Chapter 5 – Hunny in my Tree

This is the fifth chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here. The novel begins here.

Leaving my office building, I headed toward the 7th Avenue IRT and my journey home. The IRT is a group of subway lines. So is the BMT. So is the IND. A lot of people don’t know this. At some point in the last decade or so, all traces of the New York I knew as a child disappeared. The whores were chased out of Times Square by a giant mouse. The junkies were chased out of Union Square by farmers. Homeless people were scooped up into unmarked white vans and deported to San Diego. New York accents were banned from Manhattan.

My Grandfather grew up in Manhattan and spent his whole life there. He spoke with the kind of accent you hear in old movies. Part Leo Gorcey, part Humphrey Bogart, with hints of the pale of settlement polyglot he grew up speaking. He used tell us kids bedtime stories about the charms of old New York. In his day, it was the Jews against the Irish – pitched battles in the Gashouse district against the gang led by his arch-nemesis Hugo Mahoney. The way Grandpa said the name, it sounded like “Oogie Maharney,” and in his stories, Grandpa always came out on top, hitting Oogie in the face with a rotten tomato, or chasing him into the shins of the beat cop.

I always knew grandpa wasn’t really gangster, or an angel with a dirty face, just a regular guy, retired from a regular job, who wore a fedora and a coat and tie when ever he went out. When he died, his final raspberry to the religious upbringing he walked away from when he enrolled in the Jewish Harvard was his instructions to be cremated. It’s a good thing we followed those instructions, too, because if there had been a body, some yuppie anthropologist who thinks an egg cream is supposed to have eggs and cream in it would have stuffed him and stuck him in a diorama in the Museum of Natural History next to the cavemen and the saber tooth tiger. Grandpa hated cats.

But I digress. One of the stranger things to have happened is that one day, in the middle of the night, somebody went and changed the names of all the trains. All vestiges of the three separate subway companies were erased. F’s were turned into V’s. V’s were turned into Q’s. The double-L lost an L. And nobody told the lifers. On the rare occasions when one of us could find another, we’d swap stories about flashers on the BMT or ax murderers on the IND. Meanwhile, flocks of newly arrived actors, lawyers, and media slaves stop and ask for directions to the red line, and we try to figure out why all these people think they’re in Boston.

But I digress. I took the subway back to my palatial civil servant’s villa, better known as a crumbling apartment, in a crumbling building, in a neighborhood that used to be overrun with hookers after the factories shut down at night. Now it’s the latest clone of Soho, but it’s still crumbling. Pushing and shoving my way through the phalanxes of smokers standing outside the 14 bars that have opened on my block in the last three months, I made my way to my building, inside and upstairs to my apartment.

As I started to turn my key in the lock, the door jerked open, and I tumbled forward into my foyer. I looked up from the floor to see standing in from of me the girl I saw loitering on Arthur Avenue.

Ordinarily, I gawk as well as the next guy, but when I saw her earlier, I was too preoccupied to give her the attention, she obviously sought. I could see now that she deserved, it too. From the brief glance I shot her way on Arthur Avenue, I had guessed she was jailbait because of the way she dressed – the only women on the streets who look like hookers these days are twelve year old kids. I have as active a fantasy life as the next guy too, but I have certain rules. Like never undress a minor with your eyes. Maybe the government can’t intercept what your eyes download to your brain, yet, but I’m not taking any chances.

Now seeing her up close, I could see that see wasn’t as young as I had thought. She was in her twenties, and dressed for, if not action, at least attracting the stares of civil servants who don’t get out too much. Beneath the spiked blond hair of dubious provenance, heavy mascara, multiple ear and nose rings, exposed skin, and tattoos was a certified natural beauty. Big green eyes, full lips, and porcelain skin, and cheekbones like a movie star. I picked myself off the floor, and lifted my jaw back into place before putting it into service.

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my apartment?”

“I’m a friend of Tony’s. A close friend. I need to talk to you. Your door was open.”

Two things told me she was lying. One, there was no way a vision like this was close friends with the likes of Tony Paternostro. He was a middle-aged, blue collar guy out of the Bronx, with a wife and kids, and a dead-end job. He hid from his battleax of a wife in neighborhood bars and social clubs with a one-eyed sociopath. She was a walking wet dream. Guys with looks, money, and connections for anything she could possibly want would be parading behind her, tripping on their tongues and signing over their condos in Florida to her. Lord knows who she hung out with, but it had to be someone with more obvious charms than a guy who spends his life around sticky black stuff and rocks.

