THE UNEXPECTED SPRING RAIN responsible for ruining the American Red Army’s surprise party in Williamsburg, continued through Sunday and Sunday night, an unremitting downpour which did not die out until late on Monday morning. By that time the highways in New York City, as well as thousands of basements in the outer boroughs, had been turned into a series of muddy-brown lakes.
FDR Drive went first. By 9 AM on Sunday, the underpass below Carl Schurz Park was flooded with more than two-and-a-half feet of water and the Drive was closed in both directions. A half dozen roads followed—the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; the Whitestone Expressway at the fork to the Whitestone Bridge; the Grand Central Parkway in Kew Gardens and again at Hoyt Avenue; the Cross Island Parkway and the Interboro at Metropolitan Avenue. The Belt Parkway, which runs along the Atlantic Ocean in southern Brooklyn and floods in a heavy fog, was impassable. The ocean, in several places, had reached out an arm to cover the roadbed.
Monday morning was a commuter’s nightmare and switchboards were jammed all morning with the excuses of those unable to face the traffic. Some abandoned the roads, deciding to approach the island of Manhattan by subway. They forced their way into trains that simply remained, doors open, in the stations. The tunnels below were as flooded as the streets above: Signals were jammed, switches stuck and third rails shorted throughout the system.
The majority arrived at their jobs about noon, wet and disheveled, harassed even beyond a New Yorker’s ability to cope. Then, as they scurried about, trying somehow to catch up, the temperature outside began to drop. It had been fifty-three degrees when the rain began. By Monday evening, it was twenty-six and falling. By Tuesday morning, it was sixteen degrees and what before had been merely wet, was now ice. The subways were barely running and all those commuters who’d been bitten on Monday, took back to the roads just as those who’d taken Monday off pulled out of their driveways. The backup at the bridges and tunnels began before 7 AM. By eight o’clock, traffic on the entryways to the great island was frozen as solid as the puddles on the street.
Even within Manhattan, patches of ice, untouched by an armada of orange saltspreaders, slowed traffic to a standstill. Fifth Avenue became a sea of buses surrounded by bright yellow taxis, as packs of dogs might surround buffalo. Passengers complained to harassed cabbies who could think of nothing except how slowly their meters ran when they moved along at a rate of four red lights to a block. Of course, the horns would not stop, not even when the traffic officers, huddled down in their heavy brown coats, waved ticket books threateningly.
And these New Yorkers had been waiting for spring since the end of the holiday season. In January, all along the northeast coast of America, the cold moves in, soaked through with humidity, driving those who can afford them into ankle-length mink or down coats. The good citizens run from office to cab to home, glancing up into the sky in search of the warm days to come. By March, they are already impatient; by April they are desperate for the few seventy-degree days that mark the boundary between unbearably cold and unbearably hot. These days rarely arrive before the very end of April, yet eyes persist in flickering skyward, hoping for the best and, failing that, filling the cabs and subways and buses with their lament: “Man, it is fucking cold out there.”
But for Rita Melengic and Stanley Moodrow, the weather went virtually unnoticed, even though it took them nearly ten hours to drive from Atlantic City to Rita’s apartment on First Avenue. The Garden State Parkway was awash, with visibility down to near zero. They joked about it for awhile and then Rita fell asleep, her purse, stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, cradled in both arms. At times, in her sleep, she slumped against the door and Moodrow patiently tugged her across until her head pressed against his shoulder. Then he plodded on, slowly, persistently.
Rita woke at 6 AM, as they were rolling through Perth Amboy toward the Outerbridge Crossing into State Island. At her request, they stopped for breakfast in a small diner off the main road. At first, tired and silent, they simply stared at each other through critical, puffy eyes, but by the time they reached Staten Island, the coffee had made them more or less alert. Rita, somehow, managed to fix her hair without looking in the mirror, then elbowed Moodrow in the ribs.
“Say something, you fart.”
