The Graving Dock

by Gabriel Cohen

  He parked across the street and stepped out of his car. The club was a little nondescript brick storefront, no windows, no sign above. It was almost comforting to see that places like this still existed, some small tie to his past, before the area got fancied up with the name Carroll Gardens. Back in the day, this had all been brawling Red Hook, and such clubs were a dime a dozen. Inside sat some of the most powerful men in New York. There had been lots of them then, and they ruled the docks. Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia, head of Murder Inc.; Crazy Joe Gallo and his gang; Joseph Profaci; Carmine “The Snake” Persico; the list went on and on. When Jack was a kid, such thugs had been dark powers in the neighborhood, the kind of men people didn’t even dare talk about behind closed doors.

  Now it wasn’t just the old businesses that were on the way out; the waterfront kingdoms were waning, too. Not just because of the efforts of eager, career-building prosecutors like Rudy Giuliani, or the invasions of yuppies, but inescapable shifts of time and tide. The shipping industry had drifted away from Brooklyn. Gone were the days of infinite swag, when the mob and the longshoremen’s union had diverted mountains of goods from the holds of vessels into local basements and the trunks of cars.

  Which was not to say that the day of the dons was over for good. There were other lucrative businesses to infiltrate, and when the feds busted one they moved on to another. Gravel and concrete. Trash hauling. The Fulton Fish Market. And construction projects, the specialty of the man who owned this particular club, one John Carpsio Jr.

  Last night, the man outside Maureen Duffy’s had played dumb, but a computer check of his license revealed that he was a known associate of Carpsio, and the car had been registered to a Carpsio-owned business. Carpsio himself had been indicted twice, though never convicted. The first time, back in the nineties, had been for dealing narcotics. In the second case, he had been allegedly involved in a common type of labor scam in which contractors charged for providing union labor for a City project, though they actually hired illegal immigrants who were too scared to complain about their appallingly low pay.

  Jack crossed the street. The social club was in the middle of the block, not far from a store window full of trendy baby clothes and a restaurant advertising “French-Asian fusion.” The old metal door had a diamond-shaped little window cut in the center, blocked by a faded red curtain. When Jack knocked, the curtain slid aside. He held up his tin. Someone inside gave him the hairy eyeball, then the curtain slipped back into place. The door didn’t open for another thirty seconds.

  An old geezer wearing a beige leather sports jacket finally invited him in. Jack glanced around the tiny club, which resembled a basement rec room. Cheap wood paneling, an ancient jukebox, a bottom-shelf wet bar—everything overhung with a pall of cigar smoke. It was a dump. Jack knew the old-school mobsters didn’t like to flash their money, and lived in modest neighborhood row houses instead of suburban McMansions, but still, it was depressing. Cops had to work out of cruddy precinct houses, crammed with drab furniture, glommed with institutional paint, but that was due to lack of funds. What was the point of making big money if you still had to surround yourself with this?

  Three middle-aged men in athletic clothes sat around a card table in the middle of the room, and several other men, older, stood looking over their shoulders. A game of dominoes. The older men wore sporty tweed caps, jackets that might once have seemed sporty (epaulets, lots of zippers…Member’s Only). They looked like the kind of old-timers who hung out at the OTB over on Court Street, cheering on the ponies. The twilight of the gods.

  One of the men at the table stood up, walked over to the bar, and sat on a stool. He gazed up at a big-screen TV, which was playing one of those cheesy courtroom shows where ex-roommates duked it out over unpaid bills.

  The geezer who had opened the door led Jack over for an audience. John Carpsio Jr. was a small man, trim, maybe mid-fifties, wearing bleached jeans and a blue sweatshirt. With his brushy gray crew-cut, wire-rimmed spectacles, and nondescript face, he looked, Jack thought, more like an unfriendly pharmacist than a gangster. (The kind of pharmacist who might boost his profits by substituting sugar pills for cancer prescriptions.)

  The man barely acknowledged Jack’s presence. His cronies over by the domino game studiously maintained their casual postures, but Jack could sense a tension in the air.

