The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  Jack trudged along, seeing how the upper windows of the houses filled with the bright gold of the late afternoon sun; white airplane contrails cut the blue sky above. And then, at the corner, he stopped and looked down. For the first time since his youth, he was standing over the spot where his younger brother had been slain. He stared at the sidewalk, half-expecting to see bloodstains on the cracked concrete. But the concrete itself had probably been replaced a number of times since that fateful day—a reminder that this was one very cold case indeed.

  A flock of sparrows chittered loudly up in the branches of a scrappy little tree. Jack looked around. Across the way, a couple of the old houses had been sandblasted and renovated, maybe by some of the artsy types who had been moving in and trying to rejuvenate the neighborhood; they called themselves “urban pioneers.” A block down was the corner where the diner had once stood, where the patrol cops had stopped in before they could witness two local boys getting jumped.

  Jack stared down again. There should have been a memorial on this spot, a permanent one, a bronze plaque dedicated to a teenage kid who had been so cheerful, such a natural athlete, so full of life. The detective made a solemn vow: I swear that I will find out who was responsible for what happened to you, Petey. And I will bring him to justice.

  Somewhere, maybe just a mile away—if he was still in this world—lived the man who had set this killing in motion. And there was no statute of limitations on murder.

  Jack stood there a few minutes, musing. It was a strange thing: an Italian man and two Negro boys, together in Red Hook, back in the sixties. Like oil and water. Mulignans, the Italians called their neighbors to the east, meaning “eggplants,” referring to their dark skin. There was no love lost.

  The boy with the knife, Jack’s visitor yesterday, one Darnel Teague Jr., had never known the name of the man who had hired him. Dead tired, soaked with sweat, as he was getting off a shift as a dishwasher in a Fort Greene restaurant, Darnel had been approached by an Italian-American man, black-haired, medium height and build, maybe thirty years old. It had been very late, and the street was dark, and the man was sitting out front in a sharp-looking car, an Eldorado, maybe, or an LTD. He called out as Darnel walked out onto the sidewalk, but the teenager ignored him. The man called again, using Darnel’s name this time. The boy approached the car cautiously, leery of talking to some strange white man at that hour of the night (or at any hour, for that matter), but the visitor quickly piqued his interest.

  “Word on the street is that you’re a smart kid. I bet you don’t want to be a dishwasher in some shithole all your life.”

  And then Darnel was in the car, poised to jump out. The man drove them out of the neighborhood, up Atlantic Avenue, and then pulled over on a deserted side street. He made it clear that he knew quite a bit about Darnel, about his membership in the gang, about his juvie record: shoplifting, grand theft auto, possession of a homemade zip gun. (Ingredients: a piece of wood for the handle, a section of car aerial for the barrel, a strong rubber band. That sounded playful, except the thing could fire a .22 bullet. They came in very handy in rumbles with Red Hook’s white street gangs.)

  “I’ve got a project for you,” the man had said. “We’ve got somebody over in Red Hook who needs to be taught a little lesson.” He didn’t explain who the we was, but—judging by the man’s stylish car, his two-tone shirt, his heavy Italian accent—Darnel knew enough not to ask. But he did have one question. “Why don’t you get one of your own people to deal with this?”

  The man had not answered—he just reached into his back pocket and took out an envelope. “This is all the explanation you’re gonna need.”

  Still wary, Darnel looked inside. Ten crisp fifty-dollar bills. And this was back in the sixties, when that had seemed like a fantastic amount of money for a young colored man. Hell, for anyone …

  “What you want me to do?” he said.

  “We just want you to shake a couple of kids up.”

  Jack, hearing the story decades later, had been frustrated by Darnel’s vagueness. If he was going to reopen this case, he would need some definite ground for charges.

  But then, according to the tale, the stranger had taken things a step further. He reached out, opened the glove compartment, and handed over a switchblade. “This might come in handy.”