Two, I’m a fourth generation latchkey-kid, native New Yorker. No silver spoon for me – I was born with a Medeco, a Schlage, and a Segal in my mouth. I’ve triple locked my door every day since second grade. In crumbling neighborhoods like mine, even ones where the cheapest apartments now go for three grand a month, that’s what you do. It keeps out the smokers. All that time I thought it also kept out girls with bodies that blatantly defy the laws of physics and who make no effort to conceal the color of their underwear. I guess I never got the memo that telling me they were allowed in after all. Maybe they only give those memos to the market rate tenants, like heat and hot water.

This was no time to discuss the finer points of the housing market though, and as much as I might have liked to let myself think with the wrong head, the events of the day wouldn’t let me. Besides, red lace thongs don’t do all that much for me. Not that I’d noticed. I’m not all that interested in looking at the outline of a nipple ring through a tight, nearly see-through blouse, either. Not that I’d noticed. I was trying to get to the bottom of why a barely clothed bottom threatening to escape from a tight leather skirt was in my apartment. Not that I’d noticed.

“Try again. I don’t know who you are, or how you got here. So how about you clear that all up for me, before I call my new best friend Detective Rendell.”

With that, I heaved my government-issue cellphone off my belt, fished Rendell’s card out of a pocket and started poking at the keypad.

“Please. Don’t do that. I can’t talk to the cops about this. You gotta help me.”

“I gotta help you? I don’t know anything about you, and I don’t think I want to, especially if you don’t want to talk to the cops about the murder of your ‘close’ friend.”

“I can’t talk to the cops. If they find out, I don’t know what they’ll do to me.”

“Who, the cops?”

“No the people who killed Tony”

“You know who killed him?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Regretting the words the minute they left my mouth, I asked anyway.

“All right, why don’t you tell me what’s going on, then tell me how you know Tony. Let’s start with your name.”

“Honey … ”

“You can call me honey once we get to know each other a little better, but for now why don’t you just tell me your name.”

“I told you – it’s honey. H u n n-y.”

“Yeah, and who’s your brother, Christopher Robin?”

“Ha ha. My daddy wanted to name me that, and he’s the kind of guy that gets to do what he wants.

“Yeah? Who’s your daddy?”

“His name is Vincent Pugliacci.”

The room reverberated with the sound of my jaw hitting the floor again. For the second time in a day, the name of one of the most notorious innocent-until-proven-guilty men in New York turned up in connection with a dead guy who used to work for me. On top of that, he appeared to have an appreciation for whimsical classics of children’s literature. Menace and whimsy can be a fearsome combination.

“So let me see if I got this straight. You’re Vinnie the Pooh’s daughter, and I’m guessing he loves his Hunny?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Cute, huh?”

“I guess so, but none of that explains what you were doing outside the scene of Tony Paternostro’s murder, and why you expect me to be able to help you.”

“Like I told you Tony and I … well, he was my boyfriend.”

“I’m having a little trouble picturing that”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Why does everybody say that”

“Well, he was … uh quite a bit older than you.”

“So?”

“Well, you’re a very pretty girl …”

“And Tony was a very handsome man.”

What can I say? Love is blind. Either that or “pear-shaped, pock-marked, and pale” is the new Brad Pitt.

“Let’s just skip that for now. Why don’t you tell me why you think I can help you?”

“Tony always said he trusted you. He said you’re the only boss who ever did anything for him.”

“Sure, at work I took care of him, but that’s just because he did his job OK, at least compared to whoever else was available. I’m still not seeing what you want from me.”

“Tony said that if anything ever happened to him, stay away from his wife, and stay away from crazy Joe. I got nobody I can trust so that’s why I’m coming to you.”

“Listen, all I can tell you is that if you think you know what happened to him, and you need someone to protect you, you’d do a lot better looking a little closer to home.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Start with your father. I heard he knows something about protecting people.”

“And a lot of other things too. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t go to him because I think he might be connected to what happened to Tony.”

“What do you mean? You think your father killed your boyfriend? And you want me to do something about it?”

