Slip & Fall

by Nick Santora

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Faced with a struggling practice, a pregnant wife, and a sister in trouble, Robert Principe realizes the white-collar world isn't as easy as he thought. He needs money. Fast. Desperate, he approaches his wiseguy cousin Jackie with an insurance scheme -- a way for the Mob to collect from guys who owe but can't pay, and a chance for Robert to use his law degree to make a few quick bucks when he needs it most. Robert thinks it will be a one-time thing. It isn't. The scheme works well -- too well. The money flows, the violence escalates, and Robert soon learns that getting out of a deal with the Mafia isn't exactly easy . . . especially when the FBI is onto you.

Release date: April 3, 2012

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Print pages: 296

Sample

Thick morning fog rolled in off New York Harbor as the old immigrant was led to a secluded spot in the back of the lot. The hanging mist and a sun that was still a few minutes from rising made him and the younger man who guided him invisible even to those who were filtering through the chain-link gate for a day’s work, just fifty or so yards away.

They stopped behind a green dumpster. The old man was told to get down on his knees, and even though at seventy he was twice the age of the younger man, he did what he was told. The young man stuffed a white sweat sock into the immigrant’s mouth.

“You make a sound, I’ll smash your fuckin’ head in, understand?” the young man threatened.

The immigrant nodded.

“Gimme your hand.”

The old man complied. At first he tried to get away with offering up his left hand, but it didn’t fly.

“Not that one,” the young man ordered. “The one you write with.”

The immigrant pulled his left hand back and slowly pushed his right hand forward, along the ground, making grooves in the earth with his fingers.

The young man removed a hammer from inside his coat pocket.

“Remember, not a sound,” he warned.

The immigrant pressed his eyes closed tight.

The hammer swung down with full force. Blood shot out from all sides of the old man’s hand as if someone had stepped on a sponge soaked in dark red paint. The grooves in the dirt filled in black. Despite the sock and the warnings, the immigrant let out a wail that couldn’t be heard over the sound of workers unloading flatbeds by the gate.

“Motherfucker,” the young man barked, and he quickly drove the hammer down into the hand two more times as punishment for the old man’s disobedience.

The immigrant collapsed onto his side, grasping his mangled paw. He wept silently, the pain too great for any more screams. The young man grabbed the dumpster by its side and pushed it over. The immigrant didn’t even see it coming; he just felt it land on his hand, crushing already broken bone into smaller pieces. The pain was so bad, the old man passed out.

When the other workers found him about twenty minutes later, he was unconscious, bloody, and alone.

The immigrant wasn’t the first guy in Brooklyn to catch a beating—and he won’t be the last. Everyone in Bensonhurst pays their dues eventually. Some pay what’s fair; some pay tenfold. A lot of people feel I didn’t pay nearly enough; they think I got away with murder—figuratively and literally.

And if that is how people want to look at me, I won’t try to convince them otherwise. The blood on my hands and the hands of others—I caused it all. It’s that knowledge that gives me the nightmares that keep me awake every night. But I deserve them; I deserve everything I got. It’s my never-ending penance for what I did. Because what I did was horrible.

My father hired a limousine to take my entire family from Brooklyn to Manhattan to see me graduate from law school. I watched them pour out of the vehicle in front of my apartment building on 113th Street—my stocky father, my portly mother, fat Uncle Vincent and husky Aunt Edith, and finally my chubby sister, Ginny. It looked like some kind of Fat Italian Clown Car. I had tried to dissuade my father from getting the limo. He and my mother didn’t have much money and a limousine definitely was not within their budget. He wouldn’t listen.

“This is the proudest day in Principe family history,” he told me. “We’re going to celebrate it properly.”

My grandfather served under Patton and stormed the beach at Normandy but me becoming a lawyer was considered the family’s finest hour. Makes you think.

To my family, and especially my father, my graduation was validation that everything my family had gone through was not in vain—from my mother’s father leaving Italy as a stowaway in the bowels of a cargo ship to my dad’s dad, and my old man as well, destroying their bodies, one day at a time, as overworked, underpaid, journeyman carpenters. I was the big payoff, the jackpot, the scratch-off ticket that when rubbed with a quarter revealed three perfect cherries. I was the one who would transition the Principe family from blue collar to white, from tool belt to leather belt, from work boot to dress shoe. I was the Golden Boy.

Despite my parents’ aspirations for my career, I never wanted to stray far from my roots. Even though I was recruited by all of the top Manhattan corporate law firms, I turned them all down. Instead, I opened my own practice immediately after law school. I was so goddamn naïve—I thought I had outsmarted everyone. While my classmates from Columbia were working hundred-hour workweeks for behemoth firms such as Sullivan & Rose and Warren, Kugler & Curtis, I’d have my own personal injury practice.

