The Brooklyn Rules

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The Brooklyn Rules

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  The Brooklyn Rules

  Killing O'Malley

  Though only pushing forty, Pete Connell was a bitter old fuck, the kind of man to turn the Host into ashes at the touch of his tongue. BodyofChrist, my ass! He was the worst kind of bitter old fuck, an impotent and drunken one and a liar to boot. His shamed relations claimed a thousand reasons for Pete's sour spirit, their favorite centering on the horror of D-Day.

  "Oh, poor Peter," they would say. "The war done him in. His heart sopped up the horror at Omaha Beach, and his soul broke in the face of so much death. And the bottle … It's ruined better men than himself."

  Eloquent for sure, but utter bullshit. The only sand to have touched Pete's boney white feet had come from Brighton Beach. There were too many Jews for his taste at Manhattan Beach. And the closest he'd come to D-Day combat was slapping around a two-buck whore in Omaha, Nebraska, for laughing at his limp dick. She'd slashed his face with a straight razor for striking her.

  "Kraut schrapnel!" he'd bark whenever anyone asked about the scar.

  Perhaps the weakest excuse of all was the drink. In the overall scheme of things, Pete Connell had certainly brought more troubles to the bottle than the bottle to him. No, some men are just bitter born. He was one. There was but one pleasure, one joy in the miserable bastard's existence, his beloved Dodgers. Them Bums were it for him. Forget Kelly green Irish blood, Connell bled Brooklyn Dodger blue.

  That night, the night at Muldoon's when the news fell on the patrons' heads like a British Comet falling out of the sky, Pete Connell was already feeling it. He was already several sheets to the wind, beer and bile indistinguishable to his palate. And what made the news that much worse to bear was the messenger. Pete Connell despised Michael Duke for everything Duke was and he was not.

  Whereas Connell had pissed away his police career-taking a five-buck bribe from a colored whore and getting caught in the act-Duke had built his American dream out of near death and dust. Then again, Pete Connell always sold cheap. Even now, as the produce man at the Packers Supermarket on Kings Highway, Connell had sown the seeds of his own demise. For months he'd been selling a quarter of his daily order to Marinelli's Green Grocer on Avenue P for ten cents on the dollar and putting the shortages down as spoils. Ten cents on the dollar, that was Pete Connell.

  Michael Duke had come to the States after the war with the first wave of refugees and camp survivors. When he arrived in Brooklyn in '46, he was Mikhail Dukelsky, a twenty-one-year old from Kiev who had exploited his wits and math skills to impress his Einsatz Groupen masters enough to last three years under their blood-red thumbs. He had used his ten-plus years in New York to change more than his name. Now a citizen and a CPA employed by the city, he lived a quiet, comfortable life with his wife and newborn son in a nicely appointed two-bedroom flat on Avenue H. He'd even purchased a plot of land in the Catskills on which he someday hoped to build a summer cabin.

  His one selfish pleasure was his after-dinner stroll to Muldoon's Tavern at the junction of Nostrand and Flatbush Avenues. Mike enjoyed the serenity of the Brooklyn College campus as he made his way to the bar for his nightly stein of Rheingold. It relaxed him, strolling across the peaceful green quadrangle, stopping to gaze up at the clock mounted atop the tall white steeple. He loved the chiming of the bells. In the Ukraine, there were clock and bell towers too, thousands of them. Not even the Nazis and accursed Soviets could have destroyed them all. But Mike Duke thought the Brooklyn College steeple most beautiful of all. It was so un-European, so devoid of religious burden. That night, however, he did not linger by the clock tower nor was his stroll to Muldoon's a matter of simple relaxation.

  "If it ain't Mike the kike," Pete whispered just loud enough for Duke to hear.

  Usually, Michael ignored the prick's asinine barbs. Compared to the inhumanity he had suffered at the hands of the SS, Connell's bigotry was usually no more than the buzzing of a fly. But just lately, it had begun to eat at him. Maybe it was the birth of his son, Alan, that had changed his attitude. That he had been forced to endure the hatred of others in the old country was one thing, but this was America, he was an American, and Michael would be damned if he would let small-minded cowards like Pete Connell poison his son's life. Tonight he would see to that.

  The bar was empty save for Connell, Muldoon himself, Hattie the Hooker, and the Professor-a bum who had Einstein hair and scribbled nonsense on Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers.

