He cleared his throat. “I, ah, I guess I never really told you much about my old man.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Actually I’m not.” Jack stared down at his own hands. “My father was not a bad guy, really. He was very hardworking, down on the docks. He always supported us, even when times got bad—and they did get bad, back there in Red Hook. I know he loved us, in … in his own way. But he, ah, he had this drinking problem.”
Ben stopped scowling and listened.
“Like, I said,” Jack continued. “He was a decent enough guy, most of the time. But he had a lot of pressure on him, financial pressure, and when he drank, I guess he needed to blow off some steam.” Financial pressure, he’d said, but it was certainly more than that. Who knew why the Old Man was so angry? Images rose in Jack’s mind: his father hurling a full plate of food at the wall because it wasn’t hot enough; his father’s face, contorted with rage, as he pulled off his belt to give his sons a whipping. As no doubt his own father had once whipped him. And so it moved, on down through the generations, a poison in the blood.
He winced. “I’m kind of rambling here. What I want to say … what I want to say is that I know that I’ve never really talked to you enough. I know I’ve kind of held back a bit, as a father. I guess … I guess I was kind of afraid that I’d turn out like my old man.” And, he didn’t say, I hope you’ll turn out happier and less uptight than me.
He fell silent. Ben didn’t look at him; he just stared down at the table. Jack didn’t know what his son had made of this rare personal speech, but then he saw Ben swallow several times, and he realized that the kid was fighting not to cry.
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, BACK in his car, Jack sat quietly for a minute, thinking about this latest get-together. After his big speech about the Old Man, he’d changed the subject and told the story of Uncle Leon. Ben had been amazed to hear about these dramatic family adventures, to learn that he’d had a long-dead great aunt. Then the conversation had finally turned to lighter things, to small talk that—for once—didn’t feel too small. They had sat together, almost like friends, and then, when Ben stood up to leave, he had actually given his father a quick hug.
Jack started his engine and drove away from his son’s neighborhood, with no destination in mind. He was feeling pretty good about his parental ability, for once.
Soon, though, he started thinking of Joseph Joral again, and the man’s arrogant certainty that he had put one over on the NYPD, and then—on his own time—he drove back to the suspect’s neighborhood and circled around again, searching for the car.
After another hour, he decided to drive to the bar where Shantel Williams had last been seen alive. Kyle had already gone out there in the afternoon to show Joral’s mug shot to the bartender, who said he’d been too busy the night of the killing to remember individual faces, but the bar had been nearly empty during that daytime interview. Now Jack would show the picture to the nighttime clientele to see if anybody could put Joral and the murdered girl together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JOSEPH JORAL CROUCHED ON the roof of his Brooklyn house, brushed some sticky tar from his hands, and edged forward toward the street. The moon was only a quarter full, which was helpful, and big, dense sycamore trees rose up over the lip of the roof, also good: he was able to lie down, peer over the edge, and see the unmarked cop car parked about twenty yards down the block without worrying about getting spotted. Two men sat in the front seat, waiting for him to make a move.
He crouched low again and made his way past a series of chimneys and trapdoors, like the one he had climbed out of. Thank God these were connected row houses, ’cause he wasn’t up for any movie-stuntman-jumping-roof-to-roof shit. At the end of the row, he eased down a rusty fire escape—praying that the damned thing wouldn’t wrench away from the brick wall—and soon he was able to drop down into the last back garden, shinny over a low chain-link fence, and stroll unconcernedly out a back alley onto the other side of the block.
He walked a couple of streets away, leaving the dumb fucking cops sitting back there, and then he stopped under a streetlamp to inventory his clothes. He had to look sharp if he was gonna meet any bitches tonight. He frowned at a small tar smudge on the left knee of his pants, and he licked his fingertips and tried to wipe it away. The stain on his clothes made him think about another kind of stain, how his stepmother used to whip him with an electrical cord when she’d find evidence of his dreams on his bedsheet. He grimaced. Some drunk girl was not gonna be worried about some little smudge on his pants, right? He was a big guy, handsome, and his clothes were obviously expensive, and that’s all she’d need to know.
