Long Island Noir

by Kaylie Jones

  There are about a dozen taverns and clubs that huddle around Wantagh station, borne of an era which dictated that the suburban response to urban stress should be alcohol consumption followed by driving home. Though that attitude is presently frowned upon, the establishments have rooted deeply and continue to thrive in the new culture of designated drivers and taxis.

  I had no designated driver, and though my cash might cover cab fare, I did not need a witness to my breaking into the garage, so I walked the two miles to the house.

  Being on foot alone at night, even in the overgrown suburbia of Wantagh, the feeling of isolation was overwhelming. This had been Jerusalem, my parents’ promised land. They had traveled here as children, and told me stories of Victorian homes surrounded by forests and farms; a dozen streets laid out with tract housing, then a huge cornfield, then another tract. Friends and cousins with backyards, lawns, well water, and above-ground pools. Success.

  I looked for this magic on my own childhood visits, but found only the used dreams that had been inherited by cops and plumbers, bus drivers and bank tellers. Those with the luxury to dream big had already rolled east. We went to down-at-the-heels bowling alleys and the drive-in at Westbury and breathed in the last wisps of the good life. My mother and father were blind to that reality, and I realize now that blindness can be a blessing.

  The garage felt vast and soulless without the car. Whether it had been towed by the municipality for some infraction, or seized by the now rightful owners, was irrelevant; it only served to up the ante on my increasingly claustrophobic circumstances. This morning, after the first truly cold night spent on a concrete floor, I walked the two miles back. I have been standing here for several hours, and the clock is about to run out.

  Three unmarked vans will have left police headquarters a few minutes ago. Soon they will park on the opposite corners from this establishment and discharge the officers who will execute the raid. Soon. I have timed their arrival to cover my escape, but the schedule has absolutely no flexibility.

  The weapon stuck in my waistband feels very heavy, and it digs into my empty stomach. I need to decide now. If I misjudge this I will not live to avenge my son.

  There is a crushing moment of self-awareness that descends upon me as I consider my next move. These instants of vicious clarity are thankfully rare, but when they hit it is with the brutal force of unfiltered truth, like visions of dying alone that visit in the night.

  It comes to me that it matters not a whit whether I am successful. Wantagh is where my family goes to die. If I fail, I will most likely die. But if I triumph, then what? If this day results in my greatest score in a life spent chasing the great score, then what? I will be penniless in six months or less, living in a shelter, unclean, and again contemplating violence. And violence, by all reputable accounts, comes easier the second time around, and easier still thereafter. Whatever good comes into my life I will destroy. And if some all-powerful deity grants me a second chance, with full benefit of the memories of this life, I’ll make short work of ruining that too. Because I am a monster. We are all monsters here. We sacrifice careers and relationships, the bonds of family. We sacrifice our sons. Nothing is left but need, ever growing.

  The moment is paralyzing in its weight but mercifully brief. An old green Saturn sedan stops at the light in front of me, then turns. Its license plate is GSB117, and there is a Padres baseball cap sitting on the rear window shelf. Now I am golden. GSB. Giants Super Bowl. 117. 711. Get it? I was living in San Diego.

  I open my jacket and shake it once to billow it away from the outline of the gun, and walk quickly toward the bar’s side door.

  Sometimes these decisions are made for you.

  PAST PRESIDENT

  BY SARAH WEINMAN

  Great Neck

  On Monday morning, six days after she was voted the shul’s first female president, no one showed up at the annual general meeting. Under normal circumstances, Pamela Rosenstein would have raised a stink about the collective disrespect. She would have been infuriated at being undermined by a group, not just by individuals who had opposed her appointment in the first place.

