Redemption Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  This was a fresher death. The stench of urine and feces hung in the air, not quite overwhelming the minty-pine atmosphere. Arthur Rosen’s nude, soiled body was slumped in the corner. He’d hanged himself with his belt tied to the closet-door handle. They did it in Rikers this way sometimes, with a bedsheet. You have to really want to die to do it this way. It’s not like kicking the stool out from beneath your feet. This way, all you have to do to save yourself is stand up. No, Arthur Rosen had been determined to die. He got his wish.

  The cop in me knew he was gone at a glance, beyond resuscitation. I wanted to admonish Dr. Prince, warn him to touch nothing. I wanted to grab him by the shoulder, back him out of the room, and call 911. Instead, I pulled out my knife and cut the belt. Dr. Prince stretched the body out on the floor, removed the ligature from Rosen’s neck, and began the exercise in futility that was CPR.

  “Where’s the phone?”

  “Forget it,” he said, abandoning his efforts. “He’s cold. The blood’s begun to settle.”

  “Okay, Doc, you go call this in. I’ll secure the scene. Anyway, you’re gonna have to deal with all the other patients’ reactions. That’s not gonna be easy.”

  He stood and left without comment. I closed the door behind him. No need for a curious passerby to wander on in. Word would spread soon enough. In institutions, bad word spread on the wind. And I wanted a private look around. Cops are trained to treat the scene of an apparent suicide no differently from how they would treat the scene of a homicide. My snooping was bound to screw up the forensics some, but that was just too damned bad. Both the doctor and myself had already gotten a good start by handling the body so much. What would it hurt if I handled it a little more?

  I gently rolled Arthur Rosen onto his stomach. Other than the angry ligature marks around his throat and what looked to be an old burn scar on his left forearm, there was nothing remarkable about his body. He just seemed frail, and lighter than I expected. Though I didn’t really know him, I suspected the years of smoking, torment, and medication had taken a heavy toll on him.

  I checked his hands, his fingers. His nails were dirty, and he seemed to have some fresh cuts on the tips of both index fingers, but I couldn’t be sure how fresh. Maybe he’d cut them days ago or had split the skin while rigging his belt. No matter how much uniformed cops may brag about it, they don’t usually get up close and personal with stiffs. They know the smell of death, but they don’t know the feel. They may touch a throat to check for a pulse. That’s about it, though. Mostly it’s hands off. The detectives and crime-scene guys have all the real fun.

  I rolled him back over and tried replacing his arms as they had fallen after I cut him down. I’m not sure I got it right. I stood up, a little too fast, I think. The stink was getting to me for sure, and just maybe it crossed my mind that my refusal to take the case had been the last straw, that my words had been the last bit of motivation Arthur Rosen needed to stick his head in a noose and keep it there. I was pretty nauseous and grabbed the first solid thing I could get my hands on—the dresser. I steadied myself. I found myself looking into the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw, and what the mirror saw didn’t like me. The nauseousness was ebbing away when I spotted something other than my sorry face in the lower right-hand corner of the reflection.

  I turned and walked quickly to the opposite wall, to the side of the bed. I pulled the nightstand away from the side of the bed. Several words were scrawled on the wall in crude block letters. WRONG. HAMMERLING. FIRE. POEMS. JUDAS. There was one more word, a name, my name. PRAGER. Only my name was different. It was smeared in reddish-brown lettering for which Arthur’s veins had contributed the ink. Apparently, the cuts on Arthur’s fingers were very fresh. Below the graffiti, and, until now, hidden beneath the night table, were a stack of yellowed newspapers. They were copies of some rag called the Catskill Tribune. I had begun to thumb through them when I heard footsteps coming down the hall. I rolled the papers up and tucked them under my jacket.

  The footsteps out in the hall were coming in my direction. I scanned the room, looking for a suicide note. I didn’t see one. There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and Dr. Prince stepped in. Prince gave me a perplexed stare as he reentered. And believe me when I tell you, with eyes like his, Dr. Prince’s perplexed stare was unrivaled.

