The ground was slippery from some garbage, remains from the fish market, something a tourist had tossed on the ground. I threw away my cigarette, and started to walk. I walked faster, still feeling someone following me.
When I got back to my block, I saw my car was parked out front of my building. I figured that one of Tolya’s guys got it repaired, then delivered it. From the coffee shop across the street, Mike Rizzi waved me over.
“This came for you yesterday,” he said holding up a large flat package as I went in and sat at the counter. “I forgot. You want some pie, Artie? I got really nice lemon meringue.” I shook my head but he gave me a slice anyhow. “On me,” Mike said.
Inside the padded envelope was a note from Sid. Congratulations on your marriage, it said. The envelope also contained a photograph of Stan Getz by Herman Leonard. My favorite musician, favorite photographer. I looked at the postmark on the package. Sid had sent it the Saturday he started calling me.
“Great party,” Mike said. “Terrific. What’s the matter? You look like you saw a ghost. Good pie, right?” Mike invested heavily in the fact that he served the best pie of any coffee shop in New York.
He watched while I dug into it. It was good, sweet and tart and wet, the meringue sugary and firm. Even in my lousy mood I couldn’t resist and while Mike watched me, I ate the hefty slab of pie, drank two cups of black coffee and, since there was no one else in the place, leaned on the counter and held up a pack of cigarettes.
“Sure,” Mike said. “Smoke if you want.”
“There’s something on your mind, Mike?”
“I heard they’re going to hit the stock exchange and other financial stuff next week, third anniversary of the Twin Towers, fucking terrorists, that’s what they’re saying, you believe it?”
“I don’t believe anything. I sure as shit don’t believe any politician, not this summer, Mikey, what about you? You buy it? You think it’s real, or it’s the election coming and us falling for fear like we were two years old?”
He reached up and turned on the TV that sat on a shelf over the cereal boxes. “All I know is I was supposed to take the truck out to Jersey and that getting through the tunnel’s a nightmare and there are guys with AKs walking around near the bridges again like the winter before last, nothing’s any better, and I feel like, you know, tired of it, Art. I feel like I want a permanent vacation.”
“Yeah, I know.” Out of a corner of my eye I was watching the TV. Stories of dead children were coming out of Russia. The picture changed to Bush.
Mike looked up and said, “He’s OK. He’s like a regular guy.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I like Bush. I got a right.”
“But that’s stupid, man.”
I had never seen Mike Rizzi get mad in all the years I had lived on the block. His face was red.
“I don’t think I’m stupid,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s any of your business who I vote for, OK? I’m not stupid, you know, I listen to the news, I watch Fox, I watch CNN, I like Bush. He makes me feel he gets it about ordinary people, like me. He makes me feel safer.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Who for?”
I started to apologize, but he just kept his back to me and waved his hands to acknowledge what I said or maybe tell me to get lost, then threw some bacon on the griddle. The fat spattered. Mike turned around.
“It’s OK,” he said.
I didn’t want to put my foot in it, so I left. Outside I almost tripped over a black guy lying on the ground. He was naked except for a filthy undershirt and a ragged towel over his dick. That was it. Nothing else. Just lying there. I bent down and took his pulse. He was barely alive. I saw a lot of guys like him now, a lot of bad drugs coming back into the city, no housing, no nothing except politicians saluting the flag and talking tough.
Everyone was tired, everyone drinking too much. I remembered suddenly that Mike Rizzi had a boy in the Air Reserves who had been posted to Iraq.
The black guy on the sidewalk didn’t move. I went back into Mike’s and asked him to call 911 and I waited until the medics came and loaded the guy up into an ambulance. While they were loading him, the filthy towel fell off and left him naked, except for the undershirt and one dirty sneaker.
20
I recognized Sid’s son as soon as I saw him through the open door of Sid’s loft in Red Hook. I went in, introduced myself as a friend of Sid’s. I’d been hoping I could get another look; I still had the key I stole, but the door was open.
“Alex McKay,” he said briefly, then introduced the woman who sat near him on the edge of a chair as Miss McKay.
She was Sid’s sister. I had seen her at the hospital. Holding a box of photographs, she sat straight, her back not touching the chair. Her hair was gray, cut short, she wore pearl earrings and a black linen dress and though she was older, she was a dead ringer for Sid.
Alex returned to the shelf where he had been examining his father’s books.
“What’s your interest?” he said.
“I was a friend of Sid’s,” I said again and didn’t mention I was a detective.
He looked like his father. He had a light smooth face that was expressionless and looked as if it had been poured that morning. He looked young for his age—I knew he was about forty—it was what I noticed first about him. He wore an expensive blue summer shirt and black jeans. He was taller than Sid and he had broad shoulders and big arms. Sid had married briefly and Alex was the product of that marriage.
Obviously rattled by his father’s death, he moved around the loft fretfully but I didn’t see any sadness.
“What kind of friend is that?” he asked, faintly sarcastic. “I bet he had a lot of those friends.”
“Alex,” his aunt said, “enough.”
