Neptune Avenue

by Gabriel Cohen

  To make life more complicated for the humble detective, each tribe was divided into smaller camps, some of them fiercely different from one another. A casual visitor might see men in side curls and big black hats and think “Hasidic Jews,” yet be ignorant of the fact that Satmar Hasidim lived in Williamsburg and Borough Park and were severely religious and strictly insular, while the Lubavitchers of Crown Heights and Midwood were more relaxed in their religious rules and somewhat more open to New Yorkers of other stripes.

  That relative openness did not provide much comfort to Jack Leightner now, sitting in front of two visitors to the Seven-one Precinct House. Business seemed slow in the squad room; other detectives glanced idly over at the pair of Lubavitchers parked next to Kyle Driscoll’s battered gray desk. The men were volunteers; they served as liaisons between their community and the local police.

  One of them was a stooped old man. “My name is Mandel,” he said. “This is my grandson Oren.” Both men wore full beards, side curls, black fedoras, and—amazingly, considering the almost nonexistent air conditioning inside the building—full black suits. The grandson looked to be about twenty; he shared his relative’s pinched face and pronounced Adam’s apple. His granddad had the twinkling eyes of a department store Santa. (Maybe not the most appropriate comparison, Jack realized, but still …)

  “Thanks very much for coming,” Kyle said. This time, he had insisted on doing the talking.

  “We’re glad to help,” the young man said. He wore braces, and his voice sounded as if it had just broken.

  “Can I get you anything?” Kyle said. “A soda?”

  The visitors shook their heads. The old man had a cane; he rested both hands on top. “What can we do for you?”

  Kyle cleared his throat and hunched forward in his seat. “This is, ah, it’s a matter of some delicacy. And we’re very grateful for your assistance.” He spread his palms out on his knees. “It’s about a couple of homicides. The body of a young woman was found in the neighborhood yesterday morning. And we found another woman several days ago.”

  The old man’s cheery face grew puzzled. “Members of our community were murdered? We have heard nothing about this.”

  Kyle looked uncomfortable, but Jack was not inclined to jump in and help. The Hasidim evoked complicated feelings in him. He could admire their stubbornness in maintaining their ideals in such a compromised, crass society, which celebrated Baywatch babes and celebrity cokeheads, yet—like a number of more secular Jews—he was embarrassed by how he felt embarrassed by them. They seemed trapped in an unhappy circle, the way they showed off their difference and righteousness—and then reacted to prejudice by becoming even more insular.

  “Actually,” Kyle answered, “the victims were young African-American women.”

  The younger visitor frowned. “I don’t understand. How can we help with this? You think one of us might have witnessed one of these killings?”

  Kyle shifted in his chair. “Not exactly. As I said, this is a matter of some delicacy. And I hope you won’t be offended if I speak frankly. We, ah, we have some forensic evidence. It’s not at all conclusive, mind you, and we’re not making any accusations against anyone. We’re just looking for some advice.”

  Both visitors seemed utterly confused.

  “Look,” Kyle continued. “I know that your people are model citizens. An incredibly low crime rate, fantastic participation in community affairs …”

  The Hasidim just stared.

  Kyle plunged on. “I’m sure that if someone in your community was having a problem, you’d want to identify this person, right?”

  The old man’s hands tightened on top of his cane. “What kind of a problem? Are you suggesting that one of us might have killed these women?”

  Kyle cleared his throat. “As I said, we have some forensic evidence.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  Kyle lowered his voice. “This is confidential information. We, ah, we found some animal fur at the scenes. Beaver fur.” He paused to let the implication sink in.

  The old man frowned. “And this proves what, exactly?”

  Kyle raised his hands in a placating gesture. “It doesn’t prove anything. But you have to admit, it’s pretty unusual.”

  The old man looked at his grandson, and then both men suddenly rose to their feet. Mandel shook his cane at Kyle. “I’ll tell you what is not unusual, Mister Detective: this sort of slander against the Jewish people has been going on for thousands of years. And you should be ashamed of yourself.” He turned, grabbed his grandson’s arm, and both men marched out of the squad room.

