reading

Casino Moon

Peter Blauner

For my son, Mac,
and my mother, Sheila

Contents

A Biography of Peter Blauner

Acknowledgments

Some people never learn to be good.
One-quarter of us is good. Three-quarters is bad.
That’s a tough fight, three against one.
—MEYER LANSKY

In dreams begin responsibilities.
—W. B. YEATS

AS THE COLORS in the sky faded, the red casino lights along the shore came up to replace them. Slowly, dozens of seagulls began to circle the glowing sign on top of Trump’s Castle, like bits of paper caught in a cyclone.

I was watching from the parking lot of a club called Rafferty’s, on the other side of Gardner’s Basin. It was a short boxy car-battery of a place with a blue neon Schaefer sign in the window. I’d stop by once or twice a week in those days to help total up liquor receipts and invoices. But on this night, my father had called me to a special meeting and I knew it wasn’t to count any invoices.

I lingered outside awhile, trying to think of a reason not to go in. I checked my Filofax three times, hoping I had the wrong night. But there it was, 7:30 p.m., June 3. A little stretch of pink showed under the dark skirt of the night. I saw a light cross the sky and thought it might be a shooting star. But before I had a chance to make a wish, it turned into a plane and went blinking off toward Philadelphia. There was no sense putting off the inevitable. I buttoned my jacket and went in to see my father.

Inside, the club was what my old man would call a real fugazi kind of joint. Smoked mirrors on the walls, a plush red carpet that would’ve looked right in either a brothel or an airport lounge, and a glittering disco ball hanging from the ceiling that might’ve seemed hip in about 1977. The club was officially closed that night, but that ball was still going around.

My father was sitting in a booth near the back, talking to Richie Amato and a guy named Larry DiGregorio, who had a carting business over in Brigantine.

As soon as I saw Larry sitting there, my head started to throb and my heart began to race. I knew he was in some kind of trouble with my father’s crew. He was a nice, mild-mannered guy with a slight stammer. I’d known him since I was a kid. Always fastidious. Never a hair out of place on the steel gray helmet of a wig he wore, and never a stain on his crisp white shirt. He had absolutely no chin, though. His neck pretty much began at his mouth.

Driving over, I’d been praying that he wouldn’t come tonight. But with him already sitting there, nursing a beer next to my father, I wasn’t sure what I could do. I’d hoped to get my old man alone to talk him out of this craziness.

“Look who decided to show up,” said my father.

“It’s the Great Pretender,” Richie chimed in.

My father—who was actually my stepfather, if you want to get technical—was named Vincent Russo. He was sixty then, but he moved around like someone twenty years younger. His muscles weren’t the kind you got from lifting weights, but from ripping open shipping containers with your bare hands. His face was a record of every beating he’d ever caught in a police station or a prison yard without breaking down and giving someone up. When he smiled, he showed rows of broken, snaggled teeth on the top and bottom. He was the most loyal man I’d ever met. If he liked you, he’d take a nail through the heart for you. If he didn’t, he’d never rest until he got you around the neck with chicken wire.

He’d been my real father Mike’s best friend until Mike disappeared. After that, Vin came in and took care of my family. He courted my mother with Black Label scotch and chrysanthemums and played war games and boccie with me in the backyard. In the fall when it finally dawned on me that my real father wasn’t coming back, and the whole world seemed strange and frightening, Vin was the one who took me by the hand and led me back into the schoolyard. When bullies taunted me about losing my old man, he’d stand outside the fence and stare at them with eyes like ball bearings until they slunk back to their dodgeball games. He raised me like I was his own flesh and blood and looked after my mother when she started taking pills and stopped being able to tell the difference between her dreams and real life. I knew he loved me, but in the last few years I’d realized I didn’t want to be part of his world.

“You’re late,” he said in a voice like a manhole cover being picked up. “You were supposed to be here a half hour ago.”

“I ran into traffic on the Expressway. I think one of these buses turned over that was carrying old people to the casinos. They had it backed up all the way to Camden.”

“You could’ve taken the White Horse Pike. You would’ve been here in five minutes.”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“You didn’t think of it because you didn’t want to think of it,” my father said.

Larry DiGregorio raised his beer glass to me and smiled. I turned away quickly and caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar.

I’ve been lucky enough to inherit my real father’s high cheekbones and dark eyes, but tonight my suit was letting me down. A blue silk double-breasted Armani knockoff that cost three hundred dollars at the Italian Dimension on Atlantic Avenue. It was a kind of clean-cut GQ look I was going for. None of that Italian Stallion bullshit, with all the chains and cologne. Bells and smells, I call it. But in the nearest pillar mirror, my suit made me look like a thirteen-year-old taking his great-aunt Doris to her seat at a wedding.

“No respect, no respect,” said my father, taking out a comb and trying to smooth back the wild shock of gray hair that was always jumping from the top of his head.

The other two laughed and tilted back their beer mugs.

“Sit down a second, Anthony, you look like sh-sh-shit,” Larry DiGregorio said.

I could barely look at him, knowing what was expected of me. I remembered Larry taking me with his son Nicky to a Phillies game when we were kids. I can still see him climbing over the people in the next box, trying to get us a foul ball hit by Mike Schmidt. But he was too slow. Afterwards, he was so depressed he could barely talk to us. Even as a kid, I felt sorry for him.

