P.F. stopped talking to his father after that day he’d found him in the bar. But in the time he’d been on the job since then, what did he have to show that he was any better? At least his father had the whore on his lap. All P.F. had was three divorces, a son and a daughter who wouldn’t speak to him, a largely undistinguished service record, and the Mike Dillon file stuck away somewhere in his dusty locker.
“Some cases weren’t meant to be solved,” he said so softly that no one else could hear him.
“What’d you say, P.F.?” Earl sat forward, with his elbows on his knees. The two other cops were grinning.
“I said no one gives a shit about that anymore,” P.F. said, propping himself up. “It’s past. Prologue. History. I don’t need to muck around in it anymore. I’ve got this job with the Doubloon.”
A slow easy smile rolled across Earl’s face. “Well if that’s true about you and the security job, how come I heard the chief assigned Ray Youngblood to work the security detail at the fight next fall?”
P.F. flinched like he’d been slapped across the face. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I have final say about who gets on that detail. I worked it out with Bobby. It was part of the transition for when I retired. They wouldn’t just give all that overtime to a black guy like Ray without asking.”
He saw a muscle tense in Earl’s cheek and knew he’d said too much. “Promises were made,” he protested. “The deal was set.”
“Then the deal is off,” Earl noted with grim satisfaction. “Part of the new order coming down. Community policing, minority recruitment. It ain’t enough just to be Irish anymore. Your time is over. It used to be you folks ran the department, made your little arrangements, and had your pick of the litter. But now it’s someone else’s turn.”
“And I’m telling you that is fucking ridiculous!” P.F. staggered to his feet and pointed a finger at Earl. “It’s absurd. My word still means something in this town.”
“Have it your way,” said Earl, raising his drink cheerily. “I just can’t help noticing you got a fifty-dollar bill on that bar counter and in the old days, all your drinks would have been on the house.”
P.F. glanced back at the bar and the crumpled-up fifty-spot seemed to cast an unnatural glow on the counter. Maybe his influence was declining. The shame and embarrassment burned in the pit of his stomach and sent a fog up to his brain. He suddenly had an urge to get out of there and pass out in peace. He started to leave.
“Hey, P.F.” Earl caught him by the arm. “Next time you’re coming by, let me know. I’ll buy you a round.”
7
OVER THE NEXT few days, I began to see new vistasand opportunities opening up before me. Soon I’d be negotiating major endorsement deals and worldwide satellite hookups with men twice my age at mahogany conference tables.
One of the great things about boxing is that it’s easier to get a manager’s license than it is to get hired by a casino. There’s not as much checking into your background. For once my family connections wouldn’t hold me back.
I even managed to forget about Larry lying there with the ice pick in his side. Or at least I did until I had to go to Teddy’s sixtieth birthday party on Wednesday night. I showed up at the restaurant called Andolini’s, just off Arctic Avenue, at about quarter past eight.
A dozen of the guys from the crew were in the back room talking over their latest scam. What they had on the table I can only describe as a pigsty. Pieces of salami hanging off plates. Slices of provolone and cigarette butts in the ashtrays. Lumps of red peppers on the checkered tablecloth. And presiding over it all, Teddy, the king hog in his cheap Sears suit.
I sat next to my father, two seats down from Teddy. My old man was busy explaining some new idea to all of them.
“This guy Murray Weisbrod works at the savings and loan up the parkway,” he said. “He got in deep with Danny Klein. Owes him about three K. Now he’s working for us. He’ll vouch for any of our people. So all we gotta do is send a guy over to the casino, have him play awhile and then ask for a nine-thousand-dollar marker. They check our guy out with Murray, he’ll say the player is okay, and the casino will give our guy nine thousand in credit to buy chips. So then our guy cashes his chips and splits the money with the rest of us.”
“And who we gonna get as a player?” asked Teddy, spitting out two olive pits and laying them alongside the provolone in the ashtray.
“I was thinking about my boy Anthony here,” said my father, putting a dry hairy hand on the back of my neck. “He hasn’t been in to play that much. I can’t think of a single reason they wouldn’t want to lend him the money. It’s not like he has a record already or anything.”
His breath smelled from scampi and wine. The waitress brought in a few more platters covered with veal chops in mustard sauce, osso buco, garlic bread, anchovies, eggplant parmigiana, and strips of marinated steak.
“How do you eat that shit?” I said as she set the plates down.
“What’re you talking? ‘How do I eat it?’” Teddy sucked his teeth and hooked his arm protectively around his plate. “It’s food. What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s not food, it’s a hospital bed.” I started picking the red candle wax off the Chianti bottle in the middle of the table. “My arteries are clogged just looking at it.”
“So order something you want. It’s a free country.”
“You got any plain fish?” I asked the waitress, a pale chunky girl with dark curly hair. She shook her head.
“What’d I do, Teddy?” said my father, wringing my neck and pinching my cheek. “I raised a fuckin’ yuppie.”
“I’m just trying to watch my cholesterol,” I said as the rest of them laughed along with him.
It didn’t matter, though. All those guys were slobs anyway. Faces as rough and scaly as tortoiseshells. They all wore polyester polo shirts with horizontal stripes and ropes of gold chains around their necks. Not a suit among them, besides Teddy’s. A bunch of no-account jerk-offs who couldn’t tell a quartz watch from one with a Swiss movement or understand why Jerry Vale wasn’t as good a singer as Frank Sinatra.
I noticed Richie Amato trying to stuff a three-inch-high hero into his mouth at the other end of the table. He was sitting next to a guy called Tommy Sick, who was always smiling and saying things like “That’s sick” or “I’m sick!”
“The youth,” said Teddy, running three sausage-like fingers through his oily dyed-black hair. “They’re always going around like they got some kind of stopwatch jammed up their ass. They don’t know how to stop and enjoy the finer things.”
Truthfully, Teddy’s life was about as interesting as scrap metal. Sitting around all day sipping espresso with Vin at a social club with torn-up green vinyl chairs and Italian flags on the wall. Maybe once a week, they’d hear about a hijacked truck full of toothpaste and drive for an hour to get someplace where the other guys wouldn’t show up. And by then it’d be dark and time to think about dinner.
“I got my own schedule, Ted,” I said diplomatically.
“I’m telling you you oughta learn to go with the flow.” Teddy speared a piece of prosciutto off my father’s plate. “Listen to your old man when he has a good idea. I seen you rolling your eyes just now when he was talking about you getting a marker off the casino.”
“Yeah, that’s all right, but I’ve got my days planned out already.”
I wasn’t going to mention anything about my talk with John B. I already had Teddy hanging over my shoulder looking to grab half of whatever I made.
“Look at it,” said my father, reaching into my pocket. “He’s got a little black book he carries around with him.”
I pushed his hand away from my Filofax as the rest of them started to crack up again. As the laughter started to die out after a couple of seconds, I heard a round of sniffling from the other end of the table. Maybe some of these guys still had their cocaine habits after all.
