Danny got into the Pontiac. The man beside him closed the door. Nobody said anything.
The driver pulled away from the curb and joined traffic as though he had been doing nothing more suspicious than waiting for his wife outside Macy’s.
Danny sat in the back with the second man. He smelled cigarettes, wool, and something medicinal. The man beside him was perhaps forty-five. Dark suit. White shirt. Plain tie. No jewelry. His shoes were polished but not new. Continue reading
The Pontiac sedan had been parked across the street for forty minutes. Danny knew that, because he had been watching that car for thirty-nine of those forty minutes.
It was black, four-door, clean enough to belong to somebody who didn’t park on the street very often. Two men sat in front. Dark suits. Dark hats. Neither had gotten out.
Danny finished his coffee. Continue reading
The five hundred dollars changed Danny’s financial condition from desperate to temporarily mysterious.
He paid what he owed at the rooming house, bought two shirts, had his shoes repaired, and put the rest in his pocket. Continue reading
Nobody contacted Danny for three days. That bothered him more than if somebody had. Continue reading
The address Tony Spada had given Danny belonged to a funeral parlor. Danny stood across the street looking at it. “That figures,” he said softly to himself.
It was a narrow three-story building wedged between a bakery and a store that sold religious articles. The sign over the door read:
ANGELOTTI & SONS
FUNERAL DIRECTORS Continue reading
Danny Marino learned something important about organized crime on a Wednesday afternoon. Continue reading
Danny Marino had never been shot at before, and to tell you the truth, he discovered immediately that he didn’t care for it. Continue reading
Danny had been followed before, but never by a car nicer than his apartment.
The black Cadillac was half a block behind him when he turned onto Atlantic Avenue. He saw it in the Buick’s rearview mirror: big, polished, patient.
He turned right.
The Cadillac turned right. Continue reading
There’s a wonderful vocabulary available: made man, wiseguy, associate, capo, crew, sit-down, the books, getting made, on record, tribute, kick upstairs, envelope, no-show job, shylock, vig, numbers, bookmaking, fence, hijacking, score, piece of the action, straighten out, connected, stand-up guy, rat, beef, button man. Some terms vary by period and place, which itself gives us something to teach: don’t put a 1990s mob expression into a 1957 character’s mouth. Continue reading
Writing a good story isn’t just plopping people into a plot. If I’m going to write a mystery and it involves the historical figures of the five major crime families in New York City, I’d better do my homework:
The important thing about the Five Families in 1950s–60s New York is that they did not have clean geographical jurisdictions like police precincts. Several families could operate in the same borough—even the same neighborhood. Their territories were often defined more by crews, unions, industries, docks, markets, gambling operations, and particular blocks or establishments. Continue reading