Street Money: A Mystery - Hardcover

Bill Kent is a writer, journalist, critic and author of three novels and two non-fiction books. His writing has appeared in more than 40 regional and national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Magazine. He lives in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, with his wife and son.

  1get yourself deadIn some parts of Philadelphia, you don’t die, you don’t get murdered, you don’t commit suicide or fall off a roof or come home and light a cigarette when the oven’s pilot light has gone out, blowing half the block to Kingdom Come.You get yourself dead.And like a lot of things that happen in a neighborhood when you’re not watching your back, this isn’t particularly good. Because, maybe you really did make a mistake that you could’ve avoided, but it is also possible that there were real reasons, people, money, or other things involved that had something to do with the neighborhood, and that can bother people.It bothered Andrea—call her Andy—Cosicki that her father, “Benny Lunch” Cosicki, got himself dead, but, if you listen to some people, Benny shouldn’t’ve gotten her that job with the Philadelphia Press because the media always gets it wrong, even when they get it right, and you don’t want no one in the media looking over your shoulder, asking you questions about who you’ve been breaking the bread with. Especially if you come up from a neighborhood like Redmonton, make enough money cutting deals—you know, making some things happen sweet and easy for some people in the city, and not so easy for others—then move out to the suburbs—the Main Line, no less. He figured he could drop back in on the place where he got his start, that he could drive into Redmonton in his gray suit and his yellow Buick and that wouldn’t bother people.It bothered people and then he got himself dead.And that bothered N. S. Ladderback, the guy that writes the obituaries at the Press. They say he made some calls, just the way he does when somebody gets dead in the city, somebody who isn’t big or rich or famous, but important enough to get a mention.So why was it nobody in town, not the Press or the Standard or the little newspapers, the freebies that you see blowing around all over the streets, did an obituary about Benny Lunch? It could’ve had something to do with Benny Lunch working a deal that settled the newspaper-delivery truck drivers’ strike in such a way that the drivers made out okay but the newspaper owners got a little bit screwed.Or maybe it was because Benny Lunch never liked seeing his name in the papers and that, even when he was dead, he could call in favors.You’d think he get an obit because Benny Lunch had this faith in people, places, and things: That no matter how bad things got, no matter how much people hated each other and tried to kill each other, you could get them to sit down at a meal and work out their differences.The cops found his body in the basement of the Straight Up Club, a place at North Seventeenth and Sackawinick where he used to tend bar before it caught fire and was never rebuilt. They figured he fell through a hole that the fire had made in the second floor of the club, in what had been an apartment where the sarge—retired Philadelphia Police Sergeant Francis McMann—lived with his daughter Charlotte (her mother, a Polish woman named Natalie, had died of some kind of cancer a few years before that).Everybody knows that the sarge died in that fire while helping to rescue the club’s patrons. N. S. Ladderback wrote a great obituary of him in the Press—it hung in a frame on the wall of Bep ‘n’ Betty’s Luncheonette at Eighteenth and Sackawinick until the place closed. Ben Cosicki, who was really, really short, married Charlotte McMann, who was really, really tall, not long after what was left of the sarge was buried. The baby came a little too quick—but that didn’t stop Ben from strolling Andrea around the neighborhood. He let everybody admire her and wonder if she was going to grow up tall, like her mother, or short, like her father, while Ben handed out the street money from Councilman Szathmary’s office, right upstairs of Bep ‘n’ Betty’s Luncheonette.Now Cosicki had a real job that the councilman got him, riding a trash truck, but everybody knows when you get your job through politics, your job is just what you do when you’re not working for the person who got you the job.Oh, you should have seen Ben working the street money on election day, walking fast and wearing the big smile of somebody who knows he’s on the bottom but thinks if he plays the game right, and performs an occasional miracle, he’ll go right to the top.There was one election day coming on and the weatherman was calling for rain, which meant that it would cost more to get out the vote, because there are people in the city who will walk from Redmonton all the way down to Broad and Market to watch the Mummers on a freezing New Years Day if the sun is shining. But these very same people will not go two blocks to the polling booths at the Gerrold Street VFW Hall if there’s a drop of rain on the sidewalk, unless they can expect something for their effort.Up in Councilman Szathmary’s office, Bep Adamo had wrung every penny he could out of the