Murder at the Foul Line (33 page)

“You grew up with him?”

“What did I just say? Our mothers were in the same canasta club. Even then I hated him. He was a little goniff. When we were
about twelve or thirteen, he stole some athletic equipment from the Jewish Community Center and sold it to some Negroes across
town. I ratted him out. From then on, he hated me. I wasn’t surprised that he became a bookkeeper for Mo Mo when he was still
in his twenties. He was always good with numbers. But did I know the little goniff had moved up to run organized crime in
Philadelphia? What did I know from the workings of the underworld? I was shocked when Mo Mo tells me this, but I don’t let
on to either of them that I grew up with the
mamzer
.

“Because now I know why Irving Levchuck has Al by the balls and won’t let go. First of all, he’s getting back at me for ratting
him out twenty-five years before. But the real reason? Owning a piece of the Planets was like owning a piece of God. We were
the force of good, Ronnie, and Irving was the kind of guy who had to take a shit on everything he couldn’t control. And without
knowing it Al had just handed him the opportunity of a lifetime.

“So we drove back from Atlantic City in silence and when we played our last regular season game in Harlem a couple of nights
later, I kept Al on the bench. And that fucking Itchy had the balls to come down to the bench near the end of the game and
yell at Al. I was right there and I heard him ask Al, ‘You got a death wish, Al? You got a death wish?’ His face was right
down next to Al’s, and Vic Fine, who’s sitting next to him on the bench, throws an elbow right in Itchy’s face. Itchy opens
his coat and shows them his semiautomatic. ‘I got something better than elbows, you pricks.’ I remember this like it was yesterday,
Ronnie. I thought he was going to use the gun then and there. But I point a finger at him and order him back to his seat,
and you know what? He goes. But after the game, since I figure these
mamzers
are going to be waiting for Al, we got him out of the Renaissance Ballroom with the Harlem team.”

Out of his pocket Sidney took the soiled hanky again and ran it around his forehead and skull. “But nobody had to tell me
this story didn’t look like it was going to have a happy ending. I put Al and Vera up in the Rittenhouse Hotel. The next day,
or the day after that, Vera pays me another visit at my office and says that if Al doesn’t play and do what they say, they’re
gonna kill him. You don’t have to be a genius to know this is a distinct possibility. But how come she’s so sure? Well, since
I last saw Vera I’ve been asking about her around South Philly, and now I know she’s been peddling her puss for Irving and
his crowd since she was a teenager.
This
is the broad my best ballplayer chooses to shack up with?” Sidney clapped his hand against his forehead. “
Gott in himmell!

“It took me about a minute and a half to turn her, Ronnie. I told her she had to choose sides. I told her from now on she
was my spy. To let Irving’s people know Al wasn’t going along with them and I wanted Vera to let me know exactly what they
were going to do about it. The playoffs are about to start and Vera reports back to me that Al won’t make it out of the National
Hotel Ballroom alive if he doesn’t go in the tank—the Planets win by two points in the first game, no more.

“If she’s telling me the truth, all I got to do is frisk all three thousand people who show up for the game. I hire every
tough Jew I know to guard the doors that night. Irving and Itchy and
their broads waltz right in, but not until we’ve patted them down. I put Al in the game. Only problem is, they smuggled a
gun in somehow and Itchy comes out of his seat at the end of the game and tries to shoot Al as he’s leaving the floor. Some
of my guys get to Itchy first and nobody gets hurt, but Itchy gets away.

“An hour after the game, Al goes back to his suite at the Rittenhouse, the one I got for him and Vera, and he walks in and
there’s Vera asleep in the bed with the covers pulled up over her chin. She doesn’t wake up when he comes in, so Al goes over
and pulls the covers down. Vera’s throat has been slit from ear to ear. Poor girl. And me, I figure I’m responsible for it
because when Irving and Itchy saw all the security at the game, they must’ve figured Vera was talking to me, had tipped me
off. And she paid a terrible price.

“So now it’s war. I’m ready to break Itchy in two when one of my guys who was watching the stands during the game tells me
that it was Irving’s seat that was empty since the middle of the game. Are you sure? I ask. Sure I’m sure, says my guy. So
it’s Irving, who used to kill kittens when he was a boy. Now he’s killed a grown-up kitten named Vera.”

