CHAPTER 1 – THE
RED LANTERN
Two Months Later
The
workmen wheeled the last of the potted plant life into my office on hand
dollies.
“You
sure you don’t want us to put some out in the reception area, Mr. Rhode?”
“I
haven’t finished painting it and the carpet is coming next week,” I said. “I’d
only have to move them all.”
He
shrugged and handed me an envelope.
“Miss
Robart wrote down some instructions on how to care for them. She said if you
have any questions, just call.”
I’m
not a plant guy. I’d keep the hardiest. The best shot at survival for the rest
was my plan to donate them to other offices in the building. I called Nancy
Robart at the Staten Island Botanical Garden to thank her for the foliage. She
was the Executive Director and had donated the plants to give my new digs “some
much needed class.” She was at a luncheon, so I left the thank you on her voice
mail.
Lunch
sounded good to me. I opened a drawer in my desk, dropped Nancy’s instructions
in it and pulled out the holster containing my .38 Taurus Special. A lot of
people in my line of work don’t carry guns. Most of them have never been shot
at, in war or peace. I have, in both, and like the comforting feel of iron on
my hip. Besides, with all the hoops you have to jump through to get a permit in
New York City (if you fill out the paperwork wrong they send you to
Guantanamo), it seems silly not to carry. The Taurus revolver has only five
chambers in its cylinder, to keep the weight down. But the bullets are big. The
gun is meant for close-in work. Presumably if you need more than five shots a
sixth won’t matter.
I
clipped the holster on my belt and shrugged into the brown corduroy jacket that
was draped on the back of my chair. The jacket felt a little tight around the
shoulders. I wasn’t back to my old weight but my rehab, which included lifting
iron, was redistributing muscle. I’d have to get my clothes altered soon. Or,
assuming I got some clients, buy some new threads. But the jacket still fell
nicely, even if it didn’t quite cover the paint smudges on my jeans, and there
was no gun bulge.
I
walked down the stairs to the building lobby. The docs at the V.A. hospital
said it would help strengthen my leg and it seemed to be working. The limp was
barely noticeable. I stopped at the security station by the elevators and told
the guard that I’d left my office unlocked because the cable company was
scheduled to install my high-speed Internet and phone system sometime in the
afternoon.
“You’re
the private eye on eight,” she said. “Rhode.” Her name tag said “H. Jones” and
she was sturdily stout without being fat. Her skin color was only slightly
darker than her tan uniform. “What time they give you?”
“Sometime
between 1 PM and the next ice age,” I said.
“I
hear you.” She wrote something in a large cloth-bound ledger, the kind that
used to sit on hotel check-in counters and private eyes were able to read
upside down in noir movies. I never could read upside down, so the move to
hotel computers made no difference to me. “You coming back?”
“Yeah.
Just running out to pick up some lunch.”
“Where
you headed?”
“Red
Lantern, in Rosebank. You know it?”
“Oh,
man. Best eggplant hero in the borough.”
“Can
I bring one back for you?”
“Sure.”
She
bent to get her purse.
“Forget
it. My treat. What’s the ‘H’ stand for?”
“Habika.
It means ‘sweetheart,’ in some African language I have no clue about. My folks
had just seen
Roots
when I was born. Coulda been worse, I guess.”
“Alton,”
I said, extending my hand.
“Like
I said, it coulda been worse,” she said. “You can call me ‘Abby’. Everyone else
does. Abby Jones.”
“Why
not sweetheart, or sweetie?”
“Cause
then I hit you upside your head. Listen, my brother works at the cable company.
I’ll give him a call to make sure they don’t forget about you.”
A
Rhode rule: It never hurts to buy an eggplant hero for a security guard.
There
was a bank branch in the lobby. It had an ATM but the daily limit was $400 and
I had a bar tab to square. I was working off the cash from a dwindling home
equity line of credit inexplicably approved by the same bank. I wondered if I
could be nailed for trading on inside information if I shorted its stock
because it lent me the money.
The
branch manager came out of his cubbyhole to shake my hand, smiling effusively.
He led me over to a cute little redhead teller who thanked me before, during
and after the transaction. If I’d wanted a toaster, she would have gone home
and taken one from her own kitchen. The banks had a lot of PR ground to make
up.