  Now Jack stood on the corner where the schooling had been done, although he still had no idea what the lesson was supposed to have been. He thought about Darnel Teague, the teenager, and Teague, the man. All of his life and career he had nursed fantasies of what he might do if he ever ran into his brother’s killer. One thing was sure: he had never imagined that he might just let the perp walk away, alive and scot-free.

  It was nice to think that criminal justice was cut-and-dried: you caught the bad guys and put them away. But the system was riddled with compromise. Vicious criminals were allowed to plea bargain every day or were turned into confidential informants and sent back out on the streets. The principle was simple: you did what you could to land the biggest fish. Jack’s choice had been equally clear: he could exact revenge on one lone ex-teenager, or he could let the man go in exchange for the information he was mulling over now.

  So he had let Darnel Teague walk out of his kitchen and back into the world. And now he ran his hand along his jaw, pondering. An Italian-American man, a black teenager. Brooklyn, 1965. Way back then, who would have dared to bridge the gap between the races? Who would have been bold—or crazy—enough?

  He walked quickly back to his car.

  “WHY DON’T YOU BRIGHTEN this place up a little?”

  Jack glanced around his old friend’s office. “Open the windows, get some overhead lighting. … It looks like Don Corleone’s den in here.”

  Larry Cosenza sat back in his massive leather armchair and shrugged. He was a handsome man, broad-shouldered, with a full head of bright white hair. “This is what people want. They think it means respect for the dead. You know how things are around here: it’s not about change.”

  They were sitting in the Cosenza Funeral Home, in the heart of Carroll Gardens. The neighboring areas were gentrifying rapidly, with sushi restaurants and French bistros pouring in, with a flood of young hipsters who couldn’t afford Manhattan rents, but the Gardens were a last remaining bastion of the old-school Italian ways. Out front, amidst dark perennial shrubs, cherubs sprayed water in a little aquamarine fountain, next to a statue of the Virgin Mary.

  Larry placed his hands on his massive old desk. “So: to what do I owe the pleasure?” It had been years since their last reunion, when Jack had come to consult his childhood friend about another Red Hook case.

  He stood up and wandered over to a credenza covered with sports trophies; his friend was sometimes referred to as the unofficial mayor of Carroll Gardens and his business evidently sponsored several local kids’ teams.

  Jack hefted a softball trophy. “You should have some of these for bocce,” he said. The little local park still held a sandpit where old geezers in Members Only jackets and tweed caps could gather, tossing the heavy metal balls and reliving their glory days, when a sparrow couldn’t fart in this neighborhood without the consent of the Mob and the International Longshoremen’s Union.

  “You didn’t come here to talk about sports,” Larry said.

  Jack turned and came around to his chair in front of the man’s desk. He sat down slowly, as if his joints ached. “I’m gonna tell you something, Larry, and I need you to keep it to yourself.”

  The funeral director shrugged again. “No problem.”

  “No, really. I need you to swear.”

  Cosenza’s eyebrows went up. “You want me to prick my finger? What are we, kids again?”

  Jack just frowned.

  Cosenza’s hands went up in surrender. “Okay, okay: I swear. Now what’s on your mind?”

  As Jack told the tale, he gripped the sides of his chair in order to keep his hands from shaking.

  When it was over, Larry Cose
nza sighed. “You’re really bringin’ up some ancient history here.”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s not ancient to me.” He leaned forward. “I need your help. You know this neighborhood as well as anybody.”

  Cosenza reached out to the leather blotter in the center of his desk and picked up a heavy glass paperweight. Then he sat back, staring into it as if it were a crystal ball. “Let me ask you something: what are you hoping to achieve here?”

  “Achieve?”

  “You looking for closure? That’s what people yak about these days: ‘Finding closure with the dead.’” Cosenza shook his head. “You and I both deal with this every day. And so you know the dirty little secret: we don’t want ‘closure.’ We want them back. We want do-overs. We want to make things right because they weren’t right the first time around. But the dead don’t come back. They’re gone for good.”