As casually as I could, I said to Miss McKay, “Tell me about Earl. Sid told me that he had a half brother named Earl and they were friends when he was a boy. You must have known him. Sid said they were very close when they were teenagers.”
She remained expressionless. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said. “I don’t know of anyone named Earl. Not in our family. No, no one that I can imagine.” She looked down at the box she held. “There were so many pictures of Sid. I don’t even know who most of the people are.” She held one up and looked at it. “I wish I knew.”
When I asked for her phone number, she reached into her handbag and gave me an engraved card with her name, address and phone number.
“You’re a cop,” Alex said to me, putting down the book he held. “Aren’t you?”
“We’ve already seen the police,” the aunt said. “We’ve told them everything. It was an accident. Right, darling?” She turned to Alex. “We agreed that, didn’t we? I know we talked about suicide, but I think it was an accident.” She said it as if she could prescribe the means of Sid’s death.
“I need some air and a smoke,” Alex said to me. “You want to walk?”
We went outside and walked along the pier out over the water. In the gusts of wind that came off the river, a few boats bobbed around.
Alex took a thin ropey little joint out of his pocket and lit it. I had assumed he meant cigarettes when he said he needed a smoke. He seemed unconcerned that I was a cop. He didn’t pass the joint to me either.
He was tight as a drum, the skin was stretched taut over the bones. Alex was a tense man.
Finally I said, “When’s the last time you saw him?”
“A year. Around a year ago,” he said.
“But talked to him, I mean.”
“I don’t know. Months.”
“He told me you sent him an iPod,” I said, remembering how Sid told me he was listening to it on the deck of the Mexican restaurant the day before my wedding. “You didn’t talk to him but you sent him a gift?”
“Say that I was a dutiful son.”
“Why didn’t you see him? How come?”
“I didn’t like him,” he said
quietly.
“That must have been rough.”
“Who for?”
“You want to tell me where you were over the last week or so?”
“I think I already told about ten people, but if you want to know, I’m OK with it,” Alex said. “I was working in Borneo. I’m a DP.”
“What?”
“Director of photography,” he said. “A cameraman. I make ethnographic documentaries for people like National Geographic, I probably thought somehow in a Freudian moment that it would put them right out of joint, the family, me doing stuff about tribes, you know, black people with lip plates, the kind my family figure for cannibals. Maybe I hoped it would drive them nuts or something, and then I won a few prizes so they all talked about it for a while, and I was a kind of family star for a month, and then it was just what I did. I heard about my father and I had to get about six damn planes to get here.”
He was cool. Most people, a cop asks them where they were during the time someone they know was murdered, they get disconcerted. Alex looked at his watch.
At the end of the pier, we leaned against the low wall. I fumbled for my cigarettes in my pocket. It gave me a couple of seconds to look at Alex.
“He named you for Pushkin?” I asked.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Arms crossed, Alex stood still, waiting. He had an eerie ability to stand almost motionless; maybe it was his profession; maybe he was always waiting for the right light, the right shot. Even his face was still, but he watched you very carefully. His eyes were two different colors, one blue, the other hazel.
“So, how was it?”
He said, “Who for?”
“For you? For him? The not getting along,” I said. “The not speaking, finding him like this after so much time.”
“I gave it all up years ago,” Alex said. “I just quit caring or worrying about what he thought of me, you know?” He looked out at the boats on the water. “It’s windy,” he said and shaded his eyes from the sun.
“That bad?”
“That nothing,” he said. “My father was there for everyone, he was a guy who loved the whole world, but he was too busy, too self-obsessed to care much about me. Everyone loved Sid, he would bring his young reporters to the house, he would stay up late reading their copy, he was always there for them, boys, girls, the ones he slept with, the ones he didn’t sleep with. And he had these ideas of justice and truth that he couldn’t break with, so if anyone strayed, you were fucked. I mean, tell a lie, he froze you out even if you were a kid. I’m talking any lie, like, you ate the Almond Joy candy bar, and you said you didn’t and he found out, you got the deep freeze for days. He did it with everyone. So I went away to boarding school when I was sixteen. Up in Vermont,” he added.
“What about your mother?”
He shrugged. “What’s the difference?” he said. “She died when I was in college. She drank. Quietly. I didn’t even know, I thought she was always drinking glasses of water, and sitting by herself, and it was gin. She kept it in tonic bottles in the fridge. So I went back to live with him for a while, I think I kept waiting for the redemptive moment, you know, for the good stuff to click in, the way it’s supposed to. Never mind.”
“Any idea who killed him?”
We started back to Sid’s. Alex threw away the remains of his joint.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You’ll be around?”
“I’ll be around for a few days. Few as possible. Fucking New York.”
“Yeah?”
Alex said, “Me, I love LA. I love it where I am, it’s suburban and plastic and clean and the cars are fast, we have a house with a pool, the girls are pretty and people are superficial, that’s what he felt, anyway, it’s everything my daddy hated. I hated New York before. I hate it worse now, people, noise, everyone scared, pretending they’re not scared, I feel like the whole thing could sink into the harbor and it would be no bad thing, you know? My father sold the beautiful house he grew up in, and bought an apartment in Brooklyn Heights he never used, then he sets up at this rundown warehouse.” He gestured to the building. “What’s he want with Red Hook? To me it’s a dump. Apparently he was obsessed with it.”