He checked his pocket again to make sure that he hadn’t forgotten the condoms. He hated the damn things; to have to fumble one on, right in the middle of a good groove. No wonder he’d had problems. But he couldn’t do without them, not if he didn’t want to get the goddamn crabs again—or worse.
He looked around for cops, then strutted off down the dark sidewalk. This time he wouldn’t have any problems getting off; he could feel it.
He wished he had his car, but he’d lent it to a work buddy that morning; the guy needed to move all his shit out of his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. Joseph felt naked without his ride. Yeah, it was just an Acura, but girls loved what he had done with it: the chrome rims, the purple light around the back license plate …
He needed to find some girl who liked to party. He wasn’t gonna pay for it tonight. That had been a terrible idea, that other time. No wonder he couldn’t get it up, with some street skank … Hell, women should pay me, he thought, that’s how things should go. … A memory of laughter rose up in his head, and his fists clenched. What’s the matter, hotshot?
He made a face. He needed a drink. A couple of drinks. He’d stop at the next bodega, buy a couple tall boys, get primed. Who needed to pay fancy bar prices for a goddamn beer?
He thought of the girl from the other night. He’d offered to buy her a drink, but she’d given him a cool brush-off. It wasn’t as if he’d been the only white guy in the bar or anything, but there’d been something about the people in there, the upscale, trendy crowd, mixed black and white—they looked like young lawyers from some prime-time TV show. What was going on? This was Brooklyn, for chrissakes. Fuck them. The music had been loud, seventies funk mostly, and people were dancing in the back of the room and buzzing around the bar, and soon the joint had totally filled up. He’d sat on the end of a big sofa in a corner, scoping the place out—it had been so crowded that nobody had really paid him any mind, except some women giving him snobby goddamn looks. He’d watched the young chick at the bar, watched her drink nonstop, saw the friends she’d come with eventually split. By the time she finally left, she’d been all by her little lonesome, unsteady on her feet, and he watched her stumble out the door. He waited thirty seconds, then slipped out after her.
He caught up with her easily, a block away, because she had stopped; she was leaning against an iron fence.
“You all right?” he said.
“’m fine,” she said, voice thick with alcohol.
“You look like you might need a little help getting home.”
She shook her head emphatically. “What I need is another goddamn drink.”
He recognized the type: no Off switch when it came to booze. He thought quickly: there was no chance of scoring any hard stuff at this late hour unless they went to another bar, but then maybe the bartender would see how drunk she was, offer to call a cab, which would screw up everything.
“How about a nice cold beer?” he said.
“Who are you?” she said, pushing herself, with effort, away from the fence. Her voice had a kind of a white Valley Girl thing going on, which Joseph found discordant. He wanted to sound more hip, but this girl wanted just the opposite. …
“I’m just another thirsty person,” he replied. “Like you.” He hoped she wouldn’t pass out.
She shrugged.
“Whatever.”
“C’mon,” he said. “I’m parked just around the corner, and we can go get us a six-pack.”
He practically had to carry her to his car and pour her into the passenger seat, and then he drove them to the nearest deli, where he bought a six-pack of Coors.
“Ewww,” she said, “nasty,” but he knew she’d drink it. He tried to think where he could take her, somewhere private, where he could get a bit more friendly. A block on, they came to a little community garden. He stopped the car and peered through the iron fence; saw the dense vegetation shining faintly silver in the moonlight. He could barely see the back, dark and shady as it was. Without really thinking about it, he reached into his right pants pocket and was reassured when his fingers closed on a short length of electrical cord. Just in case …
“Why don’t we go sit down?” he said. “Make ourselves comfortable while we have a little drinkee …”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE SANDALWOOD LOUNGE WAS the name of the bar where Shantel Williams had bought her final cocktail.
