“You all right?” a customer asked me as I stepped out of the office. “You’re pale as can be.”
Nauseous. “Fine,” I answered.
“Good, then can you please explain to me exactly why you charge a full three dollars more for Moet White Star than Crates and Carafes in Roslyn?”
“I would be happy to.”
And for the first time in years, I was.
CHAPTER SEVEN
2951 West Eighth Street, that’s the address of the 60th Precinct. It’s one of those hideous prefab buildings that lacks looks, character, and just about every other aesthetic quality you might think of. Its only saving grace is that it is located directly across West Eighth Street from Luna Park, one of the ugliest housing projects known to human-kind. The precinct house is also right next door to a firehouse. Now there’s some sharp thinking, huh? It’s like putting the hyenas and the lions next door to each other at the fucking Bronx Zoo. There were times during my service I thought lions and hyenas were more congenial.
A civilian employee-a heavyset black woman with lacquered hair-greeted me as I entered. She was so impressed by having an ex-member of the Six-O show up at her desk that she nearly fell asleep mid-sentence. Not that I blamed her, mind you.
“Can I help you?”
“This used to be my precinct,” I said, feeling immediately like an idiot.
“Y’all want it back?”
Then I compounded my stupidity by showing her my badge. Oh, man, that really impressed her.
“You wanna see mine?” she said, showing me the laminated credentials she had clipped to the overburdened waistband of her slacks. “Not as pretty, I know, but it don’t set off metal detectors or nothing. Now is there something I can help you with?”
I thought about it. My showing up here wasn’t exactly part of some master plan. It’s not the way I worked. Like I had any idea about that. Unconventional was a polite term for how I went about my business.
Didn’t matter. Whenever they came to me, it was always with the Gotham Magazine article in hand or in mind. After my future brother-in-law went missing in 1977, some hotshot investigative reporter did a cover piece on the mystery surrounding Patrick’s disappearance. It was a natural. Francis Maloney Sr. was a big macha, a mover and shaker in the state Democratic party and one of its biggest fund-raisers. His eldest son had been shot down over Hanoi and his youngest son had vanished off the face of the earth. But what it always came down to was Marina Conseco. Within the body of the article about Patrick’s mysterious disappearance was an inset with my picture, Marina Conseco’s, and a brief description of how I’d saved her life back in ’72.
“Hey, mister!” She snapped her fingers. “Y’all want me to call the control tower for landing instructions or what?”
“Sorry.”
“No offense, but I am kinda busy here,” she explained.
Well, that was bullshit, but I couldn’t blame her for wanting to get rid of me. I had come here only because I knew I would eventually have to.
“So is there somebody you wanna see?”
“Yeah, is Rodriguez around?” I asked.
“Retired last year,” she said. I knew that.
“Lieutenant Crane?”
“Captain Crane now. He’s at One Police Plaza.”
“Stroby?”
“Never heard a him. Listen, Dancer and Blitzen, Doc and Dopey, they ain’t here neither. So-”
Just when she was getting going, the door opened at my back and the room filled with noise. I turned to look over my left shoulder. There, cursing up a storm in both English and Spanish, was a stunning woman in her mid-twenties with coffee-and-cream skin. She had thick pouty lips, straight jet-black hair, and brown eyes that were at once both fiery and cold. She was busy waving a rolled up New York Post at
“Jesus, enough already,” he said out of desperation. “Whaddaya want from me, I didn’t kill the schmuck.”
Another familiar voice, definitely Bronx Irish.
“Fucking Melvin! My big case down the crapper and this is how I find out, through the fucking Post!”
Fishbein’s help hadn’t gotten me much of a head start. Though I had more details than the papers about the life and demise of the late Mr. Jabbar, a.k.a. Broadbent, the daily rags had the essentials. I knew because I read about it myself this morning over coffee. The news of his identification and the scant details of his very small life weren’t exactly the stuff of banner headlines. The networks weren’t going to preempt their afternoon soaps and the world would continue turning on its axis. But some people would notice. Some already had. His was the kind of death that would cause a ripple on the surface of a silent sea. The ripple might quickly weaken and fade, forgotten like a fallen leaf. Or the ripple might plow the water into a wave, a wave to crash onto our heads, to sweep its victims into the sea without regard to their relative guilt or innocence.
“Yo! You got a problem?”
It took me a few seconds to get that the Latina detective was talking to me. I also realized I had been staring at her. Well, I’m not sure staring is the right word, precisely. I was more than staring. It was like the rest of my visual field went blurry at the edges while her image was hyper-sharp, almost painfully so. And my hearing took on that muted, head-under-water quality. Yes, she was very pretty but something else about her commanded my attention. Even after she barked at me, I could not turn away.
“Do I know you?” she asked impatiently.
“I’m sorry, no, I don’t think so,” I heard myself say, and finally looked away.
She and her partner walked by, the partner shaking his head but relieved for a few seconds of distraction. Then, before they got all the way down the hall, she started up again.
“I got enough shit on my plate without some middle-aged shithead stalking my ass.”
