They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “That’s not what he means,” I interrupted. “Were you arrested on your way back from skiing?”

  “I was.”

  “And if I guess where it was you went skiing, will you promise to have a little hope?”

  “You ever been chained to a chair, Mr. Klein? It’s hard to have hope when you’re chained to a chair.”

  “Point well taken.” I paused. “Cyclone Ridge.”

  She didn’t react at all the way I had expected. “So what?” she said. “You could’ve found that out fifty different ways. You could have read it in the paper.”

  “The point is that he didn’t,” MacClough jumped to my defense.

  “Don’t you think my lawyer sent an investigator up there? They didn’t find anything. What do you think you’ll find almost a year after the fact?”

  “Show her the paper,” John gestured to me.

  I unfurled a copy of the Riversborough Gazette article about Steven Markum’s death. “Recognize him?”

  Her eyes got wide. “He was . . .” She choked up. “He was the valet.”

  “I think,” MacClough said, “we just found out how that Isotope got into your car.”

  “But he’s dead,” Valencia Jones was quick to note. “What good does that do me?”

  “Maybe none,” John confessed. “But if I were you, I might find a way to get conveniently sick for a few days. I also think I can foresee your lawyer getting the urge to file every motion she can think of. I’d say it was in your best interest to stretch things out, if you catch my drift.”

  We spent the remainder of our time with Valencia Jones talking directly about Zak’s disappearance. She was as clueless on the subject as everyone else. She did, however, recommend that we look up some cyberfreak friend of Zak’s called Guppy. She didn’t know his real name or address, but that his hacking exploits were the stuff of campus legend. Just for the hell of it, I wondered if Zak had ever mentioned a girl named Kira Wantanabe? Valencia Jones said the name was unfamiliar to her, but that she didn’t know all of Zak’s friends.

  There was a thunderous knock on the steel door. It swung open. The prison matron leaned into the room and shouted: “Time!”

  We did a quick round of farewells. Just before I was at the door, Valencia Jones called to me. I turned.

  “Even if this doesn’t work out for me,” she said, “I hope you find Zak.”

  “Thanks.”

  And as I watched the guard unshackle Valencia Jones’ leg, I thought I saw something that looked like hope in the corners of her eyes.

  Paper Apologies

  We didn’t speak much on the ride back to Riversborough. MacClough was busy absorbing information and planning our next moves. My mind was just as busy, but my thoughts were far more scattered. I was furious with Jeffrey for not telling us about Zak’s connection to Valencia Jones. At the same time, I had a gut feeling that John and I were on the verge of stumbling onto something very big. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see how any of this was getting us closer to finding Zak. Traces of Zak were all around the periphery, but it was Valencia Jones at the center of this part of the universe.

  It was past dusk when MacClough pulled into the rest stop where I had left my rental. As I was getting out of the car, John grabbed my arm.

  “You can see now that you had nothing to do with Markum’s death, can’t you?”

  “I guess,” I said, “but I still feel like shit.”

  “Come on, Klein, think! This is bigger than Steven Markum. I can’t tell you for sure, but I would bet Valencia Jones wasn’t the only person whose car got packed with a little extra baggage. With the trial coming up, Markum’s old employers probably didn’t want to risk him opening his mouth. He was going down whether you got chucked in that holding cell with him or not. So stop beating yourself up over it.”

  “Is that what you’re doing with the Boatswain case,” I wondered, “beating yourself up over it?”

  “Yeah.” MacClough shook his head, “I saw that fax in your room. But believe me, even your big macher friend Feld doesn’t understand. So don’t you try to. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He ignored me. “Get some sleep. I think we need some skiing lessons.”

  The door wasn’t fully closed, but he pulled away just the same. The sleeve buttons of the peacoat caught on the door edge, shredding the coat arm as it went.

  I picked up some fast food and went back to the Old Watermill. I was so preoccupied that I nearly didn’t notice who was behind the desk. My old pal was on duty.

