Maria's Girls (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  Isaac wasn’t happy to see him.

  “Caroll, you broke our cover.”

  “Sorry, chief, but I didn’t want to stand under the Williamsburg Bridge. Rosen tried to kill himself. I thought you might be interested.”

  “It could have waited,” Isaac said, with that mad streak in his eye.

  “Rosen might not agree. Besides, we’re fucked. Montalbán made me.”

  “So what?”

  “Isaac, he knows who I am. He berated me in front of his school board. They were all there … at the hospital.”

  “I’ll bet. Like a bloody soccer team.”

  “Can’t you consider for one second that they might have been concerned for Rosen?”

  “Hearts and flowers,” Sidel said.

  “Yeah, hearts and flowers. But I like little Rosen. And I can’t be your submarine if Montalbán has my badge number. So send me back to Sherwood Forest, will you please?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you pluck me out of the dark? I was doing time in the Bronx. Why’d you pick me up?”

  “It’s your name,” Isaac said. “I saw it on the promotions list. ‘Caroll.’ That was Whitey Lockman’s real name.”

  “Who’s Whitey Lockman?”

  “Christ,” Sidel said. “He was the sweetest first baseman the New York Giants ever had.”

  “Isaac, I was in kindergarten when the Giants left New York. I never saw them play. And I don’t even like baseball.”

  “That’s barbaric,” Isaac said.

  “But you picked me out of a fucking file because my name is Caroll and I reminded you of some schmuck in the grandpa league?”

  “Don’t say that about Whitey Lockman. I might get mad.”

  “And will you slap me around? How can I get on your shit list … or do I have to resign?”

  “You wouldn’t resign,” Isaac said, a little wounded. “You’re a cop.”

  “I’m not a cop,” Caroll said. “I’m a submariner. I spy for you. I save pianos. I threaten little men who try to hang themselves.”

  “Should I grieve for Rosen? All right, I’ll grieve. But he’s still Maria Montalbán’s private bookkeeper. He still traded drugs. He kept Montalbán’s rotten accounts.”

  “And I cultivated Rosen for you. I groomed him like any pigeon. But it’s too late. I can’t go to board meetings. Maria Montalbán will notify every district in town. He’ll prepare a rap sheet on me. He’ll put my face on the wall.”

  “Let him,” Isaac said. “You’ll grow a mustache. You’ll dye your hair … I can’t train another submariner. It’s too risky.”

  “But you’re ready to risk my ass. Just because my name is Caroll.”

  “That’s how I found you. In the file. But it’s different now. It has nothing to do with names.”

  “You’re not naked, Isaac. You could always rely on your secret service, your fucking Ivanhoes.”

  “They’re disbanded. The Justice Department made me close my shop.”

  “So I have to walk point for you. I have to take spears in the chest … like Manfred Coen.”

  Blue marks appeared on Isaac’s head. “Coen has nothing to do with this caper. He got careless. He was playing ping-pong … without his gun.”

  But the PC had to sit. It was his famous worm. He’d gone underground in the Bronx, turned in his badge to sit in a candy store with the Guzmanns, a gang of Peruvian pimps. The Guzmanns had given Isaac his worm. They’d been friends with Manfred Coen. And Isaac had turned Coen against them. That’s how Coen got killed.

  “All right,” Caroll said. “I’ll walk point.”

  The color had gone out of Sidel. He was a rootless, middle-aged child, the orphan of orphans whose dad was alive. Joel Sidel had left his family to become a portrait painter in Paris.

  Isaac’s lips moved. “I don’t need fucking favors.”

  “I’ll track Montalbán. But I want to know one thing. Did you get near Fabiano Rice? Did you make him release me from my vig?”

  “You told me not to step on Fabiano’s feet,” Isaac said, suddenly interested in Caroll.

  “You could have gone to Jerry DiAngelis. Or his father-in-law, the melamed.”

  “The melamed had a stroke. And Jerry has no clout with Fabiano. The shylock is sworn to Sal Rubino.”

  “Sal’s dead.”

  “Means nothing. Fabiano is still Sal’s man. Everybody thinks I murdered Sal.”

  Caroll couldn’t keep quiet. “Didn’t you, Isaac?”

