The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (15 page)

“Like?”

“Travel, get into trouble, get out of it. Read books, maybe even write some. Some people are just not born to be cops.”

“Still, your old man had a good name in the department. Until he—you know.”

“I’m glad,” I said, ignoring the addendum. “He worked hard all his life.”

“I heard your mom died.”

Shit, I thought. “Yeah. I was little. I know her from pictures. My dad raised me.”

“So you know the drill.”

“What do you want to know?”

“It’s not me wants to know and it’s not Dougie. It’s the Manhattan DA. They’re looking for your friend.”

“An acquaintance. We’re members of the same organization.”

Cohen came alert. “What organization?”

“The Mafia,” I said. “Sometimes called The Family. Sometimes the Cosa Nostra. You heard of it?”

Cohen was just not very bright. But he tried to be helpful. “You know what you’re saying, kid? Because you might want to think about it.”

“The Bhotke Young Men’s Society,” I said. “That’s the organization, detective. Not the Mafia. It’s a club for old geezers who came to this country from a place in Poland—“

“My old man’s from Poland.”

“Everybody’s is,” I said. “In Brooklyn. It’s just a stupid club for guys who like to talk about the old country before Hitler destroyed it. And there’s burial plots in Beth David.”

“The Shomrim’s plots are in Beth David.”

“Detective Cohen—”

“Stan.”

“Stan, the only connection Mr. Shushan Cats and I have is through the Bhotke Young Men’s. I helped with the funeral, the mourning period.”

“You can say
shiva,
kid. I’m no goy.”

“Who’s no goy?” Kennedy said, walking in. He was a Kennedy in name only. Where everything about our president was elegant, understated, well-tailored, this Kennedy was so lace-curtain no amount of money would make him anything but sloppy, overblown and incredibly badly dressed, even for a cop. His rayon tie looked like it had been fished out of the East River, and his suit like what had fished it out. His shoes were unshined, but his nose made up for it. And, this close, he had had a drink, maybe in the past minutes.

As my father would have said, a disgrace to the force, but more or less standard issue. “I was just telling Stan—”

“Stan?”

“Detective Cohen here that my only relationship with Shushan Cats is we belong to the same Jewish organization. We buried his mother.”

Kennedy crossed himself silently. “Well, kid, if we don’t find this guy you have no relationship with you’re going to have another tombstone to put up.” He considered. “Jews put up stones?”

Stan and I looked at each other.

“Yeah, we do,” he said. “Sometimes we do that when we’re not kidnapping Christian children to put their blood in matza. You know what, Doug? We been together six years day in day out, and that’s what you think of Jews, that we don’t properly bury our dead?”

“I didn’t say that,” Kennedy said. “It just never came up what Hebrews do.”

“You and I been to a Jewish graveyard.”

“When?”

“Moscowitz,” Cohen said. “When that spick shot him in fifty-nine.” He turned to me. “Big funeral. You wouldn’t believe how big.”

“Huge,” Kennedy said. “That’s the kind of funeral I don’t want.” He turned to me. “That’s the funeral you get when you take a bullet. Me, I plan to die on the beach in Florida on full pension.”

“Gentlemen,” I said. “I really don’t know where even to look for Shushan Cats. And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to look for him. I’m a college student. My interests are women, literature and getting high, not always in that order. This whole thing with Shushan, it’s an anomaly.”

“It’s a what?” Kennedy asked.

“Not usual, not normal. Completely out of what anybody would expect. Like running into a street-corner Santa on Easter Sunday, or snow in July. Theoretically this kind of thing can happen, but it’s unlikely. Anomalous.”

Cohen stepped in to help out. “Like when you get a letter but it’s not signed.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. Now can I please go home?”

Kennedy smiled. Under the fluorescent bulbs that lined the ceiling like railroad tracks for aliens his teeth glowed a bright chartreuse. The veins in his nose seemed to be a roadmap of a very busy city. “Kid, we got to hold you.”

“It’s not personal,” Cohen said.

“Not at all,” Kennedy said. “Your old man and all.”

“You have to hold me. Why?”

“Because the Manhattan DA wants to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About Shoeshine.”

“Shushan,” I said.

