They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  In my head, I ran through the parts of the plot of Coney Island Burning I could remember. Other than the obvious and superficial resemblance between my brother and the A.D.A. in my book, I was at a— That’s when it hit me; MacClough had suggested the character of Janson Whitehurst, the corrupt A.D.A. He wasn’t my invention. I tried recalling the other sections of the book John had suggested. Feverishly, I thumbed through the pages to the section where a dirty cop tortures information out of and then kills a drug dealer:

  “. . . hit him again and again in the kidneys with a tightly rolled newspaper. Gonzales stubbornly refused to give in, furiously shaking his head no.

  “Tough spic, huh? Big cojones. Okay, macho man,” Murphy said, patting his prisoner affectionately on the cheek. “We’ll see about that.”

  Murphy reached not for his service revolver, but pulled up his pant leg to reveal a short-barrel .38. Smiling broadly, he unholstered the gun from his ankle, pulled back the hammer and put the barrel to Gonzales’s temple. Murphy loosened the gag in the dealer’s mouth and let it fall to the floor. Gonzales gasped for air.

  “Agua,” he coughed, “water.”

  “Here’s something to put in your mouth.” Murphy snapped Gonzales’ head back by yanking on his thick, black ponytail and moved the gun barrel from his prisoner’s temple into his mouth. He began to count: “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.

  “Okay, okay,” Gonzales relented, sweat pouring down his face.

  Murphy pulled the barrel back slightly so Gonzales could speak more clearly. “Go ahead, spic.”

  “The money is in employee locker 12 in Nathans’ back room.”

  “You bullshitting me, pendejo?”

  “I’m in no position to bullshit you.”

  Murphy smiled again. “I guess you’re right.”

  As Gonzales began to smile with relief, Murphy shoved the .38 back into the dealer’s mouth and calmly blew his brains out the rear of his skull. Murphy wiped the gun clean, untied the dead man’s hands and wrapped the fingers of Gonzales’ right hand around the handle of the little .38.

  Using an untraceable second gun to make an unrighteous kill or just plain murder look like suicide was a time-honored trick. You wouldn’t find the second gun trick in any manual or textbook, but it was one of those things old school cops learned before they ever set foot out of the academy.

  Murphy continued the setup, wiping the whole house clean of his prints and making sure he took the rope, the gag and the newspaper with him. He really wasn’t worried about getting prosecuted, not with his connection in the D.A.’s office. In a day or two, Murphy would drop a dime and make like an anonymous tipster. By that time, no one would connect him to Gonzales’ death.”

  I was nauseous. MacClough had nearly dictated that part of the book to me. It seemed so real to me then, I hardly played with it. Now I knew there was a good reason for that. I could feel myself getting dizzy.

  “You all right, sir?” A librarian shook me by the shoulder. “You don’t look well.”

  I didn’t answer. I stood up and stumbled up a half flight of stairs. When I looked back, I noticed the librarian studying my picture on the rear of the dust jacket. I smiled. It was a hollow smile.

  After wandering around snowy Riversborough, I found myself drinking coffee in the coffee house I’d gone to with Kira a few days before. It seemed like quite a long time ago to me now. I laughed at myself, but no one was there to hear it. The waiter was in the back and there were no bongos or bad poetry at this hour of the day. I read the graffiti carved into the table for entertainment.

  “Excuse me,” a melodic voice interrupted my reading, “but I was wondering if I might have a seat with you? I do not enjoy my afternoon tea alone and you look so much like a friend of mine.”

  “I do?” I said, looking up into the dark, sweet face of a man of undetermined years. His hair was shiny and black, as were his eyes. I thought he might be Indian or Pakistani, maybe an Arab. “Sure, have a seat. What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Oh,” he smiled and sat, “that is of no matter. He is lost to me and speaking his name will not bring him back.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “You too have lost someone?” he wondered.

  “I hope not. I’m still looking.”

  “That is as it should be. Keep searching. A man searching may find many things, unexpected things.”

