Piece of the Action (3 page)

“He hits pretty hard for a little guy,” Jake observed.

“Gotta rip it up,” Abe sang, “gotta tear it up.”

Izzy kept at his work until Betty stopped screaming. Then he let her drop and all three men turned to leave. When they saw the small brown man standing in the doorway, they did a double-take worthy of the Three Stooges.

“
Que pasa
?” Luis Melenguez asked as the three men stared at him, wide-eyed. “
Que pasa
,” he repeated, as Abe Weinberg pulled Little Richard out of his coat pocket. “
Que pasa, que pasa, que pasa
,” as the hammer drew back and the automatic exploded and a .45 caliber slug blew the back of his head off.

“What’d ya do that for?” Jake asked, wondering if he should be angry or not. “It was just a friggin’ spic.”

“I hadda make my contribution, didn’t I?”

N
YPD PATROLMAN STANLEY MOODROW
sat before a full length mirror in the boys’ locker room of Robert Lehman High School and watched while his trainer, Sergeant Allen Epstein, wrapped his huge hands with a narrow strip of white gauze.

“Tighter, Sarge,” he hissed. “A little tighter.”

“You sure?” Epstein answered, dropping the gauze bandage to reach for a roll of white surgical tape.

“I gotta go six tonight. I don’t wanna hurt my hands in the first round.”

“You can’t hurt your hands punching air, Stanley. This guy’s fast.”

Moodrow tried to frown, but found himself grinning instead. Punching air? The phrase summed up his whole career. “Punching air” and “too damned big.” It was funny, in a way. The last fight of a boxer’s career wasn’t supposed to be held in a Brooklyn high school. And it wasn’t supposed to be the most important fight of that career. The last fight was supposed to come after a career filled with main events in Madison Square Garden, with championship belts held aloft, with popping flashbulbs and crowds of reporters.

Moodrow turned away from Epstein and curled his hands into fists. Satisfied, he studied himself in the mirror. Or, at least, he studied that portion of himself visible in the narrow glass. If he wanted to see the whole of his six foot six, 245-pound frame, he’d have to stand on the other side of the locker room. But he didn’t want to see his chest or his shoulders. Stanley Moodrow was looking into his own eyes, looking for any sign of indecision.

“Too damned big,” he thought. That’s what his first serious trainer, Sammy Turro, had told him. “You’re too damned big, Stanley. Ya stay in the fight game, ya gonna get your ass kicked.”

Moodrow had begun his fighting career in 1948, when he was fifteen years old. Most kids take up boxing because they’re afraid, but not Stanley Moodrow. He was always the biggest kid in his class, always a head taller than the tallest student. Maybe that was why, despite his good grades, he was cast as a dummy, a dope. The other kids made fun of him and he reacted, as kids will, by beating the crap out of them. That ended the teasing, but it hadn’t made him popular.

No, the end result of his schoolyard victories was that the losers, the hoods and the dummies, came to admire him, while the rest of the school left him entirely alone. Stanley Moodrow knew all about losers—growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was no way to avoid them—and he wanted no part of their lives. Lost in arrogance, they hung out on every street corner, sucking on bottles of beer, dreaming of easy scores and easier sex. Right up until the day a judge sent them up the river.

“These are bums, Stanley,” his father, Max, had explained again and again. “All of them. They don’t want to work, so they take what they need from the people. Better to be a dog than a bum. God willing, I’ll live long enough to spit on their graves.”

God, apparently,
hadn’t
been willing. Max Moodrow fell off a ladder at a Bronx construction site four days before his son’s fifteenth birthday and died on the way to the hospital.

But that didn’t end the lectures. Moodrow’s Uncle Pavlov took up the theme before his brother was in his grave. “I hear you’re fightin’ in school, Stanley,” he counseled. “It’s okay to be tough. Ya gotta be tough to survive down here. But don’t be stupid, all right? Don’t be a bum. Ya wanna fight, go in the ring where it’ll do ya some good.”

Uncle Pavlov, a ten-year veteran of the NYPD, just happened to be in charge of the P.A.L.’s Lower East Side boxing program. He also just happened to be smart enough to act surprised when his brother’s kid turned up a month later.

“Hey, Stanley, fancy meetin’ you here.”

“I thought I’d give it a shot, Uncle Pavlov. I mean boxing. I wanna try it out.”

