This is the fourth chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here.
Apparently, the Bronx homicide division’s headquarters were nowhere near lower Manhattan, and Rendell wasn’t offering to go out of his way. A short while later, he pulled up to the curb next to a subway station.
“Out you go. I’m done with you for now, but don’t leave town,” he said.
Shocked at the circumstances I found myself in, and frustrated with being dragged around town and bullied all day, my natural peace-making and problem-solving instincts rose to the surface:
“Wow, so cops really say ‘don’t leave town?’, or have you just been watching a lot of Kojak on cable?”
“A wise guy eh?”
I guess that answered that question.
“No just trying to win you over with my charming sense of humor, but I can see it’s not working. If you need me, you know where to find me.”
With that, I descended. A short while later, I found myself on the train, with plenty to think about on the long ride downtown.
I guy who worked for me, whom I was friendly with, but not too close, was dead. Really dead. Usually, when a City worker dies, no one notices for a while. Lack of movement and strong odors don’t mean much in a typical civil service office, but this time there no was getting around it. Pats was dead -- he didn’t just smell funny.
A no account scam artist sleaze bag and known associate of the deceased finds the body, and decides to tell me about it instead of the cops. I should be honored by his faith in me, I suppose, but confidant to the bums wasn’t exactly my first career choice.
The widow of the dearly departed can’t keep her stories straight. Either she worshipped the ground he walked on, or she couldn’t wait to bury him. Either she didn’t know a thing about her husband’s extra-curricular activities, or she knew exactly what he was up to, and wanted to make sure she got her cut.
As for the dearly departed, he was turning into a complicated guy. It seems he was stashing girlfriends in an apartment owned by a guy with an animal for a middle name. Never a good sign.
And here I was, a bureaucrat, not bloated yet, but getting there. Rip Van Civil Servant waking up in the middle of a mystery. Except, as we say in the business, it’s not my department. Mysteries are for cops. Not for guys who drift through a career or two, wind up in a job they couldn’t imagine themselves doing in a thousand years, and stay there until it’s too late to leave. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great job for a guy who thrives on paperwork and tedium, but I flunked torpor in college. I may not be an artist, or a poet, or a rock star, but I’m not this guy behind this desk. And I’m definitely not a homicide detective. With a long ride ahead of me and psychopathic fellow passengers to stare down, I tried to put thoughts like that out of my mind. Soon enough, I found myself behind the desk behind which I’m not the guy.
For a change, the phone rang.
Before I could utter an officially approved greeting, I found myself being warmly addressed for the second time that day
“Where the fuck you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.”
I quickly filled Big Al in on the details, and for the first time in 10 years, I heard his voice drop below a bellow.
“Holy shit. Pats is dead? Shot? Why would anybody kill him?
Not having gained any insight into that question myself, there wasn’t much to say, so I said it.
“I don’t know. His wife didn’t seem upset -- more like she was pissed off. She said something about a death gamble or something, but I couldn’t really follow it.”
“You still didn’t read that pension booklet? How many times I gotta tell you. Read the fuckin’ book and pick a fuckin’ plan. Don’t you know that’s your money?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t ‘huh’ me. You know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“I know, I know, but I still don’t know what I’m gonna do. I might quit in six months and putting all that money into the pension would be like throwing it away.”
“Who do you think you’re kidding. You’re a lifer like me. You gotta take care of these things.”
“Yeah, yeah, but what does that have to with Pats?”
“Listen you dope, she said death gambit. She was talking about the death benefit in Pats’ pension.”
“Yeah that must have been it. But I can never figure that stuff out.”
“Big shot executive. Got numbers comin’ out his ass, but can’t even read his own pension plan. Jesus H. Christ. Do I gotta teach you everything?”
With that big Al launched into a detailed explanation of civil service pension options. Apparently, when you sign up, you have a choice. Either you take your full pension when you retire, and if you die before your wife dies, tough luck for wifey – she gets nothing. But, if you agree to take a reduced pension, if your wife outlives you, she can keep collecting. It’s called a death gambit because you have to bet on who dies first. It also, as I understand it, involves filling out forms.
“Sounds sort of like a blueprint for spouse-a-cide, if you ask me,” I said after he finished.
“Yeah, well I love me wife and I don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe Pats’ wasn’t so sure about his wife.”
“Yeah, but if he didn’t set it up for her to get the pension, she wants him alive, or she’ll never get a dime.”
“I guess that knocks her out of suspicion, but I’m telling you, there was something really funny about the way she reacted – almost like she knew he was dead already.”
“Look at you. Sam Fuckin’ Spade. Leave it the cops, and get your ass down to the pension office.
“Yeah sure. As soon as I can. Hey, what were you calling me about anyway?”
“Asphalt you dirtbag, waddya think? What am I gonna do tomorrow? Who’s gonna place the orders?”
“Oh shit. That was the last thing on my mind. I’ll take care of it.”
After I hung up with big Al, I made the requisite phone calls and made sure that streets would flow black for another day.
I decided it was time to turn to my in-box and see what the bureaucrats on high had for me today before settling into some real work avoidance.
“Memorandum:
To: All Department Employees
From: Commissioner Davis
Subject: Objections to Materials
It has come to my attention that some employees have been displaying appropriate materials of an unobjectionable nature at their work stations such as pictures. As you know, exposure to appropriate materials constitutes a serious violation of the employee code of conduct and may result in serious consequences.”
I tacked the memo up on my bulletin board, next a collection of similar missives, and made a note to surf the web for some appropriate porn to hang on my wall. I hate to be out of compliance with policy. Then I continued to work my way through the pile. After a while, I reached the bottom and decided to move onto my next activity – reporting back to my superiors about the day’s developments. By that time, it was a few minutes after five, and I noticed that everyone else had cleared out of the office. Oh well, too late for that. Time to clock out.
Actually, sign out. A person of my exalted status didn’t actually have to punch a time clock, but I did have to write in the time I came and left, and account for any time taken off, or extra time worked by filling in a code on the card. There’s a code for everything – sick-leave with a doctor’s excuse, sick leave without a doctor’s note, sick leave for when you’re just malingering, scheduled vacation, taking a day off when your not scheduled to take off, coming to work when you’re scheduled to take a day off. The City’s got it all covered. It all goes into a computer. Nothing ever comes out of the computer, but that’s okay. We know it’s in there.
I couldn’t find “overtime spent watching a corpse and interrogating a widow,” though. I bet the cops have that one in their time code book. I wrote in the closest thing I could find and headed for the door.
Before I could get there, the phone rang. Surprised by such a late call, I was barely able to squeeze out an official greeting.
“Jon White speaking, how may I help you?”
“May I speak to Jon White please?”
“This is he.”
“Mr. White?”
“Yes?”
“Oh thank goodness I caught you. I’ve been leaving messages for you all day.”
“Funny, I checked my voice mail, and there weren’t any messages. Who is calling?”
“Oh, well I never use voice mail. I prefer to write messages down.”
“I didn’t see any notes in my inbox.
“Oh no, I have them right here.”