  “Some unexpected things can kill a man.”

  “Maybe so,” my table mate agreed. “But they can enrich him as well.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.” I put my hand out. “Dylan Klein.”

  He shook my hand, his eyes checking his watch. “Oh dear, look at the time. I must excuse myself.”

  “Hey, what about your tea?” I called after him.

  “Tea, I never drink the stuff. Keep searching. Maybe you will find my friend as well. Good day to you.” He hurried out the door.

  Pretty bizarre, I thought, pretty fucking bizarre, but why should afternoon coffee be any different from the rest of my life? When the waiter came to refill my cup, I described my philosophical friend and asked if he knew the man.

  “Sounds like Rajiv Gupta,” the waiter said without hesitation. “He’s a clerk over at the campus bookstore. Nice guy.”

  “Guppy!” I said aloud, but to myself. “Everybody’s got clues but no answers.”

  A Children’s Book

  I walked some more, made a second stop at the library, and headed back to the inn with the moon rising over my shoulder. Hesitating outside the door, I blew a good-night kiss to my escorts in the blue minivan. I was almost getting used to having them around. Truth was, they had kept their distance today, not interfering with me as I strolled the Riversborough campus hunting for Guppy. Maybe they were waiting for me to slug a lady professor. I could see no one on the street fitting the descriptions MacClough had given me of the ski dude or the federal agent. Then again, they were trying not to be seen.

  “Dylan!” Kira rushed up to me, hugging me. “God, I’ve missed you.”

  And for a second, I lit up. My heart raced. My cheeks warmed. I could feel the smile on my face. In spite of everything I knew about her, it was undeniable that part of me missed her as well. Not all of me though. I felt my smile harden, the blood rushing out of my face.

  “Is everything all right?” she wondered, trying to look through me. “You don’t seem yourself.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not all right.”

  Jesus, she was good. Her voice quivered: “Is it Zak?”

  “No, it’s not Zak. I just found out today that a friend I thought I knew, I didn’t really know at all.”

  And the moment I spoke the words, I wanted to take them back. But like my mom used to say, once the words leave your mouth, you’re no longer their master. It was the only truly wise thing she had ever said. I had been speaking of MacClough, of course, though Kira could have interpreted my words as meant for her. If she had taken it that way, her face didn’t betray her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said right on cue.

  Trying to assure her that my words were not a warning, I pulled her by the hand into the ever-vacant guest lounge. Making sure that we were alone, I kissed her deeply. While pulling her hair back with my left hand, I slipped my right into her coat, under her sweater, and began massaging her left nipple. It hardened and I wondered how she had learned to fake that. She clamped her legs around my tight thigh and began sliding her groin up and down the length of my upper leg. Finally, she clamped down hard and shook the both of us.

  And then, oddly, as if trying to convince me of her genuine attraction, she pulled my hand out of her sweater and pushed it onto the wet crotch of her blue jeans. She waited a few seconds before urging my fingers into her mouth. I no longer had any doubt why her employers had picked her to get close to me. The desk clerk said they paid the girls across the border a C-note and a half. I was willing to bet she came more dearly.

  “I misse
d you, too,” I confessed. “And I’d like more than anything to take you upstairs and let you wear me out, but . . . It’s gotta be tomorrow night. I’m sorry. There’s just some stuff I’ve got to work out by myself.”

  Not wanting to overplay her hand, she said, “I understand. I’m sorry that you’ve been hurt.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “I hope so.” She winked. “Be in your room tomorrow night and maybe I will come.”

  I walked her out to the lobby. My thousand dollar friend at the front desk was trying too hard to ignore us; whistling, checking and rechecking the empty mail slots. I wanted to smack him. As I leaned over to kiss Kira, I noticed John’s image reflected in the glass door. I could make out his rugged features perfectly: the twinkling blue eyes, the crooked smile, the square jaw. Over the past decade, I had come to know his face as well as my own. Somehow that face looked different to me tonight there in the glass, but it wasn’t MacClough who had changed. John MacClough had had nearly a quarter century to live with what he had done. I had lived with it for only a few hours.

