Old Flame

by Ira Berkowitz

  “Sounds like a treat.”

  “Tell me about it. And to top it all off, you got a bunch of truly scary hard cases, snake-eaters, who look like they can take down a small country with a Swiss Army knife. And when you throw in the fucking politicians all elbowing for face time with the press, it’s, shall we say, tension-filled. So I said, Fuck it, and moved into something a little less harrowing.”

  “Who’s your partner?”

  “Arne Jensen. Very earnest young man. All about truth, justice, and the American way. Makes my hemorrhoids throb. Plus, he wants to be called Swede.”

  “Swede. Catchy.”

  “ ’Course, no one does it. ‘Suck Up’ works just fine.”

  “Seems kind of young for a shot at the brass ring,” I said. “It took me years before I got my gold badge.”

  “Excellent deduction, Sherlock. The hump’s connected somehow. Been on the job three years, and he gets to work with the big, swinging homicide dicks. For all I know, the commissioner is his rabbi.” He shrugged. “Who gives a shit? In a couple of years I’ll have my pension. I’ve got a security job lined up. No muss, no fuss, and home at six in one piece.” He squinted at me through the raindrops. “So, what’re you doing here?”

  “Your vic might be my ex-wife’s husband. Guy named Gerhardt.”

  “You got the wrong crime scene, pally. According to his ID, my stiff is Tony Ferris.”

  “How could that be?”

  “Maybe you got bad information. You say Ginny married this guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you’re in for another shocker.”

  Toal took my arm and walked me over to the body bag. He knelt and pulled the zipper down.

  The surprises just kept on coming.

  Tony Ferris was black.

  CHAPTER

  3

  My head was buzzing with exes.

  My ex-mother-in-law shows up to tell me that my ex-wife and her husband are getting death threats. The husband winds up dead, so someone followed through. I thought the stiff was Husband Number Two. Turns out he was Husband Number Three. Lucky for Husband Number Two, but still very confusing. Since confusion usually makes me hungry, I headed over to Feeney’s for a late breakfast and a little quiet to sort things out. Except for the two guys sitting at either end of the bar nursing their morning whiskey, the place was empty.

  Feeney’s is a hole-in-the-wall Hell’s Kitchen saloon dating back to Prohibition. Now it serves as an oasis for barely socialized individuals who take their drinking seriously and find comfort in doing it alone.

  I parked myself in a booth and pondered the problem, especially its very large wrinkle. Why didn’t Jeanmarie mention that Ferris was black? Could it be that Ferris’s race was something she had come to terms with, and therefore it was unimportant?

  Nah! Not to Jeanmarie. In her world even Black Irish didn’t make the cut. Jeanmarie was an equal opportunity hater, as was her husband, Ollie, a bottom-of-the-barrel guy who lived his entire life locked in a snow globe of the eternally pissed-off. And Ferris wasn’t married to just any white woman. Ginny was the daughter of Jeanmarie and Ollie, a fact not easily dismissed.

  The only other fact I had was that Ferris had been threatened about something and didn’t take it seriously. His killer obviously did.

  But threatened about what?

  It was at that moment that I knew I had slipped from mild curiosity to something bordering on interest. To make matters worse, I had fallen into the trap of putting together a list of suspects. The realization didn’t make me happy. For the past year my days had passed peacefully. I had pretty much rehabbed from my bullet wound, and the only thing that was off the table was heavy lifting and running the marathon. And I had the pension. Not much, but enough. Life was reasonably good.

  And I was about to screw it up again.

  “Since when did I become your fucking answering service?”

  I looked up to find Nick D’Amico, the proprietor of the joint, looming over me. Nick was a made guy who’d gone his own way after Joe Colombo bought it at an Italian-American Civil Rights League rally and his Family fell into turmoil. Ever since, Nick worked for my brother, Dave. Nick was as much an anachronism as his saloon. To outsiders, Nick was a happy-go-lucky muffin who closed the place down to his regular customers on Christmas Eve and threw a party for the neighborhood home less. They never saw the stone killer who would turn you into origami over a slight.

