Redemption Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Thanks for last night,” Katy whispered in my ear, trying to fight back tears. “Try not to get beat up for a few days, okay? It’s harder on me than you think.”

  “I’ll be all right. Everything will be all right.” I kissed her lightly, but held her for a few minutes.

  “I don’t know why,” Katy confessed, “but I almost feel sorry for Andrea.”

  I was taken aback. “She probably murdered sixteen people, hid it for as many years, and helped blackmail her brother. With her brother’s money and influence behind her, I doubt she’ll spend more than a few years behind bars. She’ll cop a plea and the world will forget. It always does.”

  “I guess you’re right,” she said without much conviction. “I’m just being silly. What are you going to do about Sam?”

  “One life at a time, kiddo. One life at a time. Andrea’s, first of all.”

  Last summer’s hit was playing on WNEW as I hit the Bronx, and I couldn’t shake it. It was stuck in my head, doing a fierce pas de deux with the lines I was rehearsing to say to all the other players. Doomed by its infectious hook to the annals of one-hit-wonder-land, I thought the song ironically apropos. I was a one-hit wonder myself. I tried to focus. “… Jenny, don’t change your number, I need to make you mine …” It was hopeless. “… 867-5309, 867-5309, 867-5309 …”

  By the time I hit old Route 17, I knew what I would say to Andrea almost as well as the lyrics of that stupid song. Parts of me still considered dealing with the ancillary players first: Sam, Lieutenant Bailey, et al. But, like I had told Katy, Andrea was necessarily top of the pops. Her debts were biggest, and by choosing to trust R. B. Carter, I might have already given her opportunity enough to slip away. It wouldn’t be the first time. And Sam was the wild card. I hoped he’d bought my act and hadn’t spent the time I was away covering his ass and discarding evidence. I’d know soon enough. The old bungalow colony was just ahead.Walking from the car to the longhouse, I flashed back to the last time I’d seen Andrea Cotter. I could smell the dirty salt water off Coney Island Beach. I felt her touch on my shoulder, a touch I had dreamed about since our days at Cunningham Junior High School. I turned around to see her hair blowing across her pale face in the afternoon breeze. I heard her politely asking if I was Moses Prager. I remembered that I suddenly believed in God. I felt the pen in my hand, the pen I’d used to sign her magazine. I could still see her walking down the boardwalk away from me, never turning to look back.

  My heart was racing again, as it had that spring day sixteen years before. Even now, after all these years, in spite of Katy and Sarah, sixteen bodies, and the treachery, the fantasy endured. I remembered what Katy had said about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet was awakening after sixteen years, but this time the blood on her hands would not be hers.

  Judas Wannsee was waiting for me alone in the big room. I recalled the feeling of being watched during my first visit here, remembered the video cameras.

  “You’ve considered my words,” he said.

  “As a matter of fact, I have. A lot of what you said made sense. Maybe assimilation is the curse you say it is, and maybe I’ll get gassed in the next Holocaust no matter what I do or who I know. Anyway, you know that’s not why I’m here. Where is she?”

  “Bungalow Eight,” he answered. “Just knock and enter. The door will be open. She’s been waiting for this day a long time. She’s been with us long enough to know you cannot escape your destiny.”

  “It doesn’t stop people from trying, does it?” I mumbled.

  “Who would know that better than you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He smiled at me. “You were at a meeting. I think you know exactly what it means.”

  “Well, thanks anyway.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he warned. “Even when we think we know the gifts we’re about to receive, we can be surprised.”

  “Is it the mountain air or what? Can’t anybody up here just say what they have to say?”

  He laughed. “I suspect your answer to that question is in Bungalow Eight. No matter the answer, remember to ask yourself if you’re a proud Jew.”

  Finding Bungalow 8 required no map, only elementary math skills. Hence, Aaron would have argued, I was at a disadvantage—arithmetic was never my forte—but I managed to find the cabin nonetheless. My palms were sweaty. My heart … Forget my heart. From the moment I put my directional on to turn into the old bungalow colony, my pulse rate was revving higher than my engine. I tried imagining what Andrea would look like after all these years, what toll the years of deception had taken on her. It was already abundantly clear what toll her deception had taken on everyone else. I raised my hand and knocked. The door fell back without my even having to turn the handle.

