I might have been at Cunningham's. Not in one of the private dining rooms with the old man and his thirty new brothers, but standing at the bar or seated in the main dining room, or at a table in the smaller grill room that Vince Mahaffey liked. I'd have been twenty-two, with less than two weeks until my twenty-third birthday. Six months had passed since I cast my first vote. (They hadn't yet lowered the voting age to eighteen.) I voted for Kennedy. So, apparently, did a great many tombstones and empty lots in Cook County, Illinois, and he won by a nose.

I was still single, although I had already met the girl I would soon marry, and eventually divorce. I wasn't long out of thePoliceAcademy, and they'd assigned me to aBrooklyn precinct and teamed me up with Mahaffey, figuring I'd learn something from him. He taught me plenty, some of it stuff they didn't much want me to know.

Cunningham's was Mahaffey's kind of place, with a lot of dark hand-rubbed wood and red leather and polished brass, tobacco smoke hanging in the air and hard booze in most of the glasses. There was a decent variety of beef and seafood dishes on the menu, but I think I must have had the same meal every time I went there- a shrimp cocktail, a thick sirloin, a baked potato with sour cream. Pie for dessert, pecan or apple, and a cup of coffee strong enough to skate on. And booze, of course. A martini to start, ice-cold and bone-dry and straight up with a twist, and a brandy after to settle the stomach. And then a little whiskey to clear the head.

Mahaffey taught me how to eat well on a patrolman's salary. "When a dollar bill floats down from the skies and happens to land in your outstretched hand," he said, "close your fingers around it, and praise the Lord." A fair amount of dollars rained down on us, and we had a lot of good meals together. More of them would have been at Cunningham's but for its location. It was inChelsea, at the corner ofSeventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and we were across the river inBrooklyn, just five minutes away from Peter Luger's. You could have the same meal there, in pretty much the same atmosphere.