  “There’s no note,” I blurted out guiltily.

  “The cops will be here”—he was interrupted by sirens outside the window—”any minute. There they are now.”

  “I was the last straw,” I said, pointing at my bloody name on the wall.

  Dr. Prince understood without explanation.

  “It’s not that simple, Mr. Prager. Those words are not like the numbered dots on a paper place mat. The mind is curved just as space and time. It defies easy answers. Straight lines don’t apply. The dots don’t connect in sequence.”

  The cops came in. They didn’t bother to knock.

  I was purposefully vague with my former brothers in blue. And they weren’t especially interested in me. If Rosen hadn’t written my name on the wall in his own blood before hanging himself, they probably would have dismissed me without a second thought. As it was, the detective who caught the case accepted my explanation without question. I had known the deceased man’s late sister in high school. He had looked me up, but I had been too busy to talk to him. I felt bad about not making time to talk to him and had therefore come to apologize. Why did I think he’d put my name on his wall? I didn’t know why, I said. I didn’t really know him, and he was crazy, after all, wasn’t he?

  I knew what I was doing. It isn’t like on TV. Sherlock Holmes is strictly for the PBS crowd. Cops want easy, reasonable answers, not headaches. They want to close cases, have a few beers, and go back home to Massapequa. They don’t eat their guts out over every stiff, especially losers like Arthur Rosen. It’s sad but true that cops value some lives more than others. Hey, I’m not throwing stones here. I’m as guilty as anyone. I suspect we all are. When Marina Conseco went missing, it seemed like the whole city mobilized to try and find her. When something happens to the Arthur Rosens among us, the city sighs in relief, says good riddance, and sleeps better that night.

  I wouldn’t sleep better for some nights to come.

  Chapter Four

  Thanksgiving

  Silence was neither golden nor unusual around the Maloneys’ holiday table. Maybe before Patrick had disappeared, before Francis Jr. was shot down over Vietnam, things had been livelier. Somehow I doubted it. The icy presence of my father-in-law was enough to dampen any celebration. But I couldn’t lay all the blame on his plate, not today, not after Arthur Rosen’s suicide.

  “You were awfully quiet at dinner,” Katy whispered, snuggling up to me on the couch.

  “Is Sarah asleep?”

  Katy knelt forward and stared directly into my eyes. “You know she is. What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Remember that nut who came into the store?”

  “Karen Rosen’s brother.” She smiled. “The one who wanted you to find his dead sister.”

  “Last night, when I told you I was late getting up here because of an accident on the Tappan Zee Bridge … there was no accident,” I confessed. “I went to see him. His name is—was—Arthur Rosen.”

  “Was?”

  “He’s dead. He hung himself. Or is it ‘hanged himself’? Hanged, hung—whatever. I found him. Just in case I didn’t feel quite shitty enough, he wrote my name on the bedroom wall in his own blood. I pushed him over the edge when I turned him down.”

  Katy knew better than to argue the point. If I was determined to feel responsible, nothing she was apt to say was going to change it.

  She tried a different tack. “Did you ever find out about his sister?”

  “Remember when we first started seeing each other I told you about the girls from my high school who were killed in the fire in the Catskills?”

  “I remember. You mean she was one of the dead girls, Karen Rosen?”<
br />
  “She was.”

  “There were three girls, weren’t—”

  I cut her off. “Technically, there were three girls, but one had graduated Lincoln several years before and was just working at that hotel as a matter of unhappy coincidence. I don’t even recall her name. There was Karen Rosen and—”

  “—Andrea Cotter,” she snapped. “You don’t think I’d forget the girl you had such a big crush on, the girl who inspired you to write poetry, do you?”

  I was taken aback by Katy’s tone. “You almost sound jealous!”

  “Maybe I am,” she confessed, “a little. You know, I had an English-lit professor who used to say that no one would have remembered Romeo and Juliet if they got married and had three kids. Death made them eternal.”

  “This is the Catskills we’re talkin’ here, kiddo, not Verona.”

