First, Do No Harm

by Larry Karp

  “He and my father were friends,” I said. “Years ago, in Hobart.”

  “Hobart?” The woman looked as if I’d tried to force a square piece into a round hole in a jigsaw puzzle. “I thought Mr. Fleischmann came to us from a private home in Verona.”

  I warned myself not to say Murray was once a junkman. “This was a long time ago, almost sixty years. Lot of people who lived in Hobart then live somewhere else now.” Mostly under ground, I added privately.

  Shirley moved past me toward the door, moon face shining with good will. “Well, you just follow me, Mr. Firestone. Mr. Fleischmann always plays billiards in the morning.”

  Four doors down, on the left. Old men and women walked ahead of us, passed us going the other way. “The people here look in pretty good shape,” I said. “Except for that poor old man on the porch, who—”

  Shirley’s expression stopped me midsentence. “Oh, dear, Mr. Wagner again. I’ll go attend to him after I’ve gotten you together with Mr. Fleischmann. The incapacitated residents are in another wing.” She waved vaguely toward the far end of the building. “But sometimes Mr. Wagner wheels himself out to the main entrance and sits there to wait for…did he—?”

  “He thought I was his son, called me Marty. I played along. No problem.”

  Shirley looked stricken. “His son died last year, very suddenly, a heart attack. Mr. Wagner sits out on the porch every chance he gets, and waits for Marty.”

  A lump rose out of my chest, settled into my throat. That kiss I gave Mr. Wagner was the best story I could’ve told him. If it cheered him up only for a while, fine. What’s forever?

  I followed Shirley into the billiards room, all dark wood paneling. On the far wall, floor-to-ceiling glass doors, open to let in a soft late-spring breeze. Racks with cues flanked the doors. Three tables neatly aligned front to back, plenty of space between them to take any shot. At the near table, a gaunt, angular coot of about eighty, with rimless glasses and the hollowest cheeks I’d ever seen, chalked his cue methodically. His companion stood hand to chin, studying the balls on the table like a chessmaster planning his next move. Red suspenders crossed over a rumpled white shirt to hold up a pair of brown worsted pants that might’ve been pressed about the time Nixon left office. Not much hair on top, gray swirls down his neck and over his ears. Intense brown eyes, thick lips, beak of a nose, skin like creased and pebbled leather. Big chest, big belly, big ass, big everything. My man, no doubt. A wave of chills flew up my back, across my arms, over my face. The old junkman scratched at his head, nodded, then bent to line up his shot.

  “Mr. Fleischmann…”

  He jumped as if goosed, wheeled around. “Shirley—Jesus Christ!” He seemed about to say more, but when he noticed me he made a gurgling sound in his throat, and all his high ruddiness drained. He leaned against the billiards table as if for support. Shirley put a hand on his arm. “Mr. Fleischmann, are you all right? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Nah, nah, nah. Just thought for a minute…” He pulled away, a little roughly, worked his heavy lips into a twisted grin. “Can’t get rid a me that easy, Shirley.”

  Shirley didn’t seem put off by his speech and manner. “You’ve got a visitor,” she said, with a wave of her arm grand enough to suggest I might be royalty.

  The old man squinted, studied me for a moment. Not quite the face I’d expected, no hint of that ebullient grin Dad saw so often. Instead, a map of deep lines and folds, all roads leading to the downturned corners of his mouth. His gaze wavered, shoulders sagged. He still hadn’t recovered his color. “Mr. Firestone told me you and his father were friends, years ago,” Shirley said. “In Hobart.”

  The sun came up like thunder out of China ‘cross the bay. Murray’s eyes looked like dinner plates. “Jesus H. Christ in thermal underwear! No wonder I thought…you gotta be Leo Firestone’s kid.”

  “The same,” I said, and extended my hand.

  He stood his cue against the table, gripped me with a trembling hand. Skin on that hand like cigarette paper, brown-spotted, veins bulging, but nothing wrong with the man’s muscle power. Murray peered into my face. Clumps of thick black hairs in his nose quivered, reeds in wind. “Leo ain’t…you didn’t come here to tell me—”

  “No, he’s fine.”

  “Sheesh, I’m glad to hear that. Practically all I ever get now is this one’s sick and that one’s dead.”

  “Dad’s seventy-six, still painting, having exhibitions.”

  “He is, huh?” Hollow laugh. “Well, good, good for him. I wish him the best. Hope he’s still doin’ his thing right up ’til the day he dies.”