  But these weren’t normal circumstances. Pamela had also skipped out on the general meeting. Instead, all twelve members of the shul board stood by the freshly dug grave of Morris Cohn, the man whom Pamela had replaced. Morris’s retirement after thirty-five bitter, bullish years as the Greater Synagogue of Great Neck’s top macher had not been voluntary. Pamela’s sudden and unexpected ascension came after Morris’s wife found him in his study with a bullet in his head and three more in his chest. He’d lingered in the hospital for five days, never regaining consciousness but still inspiring his wife to proclaim he would come out of it “in no time.” He never did, and finally expired Sunday afternoon, while his wife had stepped out for a brief bathroom break. Now, at the grave, Mrs. Cohn looked like she was about to relieve herself of a greater load, what with the ferocious stink eye she affixed the shul’s collective, Pamela included.

  The wind whipped Pamela’s red-gold locks into her face, and as she smoothed her hair back, a terse whisper sounded in her left ear: “You’ll certainly be sitting pretty now.”

  Pamela looked to her left, but no one stood next to her. She nonetheless recognized the unmistakable Southern drawl—and the trail of orchid-scented perfume—of Lyssa Kamp, chairwoman of the social committee. She was loyal to Morris and Morris only, and had been the loudest of Pamela’s many opponents. It would be just like Lyssa to suspect Pamela had some sinister hand in Morris’s death, when Pamela hadn’t even met the old codger until two days before his shooting, during kiddush after Saturday services. And that meeting had only come at the insistence of the vice president, who had been one of the first to welcome Pamela into the synagogue community and thought she and Morris should meet each other. “You never know if she’ll come in handy,” he’d said, as Morris and Pamela stared awkwardly at one another.

  Little did the vice president know how accurate his words would be.

  As Morris’s coffin was lowered into the ground, Pamela took stock of her fellow board members. So much gray hair. So many wrinkles. That usually meant experience and wisdom, but for the past week she’d seen little sign of those traits, instead replaced by bountiful heaps of pettiness and malice. The worst of it had come four days ago. As Morris lay in a coma, Lyssa and her fellow social committee members knocked on her door, presented Pamela with a document, and told her, in Lyssa’s sweetly oozing drawl, that fifty shul members had signed or would sign a petition to remove Pamela as president.

  Three hours later, at the behest of the vice president, Lyssa had apologized, but both women knew this was for show. All it would take was one tiny mistake on Pamela’s part and the war would begin in earnest.

  It wasn’t as if Pamela had asked for the job. No one wanted it. Who could follow in Morris’s footsteps? Who could grease community wheels and cajole donations from shul members to the tune of $3.4 million a year, which still wouldn’t account for the extensive renovations the eighty-year-old edifice needed to heal its crumbling infrastructure? Who could convince an Orthodox rabbi to work for them when the board couldn’t decide if they should modernize and downgrade their religious observance to Reform, or stubbornly cling to a 1950s-style orthodoxy nobody practiced anymore? And who’d want the hassle of replacing Morris when so much of what made him effective, however brutal his methods, relied on knowledge he never shared with anyone?

  But what rankled Pamela most was why she had been chosen as shul president in the first place. It wasn’t for her religiosity, acquired only five years ago after a later-in-life epiphany that she should move away from secularism and reacquaint herself with a more Jewish way of life. It wasn’t because of her leadership abilities, for she’d pissed people off mightily in her last full-time job, getting suspended three times and eventually asked, more nicely than warranted, to consider some other line of work.

  No, the reason Stephen Pascal, who a
s vice president had been helping to lead the shul almost as long as Morris Cohn, asked Pamela to step in six days ago was because of her former job with the 81st Precinct of the New York City Police Department. And specifically, her specialty in homicide detection. That meant Pamela’s survey of her fellow board members wasn’t just a matter of politics, but of murder. And everyone assembled—even Stephen—was a suspect.

  She’d said no, multiple times. It had been easy when the request was straightforward, a little less the next time, when Stephen added a pleading tone to his voice. Then, on try number three, he brought out his trump card: Pamela had been so effective at defusing that precarious situation, when a Satmar hasid from Williamsburg wandered into the wrong Bed-Stuy street corner at the wrong time. He got out, but not before Pamela fired two bullets into the neck of his attacker. She was a heroine to the Jewish community then; she could be the same here in Great Neck.