  He shifted on his feet. Normally, standing while an interview subject was seated would give him a psychological edge, but not now. He was the odd man out. He glanced over Carpsio’s shoulder. Up on the TV screen, a sour, unhappy-looking plaintiff hugged herself as she got smacked down, loudly, by the judge.

  Jack frowned. “Why don’t you turn that off for a minute?”

  Carpsio, in the middle of lighting a cigarette, turned and stared; he clearly wasn’t used to being told what to do in his own club. After a tense moment, he shrugged. His voice was gritty. “The noise’ll give us privacy.”

  It was hard to argue with that. Round one: Carpsio.

  The man reached over the bar and picked up a big bottle of Diet Coke. He seemed very calm. He was so calm, in fact, that Jack began to wonder if maybe he was mistaken about Carpsio’s connection to the Balfa case.

  No point in wasting time. “I bet you miss Tommy Balfa,” he said, just to see if the man would twitch.

  Carpsio didn’t blink. “Never heard of him.”

  “I’m not here because of that,” Jack said. “I know you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him.”

  Carpsio just glanced at the dominoes table, as if he was impatient to get back to it, then returned his gaze to Jack. “Who are you supposed to be, exactly?”

  Jack took out one of his business cards and laid it on the bar.

  Carpsio picked it up, then pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “I heard of you. You’re that cop took the swim in the harbor.”

  Jack did his best not to react.

  Carpsio squinted at the card again, then handed it back. “Leightner,” he said, pronouncing it correctly, like light. “I know that name. You go to P.S. 27?”

  Jack frowned. He had gone to that Red Hook elementary school, but the last thing he wanted was to discuss old times with this neighborhood blight. He felt a familiar tightness in his stomach: He realized what was coming next.

  Carpsio blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “I knew I remembered the name. I must’ve been two, three grades ahead of you. I’ll tell you one thing: I sure as hell remember what happened to your brother. Petey, right? Terrible thing. They ever catch who did it? Couple’a niggers, as I recall…”

  Jack couldn’t help scowling. His brother’s murder was something he never talked about, and certainly not with scum like this. Back when he was growing up, his father had always warned him away from such men. His father had been no prince—he had been, in fact, an abusive alcoholic—but at least he had been a hard worker. Exactly what these bastards were not, with their goddamn leisure outfits designed to show how they never had to lift a pinkie. They were just leeches, draining the livelihood of working families…He took a deep breath and rubbed the sides of his mouth; he needed to take charge of the situation, but he was coming perilously close to playing defense.

  Carpsio shook his head. “Your old man should’ve reached out. There was plenty of people in the neighborhood who would’ve been glad to help. They would’ve caught those mulignans”—Italian for “eggplants”—“and taken care of them that same fuckin’ day.” The man suddenly squinted again. “What’s this?” He was looking down, at Jack’s shoulder. He reached out, and Jack forced himself not to flinch. The man picked something microscopic off Jack’s sport coat. “Looks like a piece of lint, or something.” He grinned.

  Jack frowned. He wasn’t about to be intimidated by some little two-bit gangster. This was no Joe Profaci, no Carmine Persico. Carpsio was just a neighborhood asshole running small-time contracting scams.

  “I’m not here to shoot the shit. I want you to lay off Mauree
n Duffy. She’s just a kid—a goddamn nurse, for chrissakes—and she needs to be left out of whatever’s going on here.”

  Carpsio shrugged. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but somebody’s been yanking your chain.”

  Jack was about to protest when the front door of the club swung open and in walked a beefy man who looked like a football linebacker gone to seed. One of the two thugs who had tried to come up on Maureen Duffy the other day. The punk pulled up short when he noticed the detective.

  “Nice to see you again,” Jack said.

  The man colored, then hurried across the room and ducked out through a door behind the bar.

  Funny how the tide of an interview could turn in a second. Jack looked at Carpsio and shook his head. “Now—what were you saying?”

  Carpsio didn’t say anything for a moment. He glanced up at the TV, took another deliberate sip of his soda. He turned back to Jack with a new businesslike air. He patted his chest. “You mind if we check you out a little?”