  “I’d be happy to take my business elsewhere,” I said.

  “What business? You don’t drink no more, and what you eat here ain’t gonna get me that condo on Park Avenue anytime soon.”

  “Look at the bright side. You won’t have all those people to tip at Christmas.”

  He shrugged his agreement. “That condo on Park was almost a possibility. I got an offer for the building.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Hell’s Kitchen was hot. Most of the buildings wore scaffolding like leis. And perfectly formed thirty-somethings, all decked out in “vintage” sneakers and shirts with little polo players on the pockets, prowled the streets sizing up the area, using words like charming and quaint.

  “And?”

  “Told them to stick it up their ass.”

  Worked for me.

  “Who called?” I said.

  “Allie, and your old buddy Danny Reno. She was back from San Francisco and heading into a meeting.”

  “And Reno?”

  “Who gives a shit? Didn’t sound too happy, though.”

  One out of two wasn’t bad.

  Allie was Allison Lebow, the love of my life and reigning creative director at Bellknap & Hoskins, an advertising agency that had recently set up shop on Tenth and Fifty-second.

  We met purely by chance at a particularly nasty deli near her office. She was grilling the counterman, a bearded and turbaned Sikh, on whether the seeds on her bagel were poppy or the desiccated exoskeletons of tiny insects. Poppy, he assured her. She wasn’t buying it, and things were getting ugly. Her mood ring had turned from a pretty blue color to angry black. I stepped in. A quick nibble was all it took. Bug casings, for sure. We’ve been together ever since.

  “She’s good for you. I see it.”

  “I agree.”

  “You’re not such a fucking mood-buster no more.”

  “Is there a compliment in there?”

  “Take it for what it is,” he said. “You did a good thing taking Frankie off the map. Look, we all do what we have to do to earn, but it was never business with that twisted, shit-brained fuck. So I figured maybe you’d be a little happy. But no, you turned into a pissy mope. Until you met Allie.”

  When a whore’s earning power had slipped, Frankie One-Eye, a greasy-looking lowlife with bad skin and a milky eye, was her final stop in the pimp marketplace. Frankie bought these poor crack zombies at a deep discount and put them to work in sex shows he ran in the backs of semis in the Meatpacking District. Their time with Frankie was brief. When they no longer amused his equally lowlife customers, or him, they wound up dead, but we were never able to nail him. Frankie became my personal White Whale when he turned a young girl in his employ — a sad-eyed, tiny little thing I kind of looked out for— into a Hudson River floater. Once again, Frankie proved to be the Teflon pimp, but I saw it as a minor inconvenience. Getting into his oatmeal became my reason for being. It didn’t take long for him to snap, and when he did, I took the top of his head off. But not before he almost returned the favor by putting a nine in my chest. Given my unorthodox handling of the situation, the folks at One Police Plaza did a quick investigation, decided to call it a righteous shooting, and put the lid on. Tight. But they figured that it would be better for everyone if my recuperation lasted forever. In exchange for my gold shield they gave me a medal and a disability pension.

  Yeah, popping Frankie was a very good thing, but he turned out to be the gift that just keeps on giving; the one monster in my pantheon of night demons that set all the others free to frolic i
nside my head. At least until Allie came along. When she was with me, the monsters weren’t.

  “Love gives the heart ease, and she keeps the snakes in my head from rioting,” I told Nick.

  Nick slipped into the booth and sat opposite me. His powder blue Banlon shirt fit him like a sausage casing. “That may be,” he said, “but today you don’t look too happy.”

  “Ginny’s husband got iced.”

  “Who gives a shit? The day she left you she ceased to exist. I don’t give a fuck what happens to her or her husband, and neither should you.”

  Nick had known me ever since I was a kid, and loyalty was high up on the very short list of things he cared about.

  “Her mother asked me to look into it.”