  “Like his father.”

  Lightly spoken, but the message hit home. Murray’s face drew taut by degrees.

  “Talk to me?” I asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure.” Mumbled. The jig was up and the speaker knew it. He seemed to struggle to look me in the eye. “Yeah, I’ll talk to you.” He turned to his playing partner. “You mind, Ben?”

  Ben waved a bony hand. “Naw, ‘course not, go visit. Tomorrow.”

  Murray gestured toward the glass doors. “There’s a little trail, runs through the woods out back. We can walk, talk.”

  I nodded to Shirley. “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome. Have a nice visit.” Her face said she’d give a month’s pay to come with us.

  Murray led me outside, then along a flagstoned path across a wide lawn. He moved with an old man’s shambling gait, leaned left, then right. A man rode a mower past us. Fresh-cut grass on a warm spring afternoon, better than pot. I inhaled deeply, instant transport back fifteen years to my caddy days, Lakeside Hills Country Club, ten bucks a bag for eighteen holes. We passed four old men and women playing croquet; Murray snorted dismissal. Croquet definitely was not his game.

  As we approached the woods, flagstones gave way to a clearcut path, wide enough for us to walk side by side. Murray slowed to a stroll. I followed pace. “You didn’t say what was your first name,” he said. “Else I didn’t hear.”

  “Martin. Martin Firestone.”

  “Doctor Firestone?” The old junkman seemed to be sizing me up as a possible buy. “You a doctor?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to start med school this fall.”

  “How’s your old man feel about that?”

  “He doesn’t seem too fond of the idea.”

  “Oh yeah?” Murray cackled. “Well, I ain’t heard from Leo for close-on sixty years now. How the hell’d you ever find me?”

  “Internet. No big trick these days.”

  He stopped walking, turned a five-alarm dogeye on me. “Next question’s why? What do you want from me?”

  “Dad told me a story Saturday, about himself and you. And Oscar. George Templeton. Chester Hogue, a girl named Harmony…”

  Murray’s face went slack. He looked around as if for something to hold on to. I reached a hand toward him, he shifted away. “Your old man just yesterday told you that stuff for the first time? You never heard nothing before?”

  I shook my head. “All I ever knew was what my mother told me, that my grandfather died young, and he was a very good doctor.”

  “‘A very good doctor’? Christ on a rubber crutch! Samuel Firestone was a one of a kind. Didn’t anybody ever tell you—”

  “About selling metal and babies on the black market? No.”

  Murray staggered as if I’d hit him. His thick lips blubbered, eyes begged for clemency. “Take it easy,” I said. “I’m not here to hassle you. It’s just that parts of my dad’s story go clunk, and I need to find out what really happened. For his sake.”

  Murray sighed, deep, long. “Vay iz mir. Hey, listen, I’m an alte cocker now, eighty-six years—”

  “I won’t make any problems for you, promise. Just answer a few questions. It’d make a big difference for my father.”

  He looked like a junkman being offered highly questionable merchandise. “I helped your old ma
n plenty, and did he ever so much as say thank you?” Murray’s forehead went dark, his eyebrows set sail on an apparent collision course, but then his gaze softened. He turned his head, hawked, spat ferociously, like someone trying to get rid of a foul taste. “Not that I can really blame him, though, tell the truth.”

  “He’s still got that music box…” Tossing out a lie, just to keep talk flowing, but suddenly blown away by the realization it was no lie at all. “He wouldn’t get rid of it for anything,” I babbled. “Keeps it in his den.”

  Murray gave me the fish eye, then laughed into his sleeve. “Christ Almighty, that music box…” He waggled his hand, motioned me down the path. “There’s a bench just a little farther. We’ll go sit, you can ask your questions.”

  The bench stood at a turn in the path, on the edge of a crag. Murray settled heavily into place. I parked beside him, looked down into the deep ravine. A stream gurgled through luxuriant ferns and mosses. Murray turned toward me, tapped fingers on the top back slat. “Okay, Dockie, shoot. What kinda questions you got?”

  Dockie.

  “Start with Oscar and Samuel. Why’d they have such a case on each other?”