  “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t bother playing dumb. “Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but I feel like I owe it to him, to Arthur, to look. So I’ll go up there for a few days and find out what the world already knows, that his sister and sixteen other unlucky people were killed in a fire.”

  “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something else is bothering you.”

  She stared at me coldly. She did that sometimes, like a boxer sizing up his opponent. She watched how I moved, my gestures. She waited to listen to my voice, my inflection. Did I mean what I was saying? It put me on edge, the way she did that, how she waited me out. It was the only part of her father, I recognized in her. So I explained about my backseat visit with R. B. Carter and his attempt at checkbook diplomacy.

  “So which is it, Moe?” Katy broke the silence. “Are you going up there because you feel guilty or because you’re pissed off that someone thought they could buy you off cheap?”

  “A little bit of both, I suppose. A little bit of both.”

  Katy pushed herself away from me and got to her feet. “I’m going to bed.”

  I was momentarily perplexed by the anger in her voice and the abruptness with which she pushed herself away. Then it came to me: Katy was frightened, even if she didn’t quite realize it herself. Was she jealous? Yeah, maybe a tiny bit. There was, after all, a certain quixotic romance in the task I was about to take on. But mainly, I think, she was just scared.

  I was no longer a cop when we’d met, and Katy hadn’t had to deal with the silent fears every cop’s wife faces every time her husband works his shift. And though I know for a fact that she thought my having an investigator’s license was pretty cool, I guess it was cool just so long as it stayed in my sock drawer. Now I was actually taking on a case, crazy as it was, and leaving her and Sarah for the first time. I’d never thought it through before, because I didn’t think anyone would actually come to me for help.

  Explaining myself any further would just dig a deeper hole, so instead of talking I stood up and took her in my arms. I held her close, though she stood rigid in my embrace. It was Katy who had taught me that kind of physical reassurance. What my words could never say, my touch would. I loved her, and nothing, especially not some stupid high-school crush, could ever threaten that. I had already risked a lot more than a trip up to the Catskills to guarantee nothing would come between us. I had made a deal with the devil himself. I could feel the tension flow out of her, and we sat back down on the sofa. I guess we nodded off.

  I woke up still on the couch, alone. Katy, who must have moved up to bed or to check on Sarah, was gone. Gradually, though, I became aware that I was not alone. I heard him breathing. Seated diagonally across the room from me on a wooly blue recliner was my father-in-law, Francis Maloney Sr. Regardless of what people say, when you marry a woman you marry her family. And it was times like these, these quiet moments alone with Francis Sr., that were the only aspect of my married life I dreaded.

  When he noticed I was awake, he stopped swirling the glass of Bushmills whiskey he held in his right paw. His full attention was focused on me. It was his turn now to size up his prey, to survey my weaknesses, as his daughter had before him. But I mean it less metaphorically with Francis Sr. For, although he’d not spoken a word in protest against my marrying Katy, I always got the feeling he was toying with me the way a feral cat does with a grounded sparrow.

  He took the opportunity, as he often did, to reinforce my uneasiness. My father-in-law smiled that cold, knowing smile at me and raised his glass in a mocking toast. Placing the whiskey upon his thigh, he continued to stare, continued to smile. That he despised me was fair enough. The feeling was more than mutual. It was only one of our silent secrets. What unnerved me was that he so enjoyed my discomfort. When we were alone like this, everything about him seemed to say: “Your day will come. You won’t see it coming, but it will come.” I think I understood what the grounded sparrow felt like.

  We never discussed the biggest secrets, the roles each of us had played in Patrick’s disappearance. He was one of the four people who knew about my having let Patrick slip away. I had tracked Patrick to his lover’s apartment in the West Village, fully prepared to haul him back to his family by the scruff of his neck if necessary. But Jack, his lover and protector, convinced me that Patrick would go back voluntarily in a few days. They both gave me their word that Patrick wouldn’t run, and, like a stupid-assed rookie, I believed them. No one had seen him since.