Despite its rows of ornate brownstones, Jack had long known the neighborhood as a rather rough place, site of quite a few heroin spots and abandoned buildings. Now it was coming back, part of the general gentrification that seemed to be sweeping Brooklyn. The bar had red velvet drapes, fancy candles on the little tables, polished wood, plush sofas, and expensive specialty martinis. Back in the day, a “lounge” had meant something else, a place where tough street folk could smoke up a storm and drink cheap rail drinks and slowdance to Barry White. Now it seemed to be a place where sleek young people in expensive clothes could mingle and “network.” Interestingly, the clientele was about half black, half white, and they seemed to be getting along with a minimum of tension.
Jack was a bit self-conscious in his work attire, and he wondered what Joseph Joral might have felt like in here. The man didn’t exactly ooze sophistication.
Keeping things low-key, he caught the attention of the bartender, a tall, handsome young man with dreadlocks. First, he ordered a glass of seltzer; the heat outside had been powerful, even in the evening. Then he showed his badge and laid a photocopy of Joral’s mug shot on the bar. “I’m investigating the homicide of a young woman who was in here the other night. You recognize this guy?”
The bartender looked down, then shook his head. “I’ve been off for the last week. I had an acting gig.”
Jack showed the photo to the patrons along the bar. They seemed surprised to find a police detective in their midst, but they were relatively cooperative. Unfortunately, they didn’t recognize the photo. Jack kept going, circling the room, showing it around, getting nowhere. The place was crowded, especially toward the back, where a knot of people were dancing to a seventies soul song. He moved along methodically, completing his canvass. A young couple thought they recognized Joral, “some white dude that was sitting on a sofa over there the other night,” but they weren’t sure enough to make a definite I.D.
Jack was making his way toward the farthest corner of the room, dodging dancers and cocktail waitresses, when he glanced toward the bar and saw a big white guy with a Caesar haircut. He blinked; it was impossible. If Joral was out and about, the surveillance team had been instructed to page him. The lighting was low, and the crowd was dense—maybe he was just imagining things. He threaded his way back across the little dance floor, frustrated by his slow progress.
Joseph Joral glanced over and spotted him, and then he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“UNBELIEVABLE,” JACK SAID. “UN-FREAKING-BELIEVABLE.” He scowled at the two detectives from the Seven-one, who were sitting in their squad room. “If I hadn’t happened to be in that bar last night, we might have another murder on our hands.”
The detectives remained silent. There was nothing they could say.
Their boss sighed. “Well, we’re damned lucky the bastard showed up this morning.”
That was something they could all agree on. Joseph Joral could have fled for good, and who knew if they would ever have found him again? But no, the cocky bastard had strolled in to work at 8 A.M. And what could they do? They couldn’t arrest the man for sneaking outside of his own home the night before. They couldn’t arrest him for visiting a neighborhood bar.
They made arrangements to double up on the surveillance and ensure that he wouldn’t evade them again.
Then Jack and Kyle went back to recanvass the areas where the two women had been found, this time showing Joral’s photo.
No hits.
The day went by. Joseph Joral spent his morning parking and cleaning rental cars for his employer. At noon, he went to a local Kentucky Fried Chicken and had lunch by himself. He returned to work at 12:32, and he stayed there until 5:01 P.M. He took a bus home, stopping at a local deli for a six-pack and some toilet paper before he entered his residence. He stayed inside for forty-seven minutes. He did not leave the apartment through the roof or enter the back alley—this time the surveillance team made sure of that. At 6:12 he went out and ordered some food to go from a local McDonald’s restaurant.
And that’s what the latest report had to say by the time Jack got to Zhenya’s apartment.
“I AM JUST GETTING home,” she said, after he kissed her in her foyer, under the chandelier. “Is no food here. Can we go to market?”
He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” They didn’t go out to eat at local restaurants, but surely a little shopping expedition would look innocent enough.