  Murray chuckled, but the sadness in his eyes was almost a palpable weight. “Way it was, that’s all. Like putting a wildcat in a room with a giant bulldog and shutting the door. Samuel had this silver tongue—I mean, imagine, a kid on his own, lost his whole family, he walked and talked his way all across Europe, finally got himself over to America. At Shadburn’s appliance store, he talked his customers into trading in their old stuff ’stead of selling it for junk. Then of course he fixed it and sold it used for ten times what Pop or any junkman woulda given for it. Really got to Pop. Once when I was a little kid, seven years old…”

  Murray chuckled again, now with genuine amusement.

  “Pop’s having lunch, left a full-loaded wagon parked outside the tavern, and when he comes out and says giddyup to the horse, wham! There he is on his ass, junk all over the street. We couldn’t even eat supper that night, way Pop carried on. ‘It was Sammy Firestone who done it, that snotnose greeny fucker, took the bolt right offa one of the wheels.’ Pop was gonna kill him, we should just wait and see. So first thing next morning, I hustle on down to the appliance store, gonna get a look for myself at this Sammy character, maybe he’s got horns on his head. But all I see is this nice looking young guy with Mr. Shadburn, they’re taking new line cords outa a box and putting them on their appliances. All of a sudden Mr S. jumps up, grabs me by the shirt, yells at me to get out of there, and if I even go close to a refrigerator he’s gonna cut off my dick and balls. He waves one of the cords. ‘And tell your old man if I ever see his face one step inside my door, your mother’s gonna take him home in a box.’ Scares living crap outa me, I don’t have a clue what the hell’s going on. But Samuel comes over, walks me outside, got a look on his face like somebody’s telling him a joke. He asks, real nice, what it is I wanted. I say I was only hanging around, and why’s Mr. S. so sore at me? Then Samuel tells me how Pop came in the day before when him and Mr. Shadburn were with customers, and afterwards Samuel saw all the appliance cords were cut off right at the plug. That’s how it went with your grandpa and Pop—do to me, I do double to you. I think for Samuel it was just fun and games, but Pop, no. If he coulda, he’d’a got somebody to blow Samuel away. But find a person anywhere near Hobart to lay a hand on Samuel Firestone? Maybe the sun wouldn’t come up next morning.”

  “What about Oscar paying Samuel’s way through med school?”

  Big shrug. “Sorry, Dockie, never did hear Samuel’s story. I was still a kid when it happened. By the time him and me got to be friends, it was all water way gone to hell under the bridge. But did Pop ever carry on, not a peaceful supper for over a week. Sammy Firestone robbed him! Sammy Firestone swiped his scratch! Sammy Firestone double-crossed him and ran off with his dough! Yelling, screaming, spit flying outa his yap, fists waving all around—“

  “Sounds like Oscar shot first, asked questions later.”

  “Huh!” Ten pounds of contempt in a one-ounce expletive. “Smelly old bastard never stopped shooting off his mouth. Swung his hands a lot, too. I still got scars from where he hit me when I was a kid. Never gave me a chance to tell him maybe I didn’t do what he thought.”

  “So when Oscar stayed in the yard overnight to keep an eye on a stash of aluminum and caught a girl in the office, I’ll bet he didn’t give her a big smile and say, ‘Excuse me, Miss, but what are doing here, hacksawing my strongbox at one o’clock in the morning?’”

  Murray on ready-alert. He nodded, waited.

  “I’ll bet he hauled off and beat her within an inch of her life without even thinking about it. Then what? Did he realize what he’d done, drag her a few blocks away, drop her under the trestle?”

  All through my speech Murray nodded like an automaton. But I jammed his mechanism by saying, “That doesn’t fit.”

  “What don’t fit?”

  “Oscar leaving Harmony alive. He was a loudmouth, a bully, a thug, but street-stupid? I don’t think so. Oscar would’ve known where that girl’s finger would point if she ever woke up, and he would have finished the job. I’m betting someone else dragged Harmony to the riverbank, someone decent enough to call an ambulance afterward and say they’d seen a young girl lying under the Fourth Av trestle. Someone who wouldn’t care a bit if she did wake up and finger Oscar, because by then, the aluminum would be safely out of the yard. Let the old bastard go to jail. Let him go to hell.”

  Murray couldn’t hold back a quiet snicker.

  “But that would mean someone else was in the yard with Oscar. And that Oscar would’ve let him take Harmony away alive.”

  Murray’s whole body tensed. He looked like a relic dug up by an archeologist and exposed to the light of day for the first time in centuries.

