Redemption Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “We’re in the mountains, Sam.”

  “Mountains, buildings … Doesn’t matter, they’re tall and they’re solid, right?”

  “Forgive my attention to detail,” I begged sarcastically.

  Sam winked. “I’ll think about it. So—how’s my friend, the little hateful bastard? What’s he calling himself this week, Anton Hard-on?”

  “You know him?”

  I was stunned. I figured Sam knew about the little shantytown on the grounds of the old Fir Grove, but I hadn’t counted on his being on a first-name basis with any of its occupants.

  “Know him!” Sam chortled, holding his right hand to his mid-thigh. “Since he was a little pisher this high. His mother worked as a chambermaid at the Fir Grove for years. She died in the fire. Why, did he neglect to tell you? He’s a harmless putz. Just ignore him.”

  “I’d love to, but he had a brick thrown into my back windshield and the word JEW spray-painted across the hood of my car.”

  “You want I should go over there and wash his mouth out with soap?”

  “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” I chided. “Who’s gonna wash out your mouth?”

  “They don’t make bars of soap that big.”

  “His mother died in the fire, huh?” That mock grave suddenly made some sense to me. “The mother,” I wondered, “was her name Missy?”

  “You’re a smart one,” Sam complimented. “I gotta watch out for you. Yeah, Missy, that was her name. Nice girl. Not too bright. Big tits.” Sam held his hands a foot away from his chest. “The kid’s name was Robby Higgins. The father was a real shikker. You know what means a shikker?”

  “A drunk,” I said.

  “Very good. Yeah, the father was a drunk, you shouldn’t know from it. When the parents split up, our shikker moved down to Pennsylvania someplace. The owners of the Fir Grove were real soft touches. They let Missy and the kid move into the workers’ quarters. He was a sweet kid until the breakup, used to help me around the place with errands and stuff. I’d throw him a coupla bucks here and there. But after the mom gave Dad the heave-ho, Robby went a little …” Sam waved his hand. “… a bissel meshugge. He blamed Missy, I guess. After the fire he moved to Pennsylvania with the drunk.”

  My mind went into overdrive, so much so that I barely took notice of Sam. Sam, a performer through and through, lost interest in me as soon as he lost me as an audience. It must be a scary thing to depend so much upon the approval of an audience, but I had neither the time nor the inclination to contemplate the performer’s dilemma at the moment. Anton Harder or Robby Higgins was foremost on my mind.

  He had obviously escaped the fire. And if what Sam had told me was true about the anger and instability of the young Robby Higgins, I thought the fog I’d been operating in might quickly burn off. Was Higgins angry enough with his mom to strike out at her? Had his parents’ split knocked him so off balance that he could do something incredibly stupid and dangerous? I remembered my lack of judgment as a kid and had my answer to that question. Maybe it hadn’t been some idiot smoking in bed after all. God, it all seemed to fit so perfectly: the displacement of anger and guilt, the transmutation of those raw emotions into blind hatred, the cesspits, the shrine to his mother. It was neat. It fit. It was easy. The perfect formula for an ex-cop. I wondered why someone hadn’t put the obvious components of tragedy together before this. Maybe someone had, someone named Arthur Rosen.

  I had Sam give me an outside line and called down to the city.

  “Intelligence Division,” a distracted voice picked up, “Detective Gigante.”

  “Is Larry Mac around?”

  Detective Lawrence McDonald and I had worked together for a few years in Coney Island. Larry, Rico Tripoli, and I were known as the Three Stooges: Moe, Larry, and Curly. It would have been more accurate to call us Moe, Larry, and Wavy. Rico, who had a remarkable resemblance to the young Tony Bennett, had thick, wavy black hair. Both Larry and Rico had gone on to get their gold shields. Larry earned his. Rico sold his soul and our friendship for his, but that’s another story.

  “Hold on,” Gigante said.

  “Detective McDonald speaking.”

  “Larry Mac, how the fuck are you?”

  “Moe, you tough Jew prick, how’s the wine business? Christ, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “The wine business is good, ya shanty Irishman. You know it wouldn’t kill you to come uptown and stop by the store one day. Ah, but maybe not, I don’t think we have enough inventory.”

