Empty ever after mp-5

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Here,” I said, as I poured. “You look like you could use this.”

  Carmella still did not face me. “I’m not drinking these days.”

  “No wonder you’ve been such a bitch.” I was laughing. She wasn’t. “Come on, you know I hate to drink alone.”

  “No!”

  “What the fuck is the matter with-”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  I drank my scotch, quickly, then drank the glass I poured for Carmella. After that, I said nothing. Sometimes, the two of us would talk about my divorce and what had gone wrong between Katy and me. We almost never talked about Carmella’s social life. That was mostly my doing, I suppose. Her taste in men sucked and I wasn’t shy about voicing that opinion. I also tended to pile on when the latest asshole would inevitably disappoint her. It didn’t take her long to tire of hearing me say, “I told you so.” She thought she could read my mind.

  “Go ahead, say it. I know you’re thinking it.”

  “No, I’m not. What I’m thinking is are you gonna be okay?”

  “I’m always okay. You know what I been through. I can take anything.”

  She was right. She had been through a lot. Her whole life seemed to be one long drawn-out test of her will to survive. Outside her family, only I knew just how cruel that test had been. I walked over and knelt down in front of her chair.

  “Just because you always survive doesn’t mean you’re always okay,” I said, stroking her hair. I wiped her tears away with my thumb.

  “What am I gonna do, Moe?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want?”

  “I want not to have gotten knocked up is what I want.” The anger shut off her tears. She looked up at the ceiling. “I pray to God, always. Since I was a little girl, I pray to God, but he don’t answer my prayers.”

  She crossed herself, then flipped up the middle finger of her right hand. I went back around the desk and poured myself another scotch.

  “You remember Israel Roth?”

  “The viejo, your friend? Sure, I remember. Nice man.”

  “You know he survived two years in Auschwitz, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What Mr. Roth used to say was that the problem with God wasn’t that he didn’t answer prayers. The problem was his answer was usually no.”

  “Smart man, but that don’t help me.”

  “Have you told the father?”

  “Fuck him!”

  I didn’t touch that line. “Who is he?”

  “Doesn’t matter, just another jerk in a long line of jerks.” She stood up and came to stand close by me. “It’s your fault, you know.”

  “How’s it my-”

  “You know,” she said, threading herself through my arms and wrapping hers around me. “Why don’t you love me?”

  “Carmella, we’ve been through this bef-”

  She pushed the end of the word back into my mouth with her tongue. At first, I just took it, but I was returning her kiss soon enough. When I had allowed myself to fantasize about being with her, I told myself that a second kiss would never match the first. I was right. The second kiss was better. The first kiss had been rather chaste, more a tender brush of the lips, heavy with possibility and light on passion. This kiss would not be mistaken for a chaste brush of the lips. Her slight sigh broke the spell and I pushed myself away.

  “I’m not doing this,” I said.

  “Not that again. That was forever ago. You can’t keep punishing me for what someone else did to me.”

  “It’s never been about that.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “You mean other than your being pregnant?”

  That quieted her. There was chemistry between us. There always had been, but this kiss had been about distraction, not chemistry. It had done a fairly good job of distracting me as well.

  “Oh, Christ, Moe, what am I gonna do?” She pulled herself close again and rested her head on my chest.

  “Do you want the baby?”

  “Me? I’m a thirty-five-year-old unmarried woman. What am I gonna do with a baby?”

  “That’s not an answer. Do you want it?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Now that’s an answer,” I said, once again stroking her hair. “How far along are you?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Whatever you choose, you know, it’s good with me.”

  “I know.”

  I reached under her chin and tilted her head so that she was looking up directly into my eyes. “Just one thing, Carm, don’t think that because you’re not far along that you have a lot of time. The longer you wait, the harder it will get. Whatever decision you make will be a permanent one and you’ll have to live with it forever.”

  She smiled sadly. “Maybe not forever, but just as long as I live.”

  “Yeah, I guess everybody’s forever is a little bit different.”

  Now she pushed herself away, wiping off what was left of the tears with the backs of her hands. “Come on, we got work to do. Go put that bottle away and then get your ass back in here.”

  By the time I returned to her office, she had completely regained her composure. I hadn’t invested in this partnership because of her looks. Of the two of us, she was the professional detective. I’d only ever been in uniform. When Carmella needed to, she could be all business. You couldn’t’ve worked homicide the way she had without the ability to check your emotions. There were times when her knack for emotional distance verged on antiseptic and, given what was going on with my family at the moment, that was probably a good thing. I was too close to it, way too close.

  She slid a thick file across her desk. “That’s what you asked for. You’ve got current addresses-home and business-phone numbers, e-mail addresses… everything. There’s only one guy, this… Judas Wannsee, that we’re having a little trouble locating.”