  Jack shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  Carpsio called over one of the men from the card table, who gave Jack the most thorough frisking he had ever received, checking for a transmitter under his shirt, all through his jacket lining, even inside the cuffs of his slacks. “He’s clean,” the man concluded, and returned to his seat.

  Carpsio nodded. He pointed at Jack with his cigarette. “I’m gonna spell a few things out for you. This Duffy cooze is no angel. She was in cahoots with your dirty cop from the get-go, tryin’a shake me down.” Jack started to say something, but the man raised a hand. “Even so, I don’t have anything against her. There’s just one little problem: She’s got something that isn’t hers. She gives it back, we’re done. You wanna do a good deed, maybe you could talk to her, help her figure things out…”

  Jack scoffed. “I’m not here to run errands for you.”

  Carpsio just shrugged. “Don’t be so touchy. One hand washes the other. Maybe I could help you with something. Like this nutjob you’ve got running loose around the waterfront, whackin’ people right and left…I know things aren’t what they used to be, but I still got some eyes and ears down the docks.”

  Jack snorted. “I don’t need any help. Leave the girl alone, or the NYPD is gonna drop on you like a ton of bricks.”

  Carpsio made a sour face of his own. “I already told you. She gives back what isn’t hers, she goes her way, nobody touches her. You got my word.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  Carpsio let an unpleasant silence fill the room.

  CHAPTER thirty-seven

  I ONLY HAVE A minute,” Maureen Duffy said, looking around nervously as other nurses and doctors bustled in and out of the front entrance of Long Island College Hospital. She wore her red hair up in a bun, and looked cute as ever in her green scrubs.

  “Let’s take a little walk,” Jack said.

  The nurse hugged herself. “It’s cold out here.”

  Jack removed his coat, draped it around her shoulders, then led her around the corner. To the left, an ambulance zoomed up to the Emergency entrance. To the right, a couple of blocks away, the street ended at the waterfront, where a red tugboat was pushing a long black barge. Jack turned toward the water. The girl followed, reluctantly.

  As they came closer to the harbor, a vista opened up of the lower Manhattan skyline. Always now, that stupendous absence…Jack pressed his elbows against his sides, trying to keep warm. He turned toward the girl. “You need to know something: I can’t be around to protect you every night. And I can’t call for a patrol watch unless you tell me what’s going on.”

  Duffy chewed her lower lip, but remained silent.

  Jack felt a band of pressure building up between his eyes. Tommy Balfa had been a pain in the ass when alive, and he was proving to be a bigger pain now. Whatever the detective and Carpsio had cooked up, unless it somehow involved a homicide, it was outside his official purview. He considered taking what he knew to the boys over in the Organized Crime Division, but things would likely rebound in some unfortunate way, seeing as how he would be tainting the Dead Hero Cop. He rubbed his forehead, suddenly weary as hell. He didn’t want to let Carpsio get away with whatever bad business he was up to, but he already had enough crap to deal with. Right then, he made a resolution: He’d make an end run around the NYPD and gift his information to Ray Hillhouse, ask the FBI man to keep his name out of it. Then he’d get back to focusing on his own goddamned job.

  Meanwhile, though, there was this reckless young woman to worry about. “I just had a little talk with John Carpsio,” Jack told her.

  Duffy stayed quiet, but her somber green eyes opened wider.

  “He says you’ve got something that belongs to him. My guess is it’s just cash, or he wouldn’t have let me know about it.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You have three options here. You can cooperate with me, tell me what’s going on. Or you can cooperate with Carpsio. The third option is not very pretty.”

  Duffy still wouldn’t talk, but he had her full attention.

  “These guys will get to you eventually, Maureen. Don’t doubt it. They’ll hurt you really bad, or worse. You could try running, but I have to tell you that the track record of people who’ve done that is not very good. They’ll catch up with you, and by then they’ll be really pissed off.”

  He stopped. Duffy walked on for a few steps, then stopped, too. She turned away from him, stood facing the harbor, thinking.