  “There’s another problem,” I said. “Oscar sounds like the meanest son of a bitch ever to draw breath. Never mind he wouldn’t’ve let the girl get away alive, he had a knife to the throat of a kid whose father happened to be the man he hated most in the world. No way he’d’ve just cut a wrist. He’d’ve slit my father’s throat from ear to ear. That wasn’t Oscar there, was it?”

  Murray hung his ancient head, kicked absently at a leaf.

  “It was someone who’d set the kid up but wouldn’t’ve killed him for anything, even when the setup went sour. I know who. What I want to hear is why and how.”

  “You done pretty good so far,” Murray mumbled.

  “Take me the rest of the way.”

  Chapter 18

  Murray looked like a spaniel silently pleading not to be whipped. “We try and do what’s right… Yeah, Pop was crackers over that aluminum, said two of us were gonna stay all night and take turns keeping an eye open every minute, right up to when the stuff was rolling away in Red’s truck. I told him we got the aluminum under wraps, nobody’s gonna bother it, let’s lock up and go home, but it was like talking to a wall. ‘That fuckin’ Ezra Shnayerson—he wants to play games with me, he’s gonna find out I play pretty goddamn rough.’ So, finally we draw straws. I get the long one, I go home. Little before one in the morning the phone rings. George, he’s hysterical. He was sleeping, wakes up hearing a girl scream and Pop yelling at the top of his lungs, so he runs inside the office and there’s Pop holding the girl by her hair, pounding shit outa her with a lead pipe.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Hey, you asked for it. You want I should go on?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “George tries to get Pop to quit, pulls at him, grabs him, slugs him. But the old shitheel’s out of his mind, just goes right on bashing the girl with the pipe. When the girl stops screaming and Pop don’t even slow down, George gets really scared. He picks up a hammer offa the desk…”

  “Which took care of Oscar.”

  Nod. “I’m down at the yard inside a five minutes, what a scene. Pop stone cold
dead in the market, girl next to him, she’s still breathing. Blood all over the place, purse and a hacksaw and Pop’s strongbox laying between the girl and Pop. She musta climbed the fence away from where he was sitting, got past him into the office, but when she turned on the light, or when Pop heard a hacksaw… I try waking her up but she’s limp like a dishrag, bruises from that pipe all over her head and face. I look at Pop, that filthy scum, wish I could kill him all over again. For what he did to that poor girl he didn’t deserve to die so easy.

  “But what the hell were George and me gonna do? Call an ambulance, have cops coming two steps behind? With all that aluminum piled right inside the gate? Tell the cops this colored guy killed his white boss? In 1943? George woulda been a goner. So while George starts cleaning up blood, I put the girl over my shoulder, take her down by the trestle. When I come back, then I call the ambulance. After that, George’n me get done cleaning up. We finish the hacksaw job on Pop’s strongbox—wanna guess what we find?”

  “Pictures.”

  “Bingo, Dockie, but not what you’re thinking. Nothing to do with your grandpa. Kinda pictures you’d buy from a gink in Times Square. Also some dough, ten hundreds. I take half, give George half. Then we stand there looking at each other, what the hell we gonna do about Pop’s body? All of a sudden I get an idea. Red Dexter’ll be there first thing in the morning with a truck, right? Maybe he can take away more’n aluminum. Wouldn’t be anything new and different for those guys, and besides, Red and me, we go back a long ways. Better give him a heads-up, though. I pick up the phone, call him.”

  The old junkman stopped talking, chewed at his lip. His face seemed to melt. Thick jowls hung from his jaws, a wattle developed at his throat. “Soon as Red hears what’s up, he says sure he’ll help, we gotta stick together. He’ll be right down and scope the situation, don’t want to show up cold in the morning with a coupla truckmen. Not twenty minutes, he’s there, looks fresh as a daisy. He gives Pop the once-over, then he laughs. ‘Lemme get this straight, Murray,’ he says. ‘Oscar catches a girl in here hacksawin’ his strongbox, starts beatin’ her up. George there bops him with a hammer. You drag the girl over to the Fourth Av trestle and call an ambulance. That’s it?’ I tell him yeah. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Then we gotta move fast, can’t wait ’til morning. Girl wakes up, there’ll be cops all over this place in nothin’ flat. We’ll bury Oscar under your dump back by the fence, then I’ll call for a truck, get the aluminum outa here. Then we’ll get the hell out. Cops come lookin’ for Oscar, they sure as hell won’t think he’s hidin’ underneath a burnt-garbage pile.’