  It was dark and musty inside the little shack, shafts of light slicing through the shadows like steel sabers through a magician’s trick box. I sensed her presence. I could hear her breathing, I thought I could smell her breath. Like her brother, Andrea felt comfortable hiding in the shadows. She must have gotten very used to it.

  “Come on, Andrea, let’s get this over with. It’s been a long time coming.”

  She didn’t say anything, but I could hear her move. A frail arm flashed in the light and out again. Her breathing was labored. And the smell of the atmosphere, which I had taken for mustiness, was something different altogether. The air was sour and antiseptic all at once, like the poor wards at the old municipal hospitals.

  “Please,” I appealed, “let’s make this easy.”

  A light snapped on. An unshaded lamp made out of a tree branch sat on a similarly constructed nightstand. My hostess stood just beyond the footprint of the bare bulb, in the corner of the room. Her face was difficult to make out, but her plain clothes and yellow star were unmistakable. She took a step forward.

  Now my heart simply stopped.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, laughing sardonically, grabbing her side in pain.

  I couldn’t speak. I felt a thousand things in one impossible jolt: rage, fear, confusion, disappointment, panic.

  “I have seen a ghost,” I mumbled at last, “just not the one I expected to see. Where’s Andrea?”

  “Dead. She’s been dead for sixteen years.”

  “But the poems … I don’t understand.”

  An object flew out of the shadows. I flinched reflexively, though I was in no real danger of being hit. Something thumped on the floor at my feet.

  Karen Rosen said: “Pick it up.”

  It was a girl’s journal. The spine had been taped and retaped over the years. The entries on the delicate yellowed pages dated back to the early sixties. There were poems on some of the pages, Andrea’s poems. I bet there was also an entry about her brother playing doctor with Cousin Helen.

  “I took it the night of the fire,” Karen volunteered. “Talk about an albatross…. But it contains everything an aspiring extortionist needs.” She laughed that laugh again, wincing as she did. “I never wanted any part of that—the blackmail, I mean.”

  “You had a long time to stop,” I admonished. “And you didn’t.”

  “I had only one chance to stop,” she said, “sixteen summers ago. After that, what did any of it matter?”

  “What really happened that night?”

  “What really happened is that I murdered sixteen people.” She hesitated, as if to gather strength. “Listen, I will tell you everything, and I will abide by whatever decision you make about how to handle things.”

  “There’s a ‘but’ here somewhere, right?” I wondered skeptically.

  “You have to hear me out, completely. You won’t like a lot of it.”

  “I haven’t liked most of it to this point. Nothing you say’s gonna change that.”

  “Will you hear me out?” she shouted breathlessly.

  “Agreed.”

  For the first time, Karen stepped fully into the light and sat down on the bed in front of me. She was thin like some of
the other Yellow Stars, but her skin was terribly jaundiced. Initially I thought it was just the light from the cheap bulb that gave her skin that sickly tone, but no bulb was that cheap, and only those fancy new streetlights were that yellow.

  “It had been a horribly rainy summer,” Karen began. “It was bad all around. Just before Andrea and I came up here, my boyfriend … Do you remember Steven Glickman?”

  I raised my hand over my head. “Tall kid, black hair, good-looking, played on the baseball team—yeah, I remember him.”

  “He broke it off with me, and when Arthur found out he went apeshit and threatened Steven that he’d kill him if he hurt me again. That pretty much ruined any hope for the two of us getting back together. He really fucked that up, my big brother.”

  I wondered how much she knew about Arthur’s extraordinary efforts to find out what had happened to his little sister, or if she knew what had become of him. I wasn’t going to tell her—not yet, anyway.