  “Shut up, fuck-o. What’s up?”

  I more or less explained what I was working on and asked him to do a little digging into the men of the Higgins family, formerly of Old Rotterdam, New York. I also asked for a picture of Arthur Rosen, even if it was only a mug shot or an autopsy photo. I spent a minute explaining just who Arthur Rosen had been. Larry said he’d see what he could do, which meant he’d have it nailed within forty-eight hours.

  “You hear, Rico got his shield?” Larry asked.

  “I heard.”

  “What’s with you and Curly, anyway? You used to be like—”

  “Used to be, Larry, used to be. He paid a big price for a few those few ounces of gold plating and blue enamel. I hope it was worth it.”

  “Yeah, Moe,” Larry said suspiciously, but knew better than to ask, “whatever you say.”

  I gave him my phone number at the Swan Song.

  “They got a fax machine there?” he wondered.

  I wondered what he was talking about. “What the fuck is a fax?”

  “They’re like Xerox machines attached to the phone. You know, like those old gizmos that spun around we used to send pictures over to other departments with, but these are much faster. You can get two or three pages a minute.”

  “The next Edsel,” I predicted. “I’ll check and get back to you.”

  At least Sam knew what a fax machine was. He didn’t have one, but said that the stationery store in town had one. He got me the number and I passed it on to Larry Mac.

  “When your stuff comes in, they’ll call, and I’ll have somebody pick it up for you,” Sam offered generously. “I got to offer something special to my only full-paying guest.”

  Now there really was nothing to do until I could arrange a meeting with Hammerling or until the info came in from the city. I considered Mr. Roth’s invitation to share a drink and some stories of the good old days, but I wasn’t up for it. I watched the snowfall on my TV for an hour or so. I think there was a college football game going on underneath it. The announcers said there was, so I suppose I had to believe them. I slept for a few hours, forced down the enormous amount of bad food on the plate the Swan Song served up for my dinner, and walked the grounds to try and burn some of it off.

  Back from my constitutional, I found Sam and asked him if he knew how I could get in touch with Molly Treat. He asked if I’d ever heard of this thing called a phone book, but suggested I just go down to Hanrahan’s Pub in town. Molly was always there on Saturday night, he pronounced with great authority. So I was off to Hanrahan’s. I invited the old comedian along. He politely declined. It was the only polite thing the man had done in two days.

  Located at the corners of Monticello Avenue and Loch Sheldrake Street, Hanrahan’s was as predictable as another losing season for the Jets. The pub occupied the first floor of a two-story red clapboard walk-up. Even if I hadn’t gotten directions, I would have been able to spot it by the cigarette smoke pouring out its front doors. When I got within earshot, I could hear the jukebox blasting the Four Seasons. I’m talking Frankie Valli here, not Vivaldi. Big girls, Frankie explained, don’t cry. I’d have to ask Molly Treat about that.

  And that wouldn’t be hard to do, for, as Sam Gutterman predicted, Molly was seated right square in front of the beer pulls. A cigarette dangled perilously off her bottom lip as she exchanged a few words with the girl behind the bar. Both the barmaid and Molly turned their eyes to ogle a burly twenty-something in a flannel shi
rt playing eight ball at the table near the juke. Maybe he was worth their attention. Frankly, it was hard to see through the tar-and-nicotine fog. After my first ten breaths in that place, I felt confident I was well on my way to emphysema.

  “Hey, Molly.” I took her by surprise, appearing out of the smoky darkness. “Remember me?”

  “Mr. Prager.”

  “Moe, that’s right. What are you drinking?”

  “Bud,” she said.

  “Give the lady a Bud.” I winked at the barmaid, an old cop habit, and laid a twenty on the bar. “I’ll have a double Dewar’s rocks, and buy yourself something on me.”

  The barmaid winked back, much to Molly’s dismay. “Don’t mind if I do,” she said, putting a beer, my scotch, and her shot of Jack Daniel’s on the bar top.

  “To new friends,” I toasted. We clinked glasses. Molly took half the mug in one swig, I sipped, and the barmaid slammed hers back. I whispered in Molly’s ear: “Don’t sweat it. She’s not my type. I always hated women who could outdrink me. If I were in the market, you’d be first on the list around here.”