“I don’t know, Larry,” I said, rubbing my fingers together and trying to figure a way out of this. “I don’t know. Lot of stress these days, lot of stress. I oughta have my head examined, starting a contracting business in the middle of a recession.”

“Recession!” Richie smirked like he’d never heard a word with more than two syllables before. He spent all his time reading Muscle & Fitness and the Physician’s Desk Reference, looking for different combinations of steroids to try.

In that picture The Ages of Man, Richie’s the second one over from the right. His chest was so pumped up it looked like he’d swallowed a two-hundred-pound barbell. A single eyebrow ran from one side of his forehead to the other like a hairy railroad.

“Yeah, recession, Rich.” I looked at him. “You ever hear of that? You oughta pick up a newspaper for once in your life.”

My father jabbed a gnarled finger at my white oxford shirt. “And if you’d listen to me, you wouldn’t have to worry about no recession. I’m trying to get you to do some work so you can get the button. But you can’t even keep an appointment. I tell you seven-fifteen, it’s almost quarter to eight.”

“Hey, Vin.” Larry put a hand on my father’s arm. “He’s here. That’s all that matters.”

“That ain’t the point,” said my father, slapping the table with his palm. “I’m trying to get Anthony to be a man and accept his responsibilities.”

Some people’s families want them to be doctors. Others would like them to be lawyers. Mine wanted me to be a gangster. To my father, the greatest thing a man could be was a made guy in the mob. To be able to walk into any bar or restaurant and have other men fear and respect you, and even pick up your check. He’d worked hard all his life and wound up the underboss in a scrubby local Atlantic City crew. But he had greater aspirations for me. He thought I could become a capo or maybe even a consigliere with one of the major families.

He couldn’t understand that what I wanted more than anything was to be legitimate. I’d grown up around the Cosa Nostra, I’d lost my real father because of it, and I’d had enough. I didn’t want to spend every night of my life staring at the ceiling, wondering if a rival crew was going to have me whacked or if the cops were going to arrest me. I wanted what most people with some college education want: a bigger house, longer vacations, the love of my kids, and a shot at doing better. But my problem was that at the age of twenty-eight, with a wife and two children to support, I was struggling to make an honest living. I hadn’t had a decent contract for my concrete business in over a year, even though I was hustling around the clock. To my father, the way I lived was a disgrace. Only suckers worked nine-to-five.

“Listen,” he said. “If I could get you in with Teddy, you wouldn’t have any more worries in your life about providing.”

Teddy was my father’s boss. His capodecine.A three-hundred-pound engorged pig, who always wanted half of whatever you made. I remember him stealing pancakes off my plate when I was a kid.

“If I lived like you and worked for Teddy full-time, I wouldn’t make any real money anyway,” I said. “I wouldn’t even have a name.”

“What’re you talking about? I have a name.”

“Yeah? Ever have a car leased in your own name?”

“Why do I need that? I got four or five driver’s licenses.”

Across the table, Larry was sipping his beer and using the handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his mouth, oblivious to what was about to happen.

“Ever live in a house that didn’t have someone else’s name on the lease?” I asked my father.

“No,” he said. “And I never paid no taxes either. So what does that tell you?”

He turned to Larry and jerked his thumb at me. “You see, he thinks it’s beneath him to be part of a crew.”

“Well, Vin, the young generation d-doesn’t have the same priorities as we did.” Larry stroked the part of his face where a chin should have been. “The F-family doesn’t mean the same thing to them.”

“That’s because they don’t understand all the sacrifices we made.”

Larry shrugged as my father rubbed his nose with his forearm. “Look, V-vin. They’re never gonna t-t-take him anyway. So what’re you gonna do about it?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I can’t be made because I haven’t got Sicilian blood on both sides. Those are the rules.”

I was hoping that would derail the conversation, but my father was set on his plan.

“Every man wants his son to have a better life than the one he had,” he said gravely. “Maybe they could bend the rules for once.”

“Hey, don’t be so . . . officious with me.”

My father looked at me like I was giving him a migraine. “Officious?”

“V-vin.” Larry leaned over and grabbed my father’s elbow in a show of old-man camaraderie. “May-maybe it’s better like this. Look at my boy Nicky. If he could’ve stayed clean, like Anthony, maybe I wouldn’t have to be here tonight trying to straighten this out with you.”

My father grumbled. “And if Nicky woulda come in to talk about it himself, we could’ve had it out with him insteada you, Larry.”

“You know about this?” Larry turned to me as a potential ally. “My Nicky had a little m-m-misunderstanding about the union p-p-pension fund.”

“He was skimming an extra fifteen hundred a week,” said my father. He stared at me. “Haven’t you got something to tell Larry about that?”

“What?” I just looked at him.

“Don’t you wanna say something to Larry?”

“No.” I looked away. “What am I going to tell him?”

“That thing you said you were going to tell him.”

My father’s eyes were like two drill bits going through the side of my skull. I suddenly became aware of every breath being taken in the bar, the tick of the clock, and the catch in Tony Bennett’s throat as he sang “Cold, Cold Heart” on the radio.

“I haven’t got anything for Larry,” I said.

My father was still staring. He punched me lightly in the shoulder.