  After a minute, she turned back. “I don’t know anything.”

  Jack sighed. “Then I hope you pick option two, or else one of these nights I’m gonna get a call and I’m going to have to come look at your corpse.”

  THE CHILL JANUARY WIND sent dead leaves skittering across the sidewalk, swirling after Maureen Duffy. Jack just stood and watched her walk away. He didn’t know what game she was playing, but he knew she was in over her head. A man like John Carpsio would have no compunction about stuffing her battered body in a car trunk and dropping it off somewhere along the Belt Parkway.

  The nurse turned the corner and disappeared. He glanced at his watch, though it was another day off and he didn’t have anywhere he needed to be. The Seven-six house was only a few blocks away, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to focus on work. He turned toward the waterfront and suddenly a massive wave of loneliness swept all thoughts of Maureen Duffy from his mind.

  Michelle, he wanted to shout into the breeze. He wanted to reach out and grab her shoulders and shake her. He wanted to strike her, or pull her close. He took out his cell phone and glanced hungrily at its little screen, wondering if he might have missed her call. He couldn’t believe the business about an affair. Maybe that was just a smokescreen; maybe she had gotten cold feet, scared off by his sudden proposal. Maybe she was nervous about marrying someone who was so clearly already married to his job. Maybe she was worried he would never want to have kids. He felt a rush of sympathy. Maybe she was scared and lonely, too. Maybe he could help her.

  Then he remembered what she had actually said. I’m seeing someone. It just happened. It’s nothing to do with you. His fists tightened. She had betrayed him, plain and simple. How could he have been so incredibly, stupidly blind?

  CHAPTER thirty-eight

  SOME BARS HAD REGULARS; Tony B’s had irregulars. Give me your poor, your huddled masses, your toothless, gimpy weak of liver. A sign over the garish jukebox summed up the clientele: WE’RE ALL HERE BECAUSE WE’RE NOT ALL THERE.

  The old dive was down near the East River, stuck like a barnacle to the edge of swanky Brooklyn Heights. Jack had always joked to himself that if he was ever searching for Popeye, this was where he’d start. The old sailor would feel at home here, with the life preservers hanging overhead, models of ships on the walls, dusty semaphore flags. Old photos and newspaper clippings recalled the waterfront’s World War Two heyday, when hundreds of craftsmen built great navy ships and thousands of sailors roamed this shore.

  Norma
lly he came here only when he needed to consult one of his neighborhood informants. The snitch, a scrappy little bantam who went by the nickname T, was sitting under the fog bank that enveloped the bar, accompanied as always by his true love, Janelle, who looked like a bobby-soxer ravaged by crack. The little guy straightened up expectantly, but Jack just shook his head.

  He had eaten some crappy lasagna at a pizza joint a few blocks away. After, he hadn’t been able to face the thought of returning to his empty apartment, so he had just driven around aimlessly for a while, killing time, trying to keep his mind off his troubles. Now here he was, Tony B’s…The bar was crowded. He took one of two remaining seats, over by the front window, which was made of glass blocks heavy enough to deflect a wandering punch or a tossed barstool. He ordered a Rolling Rock. Wrapped his hand around the cool green bottle, took a swig. He had never been much of a drinker, but tonight he was considering putting a dent in that reputation. It was hereditary, after all. He thought of his father on paydays, spinning like a tornado through Red Hook’s waterfront bars.

  The Old Man would certainly have appreciated Tony B’s. For years he had made his living as a stevedore in Red Hook, hauling cargo out of ships. And then some bright mind came up with the idea of containerization: instead of using muscle to lift boxes from the holds, the shipping companies could stack their cargo in huge metal containers, which could be hoisted out by cranes and set directly onto railroad cars. For every twenty men who had worked the docks before, only one was needed now. Most of the work had moved to New Jersey, where trains could roll right up to the shore. The Old Man lost his job, and then he started drinking in earnest. He’d always been a scrapper, but how could he fight something as abstract as technology? He became a walking mourner of his own ruined life.