  “You really are someplace else tonight, aren’t you?” There was that concern in her voice again.

  “Yes.” I pecked her on the cheek.

  She walked out the door. When it swung shut, MacClough’s reflection was gone. It was time to go speak with the man himself.

  He wasn’t in my room. I walked up to his. As I walked in, he handed me a cold bottle of my favorite ale. I took half the bottle in a gulp, but could not make my eyes meet his. He was easier to deal with as a reflection, when I could see him and see through him all at once.

  “How was skiing?”

  He said he hadn’t done much of it. He had done a lot of hanging out at the bar, walking the grounds, bullshitting with the help. That was John in his glory. If you spent ten minutes with him over a beer, you’d understand why he had been so good at getting confessions out of suspects. I suppose he saved the rolled-up newspaper for special cases.

  “Markum worked there, all right,” MacClough said. “Two years. He was a jack-of-all-trades. He worked on the lifts some, waited tables, but mostly parked cars. Wanna guess when he got fired?”

  My head was spinning. “No.”

  “The day after Valencia Jones was arrested. You think somebody was a little pissed at him for planting the Isotope on the wrong car?”

  “I guess,” I said. “But he’s been floating around loose for a year. Why kill him now?”

  “From what I found out about Markum, no one was gonna beat down his door with job offers. Maybe he figured with the trial coming up he could put the squeeze on his old bosses for a little hush money. Getting killed is a kinda tough way to learn that blackmail isn’t so easy as they make it on the tube.”

  “Anything else? Anything about Zak?”

  “Nothing about your nephew. Sorry. But there were a few buildings up there I’d like to get into to have a look-see.” He turned the tables: “And you, what’d you do? Did you get the test results?”

  I explained that I hadn’t, that I had other things on my mind.

  “Other things!” He was incredulous. “You’re waiting for the results of a fucking AIDS test, what else could you have on your mind?”

  “Don’t ask the question unless you’re prepared to hear the answer,” I paraphrased Larry Feld’s earlier admonition.

  He let that go without a word, pressing me about my day. Omitting my call to Feld and my two side trips to the public library, I laid it out for him. I told him about the coffee house and my visitation by the mythical Guppy. I related our conversation as close to verbatim as I could manage without a transcript. MacClough was keen to know what I thought it meant.

  “At first, at the coffee house, I didn’t think it meant anything,” I said. “Just another interested party weighing in with well wishes and vague hints of this or that. But as I went over it in my head, it seemed to me he was delivering some kind of coded message. I don’t know.”

  “You think he knows something?”

  “It was weird, John. It was as if he wanted me to know he was delivering a message, but not to realize it until after he had gone. And his demeanor was so calm, unworried, like he wanted to reassure me. But if he knows something, why didn’t he come right out and say it?”

  “Maybe,” MacClough suggested, “you didn’t meet Guppy at all.”

  “But I did.”

  “How do you know? Come on, Klein, use that yiddisha kop God gave you,” he said with a perfect accent, slapping my forehead. “How do you know what Guppy looks like? Interesting, isn’t it? You walk around campus all morning asking about Guppy, but no one knows who he is or where he lives or how to reach him. Then, bang! Three hours later, Guppy serves himself up to you on a silver platter. All you know is that you had a weird conversation with a guy named Rajiv Gupta and you can’t even be sure of that.”

  “Guppy the red herring. Great title for a children’s book, you think?”

  “If they could put the girl next to you, they could just as easily dig up a clown to talk some shit to you, confuse you, throw you off the scent.”

  “About the girl . . .” I was almost glad MacClough had broached the subject. “I don’t think I can play my part much longer. And tonight, when you saw us down in the lobby, I think she might have suspected something was different.”

  “I know it’s hard when you’re that angry at someone,” he empathized.