  "Hey, Mike," Muldoon muttered, putting up a tall glass of beer. "How goes it?"

  "Thank you, Patrick," Duke said, placing two quarters on the bar: one for the beer and the other as tip. "As to your question, I fear it goes not so well."

  "How's that?" the barman asked.

  "I bring bad news."

  "What, someone blow up the Hebrew National hot dog plant?" Connell blurted out.

  "Very funny, Pete. Why not cut the guy some slack?" Muldoon snapped.

  "No, Patrick, that's all right. After I tell you my news, we will all need to find a way to laugh." Duke sipped his beer.

  "Now you got me curious, Mike."

  "Yeah, Heeb, you even got my attention."

  "You know I work for the City Budget Office, right?" Mike began. "And if you recall, I mentioned several months ago that I was working on a very serious project that involved Brooklyn."

  "Sure. Sure!" Muldoon snapped his fingers. "But you said you couldn't talk too much about it because you could get in hot water."

  "Yes, Patrick, you remember."

  "Enough with the suspense, Heeb," Connell snarled.

  "I guess I should just say it then. Here goes. The Dodgers are leaving Brooklyn."

  Pete Connell spit out his drink. Hattie lifted her head off the bar. Even the Professor stopped scribbling.

  "I like you a lot, Mike, but you shouldn't ought to joke like that, not if you wanna live to see sunrise."

  "I wish only that it was a joke," Mike said, holding his hands prayerfully. "But I swear on the souls of my murdered parents that I speak the truth."

  Grief grew heavy in the air as Michael Duke explained how Mayor Wagner tried calling Walter O'Malley's bluff and how O'Malley had basically told Wagner to go fuck himself.

  "He did a little Irish jig," Mike said, lifting his trouser legs and hopping from foot to foot. "He said Wagner should come visit him in L.A. and that he would find the mayor some nice seats in the Coliseum with the wetbacks, Japs, and Chinks."

  Of course, this last part was a complete fabrication, meant specifically for Connell's ears. Mike went on for about ten minutes, describing in excruciating detail how Walter O'Malley had taken great pleasure in his own greed and the thought of spitting on all of Brooklyn.

  "The things he said about us … I am embarrassed even to repeat them. I will tell you, I was sick to my stomach."

  "Go on," Connell demanded, "tell me what he said."

  "First," Mike said, putting a ten spot on the bar, "a round for us all. You too, Patrick."

  "Okay, kike," Connell said, "let's have it, every word."

  Mike suggested that he and Connell retire to a corner table and discuss it between themselves. He said he knew that Pete hated him, but that on this issue they were brothers, that every Brooklynite had one color in common, Dodger blue. Pete agreed. Michael left the money on the bar and told Muldoon to keep the drinks coming.

  Michael laid it on thick, pulling Pete's strings with every word, whispering so that only Connell could hear. First he told how O'Malley admitted to always hating greaseball guineas, stupid Polacks, and thick-skulled kraut bastards and that the only reasons he ever let niggers on his teams was because the shee
ny Jew bankers demanded it. But he saved the coup de grace for after Connell's third free drink. That was when Mike explained how O'Malley hated his own people worst of all.

  "Pete, may I call you Pete?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Mr. O'Malley called you all a bunch of stupid micks, donkeys that couldn't think your way out of a potato patch. Said the Irish who'd come over after the famine were the dregs of the race, the very worst kind of shanty scum imaginable."

  Connell seemed almost in shock. He laid his head down across his folded arms.

  "It's okay, Pete," Mike comforted, placing a hand on Connell's shoulder. "Let's get you another. Patrick, another, please. "

  The barman brought over the drinks. When Muldoon returned to the bar, Mike suggested to his new friend that he compose a letter to the Dodgers' owner.

  "You'll speak for all of us, Pete," he whispered, "and on my honor, I will hand deliver it to Mr. O'Malley."

  "Hey nut job!" Connell yelled at the Professor. "Gimme your fucking pen or I'll snap your geek neck like a fucking toothpick!"

  The nervous little man ran out the door, but not before dropping his pen next to Mike's empty beer glass. Mike unfurled a bar napkin and began to write as Connell dictated. Muldoon tried listening in, but couldn't make out a word. Ten minutes later, Mike stood up and placed the napkin in his back pocket.