“I don’t know if my father did it. All I know is that someone close to him was involved. If this person was, and the cops come after him, he’ll know it was ‘cause of me.”

“Don’t worry about it. The cops can protect the person id-ing a suspect. They did it all the time on Barney Miller.”

“Who’s Barney Miller, and what’d the cops do on him?”

“Uh, forget it. Anyway, how would this guy know you told the cops about him?”

“Because I saw him running out of the building, and he saw me.”

“Look, I can see that you’ve got a problem, but I still think you should go to the cops. If you really think you can’t, then you’re better off going to your father and telling him what you saw. What would he do to his own daughter?”

“Don’t you get it? I can’t go to him. If he was involved, that means my own father killed the man I love. If that’s true, I don’t ever want to see him again, and I don’t want him knowing the reason why.”

“OK, but what do you want me to do for you?”

“I want you to find out if my father did it, so I’ll know whether I can ever see my father again.”

“Who do you think I am, Archie freakin’ Goodwin? I’m sorry Hunny, but I think you’ve got the wrong guy. All I do is push paper.”

“That’s not what Tony said about you. He said you knew stuff about my father’s business and the people that work for him. That you knew how to dig things up. He also said he could trust you.”

“Look, I know enough to know that I don’t want to dig any deeper. I also know that I already have a job, one I can’t afford to lose by interfering with a murder investigation.”

“You don’t have to worry about your job. I can pay you. A lot. And if you find out that my father is innocent, he’ll take care of you.”

“Are you crazy? What if he’s not innocent? Then he’ll really take care of me.”

“Now who’s being crazy? Look, Tony’s dead. You might be next. The only way you can protect yourself is finding out who did it.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The inappropriate boyfriend of a mobster’s daughter winds up dead, and his boss has to worry about being next in line for a bullet? What, your father thinks I fixed the two of you up?”

“What do you mean ‘inappropriate’? He was a very nice man. And who would be appropriate? Some zip in a black shirt and white tie? Besides, this has got nothing to do with what was between me and Tony.”

“You’re saying your father was happy about you being in love with a married man who made next to no money and came home from work every day smelling like asphalt?”

“My father has never liked any of my boyfriends, but he’s never killed any of them.”

“First time for everything.”

“He didn’t know about me and Tony. Nobody did, so that can’t be why he killed him, if he did. If he did, it had to be about business. You and Tony’s business.”

“Then forget about you telling the cops. I’m telling them myself. Now. I’d rather take my chances with them.”

I hoisted the phone up again and tried to heave open its giant clamshell. She was too quick though. She grabbed it from my hands and heaved it through the open door. I heard a splash, and knew I’d be filling out forms in the morning.

“Nice shot.”

“I played shooting guard at Our Lady of Padua”

“You know that’s not the only phone in the world. You’re not gonna stop me from calling the cops.”

“Maybe, but for now, that was the last one in this apartment. The nuns taught shop, too. I know all about wiring.”

It looked like she had won the first round. If I was going to call the cops, it might not be for a while. There’s probably a code in the city procedures manual for how to replace drowned telecommunications equipment. I didn’t know it, but Carboña probably had it. Besides, they’d probably fine me for polluting the sewers. There’s probably a way to get the phone company to show up and fix your wires, too, but no one I know has ever cracked that code. I was gonna need to get to out of my apartment by myself to get to the cops. If she played hoops and took shop high in school, who knows what other skills the nuns imparted to her. Besides, I was taught never to hit a girl. The only people I was supposed to hit were Irish street urchins, and I didn’t have any rotten tomatoes handy. They were all in the fridge.

“All right. It looks like I’ve got no choice but to listen to you a bit more. But this doesn’t mean I’m gonna help you.”

For the first time since I fell into my apartment, somebody cracked a smile.

“Well at least that’s a start.”

I had to smile a little myself. Hunny seemed to have a way of getting what she wanted out of people. Not that I was ready to start moonlighting yet. I’d need to fill out a form to get approval to do that.

“All right, so what’s the story here? Why do you think this had something to do with Tony’s job?”

“I told you. If it’s not because he was my boyfriend, what else could it be?”

“For starters, it could be his wife.”

“No way. She needed him alive, and married. She wanted half his pension – Tony always told me she couldn’t collect if they got divorced or he died”

“Yeah I heard about that. I was there when the cops broke the news to her. The minute Rendell start asking her about her how things were between her and Tony, she broke out that story about the pension. Acted all pissed off about his dying before he filled out some paperwork that would have benefited her.”