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

I saw Larry’s eyes shifting around nervously. If he’d had any brains, he would’ve leaped up and run out of there.

I patted my pockets and stooped my shoulders as the blood began pounding in my ears. “I haven’t got anything for him.”

“Aghh.” My father waved his hand in disgust and started to get up from the table. “I’m gonna go take a piss.”

“Don’t fall in,” said Richie as Larry stood up to let Vin out.

My father walked around the circular chrome-topped bar and went through the brown door on the other side of the club marked “Mermen.” Most of the tension went out of the room with him. The pounding in my ears subsided and I let the music from the radio wash over me. Tony Bennett was hitting all the high notes. Larry was going to be all right, I thought.

He sat back down and reached across the table to tap my hand.

“He’s a real old hard-ass,” he said softly. “B-but he loves you. D-don’t ever forget that.”

“I know, Larry. But he doesn’t understand.”

“Sure, but in his heart, he only w-wants what’s best for you.”

That disco ball was slowly turning on the ceiling and a thousand little stars of light chased each other around the room. They reminded me of the gulls outside.

I was about to tell Larry that this would be a good time to leave. But right then my father came out of the bathroom with a .357 Magnum in his hand, just the way I thought he would. He walked around the bar and raised it slowly, leveling it at Larry from fifteen feet away. I got ready to hit the floor and cover my ears.

But then something unbelievable happened. Old Larry DiGregorio, who’d always had the reflexes of a Valium addict, whipped his hand inside his jacket and pulled out a snub-nosed .38. Before any of us could react, he fired off a round at my father and reality began to dissolve. The bang made Richie yelp like a schoolgirl finding a roach under her chair. My heart jumped up against my lungs. But my father only looked annoyed, like he just remembered he’d left his keys in the car. He fell to the floor in a heap as Tony Bennett finished his song. From somewhere far away, a foghorn sounded.

Larry turned to us slowly like a high school principal about to deliver a lecture. “You know, I want to believe neither of you boys had anything to do with this,” he said in the steadiest voice I’d ever heard him use.

My breath froze. Richie farted so loudly it sounded like he was blowing his nose in his pants. Larry began to sit down. He didn’t see my father rising up behind him like a movie creature back from the grave. With one hand, Vin grabbed the nearest bar stool and came rushing at him. And the next thing Larry knew, that bar stool was crashing down on his head.

All hell broke loose. The two of them hit the floor and started wrestling like a couple of old chimps under the banana tree. Spit was flying everywhere, chairs and tables were falling. They began rolling over each other back toward the bar, gasping for air. First my father was on top. Then Larry. A pair of bifocals fell out. Then a set of false teeth. Now a hearing aid. Something furry tumbled off Larry’s head and I realized it was his toupee. It was like they were shaking parts of each other loose. Glasses tumbled off the bar and shattered next to their faces. An ice pick rolled off after them. My father grabbed it and tried to jab it in Larry’s eye. Larry grabbed his hand and bit Vin’s ear. It felt like someone had taken all the nerve endings at the back of my head and twisted them into a tourniquet.

My whole life’s dilemma was squeezed into those couple of seconds. Every fiber in my body was screaming Go, get out of there, drive a million miles away. But I knew I had to stay. Vin was more than the man who married my mother. He was my father, my protector, my sword and shield against the rest of the world.

“GIVITBACK! GIVITBACK GIVITBACK!” It was impossible to tell which of them was screaming.

I saw Richie sitting in the booth like a beached whale. My old man was on the floor making this horrible “ACK-ACK-ACK” strangling noise. He needed me. But they both had guns, which could go off any second. I forced myself to take a step forward, but then two sharp pops stopped me in my tracks ten feet away and I heard a thwop sound like a knife going into a pumpkin.

Peggy Lee sang “Is That All There Is?” on the radio.

Someone groaned. An ice cube cracked. In the revolving disco ball lights, I could see the outline of an arm going limp. There was another muffled pop, pop from the gun and then both of them got very still.

For a minute, I got scared that they both might be dead. That headache turned into a blinding whiteout pain right over my eyes. How could I explain what we were doing here? What would we do with their bodies? And what would I do without my father? Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized I loved him almost as much as he loved me.

There was another groan and then slowly Vin began to disentangle his arms and legs from the pileup on the floor. He stood up and looked from me to Richie and then back to me again.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “When I ask if you got something to tell him, you’re supposed to jump up and strangle that cocksucker.”

“I didn’t bring the rope,” I said numbly. I was still in shock about what had just happened.

“Ha?”

“I said, I forgot the rope. I guess it’s still in the trunk.” That was a lie. I hadn’t wanted anything to do with killing Larry and my father knew it.

He cursed under his breath and started to wipe the prints off his gun with his shirttail.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, he just nicked me.” My father checked the shoulder of his shirt where the bullet passed through. He seemed more concerned about the rip in the material than the scab forming on his skin.

I breathed a sigh of relief and went over to take a closer look at Larry. He was lying very still with four bullet holes in his chest and the ice pick through his kidney. His wig was off, leaving his pale bare scalp exposed. He was covered with blood and half his blazer was stuck under his back. I kept thinking he would’ve wanted it closed with the brass buttons showing.

The stench was so overwhelming it was like a cloud coming off him.

