The James Deans

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Although the first crime is known only around the New York Metropolitan area, the second crime garnered national attention. Just about a year prior to the release of Redemption Street, Chandra Levy’s remains were discovered in a wooded area of a Washington DC park. Although I try very hard not to pay attention to the sensational and salacious aspects of the news, I was not immune from the rumors about Miss Levy’s involvement with her congressman boss and the speculation that he had somehow been responsible for her death.

  I cannot say what inspired me to connect these two cases. I can only tell you that something did. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to bed panicked over my inability to find the right way to move a narrative along and woken up at 5 a.m. with the solution. There is no way for me to explain it because I am not conscious of doing the work, only having done it. Over the years, I’ve come to trust my unconscious mind.

  Still, with all these elements in place, a book’s worth can only be judged by the quality of its writing. They don’t give out awards for the best plans or plots or outlines. They give them for how they’re executed. I have heard it said that the first chapter of a novel should contain all the elements of the entire work. That when a reader finishes a novel, he or she should be able to go back to the first chapter and find the seeds for what has played out in the remaining pages. Not before, not since, have I been as successful in accomplishing this as in The James Deans. Those opening pages broke my heart when I wrote them and, as anyone who’s heard me read that chapter can attest, they still break my heart.

  Perhaps the thing about The James Deans that works best is the dovetailing of plot, subplot, and theme. It’s more than that. In The James Deans those three elements don’t simply come together, they become the same thing. The underlying theme in all the Moe books is that the past is present, that the very notion of moving on without resolution is an absurdity. Faulkner said it best, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” The pages of the novel are rife with characters whose own pasts haunt them. Whether it’s Steven Brightman covering up an old murder with a newer one or Moe feeling secretly to blame for the miscarriage or Wit still coming to terms with the murder of his grandson, nearly every character in the book from Joe Spivack to Preacher “the Creature” Simmons to Thomas Geary to Klaus is acting today because of a past that isn’t past.

  My faith in the book was cemented when I received my editorial letter. You may not believe this, most people don’t, but the only meaningful suggested cuts consisted of editing down two paragraphs. One alluded to the World Trade Center—part of that paragraph remains intact—and the other was a throwaway paragraph in the epilogue about a minor medical procedure Moe was to undergo. It was thrown away.

  Even the things that went wrong with the book went right. Only months before the book was to come out, my then agent called me to inform me that I had a choice: I could hold my publisher to the terms of our contract and force them to do hardcover and paperback editions of The James Deans or I could go along with their decision to put the book out as a paperback original. My then agent strongly advised I go with the latter. It killed me to do it, but I agreed. That decision led to a great cover image and a greater commitment by the publisher to sell the book. It also allowed The James Deans to be considered for awards in the paperback original category. I can’t really argue with the results.

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  May 20, 2008

  Lake Grove, New York

  REQUIEM FOR JACK

  A Moe Prager Story

  Originally published in Crimespree Magazine, Issue #6 (2005). Copyright © Reed Farrel Coleman.

  IT HAD BEEN years since Pete Parson had moved south and they’d turned Pooty’s Bar and the space above into money sponges in the shape of lofts. Tribeca, once a bohemian refuge, had long since been declared an artist free zone by the City of New York; the last starving painter tarred, feathered, and exiled to Williamsburg during the end days of the last millennium. The neighborhood was scrubbed and bleached of real character so that now it was sprayed on the streets after dark and chipped into the bricks by Mexican day laborers for a hundred bucks cash and lunch.

  But still I came to look at where Pooty’s had been. I’d walked over from the Brooklyn store, across the bridge, down Chambers and up Hudson Street; the whole time with the book in my hand. Book indeed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a book for pleasure or even held one that didn’t have something to do with wine or the business. I tried counting back the years to when Sarah was a little girl and Katy and I would read her to bed. Sarah, a woman now, self-contained, moved away, a veterinarian, her curls gone to light brown with only traces of little girl red peeking out at her dad at Hanukkah.