“That would explain why I didn’t get back to you.”
“I beg you pardon?”
“Well, you didn’t leave the messages anywhere where I could see them, so I couldn’t respond to them.”
“Oh that’s all right, I have you on the phone now.”
“Let’s try this again. Who am I speaking to?”
“There’s no reason for you to use that tone with me!”
“Tone? I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of any tone. Can you tell me who you are and what this call is about?”
“This is Miss Davis from payroll.”
Ah, now were getting somewhere. A fellow civil servant. Time to turn on the esprit de corps.
“Yes, Miss Davis? How can I help you?”
“Please send the cards I mentioned in my messages.”
“But I didn’t get the me … Oh never mind. Miss Davis, I seem to have misplaced your messages. Could you please tell me what cards you need me to send you.
“We’re missing the timecards for two of your employees. Could you send them in please.”
“Which ones are you missing?”
“The ones which weren’t handed in last week.
“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. Which employees are you missing cards for?”
“Honestly Mr. White, the least you could do is look at your messages. Time cards for Anthony Paternostro and Joseph Pazzolini were not turned in last week.”
“Uh, Anthony Paternostro is dead.”
“That’s all right, just submit his card. Make sure all the right codes are written in – and make sure he signs it.”
“I don’t think that would be possible in his current condition.”
“Why? Is he absent? There’s a code for that.”
“He is dead.”
“Oh. Well just put the code for that and write and have him sign it. Then send it in as soon as you can or he won’t be paid.”
“I think that’s the least of his problems. How about if I sign it for him? Also can you tell me what code to use.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to do your job for you. I’m sure you have a code book in your office.”
With that, she hung up. I decided to put off the late, questionably not-too-lamented Anthony Paternostro’s final payroll reckoning for another day, and headed out the door.
Next chapter
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Friday, January 26, 2007
Live or ...
Discussion of music tends to focus on recordings. This makes sense, of course, since the majority of music we experience is through recordings. For pop music fans, this is often enough, maybe even better than focusing on live performance since live pop music can be a very frustrating experience. Nevertheless, the musical moments that have meant the most to me have mostly been live.
A case in point: in a previous blog entry, I mentioned that I think Pheobe Snow is one of the all time great R&B vocalists. I would guess that to the extent that anyone is even aware of Snow it's through her one hit from the mid '70s, a pleasant song called "Poetry Man" that most people probably file mentally somewhere in the neighborhood of Carole King or Carly Simon. Not a bad neighborhood, but you wouldn't take out a mortgage to move there.
So why do I think she's one of the greatest singers since Aretha Franklin? Because I heard her live once. In the early '90's, Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) put together a sort of musical repertory company called the New York Rock and Soul Review that performed regularly around town. The NYRSR was basically a bunch of studio cats and semi-luminaries jamming together on R&B songs. At one of the shows that I saw, the theme was soul music from New York. During a medley of Berns and Ragovy songs, the band started playing the intro to the Janis Joplin hit "Piece of My Heart." Fagen announced a special guest vocalist, Phoebe Snow.
Phoebe approached the stage through the audience, parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea. She picked up the mic, and proceeded to deliver the greatest vocal performance I have ever heard in any genre in my entire life. Terms like virtuoso, colloratura, soul diva, voice of god don't even begin to do justice to what this was like. The expressiveness, emotional intensity, range, dynamics, power and musicality were literally awe inspiring. As the song built to the chorus, she leapt up and down octaves and made you feel like she really was having a piece of her heart ripped from her. As the song ended, the audience exploded. We screamed for more, but I think we were all secretly glad there was no encore. There was no way this could be topped, and if it were, I don't think we would have survived the experience. If Janis had ever heard Phoebe sing this song, she never would have dared sing it herself.
The NYRSR put out a live album which has two Phoebe cuts: a duet of "Knock on Wood" with Michael McDonald, and a solo version of "At Last". "Knock on Wood" is pretty good, but the song itself doesn't invite the kind of majestic performance that "Piece of My Heart" does. "At Last" comes closer, giving a sense of what Phoebe can offer. I've scoured the web for bootlegs or you-tubes of her doing "Piece of My Heart" to no avail. The only thing live performance I could scour up was this:
Perhaps it's best that this is all I could find. I'm not as young and vigorous as I used to be, and I'm not sure I can spare any pieces of my heart.
A case in point: in a previous blog entry, I mentioned that I think Pheobe Snow is one of the all time great R&B vocalists. I would guess that to the extent that anyone is even aware of Snow it's through her one hit from the mid '70s, a pleasant song called "Poetry Man" that most people probably file mentally somewhere in the neighborhood of Carole King or Carly Simon. Not a bad neighborhood, but you wouldn't take out a mortgage to move there.
So why do I think she's one of the greatest singers since Aretha Franklin? Because I heard her live once. In the early '90's, Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) put together a sort of musical repertory company called the New York Rock and Soul Review that performed regularly around town. The NYRSR was basically a bunch of studio cats and semi-luminaries jamming together on R&B songs. At one of the shows that I saw, the theme was soul music from New York. During a medley of Berns and Ragovy songs, the band started playing the intro to the Janis Joplin hit "Piece of My Heart." Fagen announced a special guest vocalist, Phoebe Snow.
Phoebe approached the stage through the audience, parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea. She picked up the mic, and proceeded to deliver the greatest vocal performance I have ever heard in any genre in my entire life. Terms like virtuoso, colloratura, soul diva, voice of god don't even begin to do justice to what this was like. The expressiveness, emotional intensity, range, dynamics, power and musicality were literally awe inspiring. As the song built to the chorus, she leapt up and down octaves and made you feel like she really was having a piece of her heart ripped from her. As the song ended, the audience exploded. We screamed for more, but I think we were all secretly glad there was no encore. There was no way this could be topped, and if it were, I don't think we would have survived the experience. If Janis had ever heard Phoebe sing this song, she never would have dared sing it herself.
The NYRSR put out a live album which has two Phoebe cuts: a duet of "Knock on Wood" with Michael McDonald, and a solo version of "At Last". "Knock on Wood" is pretty good, but the song itself doesn't invite the kind of majestic performance that "Piece of My Heart" does. "At Last" comes closer, giving a sense of what Phoebe can offer. I've scoured the web for bootlegs or you-tubes of her doing "Piece of My Heart" to no avail. The only thing live performance I could scour up was this:
Perhaps it's best that this is all I could find. I'm not as young and vigorous as I used to be, and I'm not sure I can spare any pieces of my heart.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Every story tells a picture
There are certain songwriters who are artists pretty much beyond categorization or imitation. They merge music and lyric to create something so beautiful, intriguing, compelling (or some other inadequate adjective), that all you can do is listen. The most obvious examples for me are the Beatles, Stevie Wonder (though not in a long time), some of the great figures in the American musical theater tradition like Cole Porter, Rogers & Hartenstein, or A.C. Jobim & J. Gilberto.
