Bronx Noir

“How can you bust up Katz & Katz?” I asked her, again in my impatient way. “We got a nice long-standing clientele of decent New York criminals.”

“It’s not like it’s fatal,” she said. “Partners split up all the time.” She was cool, like she had the questions and answers doped out ahead of time. Like I taught her.

“Right here in New York, kiddo, you got a big future.”

“As what? Daughter of the great Stanley Katz who doesn’t paint houses? The consigliere? I’m already Stanley Katz’s kid. It’s not a skill. I have to be my own person, find my own space.”

Oy vey.

“In Los Angeles? What’s out there for a lawyer?”

“Entertainment law. Like I told you a hundred times.”

“A hundred times I still don’t get it. What do they know from murder in Hollywood?”

This could have been the stupidest thing I ever said. So I tried to brighten up the moment with a blast from the past.

“Say, kiddo, what’s the best thing about a murder trial?”

Wendy didn’t give me the setup like years ago when she was a little girl all excited about the game of Papa’s punch line.

So I answered me: “One less witness.”

“That is so ancient, Daddy.”

“You’re breaking my heart. Don’t leave me. I’m lonely.”

“It’s a lonely world, Daddy.”

“Which makes it a shame to be lonely all alone. You look like your mother. I miss your mother.”

“Me too, Daddy. But she’s gone. You know.”

Then Wendy and the blue suitcases her mother and I bought her for college walked out of my life.

“California is not out of your life,” she tells me whenever I call these days and start up with the you-walked-out-of-my-life business. Wendy informs me, “They’ve got airplanes now.”

Okay, I should fly out and visit.

But right now, I need to talk.

“You hear me? Your boy found his way to the Palomino Club.”

“Oh—hi, Daddy.”

“This guy, Lewis, he’s for real?”

What am I saying?

“You can bank on Blake Lewis,” says Wendy. “He’s a legitimate television producer. He’s big-time.”

“For me, all he’ll produce is a visit from the feds.”

“Like they’ve never been to your office.” Wendy says this with a sigh, like when she was a teenager complaining how I embarrassed her in front of her friends. Then she laughs and says, “Don’t you want to be on TV, Daddy?”

Is my own kid in on this proposition I got last night?

“Why me?”

“Blake’s looking for consultants. It’s what he does for his kind of shows.”

“What’s he calling this one?”

“Unofficially, it’s called The Assassination Show. Keep it hush-hush, okay? Blake only told me because he had to ask about—well, technical advisors, let’s say.”

I’m thinking over a number of things I don’t want to say to Wendy until I think them over. This seems to make her nervous.

“Well, so, naturally, I sent Blake to you.” Naturally.

“Ideas get stolen in the television business, Daddy. So hush-hush.”

“Television’s for cabbage-heads.”

“Speaking of cabbage, did you talk money?”

“Money I don’t care about.”

“I do. I’m only just getting off the ground here. I did a couple of five-percent series contracts, but you know how that goes.”

“Yeah, you sent me copies of your work, kiddo.”

“It’s mostly boilerplate according to the unions and the producers’ association. About a hundred ifs in there between a lousy ten grand, which doesn’t even pay the rent, and the sky.”

“But when you get up there, it’s dizzy time. When are you coming home?”

“I kind of want to, Daddy, but what I need right now is a real show-runner client like Blake Lewis. A big fish who can pay me a big commission. I need you to help me reel him in.”

“You should have called me, Wendy.”

“Where would that have got me? You would have blown me off, right?”

“Not necessarily.”

As soon as I say this, I know she’s got her foot in the door. And I know she knows that I know.

“Listen, Daddy, this is a good piece of business. It gets me in solid with the biggest thing going out here.”

“What’s that?”

“Reality TV.”

“There’s an oxymoron for you.”

I have got many things on my mind this morning in the November drizzle that’s making my shoes squeak. Not only that, I accidentally step on a liverwurst sandwich somebody dropped on the sidewalk. So this is not a good omen.

I am on the way from my place on the Concourse over to the office on 161st Street around the corner from the marble glory of the Bronx State Supreme Court. This is where it’s my calling to help little people through the meat grinder of their lives and take from the big people what the market will bear.

When it looks to me like they can hack the payments, the working stiffs pay me with their little credit cards. Or else I take IOUs, which I almost never collect on. The big people—your old-fashioned wiseguys, your rap music moguls, your disgraced politicians—they pay cash, and lots of it.

In case you hadn’t noticed about the times we are living through, weirdness and rudeness is rampant. And it’s not just up there at the top, either, it’s now trickled down to the bottom of the food chain. Never mind, for me business is brisk.