Looking back, I think I’d never felt so confused. I’d known my father had killed people, but I’d never actually seen it before. His violence sickened me. It didn’t just turn my stomach; it split my mind open. How could the same man who walked me through the schoolyard do this to another person?

But at the same time, I was secretly excited. There was something incredibly powerful about watching him just take a life. He and Larry had been locked in a mortal struggle and now he was going to walk away and Larry wasn’t. It changed me—seeing that—but I didn’t know how much at that moment. Almost immediately, I went back to being horrified and ashamed.

My father came over and nudged Larry with his foot. “You were supposed to do this, you know, not me,” he told me in a raspy voice, pocketing the .38 that had been lying at Larry’s side. “We were waiting so long he would’ve left if I hadn’t of shot him.”

“He almost left anyhow,” said Richie Amato with a smaller smirk.

“You shut up!” my father snarled at him. “You never got outa the fucking booth either.”

He picked up Larry’s beer, which had been sitting on the table the whole time, and finished it in one gulp. The ultimate macho fuck-you. Kill your enemies. Take their women. And if there are no women around, drink their beer.

What could I do? Call the police? This was my father. Besides, it was gradually beginning to dawn on me that by just standing here I was an accomplice to felony murder. I couldn’t say anything to anybody without implicating myself.

“Ah, shit.” My father started to wipe some bloody mess off his forearm with a cocktail napkin. His shirt was rank with sweat and his breathing sounded like rats running through a wind tunnel. “Well, now I got a problem.”

He took another deep breath and heaved his shoulders. A single green vein pulsed above his left temple. His body was still radiating all the hate it took to rise up and kill Larry.

“What’s up?”

He looked down at Larry and shook his head. “He wasn’t supposed to get shot and stabbed like that. Teddy wanted him strangled and he wanted you to do it. It was part of the plan for having you take over the union envelope.”

“So don’t look at me,” I said sharply. “I didn’t want anything to do with this. I only came tonight because I thought there was a chance we might be able to work this out peacefully ...”

But even as I was saying this I found I couldn’t stop staring at Larry’s corpse. It was terrible what had happened, but somehow I found myself adjusting to the circumstances. Larry was dead. There wasn’t a thing I could do for him.

“Well, lookit,” said my old man, pulling the ice pick out of Larry’s side. “Maybe there’s something we can do.”

‘Like what?”

He bit his lower lip. “Maybe you could just throw a rope around his neck and say you did it and I gave you a hand toward the end.”

“He’s still got all them holes in him,” said Richie, suddenly turning into a forensics expert. “They’re gonna look at ’em and say that’s what killed him, not any rope.”

My father carefully surveyed Larry’s face. “Well then we gotta figure out how we can get the tongue to come out and the eyes to bulge.”

I straightened my tie and cleared my throat. It’s amazing how quickly things can go back to seeming normal. The disco ball on the ceiling was still spinning, the music on the radio was still playing, the beers were still on ice behind the bar, waiting to be sold for three dollars a pop. The only thing different about the place was Larry lying there dead on the carpet.

“Look,” I said, “forget about saying who did what to who. What are we going to do about him lying here?”

“Hey.” My father shot me an irritated look. “I’m just trying to get you some credit with Teddy.”

“Well forget it,” I cut him off. “You tell a lie, it’ll come back to haunt you every time.”

This was the last thing I needed. I was already implicated in a murder. Now Vin wanted to put the weapon in my hand. I just wanted to get out of there, have a drink, and take some time to sort things out.

My father was glaring at me again. “You know, you fuckin’ kids kill me,” he said, turning from me to Richie. “Will one of you go get a plastic mat so I can roll up this sonovabitch?”

Richie went springing off to a back room, all gung-ho since there wasn’t any danger now. I was still looking at Larry. Just a couple of minutes ago, he’d been asking me how my business was doing.

“Officious,” said my father, taking him by the ankles and starting to drag him away. “That the word you used before?”

“Yeah, Dad. Officious.”

“You fuckin’ kids,” he said. “You kill me every time.”

WHAT WAS THAT bonehead’s name?

Detective Pete “The Pigfucker” Farley watched the F.B.I. man duck under the yellow crime-scene tape and approach Larry DiGregorio’s corpse. What was this fed’s name? Something that rhymed with stain. Lane. Payne. Wayne, that was it. The F.B.I. man knelt down next to the body and began pawing through the pockets like a bear looking for honey.

Beautiful, thought Pigfucker. By the time he’s done, he’ll have his fingerprints on every useful piece of evidence.

The scene was beginning to take on the ambience of a nighttime baseball game. Dozens of people streamed over from the Golden Doubloon Casino across the street, trying to get a look at Larry lying in the dim, drafty alley behind an abandoned restaurant. Four heavyset bicycle cops in plastic helmets and blue shorts attempted to cordon off the area. A German shepherd barked from the back of a K-9 unit car by the curb and two guys from the medical examiner’s office hung out nearby, leisurely smoking cigarettes.

From twenty feet outside the crime scene tape, Pigfucker watched Wayne the F.B.I. man carefully lift a key chain out of Larry’s pants pocket with a pencil and then touch each key with his fingers. Brilliant that they sent people to Quantico to learn how to do that. No wonder most local cops and hoods called the feds “feebs.”