  It was a secret, of course, that could ruin my marriage. A bomb the old man could drop in my lap at any time. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t, though, because it was him who’d driven Patrick away in the first place. It’d been very ugly between them, very ugly. No, Francis Sr. had already lost both his sons. He wouldn’t risk losing Katy, too. So, without ever discussing it, my father-in-law and I had created our own version of mutually assured destruction. But, just like it is with us and the Russians, I’m a lot more comfortable having my finger on the trigger than his.

  The silence grew so steep that the only sound I could make out above my own breathing was the cracking of the ice as it melted in the whiskey glass. I would not speak. I would wait him out. A word, even a cough, would be a sign of weakness, and weakness was something I dared not show my father-in-law.

  He transformed his cold smile into a cruel, joyless laugh. And, raising his glass to me a second time, grudgingly complimented: “A tough Jew, good. Good.”

  He was baiting me. I held my tongue.

  Bored by my unwillingness to engage him, Francis Sr. worked his way out of the recliner and started toward the kitchen to freshen his whiskey. He stopped, as I knew he would, as he always did when we were alone, to turn back for a parting shot.

  “Ghosts,” he said. “Do Jews believe in ghosts?”

  Ghosts again, always with the ghosts. I didn’t get what his preoccupation was with ghosts, and he never seemed inclined to enlighten me. Though tonight, given the job I was about to take on, the subject of ghosts seemed oddly appropriate.

  Katy was asleep when I got upstairs. I was exhausted, but almost too tired to sleep, so I took my first blind steps into the world Arthur Rosen had left behind. And “blind steps” was just the right term, for I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to find. Karen and Andrea were dead. The inquiries and inquests, no matter how shoddily performed, were sixteen years finished. Chances were the scene of the fire had been bulldozed, filled in, built over, sold and resold. All I had to work with were some disconnected words scrawled on a crazy man’s walls, some old newspapers, and a dead man’s paranoia. I was certain other detectives had worked with less. I just couldn’t think of their names at the moment.

  Chapter Five

  November 27th

  Katy’s resistance to my Catskills adventure was a stroll in the park compared with Aaron’s reaction. Unlike Katy, though, my big brother couldn’t have cared less that I had taken a dead man’s case. It mattered not to him whether my client was President Reagan or the Ghost of Christmas Past. To Aaron, there was no good reason to miss work short of open-heart surgery. And then o
nly with a signed note from the doctor. We went round and round like a two-headed dog chasing its tail.

  Dizzy from the chase, I put an end to it. “Look, Aaron, I haven’t taken a vacation day or a personal day since Sarah was born. I got four weeks coming to me, so I’m takin’ one of them. What’s the big deal? It’s not like I’m takin’ Christmas-and-New Year’s week.”

  “And for that I’m supposed to be grateful?”

  “No, you’re just supposed to understand. It was part of the agreement when we went into this business. I have the right to work cases.”

  “I have the right to wear a bra and panties and run through Times Square,” he chided, “but it doesn’t mean I’m going to do it.”

  “That’s an image I don’t want to think about.”

  We both laughed. Aaron surrendered.

  He slapped my face playfully. “Get back soon or I’ll start wearing sensible pumps and a handbag into work. Go already.”

  I gave Aaron my buddy Kosta’s phone number and suggested he call him if things in the store got out of hand. Kosta was initially Katy’s friend, but we’d grown pretty close. He managed a few punk and new wave bands. Yet even in punk’s heyday, he was only slightly less successful at rock-and-roll management than the captain of the Titanic was at iceberg avoidance. Kosta was heading down the homestretch toward the poverty line.

  “Don’t worry.” I cut Aaron off before he could object. “Kosta knows wine.”

  “Be safe, little brother,” he said. “Be safe.”

  November was through teasing. It had definitely decided to pack up the denim jackets and stick them in the attic next to the plastic garbage bag marked “Indian Summer.” Time had come to haul out the parkas and boots. And if there were any lingering questions about November’s intentions, the mean shade of gray hanging in the air outside my windshield answered most of them. The remaining questions were answered by my throbbing knee. “Snow,” it said in its unique kind of Morse code. “Snow.” Just what I needed for my drive upstate.