Redemption Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Richard Hammerling’s office was another story altogether. The walls, what little I could see of them behind the photographs of Richard Hammerling with the famous, semifamous, infamous, and notorious, were painted a pale yellow. The carpet was a happy shade of green and deeper than the rough at a U.S. Open. There were groupings of oversized flags in every corner, ranging from the Stars and Stripes, the largest of the large, to that of the local high-school football team, the Old Rotterdam Fighting Beavers. I wondered if Old Rotterdam Rodney was their mascot. The man himself was seated behind a mission-style desk not quite half the size of the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. I checked for incoming F-14 Tomcats before taking a seat.

  Before I could sit, Hammerling popped up out of his brown leather chair and threw a hand at me. I shook it in self-defense. He was a roughly handsome man with a grip firm enough to impress a local Teamster but light enough not to intimidate the librarian. Taller than me by an inch or two, with nice broad shoulders and a thin waistline, he was, I figured, about my age, in his mid-thirties. Clean-cut and shaven, he smelled grassy and sweet, like he’d used a bit too much Polo after shaving that morning. His blue suit, light-blue shirt, and yellow silk tie were more Sears than Brooks Brothers, but they fit him well.

  “Where’d’ya play ball?” I asked, trying to throw him a curve.

  “I was recruited by a lot of schools, even a few ACC schools like Wake Forest and Virginia, but I wound up at Cobleskill Community College. Then I screwed up my knee and that was that.”

  Translation: I was good, but my grades sucked. I got bored with school, hurt my knee, and came back home to work in my dad’s business.

  “I figure you for a small forward,” I said.

  “Shooting guard, but that’s good. You play ball in school?”

  “I’m from Brooklyn, Mr. Hammerling. I wasn’t good enough to make water boy.”

  He liked that. “But I bet you play.”

  “Up until a few years ago, yeah. But I fucked up my knee on the job.”

  He winced at that, as if reliving the pain he’d suffered. In spite of myself, I found that I liked him. He sat down and gestured for me to do the same.

  “We could spend hours telling war stories, you and I. I played a lot of ball with guys from the city. With them it was always more than just a game. But Molly tells me that’s not why you’re here, Mr. Prager.”

  “Did you know Arthur Rosen?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, rubbing his hand over his face as he stared at me. “You’re here about my attempts to reopen the Fir Grove boards of inquiry.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “And this isn’t Brooklyn and you’re not on the job anymore and you’re in the office of a duly elected official,” Hammerling admonished.

  “Point taken. Sorry, that was out of line. But did you know Arthur Rosen?”

  “I know Arthur, yes. But let me assure you, Mr. Prager, my desire to reopen this rather odorous can of worms goes well beyond the rantings of one disturbed man. I—”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Oh my God. How?”

  “Suicide. Arthur hanged himself with a belt tied to a door handle in his room.”

  I backtracked a bit, letting the councilman in on how I’d gotten involved with Arthur Rosen in the first place. I told him how Arthur had written the name Hammerling on the wall of his room. That’s about all I gave him, though. Sure, I liked him well enough, and he seemed genuinely shocked by Arthur’s suicide, but I wasn’t going to give out any information unless it was absolutely necessary. I still needed a scorecard to tell the players around here. I wasn’t about to reveal anything to anyone who probably knew the players better than I did.

  “I wouldn’t eat my heart out with guilt,” Hammerling consoled me. “Mr. Rosen could be very lucid at times and was obviously an intelligent man, but he was very unstable. In some ways, though I would never have wished this on him, he was more a hindrance than a help. It doesn’t exactly help a politician’s credibility to have his biggest backer for a very unpopular cause be an out-of-town lunatic. If you get my meaning. My opponents used Arthur against me every chance they could.”

  “Then why bother if this is so unpopular a cause?”