“See?”

“Yeah, but it was all a little too neat – she was too ready to tell us she had no reason to kill him. Didn’t show the slightest hint of real emotion when she got the news. She was just pissed off that she didn’t get his money.”

“That’s what I’m saying. She didn’t care about him at all. All she cared about was what she could get out of him.”

“Maybe so, but I’m telling you, she didn’t seem surprised or affected by the news at all. After a minute, she acted like she was upset, but it was the fakest thing I ever saw. Almost like she knew he was dead. She’s got an angle in this, I bet.”

“No way. Tony says there was no way she could get his money unless he retired, and they were still married. That’s why we couldn’t get married – she wouldn’t let him go.”

After the m-bomb, I was tempted to say something, held my tongue. I still had electronic devices I cared about in my apartment, and more than one fixture with running water. Besides, it was getting late. I needed to get her out of my apartment. Civil servants need their beauty rest.

“Look, there are a lot of complexities to the pension system. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about guys thinking they had it all figured out, only to find someone’s hand in their pockets the minute they retired. Something else could’ve been going on, too.”

“Like what?”

“Like crazy Joe. That guy’s a walking disaster area, and Tony’s been hanging around with him for twenty years. Who knows what kind of shit he might’ve brought around? So why go get a good night’s sleep, think all this over, and then see whether maybe you might do better with the cops than with me.”

“I got no place to go. I can’t go back to the apartment – the cops have got it all sealed up. And can’t go back to my father’s place right now.”

“Don’t you have any friends, someone you can crash with?”

“No one I can trust. Look, just let me stay here‘till you get this figured out. It won’t take long. I promise, I’ll be no trouble at all.”

Before I could say no, she turned her back to me, pulled her shirt off and started walking toward my bathroom. I was disappointed to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra that matched her thong. Wasn’t wearing a bra at all, actually, but I guess I already knew that.

I tried to sputter a weak objection, but couldn’t get the words out before she beat me to the draw.

“I’m just gonna take a shower. I don’t mind sleeping on your couch, but I didn’t bring a change of clothes or anything to sleep in,” she said as the door closed.

“Why don’t you give me one of your shirts, and maybe a pair of your boxers? Just slip ‘em through the door and throw ‘em on the floor. And no peeking.”

With that, I heard the water in the shower roar to life. I resigned myself to having a new roommate and set about making her feel at home. I set up the pull-out couch in the living room for her and fished out some deluxe civil servant boxer shorts and a shirt I had long since given up on from a pile at the bottom of my closet. I then followed her distribution instructions to the letter, though do to the reflective properties certain glass surfaces, perhaps not the spirit.

The rest of the evening’s ablutions passed without further incident, and with teeth brushed and face scrubbed I retreated to my bedroom for a much needed rest.

Next chapter

How to Vote for President

With the recent spate of announcements of presidential candidacies, it occurs to me that there would be great value in developing a systematic approach to candidate selection. With my background in the efficiencies of municipal procurement, who better than I to produce and disseminate such a system.

Behold the hand-dandy calcu-vote system:

1. Identify your most important core value

2. Rate each candidate according to degree of pandering to that value on a scale of 0 to 5 (0 = "I do not speak French"; 5 = "is your tongue supposed to go there?"

3. Identify 2 policy proposals from each candidate that conflate (your) self-interest and improbable predictions of macro-economic effects and rate each on a scale of 0 to 5 (0= "you want to raise my taxes and to fix social security?"; 5="cheap Chinese TV's and jobs at home? sounds good to me!")

4. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5 for combined naturalness and salt-and-pepper-ness of hair. (0=Donald Trump; 5=George Clooney)

5. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 t0 5 for absence of melanin (0=Jack Johnson; 5 = George Will)

6. Sample each candidate's stump speech for 1 minute and add 1 point for each occurence of "Freedom" ,"America" ,"Hope", "Values" and "Future" up to a maximum of 10. For any occurences above 10, deduct 2 points per occurence

7. For each candidate, count the number of X and Y chromosomes. Assign 2 points for each X chromosome and 5 for each Y (up to a maximum of 5)

8. Add up the scores for steps 1-7 and vote for the candidate with the highest total.

9. If there is a tie, vote for Ross Perot.

10. If Ross Perot is not on the ballot select a fringe party candidate at random (make sure to bring a coin or die into the voting booth).