“This is quite a story, Grandpa,” I said.

“You haven’t heard nothing yet.”

“Is it true?”

“What’re you talking about?” Sidney said, genuinely enraged this time. “What do
you
know? Of course it’s true! Sit and listen. I’m trying to tell you something!” His eyes started to glisten with tears of old
grief. “I make a few calls, people I know, and I set up a meeting with Levchuck. I knew he’d see me. The kid who made good
and the kid who made bad. So we meet on a bench by the Schuylkill River, where there can be no
surprises. He’s got three or four of his guys stationed all around, just like in the movies. Touching their weapons through
their clothes.

“Let me tell you, I’m disgusted. I
know
the guy’s murdered Vera, but he’s blaming Itchy. Saying, ‘Sidney, I can’t control him. For ten bucks, he’d shoot himself!’
I can’t say anything to him, because I’ve got to protect Al. Got to protect my team. I got to get Al and the team out of this
alive. So I plead with this goniff to call the whole thing off.

“I say to him, I say, ‘Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?’ And he says to me, ‘Sidney, what could be bigger than
having you come to me on your knees?’ See? That’s what it was all about for him, Ronnie! Making me come to him on my knees
begging for Al Newberger’s life.

“So he purses his lips and decides to change the terms. Doing me a big favor. Irving says the money on the street is swinging
the Jersey Reds’ way now, saying we can’t beat ’em in the series. So Irving wants to put his money on us now, the underdogs.”

“So Al Newberger’s gonna have to bet his life that the Planets take the Reds,” I said.

“‘I’ll take your boys, Sidney,’ he tells me, pleased with himself. ‘All they’ve got to do is win. Everything’s kosher. You
win, I’ll win, we’ll all win.’ What can I do, Ronnie? I’ve got to take the terms. At least Al’s not shaving points now, and
he’s in charge of his own destiny. But the whole thing’s making me sick. That’s what I remember saying to Irving. ‘Guys like
you make me sick.’

“And he says, ‘There aren’t any guys like me, Sidney. There’s just me.’”

“I think I’ve read about this guy Levchuck,” I said.

“Of course you have! He was a big
k’nacker!
Listen to me!
I take Al aside and tell him what the deal is now: we win the series and everything’s copacetic. But he’s out of control.
Irving’s murdered his girlfriend and now he’s supposed to go out and win the championship? To save his own life? Being owned
by Levchuck all because he beat up his scrawny
schlammer
, and now this? He’s out of control and he’s throwing things around the hotel room. I have no doubt he’d kill Irving if given
half a chance.

“I know what I’ve got to do. I ask him where the gun is, the gun he took off Itchy two or three weeks before. He says he’s
stashed it up his chimney at his apartment. So I drive him over there and make him give it to me. He hands it over, but first
he takes the bullets out. ‘Give me the goddamn bullets,’ I say, because, sure, I figure he’s thinking he’ll get another gun
and use the bullets. But Al says, ‘Fogey, I’m just taking them out because I’m afraid you might hurt yourself.’ You can imagine
me handling a gun, Ronnie, right? So he hands me the bullets separate and now I feel a little bit safer that Al’s not going
to do something stupid. And I tell him that we’ll be all right, that all we’ve gotta do is beat the Reds in seven, which is
what we were gonna do anyway.

“Well,” Sidney said with a long sigh and a sip of water, “to make a long story short, the Reds beat us up and before we know
it, we’re down two games to one. Now we’re shitting bricks. If we don’t win three of the next four, I don’t know how I’m gonna
keep Al alive. The fourth game’s at the National, so I get every tough kid in the neighborhood to watch the doors and stand
around the court, watching the stands, just in case. I tell ’em we’re expecting trouble. The place is all
kocked up
with people. Every Jew and half the Italians in Philadelphia are there, and none of them knows we’re playing for our lives.
Just Al and me.

“Well, we lose by three in front of our own fans. We’re down three games to one now, with two of the next three in Jersey
City, and I’m thinking of asking the league on the q.t. to move the rest of the series to an undisclosed location. I’m thinking
of how to get Al out of Philadelphia, maybe out of the country.