Pigfucker, or P.F. as he was known, stood back, chewing a Tums and admiring the way the blue strobes lit up the crime scene and the light rain. At forty-three, he was already as creased and jaded as Chairman Mao just before he died. He wore a brown sports jacket with dark blotches on it, tan slacks, and a wan smile meant to convey he didn’t care that people no longer thought highly of him. An unruly mop of black hair with gray frosting fell over his forehead and a thick mustache concealed the slight twitching of his mouth.

“What’s the cause of death?” he asked when one of the medical examiner’s guys walked by, carrying a transparent plastic bag.

“Four gunshots to the body and a stab wound through the kidney.”

“I see, natural cause for a guinea.” P.F. chuckled and tapped his foot in a gathering puddle of rain.

How many homicide scenes had he been at like this? Where the victim and perpetrator were clearly part of some great larger mechanism for controlling the ebb and flow of criminal enterprise. He told himself he didn’t care anymore. All these organized crime cases were in the jurisdiction of feebs like Wayne anyway. Local cops like P.F. were only there to set the table and search the gutters for spent shells.

A young patrol sergeant named Ken Lacey brought over a potential witness: a stubby little black man wearing a torn Malcolm X T-shirt, with a black Nike Solo Flight on one foot and a low-top white Fila on the other. A beard as coarse as barnacles roughened the sides of his face and a tangerine-sized bump rose from the left side of his forehead.

“Do you know me?” P.F. looked him up and down.

“I don’t even know myself no more.”

“Didn’t I used to chase you off this corner twenty years ago?” P.F. closed one eye and squinted through the other, like a jeweler examining a precious stone. “What’s your name again?”

“Steven Ray Banks. And don’t you wear it out.”

“You found the body, right?”

“Motherfucker was sleeping in my house,” Stevie Ray mumbled. “That’s my Dumpster. I been in there every night the last three nights.”

“I thought you were living under the Boardwalk. Didn’t I see you coming out of there last year?”

Stevie Ray shook his head. “It got bad there, man. They got a lot of riffraff come into town. You know? People who aren’t right in their heads. They see Merv Griffin on TV, they get themselves a bottle of pills and a one-way bus ticket to Atlantic City.”

A white jitney bus across the street discharged a squad of doughy older women carrying pink change cups.

“Eh, you didn’t happen to see who put him there, did you?” P.F. asked. “In the Dumpster, I mean.”

Stevie Ray pushed his mouth up toward his nose. “You sound like all them other damn police officers. I told them, ‘Motherfucker came in my house unannounced, just like all you motherfuckers do.’ Why is that, man? Everywhere I go, I gotta be somewhere else. People always be telling me, move on, motherfucker, move on. Ain’t I got a right to be somewhere?” He swung his leg like he was kicking an invisible ball across the street. “Got me living like a dog, without a home, man. And that is the sad truth.”

“What can I tell you, my friend?” P.F. swallowed the rest of his Tums. “It’s an imperfect world. Allow yourself to become nothing and you’ve got no place in it.”

“Don’t I know, don’t I know.”

Stevie Ray put his hands into his pockets and stared at the traffic whizzing by the open end of the alley. The TAKE A CHANCE sign for the Golden Doubloon casino blinked on and off as the F.B.I. man named Wayne got done looking through Larry DiGregorio’s pockets. It was just a matter of time before he’d want to talk to this witness.

“You didn’t know him by any chance, did you? The victim, I mean. Larry.” P.F. felt the antacids warring in his belly.

“No, man, I don’t have nothing to do with the Mafia.” Stevie Ray wagged his head like a dashboard ornament. “I was in the casino business. I used to work right across the street here. At the Doubloon.”

He stared off at the flashing TAKE A CHANCE sign across the street as if it were some distant constellation.

“Is that right?” said P.F.

“You’re damn straight! I gave them people the five best years of my life. And what’d I get for it?” He moved his hands around like he was looking for the right thing to compare it to. “What I got was .. . squat. They left me with a dog food bowl that didn’t have no food in it. It was all because of my damned shift manager, man. He say he caught me trying to steal chips out with my mouth. But that motherfucker wanted me to have sex with his sister and show it on public TV. So whenever I go over to someone’s house, they’ve got me on the TV having sex with his sister. That’s a damn shame. So now I have to live under the Boardwalk where they don’t get public TV.”

Half the time with guys like this, you couldn’t tell if they were really crazy or just faking to compensate for life’s disappointments. That’s what the casinos did for these people. They raised their expectations and let them down brutally. A couple of years ago, you might’ve found this Stevie Ray wearing a starched white shirt and gold cuff links, dealing blackjack over at the Doubloon. Talking about owning a house for the first time. But it never lasted. The casinos never delivered on all the wealth they promised. Eventually people like this Stevie would get laid off and wind up out on the street again. Amidst forty-eight blocks of drab poverty and gaudy desperation.

As they finally got done loading Larry’s body into the medical examiner’s van, Pigfucker saw Wayne the F.B.I. agent heading over his way.

“Say, man,” said Stevie Ray. “Things have been a little slow tonight. Why don’t you let me hold five dollars for you ’til tomorrow?”

“I’ll tell you what,” P.F. countered. “If you remember anything about someone unusual hanging around your Dumpster before they found the body, you got your five-spot.”