  The room went silent for a moment.

  “Well,” Jack finally said, “that went well.”

  At least Kyle Driscoll had the good grace to laugh.

  “Excuse me.”

  Both detectives looked across the room at a stout fireplug of a man with slicked-back hair. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a significant gold chain. Jack pegged him as an undercover. The guy had been talking to a couple of the squad detectives over in the corner, but now he was headed toward Driscoll’s desk. He stuck out a hand. “How ya doin? I’m Rob Tewks. I used to work with a Street Crimes squad here, before I got transferred to the Eight-four.”

  Jack and his partner introduced themselves.

  “You mind if I ask what that was all about?” the other detective said.

  Kyle filled him in.

  The man shook his head. “I wish I’d known what you were looking for earlier. I got just the guy for you to talk to.”

  YOSI SILBERBERG WAS ALSO a Lubavitcher. Unlike some of his stern compatriots, the Hasid was openly cheerful, a roly-poly, red-haired clerk who spent his days perched on a stool behind the counter of an electronics store on Atlantic Avenue, where he sold big automotive sound systems to young African-American men. (As often happened in New York City, commerce had a way of trumping—at least temporarily—all sorts of tribal differences.) The air conditioning inside was pumped up high, and Jack and the Street Crimes detective stood to the side, enjoying it, as Silberberg finished demonstrating a powerful new speaker system to a couple of homeboys wearing gold chains, gold-capped teeth, and incredibly slouchy jeans. He cranked up a volume knob, and the store practically shook with heavy hip-hop bass. Then he reached back, flicked the sound off, and turned back to the potential purchaser.

  “Well, my friend? What do you think?”

  The customer smiled at his sidekick. “Yo, dawg, that shit is bumpin’!” They knocked fists together in a dap.

  The salesman winked at Tewks, then smiled at his customer. “That’s right—and I give it to you for fifty dollars off, today only.”

  The salesman and the detective had met several years earlier, when Tewks caught an assailant of Silberberg’s uncle—a mugging attempt gone bad. The young man had been very grateful.

  After the clerk rang up his new sale, he turned to the two detectives. (Kyle had reluctantly agreed that it might be best if he waited outside in the car.) “So, Detective, what can I do for you today? Are you in the market for a ‘bumping’ new sound system for your police car?”

  Tewks smiled. “No, thanks. This is Detective Leightner from Brooklyn South Homicide. We’re actually here to talk about hats.”

  Silberberg’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Hats? I think you might have the wrong store.”

  Tewks leaned forward and rested his forearms on the counter. “It’s for a case. We’re trying to identify someone.”

  The clerk’s cheery face grew grave. “A killing involving one of us? I haven’t heard about it yet.”

  Here we go again, Jack thought. He stepped in before the other detective could explain. “We’d like to know about hats. I know there are different sects of Hasidic people here in Brooklyn. Do you all wear the same kind of hats?”

  The clerk shook his head. “Oy—do you have a couple of days to discuss this? First of all, we don’t say ‘sects.’ We say ‘courts.’ And there are a number of these: the Lub
avitchers, like me, the Satmars, the Ger, the Bobov, the Belz … All wear different hats. We Lubavitchers prefer the black Borsalino, a fedora. The Bobov like a good bowler; the Satmar, a wide-brimmed, flat-topped—”

  Jack cut in again, seeing that he was about to get more information than he could handle. “What about fur hats? Which ones would wear beaver fur?”

  The clerk considered the question thoughtfully. “We call this biber. Now, do you mean beaver felt or beaver fur?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Felt is made from wool or animal hair, compressed into a dense fabric. We call this material ‘smooth.’ Like my hat here,” he said, lifting a fedora from a shelf behind him.

  “And the other kind?”

  “There are a couple. Some wear hats with what is called a beaver finish, which is sort of like a thick velvet—but it’s usually made from rabbit.”