Try it out? The truth was that fifteen-year-old Stanley Moodrow wanted to be a champion. Like every other kid who put on the gloves. And his first twenty fights did nothing to discourage him. It wasn’t just the power in his right hand. Stanley Moodrow, like all good fighters in the early stages of a career, simply refused to lose. He found a way to win, even when overmatched, to eat the pain and keep on coming. If his fists weren’t good enough, he beat his opponent into submission with the sheer force of his will. The pain—and there was
plenty
of pain—was a badge of honor.

“Ya mind’s not where it belongs, Stanley.”

“Huh?” Moodrow turned to his trainer. “What’d you say, Sarge?”

“The fight,
schmuck.
The one you’re gonna have tonight. Get your mind on the goddamned fight.”

Moodrow stood up and kicked the stool away. He set himself in front of the mirror and began to shadowbox with his reflection. Fights, he knew, don’t begin with the opening bell. They begin the day the match is made and progress through a number of stages. Training, first, then a layoff two days before the bout, then the weigh-in, the taping of the hands, the ritual of working up a sweat, the long walk to the ring, the introductions. You could lose your edge anywhere along the way. The will to win could be sucked out of you like a malted through a straw.

“I’m gonna take this guy tonight,” he said without stopping. “It’s six rounds, not three. I’m gonna catch him and take him out.”

The thing about it was that you could control a lot of things in your life, but you couldn’t control everything. You couldn’t control the fact that you were seventeen years old and six foot five inches tall and maybe you’d kicked the hell out of YMCA competition, but now you were in the Golden Gloves and your opponents were faster and more experienced. Very few kids are full-blown heavyweights at the tender age of seventeen.

Moodrow made it to the semi-finals, despite the fact that his opponents were all in their twenties, but that was the end of it. Bobby Brown was a three-time Golden Gloves national champion. Four inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than Moodrow, he used his speed to every advantage, darting in to throw four-punch combinations, then moving back and away before Moodrow could respond. The blood began to flow halfway through the second round and the referee stopped it fifteen seconds into the third. Moodrow, back in the dressing room, tried to make an excuse.

“It was a butt,” he told the doctor sewing his eyelid back together. “A butt,” he insisted to his trainer.

Sammy Turro was kind enough to wait until the doctor finished, until there were no witnesses, before he enlightened his fighter.

“Ya too big, Stanley. Too fuckin’ big. There ain’t no champions big as you. And don’t give me Jack Johnson, neither. Guys today are scientific. They know how to stay away. You get in against one of the good ones? Eddie Machen? Zora Folley? Cleveland Williams? I don’t care how hard ya work, they’re gonna use ya for a punching bag. Lotta guys big as you, guys with your heart, they go into boxing anyway. Fifteen years later they’re sparrin’ partners for two bucks a round. They hear bells whenever they close their eyes.”

“Sammy,” Moodrow insisted, “he
butted
me.”

“Yeah, well I didn’t see no butt, Stanley. But if he
did
put his head in your eye, you oughta send him a thank-you note. Another two minutes and he prob’ly would’a killed ya.”

Moodrow, eyes riveted to his reflection in the mirror, stopped throwing punches and assumed a defensive posture, fists alongside the jaw, elbows tight against the ribs. It was the “peek-a-boo” defense used by the current champion, Floyd Patterson, who should have been quick enough to do without it. For Moodrow, on the other hand, it amounted to an acceptance of punishment. He wasn’t fast enough to slip punches, to move out of harm’s way. He was going to have to take one to give one. Or take two. Or three. Or four.

“All right, Stanley, don’t overdo it. You’re supposed to warm up, not leave your fight in the dressing room.”

Moodrow ignored him. Allen Epstein didn’t know squat about the fine art of bringing a fighter to his peak on the night of a big bout. Epstein was in it for the same reason as Moodrow, though he wasn’t dumb enough actually to be the one in the ring.