  “How was ice fishing?” I teased.

  “Huh?” he puzzled.

  “Never mind. Can I have a word with you?” The way I said it, it didn’t sound like a question. I stepped into the vacant guest lounge. He followed, but without much bounce in his step. “Okay. Now you want to explain your rudeness to me the other morning? Or do you always treat people like shit who give you big tips?”

  “It wasn’t you,” he raised his hand as if to swear an oath. “It was . . . um . . . It was . . . you know.”

  “The girl I was with?”

  “You said it. But anyway, yes. We don’t usually let her kind in here.”

  I was so stunned by his admission that it took me a few seconds to lift him into the air by his neck. He was even more stunned and his face turned several shades of red. I told him he’d have a career as a color chart for flesh-tone paints, if I let him live.

  “You don’t understand,” he managed to choke out. “She’s a—”

  I squeezed a little harder. “She’s a what, asshole? Come on, cat got your tongue?”

  When his eyes began rolling up in his head, I relaxed my grip and let him down. He gasped, grabbing at his throat. He coughed up phlegm and fell to his knees.

  “Listen, you racist motherfucker,” I began, “I’ll cut your heart—”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said, his voice stronger now. “She’s a pro. This is a respectable place. It’s against house rules to let working girls up to the rooms. I could have lost my job.”

  And somewhere, deep in my belly, I knew he was telling the truth. I helped him to his feet. The, “How do you know that for sure?” came out of my mouth reflexively.

  “There’s this place over the border. A, um. . . Anyway, there’s a place over there where they throw these way cool bachelor parties. Theme parties, you know? The bachelor chooses the theme and for like a C-note and a half a guy, they send you around the world.”

  “Okay, I’m sold, but get to the point. What about the girl?”

  “My friend’s party was there. His theme was to get stranded with a native girl. She was—”

  “—the native girl,” I finished. “You’re sure?”

  “Trust me, Mr. Klein, I wouldn’t forget her. She—”

  “Spare me the details.”

  I pulled five hundred dollars of Jeffrey’s money out of my wallet. I put the bills in the clerk’s palm and told him it was just my way of saying sorry for nearly killing him. He said he preferred paper apologies and that anytime I wanted to work off a little tension at five hundred bucks per minute, to just ring him at the desk. I informed him that the money came with a catch. He had to keep quiet about the girl and he had to let her keep coming up to my room. He didn’t like that so much. I could see him begin to waver. And when he moved his hand to return the five bills, I grabbed his wrist.

  “Give me a few days. There’s another five hundred in it for you and we can leave out the rough stuff this time. Just look the other way when the girl comes in and goes out. Half a grand to look the other way is pretty easy money. Deal?” I let go of his wrist.

  He hesitated. Then shoved the money in his pocket. “Deal.”

  I was curious. “Anybody else who works here know about her?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good. Keep it that way.”

  I let him walk back to his station at the front desk. After taking a minute to co
nsult the local Yellow Pages, I headed back into the night. Before I got out the door, I literally ran into MacClough. Judging by the bags he dropped at my feet, he too had decided on fast food for dinner.

  “Where you going?” he whispered, as I knelt down to pick up his food.

  “To take a test,” I whispered back. “Wish me luck.”

  Clearly confused, John stood stony-faced as I played the part of the clumsy stranger. I apologized profusely for knocking into him. I think the desk clerk was watching to see how much money I would slip MacClough. John reluctantly let me go with a warning to be a little more careful in the future. At the time, John had no way of knowing just how ironic that bit of advice was.

  Peekaboo

  I knew one of them would be waiting for me when I got back. I was glad it wasn’t Kira, if that was her name. I don’t know how I would have handled that. Ripping her heart out seemed fair. I could hear the interrogation now.

  “Why’d ya do it, Klein?”

  “I was looking for a hooker with a heart of gold.”