  “My first week up here, I found out my dad lost his job and that he probably wasn’t going to have the money to send me to Brandeis. Brooklyn College, here I come. Then I got the worst possible station in the dining room. My tables drove me crazy and didn’t tip for shit. I thought about going back home. I was lonely and depressed and … God, I wished I’d gone home.”

  “So do seventeen families,” I said tersely.

  So far Karen wasn’t exactly scoring a lot of points on the empathy meter. Kids break up. Kids go to work. Kids get lonely. Kids don’t usually murder anybody.

  “But I noticed that Andrea was always flush with cash, and her station wasn’t a whole lot better than mine. I asked her about it. She said there were a lot of ways to make money up here besides waiting tables.”

  “You were curious?”

  “I was real curious,” she admitted. “Like I said, waitressing sucked and I needed money.”

  “There’s no such thing as easy money, Karen,”

  “I was a kid. I didn’t know that. All money looks easy to a kid.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  For the first time, she hesitated. “We had to a … we had to date guys that worked at other hotels in the area and find stuff out.”

  “Stuff! What kind of stuff?”

  “When we were out with the guys from the other hotels, all we had to do was find out if there were any guests at those hotels throwing a lot of cash around or flashing lots of jewelry. That’s all. We got twenty-five bucks a date, and sometimes we’d get an extra fifty. What’s the matter? You look disappointed.”

  Karen found something about what she’d said very funny and began to make a sort of suffocated giggle. Then she grabbed her side and sat quickly down on the bed.

  “Did you ever ask why?”

  “Just give me a second…. Yes, Andrea asked. Someone was running a big-stakes card game and was interested in recruiting high rollers. They couldn’t exactly advertise it in the local paper.”

  “And you believed that, this story about the high-stakes card game?”

  “I believed the money. Yeah, I believed it. Why not? It made sense, and I didn’t see the harm in it.”

  “You said you believed at first,” I repeated. “Something must’ve changed your mind.”

  “Something did.”

  A siren went off in my head. “The burglaries!”

  “Very good.” Karen applauded weakly. “Judas said you were some kind of cop.”

  “How’d you figure it out, about it not being for a card game?”

  “Andrea did. I think she was a little more suspicious than me, but we sort of enjoyed the illicit nature of what we were doing. It was kind of exciting.” The years seemed to disappear from Karen’s face, an innocently mischievous smile spreading across her yellowy skin. For the first time she almost resembled the girl with the Siamese cat in her lap. “The money was great, and as long as we couldn’t see anybody getting hurt, we figured, What the hell. Then …”

  “Then what?”

  “Then,” Karen said, the years returning to her face, “the stories about the burglaries started appearing in the local paper and on the radio. It didn’t take us long to match the names of the victims to the names we’d gotten out of some pimply-faced pool boy or horny bellhop.”

  “Did Andrea want to stop?”

  “That’s rich! No, Moe, she didn’t want to stop. She didn’t want to get caught. Those are two different things, just in case you’re keeping score. I wanted to stop, but Her Royal Highness had developed a taste for danger. Andrea told me that as long as I kept my mouth shut she’d still throw some more money my way.”

  “You took the money.”

  “Why not?” Karen stood, pushing herself off the bed with quite a bit of effort. “No one was getting hurt, not really. So what if some old ladies were getting their rings stolen? The hotels were insured. We were kids having a lark. And now I was getting paid for doing nothing.”

  Then it occurred to me what went wrong. “This was all working out great for you, I guess, until that guy got beaten unconscious, huh?”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “I’m some kinda cop, remember? But,” I confessed, “I still don’t see what this had to do with the fire.”

  “When that guy got knocked unconscious, Andrea panicked. She said she was going to the cops, but that she’d leave my name out of it.”

  “You didn’t believe her.”

  Karen bowed her head. “The funny part is, I did. I suppose I was always a little jealous of Andrea. I think every girl in Lincoln was jealous of her, and maybe getting involved with her the way I did back then made me see her in a different light. I guess I grew to not like her so much, but she could keep a secret. I trusted her.”

  “But Sam didn’t. He couldn’t afford to. The stakes were bigger for him.”