That hurt. No one enjoys being called middle-aged. It’s like when you turn forty you begin the long process of being dismissed. You’re no longer your own person, but just another ant in the colony. Fergie May used to say that a man knew he was middle-aged when he became invisible to hippie chicks. Well, hippie chicks might have gone the way of the Edsel and moon landings, but there was no arguing the essential truth of his philosophy. I was invisible, and if I hadn’t exactly been dismissed, I was being handed my coat and gloves.
“Who was that?” I asked the woman at the desk.
“Her? That’s Detective Melendez. Bitch!” she whispered, loud enough for me to hear.
We both smiled at that.
I drove to Bordeaux In Brooklyn, our store in Brooklyn Heights. Situated on the lower floors of a lovely old brownstone on Montague Street, it was my favorite of our three locations. With its gilt lettered signs on green pane glass, globe fixtures, and intricate woodwork, the place had a distinct nostalgic feel reminiscent of the Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlors that used to dot the borough. There were many reasons to love that store: the weird customers it seemed to attract, its proximity to the Brooklyn Bridge, the breathtaking views of lower Manhattan from the Promenade. I can remember a hundred spring days when I felt as if I could simply reach across the East River and rake my fingers along the ridges of the Twin Towers, or take a running jump and land on the South Street Seaport.
In my heart of hearts, I know I loved that store best because of Klaus. Klaus, the store manager, had been with us for years. He knew more about music and fashion and popular culture than anyone I had ever met. Born out west somewhere, Wyoming or Utah, I think, Klaus came to New York to escape his family, or maybe it was to let them escape him. The two thousand or so miles between son and family served both parties well. The distance made it easier for his folks to deny his gayness, and he could love his folks back without constantly chafing against their beliefs.
When he started with us he was a total punk. He was all ripped clothes, piercings, weird haircuts, and attitude, but he made it work. Klaus spent more time at Dirt Lounge, CBGBs, and Mudd Club than at work. Yet he was never late, never calle
d in sick, and learned how
“Excuse me, mister, you got any Ripple?”
“Hey, boss!”
Klaus came around the counter and hugged me.
“Please, I’m a married man.”
“Oh, yes, and how’s that working out for you?”
He knew what he was asking; Klaus had become one of my closest friends. He was familiar with the rough spots in my life. It’s odd, but it seemed that I had spent the last dozen years shedding most every old friend I’d ever had. That’s what aging is, I think, shedding your old lives like snake skins. And what represents a man’s life better than the friends he’s made and lost along the way? Along with Klaus, there was Kosta, Pete Parson, Yancy Whittle Fenn, and Israel Roth: a gay, a Greek, an old cop, a drunk journalist, and a concentration camp survivor. Not exactly the A-Team, I know, but men who I could trust more than Larry McDonald.
“How’s it working out?” I repeated. “We’re still married. That’s how.”
“That bad.”
“Worse.”
“If you want my opinion, it’s not Katy.”
“No?”
“No, it’s you.”
“Can we go back to that part about wanting your opinion?”
“You’re bored,” he said.
“Thank you, Dr. Freud, but that’s not exactly breaking news.”
“Alan, he’s my lover, he-”
“I know who Alan is, for chrissakes! You don’t need to tell me that every time you mention his name.”
“Okay, boss, put your claws back in. He’s a psychologist and he’s about five years your senior.”
“Yes, I know. We’ve met. Is there like a point to this or are you gonna make me wish I had gone to the Manhattan store and let Aaron aggravate me instead?”
Klaus ignored that. “Well, before me, Alan had been in a ten-year relationship, and he said when he hit forty and he’d been with his partner for a long time. . he just lost it. He felt bored and lost and wanted to jump out of his own skin.”
“Did he buy a red 911 and start sleeping with cheerleaders?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. Why, don’t you think a gay man can have a midlife crisis?”
“I wouldn’t know. I figured you’d tell me when the time came. So, that’s what you think this is, a midlife crisis?”
“Why, did you think you were immune? Being aware of the phenomenon is no protection against it.”
“I suppose.”
“Okay,” he said, “I can see it’s time for a change of subject.”
“Nice segue.”
“If you prefer, we can go back to-”
“No, that’s fine.”
“So what are you doing here? There’s a rumor that we have a new store and that you’re supposed to be there now.”
“Christ, you’re starting to sound like my brother.”
“Bite your tongue!”
Aaron thought the world of Klaus in a business sense, but they weren’t the same kind of people. It wasn’t Klaus’ being gay that bothered Aaron so much, though I don’t think he was completely comfortable with it either. It was that Klaus was obsessively plugged in, so much an animal of fashion and music, of what was coming next. Without really trying, he tended to make you feel out of it, passe. And Aaron was very much his father’s son, a traditionalist. My big brother was old when he was young. He felt way more comfortable with Elvis Presley than Elvis Costello and couldn’t have imagined any set of circumstances that would have allowed for the words sex and pistols to be in close proximity in the same phrase. As Klaus had once said of Aaron, he was more a fugue than a frug kind of guy.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I took a few days off.”
His face lit up. “You’re working a case! But what are you doing here?”
“Kenny Burton.”
“Sorry, you’ve lost me.”