What all of these have in common for me is that I have almost no desire to analyze their greatest work -- I just want to hear it, or play it, without feeling any strong pull to imitate it or figure out what makes it tick (except to the extent that I need to in order to blow over it if it's a "jazz" tune). I'm thinking of a song like "Fixin' a Hole" or "Golden Lady" or "Night and Day" or "Wave". Generally, I'm a pretty curious "say-how-does-this-thing-work" kind of guy, but with music like this, I'm pretty much content to let it send chills up my spine.
There's another category of songs/writers that achieve their own sort of excellence that I look at a bit differently. These tell a little story or vignette with, I don't know, closure? Character arc? A kind of Occam's razor of song elegance? Nothing missing, nothing excessive, singable, fun to play, with a hook to boot. These are the ones that intrigue me the most as a player and wannabe songwriter.
A case in point: "Dixie Chicken" by Lowell George/Little Feat. The song tells the classic story -- boy meets girl, girl gives boy cute pet name, boy loses girl, boy meets a crowd of guys in a bar who had their hearts broken by the same girl. It's got everything I love about a "story" song. Simple song form, with a great chorus and guitar hook. Mixture of humor, pathos, and self mocking in the words. A plot. Perfectly drawn scenes with clear who/what/when/where (though why is left up to interpretation). It's an utterly perfect song. At the same time, it's also so clearly structured and formulaic, that it's not too hard to do a half OK imitation. Lowell wrote a bunch of others that achieve similar perfection -- "Willin'" "Fat Man in a Bathtub" "I've Been the One" "Two Trains Runnin'" ...
Another one is Smokey Robinson -- "Tracks of My Tears" "Second that Emotion" "Ain't that Peculiar" "My Girl". He's maybe a bit closer to the Beatles in terms of ineffibility, but at the same time, he's got these kind of recurring characters and themes -- the weeping clown or lovesick soul, the cliche/stock phrase turned into a hook -- that give your friendly neighborhood plagiarist, er, aspiring songwriter a lot to work with.
A few of other writers inhabit this story telling world for me -- Merle Haggard, John Hiatt, Becker and Fagen, Jack Bruce, Mark Knopfler. But all in all, it's a pretty exclusive club, as perfection ought to be.
What all of these have in common for me is that I have almost no desire to analyze their greatest work -- I just want to hear it, or play it, without feeling any strong pull to imitate it or figure out what makes it tick (except to the extent that I need to in order to blow over it if it's a "jazz" tune). I'm thinking of a song like "Fixin' a Hole" or "Golden Lady" or "Night and Day" or "Wave". Generally, I'm a pretty curious "say-how-does-this-thing-work" kind of guy, but with music like this, I'm pretty much content to let it send chills up my spine.
There's another category of songs/writers that achieve their own sort of excellence that I look at a bit differently. These tell a little story or vignette with, I don't know, closure? Character arc? A kind of Occam's razor of song elegance? Nothing missing, nothing excessive, singable, fun to play, with a hook to boot. These are the ones that intrigue me the most as a player and wannabe songwriter.
A case in point: "Dixie Chicken" by Lowell George/Little Feat. The song tells the classic story -- boy meets girl, girl gives boy cute pet name, boy loses girl, boy meets a crowd of guys in a bar who had their hearts broken by the same girl. It's got everything I love about a "story" song. Simple song form, with a great chorus and guitar hook. Mixture of humor, pathos, and self mocking in the words. A plot. Perfectly drawn scenes with clear who/what/when/where (though why is left up to interpretation). It's an utterly perfect song. At the same time, it's also so clearly structured and formulaic, that it's not too hard to do a half OK imitation. Lowell wrote a bunch of others that achieve similar perfection -- "Willin'" "Fat Man in a Bathtub" "I've Been the One" "Two Trains Runnin'" ...
Another one is Smokey Robinson -- "Tracks of My Tears" "Second that Emotion" "Ain't that Peculiar" "My Girl". He's maybe a bit closer to the Beatles in terms of ineffibility, but at the same time, he's got these kind of recurring characters and themes -- the weeping clown or lovesick soul, the cliche/stock phrase turned into a hook -- that give your friendly neighborhood plagiarist, er, aspiring songwriter a lot to work with.
A few of other writers inhabit this story telling world for me -- Merle Haggard, John Hiatt, Becker and Fagen, Jack Bruce, Mark Knopfler. But all in all, it's a pretty exclusive club, as perfection ought to be.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Bear or Lion?
Over the last I don't know how many years my buddy Mike and I have have had a semi-regular Sunday night music session. If one of us has a composition in some state of recordability, we work on that. Otherwise, we just play tunes, usually jazz standards. One Sunday a couple of years ago, it was a standards night, and I hopped into a cab with my archtop.
The driver, a Sikh in full beard and turban, immediately asked me about the guitar -- what kind was it? did I have a gig? what kind of music do I play? Happy to have a little interaction, I answered his questions. Then I asked him if he played, and he said he didn't but was very interested in guitar. Then he asked me one more question: who is the best guitarist, Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix? A Sikh from India, driving a cab in New York City in 2004 raising the great 70's high school guitar nerd debate. Only in New York.
I answered that it's not a competition; both had a lot to offer. The guy wouldn't accept it. He felt that one must be better than the other, but he hadn't been able to figure it out for himself. He was relying on me, as a clear expert in the field, to resolve this question for him. I tried putting it different ways -- it's a matter of taste; they both had their ups and downs; Jimi was a more innovative technician, but EC opened peoples ears up in other ways. Jimi was a more adventurous artist, but EC had a few masterpieces that hold up well in any comparison ...
He still wouldn't buy it. One had to be better than the other. I have to admit it, I don't completely buy it either. But that's because of my own inner OCD. I'm a bit obsessed with comparisons in general, and have debates like this running through my head all the time. I'm also the sort of person who can see at least two sides to almost any question, so I never resolve anything.
My father had more than a bit of this streak in him. He would often replay the great debates of his youth, or compare stars from different eras. Patton vs. Rommel? DiMaggio vs. Williams? Ruth vs. Gherig? Ali vs. Marciano? Tilden vs. Laver? Bear vs Lion?
Dad, what do mean? Chicago Bears vs. Detroit Lions?
No, an actual bear vs. an actual lion.
A bear vs a lion.
Yup.
What kind of bear grizzly? Black? Panda?
C'mon. Be serious a panda's not a real bear. Black bears eat fruit. I'm talkin' Grizzly.
I say a lion - runs faster; king of the beasts; won't settle for berries or fish. Goes for the throat every time.
I say a bear -- much bigger and stronger can kill a deer with one swipe of the paw.
Yeah, but lions work as a team. They use strategy and superior numbers to knock out bigger prey. You ever hear of a pride of bears stalking a bison?
C'mon, a bear gets up on his hind legs, one, two, five, doesn't matter how many lions, they're all gonna turn tail and run.
And hide in the brush until the bear lets his guard down, then kick some ursine butt ...