  “The Dragon Lady? You gotta be kidding! When you were married to her daughter, fucking Jeanmarie wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you if you were on fire. ” He reached over and rapped his knuckles on my forehead. “What’s going on in there? The slug took out part of your lung, not your brain.”

  “I didn’t say I’d do it. I’m just thinking about it.”

  “I know you better. Walk away. No, make that run away. And here’s something else: I know you and Ginny were married and all, but the apple don’t fall far from the tree.”

  I should have listened.

  CHAPTER

  4

  I called Pete Toal and got Ginny’s address.

  According to the Hertz map, Seaside was nestled in the middle of Long Island, smack dab in the crotch of the Twin Forks and, in a bit of developer tomfoolery, nowhere near the sea.

  The combination of a dogged, slanting rain and a salmon run of crosstown traffic nearly gave me second thoughts. The Long Island Expressway was more of the same. Construction had backed traffic up for miles, but once I got past exit 40, I was speeding along at a blurring twenty miles an hour. After another ten exits, stands of tall trees just coming into bud flanked the highway, obscuring the sprawling exurbia of Civilserviceville.

  Once, city workers actually lived in the city. Now, most have pushed the envelope to the outer reaches of the New York metro area. The commute is a daily stick in the eye, but a city job, even at the top of the pay scale, barely covers the rent on a shitty two-bedroom in an equally shitty neighborhood teeming with crime beggaring description. Out here in Civilserviceville, things are different. Home ownership is a God-given right, kids actually learn useful things in schools, no one kills them for their iPods, and the skies are not cloudy all day.

  A definite no-brainer.

  Three plus hours later I saw the sign for Seaside. The good news was, the rain had stopped. The bad news was, I was in a place that looked remarkably like Kansas.

  A jillion years ago, glaciers had flattened Long Island, and it never recovered from the trauma. As far as the eye could see, miles of tract houses interrupted only by shopping centers and office parks—an oxymoron of titanic proportions — marched to the horizon.

  Ginny’s house was a tract ranch fronted by a tidy, postage-stamp lawn and leafy foundation plantings, sitting cheek by jowl with other ranches with tidy patches of grass and leafy foundation plantings. Everything was laid out with geometric precision. The word soulless popped into my mind. It was hard imagining Ginny living in a place like this. It was hard imagining anyone living in a place like this.

  Ginny and I were neighborhood kids who married, grew up, and, after a few years, divorced. Our marriage began in high teenage wattage and unraveled stitch by stitch. For a while I blamed the breakup on my drinking, convinced myself that though my life was spiraling into the toilet, it was a good thing she wasn’t willing to go along for the ride. But that wasn’t it.

  Were we in love? That was, and I guess still is, an open question. But when you cut right through it, we were never a fit. Never one bone. Never one skin.

  Another Hell’s Kitchen Station of the Cross.

  We had met at the Church of the Most Precious Blood Confraternity Dance. I was seventeen; she was a year younger and a stunner. And for some unfathomable reason totally smitten with me. A shock, since adolescence wasn’t my best moment. I could only ascribe my good fortune to pheromones.

  We began dating and quickly became what was known in the neighborhood as an “item.” When I turned eighteen, I embarked on the first leg of your basic Hell’s Kitchen life journey. I enlisted in the Marine Corps. When my tour in Desert Storm was up, I came home.

  Instead of getting a job and settling in for the long haul, I crossed everyone up and enrolled in City College, and Ginny and I picked up where we left off. Two years later we married, and it was time to earn a living. I bid academia a reluctant good-bye and went on the force. Given the other choices —blue-collar work, or a job strong-arming people for my brother, Dave — it was a reasonable alternative. Do twenty years on the job, have a couple of kids, buy a summer cottage in the Poconos, cash the tax-free pension check, and if things got tight, there was always a security-guard job out there on the horizon. A pleasant life trajectory.

  But there was a snake in the Garden. The Marines had taken me out of the Kitchen and into the world. And I liked what I saw.