  Jack shook his head, impressed. It seemed that the various Hasidic sects—no, courts—had a sartorial code as complex as that which separated the Crips and Bloods. And the rivalries were almost as intense. (He had heard stories—possibly apocryphal—of Hasidim from one group kidnapping a young man from another, throwing him into the back of a van, and cutting off his side curls.) “How do you keep track of all this?” he asked.

  The Hasid just shrugged. “How do you keep track of what different police wear?”

  “That’s my full-time job.”

  The clerk shrugged again. “Being a Hasid? Also full-time.”

  Jack smiled. “What about those big, round hats, shaped like, um, an angel food cake, made of thick fur?”

  “Ah,” the clerk said, nodding. “Those are shtreimel. We Lubavitchers don’t wear them.”

  “Who does?”

  “The Satmars, and some of the others.”

  Jack frowned; he was starting to go cross-eyed with the complexity of the topic.

  Rob Tewks looked at his watch. “You okay here? I gotta run.”

  Jack nodded and thanked the detective, who seemed relieved to split, like a schoolkid saved by the bell.

  “So tell me,” the clerk said to Jack. “What did the hat of your victim look like?”

  Jack pinched his lower lip, feeling a bit guilty about not explaining the details of the case, but not so guilty that he was prepared to ruin the interview. “We didn’t find a hat. Just some beaver hairs.”

  The clerk stroked his red beard. “The victim—what did he look like?”

  Jack shook his head. “We just found the hairs.”

  The clerk frowned. “So you don’t know if there was a Hasid involved at all?”

  Jack shook his head, rather sheepish.

  Yosi looked pensive. “All is not lost. Tell me something: this incident, which I assume you believe is connected to a homicide—what day of the week did it occur?”

  Jack scratched his head. “Let me see … there were actually two. One happened on a Saturday or Sunday, the other on a Thursday. Why?”

  Yosi smiled, eyes twinkling. “This is good news. I think no Hasid was killed at all.”

  Jack’s eyes widened. “How could you possibly know that?”

  The clerk shrugged. “Simple deduction. First of all, the shtreimel hat is often actually made of sable or fox fur. And it is worn only on shabbes”—Friday nights—“or on holidays or special simchas.”

  “Simchas?”

  “Formal celebrations, such as weddings.” The clerk smiled, proud of his reasoning. “Someone wearing a shtreimel on any other day would stand out like a pork chop on a bar mitzvah buffet.”

  Jack thought about this for a moment. It had been hard to imagine a young West Indian woman and a Hasid in full regalia meeting for a tryst in the dark community garden. But what if the perp had not actually been wearing the hat that night?

  Yosi raised a hand. “I know what you’re thinking. Maybe the man had these hairs on his clothing, and they fell off at the time of the incident.”

  Jack’s eyes widened further.

  Yosi grinned, then glanced at his fellow Hasidic salesmen and lowered his voice. “Once or twice—and this must be our little secret—I may have watched CSI on the television. The fact is,” he concluded, “that these hairs would not have gotten on the man’s regular clothing because the shtreimel is only worn with the kapote.”

  “The who?”

  “It’s a long satin robe, also worn on these special occasions. So the hairs from the shtreimel would have fallen on the kapote, which your man would not have been wearing on a recent Saturday, Sunday, or Thursday. And surely he would have bathed between the Sabbath and those other days, so any hairs on his person would have washed away.”

  Jack whistled. “Maybe we should start up a Hasidic Homicide auxiliary.” He looked off into the distance and mused aloud. “Where else would beaver fur come from, then? Ordinarily, I’d guess a fur coat, but that would be pretty unlikely in the middle of August.”

  The clerk shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that one. But if you would like to buy a car stereo, I’m your man.”

  Another salesclerk cranked the volume. Jack thanked his technical adviser and stepped back out into the morning heat. He joined Kyle Driscoll in the front seat of his unmarked Crown Vic.

  “How’d it go in there?” the young detective asked.

  “It’s not looking good for the Hasid theory.”

  Kyle frowned.

  Jack was in the middle of relating Yosi Silberberg’s convoluted explanation when his cell phone trilled.