  So here I was, bent paperback in hand, standing outside a building that had since forgotten me or what itself had been. I tried seeing it, superimposing my memory of it over what stood in its place. No luck. Works better in movies than in a man’s life, that. Things gone are gone. There’s a deep truth there. Lord knows what it is. I couldn’t find it. I made to step away.

  “Ya grow up here?”

  “What?”

  “Jaysus, the way you were staring at the place … You looked like a man thought he saw his lost love.”

  Definitely Irish. He was thin as a wire, but not erect. There was a sway to him, more a blade of grass than a man, a weary blade of grass. No, a twisted root, I think. You see them at craft fairs sometimes, bush roots shaped remotely like a man that the artist has cajoled into a more striking resemblance. The summer breeze off the Hudson whipped his hair into a gray swirl. He had a hollow, lined face that had once been a calling card. There are all sorts of lines on all sorts of faces, but these were hard lines, etched lines, sharp and jagged under a microscope. These were not lines of slow, smooth erosion. Life had used a knife on him.

  He moved left and right, craning his neck as if looking for someone to show.

  “Nice limp you got there,” I said.

  “Noticed you’ve one as well, pal.”

  “Yeah, slipped on a piece of carbon paper in the late seventies. Three knee operations. Then a few years later, someone took a baseball bat to the back of my legs.”

  “Hurly,” he said as if that explained it all.

  “Hurly?”

  “A baseball bat done Irish, hardwood roughly in the shape of a human femur.”

  “What’s it used for besides leg-breaking?”

  “Hurling. Combination of field hockey and murder.”

  “Sounds like politics.”

  “Life’s more like it.”

  We shook our heads in silent commiseration.

  “Smoke?” he offered up a green pack of cigarettes the likes of which I’d never seen.

  I waved him off. He put the pack close to his crooked lips and the unfiltered nail seemed almost to jump into his mouth. Next out of his pocket was a heavy, silver Zippo, the kind my dad used when I was a kid.

  “Ya mind, fella?” he positioned me to block the wind.

  Christ, the damned cigarette emitted more pungent fumes than a city bus. He slipped the lighter back into his suit pocket. It was a cheap blue suit, someone else’s cheap blue suit, a quick pick off the discount rack at a retro store. Salvation Army, more likely. Still, ill-fitting as it was, it seemed right on him, even as it clashed with his highly polished and paradoxically expensive brown shoes.

  “Well …” he seemed impatient. About what, I wasn’t sure. He got tired of me trying to figure it out. “Were ya raised here?”

  “Nah. Brooklyn. Coney Island. There was a bar here once, Pooty’s. Friend of mine had a share in it. The grout in the tile was dirtier than my mechanics fingernails, but it had the best jukebox in New York City.”

  He was skeptical. “The hell, you say. In the whole city?”

  “Duke Ellington, the Dead Kennedys, John Lee Hooker, the Beatles, the Clash, Howlin Wolf, the Ramones … Fell in love with my wife here. Took an actress here once when I was on the job.
”

  He smiled wryly. “A copper?”

  “Once. You?”

  “In a manner of speaking, back home in Galway.”

  I was curious, but there was something in his demeanor that warned me not to ask, that I wouldn’t like the answer and he wouldn’t like giving it.

  “What is it you do now other than stand and stare longingly at buildings housed old pubs?”

  I own wine stores with my big brother. “Private investigator.”

  “Jesus and His blessed mother.”

  “You too?”

  “In a manner of speaking. They don’t have a name for it. Like most things in Ireland, there’s shame attached to the profession.”

  I took him at his word, glad he hadn’t asked to see my license. I still kept it in my sock drawer.

  “You investigating an author?” He pointed at the nearly forgotten paperback. “Love books. Only thing’s kept me above the dirt this long. Balances out the drink and these.” He waved the cigarette at me, then flicked it in the gutter. Lit another. “The book,” he prodded.