businessmen, shopkeepers, laborers, tradesmen, bookies, drug dealers, pimps, and any other fine, upstanding citizen who wanted the very best government money could buy. But there just wasn’t enough.That was when Ben Cosicki saved the day. He was strolling his baby daughter around with him when he heard that the councilman had come up short. He parked his daughter in the stroller in front of Bep ‘n’ Betty’s Luncheonette, and got Betty to go up on a stepladder and hand him down one of the cookie jars she kept on shelves above the tables. Then then he took the cookie jar into the Hampton Bank branch, this big, old, domed, marble-sheathed monster of a building that stood just across Sackawinick Street from Bep ‘n’ Betty’s, but could be miles away.The Hampton Bank, like a lot of Philadelphia institutions that survive, persist, and endure, in spite of the offspring that inherit them, was not the biggest, richest, or most powerful financial institution in the country, but it was the oldest. The bank’s chairman, Kellum Brickle, a New England blue blood who married into the Wadcalader family that had owned the bank since before the Revolutionary War, sometimes used that branch as his office because he liked to wander down to the sarge’s nightclub and drink himself blind listening to the jazz music there before the limo came to take him back to his estate in the suburbs. They say Brickle, no spring chicken, had had himself a stroke the night that the Straight Up Club caught on fire, and that Ben Cosicki had helped get him out of the fire and into an ambulance.Brickle wasn’t in his office that day—he hadn’t been seen around Redmonton since he had that stroke. But Ben made one phone call and came out with a cookie jar considerably heavier than when he went in.Everybody stood around and cheered when Ben put that cookie jar in his daughter’s tiny arms and carried her, and the jar, up the stairs to the councilman’s office, as shining with pride as one of those lights they used to put on the front of the locomotives that came roaring out of the factory just down from the bank.No doubt about it, at that moment, everybody thought Ben Cosicki was going places. “You’ll see, as soon as the results are counted the next day, Ben will be off that trash truck and behind a desk.”On election day some of this street money came back to Betty, because she got paid at a discount rate to make coffee and donuts (no cookies, though) to give to the people when they showed up at the VFW Hall to vote, as well as the buffet for the victory party later that night. Some of the street money went to people you never saw or heard of, who had gone around the neighborhood at night and put up signs for the state representatives, judges, and functionaries major and minor, sharp and flat, that Councilman Szathmary wanted to boost into office. Some of the street money went to cab and limousine drivers working out of Hank Norwood’s garage to pick up the people that needed picking up and bring them to the VFW Hall, and, later, to the victory party, those that were invited and should be there to show their consideration. And because a few of the more progressively minded of the neighborhood’s clergy made sermons about how it was important to remember who takes care of you, in this world as well as the next, some of the street money went their way, too.But because Councilman Szathmary wasn’t running for reelection that day, and Redmonton was considered a knee that jerked when Councilman Szathmary tapped it, most of that street money went to other districts where the election results might not be so predictable.In some of those districts, due to many reasons that people are still guessing about, the election turned into what the Press called “a bloodbath that money couldn’t buy.”But, as an old hand like Bep Adamo would tell you, that’s the way it goes in politics: You only win when you win big. Win small, or lose big, and people look for someone to blame.Ben Cosicki got blamed. He was picking up trash when some creeps threw him into the hopper, turned on the hydraulics, and crushed him half to death. Not long after that, Hampton Bank announced that, due to low customer demand, it was closing its Redmonton branch, for good.By the time Ben Cosicki got himself dead in his old neighborhood, the bank building, Bep ‘n’ Betty’s Luncheonette, the locomotive factory, and the sarge’s ruin of a nightclub had all been bought by the Reverend Hooks, a crazy preacher who, because he could tell his parishoners who to vote for without passing out street money (at least, that’s what people said), was the new force to be reckoned with in neighborhood politics.What Ben Cosicki was doing getting himself dead in the sarge’s club, nobody could figure. The club had been boarded up more than twenty years since the fire, but you could get into it if you wanted. Some people say the second floor was used as a place to stash drugs that the dealers were selling on street corners. The same streets had once been filled with Cadillacs and limousines belonging to suburbanites who’d come to listen to jazz at the sarge’s club.Other people say Ben had set up a meeting on the second floor with people who maybe didn’t want to be in the same room with each other, and that things got out of hand. This, in