  “Because it’s a just cause. It’s the right thing to do, Mr. Prager.” He pointed at a picture on the wall that featured himself holding Old Rotterdam Rodney, the celebrity beaver. “So much of what a local politician does is horse crap. Sometimes I think the meaning of life is fund-raising and publicity seeking. That’s not what I got into this for. I want to help the people of this area thrive. I want us to get out from under the black cloud that’s hung over this community for the past sixteen years.”

  He sounded earnest enough, but I half expected red, white, and blue balloons to fall from the ceiling and “America the Beautiful” to start playing in the background as he accepted his party’s nomination for governor of the Empire State. I let him get it out of his system.

  “But are you making any headway? Are you gonna get any of the inquiries reopened?”

  The air went right out of him. “It’s always two steps forward, one step back. Just when I think I’ve cobbled together the votes, things always seem to fall apart. I’m good at building a consensus, at putting together coalitions. With this thing, though …” He pointed to his forehead. “See this flat spot here? It’s from banging my head against the wall. Sometimes it’s like I’m fighting an unseen enemy.”

  I nearly bit through my tongue. I was pretty sure his unseen enemy had a name, drove around in a big black car driven by a svelte man in a perfect blue suit. But, like I said before, I wasn’t here to give out information, just collect it. Maybe, when I got to the bottom of whatever there was to get to the bottom of, I’d make an anonymous call to Hammerling’s office and let him know who he was fighting and how deep his enemy’s pockets were.

  “Don’t you ever get discouraged?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve probably gotten all the mileage you’re gonna get out of this, right?”

  “I get discouraged all the time,” Hammerling confessed. “But I’m not giving up.”

  “Good for you,” I said, and meant it. “Good for you.” I looked at my watch and thanked him for his time. I was about to go when it occurred to me to ask him a few more questions about Arthur Rosen. “Just one more thing about Arthur Rosen, if that’s okay?”

  “Sure, it’s the least I could do.”

  “You said he could be pretty lucid, but really unstable.”

  “I did say that, Mr. Prager, yes.”

  “When he was at his most unstable, what sorts of things did he say?”

  “Sometimes it was the type of thing you’d expect.” The councilman shook his head as he spoke. “You know, about the fire and the investigations being part of a big conspiracy and a cover-up aimed solely at his family. But sometimes he’d say really wild things, like that he knew someone who was killed in the fire was still alive, stuff like that.”

  That got my attention. “Did he ever say who?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. He said he was afraid for me, that if I knew they’d come after me.”

  “No doubt he didn’t tell you who ‘they’ were either.”

  “No doubt. But, like I said, Arthur was a profoundly disturbed man.”

  “How long ago did he start this particular craziness?” I wanted to know.

  “I didn’t keep a record of it.” Hammerling was getting a little impatient.

  “Take a guess, please.”

  “Two, maybe three years ago. He moved up here for a while, a couple of months, I think, before going back home. Now, will that be all?”

  I thanked him again, wished him well, and left his office far more impressed than when I’d walked in.

  Molly had the rose in a glass of water at the corner of her desk. Flowers, even one flower, could light up any room. I remembered the blood roses, white snow, the gray cross, and found myself wondering how long it would take Larry Mac
to get me that info on the Higginses. Patience was a virtue, but not mine. None of us Pragers were much good at waiting. If we had a family motto, it would have been: “Bad news is better than no news at all.” Catchy, huh? I asked Molly if I could use her phone to make a local call.

  “Take me to lunch and I’ll let you call Zagreb.”

  I should have known. “Sorry, madame, I made my weekly call to Yugoslavia yesterday. But don’t you think a rose and a cup of coffee is worth a local call?”

  “Yes, but you can’t blame a girl for trying.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Sam said I hadn’t gotten a call from the city, nor had the stationery store in town called to say the fax was in. I asked Molly where the library was. She answered with only a weak attempt at extortion. Hope may spring eternal, but, like Molly had said, she’d seen last call too many times not to factor reality into the equation. I promised to see her again before I left. “Promise,” I assured her, wasn’t a word I used lightly, so she could count on it.