  In his many appeals Pamela could see why Stephen was an effective sidekick to Morris’s more showy, less politic personality. Stephen flattered. He reasoned. He explained. And eventually, he convinced Pamela that her newly visible position would be a good cover for finding out the truth about Morris Cohn. He persuaded her precisely by underplaying his hand, not realizing it was the very guilt Pamela felt about the Bed-Stuy shooting which bolstered her policing career that prompted her to reconsider her Jewish self, and to leave New York City altogether.

  Pamela had no one to consult before accepting the offer. Not her husband, who’d walked out on her when she announced she was ba’al teshuva, returning to the faith. Not her partner, who as far as she knew was still a cop, though no longer homicide, and no longer with the 8-8. Not her boss, canned two months after Pamela on embezzlement charges, news that surprised her more than anyone. Not even her dog Marky, a Boston Terrier who didn’t care about anything except when he’d next eat and when he could go for a walk.

  But she knew the real, awful reason why she’d accepted, an answer trumping curiosity, the desire for justice, or random whim. The truth was, she was bored out of her mind. Pamela had moved to Great Neck thinking she’d be a better Jew there than in New York City, with all its temptations to break Shabbat and lead a non-Orthodox life. The ultra-Orthodox enclaves were no option for her because she could only stomach wearing a skirt between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday and couldn’t stand the total lack of regard for women. But Great Neck was so fucking slow compared to the five boroughs. Even Staten Island. It was her choice of bed, she had to lie in it, but she might as well make her life more interesting, more meaningful, in the process.

  Even if no one would appreciate the gesture.

  The wind wouldn’t stop whipping Pamela’s hair. She’d thought often of chopping all of her locks off, going bald and embracing it. But she knew she wouldn’t. She loved her hair too much to let it go to waste, even if it meant she had to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping it out of her face. It was at this very moment that another voice said, “Don’t you know how to act appropriate at a funeral?”

  Pamela had her hair out of her eyes, now looking directly at Henri Durocher. Oh great, she thought as her heart started to plummet. Just what I need, a lecture from the synagogue’s richest donor. Any other venue and she would have fought back. His Holocaust survivor status didn’t faze Pamela, nor did his position as the owner of the country’s largest hedge fund, built from scratch after he emigrated to the U.S., by way of Birkenau, on his nineteenth birthday. Pamela had run into her fair share of powerful old men and the appropriate investigative pressure usually felled much of their formidable nature. But here, at a cemetery, the only words she could muster were: “Clearly, appropriateness eluded me for a moment.”

  “Don’t let it happen again. I sided with Stephen only because he is a very convincing man. Don’t disabuse him, and me, of that belief.” Durocher wagged his gnarly finger at her. Finger-wagging! Pamela wanted so much to laugh, but like so many of her impulses, she’d have to save them for later, when she was in the public role of president and private role of investigator. Even at the age of seventy-eight, Durocher was rich enough, cunning enough, and dangerous enough to land high on her potential suspect list, despite being one of Morris’s best friends.

  But could Henri, or any of these other graying board members, truly be capable of murder? Pamela knew well that anyone could kill, given the right motivation, the best weapon, and well-timed rage, and she would certainly ferret out all of those variables. Yet looking around the grave, Pamela’s first instinct was to rule out all of her fellow board members. It was one thing to stab in the back metaphorically, which most of these members did with astonishing ease. It was quite another to elevate character assassination to out-and-out homicide.

  Then an odd movement caught the corner of Pamela’s eye. She couldn’t turn around, because it happened just as Morris’s coffin was lowered into the ground and the aging pallbearers picked up nearby shovels and began to throw dirt into the hole. As Morris’s wife and two sons started saying Kaddish, Pamela craned her neck toward the cemetery exit. And added someone new to the potential suspect list.