My father provided a built-in client base. He had worked with every lather, carpenter, and laborer from Coney Island to the Bronx. These guys knew him and respected him, so why wouldn’t they hire his son if they ever got hurt on the job? Construction sites are dangerous places and guys get hurt all the time, and their lawsuits are very lucrative. Why the hell would I want to work at some stuffy firm representing banks and hedge funds when I could represent real people, people I knew and grew up with; people who truly needed my help—people who wouldn’t be able to feed their families if they broke their leg or fractured an arm? I was going to get rich doing God’s work. I truly started out with the best of intentions.

I realize now that a big reason I went out on my own was because of my dad. I think subconsciously I knew I could never pay him back for all he’d done for me, putting me through college and all—working his ass off so I could get an education. The least I could do was help his union brothers when they needed help the most. That kind of thinking was my first mistake. A son can never pay back his father. It’s impossible. You can give him everything in the world and still come up short.

So after graduation I opened an office above Morelli’s Deli in Bensonhurst, at the corner of 18th and 71st, just a few blocks from where I grew up. The space was big, but reasonably priced, mostly because on hot days the smell of headcheese and pimento loaf would seep through the cracks of the old wooden floorboards. There was a reception area with a secretarial station, a large office, a small bathroom, and a smaller office that was so jammed with old furniture, boxes, and other junk from the prior tenants that you couldn’t walk more than a few feet inside. The space needed some work—a coat of paint, some rewiring, and a few holes in the walls had to be patched—but it was nothing my father couldn’t fix over the course of a weekend, which he did of course. It wasn’t much, but it was more than adequate for a sole practitioner just starting out.

The large office had a great view of the neighborhood. Sometimes, when I was at work, I’d look down on 71st and see guys I grew up with riding the sanitation trucks or humping Sheetrock for Fortunato Construction for a three-story that was going up across from Morelli’s. I’m ashamed to say it, but there were times when I looked down on them in more ways than one. Even though I was raised by and grew up idolizing men who worked with their hands for a living, once I knew I’d never meet the same fate, I sometimes felt I was a little bit more important than my former peers who dug ditches for a living. Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t an elitist, and most of the time I didn’t feel that way. It’s just that every once in a while, right after I had first opened shop, I’d strain my shoulder patting myself on the back.

My father was so excited when I first hung out my shingle. Actually, it wasn’t a shingle at all. I had a glass door at street level that opened to a staircase that led up to my office. I put those gold, stick-on letters with black trim on the inside of the door—ROBERT R. PRINCIPE, ESQ.—ATTORNEY AT LAW. My dad kept telling everyone in the neighborhood that I was a partner in my own law firm.

The old man had a tendency to exaggerate the accomplishments of his children. Once, in junior high, Ginny brought home one of those paper certificates you got in gym class for the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge. She did more situps than anyone else in her class or something like that but my father told anyone who would listen that his daughter got a personally signed “Commendation” from President Carter. A couple dozen Americans were holed up in some basement in Tehran, gas prices were skyrocketing, and the United States had just boycotted the Moscow Olympics, but somehow my dad had convinced himself that Carter could sleep at night because my sister clocked a good time in the shuttle run. But you gotta cut the guy some slack. There are a lot worse things you can say about a man than he thinks the sun rises and sets on his children.

Besides, he wasn’t the only one who was excited about my new firm. I couldn’t wait for my first case to come in. I’d be helping the injured in their time of need. And if I got rich in the process, what was the harm of that? I figured I’d settle a few big injury cases after I graduated from law school, save carefully, and be retired within five years. That was eight years ago.

The most interesting thing I learned in law school was the theory of “causation”—the idea that no event is an island unto itself; that everything that happens is just part of a long cosmic chain; and each link in the chain is the result of a prior link having already occurred. I’m convinced that when the world comes to an end you’ll be able to backtrack and find a single occurrence, even if it occurred a million years in the past, that set off a reaction that eventually led to the event that caused the downfall of mankind. In other words, I believe everything has a clearly defined genesis. You need not go back a million years to find the genesis of my personal downfall. It was when I learned that Mrs. Catalano was dead. I had just gotten the news when I heard the phone ring.

“I’m not here, take a message,” I called out to Joey from my office. I didn’t feel like speaking to anyone. I was still sort of in shock. The phone kept ringing. Joey must have been on the other line but I wasn’t about to answer the call. Besides, Joey knew how to use the damn hold button.