Without giving too much away (after all the ballot is supposed to be secret), I can tell you that I have put this system to very good use already, and I have a pretty good idea who's going to come out on top. Let's just say "President Vilseck" has a nice ring to it.

Of Course You Realize, This Means War

According to a recent article in the New York Times, U.S. "intelligence" officials in Iraq (there's an oxymoron for you) believe that Iran is supplying insurgents in Iraq with munitions, including the most effective form of roadside bomb. The article alludes to the evidence U.S. officials claim to have unearthed, but makes no attempt to assess the validity of these claims. The article also mentions that Iranian officials flatly deny the charges.

This is an extraordinary story. Given the way the Times via Judith Miller got burned by the WMD claims leading up to the invasion, it's astonishing that that the Times would report these claims as straight news. I would think that most Times readers (and I would hope editors) would immediately sense their "here we go again radar" booting up. Yet the article alludes only very indirectly to the possibility that this is part of a P.R. campaign to start another war -- by quoting U.S. officials' denials that that's what it is. Beyond that, there's is no counterpoint and minimal political context to the story. There's also nothing on the opinion pages yet. One would think that the minute a story like this hits, the opinion writers would be raising "fool me once ... " warnings, but this isn't happening so far.

Ironically, the idea that support for Iraqi insurgents is coming from Iran is entirely plausible. Iran was a refuge for Shiites throughout the Saddam era. From what I understand, the border areas between Iran and Iraq are somewhat analagous to the "tribal" areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Allegencies are religious and tribal far more than they are national. Consequently, it's entirely logical that Shiite militants are getting arms from within Iran (even if not from the Iranian government). Yet the intelligence and military "communities" under Bush are so discredited that even if they present something that on its face seems reasonable, it's almost impossible for any thinking person to take it seriously.

Or so I would hope. For now, there is only speculation. If Joe "I am the Lorax" Lieberman starts talking about the the threat to U.S. troops posed by Irani armorers, though, we'll know for sure the fix is in.

You say tomato ...

Electric guitar is a funny instrument. Compared to other instruments common in jazz and other improvised music, it's pretty hard to play a lot of notes, particularly at fast tempos. Those who do manage to achieve "speed" comparable to what pretty much any entry-level saxophonist or pianist can do are few and far between. Those can do this, and not sound like they're working really hard are among the the very best in the business. Those who can make speed sound easy and make unusual, insteresting music ... well ... that's genius.

Now, there's a "right" way, to play fast -- picking all the notes according to a system, keeping things even and tight. Using hammer-ons, and other guitarry quirks only for effect and expression. The ultimate example of this kind of tightness is probably Pat Martino. Outside of the world of jazz guitarists, he's relatively unknown. Among guitarists, though, he's a god, the true musician's musician, the platonic form of the way you're supposed to do it. But the chops aren't the most interesting thing about him -- his phrasing, his harmonic pallet, and an amazing dynamic range (both literal, and, for lack of a better expression, spiritual), are really what make him a killer. There's also the astonishing fact that he lost most of his mental capacity, including everything he knew about the guitar, following a near-fatal brain aneurysm, then systematically re-built himself intellectually and artistically, but that's a story for another day.

There's also a "wrong" way -- picking only a fraction of the notes, and hammering on, pulling off, or sliding into the rest, while paying no attention to your up and down strokes. That's what I do, an unabashed, lazy technique-cheater. It's the only way I can make the notes on up tempo tunes, and it sounds like it. It's also what John Scofield does, but he's a genius. For him, it's a style, a choice. When he plays, no matter how fast the tempo, and no matter how many notes he's playing, he always sounds like he's going slow, just lazing his way around the fretboard. I don't know any stories about his brain exploding, though I did once see him lose his chewing gum in the middle of a solo.

All of the foregoing is just an excuse for posting a video I scared up on YouTube -- a jam featuring Pat Martino and John Scofield, each tearing it up the way only he can. I'm not sure how it sounds to ears a bit less attuned to jazz guitar, but to me, it's as if they were playing different instruments, on different planets, yet, amazingly, perfectly complementing each other. Joey D. ain't half bad either ;-).

Enjoy ...