Casino Moon (30 page)
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER,
I was still in shock as they put me in the back of the squad car.
“You probably did him a favor,” said Detective Farley, sliding in next to me as another beefy detective got in the front.”He was dying of cancer, you know.”
Great, I thought, as the car started and pulled away. I’d thrown away the rest of my life to kill a dead man.
As the old house receded in the distance behind me, I thought about what I’d done to the kids. At least I’d left something for them. Thirty thousand dollars in chips wouldn’t go far, but once I got a lawyer, I’d get after Frank for the rest of the advance and the pay-per-view receipts. There had to be at least another hundred thousand coming.
Besides, I thought, they were better off without me, though it broke my heart to know I’d never see them again. All I ever did was hurt the people I loved. Little Anthony and Rachel would have to grow up without an old man around.
The driver started to make a left onto Atlantic Avenue and ran straight into a line of cars with their taillights glaring like a row of bloodshot eyes. More cars leaving the casinos at three in the morning.
“Fucking traffic light’s broken on Missouri Avenue,” he said. “It’s only letting through six cars at a time.”
“Atlantic City,” Farley sighed. He turned and looked at me. “We gotta take Route 40 out to Mays Landing so we can book you. You got any ideas how we can get there faster?”
I sat up as the handcuffs dug into my wrists. “We could take the Boardwalk.”
They looked at each other and lifted their shoulders. Why not?
They hit the siren, cut through an alley, and went up a ramp onto the Boardwalk.
With the window down a little, I was able to feel the salt breeze on my face one more time. It was a cool fall night. There were still a few stragglers out in front of the pizza joints and fortune-tellers’ storefronts. On the beachside, the last of those red-and-white-striped tents were shivering and the gulls were circling.
“You get yourself a good lawyer, you could be out in five years,” Farley said.
“Less if you can prove self-defense,” the detective behind the wheel added.
I knew they were trying to soften me up to sign a confession. I kept my mouth shut. The way Vin would’ve wanted me to.
“Plus you got extenuating circumstances, don’t forget that.” Farley leaned over, pushing his shoulder against mine as if we were suddenly the best of friends.
“Like what?”
“You know. You could talk about losing your father and all that crap. Psychological distress.”
“Yeah, right.”
I stared straight ahead through the windshield at the lighted casino towers shimmering in the distance. Vin never really got inside them and Mike never lived to see them. And now I realized I didn’t belong in them either.
“Did I tell you before that you look like him?” Farley asked.
“Who?”
“Mike. Mike Dillon. He was classic. Years ago, he tried to get me to invest in some crazy scheme where he was going to buy up land along the Boardwalk and build another of those grand old hotels. He was always a dreamer, Mike. It must have been something, having him as your old man.”
I shook my head as we passed the Doubloon and its blinking
TAKE A CHANCE
sign.
Because when I thought back about being a kid going for those long walks on the Boardwalk, it was Vin’s hand, not Mike’s, holding mine. I remember him hoisting me up on his shoulders and telling me that someday the whole town would be mine. Vin showed me the way of the world and taught me that only the strong survive, though in Atlantic City, even that’s not a sure thing. And when the time came, I acted like his son by reaching for a gun to avenge his death. That was what was in my heart, and it couldn’t be any other way. I once thought I was something different or maybe even something better than him, but now I finally understood that what he was was also a part of me. And that in spite of everything, I would always love him.
“My father’s name was Vin,” I said.
A cold wind was whipping around the island. Probably a storm on the way, or at least a light rain. Sand rose off the dunes they’d piled up to keep the Atlantic from overtaking the beach.
“Have it your way.” Farley shrugged.
I took one last look out at the ocean. A full moon was shining on the water and pulling on the tide. The ripples caught the broken pieces of light and threw them back up at the sky.
Although Peter Blauner (b. 1959) grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and attended the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, he has always been drawn to the dark side of city life. “Being a kid during the fiscal-crisis seventies, I saw how things could change and you could go from the high to the low very quickly. Which is a very good lesson in humility and an even better one for writing crime fiction.”