But it was too late. Wayne the F.B.I. man was already standing between him and the witness. Sadowsky, that was his last name. Wayne Sadowsky. The name flashed in P.F.’s mind like a half-screwed in light bulb. Big, pastyfaced Southern kid with huge linebacker shoulders and a brown perm that sat like a sick poodle on top of his head. He moved poorly, though, like he’d once been badly injured.

“Why don’t you-all just back off now, Officer Farley?” Sadowsky said, his accent rich with the kind of snide condescension young federal agents reserve for older local cops. “This here is going to be a legitimate investigation.”

Yes. Number 54, Wayne Sadowsky, out with a groin pull.

“Wonderful,” said P.F. “I’ve no need to engage in weenie-waggling with you anyway. You can have your grubby little case all to yourself.”

He scratched his crotch with regal indifference and started to walk away.

“Hey,” Stevie Ray called after him. “What about them five dollars? I wouldn’t forget it, man.”

“Ask your new friend with the federal government,” said P.F., glancing back at Stevie Ray and then Sadowsky. “They’re always ready to help out a man in need.”

The agent took Stevie Ray’s arm and pulled him away. The medical examiner’s guys finally slammed the van doors on Larry DiGregorio. And the strip of casinos on Pacific Avenue kept shining like a golden chain extending into the night, dividing Atlantic City into a realm of light on one side of the street and darkness on the other.

AFTER SEEING WHAT my father did to Larry, all I wanted to do was come home and have a quiet night with my family. But it was like trying to sit down to a normal meal after looking at the inside of somebody’s stomach.

Almost as soon as I walked in the front door, with Larry’s smell still on my hands, I got into a fight with my wife.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said.

“Holy shit! What is it?”

“What do you mean, ‘what is it?’ It’s a fucking couch. What does it look like to you?”

Twice I walked around this thing. It took me about two minutes each time. It was enormous. All done up in peach with these soft brocade pillows and a fringe hanging off the end that reminded me of the shawl my mother used to wear. It looked like the type of thing you’d lie down on before you died.

In fact, if Larry DiGregorio had any luck at all he would’ve been lying on a couch like this instead of the back-alley Dumpster where we’d left him.

“Where’d you get this thing from anyway?”

“From Spartz, two weeks ago,” said my wife. “They just delivered it.”

My face fell. “Why’d you go there?”

“What do you mean, why would I go there?” said my wife Carla, who was five months pregnant and had a voice that made the neighbors pull their windows down. “It’s a fuckin’ furniture store.”

At the same time, both of us seemed to realize our two kids were in the other room, playing with the computer. Carla put her hand over her mouth, like she was ashamed of what she’d just said.

“I thought we were going to wait a while,” I said, trying to lower the temperature a little. “Save some money, so we could afford one of those nice Scandinavian couches Dave D.’s gonna be getting in.”

“I already went by Dave D.’s and he didn’t have nothing I wanted,” Carla whispered. “Everything he’s got is made out of tan leather. It’s like a fuckin’ furniture store for fag bikers. I wanna wear leather, I’ll go ride a motorcycle. I wanna sit on the couch with my baby, I don’t sit on leather. Especially in the summer when it gets all sticky and I wanna wear shorts.”

I looked at her stuffed into her mother’s striped Capri pants and purple halter top, and wondered what had gone wrong with our lives.

I’d started going with Carla back in high school. I’d had a couple of other girlfriends before her, but neither was Italian, so my father and Teddy poisoned me against them. “You shouldn’t have outsiders around the house!” Instead they asked me to take out Carla, who was Teddy’s niece. Right away, we hit it off. There was a special connection between us. Psychosis I think is the word. She was the only girl in my grade who wore tattoos and motorcycle boots. The two of us were the class misfits. It was her and me against the world.

But then I went off to college and things changed. I started reading books and hanging out with a different crowd, people who were going into the kind of professions where you negotiated with a telephone instead of a crowbar. And Carla stayed home in Atlantic City and became more like her uncle’s niece. Right then was when we should’ve broken up. But when I came back to town on Christmas vacation sophomore year, Carla took me for a walk on the Boardwalk and told me she was pregnant. And that was all she wrote. We were stuck together even though we didn’t belong together anymore. It was nobody’s fault.

“You shouldn’t have gone to Spartz,” I told her.

“Why not?”

“You should’ve waited. By summer, maybe one of those contracts would’ve come through for me, and we could’ve gone to Ikea and redone the whole living room.”

“But I can’t stand to wait,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “I’m already dead on my feet from carrying this baby around.”

“It would’ve just been a couple of more months.”

“That’s what you always say. There’s always a break just around the corner. But you know what your problem is, Anthony? You only talk to people you already know. It, it’s ... what’s the word I want?”

“Like incest.”

“It’s retarded,” she said. “You talk to the same people, you go to the same places, your life’s in a rut. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Oh that’s not true,” I said, taking off my jacket and checking the sleeves to make sure none of Larry’s blood got on them. “I’m always trying to get out. Don’t you see me working morning, noon, and night trying to get out and make a name for myself?”

“You’re only doing that to get away from me,” she said, changing tack.