  “Some novel a friend recommended.” I held the cover up for him.

  “What a load a shite. Author’s an ejit.”

  “You know him?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” He was nothing if not consistent. “Don’t waste your time with that crap. Read McBain. There’s an author.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Lovely offer, but I’m waiting on someone.”

  I held my right hand out to him. “Moe Prager.”

  He took my hand, his grip was deceptively strong for such a bony bastard.

  “A pleasure,” he said, letting go of my hand. “Ah, here she comes now.”

  I looked over my shoulder to see a very little girl sort of waddling her way toward us. I was never good with age, but she seemed far too young to be walking alone down even the safest of streets in the smallest of towns. There was something odd about her gait, a bouncy sort of looseness in her small strides. It was only when she got closer that I noticed she had Down’s Syndrome. She looked right past me and raised her small hand up to the root man.

  “There you are,” he said to her and softly cradled her hand in his. “Mind yerself, Moe.”

  I watched them disappear around the corner. Even after they disappeared, I could not get them out of my head. Maybe it was that the smell of his cigarettes lingered in my clothes or maybe it was my shock about the girl. But gone they were. Like things, when people are gone, they’re gone.

  I found a pub a few blocks away, put the paperback down on the bar, ordered a pint of Blue Point Toasted. I had hoped the barman would be an old-timer, someone I could shoot the breeze with about how the neighborhood had been back in the day. But the barman was a woman no older than my Sarah and her back in the day was like last week.

  As I was about to leave, she asked, “What you reading?”

  “Nothing,” I said, sliding the paperback her way, tucking a five spot in as a bookmark.

  “The Guards,“ she said. “I’ve heard it’s great.”

  “Yeah, well if you see a guy in the neighborhood in a cheap blue suit, keep that opinion to yourself.”

  The walk back to Montague Street seemed much easier without the weight of the book.

  REQUIEM FOR MOE

  A Moe Prager / Jack Taylor Variation

  Originally published in Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir (Busted Flush Press, 2006). Copyright © Reed Farrel Coleman.

  HE APPEARED AT the Brooklyn store one day, stepping out of a cloud of his own cigarette smoke; a tattered old genie coming out of the lamp. A genie, mind you, in a cheap blue suit and expensive brown shoes.

  “Can’t smoke in here,” I said, not recognizing him at first.

  “Moe, isn’t it?”

  “Do I know—”

  I stopped myself and squinted through my glasses. While I didn’t quite know him, we’d met once, maybe fifteen years before on the streets of Tribeca in front of the building where Pooty’s had stood. Pooty’s was a scruffy watering hole that had once been home to the best jukebox in the city, the place where I first fell deeply in love with my wife to be. Now Pooty’s was gone and my wife to be is my wife that was. The genie was an Irishman, from Galway, as I recalled, an ex cop like myself and like myself a man who, in younger days, took on the odd private case.

  “How are you?” I held my hand out to him.

  Ignored it. Too busy crushing his cigarette out on the hundred and fifty year old broad plank flooring we’d just had restored and resurfaced. His role as fireman complete, he took my hand.

  “Ah, it’s good to see you, pal.”

  “I never did get your name all those years ago.”

  “Jack,” he said as if the single syllable explained the history of the world and then some.

  “Just Jack?”

  “Why, will it not do?”

  Said

  “It will have to.”

  “Practical man, Moe. We’ve no use for practical men in Ireland. A country full of priests and poets. Piss on the streets of Galway and you’ll catch the next five Yeats with the spray.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You’d be the first.”

  “So, what can I do for you, Jack? A bottle of Jameson?”

  Said

  “For fuck’s sake, is there like a neon sign on me forehead?”

  “No, just guessing.”

  “I’ve given up the drink, Moe.”

  “Jack, not to bust your balls, but this is a liquor store.”