Influenced equally by the films of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, the burgeoning punk rock scene, and the split-lip school of American pulp fiction, Blauner began writing short stories in high school and while still in college got a summer job assisting legendary newspaper columnist and author Pete Hamill. “He gave me a master class on what it means to be an urban writer. He taught me to always get your notes on paper right away, always ask the hardest question you can think of, and always listen carefully to the last thing somebody says to you.”
After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1982, Blauner returned to the city and began working at
New York
magazine, where he apprenticed with Nicholas Pileggi, author of
Wise Guy
and screenwriter of the film
Goodfellas
. Over the next few years, Blauner developed his byline for the magazine, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of antisocial behavior. But, he says, “My real goal was to train myself to become an urban novelist. I wanted to write stories that were suspenseful and compelling, but that also tried to capture what’s funny, surrealistic, and occasionally beautiful about city life.”
He decided on an approach of full-immersion research, which he has continued throughout his writing career. In 1988, he took a leave from the magazine and became a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation, so he could write about the criminal culture of the era from the front lines. The result was his debut novel,
Slow Motion Riot
, which was published in 1991. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel and was named one of the “International Books of the Year” in the
Times Literary Supplement
by Patricia Highsmith, who called it “unforgettable.”
Soon after, Blauner turned his attention to fiction writing fulltime, and his next novel,
Casino Moon
, was a kind of update of the classic noir pulp genre, set in the Atlantic City boxing world and published in 1994. After his time in Atlantic City researching
Casino Moon
, he returned to New York and spent a year working at a homeless shelter to research
The Intruder
, which was published in 1996 and became a
New York Times
bestseller. For his next novel,
Man of the Hour
, published in 1999, he anticipated the reality of 9/11 by writing about misguided notions of heroism and Middle Eastern terrorism in America. Four years later, he shifted gears and wrote
The Last Good Day
, about a murder in a quiet Hudson River town and the resulting social fissures among the people who live there.
Blauner’s most recent novel,
Slipping Into Darkness
(2006), found him back on the city streets creating a modern urban mystery. It tells the story of Julian Vega, a bright young immigrant’s son, locked up in the early eighties for killing a female doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. Twenty years later, Julian is released from prison and another female doctor is killed under strikingly similar circumstances. Only this time, the evidence doesn’t point to Julian at all—it points to the woman he allegedly murdered two decades before. And the detective who arrested him in the first place, Francis X. Loughlin, is left to wrestle with the possibility that he ruined the life of an innocent man. The book earned the strongest reviews of Blauner’s career, with everyone from Stephen King to the
New York Times
ringing in, and introduced him to a new audience.
More recently, Blauner has branched out into television work, writing scripts for the
Law & Order
franchise, and also into short fiction. His short stories have been anthologized in the
Best American Mystery
collection and on NPR’s
Selected Shorts from Symphony Space
. He continues to live in Brooklyn with his wife, Peg Tyre, author of the bestselling nonfiction book
The Trouble With Boys
, and their two sons, Mac and Mose.
A six-year-old Blauner dressed as the Green Hornet. His love of the comic book series marked his first interest in crime fiction.
Blauner with his mother, older brother Steve, and family friends during what he calls “the heyday of the
Mad Men
era.”
Blauner’s yearbook page from Collegiate School, the all-boys institution he attended on the Upper West Side of New York City.
Blauner’s first real byline as a reporter for
New York
magazine in 1982, when he was twenty-two. As he remembers, “It was an undercover assignment in which I posed as a street peddler; and an early version of the kind of research I’d do later for my novels. I almost managed to get arrested selling fake Rolexes and knock-off Gucci sunglasses.”
Blauner’s wedding photo with his wife, Peg Tyre, the
New York Times
bestselling author of the nonfiction book
The Trouble with
Boys. The couple was married on June 24, 1989.
Blauner and Peg (who was pregnant at the time) with George Jordan and Elaine Rivera at the scene of the Crown Heights riots in 1991, about three months after
Slow Motion Riot
was published. Jordan and Rivera were two of Peg’s fellow New York
Newsday
reporters.
Seen here in 1992, Blauner holds his first-born son, Mac, then four months old, at the Semana Negra writer’s festival, which was hosted by the International Association of Crime Writers at a seaside amusement park in Gijón, Spain. They are posing in front of a giant replica of Raymond Chandler’s
The Long Goodbye
, translated into Spanish. Blauner’s own books have been translated into twenty languages.