  The crowd dispersed after Kaddish and Pamela quietly slipped away from the group. Being ostracized had its advantages, she thought as she hurried toward the exit, hoping she could catch the mysterious decamper. It helped that the man’s limp prevented him from walking very fast, so that by the time Pamela reached the long train of cars, he was still fiddling with his keys.

  “Excuse me, do you have a minute?” she asked.

  He looked up at Pamela, startled. Then he nodded, signaling she should sit in the passenger seat.

  “I think it might be better if we spoke out here,” Pamela said.

  “It definitely would be better if we spoke in the car.” The man looked frail, but his voice boomed with easy authority. She wouldn’t have expected anything less of Stuart Cohn, two years the elder of Morris.

  Pamela acquiesced, but not before making sure her smartphone was turned on. It didn’t hurt to have the GPS broadcasted out in the event that something happened, a lesson that came in handy several years ago when a scrape in the 88th almost turned out to be her last case.

  When the doors shut, Stuart said, “I know what you must be thinking.”

  “Why don’t you tell me.”

  “That I must be a horrible person to walk away from my own brother’s funeral.”

  “Should I think you’re horrible?”

  Stuart Cohn lowered his head to the steering wheel. “Maybe. I know I do. But Morris was asking for trouble this last year. He went too far. Pushed too many buttons and made too many enemies.”

  “Were you one of those enemies?” asked Pamela.

  Stuart jerked his head up. He was frail, but the intensity of his green eyes was as formidable as it must have been during his prime in the family business. She wasn’t afraid of him, at least from a cop-to-potential-suspect standpoint. But from a shul-president-to-rich-congregant standpoint, she felt a small sting of disrespect.

  “You can take the woman out of the precinct …” began Stuart, before he realized what he was saying. Then he clamped his mouth shut.

  “It’s all right,” Pamela assured him. “I think the board knows the real reason I was appointed, and none of them like it much. Even Stephen wasn’t happy, and he was the one doing the appointing.”

  They lapsed into silence. Pamela was patient and used to such lulls. They allowed her focus to sharpen, to think of follow-up questions. And in the meantime, the person across from her would squirm a little as he or she chafed from the strain of silence.

  Stuart was a pro too, but even he succumbed. “We weren’t getting along near the end,” he finally admitted, “but there was a good reason.”

  “What was it?”

  “Morris lost all my money.”

  “All of it?”

  “Ninety percent, which for a multimillionaire is as close to all of it as one ever gets.”

  “I didn�
�t know Morris was that rich,” Pamela said.

  “The man liked to think he was a genius with money. So he got a little lucky with stock options and hedge funds! Until he wasn’t so lucky anymore.”

  The pain on Stuart’s face was real and Pamela didn’t know what to say for a moment. It was terrible. And yet, it was so Morris to take his brother’s trust and abuse it mercilessly.

  “There’s no way I can ever make it back,” said Stuart. In a smaller voice, he added, “I still haven’t told my wife.”

  “So why should I rule you out?”

  “Of course you would ask me that,” Stuart snarled. “Because you can never, ever take the precinct out of the woman. And if you must know, I was having dinner with my wife when

  Morris was getting himself shot. I’m sure the restaurant will have a credit card receipt to confirm, should you feel the need to check.”

  “I’m sure I will.” More charitably, Pamela then said, “I appreciate you telling me what happened.”

  Stuart brushed aside her comment with his hand. “I know I’m not the only one he did this to. Find the person who got pissed off the most, you have your man. Or your woman.” He unlocked the car doors and laughed without humor. “The fairer sex is probably more capable of killing him.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because there are a number of them who were far angrier with Morris than me.” Stuart bobbed his head toward the passenger door. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to spend some time with people I actually care about and impart some news no one wants to hear.”