She gathered her purse and her keys and they set out. An old woman, back twisted with scoliosis, was in the elevator when they got on, so Jack and Zhenya just stood in silence, not too close to each other. As they walked out through the lobby, he glanced at their reflection in a big wall-length mirror. They didn’t look like much of a couple. When they walked out into the evening heat and turned down a narrow side street toward Brighton Beach Avenue, he wondered how she would react if he stopped and kissed her. They walked beside a huge block-long brick apartment building.
“How was your day?” Jack asked, when what he really wanted to know was what she’d been doing the previous night. But he wasn’t going to play detective now that he was off duty, talking to someone he cared about.
“Busy,” she replied.
“That’s good, I guess. …”
They walked on, making only small talk as they turned onto the busy avenue, with its subway trains shuttling overhead on the elevated line, its colorful street stalls and sidewalks thronged with shoppers. It was the kind of old-fashioned neighborhood where people shopped each day for the dinner they would cook that night.
As Jack walked along, next to Zhenya but not touching her, he couldn’t help thinking how strange relationships were: you had to open up and put your trust in someone else, and that started to feel like something solid and substantial, but then some wind moved the curtains and you saw behind them: you realized that what you were counting on was just a fragile, tenuous, utterly voluntary agreement floating in the air between two people. At any moment, either one of them could snatch it back.
Zhenya took him to a local food market. Jack had heard about the shortages of the U.S.S.R., the endless lines and empty shelves. This place was a hungry Soviet’s wet dream. To the left stood display cases full of raw, smoked, and grilled fish. To the right, steaks, roasts, salamis, sausages … Deeper into the market, which turned out to be big and mazelike, more counters offered freshly baked bread, dumplings, potato pancakes, pickled salads, cheeses, stuffed chicken breasts. Even the aisles were jammed with mounds of canned goods. While Zhenya was ordering something from the bakery, Jack picked up a can: the label was covered in Cyrillic writing and bore a picture of a strange artichoke-like vegetable he couldn’t even recognize. Shoppers called out orders in Russian to the hair-netted women behind the counters, who wore white outfits like lab coats. Jack felt overwhelmed by the foreign language, the hubbub, his sense of being an interloper. He imagined that these people felt th
e same way when they ventured out into the rest of America—that must be why they clustered together so.
He was staring at another unfamiliar canned product when he felt a tug on his shoulder.
“Jackie?”
He turned to find a little old man staring up at him.
“How are you, Uncle Leon?”
The old man shrugged. “I can’t complain. Well, I can complain, but it doesn’t do any good.”
“What are you buying there?”
Leon lifted a couple of dark brown bottles. “Russian beer. Tastes like goat piss. But not worse than your American ‘light beer.’ The Germans make good beer, but will I buy it?” He made a face. “Never!”
Zhenya turned away from the bakery counter and rejoined Jack.
The old man’s bushy eyebrows went up.
“Uncle Leon, this is Zhenya,” Jack said. “She’s … a friend.”
Leon took off his sporty cap, bowed, and kissed Zhenya’s hand. Here we go, Jack thought.
“What a beautiful girl you are,” Leon said, turning up the charm to full wattage. “You remind me of the springtimes of my youth.”
Jack had to break down and grin at that one.
“Are you in a rush?” Leon said. “Can I buy you young people a nice cup tea?”
Jack stood there, uncertain, but Zhenya smiled, clearly taken by the old man. “Of course,” she said. “It is a pleasure.”
A stairway rose up to a second level, where Leon led them through a showroom piled with deluxe candies and chocolate assortments, on to the café. He bought them tea. They began to chat, and soon Zhenya and Leon slipped into Russian. They had an animated little conversation while Jack looked on, feeling like a fifth wheel. He was almost jealous of the old man.
Zhenya excused herself to go to the bathroom. Leon leaned forward. “So—who is this lovely girl?” Jack snorted. “She’s a woman, Leon. We don’t say ‘girl’ anymore.”
Neptune Avenue Page 15