  It was shamelessly flirty of me and completely untrue, but other than that it seemed like a good thing to say at the moment. Whether Molly believed it or not was a completely separate issue.

  “How do you drink that stuff?” Molly asked, trying to compose herself. “To me it tastes like expensive Listerine.”

  “It tastes like Listerine to me, too, but I like Listerine.”

  She raised her glass to me.

  We went on like that for a little bit, the way you do at a bar with people you barely know—saying a lot and revealing almost nothing. I even smoked a cigarette, just to show Molly what a party animal I could be. Besides, with the amount of ambient smoke in that place, having a cigarette was like a drowning man drinking a glass of water. After another round with the barmaid and Molly, I suggested Molly and I retreat to a booth. She was happy to do so. I asked the barmaid to wait a few minutes and send over round three.

  When we got settled in, I slid my badge and license across the table to her, making a show of keeping it just between the two of us. Molly was impressed all right. Now she started to look around to make sure we weren’t being watched. The only thing that could have heightened Molly’s sense of adventure would have been the James Bond theme coming out of the jukebox. We had to settle for “Piano Man.” Well, it was nine o’clock on a Saturday.

  “Molly, I need your help.” I was earnest as hell, staring straight into her eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more straight with you yesterday, but I needed to get the lay of the land. If you know what I mean.”

  “I think I understand. You didn’t know anybody.”

  “See, I knew you’d understand. Look, I need to ask you some questions about the locals, okay?”

  “Shoot.”

  I asked in a whisper: “Do you know Anton Harder?”

  “His name wasn’t Anton Harder when I knew him,” she confided.

  “He was Robby Higgins then.”

  Molly was impressed. “You knew that? Yup, I knew Robby when we were kids, before—”

  “—the fire,” I completed her sentence. “Before he moved to Pennsylvania with his dad.”

  “Well, if you know all this, why are you asking me?” she wondered, now more pissed off than impressed.

  I waved at the barmaid for our drinks. “I’m sorry, Molly. Tell me about him. I’ll just sit here and listen, cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Molly pretty much confirmed everything Sam had earlier told me about the young Robby Higgins. She did add an interesting detail or two. Apparently, Robby had been an okay student. He was quiet and didn’t take teasing very well—”And he was teased a lot because of his size and all,” Molly said—but got along pretty well with everyone but the class bullies. He had some friends. Molly even made out with him once.

  “He was cuter back then, and I didn’t outweigh him by quite so much.”

  I cringed when she said that. I hoped she hadn’t noticed. People rightly despised pity.

  The thing Molly remembered most was how much Robby changed when his parents split up. He started fighting in school, no longer willing to let taunts go unchallenged. He lost most of the fights, and his grades went south.

  “He got suspended for fighting, and eventually got kicked outta school for setting off a cherry bomb in the teachers’

  lounge,” Molly recounted, shaking her head. “He was really hurting and—”

  I could scarcely believe my ears. This was too good to be true. “He got suspended for what?”

  I tried to hide my smile as Molly repeated what she had said about Robby Higgins’ first venture into arson. I was liking Anton Harder’s younger incarnation more and more for the Fir Grove fire.

  Molly began rambling a bit—she was already working on her fourth beer since my arrival—about other kids she had known in school and what had become of them. I took the opportunity to slow my own alcohol intake and try to refocus. No matter how appealing a suspect Robby Higgins might appear to be, I had to guard against latching on too hard. An old detective I knew at the 60th had warned me not to fall too deeply in love with any one suspect. “Love blinds you in both eyes,” he said. “And pressure to make a case dulls a cop’s vision enough to begin with.”

  Eventually, I steered Molly’s ramblings around to the subject of Councilman Richard Hammerling. If the tipsy Molly was even half accurate, the Hammerling she described sounded like a cartoon cutout of a small-town politico. He was a publicity hound, fighting hard to get as much media attention as he could. It seemed he was a believer in that old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity. To hear Molly tell it, old Dick Hammerling was never afraid to look silly as long as they spelled his name right.