  In 1981, Judas Wannsee was the leader of the Yellow Stars, a Jewish anti-assimilationist cult headquartered in the Catskill Mountains. His group had provided cover for the woman who had started the fire that killed my high school crush. The group had attracted some national media attention in the early part of the decade, but by 19 9 0 had fallen into the creases of history the way pocket change disappears into the furniture.

  “Okay, have Devo keep looking.”

  “So, where do we start?”

  “ We don’t. I’m flying solo. There are some people I need to talk to by myself.”

  “Okay, but-”

  “You still have that package in the office?”

  Carmella knew what I was asking for and pulled a large plastic bag out of her drawer.

  “Good. Patrick and his boyfriend Jack had that tattooed on their forearms.”

  “So you told me, but that had to have been at least-”

  “-twenty-three years ago. I know, but I want you to send some people out to tattoo parlors to see if anyone’s had a tat like this done within the last few months.”

  “Moe, these days aren’t exactly like when my dad was young and the only people who got tattoos were sailors and bikers. There are probably more than a hundred tattoo and piercing joints in Manhattan alone. Maybe double that. Never mind the boroughs.”

  I suppose I hadn’t given it a lot of thought. “You really think there’s that many?”

  “Shit, everybody’s got ink these days.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “You do! What of? Where?”

  “You should’ve asked me that about twenty minutes ago. There’s a good chance you would have seen for yourself. But we’ll talk about that some other time. I bet you Sarah got one.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Carmella just shook her head and smiled at me. “Okay, so we’re going tattoo hunting. Anything else?”

  “Casting calls,” I said.

  “Casting calls! Tattoos and casting calls, what’s this about exactly?”

  “At the airport…” I hesitated.
/>   “At the airport what?”

  “Remember when Raheem pointed and said that the guy that paid him to deliver the-”

  “-package looked like the guy in the painting. I remember. He fed me that same line of crap when we had our little debriefing. The kid was trying to get over is all. He was full of shit.”

  “No, he wasn’t, Carm.”

  “What?”

  “I saw him.”

  “You saw who?”

  “Patrick.”

  “You outta your fucking mind?”

  “I think maybe I am, but I know what I saw and I saw him.”

  “So maybe he really isn’t dead,” she said.

  “No, he’s dead.”

  “Wait a-”

  “I didn’t see an older, not a forty-year-old Patrick. I saw Patrick from when he was in college. And there’s only two explanations for that. He was a ghost or a-”

  “-look-a-like,” she finished my sentence.

  “If he wasn’t a ghost, then somebody was shopping around for a replica and the best way to find one in this city is to hold auditions for a very special part.”

  “Okay, Moe, I can see how this would work, but I don’t understand the why. Who could hate you guys this much?”

  “When we find out who,” I said, “the why will be self-evident.”

  “ If we do.”

  “When we do. When!”

  We discussed a few more details and I got ready to head back home. Carmella was still in her office. I stuck my head through the door.

  “You gonna be all right?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. “Me? I guess I will be, but this isn’t only about me anymore, is it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “About before…I…I-”

  “I won’t pretend I’ll be able to forget it, but don’t worry about it.”

  “Safe home,” she said, turning her chair back toward the window.

  Safe home yourself, I thought, although I knew she’d be spending the night here. Would anyone walk past our offices and wonder about the light leaking through the bottom of the door?

  When I got back to Sheepshead Bay, Sarah had gone. Her note said she had decided to spend a few days with her mom. It was the right choice for all of us, especially for Katy, Folded into the note were my Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association card and Carmella’s Detective’s Endowment Association card. The postscript read, “You were right, Dad. I was being a hypocrite. Thanks for the card and thank Carmella for hers, but I won’t be needing them anymore.”

  Sarah really was the best of both Katy and me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Although Aaron lived there and our biggest moneymaker was on Long Island, the place still gave me the chills. When I was growing up and kids from the neighborhood would vanish over summer vacation, there would be whispers about their families having fled to far off places with idyllic names like Valley Stream, Stony Brook, and Amityville or to places with unpronounceable names like Ronkonkoma, Massapequa, and Patchogue. It was all Siberia to me. I lived in secret dread that one of my dad’s business ventures would finally succeed and that he’d move Mom, Aaron, Miriam, and me to one of those awful places where people lived in big houses on quiet streets. My fears might have been allayed had I bothered looking at a map to see that Brooklyn and Queens were actually part of Long Island. I needn’t have worried in any case. My dad’s bad fortune would tie me to Brooklyn forever.

  Elmont was a faceless town that was close enough to the city line to blow kisses at New York across the Queens border. It was the home of Belmont Park racetrack where the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, was held every June. If not for the track, Elmont would be notable for being on the glide path to Kennedy Airport and for its cemeteries. My parents were buried in Elmont. In the end, I guess, they had moved to Long Island, but, as yet, without Aaron, Miriam, and me. I had come to see a man in Elmont about an empty grave.