  Jack stood up again, restless, and paced the office, his shoes sinking into the thick beige carpet. “This isn’t for me, Larry. This isn’t about me. It’s about Petey. It’s about getting him the justice he deserves.” He stopped and turned to his old friend. “I know he’s gone, and I know nothing’s going to bring him back. But that doesn’t mean that I’m just gonna let the people who planned this get away scot-free.”

  Cosenza swiveled in his chair and looked out his office window for a moment. Then he sighed and swiveled back. “So what are you thinking?”

  Jack nodded, glad to have his friend aboard. “I’m thinking, who would have gone to the blacks for help back then? I’m thinking Joey Gallo.” While the rest of the big mafiosi of that era had kept to their own families and certainly their own race, Gallo had been a renegade. He’d been obsessed with expanding his criminal empire and saw a great opportunity in opening up dealings with the black community. He had taken a lot of flak for that from his own people.

  Cosenza dropped the paperweight back on his desk. “You said the kid described the stranger as black-haired. Joe Gallo was blond.”

  Jack shrugged. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t behind it.”

  Cosenza frowned. “Maybe, but he went upstate in ’sixty-one.” The notorious Red Hook mobster had been convicted on extortion charges. “And he was inside for ten years.”

  “He still could’ve called the shots.”

  Cosenza made a face. “Yeah—but why? Why would a hotshot like that have it in for two harmless local kids? You wouldn’t have been a blip on his radar.”

  Jack nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve gone over and over it in my head, and I can’t even imagine a reason why he might have had any beef with Petey or with me. There’s only one thing I can think of: he must’ve had something against my old man. Or somebody did.”

  Cosenza nodded. “I can’t say that would surprise me. Your father could be a real tough guy.”

  Jack snorted. “He could be a total bastard, when he had a few drinks in him. Which was not exactly rare.”

  “So somehow he crossed the Mob?”

  Jack shrugged. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be bothering you.”

  Cosenza frowned. “Is this an officially sanctioned investigation? You got the NYPD behind you?”

  “No. Why?”

  Cosenza leaned forward. “I know you don’t spend any time around here these days, but you can see how things are changing. Maybe you get the impression that there’s only a few of these made guys left—that they’re all ancient and toothless, and spend all their time playing the ponies over at the OTB. But I want to warn you, Jackie, as an old friend: you go sticking your nose in the wrong places around here, you might just find out there’s plenty of bite in them left.”

  Jack waved a hand in dismissal. “They don’t mess with cops.”

  “Unless cops mess with them. Anyways, I would think you might wanna stay away from poking around these particular parts.”

  It was hard for Jack to argue, considering that he bore the scar of a bullet hole on his chest—a souvenir of his last unofficial investigation in Red Hook.

  “Can you just put out a few feelers, maybe find someone who knew my pop back in the day?”

  Cosenza sighed. “It goes against my better judgment, but I’ll see what I can do. Listen, you wanna come over for dinner tonight? Sandra would love to see you, and Lord knows there’s always enough food on the table.” He leaned forward. “Hey, are you single these days? Last time, I seem to remember that you were thinking about getting married …”

  “I wasn’t just thinking about it. I went out and bought the damn ring.”

  “So what happened?”

  Jack squirmed in his chair. “It didn’t work out.” That was the understatement of the year. One fateful New Year’s Eve, heart bursting with love, he had brought his girlfriend Michelle to an expensive restaurant, gotten down on one knee, and popped the question. Michelle’s response had been a bit unorthodox: she announced that she was having an affair, jumped up, and ran out. She never came back.

  He crossed his arms. “Why are you asking?”

  “Sandy’s cousin is coming over. You remember Trish, don’t you?”

  Jack grinned. “She’s hard to forget.” Trish the Dish. Back in the day, the neighborhood boys had followed her around wide-eyed, mesmerized by the wearer of the tightest sweater in Red Hook.

  Larry waggled his eyebrows. “She’s divorced now, you know.”

  Jack shook his head. “Sounds tempting. Some other time.”

  He said good-bye, then went out and sat in his car. Home?

