The Good Rat by Jimmy Breslin

including at Good Nicky Guido’s house. Laux walked up as Nicky Guido and his uncle came out of the house at 512. Nicky had on a white zippered jacket that a girl had given him for Christmas. He and his uncle met their neighbor. Everybody said hello. Nicky took his uncle across the street, where he had his new Nissan sports car parked. They got in, and Nicky was gleefully showing his uncle the inside.
    Nobody noticed the large old Cadillac that came slowly down the street. The driver parked in front of Nicky Guido’s, and then two men got out and here they came, one on the street side, the other on the sidewalk.
    Nicky Guido did exactly what everybody would expect him to do. He threw himself atop his uncle just as the men started shooting.
    In her kitchen across the street, Dottie Laux heard shots. She saw heads running by her window. She and her husband came out into the street.
    The Cadillac was gone. They hadn’t seen it. They saw the heads through the windshield of Nicky’s car. One was the uncle’s, who was trying to get out from under his dead nephew.
    Dottie Laux ran to the car. “I did not realize,” she said.
    Her husband said, “Go inside.”
    In the front seat, Nicky Guido, his new white jacket now red.
    He died the hero he wanted to be.
     
    That day Detective George Terra was in his car when he heard the news. He remembers it was still light when he stopped at the Seventy-sixth Precinct. He went up the stairs to the detectives’ office and announced, “That Guido. They shot the wrong guy.”
A: First it was all over the—it was all over the news, and then Frankie, Frankie Santora reached out for me, and I met him, and I said, You know, your guys killed the wrong Nicky Guido.
Q: And what did Santora say about that?
A: He said Gas should have paid the four thousand dollars and got the right information on Nicky Guido. Gas got it off of somebody who worked in the gas company, and he got the wrong guy.
Q: Did you ever have a conversation with Mr. Eppolito about the good Nicky Guido being killed?
A: He told me the same thing that Frankie Santora did.
Q: Which was what?
A: Gas should have paid the money, and he would have got the right guy.
    Today you knock on the door of the good Nicky Guido’s aunt and she says, “What do you want?” She is on a hospital bed in the living room of her house at 514 Seventeenth Street.
    “I wanted to ask you about your nephew.”
    “What for? They keep bringing it up to torture my sister.”
    Her sister, Nicky Guido’s mother, refuses to speak to anybody.
    The aunt’s son, Nicky Guido’s cousin, Carmine, comes out of a dim front room where he had been sleeping.
    Their neighbor Dottie Laux had told me that Carmine was a limousine driver. “Late customers?” I say. “Long hours, limousines.”
    “I don’t drive a limousine,” the cousin says. He is about forty, short and stocky with sparse hair.
    “Oh, I thought you were a driver,” I say.
    “I work nights, security for Bear Stearns,” he says. “What do you want here?”
    “To talk about your cousin.”
    “Can’t they leave us alone?” he says.
    “Yeah, leave us alone,” his aunt says over her shoulder.
    The cousin says, “The time Nicky got killed, they had me in the precinct nine hours. They wanted to know if he was in the Mafia. He was Italian, he got shot, he had a brand-new car. Why didn’t I tell the truth that he was a mobster? I was probably being asked by the two cops who killed him.”
    “What do you want?” the aunt says.
    “To talk.”
    “Get out of here and leave us alone. Where are you from?”
    “From you,” I say.

CHAPTER 10
    Eppolito, big, brazen, and brawling, and Caracappa, slender, stealthy, silent—each lived with a clear view of hell. People are said to be born with good thriving somewhere within, but these two cops overwhelmed any decency with venom and a frenzied grasping of money for murder, never enough money, always wanting more.
Q: You talked about Santora getting