One minute I was hanging out with the same people all the time. The next I was trying to get away from her. I couldn’t win with Carla. I guess we were just clawing at each other because we were unhappy and didn’t know what else to do.

“You still should’ve waited,” I said, kicking one of these little green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dolls the kids left lying on the floor like claymore land mines. I’d finally saved enough to afford some toys and already they were out of date. “We could have had something modern in the house.”

“Instead of what?” Carla was starting to raise her voice and her belly was beginning to shake.

“Instead of the kind of thing your Uncle Ted and Aunt Camille have.”

It was a low blow but Carla took it better than I expected. She went over and stroked the end of the couch like it was a new cat she’d just let in. And what made that worse was that our walls already smelled from cats.

“Well maybe if you’d go work for my uncle full-time we could afford something nicer,” she said softly.

“I’m not gonna do that,” I muttered.

I was already in too deep with her uncle. When my father first gave me the sixty thousand dollars to go to college and start my business, he didn’t tell me it came from Ted. Now the debt was hanging over my life like the Goodyear blimp.

“So how much is this going to cost us anyway?” I asked, giving the couch a little kick on the side.

“Just forty-five a month.”

“Oh.” I felt like I’d been kneed in the groin. “What’re you telling me? What’re you doing to me? I’m gonna have to make payments on a couch I don’t want?”

“Maybe if you’d come with me just the once, we could’ve picked something out together,” she said. I saw water forming in the corners of her eyes.

This was a couch we were talking about. The whole thing was crazy. We both knew we were broke because I wouldn’t go work for her uncle full-time. So she went and bought a couch that we couldn’t afford. In retrospect, I think this was what’s called a cry for attention.

“You don’t make no fuckin’ time for me anymore,” she said. “Oh, ‘Go right ahead, Carla. Get whatever you want. Anything you want is fine. Just don’t bother me.’”

“Yeah . . . but I didn’t want . . . this!”

I was looking at this couch. In that moment, it became a symbol for everything that had gone wrong in my life. A fat, lumpy, lifeless hulk. It made me think of her uncle and my father and Larry lying there in the alley and us in this house that smelled like a cat even though we didn’t have a cat and how I felt hemmed in by everything. If I’d had a gun right then, I would’ve shot that couch.

Meanwhile, my two kids playing with the computer in the other room were yelling at us to keep our voices down. “Shut up, what’s a matter witchooo?!!”

I realized I hadn’t been in to see them since I got home. So I gave Carla the time-out sign and stuck my head in. The two of them were sprawled out in front of the Macintosh, for which I was already paying a hundred fifty dollars a month on an installment plan. Rachel with her long black hair and her sallow face, looking as mournful as the Madonna at the age of seven. I could already tell she was going to grow up to be a worrier. Always concerned that everybodyelse is okay. Little Anthony, who was five, was more like me. A hustler, a fast-talker, constantly looking for an angle to beat the odds. His big drawback in life was that he was born deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other. But instead of giving up, he went along with all the special classes and hearing aids, and basically he was going to be fine, except for occasionally mispronouncing words.

They were playing a game called Sim City that allowed you to create an entire planet on the computer screen. With a keystroke, you could build a neighborhood or start a natural disaster.

“Daddy, Anthony’s wrecking the economy again,” Rachel complained.

I still don’t know how I got lucky enough to have two kids who were so much smarter than me. “Come on,” I said. “Enough of this bullshit. Let’s play The Dirty Dozen.”

“The Dirty Dozen” was just an excuse to wrestle the way I used to with Vin in the backyard. My kids forgot the computer and jumped on me. Rachel got me on the floor and started slapping my stomach. Anthony climbed onto my head and tried shoving one of those miniature Ninja Turtle dolls up my nose. Probably the same one he’d been keeping in the neighbor’s cat’s litter box.

“Sm-ELL Mich-EL-ange-LO!!” he yelled with that way he has of overenunciating. “Smell Michelangelo!!”

I think, looking back on it, that was the happiest I was ever going to be. Only I didn’t know it at the time.

But then I heard my wife’s voice calling.

“Anthony, come out here again. We were discussing something.”

I hugged the kids and went back out, noticing a little rust-colored stain on the back of my left pant leg. I hoped it wasn’t from Larry. Glancing back at little Anthony, I realized he had the same kind of Bell Tone hearing aid that fell out of Larry’s ear.

“You don’t like this couch—tough shit,” Carla was saying with her arms folded over her chest. “Next time you come with me when I’m gonna get something for the house, instead of hanging out at the club.”

“What do you think? I like being there? It’s my business.”

I thought of Larry lying there with his wig and his jacket unbuttoned.

“Oh yeah, what about all them girls you’re bringing there? You think I don’t know about that?”

“The live entertainment’s all your uncle’s idea. I just help count the money until we get some concrete work coming in. In case you hadn’t noticed, there hasn’t been a crane up in this town in a year.”

And then there were all the bills to think about. In the next few years, there’d be more special schools for Anthony and probably psychiatrists for Rachel with the way she was going. Plus the fifty-five thousand dollars we owed on the mortgage and the sixty thousand I owed her uncle. I looked at the couch and the rust stain on my pants and I shuddered a little inside.

“Listen, Carla, I just gotta get out of here awhile, get some air.”

“We are discussing something.”

“I know, but I just have to get out.”