After a few more rounds, of this, we'd face the disappointing truth. The bout would never happen. Bears live in Yellowstone. Lions live on the Serengetti. Anyway, they'd stay out of each others' way. A fight wouldn't be worth the trouble -- baby antelope are much easier targets. They'd probably go out for a beer and trade top predator tips.
Say, I like the way you attack the flank first and then leap at the jugular. Nice technique
Thanks. Pretty cool the way you snatch that Salmon out of mid-air -- you're pretty quick for a big guy. Play some ball in college?
That's kind of the way it worked out with Jimi and Eric, I suspect. Try telling that to a Sikh, though.
The driver, a Sikh in full beard and turban, immediately asked me about the guitar -- what kind was it? did I have a gig? what kind of music do I play? Happy to have a little interaction, I answered his questions. Then I asked him if he played, and he said he didn't but was very interested in guitar. Then he asked me one more question: who is the best guitarist, Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix? A Sikh from India, driving a cab in New York City in 2004 raising the great 70's high school guitar nerd debate. Only in New York.
I answered that it's not a competition; both had a lot to offer. The guy wouldn't accept it. He felt that one must be better than the other, but he hadn't been able to figure it out for himself. He was relying on me, as a clear expert in the field, to resolve this question for him. I tried putting it different ways -- it's a matter of taste; they both had their ups and downs; Jimi was a more innovative technician, but EC opened peoples ears up in other ways. Jimi was a more adventurous artist, but EC had a few masterpieces that hold up well in any comparison ...
He still wouldn't buy it. One had to be better than the other. I have to admit it, I don't completely buy it either. But that's because of my own inner OCD. I'm a bit obsessed with comparisons in general, and have debates like this running through my head all the time. I'm also the sort of person who can see at least two sides to almost any question, so I never resolve anything.
My father had more than a bit of this streak in him. He would often replay the great debates of his youth, or compare stars from different eras. Patton vs. Rommel? DiMaggio vs. Williams? Ruth vs. Gherig? Ali vs. Marciano? Tilden vs. Laver? Bear vs Lion?
Dad, what do mean? Chicago Bears vs. Detroit Lions?
No, an actual bear vs. an actual lion.
A bear vs a lion.
Yup.
What kind of bear grizzly? Black? Panda?
C'mon. Be serious a panda's not a real bear. Black bears eat fruit. I'm talkin' Grizzly.
I say a lion - runs faster; king of the beasts; won't settle for berries or fish. Goes for the throat every time.
I say a bear -- much bigger and stronger can kill a deer with one swipe of the paw.
Yeah, but lions work as a team. They use strategy and superior numbers to knock out bigger prey. You ever hear of a pride of bears stalking a bison?
C'mon, a bear gets up on his hind legs, one, two, five, doesn't matter how many lions, they're all gonna turn tail and run.
And hide in the brush until the bear lets his guard down, then kick some ursine butt ...
After a few more rounds, of this, we'd face the disappointing truth. The bout would never happen. Bears live in Yellowstone. Lions live on the Serengetti. Anyway, they'd stay out of each others' way. A fight wouldn't be worth the trouble -- baby antelope are much easier targets. They'd probably go out for a beer and trade top predator tips.
Say, I like the way you attack the flank first and then leap at the jugular. Nice technique
Thanks. Pretty cool the way you snatch that Salmon out of mid-air -- you're pretty quick for a big guy. Play some ball in college?
That's kind of the way it worked out with Jimi and Eric, I suspect. Try telling that to a Sikh, though.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Can a Blue Man Sing the Whites?
Somewhere in childhood, I decided I wanted to learn how to play flamenco music. So when my parents decided it was time to have culture forced down my throat by an embittered hack ... I mean start music lessons, I picked guitar as my instrument. My first lessons came at an embarassingly earnest day camp the summer I turned eight, where we sat around in a circle learning the "cowboy chords" to "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" and "Tom Dooley".
I was spending that summer with my grandparents, so they assumed the role of practice cops. Each night, they sat me down with a wind-up oven timer and made me strum D, A, G, and C chords until the buzzed at the fifteen minute mark. Failing to see the connection between the length of time it took to cook brisket in a pressure cooker, a race horse named "Stewball," and learning flamenco, I failed to be inspired. Somewhere toward the end of the summer, the headstock of my guitar got snapped off in a doorway (imagine that!). It went unmourned. The lessons ended.
Over the years, I had more abortive attempts at learning music, each of which ended in frustration at being taught what the teacher knew, not what I wanted to learn. I did actually pick up a little bit of flamenco (the little bit one teacher knew), and sort of learned to read music. But the passion was gone. Along the way, a random adult passing through my parents social circle saw my guitar and showed me how to play a blues shuffle, which got filed away in deep storage. By about age 12, I'd completely had it with lessons and pretty much gave up the guitar.
Fast forward a few years to sophomore year of high school, and I became friends with a kid whose hippie older brother had disappeared into a cult, leaving behind a no-name acoustic guitar, a pre-CBS Fender Jazzmaster and an Ampeg Gemini amplifier. Discovery of these instruments coincided with discovery of certain combustible alkyloid plant matter, as well as the twelve-bar soundtrack often associated with said plant matter. Upon hearing Cream's "Crossroads" and the Doors' "Backdoor Man", I plugged in the Jazzmaster, and somehow that fragment of the blues shown to me in childhood defrosted itself. All of a sudden I kind of knew how to play music I liked on the guitar.
The credits on rock albums led me to names like Morganfield, Burnett, Dixon, Reed, King, King, and King, and, of course Johnson. It turned out that a whole bunch of other kids in my school were making the same journey with harmonicas, and I soon found myself as the only Brownie McGee in a sea Sonny Terry wannabes, all looking to cut class, drink Night Train, and jam. I also ran into names like Clapton, Butterfield, Bloomfield, Kalb, and Kooper. Eventually it struck me that some of these guys were black and some of them were white. I also discovered that there's this whole vein of weirdness on the subject, fueled by white liberal guilt and black militant anger.
Looked at one way, there is something to the debate. The blues was born out of the black experience in the south and the migration to northern cities. Country and early urban blues is full of references to sharecropping life, hoodoo, and the joys and miseries of life in the delta. It seems utterly absurd for a middle class northern white kid to sing about mojos and john the conqueror roots. It's also true that the great innovators of blues, R&B, and jazz by and large never got the coin or the credit due them, while their often tamer white imitators walked away with millions. To continue that heritage of expropriation seems a bit suspect
On the other hand, blues is not so much the music of black people as it is the music of black individuals. It's not as if everyone with dark skin south of the Mason-Dixon line can do what Muddy Waters did. Not only that, but all the really great blues artists sound completely different from each other. This is made abundantly clear to me pretty much every time I walk into a blues club. White or black, bad blues artists sound like unconvincing imitations of someone else. Good ones sound like themselves, with maybe some echoes of others, but an essence that stands alone.
Moving over to my third hand, it's not as if there are a whole lot black Americans whose experiences give them insights into life in the court of Frederick the Great or in 19th Century Milan. Yet you rarely hear it said that a black person can't play "white" music, or that Kathleen Battle is stealing Verdi's birthright.