  I wanted to tear my own hair out, I had been so stupid. Why hadn’t I listened to my own suspicions? I cursed my own vanity, my insecurities. And for some reason, at that moment, I found myself missing my father. It was an unfamiliar feeling. During his life, he had not been the type of man to be missed. His anger, his bitterness had seen to that. Who would miss me, I wondered? Who would miss me?

  The TV was on and MacClough was passed out on my bed when I came in. He looked tense these days, even in sleep. I noticed he was dreaming. His fingers and legs jerked. His eyeballs rolled frantically beneath his lids. He kept mumbling something that sounded like I’m sorry. He wasn’t the only one. It was a night for being sorry. Some nights you fry fish. Some nights you’re sorry.

  He was up when I got out of the shower and busy worrying a bald spot in the carpet. He wanted to know what that mumbo jumbo was that I had whispered about taking a test. I detailed my conversation with the desk clerk. MacClough didn’t bother calling Kira names. He had been a cop too long to get indignant about prostitution. To him, it was a business not too unlike most others. There were users and people who got used. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart.

  “How long before you get the results?”

  “You know,” I laughed, “I didn’t ask. Having the test done was stupid, anyway. It’ss take weeks for me to develop HIV antibodies if I’m infected. I guess I just panicked.”

  “Yeah, I never thought I’d ever look back at worrying about the clap as the good old days, but Christ almighty, it’s a nightmare out there now.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

  “Thanks, John, but—”

  “Hear me out, schmuck. If she’s a high-ticket girl, her employers have a vested interest in keeping her healthy. She’s a valuable commodity. She probably gets tested all the time. Besides, whoever put her close to you wants you outta town as soon as possible and wants you to stay out. Why risk getting you sick and coming back here dredging up all kinds of shit? It’s stupid and from what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think we’re dealing with idiots. Crime works best when nobody notices it. Sound reasonable to you?”

  “Sounds like a rationalization,” I winked, “but thanks.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe it is.” He hesitated a bit before speaking again. “You know you’ve got to let her keep coming here. If she finds out her cover is blown, we’re fucked. Her employers will close down shop and we won’t find jack shit.”

  “I know, John.”

  “I’m just worried about you, Klein.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I’ve been pretty worried about you lately. When I came in here, you were having a bad dream. You were twitching like mad and mumbling, ‘I’m sorry.’ What’s wrong? Does this have anything to do with the Boatswain-Hernandez thing?”

  “You’re right, I was having a bad dream.” His whole face smiled but for his eyes. “I dreamed I was asking a Jewish girl to marry me and she thought the five carat ring I bought her wasn’t big enough. You bet I was saying I was sorry.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, you antiSemite.”

  “I’m not antiSemitic,” he protested, “I only hate you. Now get some sleep. The slopes await us.” He closed the door behind him.

  I dialed both Larry Feld’s office and home numbers and got two machines. I hung up twice without leaving messages. After the second hang up, I dutifully went through the motions of going to sleep. I spent the rest of the time till sunup playing peekaboo with every bad decision I had ever made.

  Coney Island Burning

  Larry Feld was unhappy. That was par for the course. His parents had set a good example. Today he was unhappy about answering phone calls at sunrise. He was unhappy I had waited so long to get back to him after his fax. But what made him most unhappy—and this, of course, went unsaid—was the prospect that I no longer needed him or his dirty little stories.

  I was usually amenable to playing the game his way: answering his questions, letting him gloat when I got things wrong. I wasn’t in the mood today. I didn’t know that I’d ever be in the mood again. I was scared for Zak. I was scared for myself, too scared to play straight man to Larry Feld’s wounded ego or to stroke the lost little boy that would live inside him forever. I had done enough of that when we were kids. And when he began interrogating me about his fax, I told him to forget it. He was either going to tell me about Boatswain-Hernandez or he wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to play.

  “No, Dylan, it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Larry!”

  “Sorry,” he said without feeling. “But let me ask you something. Do you remember what your brother did straight out of law school?”