“You know who I mean,” Kennedy said. “He’s a popular guy right at the moment.”

I couldn’t make it out. “You know about the FBI?”

“Oh yeah,” Kennedy said.

“They try to step in,” Cohen said. “In cases like this.”

“In cases like what?”

“We got to hold you for when Frank Hogan’s office wants to see you.”

“He’s the Manhattan DA.”

“I know who he is,” I said. “I read the papers.”

The two dicks looked at each other. It was hard to believe too lumps like this had made detective. I had always thought my father’s gold badge signified membership in a very exclusive club.

“We really got to hold you,” Cohen said. “I’m sorry. It could be for a half-hour. It could be a couple of hours.”

To be precise, it was nine hours twenty-two minutes in which I sat in a five-foot square cage made of steel meshwork, and in which everything had something missing: one crippled bentwood chair minus a leg, one cement slab on which to semi-recline—it too was short by a foot—and a pile of
Playboy
magazines with the centerfolds torn out and most of the nude photos as well. I may have been one of the few college students in America who could legitimately claim to have read
Playboy
for the articles. My cage was at one end of the detective bureau, a procession of battered metal desks whose green linoleum tops were so scarred by cigarette burns there was something about them of art: Jackson Pollack might have created them on a really bad morning after.

The dicks were good to me, up to a point—outside of trips to the toilet they kept me locked up—and bought me a couple of packs of Luckies when twice mine ran out, to say nothing of meals, which they were under no obligation to provide. Lunch was all right: pizza. But dinner was spectacular: pizza with meatballs. I could hardly complain. Though they were theoretically free to come and go, neither Kennedy nor Cohen had much more freedom, in essence, than I. Whatever happened to me in the next hours and days, I did not have to return daily to this roach-infested station house in a bad neighborhood—“One point seven miles of insanity,” in Cohen’s words—where carrying a gun was as much a necessity for the citizenry as it was for the cops.

At nine-fifteen, Kennedy unlocked the cage. “I didn’t think it would take this long, but Hogan’s office, they don’t give a shit.”

“You on hours?” I asked, the cop’s son coming out in me: overtime.

“Better believe it,” he said.

Cohen came up carrying a rolled up newspaper under his arm. “The drill is this. We’re gonna put you in the back of the car. No cuffs. When we get to within a couple blocks of the DA we’re gonna put the cuffs on. This whole thing to my mind sucks. We figured an hour or two. But they been dealing with the press, the investigation, interviewing suspects. So Dougie and me we want to make sure you know we didn’t mean to treat you like shit. It’s just the system. So you walk out with us now, and later we’ll put on the cuffs.”

“Policy,” Kennedy said. “NYPD fucking policy. You don’t need to be cuffed.”

“What press?” I asked.

The two detectives looked at each other in the dimly-lit hall.

“What investigation?” I asked. “What suspects?”

Kennedy nodded to Cohen, who handed me the paper. It was the bulldog edition of the
Daily Mirror
, the first of several editions that would be pumped out through the night until the final edition at five AM. There on the front page was a photo from the funeral of Shushan’s mother, a grainy blow-up but clear enough. It was a picture of Shushan in close conversation with a young associate—Shushan was actually clutching his arm. The associate’s head was crudely circled in red, as if with a crayon. The headlines told me all I needed to know of what was.

SHOESHINE

POLISHED OFF?

CRIME BOSS VANISHES

AFTER MAFIA CONFAB

BOY-GENIUS SUCCESSOR

HELD BY COPS

But little of what would be.

The assistant district attorney to whom I was delivered at the Manhattan DA’s Office was a middle-aged woman with gray hair, gray eyes, a gray suit buttoned to the neck and sensible shoes, also gray. Even her name suggested the color—it was Grady. Her nails were bitten and her stubby fingers stained with tobacco the color of her dark gold wedding ring. Other than tiny single-pearl earrings she wore no jewelry. “Please take a seat, Mr. Newhouse.” I sat heavily on the black Naugahyde sofa at the far end of the long room from her desk. The two cops took a position by the door, as if to make sure I would not attempt an escape. They had already made a nice show of uncuffing me. Grady sat in the armchair opposite me, a yellow legal pad in her lap. If a voice could be described as gray, hers was gray. Also flat, vaguely metallic, and matter-of-fact, the voice of a teacher who had long before become disenchanted with third grade. “You are Russell Newhouse?”

