STEVEN HOROWITZ, LIKE BORN Miller, had always been an opportunistic thief; he stole whenever the possibility of theft existed. But, unlike Born Miller, Steven had matured of late, refining his operation to the point where he was in danger of developing an m.o. His specialty now was credit card fraud; he bought counterfeit cards (bearing real numbers), along with supplementary identification, from a small printer on 49th Street, in Hell’s Kitchen, and used them in suburban malls throughout Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey. Which is how he became Steven Horowitz; it was the name on the VISA he was currently using and matched his identification. His real name was Saul Merstein, but his legal name (the name which underlay his various incarcerations) was Scott Forrest; he’d changed it when he was 19.
Despite an occasional indulgence (for recreational purposes only) in the kind of quick hit that had characterized the beginnings of his career, Steven was satisfied with his present trade. It paid well and involved little risk. The cards cost seven hundred dollars (five hundred, if he brought in his own numbers) and were guaranteed to have three thousand in credit. Most had a good deal more, but no card, not even that ten-thousand-dollar American Express back in November, had resisted Steve’s attempts to find its credit limit for more than three days.
Usually, the hit was limited to a single item with a four- to five-hundred-dollar pricetag—videocassette players, gold chains, good watches. Steven, smiling his golden smile, would flirt with the salesgirls while they processed his charge. He could afford to flaunt it, because he wouldn’t be the one coming back to return the merchandise. His partner, Louella Walters, two hundred pounds of indignant black fury, made the returns. Louella could make a sales clerk break out in hives.
“Mah momma gimme this watch on my birthday and I do not want the mother-fucker. Now please make out yo fuckin’ slip and hand me my money. You makin’ a mistake if you think you gon’ mess with my money.”
It didn’t always work. Many of the stores never made cash returns on charged merchandise. Others only returned cash for low-ticket items. Louella handled these situations either by direct sales to dozens of neighbors for about three quarters of the ticket price or, if they needed money quickly, by dumping the goods on a forty-cents-to-a-dollar fence.
They’d been working the scam successfully since the day Steven was released from the Men’s House of Detention, in Brooklyn, where Steven had the good fortune to share a cell with Louella Walters’ boyfriend, Darryl Porter. It was Darryl who’d turned him on to the credit card scam. Darryl Porter who’d explained the value of the black-white partnership. Darryl Porter who’d taught Steven about crime and the life.
Steven Horowitz was no fool. The scam was a gift and when he, like Born Miller, beat the rap (the good judge had taken one look at Steven’s golden smile, his small, straight nose, his respectably cheap gray suit and dealt him five years probation), he went directly to Louella Walters’ modest home in St. Albans, Queens, and applied for work.
And that was, of course, another difference between Steven Horowitz and Born Miller. Because Steven was a freshly scrubbed, clean-cut, whiter-than-white honkey whose good looks had (so far) survived the ravages of an advanced heroin/cocaine/alcohol cross-addiction, he was able to rise above the avalanche of harsh sentences typifying the new severity in law enforcement. Steven, like Born Miller, had spent his whole life with his middle finger in society’s rectum, but society was more than willing to give Steven Horowitz another chance. That’s why he was out on the street clearing nearly a grand a day. More than enough to afford what he wanted from life: dope to make his eyes sparkle; coke to make his smile widen; alcohol to make him fearless. And vicious.
He was certainly flush when he came into the Jackson Arms, pushing past the broken door locks. Flush and looking to party on the good dope and crack he’d been copping in 4B. Like Born Miller, he was surprised by the neighborhood, but he wasn’t threatened by the middle-class couple who pushed past him as he went toward the elevator. Whereas Born Miller had frozen in near panic, Steven turned up the golden smile and got a smile in return. Not surprising, considering his disguise: navy down parka, ski cap with small, white tassel, pressed khaki trousers, scuffed cordovan penny loafers. He felt good and looked good and that’s exactly how the public saw him.
Unfortunately, Steven’s good feelings took a major downturn when nobody answered his repeated knocks on the door of 4B. He put his ear to the door, hoping for the sound of a running shower, but everything was quiet.
“C’mon, ya little gook, answer the fucking door,” he said, slapping it with the palm of his hand. “C’mon, Vallone, take the spike outta ya fuckin’ arm and lemme in.”
Steven’s impatience had nothing to do with any impending symptoms of drug withdrawal. Unlike Born Miller, his addictions, though well-developed, were under control; he even kept a bottle of prescription Dilaudids in his medicine chest as a kind of health insurance. Besides, he could go to any of a dozen places in Corona or South Jamaica to get what he needed. What bothered Steven was the certainty that, wherever he went, he wouldn’t get anything like the quality available in 4B, especially the coke which was unreal in its intensity.
“Anyone helping you?”
Steven spun on his heel, automatically flashing a confused smile. “I’m looking for my auntie’s apartment. Her name’s Weinstein.”
“Yeah?” Pat Sheehan had been chasing junkies away from 4B ever since Moodrow had evicted the tenants. At first, it was a labor of love, but he was getting tired of it. He drove ten-hour shifts for United Parcel and took care of his partner when he was home. Louis had been running high fevers in the evening, fevers that responded to the prompt administration of ice packs and alcohol rubs. “Well, there’s no dope in your auntie’s apartment, pal. The cops closed down the store.”
“Pardon?” Steven Horowitz knew, of course, that he was dealing with a fellow graduate of New York’s penal system. But the guy had some kind of hard-on and Steven figured him for an asshole trying to go straight.
“The store is closed,” Pat repeated. “Permanently closed by order of the police. So it’d be best if you stopped bangin’ on the door and took off.”