All of these arguments melt away for me in the face of the music itself though. There are a handful of blues artists who have touched me and made me want to play the music. At first it was about technique -- the precision of Clapton, the pyrotechnics of Hendrix, the intricacies of the great finger pickers. Eventually, raw emotion, personality, and individuality are what kept me hooked. It was no longer "how does he do that?" Instead it was "how do I translate what I'm feeling into a sound the way he does?" In light of that question, I can name a few white guys who deserve to be listened to on their own terms as much as any of their contemporaries. I wouldn't say this is because they sound authentic or "black." It's because they sound like themselves, and they communicate who they are. Here's a few. Some are obvious, some a little obscure, but all worth a spin:
Mike Bloomfield (anything from his Takoma Records days will knock your socks off)
Paul Butterfield
Bob Margolin
Bonnie Raitt
The Blues Project
A fella named Eric (but you gotta go way back)
Delbert McClinton
Larry Carlton (go see him live; forget his studio work)
Jimmy Vaughan (always like him more than his little brother)
Pheobe Snow (live, the greatest female R&B singer since Aretha, IMHO.)
Ari Eisenger
Duane A. (especially with EC)
Peter-Green-Era Fleetwood Mac
Carlos Montoya
Manitas De Plata
Now if I can only finally figure out the rest of Malaguena ...
I was spending that summer with my grandparents, so they assumed the role of practice cops. Each night, they sat me down with a wind-up oven timer and made me strum D, A, G, and C chords until the buzzed at the fifteen minute mark. Failing to see the connection between the length of time it took to cook brisket in a pressure cooker, a race horse named "Stewball," and learning flamenco, I failed to be inspired. Somewhere toward the end of the summer, the headstock of my guitar got snapped off in a doorway (imagine that!). It went unmourned. The lessons ended.
Over the years, I had more abortive attempts at learning music, each of which ended in frustration at being taught what the teacher knew, not what I wanted to learn. I did actually pick up a little bit of flamenco (the little bit one teacher knew), and sort of learned to read music. But the passion was gone. Along the way, a random adult passing through my parents social circle saw my guitar and showed me how to play a blues shuffle, which got filed away in deep storage. By about age 12, I'd completely had it with lessons and pretty much gave up the guitar.
Fast forward a few years to sophomore year of high school, and I became friends with a kid whose hippie older brother had disappeared into a cult, leaving behind a no-name acoustic guitar, a pre-CBS Fender Jazzmaster and an Ampeg Gemini amplifier. Discovery of these instruments coincided with discovery of certain combustible alkyloid plant matter, as well as the twelve-bar soundtrack often associated with said plant matter. Upon hearing Cream's "Crossroads" and the Doors' "Backdoor Man", I plugged in the Jazzmaster, and somehow that fragment of the blues shown to me in childhood defrosted itself. All of a sudden I kind of knew how to play music I liked on the guitar.
The credits on rock albums led me to names like Morganfield, Burnett, Dixon, Reed, King, King, and King, and, of course Johnson. It turned out that a whole bunch of other kids in my school were making the same journey with harmonicas, and I soon found myself as the only Brownie McGee in a sea Sonny Terry wannabes, all looking to cut class, drink Night Train, and jam. I also ran into names like Clapton, Butterfield, Bloomfield, Kalb, and Kooper. Eventually it struck me that some of these guys were black and some of them were white. I also discovered that there's this whole vein of weirdness on the subject, fueled by white liberal guilt and black militant anger.
Looked at one way, there is something to the debate. The blues was born out of the black experience in the south and the migration to northern cities. Country and early urban blues is full of references to sharecropping life, hoodoo, and the joys and miseries of life in the delta. It seems utterly absurd for a middle class northern white kid to sing about mojos and john the conqueror roots. It's also true that the great innovators of blues, R&B, and jazz by and large never got the coin or the credit due them, while their often tamer white imitators walked away with millions. To continue that heritage of expropriation seems a bit suspect
On the other hand, blues is not so much the music of black people as it is the music of black individuals. It's not as if everyone with dark skin south of the Mason-Dixon line can do what Muddy Waters did. Not only that, but all the really great blues artists sound completely different from each other. This is made abundantly clear to me pretty much every time I walk into a blues club. White or black, bad blues artists sound like unconvincing imitations of someone else. Good ones sound like themselves, with maybe some echoes of others, but an essence that stands alone.
Moving over to my third hand, it's not as if there are a whole lot black Americans whose experiences give them insights into life in the court of Frederick the Great or in 19th Century Milan. Yet you rarely hear it said that a black person can't play "white" music, or that Kathleen Battle is stealing Verdi's birthright.
All of these arguments melt away for me in the face of the music itself though. There are a handful of blues artists who have touched me and made me want to play the music. At first it was about technique -- the precision of Clapton, the pyrotechnics of Hendrix, the intricacies of the great finger pickers. Eventually, raw emotion, personality, and individuality are what kept me hooked. It was no longer "how does he do that?" Instead it was "how do I translate what I'm feeling into a sound the way he does?" In light of that question, I can name a few white guys who deserve to be listened to on their own terms as much as any of their contemporaries. I wouldn't say this is because they sound authentic or "black." It's because they sound like themselves, and they communicate who they are. Here's a few. Some are obvious, some a little obscure, but all worth a spin:
Mike Bloomfield (anything from his Takoma Records days will knock your socks off)
Paul Butterfield
Bob Margolin
Bonnie Raitt
The Blues Project
A fella named Eric (but you gotta go way back)
Delbert McClinton
Larry Carlton (go see him live; forget his studio work)
Jimmy Vaughan (always like him more than his little brother)
Pheobe Snow (live, the greatest female R&B singer since Aretha, IMHO.)
Ari Eisenger
Duane A. (especially with EC)
Peter-Green-Era Fleetwood Mac
Carlos Montoya
Manitas De Plata
Now if I can only finally figure out the rest of Malaguena ...
Monday, January 01, 2007
Chapter 3 – Interview with the Widow
This is the third chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here.
About fifteen minutes later we pulled up to a garden apartment complex in Westchester's least quaint municipality. We found the intercom, made our presence known, and after another demonstration of police aerobics, found ourselves standing in front of a third-floor apartment. Rendell rang the bell, and a few moments later the door was opened by woman who, if hair height contributed to vertical leap, could have been a playground legend.
"Hello Louise, I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Jon White, your husband's supervisor a work."
"Oh, yeah, I remember you Jon. What are you doing here?"
"This, uh, gentleman here is Detective Rendell from the NYPD, and I'm afraid we have some bad news for you."
"Oh shit. What did that idiot do this time? Is he in jail again? I hope he doesn't expect me to bail him out."
"Uh, I'm afraid it's not what you think -- he's dead."
"No way. He's just hiding out with that slut girlfriend of his in the Bronx."
"No, really, he's dead. I just identified the body."
"Was he on the job?"
"Uh, I don't …"
At this point Detective Rendell cut me off and said, “Mrs. Paternostro, the investigation has just begun and we don't really know what happened yet. But right now it does not look like he was at work.”