  “Sure. I went down to New Orleans with a Mossberg Persuader and shot Sal’s head off. Are you satisfied? I’m the PC. I dance wherever I like.”

  He made an appointment with Stewart Hines at Hines & Neuberger of Nassau Street. Hines was reluctant to see him. But Caroll pushed. And so the junk-bond king squeezed him in between two other appointments, perhaps because of the Cassidy connection. Caroll couldn’t say. But everybody at the brokerage house pampered him. People figured he was one more billionaire walking loose at Hines & Neuberger. He didn’t look like a detective.

  Hines’ office had no view of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was locked within a world of towers. Hines must have liked that claustrophobic grid of stone upon stone. There was a constant shadow behind his desk.

  “I need to know your source,” Caroll said.

  “Always the policeman, aren’t you, Caroll?”

  “Papa Cassidy wouldn’t go to a shylock. It’s someone else. Who’s my admirer? Who’s my friend?”

  “Admirer?” said the junk-bond king. “You married a billionairess. That’s all the admiration you need.”

  “Hines, don’t fuck with me. Fabiano isn’t important enough. When you took that blue ticket from him, you were doing someone else a favor.”

  “That’s not illegal, you know. And I’d think twice before you start threatening me. Borrowing from a shylock might not look so good on your dossier.”

  “But I’ve got magic. Isaac Sidel.”

  “That man’s been in jail.”

  “He was acquitted, Mr. Hines, or doesn’t that mean something?”

  “I could still go to Internal Affairs.”

  “Papa Cassidy supports the Police Athletic League. He has lawyers who’ve never lost a case. And I have wings. So start talking.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “You were carrying for a shylock. Why?”

  “Please get out of my office,” said the junk-bond king.

  “Make me,” Caroll said. “Call the janitor. Tell him I’m a vagrant, or whatever you like. I’m not moving, Mr. Hines, until you reveal who your source is.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “That’s not nice. I’ll ask Diana to poison her next pie.”

  “You’re the one who’s eating poisoned pies. Dee’s not in love with you. You’re her pet monkey, the cop she married.”

  And Caroll saw blood. He couldn’t concentrate on a disappearing vig. Or School Board One B. Or Carlos Maria Montalbán. Or Isaac Sidel, the Pink Commish, who was in love with Joseph Stalin. He saw blood. He traveled around Hines’ desk and began to throttle the junk-bond king.

  “Have you been sleeping with my wife?”

  Spittle appeared on Hines’ mouth. His tongue waggled like a crazy fish. His eyes grew sleepy. Caroll let him go. He could have killed the junk-bond king. Anything about Diana seemed to conjure up an amazing jealousy. He left the brokerage house.

  He stood on Nassau Street. He could see the Stock Exchange at the bottom of the hill. He remembered all the lions’ heads near the roof and the stone figures in the front wall, toiling in some strange manner, men with their testicles sticking out. He’d visited the Exchange when he was a boy, arriving with his junior-high-school class from the Rockaways. His teacher, Mr. Frost, had crumpled pants. Frost was an old-time anarchist. He called the Exchange “God’s house of gold.” Caroll went up to the visitors’ gallery with his class. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the trading pit. He’d never seen so much activity in one enormous room. It was
more compressed than the beach at Coney Island. Frost ranted, but Caroll didn’t care. He loved the mad motion and music coming from that cave.

  They went to the Woolworth Building. Caroll adored the blue-green glass in the barreled ceiling of the lobby. Frost babbled about robber barons and pirates. But Caroll couldn’t complain about a pirate who provided so much glass.

  They went to the old Police Headquarters on Centre Street. It had its own lions and glass chandeliers. Frost muttered about the hostages who were held in the basement, the beatings that had occurred in the halls. But Caroll only saw the cops who took his classmates around. A young deputy inspector was kind to him. All the kids called him “chief.” The deputy inspector had sideburns and a balding head. It was Sidel, who was taking time off from undercover work to brief some schoolchildren. Sidel was a sucker for kids. That’s how Caroll had met the Pink Commish.