Steven Horowitz wasn’t afraid, though he found Pat Sheehan formidable; he’d functioned in far worse situations. On the other hand, though he held on to his smile, Steven was absolutely enraged. His first instinct was to smash the smaller man, to crush him, but as an experienced opportunistic thief, he knew there was no opportunity in an even contest. It wasn’t like jail where you had no place to retreat to. “Hey, man,” he said, “I’m just lookin’ to get high. You know how it is, right?” He continued to smile as he turned, not toward the elevator, but toward the stairwell.
Steven was almost down to the next level before he stopped to compose himself. The flip, from soon-to-be-stoned criminal to humiliated, retreating junkie, had been much too sudden; it only added to his need for drugs. But there was no sense in going out on the street with a bad attitude, either. The first thing he had to consider was how to get high. He was tempted to settle for a crackhouse on 105th Street, in Corona. It was only ten minutes away, but the crack in Corona was all comeback and he would probably have to go inside to buy it. If he drove to the Liberty Park Houses, in South Jamaica, on the other hand, his regular people would come up to the car. And the crack was clean, pure cocaine; the dope reasonably potent; the home he was sharing with Louella less than twenty minutes away. Fuck the faggot upstairs. Nothing would prevent him from enjoying the fruits of his labor.
When a thoroughly calmed Steven Horowitz stepped into the third floor corridor, the first thing he noticed was the open door to apartment 3H. As this (and not a fistfight with a rock-hard Pat Sheehan) was what he defined as opportunity, he walked over to take a closer look. He was in the mood to indulge his nostalgia for the old days, when his criminal career consisted entirely of taking things directly from their owners. But the apartment was stripped and empty, the floors strewn with the odds and ends of moving: torn boxes, pieces of tape, chunks of packing.
With a barely perceptible shrug, Steven started to turn away, then heard the elevator clank to a stop and the door wheeze open. The old man who stepped out did such a double take upon sighting him, that Steven nearly laughed, but Steven, even while his mind worked furiously to analyze the potential for opportunity, managed to control himself. Instead of laughing, he flashed his brightest golden smile.
“Hi,” he said, drifting back to a conversation with Darryl Porter in which Darryl had explained the philosophy and the technique of the push-in, a form of robbery that could be done without weapons if the victim was old enough to guarantee control. Control. Steven could hear Darryl’s high, sharp voice even as he measured Mike Birnbaum.
Can you control the vic? That’s the first rule. You gon be with the vic a long time, so you best be able to control him.
“And what could I do for you?” Mike Birnbaum asked. Mike had never liked golden smiles.
“Looks like we’re gonna be neighbors,” Steven said. “My name’s Steven Horowitz.”
Can you get the vic in his apartment ’thout bein’ seen? Don’ forget, if some nigger see you go inside, he prolly gon’ do his nine one one bit and you still be fuckin with the vic when the man come to bust yo ass.
“What kind of name is that for a Jew? Steven?” Despite the sarcastic tone of his reply, Mike Birnbaum was more than happy to discover that his new neighbor would be a clean-cut Jewish boy instead of the black drug dealer he expected.
“My parents wanted me to be a good American,” he countered with a shrug. “You should pardon the expression.” Steven Horowitz, born Saul Merstein and legally Scott Forrest, was amazed; he’d thought the old Jews had died out long ago. The little mousey ones who gave their kid names like Izzy and the sharp-tongued whiners who soaked up that slimy fish like it was caviar? They were supposed to be long gone.
Suddenly, he was pissed-off again. The night had been shitting all over him, but now he had an opportunity to get even. And to make a few dollars.
Who know how much the poppy love got in his mattress? One time ah catch this ol’ nigger come pushin’ her shoppin’ cart with the house keys in her hand. Man, she look like she sleep in the subway. Smell like piss. Ah figure ah’m lucky if she got ten bucks. Turns out she got her “sick money” in a stocking in the back of her closet. Twelve hundred fifty-five dollars. Ah was jus’ comin’ out the institution and that “sick money” set me up in bidness.
“So when do you move in?” Mike turned the key in the lock and pushed his door open. He was a thrifty man and had remembered to put out the lights before he left. The rooms within, Steven Horowitz noted, were dark.
Is there anybody in there waitin? Sometime you be pushin’ grandma through the door and grandson be there with a damn baseball bat. Put “Louisville Slugger” all over yo ass.
“I think I’ll move in now,” Steven said quietly.
“Without no furniture?”
“You got furniture. You got enough for both of us.”
Mike Birnbaum, despite his bravado, was an old man; when Steven Horowitz, by way of fulfilling the name given to this crime, pushed Mike into his apartment, he seemed to fly down the darkened corridor, thus covering requirements number one, two, and three. The prey was under control. Nobody had seen. The apartment was unguarded.
Do the vic know y’all mean bidness? Don’t let there be no doubt. You fiend that vic till he understand the onliest way you gittin’ outta there is if he come across wit’ the goods.
Steven read the fear in Mike Birnbaum’s face even before he turned the old man over and pulled him to his feet. Steven had seen it many times in the Brooklyn House of Detention, seen a kid so shitass panicked he’d open his mouth before the wolf had his cock out. Steven could smell that fear in the old Jew, but he drove his fist into the Jew’s face anyway. Three times. And the frail hand that floated up protectively was no more than a fly to be brushed away.
Do you know what you lookin for? Can’t be spendin’ all day hangin’ on to the vic. Make yo move and get out. Make the poppy love tell you where he got the shit hid, ’cause he know if he don’t, you gon kill him.
“How do you want this, old man? Because we could do this the easy way or the hard way. You know what I’m sayin’? Like I don’t give a shit how we do it. Like I hope you make me hurt you. Like you’re just an old fuckin’ kike who shoulda dropped dead ten years ago. Like they shoulda burned your ass in the mother-fuckin’ ovens.”