I had hired Joey two weeks after I opened my firm and she had been with me ever since. She was a secretary, receptionist, legal assistant, paralegal, and unlicensed lawyer all rolled into one petite, curvy, twenty-five-year-old Puerto Rican frame. Frankly, she was more important to the everyday happenings at the firm than I was and she knew it. But she got three weeks’ vacation, a small cash bonus at Christmastime, and was allowed to leave early whenever she needed if she had to do something with, or for, one of her three kids. In exchange, I paid her a pittance and during rough patches she let me miss a paycheck or two and then make it up with interest when some money came in.

She was like a younger sister to me—so much so that when other lawyers commented on the “hot Puerto Rican piece of ass” I had working for me, it took all of my professionalism to refrain from knocking them out. Eventually, word got around the courthouses that you shouldn’t comment on my secretary, no matter how tight her blouse was or how short her skirt, because I would be pissed off. Some mistook my protective nature of Joey as the by-product of romantic feelings, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Those rumors would have bothered me except that Joey and my wife, Janine, knew they were bullshit and that was all that mattered to me.

Joey entered my office holding a pink phone message slip. I didn’t notice her at first because my face was buried in my hands.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, concerned.

I looked up at her. My eyes were red and swollen.

“I just got a phone call,” I explained. “Mrs. Catalano is dead.”

“Oh, my God. I didn’t realize you were so close to her. I’m so sorry, Bobby.”

“Fuck Mrs. Catalano!” I shouted. “She was one of the best cases in the office.” This business could turn you into a bastard sometimes.

Joey’s face registered concern. “Was she the pedestrian on the sidewalk case?”

“Yes.”

“The one who was hit by the Mercedes?”

“Yes.”

“The one with the million-dollar insurance policy?”

“That’s the one.”

“How did she die?” Joey wanted to know, as if it made a difference.

“Malignant brain tumor,” I said as I stood and stared out the window.

“I didn’t know she had cancer.”

“Apparently neither did she.”

“Can you settle the case?”

I kicked my trash can over. The prior day’s New York Law Journal spilled out and a brown, half-eaten apple rolled across the floor.

“Sure I can, for about ten grand! This case was worth half a million if it was worth a penny. Perfect liability, surgery with hardware to the leg, huge insurance policy. The whole goddamn case was based on future pain and suffering but you can’t have future pain and suffering when you’re fuckin’ dead, now can you, Joey?”

Like I said, the business could turn you into a bastard—a callous, unfeeling bastard.

“Shut your mouth right now. You sound like a horse’s ass,” Joey shot right back. “Mrs. Catalano’s family is in mourning and all you can think about is your stupid fee? You know better than that, Robert. And I know you better than that.”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think because all I’m thinking about right now is my stupid fee. Money that you and I are never gonna see now.”

“You think I work here for the great pay and the benefits? Or maybe the luxurious surroundings?” Joey said sarcastically. “I’ve stuck it out because you’re the only lawyer I know who actually cares about his clients. So don’t go and turn into an asshole now ’cause I don’t have the energy to start lookin’ for another job.”

Joey stared at me, unblinking. Man, she could be a tough son of a bitch at times. She won.

“You’re right,” I yielded. “I’m sorry. But damn it, when are we gonna catch a break? We’re almost completely tapped out.” I slumped back into my chair. I grabbed the classifieds from my desk and gently tossed them to Joey. “You better start checking the want ads.”

Joey caught the paper and threw it back at me, hard, hitting me in the chest. “Check ’em yourself, ’cause I’m not going anywhere. We’re just going through a bad stretch is all.”

“It’s more than a bad stretch. After expenses, I took home no pay last year. If it weren’t for Janine’s salary, we’d be out on the street. Joey, I don’t know how much longer I can pay you. You need to understand that. You’re a single mother.”

“You never need to remind me of that, trust me,” Joey joked.

She walked behind me and rubbed my shoulders. It didn’t help. I was as tense as a high wire.

“We’ll worry about payroll problems if and when the time comes,” she said, trying to calm me down. “Besides, we still have the Smyth case. When that settles you’ll be a millionaire and you can give me a big, fat bonus. In the meantime, why don’t you go home early, spend some time with Janine, and get your mind off things for a while?”

I stared through the door at the practically empty shelves in the reception area.

“Why not?” I said. “I’ve hardly got any cases to work on anyway.”

I instinctively grabbed my briefcase, although there was no work to be done inside of it, and left my desk. During the months leading up to the day Mrs. Catalano died, there was so little business coming in that I hadn’t had any work to do in the evenings when I went home. But, like a trained seal, I reached for my briefcase every day before leaving the office and took it home with me. And every morning, I’d walk back to work carrying the same empty briefcase. It was almost as if I would have been admitting defeat if I stopped bringing it home each night.