“Me, a fart? Rita, I been constipated for twenty-two years.” He waited for her come back, but she was too tired and so, impulsively, he blundered on. “How old are you, Rita?”
“You know how old I am.”
“Tell me.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Forty-one.”
“That’s interesting,” Moodrow responded, eyes glued to the road. “Let’s live together.”
Rita gave him a sharp look and he grinned, but refused to turn his head. “It sounds stupid to me, too,” he said, finally.
There was a silence, in its proper place, but after a few seconds, it frightened Rita and she had to break it. “So how old are you?” she asked, just reaching over to gently stroke his arm.
“You know how old I am,” he said. He was already sorry he’d opened his mouth. He recognized that he was supposed to ask the lady to marry him, given his feelings for her, not live with him.
“You’re fifty,” she said.
“We’re too old to get married. It’s ridiculous. It’ll make us look like a couple of fucking clowns.”
Another silence, while they listened to the hiss of tires on wet pavement. Until Moodrow put it on the line. “What if I said I loved you?” he asked.
She bit his ear, a quick, sharp bite. “We are too old.”
“Sure, much too old. So what I’ll do is, I’ll get enough clothes out of my apartment and we’ll try it for two weeks.”
“Then what?”
“Who the fuck knows?” Moodrow groaned. “Maybe we’ll go to Holland. For the tulips.”
“Neptune, more likely,” Rita said, “For the atmosphere.”
On Tuesday morning, while Moodrow returned to work, Rita Melengic put her winnings in the bank—$8,786—in a money-market fund. Then, at noon, when she knew it would be busy and she, as an experienced waitress, would be most valued, she went back to the Killarney Harp on Houston Street and confronted Ramon Iglesia, the man who’d fired her. Not surprisingly, he broke into a huge smile, his anger long ago dissipated, and they spent the next hour having coffee and catching up on neighborhood gossip. Ramon had a new girlfriend, but she was still running around with her ex-lover though she, Irma, swore they were not going to bed anymore.
“But I heard she went up to his apartment,” Ramon cried. “My friend told me she was up there for two hours. How could a woman go to a man’s apartment that long if she wasn’t gonna let him do it? Not for no two hours, because if she didn’t give him no ass, he wouldn’t let her stay there. Not for no two hours.”
Rita gave him a long look, reaching for what he wanted to hear. She finally decided that he was in love with Irma and so she, Rita, would try to reassure him. “Haven’t you ever had a woman in your apartment without going to bed with her?”
“Not without trying.” He gave her an affronted look, drawing in an already weak chin. “Besides,” he waved a finger in victory. “They already been lovers for three years. He ain’t gonna go in a room alone with her for no two hours if she don’t give him nothin’.”
“Well, maybe there was someone else there. Did you ask her?”
Ramon perked up briefly, then allowed the anger to rise back into his hunched shoulders. “My friend told me she was alone with him.”
“Was your friend inside? Don’t be so quick to judge. You didn’t ask the poor girl. Give her a chance, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, I’m gonna let Stanley move in with me.”
Ramon’s aspect changed immediately, brightening until he fairly glowed. He reached out to squeeze her fingers gently. “That’s so good to hear. You too beautiful to live alone.” He looked around the room, noting the customers and waitresses engaged in their noon-time dance. “Hey girls,” he called out over the noise of the bar. “Hey, Louisa, Rosa, Kathy. Come over here.” And when they arrived he continued, explaining Rita’s good fortune which began to seem better and better to her as the girls petted and kissed her. They were, all of them, veterans of the wars between men and women. Kathy and Rosa were married, unhappily, while Louisa, five-years divorced, merely screwed around, also unhappily. For them, any change, especially when viewed from a distance, had to be for the better. But it wasn’t their opinions that mattered to Rita anyway; it was their obvious feeling for her, their warmth and affection. Then she told them about her winnings in Atlantic City and they fell back, awed and jealous. In their world, men and women were always coming together and falling apart, while cash was inevitably in short supply.