  But Sidel stopped giving tours. He had his own team at the Police Athletic League. He was married to the worm in his gut. He made Caroll pick on little Rosen. And Rosen was lying in a cubby at Beekman Downtown, an assistant principal who moonlighted for Maria Montalbán.

  Caroll went to his diner on Clinton Street. He had three cups of coffee that tasted like sweet tar. Caroll had no worm to feed. The counterman winked at Caroll and pointed to the telephone. “Kiddo, it’s for you.”

  No one had ever called him at the diner. Caroll picked up the phone.

  “Who is it?” he asked, like a kid from junior high who’d never finished that tour.

  “An admirer.”

  Caroll felt like a bride. “When can we meet?”

  “Right now.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Sit. Drink another cup of coffee. I’ll be there, Caroll. Good-bye.”

  5

  The bride drank more coffee. He watched the counterman’s clock. He waited an hour. His “date” didn’t show. He wondered if Maria Montalbán were setting him up. He didn’t trust school superintendents with gold stars in their ears.

  “Fuck you, Mr. Benefactor, whoever you are.”

  He paid the counterman and stepped outside. A white stretch limo was waiting for him. It looked like a long sculpted beetle with antennas and wheels. Caroll didn’t knock. He climbed into the back seat. There was a whole world of glass between him and the driver. There was a monstrous TV, a sink, and a sofa. Caroll was alone. He could have been inside the belly of a whale.

  The driver headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Caroll could see all the wires from his window. He had a curious kind of weightlessness. He was a hillbilly from the Rockaway peninsula. And the bridge seemed to mark a freedom for Caroll, a passage outside Manhattan’s stone walls. He could have called his wife on the car’s cellular phone, but he’d have talked to Diana’s social secretary. Dee was seldom at home.

  So he sat inside the white whale. He had several glasses of Scotch and soda. He listened to Mozart, and his policeman’s life began to bleed off him. He dialed Beekman Downtown Hospital, and after screaming at a few nurses he got little Rosen on the line. Caroll was very drunk. For some reason he started to cry.

  “I’ll protect you, Rosen. You don’t have to be a fucking rat fink bastard. I don’t want you planning any more suicide parties, you hear?”

  Little Rosen was also crying. “You shouldn’t have saved me,” he said.

  “Come on, you’ll be all right.”

  “I betrayed my own charges, Mr. Brent. I lied to children. You shouldn’t have saved me.”

  “It’s Montalbán. He fucked your head. He’s an evil magician.”

  “No. You could never understand our budgeting. It’s medieval. He stole to keep us alive.”

  “I’ll break his balls,” Caroll said. “He took advantage of you. He pressured you to sell his drugs.”

  “There was no pressure.”

  Suddenly a nurse got back on the line. “Who is this?”

  “Detective Caroll Brent … of Sherwood Forest. I mean, Central Park.”

  “I know what you mean,” the nurse said. And she hung up on Caroll.

  He drank another Scotch and soda. He looked outside the window. “I can’t believe it,” he said. The white whale had taken him back to the Rockaways. He was in his home country. Beach 101st Street, where he’d looked across the channel as a kid, across the marshes, and seen the lights of Manhattan like a spectacular electric bell.

  “I can’t fucking believe it.”

  They drove across the Atlantic Beach Bridge, into Nassau County, where his dad had liked to fish. Caroll should have been born in a whalers’ town. Then he might have struggled with his forebears. A Brent among Brents. Not a cop with a gold shield, a refugee from Sherwood Forest, assigned as a submarine to Isaac Sidel. But he wouldn’t have met Diana in some fisherman’s bog.

  They got to Long Beach, among all the retirement hotels, kosher and nonkosher homes for the rich and the poor, Medicaid factories and mills. It saddened Caroll to think of these endless colonies.

  The limo stopped on West Broadway, in the heart of some retirement lane. Caroll got out, and it felt as if the car had disgorged him, vomited him out onto a little sea of grass. Caroll was in front of the Oceancrest Manor, a dump that was decorated with porches. One more Medicaid mill. He climbed the front porch, said “Hello?”

  No one answered him, and Caroll figured the driver had parked near the wrong house. The Oceancrest Manor seemed deserted enough. The walls hadn’t been painted in years. The windows were chipped. The porches were treacherous. They sagged and sank in the middle. And Caroll had to laugh. He wondered if the Oceancrest were a whaling boat that had been bumped onto land and forgotten in some fisherman’s dream. He was about to retreat when the front door opened.