  On impulse, he turned the ignition and drove off, not toward Midwood, but just east of it, to Flatbush. The Dhammapada Tibetan Buddhist Center was located in a rather rough section of the neighborhood, in an old brick building above a check-cashing joint. Jack had first visited the place a couple of years ago on official business, after a local teen accidentally killed one of the staffers by throwing an empty bottle.

  The director was a little British nun. After the arrest of the young perpetrator, she had prevailed upon Jack to assist her in helping the kid. Normally he might have written her off as an armchair liberal, but she seemed to genuinely want to get involved, so he had—grudgingly—hooked her up with a sympathetic ear in the D.A.’s office. Every now and then, he liked to drop by and see how their little social experiment was going.

  He pulled up in front of the center but was disappointed to find that the door was locked.

  He got back in his car. And went back to work.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHEN NADIM’S CELL PHONE went off, the sound made him jump as if he had been poked with a hot needle. He dug frantically in his pocket, sure the other patrons of the little café would stare. He yanked the phone out and opened it to stop the ringing, even before he saw who was calling.

  “Nadim? Is that you? Where the hell are you?”

  Rafik-kahn, his boss. In a foul mood, as usual. Nadim pictured him ensconced in his Plexiglas-walled booth, sitting fat and lordly behind his desk like a rajah on the back of an elephant.

  “Saabir dropped the car off half an hour ago,” the man continued in angry Urdu. “Not you nor I, Nadim, neither one of us is making a rupee while it’s just sitting at the curb.”

  Nadim pressed his free hand against his forehead. “I … I’m not feeling well. I think I ate something very bad for my stomach.”

  “Again with the sickness? I’m not running a convalescent home. How many times have you called in sick in just the last month?”

  Nadim rubbed his eyes. How could he explain all these absences? If his boss knew what was really up with him, he’d be fired on the spot. “Tomorrow night,” was all he said. “I’ll drive a double tomorrow. I promise.”

  “Bah,” his boss spat. “If I could put your promises in the bank, I could buy the Mohatta Palace. I’m warning you, Nadim: if you don’t come in tomorrow night, don’t bother coming back at all.”

  Nadim hung up. He really did feel sick to his stomach now. Life was turned upside down. He should have finished his shift in the car
this morning, bought a few things in the deli, picked up a copy of the Sada-e-Pakistan paper at the local newsstand, come home to make himself some dinner, had a good smoke and a read, then pulled down the shades and gone to bed. But his usual deli had been closed for some mysterious reason, so he had gone to an unfamiliar one a couple of blocks away, and so had been set in motion this terrible deviation from his hard-earned quiet, anonymous path. He hadn’t slept, had barely been able to keep down any food.

  After passing a couple of hours in the aquarium this morning—killing time was the idiom, if he remembered correctly from his courses in English as a Second Language—he had wandered over onto Brighton Beach Avenue, in the neighborhood of the Russians. He had trudged aimlessly back and forth along their short main avenue, listening to their foreign tongue. They were aliens here in America too, though they were no longer looked at as public enemies. No, since the towers had fallen, that role had shifted toward men who looked like him.

  He had walked until he could walk no longer, then drifted over to the beach and sat on a bench staring out at the ocean, wishing he had never come to this land of false promises, false dreams. The day passed slowly, so very slowly, but the sun did move overhead, and the afternoon shadows lengthened on the sand. Nadim contemplated returning to his apartment, but who knew what might be waiting for him? He wanted desperately to be back among his own people, to listen to Urdu rather than gruff Russian, but he couldn’t risk arrest. He would never go back into captivity; that was one promise he had made to himself, one promise he would be sure to keep.

  In the evening, he stayed in the café as long as he could, buying a cup of soup or a glass of tea now and then to keep the proprietor happy and avoid drawing attention to himself, but he knew he couldn’t stay all night. He looked at the clock on the wall: just about now, he thought, he should have been driving someone to the airport or to some Manhattan rendezvous, should have been flowing along the dark streets of the city, safe in his driver’s seat, in control of his destiny.