It was all starting to get to me. The couch. The baby in her stomach. Larry in the Dumpster. I felt like the walls were closing in on me.

I looked around for the hundred-dollar khaki windbreaker I picked up from Macy’s last year at the Hamilton Mall. I found it under little Anthony’s toy helicopter with a yellow crayon mashed into the back.

“I’ll be back in a little bit,” I said, putting the jacket on over my suit pants.

Carla’s eyes never left my face. “Anthony,” she said in a high quavery voice. “I know you. And I know your mind hasn’t been in this house for a long time.”

“Carla, honey, that’s not true. Everything’s going to be fine. We can talk about it when I come back.”

But the truth was that I’d been feeling trapped for years and now I was beginning to think there might be no way out.

I saw Carla looking down at the Disney World ashtray on the table like she had an idea about throwing it at me again. It already had two chips in it.

“Shut up, will you?!” I heard little Anthony yelling in the other room. “I can’t hear myself think.” He must’ve had the hearing aid turned up too loud.

“But where you going?” Carla asked. “I wanna talk to you.”

“I’m going to see my father.” I almost tore the zipper off my jacket as I was raising it.

“I thought you already saw your goddamn father tonight,” she said. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

“Well, I’m seeing him again. I’d rather be with him than take this kind of abuse from my own family.”

Carla’s cheeks were all red and her nose was swelling. “You better be going to see your father. Otherwise I’m gonna go over to Uncle Teddy’s house, borrow his Ruger and you’ll find something else waiting for you when you get home besides a fucking couch.”

“Oh yeah? You’re gonna shoot me when I come in the door? Very nice. Who’s going to look after the kids when they take you away?”

“Anthony, don’t go,” she said, crying so hard it sounded like water rushing into a cove. “I feel like I don’t know you no more.”

For a second, I stopped by the door and looked at her. I was thinking about the way it used to be too. How we met on the Boardwalk one night in the summer after we’d both had fights with our parents. I remembered how we took off our clothes and went swimming in the shallow part of the ocean. Carla had long black hair then and it just kind of floated on top of the water. You could see the moonlight in the little ripples and once in a while, one of Carla’s breasts would break to the surface like the sea was offering up something good to the sky. We were playing a game. Seeing which of us had the nerve to go further out. But each time the tide pulled away, we’d hold hands so one of us wouldn’t get taken off to drown alone in the middle of the ocean. That was a long time ago, though.

“I’m sorry, Carla,” I said. “Don’t wait up for me.”

It turned out I didn’t go see my father again that night. Instead I went where I always go when I don’t know what else to do. To the Boardwalk. It was a nice night. If I’d had my jogging clothes with me, I would’ve gone for a run. Instead I sat on a bench outside the Golden Doubloon Hotel and Casino, watching the lights go on and off on the TAKE A CHANCE sign over the entrance while the tide pulled the sand from the shore behind me.

Sometimes it seemed this was where I ended up whenever anything important happened. There are whole parts of my childhood that I don’t remember, but I can still picture my real father Michael taking me for a long walk when I was seven. He was a tall, good-looking guy who always wore the best French shirts, Italian suits, and English loafers, even when he couldn’t afford them. I’d hold his hand and think the Boardwalk would go forever if we could just keep walking. It was right around this spot that he pointed out a vacant lot and said that was where the two of us would build a castle one day.

About a year later he disappeared and it was Vin taking me for a walk down the Boardwalk. I can see myself pointing to that vacant lot again and asking what happened to Mike and the plans we’d made.

“I guess he made a mistake,” Vin said.

The Boardwalk was empty in those days. A bunch of half-demolished hotels and broken storefronts. I remembered all the stories Mike told me about how this used to be the Queen of Resorts before I was born. The place where all the old robber barons, industrial leaders, and flappers from the 1920s used to come and sun themselves. This was where they had the first Miss America Pageant, the first movie theater, the first Easter Parade, the first bra-burning, the first Ferris wheel, and the first color postcard. And down at the end of the Boardwalk, there was the Steel Pier, where thousands of people would come to watch Sinatra himself sing with Tommy Dorsey’s band while horses dove off the end of the pier.

All that was gone by the time my real father left. But there was always the chance that it would come back. “It’s Atlantic City,” I remember him saying. “Anything could happen here.” And even in those ghost town years, I knew he was right. There was a special feeling about the place. Something about the way the sea met the sky as the salt air rustled the red-and-white-striped tents on the beach. Summer always seemed right around the corner.

And then it finally came. The state decided to allow casino gambling in A.C., and soon those castles my real father had been talking about began appearing all along the Boardwalk. Places with names like Bally’s Grand, Caesar’s, the Taj Mahal. Huge rectangles of chrome and glass that turned gold when the sun hit them just the right way.

Except by then, I had no way into them. Because I had Vin as a stepfather and Teddy as an in-law, I couldn’t apply to work for any of the casinos. Any of the standard background checking would make it look like I was mobbed-up too.

So I was stuck on the porch of a rickety shack while these palaces went up literally in my backyard. And now, more than ever, I wanted to go into them. I had Larry’s murder weighing on my mind and Carla, the kids, and the bills waiting for me at home. There had to be some other kind of life out there.

I looked up again at that sign blinking TAKE A CHANCE, TAKE A CHANCE