  “He was an assistant district attorney in the Bronx. So what?”

  Feld didn’t answer that. He just said, “Go read your first book and put two and two together. Even you can get to four.”

  “I’m not in the mood for this, Larry.”

  “The next time you ask a question, make sure you’re ready to hear the answer.”

  He hung up before I could say another word. I tried in vain to muster some enthusiasm for going to Cyclone Ridge with MacClough. Giving up, I rang John’s room and begged out. He said he understood and that I would probably have just gotten in his way. He was right. In the shape I was in, I was of no use to anyone, particularly myself. I closed my eyes and, more out of the need for escape than exhaustion, I fell deeply into dreamless sleep.

  I got up around noon and noticed the message light on my phone was flashing red. I buzzed the desk. Kira had stopped by to say she would see me tonight around 8:00. I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel right. She had always played the guessing game with me; would she show up or wouldn’t she? Why, I wondered, the change in tactics. Maybe she wanted to show me how much I was missed. Maybe she got paid extra for that.

  Without trying to lose my entourage, I took a walk about campus and asked around for Guppy. Like Valencia Jones, everyone seemed to know about Guppy’s reputation. No one seemed to know him or how to get in touch with him. Guppy was the kind of guy who gets in touch with you. One kid told me that he had heard that Guppy lived in the tunnels beneath campus. I asked the kid if he had taken his meds today.

  Having struck out on my hunt for the great Guppy, I went over to the Riversborough public library and sat down with a copy of my first book, Coney Island Burning. Ich! It was really hard reading my own work, especially the early stuff. So I read the liner notes and hoped I would get whatever it was Larry Feld had hinted at. They went like this:

  While looking into the suspicious death of an old basketball buddy, insurance investigator Wyatt Rosen finds himself trapped in a racial firestorm. With New York City’s African-American community ready to explode, Rosen, along with his best friend—ex-NYPD detective Timmy O’Shea—race against the clock to prove his old friend’s murder was a crime of pas
sion, not police brutality.

  In their quest, Rosen and O’Shea are forced to enlist an unlikely cast of characters including a radical black preacher, a Hasidic rabbi and a reformed underworld hitman. Rosen and O’Shea spend as much of their time juggling the diverse agendas and personalities of their team as they do fighting against the political and social forces aligned against them.

  Rosen and O’Shea lock horns with Janson Whitehurst, an ambitious assistant district attorney who will stop at nothing to further his career, and his band of loyal toadies. There is nonstop action as O’Shea goes undercover to weed out the bad cop whose greed and carelessness opened this Pandora’s box of ill-gotten gains, backroom deals and murder.

  Along the way, Rosen runs into his first love and desperately seeks to rekindle the romance he had turned his back on years ago. Come for the ride as O’Shea confronts the man he is convinced is responsible for the death of his former partner, Jack Spinner, but who may also hold the fate of the city in his grasp.

  At its core, Coney Island Burning is a hard-boiled novel with a 90s edge . . .

  I didn’t get it, not right away. I braced myself and began turning past the title page, past the copyright, past the dedication and acknowledgments to the first chapter. Then, I’m not certain I know what made me do it, but I turned back to the dedication and acknowledgments. And there were their names, separated by only a few lines:

  “For my brothers, Jeffrey and Josh, who showed me that heroes can have clay feet and still stand tall.

  I would like to thank my friend and technical advisor, John MacClough, for his inspiration and support.”

  I tried remembering the date of the Boatswain kidnap ping. March of ’72, I seemed to recall. That would put my assistant district attorney brother and uniformed police officer John MacClough in the Bronx at the same time. They had never actually denied knowing each other. I had always just assumed they did not and they let me assume. I wanted to believe I was simply jumping to conclusions, that they had never met before I introduced them, but I knew it wasn’t so. Larry Feld was a lot of things, but inaccurate wasn’t one of them. There had to be a connection.