The widow P looked pensive for a moment than showed signs of her bereavement.
“Shit. I can’t believe that bastard croaked before I could nail the gambit down.”
Before either of us could ask her what she meant, she started grieving some more.
“That rat bastard screwed me again. I ain’t gettin a freakin’ dime. I could kill him,” she blurted out. As soon as she did, she appeared to realize that she may have set the wrong tone, buried her face in her hands and started boo-hooing somewhat over-ostentatiously.
As someone who stumbled into a civil service career, never quite believing my misfortune at having done so, I tended to overlook some of the intricacies of my compensation. The rules of government compensation are almost as tricky as the tax code. Some people work the system better than others and manage to retire wealthy when they’re 50 years old. Others toil in bureaucratic misery into their dotage and spend their golden years fighting with the cat for the last spoonful of friskies. It sounded like she might have been talking about some piece of fine print in the pension plan that I still haven’t read. Or not. I never really got it, but the widow clearly did, and was convinced she had gotten the short end of the stick.
As everybody knows, the greatest civil-service scam artists of all are cops. If anybody knows these things, Ed Rendell would. It would be interesting to see how the display we had just witnessed would play with him.
“Uh, Mrs. Paternostro,” he began. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss. If you don’t mind, though, I need to ask you a few questions.”
Either he’s a good poker player, or his cat better hide the friskies.
She brought the sobs under control and peeked out from under her two-inch fingernails.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll try, but first, tell me what happened”
“We’re not quite sure yet. A co-worker informed Mr. White here that he found your husband, apparently deceased. Mr. White then reported this to the police. We just came from the scene. We’re still investigating, but it appears he was shot to death.”
“Oh my gawd!” she gasped. “Shot? Who would do a thing like that?”
“Well, we were hoping you could give us some information about him that might help us figure that out,” Rendell responded.
“I don’t know what I could tell you. My husband was just a city worker. I can’t imagine anybody would want to kill him.”
“Well, Mrs. Paternostro, very often when a person is killed, the crime is committed by someone who knew him,” Rendell said in a reasonable facsimile of an understanding and sympathy.
“Let’s start by talking about how things were at home.”
The widow P. tensed visibly at the question.
“What’s that supposed to mean? You think I had something to do with this?” She shot back.
“Oh I’m sorry Mrs. Rendell, I didn’t mean to suggest anything like that,” Rendell countered with an unctuousness I never would have thought he could summon.
“I’m just trying to get a picture of what your husband was like, what sorts of things he did, who he hung around with. That sort of thing.”
“Oh I see. That’s okay then.” She appeared satisfied for the moment that she wasn’t under suspicion.
“Your husband was found in an apartment in the Bronx, Mrs. Paternostro. Do you have any idea what he might have been doing there?”
“Well, he’s from the Bronx, and his mother lived there, on Arthur Avenue. She died a couple of years ago. It was a rent controlled apartment, and my husband hung onto it. He was sub-letting it out.”
“Your husband was found in an apartment on Arthur Avenue, at this address,” Rendell said, showing here the address of the crime scene he’d written down in his notebook.
“Yeah, that’s the address. He must have been there checking on the tenants or something.”
“That’s a possibility we’ll have to check into. Do you know the names of the people he was sub-letting the apartment to Mrs. Paternostro?” Rendell asked.
“No, I don’t. He just told me he was renting the place to some Albanians, but he never told me their names,” She replied.
“Do you know if he had a lease with them? Maybe there’s a copy here somewhere?”
“Oh, I’m sure there wasn’t anything like that. Like I said, it was a rent-controlled apartment, and he wasn’t supposed to be doing that. He always used to complain about the landlord trying to evict him, and stuff like that. Oh my gawd! You don’t think the landlord killed him to get the apartment do you?”
“That’s definitely one of the leads we’ll by looking into Mrs. Paternostro. Do you know the landlord’s name, by chance?” Rendell asked.
“You know,” she said, starting to look very interested in the way things were turning, “I think I do. My husband used to take care of his mother’s affairs and such, and I’m sure we have that information around here. Let me go check.”
With that, she got up from here chair and walked out of the room. She returned a few moments later with a business card, which she handed to Rendell.
“I think this might be it,” she said as she handed Rendell the card. I managed to get a look at it as Rendell examined it. In plain type, with no logo or graphics it read “A Bronx Realty Company. Vincent Pugliacci, building manager.”
Rendell showed no signs of recognition, but as someone who had to sign off on contracts, I had seen the name Vincent Pugliacci many times, and it sure got my attention. Vincent “Vinnie the Pooh” Pugliacci was the president of Hundred Acre Asphalt and was known to have an interest in at least a dozen companies in the construction, demolition, trucking, trash-hauling, recycling, and landfill businesses. He was reputed to be the mastermind behind the biggest bid-rigging conspiracy in New York since the days of Boss Tweed.
His name surfaced in tabloid articles about the trials of other people, but he always managed to keep himself un-indicted. Several generations of Feds and local DA’s in jurisdictions all over the northeast had tried to take him on, but had never even gotten him into a courtroom. Maybe the evidence got shot down in the crossfire between dueling prosecutors. Maybe some grand jurors had misplaced sympathy for woodland creatures. From where I sat, all I knew was that every time he submitted a low bid things got complicated.
Or simple, depending on how you look at it. New York City spends billions of dollars a year on construction projects and all kinds of supplies and services. Over the years, the city has been victimized by every imaginable racketeering, bid rigging, feather bedding, kickback, and corruption scam. In response, elaborate systems for keeping contracts away from the bad guys have developed.
Nowadays, whoever bids on a contract has to fill out a two hundred page form listing the intimate details of his personal, professional, financial and legal life. On big dollar contracts, or contracts in industries with nefarious reputations, the forms are pored over by an army of investigators, auditors, and lawyers. Every name associated with the business and all of its affiliates are run by every organized crime task force in the country. If a contractor has even the faintest whiff of a problem, he gets knocked out and the next lowest bidder is selected. If investigators think he’s a bad guy, but they can’t prove it they’ll use any pretext – a late income tax return, unpaid speeding tickets, a summons for abusing a tree – to deny a contract.
Vinnie the Pooh had been run through that ringer dozens of times, and every time, the lawyers said there was no hard evidence that Pooh was connected, but things sure smelled funny in his waste disposal business. Something was rotten in Jersey, and they didn’t like the idea of giving him a contract. There was one catch, though. Every time he was low bidder, he was also the only bidder. For some no doubt completely innocent reason, no one ever bid against Vinnie the Pooh. With nothing, er, concrete to hold against him, and no, one else to give the contracts to, Vinnie the Pooh was the biggest supplier of construction materials to the city. He also had a reputation for being a big supplier the to the NYPD’s homicide division.
I found it hard to believe that a homicide cop never heard of a guy like Pugliacci, but I couldn’t tell what Rendell thought about this. He wrote something in his memo book and handed the card back to Mrs. P., and, still giving away nothing, proceeded with his questions.