“What are you gonna do with it?” Louisa asked.
“Well I put it in the bank this morning, but I was thinking of having a party here on Saturday night after we close. I mean, if I get my job back.” She gave Ramon a sidelong glance.
“No problem,” he said. “I already been sending people around looking for you. But I got to be careful. I can’t come myself, because your boyfriend is a cop. Jesus,” he paused to wipe his forehead, a purely symbolic gesture of submission, “for awhile I was afraid you might send him after me. He’s the biggest damn cop I ever saw.”
On the Tuesday morning following the assault on the Robert Wagner Homes, Moodrow, relieved of any special detail, also returned to work, and picked up the thread of a large fencing operation, an ongoing investigation he and several other detectives had been pursuing for nearly three months. He worked at his desk in the detectives’ room, a place he avoided as much as possible, not because he disliked his fellow detectives, but because he hated the noise—the cops yelling to each other across the room, the assorted criminals and complainants, some clearly psychotic, screaming their innocence to whomever would listen, and, most of all, the endless ringing of the telephones.
Still, he put in his time conscientiously, spending most of the morning on the hated telephone. Other detectives, involved in the same case, approached his desk from time to time. The team was looking for an informant who could introduce them to the fence, an Italian named Angelo Girardi, but after two hours of comparing notes and calling in favors, they were reduced to considering the possibility of bringing in an undercover cop from some outer precinct. All knew it would take months for a new man to penetrate the operation, and nobody was satisfied, when Moodrow, at twelve o’clock, pushed his chair away from the desk.
“Fuck it,” he declared earnestly. “I’m gonna go have lunch and see if Rita got her job back. Take about an hour.” He tossed some papers on his desk, walked out into the dayroom, shrugged into his coat and was halfway out the door when the duty sergeant looked up from his desk, peering over his bifocals.
“Hey, Stanley,” he called out over the noise of the detectives’ room. “The captain wants to see you.”
“Well, for shit sake, Harry, why didn’t you tell me before I got dressed?”
Clearly offended, Harry sniffed once, then buried himself in the stack of paperwork that lay on his desk, the same paperwork he’d been staring at since nine o’clock in the morning.
Helpless, Moodrow threw off his overcoat and trudged down the corridor toward the captain’s office. Without thinking, he opened the door as he had a thousand times before, only this time Epstein’s voice rang out before he was in the room.
“Don’t you believe in knocking, Sergeant?” the captain asked.
Moodrow looked around Epstein’s office, noting Agents Higgins and Bradley as well as a New York deputy inspector named Sean Flynn, a fourth generation Irish cop. He nearly laughed aloud, imagining the kind of pressure that could make an old-time Fed-hater like Flynn accompany two FBI agents into a precinct house. Nevertheless, in spite of his amusement, he started to back out of the room, understanding both that he was in some sort of trouble and that the captain needed to put on a show.
“Forget about it,” Epstein said, just enough resignation in his voice to show he was playing his part. “You’re in now. Why don’t you take a seat.”
Moodrow did as he was told, sitting absolutely immobile in a chair across from Higgins and Bradley.
“This is Deputy Inspector Flynn,” Epstein said.
The deputy nodded once. “We’ve met before, Captain,” he said crisply. “I had the honor of presenting the sergeant with a commendation about six months ago. For bravery, if I recall. A tenement fire.”
“How you been, Inspector?” Moodrow asked.
“Still pushing, Sergeant. Thanks be to Jesus.”
“Well,” Bradley interrupted. He knew the dialogue was meant to annoy him. A message of solidarity from the troops. “We’ve only got a few minutes, so let’s get right down to business.” He addressed Moodrow directly. “First, we’d like to know how you’re doing on the Chadwick case. Are you close to making an arrest?”
Moodrow looked at Epstein, received a slight nod, then spoke out. “We closed it out. Nothing but dead ends. Nothing solid.”