  The library was a diamond in the rough, a red brick building two blocks south of Town Hall. Unlike many of the other buildings in town, the library had not had its original Victorian spirit messed with. There wasn’t a piece of aluminum siding to be seen. Wearing asymmetry like a crown, its dirty brick turrets and bay windows were still intact. It was kind of reminiscent of the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village.

  With the kids back in school after the holiday, the old library was abuzz with inactivity. If you listened hard enough, you could probably have heard a dust mite sneeze as it dined on the pages of Moby-Dick. I inquired as to the location of the reference area. The librarian, an older man in a sweater and bifocals, asked me if I had anything particular in mind.

  “The fire.”

  He screwed up his face as if I’d just kicked him in the nuts with a steel-toed boot. He didn’t have to ask that I be more specific. He knew which fire. Was there another? But he was a trooper—did his duty and did it well, too fucking well. There were volumes of old newspapers to go through, forget any of the other source material, like the inquiry transcripts or the coroner’s reports. But the ratio of print generated versus useful information was ridiculous. Official conclusion: Some putz was smoking in bed.

  There was one dissenting voice. He was among the first wave of volunteer firemen who responded to the initial alarm. His name was Gustavo Hammerling, a local potato farmer who thought the fire spread just too fast to have been caused by a careless smoker. I guess my brother, Aaron, wasn’t the only man alive who carried the weight of his father’s legacy on his shoulders. My respect for Richard Hammerling was growing, and there was little doubt in my mind that I would find a way to let him know R. B. Carter was the unseen force sabotaging his efforts.

  I found Gustavo’s obit from April 19, 1975:

  FARMER, VOLUNTEER FIREMAN COMMITS SUICIDE

  Monticello, NY—After receiving calls from his family, who had been unable to reach him, local police today found the body of Gustavo Hammerling in the woods behind his hunting lodge. Though the coroner refused to declare an official cause of death pending an autopsy and toxicology reports, preliminary indications are that Mr. Hammerling’s death was the result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. A shotgun was found in close proximity to the body. Gustavo Hammerling had gained some notoriety in the mid-1960s, when, as a witness appearing before the board of inquiry investigating the tragic Fir Grove Hotel fire in which 17 people perished, he raised the only dissenting voice disputing the theory that the fire was caused by a careless smoker. His son, freshman councilman from Old Rotterdam and former all-county basketball player, Richard Hammerling, said that his father never got over the fire. “It haunted him for the rest of his life. It broke him. He …”

  I wrote down a few names, dates, a quote here and there, but from everything I read it sounded as if Gustavo Hammerling had killed himself over nothing. I was no fire investigator, believe me, yet all indications pointed to a careless smoker. What was fairly evident was that there had been a major push to get the investigations, boards of inquiry, etc., done quickly. All you had to do was count forward from the first news story to the last to see that the full-court press was on to rush things through. Old Rotterdam had seemingly adopted the Warren Commission philosophy. Too bad Arlen Specter wasn’t available to be the lead investigator, or he might’ve invented the “Magic Cigarette” Theory.

  It’s funny how one event can so consume a period in history. But in my skimming the old back issues of the Catskill Tribune, I saw that life went on. Babies were born at the very same time Andrea and Karen were dying. Old people were dying, too. Kids were breaking windows, and Ferris wheels at the county fair spun round and round. There was even another big story that, except for the fire, might have dominated the news. It had, in fact, dominated the news for several weeks leading up to the fire. It seemed there had been a rash of well-planned burglaries at local hotels. It was petty stuff compared with what went on in the city, but in an area dependent upon tourism, it was major. Then, the day before the fire, things had turned violent. A guest at the Fleur-de-Lis had, according to the cops, stumbled upon the burglars at work and was beaten unconscious.

  Yes, life went on before, during, and after the fire, but you wouldn’t know it from the way folks acted around here. I went back over the papers, looking for another story about the burglaries. I wondered what had become of the beaten man—had he recovered from his injuries? Yet, after the fire, there seemed to be no other news worth reporting. I gave up. My eyes ached, and I had to limit my curiosity to one family’s unresolved tragedy.