Moodrow had never seen his desire to be a world champion as simple ambition until his third week at the Police Academy. He’d looked at the freshly scrubbed faces of the other recruits, then raised a finger to the still-pink scar on his brow. He knew things they didn’t know, things you learn by going into the ring and winning your first twenty fights. He knew, for instance, that he could have turned pro and worked himself into contention for a championship. Maybe he would never
be
a champion, but white boxing fans were always scouting the horizon for another Rocky Marciano, another Great White Hope. Hadn’t they taken a rank amateur like Pete Rademacher and bet him down to even money against Floyd Patterson? He, Moodrow, big as he was, could have played the part, maybe even gotten a title fight against a champion looking for an easy payday. Maybe, if he’d been
real
lucky …

The kids sitting alongside him didn’t understand any of it, the victories or the defeats. They couldn’t know what it felt like to give up the dream when you’d already come halfway. There were twenty-four thousand cops in the NYPD and twenty-one thousand were out there pounding a beat. Most of them would spend their entire careers on the street. Checking the backs of closed hardware stores. Directing traffic in the rain. Hoofing it from one call box to another. It would pay the rent, but it was a long way from heavyweight champion of the world.

Thank God for civil service exams. There was a way to move up in the job without the direct approval of the brass. You pass the sergeant’s exam, you’re a sergeant, the lieutenant’s exam, you’re a lieutenant, the captain’s exam, you’re a captain. That wasn’t the way Stanley Moodrow wanted to do it, but if Plan A failed, he’d go that route. Plan A was to be appointed to the detectives, to carry the Gold Shield, to spend his workdays in a suit instead of a uniform.

It was a nice dream, but there was no detective’s exam to take. Detectives were appointed by other detectives and, according to his Uncle Pavlov, there was more politics in that Gold Shield than in the rest of the Department put together. In order even to be considered for the detectives, you had to catch the attention of someone already
in
the detectives. Which was almost impossible, because beat cops rarely came into contact with the suits. Meanwhile, there were dozens of cops out there whose fathers, brothers and uncles already carried the Gold Shield.

“If you wanna get the attention of the suits,” Uncle Pavlov explained, “the best way to do it is by making a big collar. The kind that gets your name in the papers. But you have to be careful not to step on any toes. The rule is that detectives detect and patrolmen patrol. If you stumble onto a robbery in progress and blow the scum away, you’re a hero. If you follow a burglar for a month, waiting to catch him inside a warehouse, you’re a hotdog.”

“I understand, Uncle Pavlov,” Moodrow replied. “But what I’m hearing is that I’m never gonna get an appointment unless I get lucky. You should pardon me when I tell you that I don’t see myself as a lucky guy.”

Pavlov Moodrow tapped his nephew on the forehead. “Then why don’t you be a
smart
guy, Stanley. You got good grades all the way through high school. You didn’t fall down, even when your father passed over. Do yourself a favor, go up to City College and take some classes. Study for the sergeant’s exam in your spare time. If the detectives call you up, that’s great, but if they don’t, you got something to fall back on. And there’s no luck involved in it.”

Moodrow took the advice to heart. Twice a week, in addition to his duties as a beat cop on the Lower East Side, he rode the subway up to City College and sat through a boring lecture. He managed to accumulate eighteen credits in three years, a long way from the hundred and thirty he needed to graduate. But graduation wasn’t the point. The point was to make his ambition known and to memorize the Patrol Guide.

He’d been given his copy of the Patrol Guide on the day he entered the Academy. All six hundred looseleaf pages of it. The Patrol Guide was supposed to provide a step-by-step procedural guide to every situation ever encountered by any cop anywhere. Most patrolmen, on the advice of the older cops who shepherded them through their first months on the job, dumped the Patrol Guide in a closet and learned the shortcuts offered by the veterans. Stanley Moodrow, on the other hand, took sections of the Guide to work with him, studying the mechanics (and the paperwork) of police procedure. The sergeant’s exam was based almost entirely on the Patrol Guide.

Moodrow, his career on course, was just finishing his third year on the job when Sergeant Allen Epstein, newly transferred from Midtown North, found him on the corner of Clinton and Houston Streets.

“Patrolman Moodrow?”

“What’s up, Sarge?”

“Get in for a minute. I wanna talk to you.”

The minute turned into twenty as Epstein explained that he knew all about Moodrow’s amateur boxing career. He pronounced that career glorious, then went on to proclaim the glories of the Manhattan South Police Boxing Club, which, under his expert guidance, would become the finest in the Department.

Moodrow listened politely—Epstein was, after all, a sergeant—but he had less than no interest in the glory derived from beating some cop into submission. Glory was a world title, not a sweaty dance in a high school gym.