“Mrs. Paternostro, your husband was found by a man named Joe Pazzolini. Can you tell me anything about him?”
“Oh yeah. Crazy Joe. Creepy little guy. He worked with my husband on his city job, and they hung around together sometimes.”
“When was the last time you saw the two of them together, Mrs. Paternostro?”
“I really have no idea. I wouldn’t let that man in my house.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, he was a real low class type of guy. The last time he was here, he took his eye out and started playing with it. Scared the shit out of my daughter.”
“Excuse me?” sputtered Rendell.
“He’s got one a them glass eyes. I ain’t got nothing against cripples and such, but there’s no excuse for something like that. In front of my children no less. Plus, he’s always gettin’ into trouble, and makin’ trouble for other people.”
“What kind of trouble?” asked the detective.
“My husband had to bail him out of jail a couple of times. And one time he and my husband were out all night together. When my husband got home in the morning, he stunk of booze, and he looked like he had been in a fight. After that, I told him that was it. I didn’t want to seem him again.”
“It seems that Mr. Pazzolini still knew something about your husband’s activities, though…maybe more than you do,” suggested Rendell.
“What do you mean by that?” asked the widow, looking like she was tensing up a bit again.
“Well, he knew where to look for him, and he found him. I understand that when co-workers of your husband asked you about him, you said you hadn’t seen him in three days. Let me ask you again Mrs. Paternostro, how are things at home?”
“Well I’m sure they’re mistaken. Me and my husband was married a long time, and we planned to stay that way,” said Mrs. P, not altogether convincingly.
“Was you husband still living here, Mrs. Paternostro?”
The widow P. tensed visibly and blurted out “Who told you he wasn’t? Of course he was. Why would you ask something like that?”
“No particular reason, Mrs. Paternostro. I’m just trying to fill in some of your husband’s background and immediate situation,” answered Rendell.
“Was he a member of any, you know, fraternal organizations? Social clubs? Did he moonlight at anything?”
“Uh, not to my knowledge,” She answered cautiously.
“Can you think of anyone, friends, neighborhoods, relatives, co-workers, he might have had disagreements with?”
“No. No one at all. My husband was an angel. He got along with everybody,” she said, a little too firmly.
Rendell muttered something that sounded like “everyone but you” under his breath while jotting something down in his notebook.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” said the grieving, and now aggrieved, widow, nearly shouting.
“Oh, I said ‘we’re done with you’, Mrs. Paternostro,” answered the detective innocently.
With that he turned to me and said “You, you’re coming with me.”
He then turned back to Mrs. The widow P.
“I’m sorry again for you loss Mrs. Paternostro. I have no more questions for you for now, but I may need to get in touch with you again shortly. Please make sure you don’t leave town for the next few days, In case there are any developments.”
“Leave town? Why would I do a thing like that? Where would I go?”
“Oh it’s just a figure of speech, Mrs. Paternostro. I’m sure you weren’t thinking of going anywhere.”
With that, it seemed the interview was over, and we exited the apartment.
Next Chapter
About fifteen minutes later we pulled up to a garden apartment complex in Westchester's least quaint municipality. We found the intercom, made our presence known, and after another demonstration of police aerobics, found ourselves standing in front of a third-floor apartment. Rendell rang the bell, and a few moments later the door was opened by woman who, if hair height contributed to vertical leap, could have been a playground legend.
"Hello Louise, I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Jon White, your husband's supervisor a work."
"Oh, yeah, I remember you Jon. What are you doing here?"
"This, uh, gentleman here is Detective Rendell from the NYPD, and I'm afraid we have some bad news for you."
"Oh shit. What did that idiot do this time? Is he in jail again? I hope he doesn't expect me to bail him out."
"Uh, I'm afraid it's not what you think -- he's dead."
"No way. He's just hiding out with that slut girlfriend of his in the Bronx."
"No, really, he's dead. I just identified the body."
"Was he on the job?"
"Uh, I don't …"
At this point Detective Rendell cut me off and said, “Mrs. Paternostro, the investigation has just begun and we don't really know what happened yet. But right now it does not look like he was at work.”
The widow P looked pensive for a moment than showed signs of her bereavement.
“Shit. I can’t believe that bastard croaked before I could nail the gambit down.”
Before either of us could ask her what she meant, she started grieving some more.
“That rat bastard screwed me again. I ain’t gettin a freakin’ dime. I could kill him,” she blurted out. As soon as she did, she appeared to realize that she may have set the wrong tone, buried her face in her hands and started boo-hooing somewhat over-ostentatiously.
As someone who stumbled into a civil service career, never quite believing my misfortune at having done so, I tended to overlook some of the intricacies of my compensation. The rules of government compensation are almost as tricky as the tax code. Some people work the system better than others and manage to retire wealthy when they’re 50 years old. Others toil in bureaucratic misery into their dotage and spend their golden years fighting with the cat for the last spoonful of friskies. It sounded like she might have been talking about some piece of fine print in the pension plan that I still haven’t read. Or not. I never really got it, but the widow clearly did, and was convinced she had gotten the short end of the stick.
As everybody knows, the greatest civil-service scam artists of all are cops. If anybody knows these things, Ed Rendell would. It would be interesting to see how the display we had just witnessed would play with him.
“Uh, Mrs. Paternostro,” he began. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss. If you don’t mind, though, I need to ask you a few questions.”
Either he’s a good poker player, or his cat better hide the friskies.
She brought the sobs under control and peeked out from under her two-inch fingernails.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll try, but first, tell me what happened”
“We’re not quite sure yet. A co-worker informed Mr. White here that he found your husband, apparently deceased. Mr. White then reported this to the police. We just came from the scene. We’re still investigating, but it appears he was shot to death.”
“Oh my gawd!” she gasped. “Shot? Who would do a thing like that?”
“Well, we were hoping you could give us some information about him that might help us figure that out,” Rendell responded.
“I don’t know what I could tell you. My husband was just a city worker. I can’t imagine anybody would want to kill him.”
“Well, Mrs. Paternostro, very often when a person is killed, the crime is committed by someone who knew him,” Rendell said in a reasonable facsimile of an understanding and sympathy.
“Let’s start by talking about how things were at home.”
The widow P. tensed visibly at the question.
“What’s that supposed to mean? You think I had something to do with this?” She shot back.
“Oh I’m sorry Mrs. Rendell, I didn’t mean to suggest anything like that,” Rendell countered with an unctuousness I never would have thought he could summon.
“I’m just trying to get a picture of what your husband was like, what sorts of things he did, who he hung around with. That sort of thing.”
“Oh I see. That’s okay then.” She appeared satisfied for the moment that she wasn’t under suspicion.
“Your husband was found in an apartment in the Bronx, Mrs. Paternostro. Do you have any idea what he might have been doing there?”
“Well, he’s from the Bronx, and his mother lived there, on Arthur Avenue. She died a couple of years ago. It was a rent controlled apartment, and my husband hung onto it. He was sub-letting it out.”