“We used to work together when I started out as a cop. Now he works for a private security firm that has a contract with the Marshal Service over at the Federal Courthouse on Centre Street. I’m going over there to talk to him in a little while.”
“So, you’re killing time.”
“Couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather kill it with.”
“Yet another sad commentary on your life.”
“Fuck you, Klaus!”
“Ah,” he said. “There’s the Moe I know and love.”
Ten years my elder, Kenny Burton had the old-cop look, somehow grizzled and clean-shaven all at once. Except for my recent phone call, we hadn’t spoken or seen each other in many years, but I was unlikely to miss him. Everything about him, from his get-the-fuck-outta-my-way strut to the you-don’t-want-a-piece-of-me manner with which he blew cigarette smoke into the faces of oncoming pedestrians, screamed asshole. Or maybe I saw that in him because I knew him a little bit from when I had started on the job in the late ’60s.
Priding himself on things most other cops would hide like a crazy aunt, Kenny Burton was a brutal, thick-skulled prick who was trained in the ways of pre-Knapp Commission, pre-Miranda Rights policing. He never paid for a meal, a cup of coffee, or a blow job until word came down from on high. He never arrested anyone who wasn’t guilty or didn’t deserve to have the crap beat out of them. His motto might well have been: Why use your head when you can use your fists instead?
“Caveman Kenny Burton, is that you?” I said, walking up to him outside the courthouse. He flicked a still-burning cigarette at the open window of a waiting cab. The cigarette barely missed, bouncing harmlessly off the cab’s door.
“Who wants to know?”
“Moe Prager wants to know.”
Burton grunted, one corner of his mouth turning up. From him this was a hug and a kiss on the lips. “What you doing around here?”
“Waiting for you. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure. There’s O’Hearn’s on Church.”
O’Hearn’s was your basic New York version of an Irish pub. What did that mean? It meant it was just like any other shithole bar in the city, only with cardboard shamrocks on the walls in mid-March and the occasional barman who understood that hurling had meaning beyond vomit.
Burton’s malicious blue eyes pinned me to my chair as we sipped at our drinks. We were boxers staring across the ring before the bell for round one. He was doing the silent calculations. I could hear the gears churning nonetheless. The mistake people make about judging brutes is to assume they’re fools. Kenny Burton was no fool. We had never been close, even during the few years we served together. Larry Mac, on the other hand, always considered Kenny a pal. Only after I’d come to know Larry well did I figure out that odd coupling. Kenny Burton appealed to Larry’s ambition, not his heart. Ambitious men are like baseball scouts-they can spot everyone’s special talent and how that talent can serve them. Frankly, I didn’t want to know how Caveman had served Larry’s ambition.
“This about that party thing we spoke about on the phone?” Kenny asked, knowing it wasn’t.
“Nope.” I waved to the waitress for a second round. “That was bullshit.”
“I figured. We ain’t exactly blood brothers, you and me. What it’s about then?”
“Larry’s missing.”
He didn’t react, but I didn’t read much into his deadpan. The gears continued churning. Then, “Missing? Missing how?”
I ignored the question. The waitress came, plopped our drinks down. When she tried clearing Kenny’s first glass, he stared at her so coldly I thought she might freeze in place. “Leave it!” She did.
“He was acting weird the last time I saw him,” I said.
“Weird?”
“Nervous. Jumpy. Not like Larry at all. Then. .”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. We got together back in Coney on the boardwalk and he started talking crazy about the good old days.”
“Good old days, my ass. Fucking job!”
“I know what you mean,” I said, just trying to see if he’d say something on his own
. He didn’t disappoint.
“You do, huh? I remember you being a cunt, Prager.”
“Nice.”
“Ah, you was like all them new cops, more worried about the skells and scumbags than the victims.”
“For every corner guys like you cut, you create two more. I was worried about following the law.”
“Fuck the law! The only law is the law of the jungle. You pussies never understood that.”
“Was Larry Mac a cunt?”
Kenny actually laughed, an icy breeze blowing through O’Hearn’s. “Larry was a lot of things.”
“Was?”
“Don’t be such a fucking asshole, Prager. You know what I mean.”
“I do?”
“What, you want me to throw you a beating? With that bum leg a yours, it’d take me like ten seconds to kick your ass twice around the block.”
“Now there’s something to be proud of.”
“Get to the point, asshole.”
“Larry missing is the point.”
“That’s what you say, but even if he is, I don’t know shit about it. I owe Larry Mac,” he said, taking his eyes off me for the second time since we sat down. “He kept me on the job till I made my twenty. It was a fucking miracle that he pulled it off. I was like a poster boy for I.A.B. for the last half of my career. Then after a few years, he got me this gig with the Marshal Service. Job’s a fucking tit.”
I had made the acquaintance of two retired U.S. marshals during the Moira Heaton investigation. One killed himself. The other tried to kill me. Only time in my life I exchanged gunfire with anyone. I think I hit him, but I didn’t stick around to check. Got the hell out of there and didn’t bother looking back.
“Okay. You hear anything, let me know.” I threw my card and a twenty on the table. I made to go.
He grabbed my forearm. “You really think something’s wrong?”
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