“There was a story about an old Soviet ship that ran aground here in the early 1950s,” I said. “Sid said he met some of the sailors. He said one of them never went home. He tried to find him. He wanted to write a book.”
“It sounds like one of his stories.”
“You think he made it up?”
“He didn’t make things up, he was a hawk for truth. Trouble was it was his truth that mattered,” Alex said. “So you’re what? You said you were a cop.”
“Yeah, but it’s not my case,” I said. “I’m just someone your dad helped out once.”
He laughed bitterly. “Didn’t he always.”
“How long will you be here?”
“You already asked. Until I can arrange a funeral. I have to worry about the family.”
“You talk a lot about the family. I mean, what is it?”
“I was an only child. Far as I’m concerned my father and mother probably fucked once and they got me.” He stretched his arms over his head, then let them hang loose, then cracked his knuckles, stretched again. “I get tight,” he said. “It’s the job.”
“You keep talking about the family.”
“They’re all very social and they do things a certain way, God help me, you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You ever hear of the Boule Club, or the Link? Jack and Jill? The élite of African-American society?” He snorted with derision. “You should have seen the debutante balls, even when I was a teenager, all those black kids turned out in ball gowns and white tie and tails, fraternities, sororities. I ran like hell. California was my salvation. The sunshine, the movie business, be who you want to be. Everyone from somewhere else.”
For the first time, Alex cracked a smile. He bent over and touched his toes, straightened up, and said, “As long as you’re good, or pretty or sharp, you can reinvent yourself in LA. You can make up your own fucking myth. Why the hell am I telling you this?”
For the first time I liked him. Like me, he’d fled somewhere else.
“Get away from what you grew up on,” I said. “The system, the rituals, the crap.”
“You said it,” Alex said and asked me for one of my cigarettes.
“Go on.”
“Did my father ever talk to you about color, I mean actual color, the whole thing about passing or not? My grandfather passed for white in order to do certain deals, but it was also about status, for a sense of who you were. They didn’t quite want white babies, they wanted very light-skinned babies, and they paid a whole fucking lot of attention when every kid was born, especially the older ladies who came to look at them.” Alex stopped. “Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure. Sid talked about it a little, but go on.”
“They inspected the skin and felt the texture of the hair. People thought about skin color, you knew it from the time you were little. The women talked about it in private, the way people in some families talked about disease. Silently. Quietly. Even the texture of the hair. One old lady would say about a little girl, ‘She’ll have trouble with that nappy hair.’ Nappy hair, they’d say. ‘She’ll have to stretch it if she can.’” Alex paused. “Everyone in my father’s family was light-skinned, except him. My father came out darker. Not black, but darker than some of the others who were very light and freckled, that generation of babies, they came tumbling out some even with blond hair. So they actually laughed at him when he was little. It made me like him better except when I found out he played the game, too, and when I started dating, I could see every girl I brought around he was looking at her color. He married a white girl, of course; except it turned out he didn’t like girls. Fucked up or what?”
“Did he ever talk about his half brother, Earl?”
I noticed for the first time t
hat there were men repairing the dock, maybe making sure no sign remained of Earl’s murder. I had tried to get a copy of a police photograph of Earl, see what he looked like, didn’t have much luck. For Sid’s sake, I’d keep trying. I didn’t figure the family kept his picture, and I wasn’t surprised when Alex McKay snorted in response to my question. Weird to think if Sid had been telling the truth, and Earl looked like him, then Alex looked like Earl, too.
“You heard my aunt. No kids named Earl in the McKay household,” he said. “Listen, I have to get on the phone. I want it over and out of my life. You think he was murdered? You think it was some boy he picked up? It would sure as hell freak them out.”
“What would?”
“That it was a sex crime. Dead from a heart attack, my father would have been a McKay. Even suicide they could handle. They could say, well, Sid was a writer, you know? He was sensitive. Murder is much too sleazy. We don’t have murders in our family, Alex, darling, they all said to me. That’s what they’d like,” he said. “Who do you think killed him?”
“I think he was murdered because he had information that people wanted, or didn’t want him to have, or didn’t want him spreading around.”
“Information was all that mattered to him,” Alex said. “Or truth. Whatever. He was obsessed. In the last few years with so much news being manipulated and politicized it made him a little crazy. He kept notes on everyone who screwed with the news. He sent e-mails about it. He made people crazy. He was fired from his job. He became an old man suddenly. Sad. Everything was about justice for him and this was injustice. He believed in justice for the world, but real people, that was something else. He had a young reporter once, guy worked for him, he could do no wrong, then he fucked up, it was over. The guy begged him. Jack said, please, come on, Sid, I remember, I heard them once. It was principle. He told me as a point of pride. You know what my middle name is? Justice. Yeah.” He laughed, bitter.
“What was his name?”
“Who?”
Red Hook Page 19