“Then it happens, like manna from heaven. Sometime after midnight on the night of that fourth game, somebody pops Irving Levchuck
in the alley behind the candy store where he likes to conduct his business. Ran his operation out of the storeroom in the
back. Old Irving takes one right in the
punim
. Dead. It’s front page in all the papers the next day. No one can figure it out. There’s talk that the Matteo brothers sent
someone to do it. That somebody in Atlantic City thought Irving was taking too big a piece of the heroin racket.

“And, of course, there’s talk that Al Newberger might’ve had something to do with it, because it turns out that Al hasn’t
kept his mouth completely shut about his predicament, especially after Irving slit Vera’s throat. After Irving gets popped,
it’s not long before the cops know that Al’s got a reason to kill him. Also, thanks to Vera, who knew these guys, that Al
probably knows about Irving’s comings and goings.”

“Wait a second,” I say. I disappeared into my parents’ den, where it took me only a minute to find a Time-Life illustrated
history of organized crime, one of those volumes they used to advertise on television; when you signed up, they’d send you
one a month. I used to be fascinated by this particular volume and brought it back to the kitchen table, where I quickly found
what I was looking for and turned the book around so Sidney could see it.

It was a wire service photo of Irving Levchuck’s body in a South Philadelphia alley. He lay on his back, limbs akimbo, his
hat sitting on its crown a few feet away. In the photo, a dark smudge on his cheek indicated where the bullet had entered.
Blood, rendered black by the film, pooled behind his head on the alley’s gravel surface. The caption read: “On April 14, 1938,
in a slaying that was never solved, Philadelphia mobster Irving Levchuck was gunned down in an alley near the candy store
out of which he ran his various enterprises.”

“While you were telling me the story, I kept thinking it sounded familiar,” I said.

Sidney stared at the photo for a long time as he passed his hanky over his face and forehead. “That’s him, all right,” he
said. “I haven’t seen that photo in a long time, Ronnie.” He looked up with that sad, hound-dog face in which the eyes still
burned bright. “All right. So the cops were all over Al for a day or two, but Al had an alibi. He said he was drinking at
the Two Deuces with some of the guys after the game and then they went to Horn and Hardart for eggs and bacon about three
in the morning. The guys told the cops Al was never out of their sight until well after Irving had been shot. They had the
time of death, you know, because a newsie at the end of the alley heard the shot and went immediately to tell a cop.

“Now the cops back off finally because none of the guys on the team will break and, frankly, the cops are glad Levchuck’s
been rubbed out, maybe even the ones whose pockets he’s been lining. Everyone figures that it was a gangland slaying and they
leave it alone. Except that one fact doesn’t quite fit. Irving’s wallet’s gone, assuming he was carrying one, but he’s got
a money clip with a couple hundred dollars in it still in his front pocket. That’s like walking around with a few grand today.
Why would someone go to the trouble to take his wallet, but not his money?”

“The killer wanted a souvenir,” I suggested.

“Souvenirs are for tourists and children. At least the guy could’ve taken Irving’s walking-around dough. Anyway, so Irving’s
suddenly out of the way, but who can predict what’s gonna happen to the deal now? Is it still in effect? We figured we could
breathe a little easier, but Itchy Weintraub, that crazy bastard, might take the whole thing on himself. Who knows? So as
the series goes on, Al doesn’t go nowhere without half a dozen boys from the neighborhood protecting him. But you know what?
Itchy disappears. Without Irving, he shrivels up and dies. Al’s a new man. As I know you know, the Planets win three straight
to beat the Reds and take our third championship in four years. And Al scores six points in the last period in the seventh
game to win it for us.” With that, Grandpa Sidney leaned back in his chair and took a long swallow of water.

“Wow, Grandpa, that’s quite a story. You lived through some amazing times.”

Sidney yawned. He consulted the old Benrus on his wrist. “It’s late.” But he made no move to get up and pad off to the guest
room he’d occupied for a few years now.

“So, Grandpa,” I said, “do you think Al did it?”

“Naw.”

“Then it was an incredible stroke of luck that Levchuck was murdered when he was.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it.”

“You don’t think so?”

Sidney was rummaging around in one of his pants pockets. He pulled out something wrapped in a white cloth, like a piece of
an old undershirt, and said, “I’m an old man, Ronnie. It all goes so fast.”

“You’re good for ten more years,” I said.

He pushed the undershirt-wrapped package across the table, keeping his hand on top of it for a moment before leaving it in
front of me.