  Caroll ducked inside. The Oceancrest was dark and dusty. Two men with shoulder holsters greeted him. They didn’t have the stink of cops. They were simple soldiers of some mob that had decided to take a sea cure. They weren’t native to Nassau County. Caroll could tell. They didn’t ask him about the Smith & Wesson he was carrying. They didn’t search Caroll. They excused themselves and wheeled a man into the front room. The man wore a blanket. He had enormous pits in his face. His scalp was practically gone. His head looked like a blue ball. But he wasn’t that much older than Caroll. He must have survived some terrible firestorm. Caroll had pity for him, whoever he was. Only one of his eyes worked. The other seemed to wander off into phantom space.

  He held out his hand. It was as pocked as the rest of him. Caroll shook the hand. He liked this curious invalid.

  “I’m sorry if I caused you trouble with that blue ticket. But it was my way of introducing myself … from a distance. I’m Sal Rubino.”

  Rubino’s dead, Rubino’s dead, Caroll muttered. “You didn’t die in New Orleans, did you?”

  “But your sweet boss left me for dead … him and Jerry DiAngelis. They killed my cousins, the Leonardo brothers.”

  “Pimps from Royal Street.”

  “Ah, you know the Quarter,” Sal said.

  “A little. I’ve been there. To a couple of charity balls.”

  “With the wife?”

  “Yes,” Caroll said. “She loves Mardi Gras. She went to school in New Orleans. Sophie Newcomb College.”

  “Never heard of the place.”

  “It’s part of Tulane,” Caroll said. I have to talk. I have to talk. Or the son of a bitch will shoot my eyes out.

  “Tulane, yes. They have their own fucking float during Mardi Gras.”

  “My wife endowed a couple of chairs at Tulane.”

  “Chairs?” Sal Rubino said, while his soldiers stared at Caroll as if he were a moon-crazed child.

  “Yes. Academic chairs.”

  “You mean fucking professorships.”

  “Exactly. One in the sciences and one in the liberal arts. And her dad is helping them to build a high-powered telescope.”

  “Patrons, your wife’s people. Like the Medicis.”

  “Sal, what’s a Med-itch-ee?”
the shorter soldier asked.

  “Shaddap,” Sal said.

  “Yeah, like the Medicis,” Caroll said. “But they’re not Italian.”

  “Been to Rome?”

  “Yes. At the last Jubilee.”

  “The wife’s religious, eh? A good Catholic girl. Well, the Leonardos weren’t pimps. They were good boys.”

  “If you say so,” Caroll said.

  “Don’t mock me. I’m a fucking zombie with a brain stem. I can’t walk. I can barely shit. Sometimes I have half an erection. My joint looks like it’s covered with chicken pox.”

  The soldiers started to laugh.

  “Shaddap,” Sal said. “And take a walk, will ya, Angelo? With the kid.”

  “And leave you alone with him?” the shorter soldier said.

  “He can’t hurt me where I aint been hurt. He’s a good boy.”

  “I don’t like him,” Angelo said.

  “You don’t get paid to like. Now get the fuck out of here before I lose my temper. I’m worse than a snake. My spit has enough acid in it to bite through your head.”

  “But who’s going to wheel ya?” the tall soldier asked.

  “He’ll wheel me. Isaac’s boy. Now blow.”

  And the soldiers withdrew deeper into the house.

  “You can’t hire talent these days,” Sal Rubino said. “They’re either stupid or greedy. Or both. And if you slap them, they rat on you and run into the witness-protection program. It’s a hard time for employers.”

  And Caroll almost smiled. He still liked Sal. “If they’re your soldiers, give them some kind of sergeant’s test.”

  “They’d never pass, no matter who the fuck administered it. They’re mental dwarfs. Wheel me into the light, will ya?”

  Caroll took the grips of the wheelchair and placed Sal near the window.

  “The Leonardos died for nothing. Did you know that? They were in love with Isaac’s girlfriend, Margaret Tolstoy. Ever meet the lady?”