James Sheehan - The Mayor of Lexington Avenue

“You boys pokin’ any of them high school girls yet?” Vito would ask every week.

“Yeah. Three this week,” Mikey would reply. Sometimes he’d change the number. It didn’t matter. Vito knew he was lying.

“Listen to old Vito,” he would say-he was about thirty-five at the time. “You gotta treat them nice. Treat them with respect and they’ll be all over you. You gotta dress nice too. They don’t wanna go out with no bums.” Then he’d laugh and the boys would laugh with him and he’d prance into the back room. Vito was a dandy in his silk shirts and sharkskin pants but the boys knew he was not a person to mess with.

At one or thereabouts, Frank would arrive. He never came alone and he never entered the store until Jimmy came out and invited him in. Guys were running out of money by one o’clock, and Frank was there to replenish their pockets.

Frank was a loan shark and his arrival always caused a stir. When Jimmy went out to get him, some guys would disappear, quickly walking out the front door, their shoulders hunched, their hats down over their foreheads. They never acknowledged Frank and he never acknowledged them.

“Frank’s a gentleman,” Jimmy told the boys one day after everyone had left. “He never tries to collect when he’s at my store.” Apparently the guys who disappeared every week when Frank arrived didn’t know about that part of the arrangement.

Gambling was only part of the program at the shoe store. Jimmy’s nephew Tony worked around the block at Doc Feeney’s animal hospital. Doc was a regular shine but only on weekday afternoons, never weekends. He always sat in the same chair, put his already-shined-the-day-before loafers on the golden stirrups and philosophized about life. Two things were constant with Doc: He was always drunk, although most folks couldn’t tell, and he included everyone in the conversation.

“What are you kids smoking for?” he challenged Mikey and Johnny one afternoon, a cigarette dangling from his jaundiced fingers. Doc had the knack of hanging an ash on his cigarette forever. He wouldn’t flick the ash off and he wouldn’t allow it to drop of its own accord.

“’Cause we like it,” Mikey replied. Mikey was respectful but never deferential to adults.

“Yeah. But it’ll kill you. If I knew then what I know now, I never woulda started.”

“Why don’t you quit?” Mikey asked.

“Can’t. Besides, I like it too much. If I’m gonna go, why not go from something I like?”

Jimmy piped in then. “Hey, ya go when your time’s up. There was a guy in this neighborhood, you know, a rich guy from Park Avenue, rich like you, Doc.” They all laughed at Doc, who was from Westchester. “I used to do his shoes. This guy ran every day-over to the park, around the reservoir. Never smoked, never drank. Every time he came in here he was drinking orange juice. Dropped dead on the street at thirty-five years old. When your time comes, it comes.”

“When my time comes, I want to be pickled,” Doc replied. Johnny and Mikey looked at each other. That was one wish they knew was going to come true.

Carl worked for Doc. He’d been at the animal hospital for twenty years and like Doc, Carl was always drunk. The difference was that Carl actually looked drunk. He was black and Doc made him wear a blue uniform, probably so people would think he was the janitor or something. His pants were always hanging down below the crack, which you couldn’t see because his shirt was always hanging out over his pants. Carl only had a few teeth and they were a cross between yellow-green and dark brown. His cigarette, a Lucky Strike, was always dangling from his lips about to fall every time he opened his mouth, which was constantly. For the first year they knew him, the boys never understood a word Carl said, partly because of the way he talked and partly because of his constant state of inebriation. Eventually, they picked up the language, just like people living in a foreign country start understanding what people around them are saying. Osmosis maybe. Whatever. When they finally started to understand, the boys found Carl to be quite funny.

Doc was funny too in his own sardonic way, but Doc was an aristocrat-perfectly manicured, perfect white teeth, richly dressed. The thought that the two worked closely together was hysterical.

It wasn’t until Jimmy’s nephew Tony started working at the animal hospital that the boys-and Jimmy-learned just how close Carl and the Doc were.

“Carl does everything, including the surgeries,” Tony told them. “The Doc and Carl make the diagnosis together, then Doc goes and meets the people in his office. They never see Carl. He comes to work through the back door.”

“No kiddin’?” Jimmy asked. He was as surprised as the boys.

“Yeah,” Tony replied. “I’m his assistant and I don’t know nothin’. Carl gives ’em the anesthesia and cuts ’em open, jawin’ all the time about who knows what. If those people from Park Avenue ever found out about who was operating on their animals, we’d all be in jail.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Jimmy murmured. “Old Doc’s got more balls than I thought. I don’t think Carl ever got past the third grade.”

Mikey was right, Father Burke didn’t know the half of it.

Joaquin Sanchez bought a boat with a trailer the day he retired from the Miami police department. It was a used twenty-six-foot outboard whaler with one seat and a small canvas canopy. Joaquin didn’t want or need any company. Like Rudy, Joaquin enjoyed nothing better in life than to be on the water by himself-observing, feeling, being a part of nature. Catching fish was secondary. Joaquin had a fish camp just outside of Indiantown on a small tributary that fed into Lake Okeechobee. When he wanted to fish for grouper or mahi, he trailered his boat from his home in Homestead to the Keys. It was a solitary life but one he enjoyed totally.

“After twenty-five years being a Mexican cop in a Cuban town, I deserve to do nothing,” he told his friend and former partner Dick Radek over the phone one day. He was kidding but he meant it, too. Only Dick, who had served beside him for twenty years in patrol and as a detective, understood both the humor and the serious side of the statement. Discrimination had many layers. Cubans, who were often snubbed by whites, rarely missed the opportunity to harass the Mexican cop for nothing more than doing his job.

Dick was a private investigator now, making big money with some hotshot lawyer in Vero Beach. They usually talked once a week. They had watched each other’s backs and saved each other’s lives too many times to lose contact at this point.

“I’m going to be like your ex-wife,” Dick told Joaquir when he retired. “You’re never going to be able to get rid of me.”

Joaquin laughed. “Don’t sell yourself short, my friend. You’re much better-looking than she was.”

From time to time, when Dick needed help on a job, he called Joaquin. He called him ten minutes after Tracey gave him the Bass Creek assignment.

“Hey partner, wanna make some extra change?”

“Not really. Working as an executive for Exxon for all those years, retiring with that multimillion-dollar severance, I don’t need the money. But humor me-do I get to spy on the wife this time? Is she decent-looking? Does she have bamboo curtains?”

Dick started howling at that one. He’d hired Joaquin to work a domestic case years before when Tracey had experimented for a time representing the rich and famous in their marriage dissolutions. Joaquin’s assignment was to follow the stunningly beautiful wife, who the husband believed was cheating on him. For some unknown reason she had decorated her bathroom with bamboo curtains. They looked nice but at night when the lights were turned on, they were, well, pretty much transparent. Joaquin called Dick first thing the next morning.