I
now had a grand in my pocket. Flush and hungry; a combination that always works
for me. I planned to walk the mile or so along Bay Street to the Red Lantern.
But it was drizzling, with the imminent promise of something heavier. With a
corduroy jacket I’d weigh as much as Donald Trump’s hairdo by the time I
arrived. I don’t use an umbrella unless animals are lining up two-by-two on the
ark ramp.
My
three-year old light blue Chevy Malibu is distinguished only by several round
indentations on its trunk and rear panels. I’d bought it at Honest Al Lambert’s
Used Car Lot in Tottenville. Al had acquired six almost-pristine Malibus at
auction from a rental fleet, but hadn’t counted on the car carrier transporting
them from Denver running into a vicious hail storm in Indiana. The vehicles on
top had their windshields smashed and their bodywork turned into the far side
of the moon. Undaunted, Al tried to sell me one of those. But even the dimmest
suspect might notice being followed by a car with more dimples than a golf
ball. So I opted for one of the Malibus on the carrier’s first level, which
sustained little damage but were still heavily discounted. It looked like every
third car on the road. Still, I made a few modifications, including a
passenger-side ejector seat activated by a red button hidden in the gear shift.
I didn’t actually do that.
At
the Red Lantern all the parking spots, including those next to fire hydrants,
bus stops and “No Parking” signs, were filled with cars that had official
stickers or emblems: police, fire, sanitation, court officers, judges, Borough
Hall, Coast Guard. Coast Guard? The NFL season was in full swing. It was Friday
and the regular lunchtime crowd was inflated by dozens of people dropping off
betting slips for Sunday’s games in the bar’s huge football pool. My glove
compartment was full of phony decals and emblems that I would have used in an
illegal spot if one was available, but I couldn’t chance double parking and
blocking in some Supreme Court judge. I settled for a spot two blocks away.
This
section of Rosebank, once almost exclusively Italian, with a sprinkling of
Jewish delis and bakeries, now had businesses run by more recent immigrants. I
passed a Korean nail salon flanked by an Indian restaurant and a Pakistani
convenience store. Across the street was something called the Somali-American
Social Club, where a tall man in a white dashiki stood outside smoking.
Probably didn’t want to light up inside near the explosives. Two doors down,
Gottleib’s Bakery, a local institution for 80 years, still held the fort. If
World War III broke out, I was pretty certain it would start here.
Inside
the Red, patrons were two-deep at the rail keeping three bartenders hopping.
All the tables in the front and back rooms were occupied and I pushed my way to
the bar. The front room had dimpled tin ceilings that tended to amplify and
redirect noise. In fact, because of an acoustic anomaly, something said at one
end of the bar might be heard clearly at the other end. Of course, most
conversations were lost in the mix of babble, but people still tended to be
discreet. If you wanted to ask for a quick blow job in the car, or you were a
city councilman asking five large in cash from a contractor who needed a zoning
variance, you might as well put it on cable. The half-oval bar ran the length
of the front room and had a dark green leather border matched by the upholstery
of high-back swivel stools. A large silver trophy depicting a crouching man
with his hand swept back occupied a place of honor next to the register. Its
nameplate read “R. Kane.” Underneath that, “1973 Tri-State Handball
Championships.” A third line said “Second Place.”
Roscoe
Kane, 60 pounds past his handball prime, lumbered over. I reached in my pocket,
counted off $500 and put it on the bar.
“Take
me off the books.”
“Business
picking up?”
“I’m
being optimistic.”
Reaching
behind the register, Roscoe pulled out a beat-up marble notebook of the type
your mother bought for your first day of school. He laid it on the bar, flipped
some pages, picked up a pencil and crossed something out. He took $420 from the
pile and put it in the cash drawer. At the same time he reached down into a
cooler, lifted out a bottle of Sam Adams Light, twisted off the cap with one
hand and slid it down to me. Ex-handball champs don’t lack for manual
dexterity. He put the notebook away. I knew that dozens, maybe hundreds, of
similar notebooks had served the same purpose since the Red Lantern, one of the
oldest taverns in the city, opened its doors back when the Kings Rifles
garrisoned Staten Island.