  When my tour was up, the Kitchen seemed a lot less interesting, and I wanted out. Ginny didn’t. We were headed in different directions. In the end, she was the one who left. I thought I would never see her again. Over was over. Besides, I’d had Johnnie B for company.

  Funny how things turn out.

  I pulled into her driveway and parked alongside a silver SUV.

  I got out of the car and went to the door. It swung open before I had a chance to knock.

  “Hi, Jake,” she said.

  Two words.

  That’s all it took.

  A jarring intimacy, the special kind of knowing that only comes from someone who has read your soul and knows all of your sins.

  Time had sharpened the once soft lines of her face. Her honey blond hair —auburn, when she served me with divorce papers — was tied tightly in a ponytail, making the angles even sharper. She wore a black velvet warm-up suit that was never intended to see a droplet of sweat, and pink step-in sneakers. A cute little hood sagged between her shoulder blades.

  Hardly widow’s weeds.

  She threw her arms around me. I got a whiff of expensive perfume and the sharp smell of gin. It surprised me. Except for the occasional beer with dinner, Ginny wasn’t a drinker. I guess grief went well with gin.

  “This is a surprise,” she said, stepping back and mustering a weak smile. “Long Island is way off your beat.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a beat.”

  She threaded her arm around mine and led me into the living room.

  The room was decorated in Hell’s Kitchen Luxe—expensive, but gaudy. Lots of heavy, dark wood, downy cushioned sofas, acres of plush carpeting, and lampshades with crystal thingies hanging from their bottoms. I settled in on the sofa and sunk to my hips. Ginny sat down beside me.

  “It’s been a while,” she said.

  “Ten years.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  “I expected Jeanmarie to answer the door,” I said.

  “She left a little while ago. Told me she came to see you. I wish she hadn’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You don’t need any more crap in your life.”

  “That’s my call, isn’t it?”

  “I heard about your dad. I liked Dominic.”

  “Everyone liked Dominic, except Dominic.”

  “And I heard about you. I’m so sorry.”

  I shrugged. “The million-dollar wound. I’ve got the pension and I’m alive. A fair trade. And I’m off the sauce. Amazing how different the world looks when you’re upright. Tell me about you. I heard you married a fireman.”

  She studied her very long French-tipped nails, and a brittle smile played on her lips.

  “Yeah, but it didn’t last long,” she said. “He had hand trouble. The psycho thought I needed discip
lining every now and again.”

  “My turn to say I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “What is it they say? All the bad things in your life just make you stronger?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you involved with anyone?”

  “I am,” I said.

  She nodded. “It really sucks being alone, doesn’t it,” she said.

  “Not when you’re your own best friend.”

  She smiled. “I forgot. You never needed anyone.” She paused. “Except for Dave.”

  “Forever bound by the ties of filial love, my brother and I continue to march in lockstep through these mean streets. Yin and Yang.”

  Her eyes strayed to her hands. “Light and darkness. Black and white.”

  “Tell me about Tony,” I said.

  Her fingers toyed with a silver crucifix hanging from a slender chain around her neck.

  “He works in the city—works for the city actually, Minority Opportunities Bureau—but we met out here. He’s — he was —a decent guy, and we hit it off right away.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Almost six years.”

  “How did that go down with Jeanmarie and Ollie?”

  “How do you think? They barely tolerated you. Tony? They wouldn’t let him in their house. Ollie still doesn’t talk to me. Thinks I’m some sort of a race betrayer.”

  “Ollie was always open-minded,” I said.

  “You know what really frosts me?”

  “What?”

  “When we were kids, come Friday night, Ollie and his buddies would be cruising black bars looking to get lucky. I know because I followed them one night. And if he didn’t manage to get lucky, he’d come home, all smelling of puke and whiskey, and take it out on us.” Her eyes filled. “Ollie and his buddies standing on each other’s shoulders don’t add up to one Tony Ferris.”

  She was silent for a while.

  Then she turned to me.

  “Does it matter to you?” she said.

  “Does what matter?”

  “That Tony was black.”