  “You know that stupid groundhog they have in Pennsylvania every year?” Molly slurred.

  “Sure.”

  “Well, Dick came up with Beaver Day. Beaver’s the state animal, you know?”

  “No,” I confessed. “In Brooklyn you sorta grow up assuming pigeons are the state animal.”

  “Anyhows, Dick is always the guy who yanks Old Rotterdam Rodney the beaver out of his hutch or den or whatever beavers live in, and shows him his shadow. It drew a lot of coverage for a few years, but just lately only the Catskill Trib and the local radio station send reporters.”

  “But Hammerling shows up nonetheless, huh?”

  “Yessiree. Hey, Moe, how do you know if a beaver sees his shadow?”

  “How?”

  “You ask him!”

  Molly thought this hysterically funny and laughed so hard she began choking. Sam Gutterman she wasn’t. When Molly got done catching her breath and drying her eyes, she continued detailing Hammerling’s career. Not only was he a publicity whore, but apparently he was power-hungry as well, always trying to wrangle the chairmanship on as many committees as he could get appointed to.

  “I think he wants to be governor someday,” Molly opined. “He does a bad job of hiding that.”

  He had a lot of other egomaniacs on line ahead of him. When I expressed a version of this sentiment to Molly she disagreed.

  “I guess Dick’s got his faults like everyone else, but his trying to reopen the Fir Grove business ain’t winning him too many friends in these parts.”

  “It’s gotten him a lot of press, hasn’t it?”

  “Maybe so,” she granted, “but it cuts against the grain around here. The fire’s the worst thing ever happened in this town. The whole place went to hell in a handbasket after that. People don’t like it being dragged up again. It’s a part of the past I think we’d all prefer stay buried.”

  As she had earlier, Molly started off on a tangent. This time I was treated to the details of Richard Hammerling’s other foibles. Unfortunately, none of this stuff was either pertinent or particularly interesting. I passed the time watching a bald-headed guy playing darts in the corner. I think maybe his hairline reminded me of the strange
guy I’d seen pass by the front window of the hardware store earlier in the day. In any case, I decided to interrupt Molly’s version of the life and times of Richard Hammerling before I began to twitch.

  “Molly, let me ask you ask you a strange question.”

  “How strange?”

  I described the man in the threadbare coat and waited for Molly to delve into the vast minutiae of his life, including his birth weight. However, for the first time all evening, Molly was speechless. She excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. When she got back, she went to the bar to buy a pack of smokes. Then she bummed a few bucks off me and took the better part of a fortnight selecting tunes on the box that had already been played five times. Clearly, Molly was as anxious to discuss this subject as she was to undergo a full course of chemotherapy.

  “Okay, Molly,” I said, “you’re stalling. I was only a little curious before. Now one of us ain’t gettin’ outta here alive unless I find out about that guy at the hardware store.”

  She actually looked frightened. I remembered about sarcasm not being a universal language and apologized. Not effusively, mind you. I wanted to know.

  “You’re not gonna get insulted or anything, are you?” She really was nervous.

  “I promise.”

  “I don’t know the man you described personally, but I think he belongs to a … to a … I guess you’d call it a cult. We call ‘em the Yellow Stars. They’re up in the same neck of the woods as Robby—I mean, Anton Harder’s people. They keep to themselves mostly. Hardly ever come into town.”

  “The Yellow Stars?”

  “They wear a big yellow patch on their coats that has the word—”

  “J-U-D-E-N,” I spelled out loud.

  “That’s it,” Molly said. “It means—”

  “Jew.”

  “You said you weren’t gonna get insulted or anything. I remember how touchy you got the other day when this sorta thing came up.”

  “It’s okay, Molly. I’m not insulted or anything.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Not even a little, but I am still pretty damned curious.”

  Molly told me what she knew, which wasn’t very much. The Yellow Stars owned what used to be Koppelman’s Bungalow Colony, about five miles north of the Fir Grove. They kept to themselves and rarely came into town. When they did, it was to see the doctor, usually, or to file papers with the town. They didn’t sell roses or anything one had come to expect from a “cult.” She was unsure of their agenda, or if they even had an agenda at all.