  “I’m here for you, not for the drink. It’s hard for me to confess, but I need your help.”

  “Help? How can I help you, Jack?”

  “I’m looking for a cat.”

  “A cat?”

  “Jesus, is there like an echo in here? Don’t you still work cases?”

  “I’m an old man.”

  “Bollix! It’s in your blood.”

  “At my age the only thing in my blood is blood and thanks to the drug companies, it’s not even that. Besides, lost pets was never my beat.”

  Said

  “Not that kind of cat, Moe.”

  “What, it escaped from the zoo? Somehow I don’t picture a gimpy old Jew and crooked old Irishman chasing tigers through the streets of Brooklyn Heights.”

  “Not that kind of cat either.”

  “Maybe I didn’t pay close enough attention in school. Am I missing something here or is there another kind of cat?”

  Ignored the question

  “When does your shift end?”

  I checked my watch. “Two hours.”

  “We’ll talk then.”

  The genie was gone. His crushed cigarette the only evidence he’d been there at all.

  OLD MEN DON’T cotton to cemeteries, particularly at night. Too much like visiting the house that’s being built for them. A house warming and I didn’t even bring cake! But a cemetery is where Jack brought me or, more specifically, where he had me drive us. And he could pick ‘em, let me tell you. This was one of the big, old cemeteries in Cyprus Hills, the one where Houdini had yet to escape from and one that played a sad role in my very first private case.

  Although the place made me uncomfortable, it was hard to deny the majesty of the grounds. It was all very nineteenth century and early twentieth, when people built marble mausoleums and erected mighty headstones to please the god of Abraham. As we made our way through the narrow paths between the graves, Jack muttered and tsked.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The greatest sin in Ireland is to let a grave go unattended. Your house can fall down around your ears and look like complete shite, but to let a relative’s grave fall into disrepair …”

  “This is an old cemetery, Jack. Most of these people’s relatives are themselves dead.”

  He crossed himself as if it hurt to do so. Said

  “Here we are.”

  Pointed at a lonely grave rimmed in
very low, but neatly trimmed hedges. The headstone was an unassuming block of gray polished granite with the top beveled. The inscription was on the surface of the bevel beneath the Star of David.

  ANNE BAUM

  BELOVED DAUGHTER, MOTHER, ANGEL

  BORN JAN 3, 1960 DIED JUNE 1, 1988

  Atop the grave itself were the windblown stems of a hundred dead roses and several grimy statuettes and plaques. One of the filthy busts was a small white, blue and black porcelain bust of Edgar Allan Poe.

  “Do you know the writer K.T. Baum?”

  “The mystery guy?” I asked.

  “The same. This is his daughter’s grave. Run down by a drunken driver.”

  “Jesus!” Funny how Jews from Brooklyn say Jesus all the time. “I have a daughter myself. I don’t know what I would have done if—”

  “Let’s not think of it, Moe. Life is burden enough without the added weight of imagined sorrows.”

  “You’re right, of course. So what are we doing here?”

  “Baum is a friend. As I don’t possess many, I treasure the ones I do.”

  “But that still doesn’t explain—”

  “Look at the grave.”

  I obliged. He lit up, lifting a heavy silver Zippo to the tip of a cigarette; the genie once again supplying his own magic smoke.

  “These are the awards he’s won, I take it.”

  Said

  “Fella, you take it right.”

  I knelt down to get a closer look at the grave, my arthritic knees creaking like an old coffin lid. Now I noticed what Jack had hoped I would see.

  “Something’s missing.” I pointed to a clothes iron-shaped depression in the grass atop the grave. “The cat?”

  “The Silver Whisker. About yea big.” Jack held his bony hands eight or so inches apart. “Of equal height and near twenty pound of silver.”

  “Why do you suppose the thief took the cat and not the others?”

  Jack said

  “Who can know the mind of a ghoul? Liked cats better than Poe. Wanted to melt down the silver, maybe.”