  I laughed at him for that. “It’s not the anger that makes it hard, John. It’s the lack of it.”

  “She’s that convincing, that good?”

  “She’s better. She’s opaque. When I kiss her, when I look into her eyes, I can’t believe she’s acting. God, I’ll be glad to be away from this place.”

  “Okay, one more performance.” MacClough rubbed my shoulder. “We’ll feed her a little misinformation to take back to her masters. Two can play these games.”

  “You would know, wouldn’t you, John? You and my brother Jeff.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  I did not want to believe the words that next came out of my mouth:

  “You killed Hernandez and Jeff helped you cover it up.”

  “No, Klein, that’s what you think you know.”

  “It’s what I know!”

  “Who told you so?” he sneered.

  “You did, John.”

  I reached under my coat and produced the copy of Coney Island Burning I had stolen from the public library on my way back to the Old Watermill. I handed the book to MacClough.

  It was his turn to laugh. “If it was that simple, I wouldn’t hate myself so much.”

  “Then explain it to me. Make me understand.”

  “You’ll understand soon enough,” he repeated the words he had said to me at the rest stop.

  Soon enough could not come soon enough for me.

  Ids

  He left a note for me. He had to get back downstate to take care of some personal business and to check on the Rusty Scupper. I did not pretend to myself that I wasn’t relieved. He wrote that he had stayed up all night doing the reading I had suggested. He had nothing to say on the subject of my brother or of their mutual involvement with Boatswain-Hernandez. Parroting my review in Publishers Weekly, however, MacClough commented that he found Coney Island Burning a captivating character study featuring crisp, staccato dialogue, but that the plot was rather too arcane and my attempt to bridge the gap between the hard-boiled genre and today’s suspense thriller was only sporadically successful. I marveled at the man. I marveled at his ability to remember that review and how it had seemed to hurt him more than me. I marveled at his ability to hang onto his sense of humor. I was not at all certain that I would be able to.

  I had met killers before; some on my own, some with Johnny’s help. I had shared food and drinks with, told dirty jokes to, and played poker with murderers. I had even listened to some describe with cold precision every detail of their crimes. Had it bothered me? Yeah,
I guess, a little, but their crimes were as remote to me as the crimes I wrote about in my fiction. The killers themselves were two-dimensional cartoon characters; evil somehow, but unreal.

  Well, I was a hypocrite, because it was different with MacClough. None of those other men were my best friend. John was. None had risked his life to save mine. John had. I barely remembered those mens’ faces. I knew John’s face better than my own. He was as close to me as a brother. No, closer. We understood one another better than brothers do. I used to think so. I wasn’t quite as sure now. Maybe it was a measure of the world’s unending barrage of cruelty that murder only mattered when it hit close to home. More likely, it was a measure of my own weakness. If what I thought was true, that John had killed Hernandez in cold blood, I knew I would never be able to look at him in the same way again. And I would have two men to mourn after this mess was over.

  It was with this black heart that I set out for breakfast.

  The coffee shop was crowded with students and I had to wait about ten minutes to be seated. I used the down time to thumb through the Gazette. Steven Markum was already old news. Mention of his “accidental” death was nowhere to be found. The Valencia Jones trial, on the other hand, remained a hot topic. The headline at the top of the third page let me know that Ms. Jones and her lawyer had taken our advice to heart:

  JONES FALLS ILL—TRIAL ON HOLD

  The article went on to explain that the judge agreed to interrupt the trial to allow Ms. Jones sufficient time to recover from what a leery prosecutor, Robert W. Smart termed: “Her sudden and convenient ailment.” The trial judge also noted that the time off would allow him to deal with the flurry of motions Ms. Jones’ attorney had filed in recent days. It was clear from the story that neither judge nor prosecutor was very pleased with these obvious delaying tactics. And, though neither stated it for the record, it was equally clear that Valencia Jones would pay a price for stalling. I hoped we would be able to make it worth the gamble.