Roscoe
put some bar nuts in front of me and said, “Glass? Lunch?”
“No,
and yes,” I said through a mouthful of nuts. “Two eggplant heroes to go.”
I
took a long draw on my beer. It was ice cold. Not too many people drank Sam
Adams in the Red, let alone Sam Adams Light, but Roscoe kept in a stash for me.
It was the only light beer I’d ever had that didn’t taste light.
I
said, “Is it true that the Algonquins ran a tab in here?”
“Never.
Bastards stiffed us.”
“Yeah,”
one of the regulars at the bar snorted, “and this place hasn’t bought back a
drink since.”
As
I sipped my beer, I turned to scan the opposite wall, which was covered floor
to ceiling with tally sheets for the 1,400 people in the football pool. The
alphabetically-listed entrants were a democratic cross section of the populace,
including just about every elected and appointed official, several judges, a
smattering of assistant district attorneys, college professors, scores of cops
and half the hoods in the borough. The sheets were taken down after the Monday
night games and updated by the three elderly Italian ladies who also ran the
kitchen. No one questioned their cooking or their accuracy.
I
felt a blast of chilly air. The bar’s cheerful hubbub eased a bit and one of
the other bartenders said “shit” under his breath. I turned as Arman Rahm and a
fire hydrant entered the bar. The fire hydrant’s name was Maks Kalugin and had
more bullet holes in him than Emperor Maximilian.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
At
The
New York Times
, Lawrence De Maria covered the stock market, often from Page
1, and – depending on how long other reporters and columnists took for lunch –
also wrote about the credit market, options, real estate and just about
anything else financial. He believes he holds the record for most bylines in a
single
Times
edition: four. (The unwritten rule – no pun intended – was
one byline per edition.)
“I
heard the Executive Editor went bananas. So what did the marketing department
do? They used all those stories in an ad campaign. I had four bylines again! I
think they only reason they put up with me was that the financial section was
nominated for a Pulitzer while I was there. Or, perhaps, despite the fact that
I was there.”
After
a stint in the Marines, De Maria got his journalistic start at
The Staten
Island Advance
, covering crime and politics in a borough where those two
pursuits were often not mutually exclusive.
“It
was the kind of job where you could bump into Roy Cohn in the courthouse
elevator,” De Maria remembers. “I was on my way to cover the trial of some
lowlife mobster accused of shooting a man seven times in a barroom full of
witnesses. Cohn and I had a nice chat. He was very pleasant, not at all like
the man who terrified the nation during the Red Scare years earlier. I had no
idea why he was in a Staten Island courthouse, or who his client was.”
Then,
after exiting the elevator, Cohn walked into the same courtroom De Maria did.
The client was the young John Gotti.
“He
wasn’t the ‘Dapper Don’ back then,” De Maria noted. “He was wearing a green
leisure suit.”
But
he still was John Gotti. And Roy Cohn was still Roy Cohn.
“Not
surprisingly, none of the eyewitnesses showed up to testify. I think the cops
had some forensic evidence, because they did manage to convict him of attempted
manslaughter, which conveniently ignored the fact that there was a dead body.
He got a few years. Maybe it was the leisure suit.”
The
Gotti trial wasn’t De Maria’s only brush with the “mob.” He also spent a week
on the set of
The Godfather
, some of which was filmed on Staten Island.
“I
was the only reporter on the set. Nobody could figure out how I was getting all
my inside stories. I snuck in as one of the waiters for the crew catering the
famous wedding scene. Marlon Brando, Diane Keaton, Al Pacino, James Caan, they
couldn’t get enough of the great Italian food served every day. Neither could
I, to be honest. I was surprised how nice and accessible they all were. I think
they sensed they were creating a classic.”
De
Maria left the
Advance
with an
Associated Press
Spot News Award
under his belt and it wasn’t long before he was exposed to venality on a whole
new scale.
“At
both
The Times
and later at
Forbes
, and then in a brief,
lamentable stint in corporate communications, I met some really serious crooks.
Gotti or Madoff? You choose.”
De
Maria believes that hobnobbing with Wall Street bigwigs was the perfect
training ground for the fiction author he now is.
“Most
of what they told you was unbelievable, as subsequent indictments proved.”