  I have heard it said that concentration camp survivors sometimes pass on their torments to their children, that the victims become the victimizers. I don’t know if it’s true or not. People say a lot of things. What I do know is that Mr. Roth had been my friend, a second father to me, and a surrogate grandfather to Sarah. He was affectionate, warm, funny, and philosophical in spite of what he had endured, maybe because of it. Yet he, by his own admission, had been an unfaithful husband and a negligent father. I knew about some of his failings, but had come by the knowledge indirectly.

  Steven Roth, on the other hand, was so utterly familiar with his dad’s failings that escaping their reach seemed beyond his ability or desire. Steven was a bitter, angry man, so full of rage there wasn’t room in him for anything else but alcohol. That toxic mix of bitterness, rage, and alcohol had caused his father and himself nothing but grief. He had done a long bid in prison for manslaughter-a bar fight, of course-and a second stretch for DWI. He had been in and out of marriage, jail, and rehab so frequently by the time his father passed away, it was difficult to keep count.

  We’d met a few times over the years and it was never pleasant. My relationship with his dad was a constant source of irritation, an allergen from which he could not find relief. Once, a few months before he died, Mr. Roth hired me to get his son out of some trouble, big trouble. But when that trouble went away, Steven Roth treated me not with respect or gratitude, but with contempt. It all came to a very ugly head at the memorial service for his dad. Steven was lit like a roman candle and in a particularly foul mood, spouting off about how his dad should have been buried, not cremated and how he should have been the one to see to his dad’s remains. When he shouted at Sarah that he would see to burying her father, I punched his lights out. Aaron tells me, I was still swinging when they pulled me off him. All I remember was that he was smiling at me. Even though I’d broken his nose and split both his lips, he was smiling.

  Walking up the few steps to the front door of the neat little saltbox Cape, I had second thoughts about not bringing Carmella along. If things got ugly this time, there might not be anyone around to pull me off. I held my finger a few inches away from the bell and rechecked the address. Well-kept houses on twisty quiet streets were not usually Steven Roth’s style. Not unlike my late friend Rico Tripoli, Steven Roth’s taste ran to the darker edges of town, to places where the blackness of their souls blended in with the scenery. I couldn’t speak to his resources or to his abilities as a schemer, but there was no doubt he hated me enough to hurt my family anyway he could. I pressed the bell and listened to the muted chimes ring inside the house.

  When the door pulled back, I stood facing a very attractive woman in her mid-forties. Beyond her broad smile and positively sparkling blue-gray eyes, it was difficult to say what was so attractive about her. Her face, in fact, was rather plain and round and her hair was a mousy brown. She was thin, I guess, but her generic jeans and sweatshirt did nothing to highlight her shape. Yet there was something undeniably appealing about her.

  “Good morning,” she said without a hint of guile or wariness.

  “Hi, my name’s Moe Prager. I was wondering if Steven-”

  “Moe Prager! Moe Prager. Steven will be thrilled you’re here.” She beamed and shouted over her shoulder, “Honey, come here, there’s someone to see you.”

  I was sure I wasn’t dreaming it, but not of much else. I was having a full out Twilight Zone moment. Then, when Steven Roth appeared with his right hand extended and a wide peaceful smile on his face, I thought to look for the hidden camera. When he took my hand, shook it, embraced me, I was still in shock.

  “Praise Jesus, my prayers have been answered.”

  “Praise Jesus,” the woman repeated.

  “Moe, this is my wife Evelyn. Evelyn… Moe Prager.”

  We shook hands.

  “Come on in, Moses. That is what Steven’s father called you, right?” she asked, folding her arm in the crook of my elbow. “Come have some coffee with us.”

  “Yes, he called me that a
nd Mr. Moe most of the time.”

  “Steven has told me a lot about you and his father. I want to hear it from you.”

  The three of us sat around the kitchen table and shared coffee in a sort of stunned silence. Then Steven, who still bore the bend in his nose from when I broke it, spoke up.

  “I’m sorry, Moe, for treating you the way I did in the past. I was such an angry and empty man until I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior. When Evelyn and I found each other and God in AA, I just knew this day would come. I should’ve sought you out, but I was weak and afraid. Even with the Lord, I have my weaknesses and my bad days. Jesus has forgiven me, but I have prayed for the strength to come speak to you and ask your forgiveness. I can only pray for my father’s forgiveness, but I can ask for yours.”

  “Sure, Steven, I forgive you.” Then I put his alleged faith to the test. “It’s what your dad would want me to do.” If anything would set him off and cut through his “The New Me” veneer, it was those words.

  He smiled. “You always were a clever man, Moe, but you can’t rattle my cage. The pain and rage are gone. I don’t blame you for not believing me. I was a pretty awful human being for a very long time. I think my dad loved how sharp you were. You were clever and quick like him. I am glad he had you to comfort him in his later years. Lord knows, I was no comfort.”

  “No,” I said, “you weren’t, but he always loved you. Your dad told me he wasn’t a very good father or husband. In some ways, I think Izzy felt he deserved what you put him through.”