  "Goodnight, Pete. I'm sorry to have been the bearer of bad news."

  "Yeah, sure. You jus' remember t'do wha' you promised with tha' note," Connell slurred.

  "I do not think so, Pete. I don't think you meant what you had me write down. In a day or two, you might feel differently."

  "Gimme tha' fuckin' letta, kike, or I'll finish wha' those Nazis couldn't!"

  Mike shrugged his shoulders. Dutifully, he handed the folded napkin to Pete Connell, who made a show of balling it up and shoving it into his jacket pocket.

  "Now gedthefugouttahere!"

  On his way out, Mike slipped Muldoon a further five bucks and told him to keep Pete's drinks coming.

  "You're a better man than me, Mike."

  "He is very very depressed, Patrick. Tonight, I guess, we are all in mourning," he said. "I too am a little schickered or I would stay and watch Pete. He is in such a bad way. Good night, my friend."

  Two hours later, Pete Connell stumbled out of Muldoon's into the moonless night. Using walls, fences, parked cars to keep upright, he made his way home. He was way too drunk to notice either the cold rain or the man across the street who shadowed his every step and turn. When Connell slipped into a narrow alley between his building and the subway trestle, his shadow closed ground.

  "Who'zzzz there?" Pete slurred.

  "It is just me, Pete, your new friend."

  "Wha'?"

  That word formed Pete Connell's mouth into the perfect shape to receive the barrel of Michael Duke's Luger. Connell froze. That pleased Mike very much, but not quite so much as his timing.

  "Do you not recognize this pistol?" Mike taunted. "You remember, you took it off a dead Wermacht captain at Omaha Beach. You tell that story with such conviction to every new patron who comes into Muldoon's, surely the police will not question it. That's what the note in your pocket will say."

  Connell's eyes got wide with fear and sudden comprehension.

  "That's right, buddy, not your drunken ravings about killing O'Malley. A suicide note."

  As the subway rumbled by, Mike blew Connell's brain out the back of his head with the Luger he had taken off an SS captain at Bergen-Belsen. Michael had slit the Nazi's throat as the Allies approached and urinated on him as he bled to death. What was that old saying about dancing with the devil? You don't change the devil. The devil changes you.

  But he did not urinate on Connell's body. Instead he placed the dead man's right hand around the Luger's handle and let both fall back to earth. Then he replaced the note in the dead man's pocket with the one he had composed as he waited for Connell to leave the bar. After calmly checking that things were just right, Michael Duke walked home to his apartment. There he peeled off his gloves and clothing, throwing them down the incinerator chute. After his shower, Mike stood silent vigil in his son's room, watching the little boy toss and turn in his crib until the sun came up.

  At about the same time, the cops were rolling over Pete Connell's stiff body and reading the suicide note taken from his pocket. It was a rambling diatribe. The poor man couldn't bear the thought of the Dodgers moving out of Brooklyn. He didn't want to spend his days missing his beloved team and obsessed with thoughts of killing O'Malley. It was just easier, the note said, to end his own life. When news of the Dodgers' pending move broke later that morning, the detectives understood completely. They felt the same way. All of Brooklyn did. That day, Mike Duke was the only happy man in all the borough.

  Requiem for Jack

  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 in the 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 Street and up Hudson. The whole time with the book in my hand. Book indeed. I couldn't remember the last time I'd read a book 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. Failed at it. Works better in movies than in a man's life, that. Things gone are gone. There's a deep truth there. Fuck me if I could find it. I made to step away.

  "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, I thought. 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 under a microscope. These were not lines of slow, smooth erosion. Life had used a knife on him.

  "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 lighter, 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 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 mechanic's fingerna
ils, but it had the best jukebox in New York City."

  He was skeptical. "The fuck, 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, ya say."

  "Once. You?"

  "In a manner of speaking, back in Ireland."

  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 that housed old pubs?"

  I own wine stores with my older brother. "Private investigator."

  "Fuck on a bike."

  "You too?"

  "In a manner of speaking. They don't have a name for it."

  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.

  "Bollix. What a load a shite. Author's a real wanker."

  "You know him?"

  "In a manner of speaking." He was nothing if not consistent. "Don't waste your time with that crap. Read McBain."

  "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 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 Syndrome. She looked right past me and raised her small hand up to the root man.