“Then how about something liquid?” Bradley asked, flashing a smile as elegant as his pin-striped suit.
“Whattaya gonna do, bust my fuckin’ balls?” Moodrow half rose in his seat.
“Now just one minute,” Flynn said calmly. “As long as I’m in this room, by Jesus, Mary and all that’s holy, we’ll have none of that language. We’re here to review an investigation and that’s just what we’re going to do.”
Moodrow, recalling, vaguely, that Flynn was president of the Holy Name Society, dropped his head contritely. “I’m sorry, Inspector. You go ahead, Agent Bradley, and I’ll try to answer. Only it seems to me that when I went out to see you in Queens, you weren’t very interested,”
Leonora Higgins spoke out quickly. “Sergeant Moodrow,” she began, “we now feel there’s some possibility that the same group responsible for the death of Ronald Chadwick is presently operating as the American Red Army. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.”
“Why?” Moodrow asked and, at that moment, using just those instincts Moodrow had spoken about earlier, Leonora Higgins knew that Stanley Moodrow could, if he chose—and that choice was by no means certain—track down the killer of Ronald Chadwick. “Tell me what’s changed enough so you think that now there’s a connection where there wasn’t one a couple of weeks ago.”
Bradley, angry, leaned forward. “We think there may be something you forgot to mention in your last report. Something you missed. Something you want to add.”
Moodrow stared contemptuously at the agent, forcing Inspector Flynn to come between them. “Look here, Sergeant. I’m not blaming you, understand, but I haven’t got time for this sparring. Do you know any more than you put in your report?”
Moodrow looked down at the floor, as if trying to make up his mind about something, then stared straight into Flynn’s eyes. “Inspector, I don’t know what kind of BS dragged these agents away from their computers, but it isn’t Ronald Chadwick. And if you don’t believe me, I’ll give you the whole deal and let you decide for yourself.
“First, Ronald Chadwick is killed and an unspecified amount of money taken from him. Then one of his closest aides, a boy who could have supplied the inside information to make the robbery come off, disappears and later turns up dead in a basement on Clinton Street. Autopsy shows that he was killed before Chadwick. Probably. Finally, this aide’s best buddy, one of twenty-three people I wanted to question, is missing. Did the aide give out the information that set up Chadwick? Did the missing friend, whose street name is Zorba, kill Chadwick and the aide? Whatta ya think the odds are? Twenty to one? Thirty to one? And, if he did, what’s the chance he’s still in New York or that he’s connected in some way to the American Red Army? Another thirty to one? You want me to find this guy? I’ll try my best, but it burns me that when I made my report to Agent Higgins, she practically laughed in my face. Told me there was nothing to it. Now she strolls into my precinct and accuses me of holding back. It’s an insult to the whole department.”
Inspector Flynn threw the two agents the darkest look he knew. They had dragged him in here on a hunch when, in fact, they had no solid evidence at all. The sergeant was clearly not derelict in his duty. He had been thorough and professional in his handling of the case. As a longtime cop, Flynn knew that federal agencies universally embraced the delusion that local police departments were at their beck and call, a kind of law enforcement minor league. “Well, Agent Bradley,” he said, shortly, “I think the sergeant has done his job properly, don’t you? And I’m sure we both commend him on the completeness of his investigation. Now, if there’s nothing else, I’d like to be off.”
Bradley, his voice full of contempt, answered, without even looking at Leonora Higgins. “Perhaps the sergeant could run through the interview he conducted in the course of his investigations.”
“I believe the sergeant,” Flynn responded before Moodrow could speak, “has already told you that you have all the information.”
“Then I have no more questions,” Bradley said, looking over at Leonora. “Anything further, Agent Higgins?”
Leonora didn’t answer, but as she looked toward Moodrow, he caught her eye and winked, tapping his forefinger against his temple and she realized, for the first time, just how big a mistake they’d made in alienating Stanley Moodrow.