As I headed out the door, Joey called to me. She waved the pink phone message slip above her head. “That phone call before was from Mrs. Guzman. She wants to talk to you.”

“Tell her I’ll get back to her,” I said without turning around. I was in no mood to speak with Mrs. Guzman.

My office was twelve blocks from my house so my “commute” to work was a fifteen-minute walk. I loved that I didn’t have to sit in traffic like the schmucks coming into the city every morning from Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island. Instead, I was able to stroll through my hometown, one of the few perks of my job. Childhood memories from the neighborhood would wash over me. Every day I’d pass Saint Joseph’s Church, where I used to play CYO basketball; Town Circle Barbershop, where my dad and I both went to get our hair cut on the days before we each got married; and Junior’s Diner, where in seventh grade Angela Valario let me feel her up in the back booth when no one was looking.

The past would cloak me and protect me in a way that only someone’s hometown can. I felt safer in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, than I did anywhere else on earth.

But the day Mrs. Catalano died, my walk home didn’t make me feel better. I had “stomach issues”—the euphemism I gave my severe intestinal problems that started soon after I began practicing law and which got progressively worse over the years. A specialist told me my problems were the result of stress and anxiety, which I found funny because no one who ever saw me in court would have ever guessed that I suffered from stress. Whether on trial or arguing a motion, I never showed any signs of anxiety despite the fact that, very often, beneath my calm façade, my heart raced, my organs drowned in adrenaline, my blood pressure soared, my synapses burned, and my stomach percolated. All of my episodes ended the same—with me sitting on the toilet, doubled over, pissing out of my ass. After Janine, diarrhea had become my closest companion.

No one besides Janine knew I had a problem, not even Joey. There had been times when I argued entire motions before the court while in the midst of a full-blown anxiety attack. No one could tell a thing was wrong. I made sure that neither the judge nor opposing counsel became aware of my condition. I’d check my breathing, wipe my sweaty palms on the inside of my pants pockets, sometimes I’d even have to clench my sphincter—whatever I had to do to keep my competitive edge and get out of court alive. But trying to keep the attacks hidden just made them worse, and a vicious cycle ensued. The more anxious I felt, the more I made sure to hide it, and the more I tried to hide it, the more anxious I became because I was scared I wasn’t hiding it well enough.

The impetus of my attack that particular day was clear—I had been counting on the Catalano case to bring some very substantial, and very needed, money into the firm. Now I realized I would be lucky to get five percent of what I had hoped to settle the case for. The pony I had bet on came in dead last. Hell, the pony died in the starting gate. All I wanted to do was get home without shitting my pants, hit the bathroom, and then crawl into bed.

Just when I thought no one in the world had it worse than me, I crossed the street toward Crown Car Wash and spotted my cousin Jackie Masella. He was behind the car wash entrance, pushing some bald, sixty-year-old Chinese guy into the backseat of Jackie’s Cadillac. One look at the fear in the Chinaman’s eyes and I knew that the self-pity party I was throwing for myself was totally inappropriate. The Chinaman had it worse than I could ever imagine. Or so I thought at the time.

If you asked Jackie what he did for a living, he’d tell you that he was a labor negotiator and consultant for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. If you asked anyone in the neighborhood, they would tell you the same thing. And everyone would be lying. Everyone in Kings County knew my cousin Jackie had been a thief, crook, gangster, and junior wiseguy for most of his three and a half decades on this earth. But no one ever talked about it.

His father was my grandfather’s sister’s son, which made Jackie my second cousin. But if you know anything about Italians and how we view family, you’d know that such labels are meaningless. If he’s your nephew, you treat him like a brother. If he’s your cousin, you treat him like a brother. If he’s your aunt’s niece’s son’s second cousin on your mother’s side, you treat him like a brother. So long as he is blood. And Jackie was more than blood. He grew up around the corner from me, and since he was only a few years older than I was, we were basically inseparable when we were kids. And we stayed like that until I went off to college. After that we drifted apart a bit, which people tend to do when they grow in different directions. I had studying and internships, and Jackie had the unions and collecting for his boss, Big Louie Turro, or BLT, as he was known in the neighborhood. I had made a point of telling Jackie about all the classes I was taking and the incredible people I had met in college, hoping that maybe he’d turn his life around, go to night school or something. I would even lie to my cousin about all the girls I was scoring at school, anything to get him interested in leaving the neighborhood and doing something with his life other than running around for Big Louie.

But every Christmas break, every summer vacation, whenever I came home from wherever I had been, there were two things that never changed. First, Ferro’s Bakery wo. . .