find the perpetrator. The perspective is that even if we don’t know who the shooter is, we know who sent him. Now, whatta ya wanna tell Stanley?”

Pat Cohan took his time thinking it over. He re-lit his cigar, then blew on the ash until it glowed. “The first thing we better do is take it out of the precinct. Kick it up to the Organized Crime Task Force. They’ve already got a backload of mob killings that’ll keep them busy for the next five years. I expect to see Stanley tonight. I’ll tell him the spic was a pimp and we think his killing was mob-related, part of a turf war.”

“Sounds okay.” Patero glanced down at his watch. “Jeez, it’s almost nine o’clock. I ain’t laid eyes on my kids in two days. Lemme get the hell out of here. Maybe I’ll be home before they go to bed.”

Pat Cohan left his desk as soon as the door shut behind Sal Patero. He walked across the room, to a small table near the window, and sat down. A half-finished jigsaw puzzle lay on the table and he began to pick up individual pieces and fit them into an apple tree in the right hand corner of the puzzle. With his hands busy, his mind was free to consider his daughter’s boyfriend.