  “Detective Leightner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Anthony Rinzella, with security for the Fulton Fish Market. We’ve had a bit of a situation here.”

  As soon as he got off the phone, Jack jumped out of Kyle’s car, got in his own, slapped a rotating beacon on the dash, and sped off, not toward the fish market, but toward Bellevue Hospital Center.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “LET ME GET THIS straight,” Linda Vargas said to the manager of Daniel Lelo’s fish company. “A while back you had an accident where one of these big metal hooks went into the back of your hand. And now you’re saying that the same thing happened again, another accident in the exact same spot, and this time the hook just happened to dig around in there a bit?” The homicide task force detective stood next to the man’s hospital bed, arms crossed, frowning, and Jack was glad that he was not the subject of her interrogation.

  Andrei Goguniv lay back, hooked up to I.V.s, and he nodded miserably. The man’s bald head gleamed under the fluorescent lights like a sickly white cue ball.

  Jack sat in a plastic chair on the other side of the bed. He was keeping silent for the moment.

  “That’s incredible!” Vargas said dryly. “What are the odds?” She looked up at Jack, as if sharing amazement at the coincidence.

  “Not only that,” his colleague continued, “but this ‘accident’ just happened to take place in your office. Do a lot of fish processing up there, do you?”

  The manager squirmed.

  “As if all that wasn’t enough,” Vargas continued, “this happened after the market was closed for the morning. Interesting time for a work-related injury.”

  The fish market security man had reported that the manager of one of the Seaport’s clothing boutiques was opening her store when she heard muffled screams coming through a wall that adjoined the market offices. By the time she alerted mall security and they discovered the source of the noise, Goguniv was sitting slumped over the desk in his office, soaked in blood, passed out, alone.

  Jack stared at the manager. He thought of his own hospital stay, after he had gotten shot. He knew how belittling it felt to be lying there in an open-backed hospital gown, at the mercy of the doctors. His heart opened to the man, even though the poor bastard was still refusing to cooperate.

  Vargas took out her notebook and slapped it impatiently against her palm. “Well? Are you planning on sharing how this miracle might have occurred?”

&n
bsp; Goguniv looked as if he was about to pass out all over again. Weakly, he flapped his uninjured hand in protest. “Please. I don’t feel so good. I need to sleep.”

  Vargas’s cell phone trilled. She answered, then stepped out into the hall to talk.

  As soon as she left, Jack sat down, pulling his chair closer to the manager’s bed. He spoke softly and earnestly.

  “Andrei, listen: I’m here to help you. Really. You’re not gonna get in any more trouble by talking to me. The way things have been going, this can only get worse for you—unless you help me put a stop to it. All you have to do is tell me who did this to you.”

  Goguniv remained silent.

  “Was it Semyon Balakutis? Just nod your head if it was.”

  The manager turned his face toward the wall.

  Jack groaned and sank back into his chair. The task force detectives hated mob-related cases for this same reason: nobody ever saw anything, heard anything, or knew anything, and the investigations tended to drag on forever.

  He leaned forward again, preparing to come at the fish company manager from a new angle, but the man’s head had sunk down on his chest. Zonked out on painkillers? Jack was tempted to scratch the bare sole of his foot with a pen, to see if he might be faking, but a nurse chose that moment to bustle in.

  He got up—reluctantly—to leave.

  THE FISH COMPANY MANAGER’S second “accident” sure seemed like a bogus miracle, but Jack still had a real one in his life. Standing in Zhenya Lelo’s brightly lit little foyer, he drew her into his arms, kissed her sweet lips, and all his troubles melted away.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “I’m hungry for you,” he replied, and he led her down the hallway to the bedroom. He lay back on her comfortable bed and decided that this was his favorite moment in all the world, watching her stand there and gracefully pull her blouse over her head, revealing her lovely rose-tipped breasts. A few minutes later, he changed his mind; this was his favorite moment, when he first moved inside her, and she wrapped her arms around him, drawing him deeper, and they both gasped with the utter rightness of it: home.