  Her jaw nearly hit the top of my shoes. “Sam! You know about Sam?”

  “Yeah, I know about him, good old Sudden Sam. But why don’t you tell me about him anyway?”

  “I told Sam about Andrea,” she confessed. “It was stupid, I know. Even though I trusted Andrea, I was afraid. I mean, I had stopped doing this shit for him weeks before, but …” Tears began rolling down Karen’s cheeks. “He told me to talk Andrea out of going to the cops. He told me that if he was going down he’d take me and Andrea with him. He held a razor to me and threatened to carve up my face if I didn’t get Andrea to change her mind. He said he had a friend on the cops who would know if Andrea turned herself in. ‘I might not be able to get to her, my shaineh maideleh, but I’ll get to you,’ “ Karen imitated Sam’s lilt perfectly, dragging a skeletally thin finger across her wet face. “He sliced open my cheek.”

  “You went to talk to Andrea.”

  “I waited until everyone was asleep, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I showed her where Sam had cut me, but Andrea had made up her mind. When she wouldn’t listen, I guess I just lost it. I was crying and shaking with fear of what Sam would do to me. I guess Andrea was coming to put her arm around me and … I … I pushed her away.” Karen doubled over, again grabbing her side.

  “So you pushed her,” I prompted. “So what?”

  “But she tripped. She fell back against her cot. I was still so furious with her. I started taunting her, telling her about what Sam was going to do to us, but she didn’t move. Andrea never moved. She wasn’t breathing. She had no pulse. She must have fallen awkwardly and snapped her neck.”

  “You panicked.”

  “I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I was a stupid seventeen-year-old girl.”

  I hung my head, knowing finally how the fire had started. “You lit her bed on fire to cover it up. How stupid could you be?”

  “No! I mean I did, but not then, not right away. First, I ran to the only other person I thought I could go to.”

  “Sam.” It all made a kind of horrible sense now, I thought, balling my good hand into a fist. “What happened when you went to him?”

  “He h
elped me. He told me to stay outside while he went to make sure Andrea was dead. When he was sure, he brought me back into the workers’ quarters and told me to light her bed on fire to cover up the evidence. He’d put her back on the bed. He told me to use a cigarette to light up the bed and spray a little lighter fluid onto the fire once it started. I told him I couldn’t do it. I knew she was dead, but I just couldn’t do it.”

  “But you did do it, didn’t you?”

  Her tears came in waves now. “Yes, yes, I did it. Sam smacked me in the mouth so hard he knocked my front teeth out. He told me he’d kill me if I didn’t do as he said. After I was done, I was to meet him in the employee parking lot.”

  “The fire spread so fast, though, Karen. What really happened?”

  “I was too frightened to wait until the cigarette caught on the mattress, so I … I doused her with lighter fluid and threw a match on her. I couldn’t believe how fast it spread. So I grabbed Andrea’s journal and ran. That stupid journal, it meant so much to her. By the time I got out, it … the … it was an inferno.” Karen clapped her hands over her ears. “They were screaming, screaming. When I shut my eyes I can still hear them screaming.”

  “How’d you get away?”

  “Before the fire trucks came, we were already on our way.”

  “To where?” I asked.

  “Sam kept a little cabin not too far away from Monticello Raceway. When things quieted down, he got my teeth fixed and smuggled me over the border to Canada. He was happy to be rid of me.”

  “Until …”

  Karen explained that she had drifted around Canada for a few years, working as a waitress mostly, but the fire and her victims were never far from her thoughts. Though she tried to stay away, the guilt over what she’d done kept pulling her back east. She said she felt compelled to find a way to deal with what she’d done. Then, in Toronto, outside an old synagogue, a man approached her and asked her the same question I’d been asked: Are you a proud Jew? It was an epiphany of sorts. From the second she heard Judas Wannsee speak that night, Karen Rosen knew what she would do with the rest of her life. Eventually, Wannsee bought the old bungalow colony. To Karen’s way of thinking, it was meant to be.