“People keep asking me that.”

Grady was uncharmed. “Of 556 Eastern Parkway?”

“Yep.”

“Social?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your Social Security number?”

I told her.

“Married, single, divorced?”

“Still single,” I said. “How about you?”

“I’ll ask the questions, Mr. Newhouse.”

“Why am I not surprised, Mrs. Grady?” In 1963 women were still addressed as Miss or Mrs. Ms had not been so much as conceived, much less born.

“Call me Dolores.”

“Dolores.”

“Russell, do you know why you’re here?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Is that so?”

“Dolores, it is so.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” she said. “Do you mind if I make a record of this conversation?” She pointed down to her legal pad.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Cohen make tiny circular motions with the index fingers of both hands. If this was good-cop, bad-cop, Cohen was up to his ears in good. For whatever reason, he was telling me what Dolores Grady was not: A hidden tape-recorder would have me on record agreeing to “a record of this conversation.” The tape would not show Grady pointing to her legal pad. There was little I could do. Either I would not agree to the taping and set up an adversarial relationship from the get-go, or agree and know that whatever I said could become evidence in a court of law. Better to conceal what I knew. “Sure,” I said. “I have nothing to hide.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Grady said. “You do know why you’re here, don’t you?”

“The papers have it wrong,” I said. “I’m nobody’s protégé.”

“We have Mr. Shushan Cats on record as having introduced you in many venues precisely as such. Are you aware of that?”

“Dolores, do I look like anybody’s idea of a gangster to you? I’m twenty years old. I’m a senior in the honors program at Brooklyn College. My biggest scrape with the law is some unpaid parking tickets which, by the way, I fully intend to pay. I don’t own a gun and in the unlikely event I found one in my hand I wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s not that I believe the pen is mightier than the .45 automatic, but the pen is what I’m interested in. I’m a reader, not a racketeer. If things go as planned I’ll end up a college professor, or maybe a writer, or both. Okay, you could say teaching and writing are rackets, but they’re legal.” I pointed to the yellow pad Grady was barely making notes on. “Maybe one day this interview is going to end up in a book. Don’t worry. I’ll play it for laughs. This is a comedy of errors, Dolores. The only thing I know about criminality is that Shushan Cats is supposed to be a hood. But all I personally know about him is that as secretary of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society I helped him arrange a funeral for his mother and then at his request helped him out during the
shiva
, the week of—”

“I know what it is, Russ. I was a Greenberg before I became a Grady.”

Did she mean she had de-Judaized her name, or that she had married out? I didn’t bother to ask. “When the mourning week was over I parted company from Mr. Cats.”

“What’s the Bhotke group?”

“A criminal enterprise in which old guys from the old country talk about how when they were young in Poland they rode horses and milked cows. It’s a fraternal organization. There are hundreds like it. Now that the old country has been erased these organizations have become important to their members, because that’s all that’s left. They’re not only legal but they’re exceedingly boring, at least to me.”

“So why are you a member?”

“My late father was one, and I got drafted because they needed young blood. And very few of them write English that’s grammatical. It’s a job, twice a month. A volunteer job, but they throw me a couple of bucks. Anyway, considering the trouble it’s caused, I may volunteer myself out of it. Dolores, if you’re looking for Shushan Cats, I’m the wrong address.”

For answer she rose and came back with a thick folder from her desk.

“Is it or is it not true that your late father, Meyer B. Newhouse, was a New York City police officer?”

“Very true.”

“And that he was relieved of his badge for conduct detrimental to the NYPD?”

“He never did anything but blow the whistle on crooked cops.”

“And that a hearing was held in which he was removed from the force?”

“By the same cops he blew the whistle on.”

“And that he lost his pension along with his badge?”

“With three years to go. He had seventeen in, and they took that away. That’s right.”

“And that because of this he harbored a grudge against the NYPD and against law enforcement in general?”

“What does my dead father have to do with this, Dolores?”