  I went to talk to the local GP. Though I knew about as much about small-town life as I knew about quantum physics, I figured the local doctor always knew what was really going on in his town. According to Hollywood, the local doctor always knows the real scoop, right? He did in Peyton Place. Doc on Gunsmoke always knew the score. Dr. “He’s Dead, Jim” McCoy was always a keen observer of the human and Vulcan heart. With my luck, the doctor was probably from Lahore, Pakistan, and had never heard of the Fir Grove or seen Star Trek.

  The shingle outside the office read: ROBERT J. PEPPER, M.D. Good, I thought, I wouldn’t need my Urdu phrase book. Pepper’s waiting room was empty, and, I’m embarrassed to say, it looked like a movie set of a small-town doctor’s waiting room. Norman Rockwell prints were prominently featured on each of the walnut-paneled walls. The furniture was colonial in style and probably in age. The magazines on the table were Boys’ Life, Life, National Geographic, and Trout Fisherman. The receptionist, dressed in full nurse’s whites, was a pleasant-looking woman of sixty.

  When I introduced myself, lying to her about having a sore throat, she said there was a lot of that going around. What was, I wondered to myself, lying or sore throats? Probably both. She showed me right in without once inquiring as to my insurance or ability to pay. She took my temperature and blood pressure, and noted my knee surgery and lack of allergies to medication.

  “My husband will be right with you, Mr. Prager,” she said as she put my chart up on the door. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  Pepper was a wiry old bird with wild gray hair and posture like the letter “C.” He wore green corduroy pants, house slippers with white socks, a brown button-down cardigan, and a stethoscope for a necktie. This guy was right out of central casting. The only missing prop was a pipe. He studied the chart his wife had started on me, moving his eyes back and forth from the paper to me.

  “Says here you’re complaining of a sore throat. Let’s have a gander. Say ahhh,” he ordered, shoving the tongue depressor just far enough down my throat to stimulate my gag response. “Throat looks fine. Eyes look pretty red, though.”

  Why I hadn’t just asked his wife if I could speak to the doctor without the pretense of illness was now a moot issue.

  “Were you around during the Fir Grove—”

  “Yes, sir, I sure was. Terrible thing, that fire. Why do yo
u ask?”

  I showed him my license. “I’ve been hired by one of the victims’ families to have a fresh look into the case.”

  He chuckled. “Find anything fresh? No, I expect not, after so many years. But it’s good to have somebody besides poor Dick Hammerling looking into it. You don’t really have a sore throat, do you, Mr. Prager?”

  I confessed and told him how stupid I felt about not being upfront with him. In my defense, I said, the townsfolk hadn’t exactly gushed forth at the mention of the fire.

  “Nope, that fire was like our death knell. More than those poor kids died that day, let me tell you. Where you from in the city, son?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “For us, it was kinda like the day the Dodgers moved out. Now, I don’t mean to disrespect the dead, mind you, by making such a comparison, but it was like we all had our hearts ripped right out of our chests that day. It never has been the same. The town—the whole area, for that matter—went right down the tubes, so you can understand the reticence of the people around here.”

  “But just before you seemed glad I was—”

  “I was. I am glad! You see, I was sort of drafted by John Crotty—”

  “The county coroner back then,” I interjected. I remembered his name from the papers.

  “You’ve done your homework, good.” He smiled broadly. “I’d done plenty of autopsies in my ten years in the army and done some forensics at Walter Reed before getting out in ‘64. Set up practice here in this very office with my missus a year later. I helped old Crotty with the bodies. In some cases there wasn’t much to work with, a few teeth, X rays of old broken bones, that sort of thing. But the politicians were breathing down old Crotty’s neck to wrap things up stat, so we did. It was just wrong to rush us like that. I’m almost certain there were still some bits of human remains bulldozed and carted away to be dumped unceremoniously in some landfill somewhere.”

  “Disrespectful,” I offered.