itself, was a little hard to believe because getting people who couldn’t stand each other to sit down for lunch was Benny Lunch’s thing. Supposedly, there was not a soul in the entire city—good, bad, or whatever—that Ben couldn’t invite to sit down for a bite. They’d meet and eat, and, somehow, arrangements were made, deals were greased, details would get ironed out, and if you were to ask Ben how it came down, he’d just shrug his shoulders and say in that side-of-the-mouth way he had of talking, that all he did was pick up a check.So, it makes you wonder, what kind of check is it that somebody like Benny Lunch would not want to pick up, especially in a place like Redmonton, a neighborhood that has been going downhill ever since they closed the locomotive factory. (Tell people that they used to make big huge monster locomotives in Philadelphia and they won’t believe you until you show them the wider-than-usual streets where the tracks used to run up to those big doors that no longer open in the walls of that big monster of a brick building that’s now the First Church of God Harmonious). All the Irish, Polish, Ukranian, Italian, German, Spanish, and Jewish people that lived in Redmonton who were content to hate each other in peace as long as they all had jobs found themselves having to go farther and farther out of the neighborhood for work. Used to be, there were half a dozen nightclubs like the Straight Up in Redmonton, and, from six in the morning until three o‘clock in the afternoon, you’d see everybody coming in and out of Bep’n’ Betty’s Luncheonette, the place that had all the cookie jars on the shelves.That the restaurant was lined with cookie jars had nothing to do with Betty’s saving habits. There was a time her marriage to Bep hit one of those potholes that you read about in the Press’s “Tell Tracy” advice column and Betty exhibited what everybody thought was cruel and unusual fascination for the custom-order porcelain restaurant crockery items proffered by a salesman who blew in from a redware china factory up in Phoenixville because—he said—he’d heard she served the best scrapple this side east of Mantua, and would she like to come out and see the factory one day?So one day after Betty was gone for a long weekend that Bep said was to visit family but everybody knew was a factory tour (you know what kind of free samples were being passed out). Betty comes back like a cat that had been left out all night and nobody says anything until a truck pulls up and there’s all these boxes of all these pink porcelain cookie jars with Bep ‘n’ Betty’s Luncheonette written on them in blue letters.Bep starts to smash them on the street in front of the driver but Betty comes out and asks if there was a bill with the shipment, and the driver said there was no bill—as far as he knew, the shipment had been paid for in advance. Bep turns to his wife and realizes that, whatever happened on that tour, he is suddenly richer by twenty-four—actually twenty-two because he smashed two—porcelain cookie jars.Such a look of love you have never seen between two people, at least, not on that day. They should start baking cookies, Bep said. When I’m ready, Betty said. So he built shelves all around the restaurant just high enough to be out of anybody’s reach, put the cookie jars on them, and one day some idiot reporter from the Philadelphia Press named Howard Lange (who’s now running the newspaper—can you believe that?) did one of those don’t-you-love-those-mom-and-pop-restaurants and wrote the place up as “The Cookie Jar.” Nine months later, Betty gives birth to a girl, Maria, who would grow up waiting tables at the luncheonette, try to become a nightclub singer at the sarge’s place, drop out of sight for a while after the indictments came down, and then come back to work in a soup kitchen run by the Reverend Jeffrey Hooks’s First Church of God Harmonious.If you asked anybody from Redmonton, they’d tell you Maria didn’t look as much like Bep as she looked like a gingerbread girl, and that that was enough to make Ben Cosicki fall in love with her, but marry somebody else. Councilman Szathmary married Ben and Charlotte McMann in his office. Then they went downstairs to have the party at Bep ‘n’ Betty’s.Councilman Szathmary got the city to pay to convert Bep’n’ Betty’s upstairs apartment into his office so he could set up a kind of one-stop service in Redmonton. You’d just follow the aroma of scrapple, kielbasa, and Italian sausage and eggs in the morning, and marinara sauce and steak sandwiches cooking in onions and olive oil in the afternoon, and if you had a problem, like a pothole in the street, or if you were waiting on your driver’s license from Harrisburg, or you couldn’t pay your gas bill that month, you went upstairs to Councilman Szathmary’s office and you’d see Bep Adamo, who always sat by the front window so he could see who was coming and going (but it might’ve been really because he had the worst breath and it was better if he was talking to you near an open window), and if Bep liked the way you looked, he’d say, “We got a visitor,” and show you into the backroom that was the councilman’s office, which they called the “Doug Out” because his first name was Douglas and that’s supposed to be funny.<...