“Your husband was found in an apartment on Arthur Avenue, at this address,” Rendell said, showing here the address of the crime scene he’d written down in his notebook.
“Yeah, that’s the address. He must have been there checking on the tenants or something.”
“That’s a possibility we’ll have to check into. Do you know the names of the people he was sub-letting the apartment to Mrs. Paternostro?” Rendell asked.
“No, I don’t. He just told me he was renting the place to some Albanians, but he never told me their names,” She replied.
“Do you know if he had a lease with them? Maybe there’s a copy here somewhere?”
“Oh, I’m sure there wasn’t anything like that. Like I said, it was a rent-controlled apartment, and he wasn’t supposed to be doing that. He always used to complain about the landlord trying to evict him, and stuff like that. Oh my gawd! You don’t think the landlord killed him to get the apartment do you?”
“That’s definitely one of the leads we’ll by looking into Mrs. Paternostro. Do you know the landlord’s name, by chance?” Rendell asked.
“You know,” she said, starting to look very interested in the way things were turning, “I think I do. My husband used to take care of his mother’s affairs and such, and I’m sure we have that information around here. Let me go check.”
With that, she got up from here chair and walked out of the room. She returned a few moments later with a business card, which she handed to Rendell.
“I think this might be it,” she said as she handed Rendell the card. I managed to get a look at it as Rendell examined it. In plain type, with no logo or graphics it read “A Bronx Realty Company. Vincent Pugliacci, building manager.”
Rendell showed no signs of recognition, but as someone who had to sign off on contracts, I had seen the name Vincent Pugliacci many times, and it sure got my attention. Vincent “Vinnie the Pooh” Pugliacci was the president of Hundred Acre Asphalt and was known to have an interest in at least a dozen companies in the construction, demolition, trucking, trash-hauling, recycling, and landfill businesses. He was reputed to be the mastermind behind the biggest bid-rigging conspiracy in New York since the days of Boss Tweed.
His name surfaced in tabloid articles about the trials of other people, but he always managed to keep himself un-indicted. Several generations of Feds and local DA’s in jurisdictions all over the northeast had tried to take him on, but had never even gotten him into a courtroom. Maybe the evidence got shot down in the crossfire between dueling prosecutors. Maybe some grand jurors had misplaced sympathy for woodland creatures. From where I sat, all I knew was that every time he submitted a low bid things got complicated.
Or simple, depending on how you look at it. New York City spends billions of dollars a year on construction projects and all kinds of supplies and services. Over the years, the city has been victimized by every imaginable racketeering, bid rigging, feather bedding, kickback, and corruption scam. In response, elaborate systems for keeping contracts away from the bad guys have developed.
Nowadays, whoever bids on a contract has to fill out a two hundred page form listing the intimate details of his personal, professional, financial and legal life. On big dollar contracts, or contracts in industries with nefarious reputations, the forms are pored over by an army of investigators, auditors, and lawyers. Every name associated with the business and all of its affiliates are run by every organized crime task force in the country. If a contractor has even the faintest whiff of a problem, he gets knocked out and the next lowest bidder is selected. If investigators think he’s a bad guy, but they can’t prove it they’ll use any pretext – a late income tax return, unpaid speeding tickets, a summons for abusing a tree – to deny a contract.
Vinnie the Pooh had been run through that ringer dozens of times, and every time, the lawyers said there was no hard evidence that Pooh was connected, but things sure smelled funny in his waste disposal business. Something was rotten in Jersey, and they didn’t like the idea of giving him a contract. There was one catch, though. Every time he was low bidder, he was also the only bidder. For some no doubt completely innocent reason, no one ever bid against Vinnie the Pooh. With nothing, er, concrete to hold against him, and no, one else to give the contracts to, Vinnie the Pooh was the biggest supplier of construction materials to the city. He also had a reputation for being a big supplier the to the NYPD’s homicide division.
I found it hard to believe that a homicide cop never heard of a guy like Pugliacci, but I couldn’t tell what Rendell thought about this. He wrote something in his memo book and handed the card back to Mrs. P., and, still giving away nothing, proceeded with his questions.
“Mrs. Paternostro, your husband was found by a man named Joe Pazzolini. Can you tell me anything about him?”
“Oh yeah. Crazy Joe. Creepy little guy. He worked with my husband on his city job, and they hung around together sometimes.”
“When was the last time you saw the two of them together, Mrs. Paternostro?”
“I really have no idea. I wouldn’t let that man in my house.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, he was a real low class type of guy. The last time he was here, he took his eye out and started playing with it. Scared the shit out of my daughter.”
“Excuse me?” sputtered Rendell.
“He’s got one a them glass eyes. I ain’t got nothing against cripples and such, but there’s no excuse for something like that. In front of my children no less. Plus, he’s always gettin’ into trouble, and makin’ trouble for other people.”
“What kind of trouble?” asked the detective.
“My husband had to bail him out of jail a couple of times. And one time he and my husband were out all night together. When my husband got home in the morning, he stunk of booze, and he looked like he had been in a fight. After that, I told him that was it. I didn’t want to seem him again.”
“It seems that Mr. Pazzolini still knew something about your husband’s activities, though…maybe more than you do,” suggested Rendell.
“What do you mean by that?” asked the widow, looking like she was tensing up a bit again.
“Well, he knew where to look for him, and he found him. I understand that when co-workers of your husband asked you about him, you said you hadn’t seen him in three days. Let me ask you again Mrs. Paternostro, how are things at home?”
“Well I’m sure they’re mistaken. Me and my husband was married a long time, and we planned to stay that way,” said Mrs. P, not altogether convincingly.
“Was you husband still living here, Mrs. Paternostro?”
The widow P. tensed visibly and blurted out “Who told you he wasn’t? Of course he was. Why would you ask something like that?”
“No particular reason, Mrs. Paternostro. I’m just trying to fill in some of your husband’s background and immediate situation,” answered Rendell.
“Was he a member of any, you know, fraternal organizations? Social clubs? Did he moonlight at anything?”
“Uh, not to my knowledge,” She answered cautiously.
“Can you think of anyone, friends, neighborhoods, relatives, co-workers, he might have had disagreements with?”
“No. No one at all. My husband was an angel. He got along with everybody,” she said, a little too firmly.
Rendell muttered something that sounded like “everyone but you” under his breath while jotting something down in his notebook.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” said the grieving, and now aggrieved, widow, nearly shouting.
“Oh, I said ‘we’re done with you’, Mrs. Paternostro,” answered the detective innocently.
With that he turned to me and said “You, you’re coming with me.”
He then turned back to Mrs. The widow P.
“I’m sorry again for you loss Mrs. Paternostro. I have no more questions for you for now, but I may need to get in touch with you again shortly. Please make sure you don’t leave town for the next few days, In case there are any developments.”
“Leave town? Why would I do a thing like that? Where would I go?”
“Oh it’s just a figure of speech, Mrs. Paternostro. I’m sure you weren’t thinking of going anywhere.”
With that, it seemed the interview was over, and we exited the apartment.
Next Chapter
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