“Where?”
“I’m pretty close to you.”
“That doesn’t help me, kid.” I wasn’t going to call him Patrick again if I could avoid it.
“Manhattan Court, number sixty-nine, downstairs. It’s a garden apartment that he rented for me.”
“Manhattan Court over by Coney Island Hospital?”
“That’s it.”
“You are close. Two hours?”
“Bring the money,” he said, all the big bad fear gone out of his voice.
I thought about calling Katy and Sarah, but I remembered what her shrink had said. I could serve this kid and Martello up on a silver tray and Katy would still resent me. She had to deal with her issues and I had to deal with mine. That worked for me, for the time being.
Squeezed in between Avenues Y and Z and perpendicular to Ocean Parkway, Manhattan Court was a small, forgettable block of post-Korean War garden apartments with a row of low-slung garages behind. The “gardens” out front were actually lawns of weeds cut low to give the illusion of grass. Each unit had a brick and concrete stoop just large enough to hold a few beach chairs and a portable charcoal grill. I suppose Manhattan Court and the surrounding blocks of garden apartments must once have seemed like a little bit of heaven in the concrete and asphalt world of Brooklyn. Now it seemed in need of repair or bulldozing.
I knew Manhattan Court because Crazy Charlie had lived there. Charlie and I went to Cunningham and Lincoln together. We called him Crazy Charlie because he would do shit no person with half a brain would do. You tell him you’d give him twenty bucks to climb the Parachute Jump and he’d say, “Fuck, yeah,” and climb it. Most kids, me included, were afraid to climb the fence that surrounded the ride, but there was Crazy Charlie two hundred fifty feet in the air screaming for his twenty bucks.
He also tended to be loose with his fists. For him, one a day wasn’t a vitamin, but a description of how many fights he averaged. Sometimes he took Sundays off. “I’m a good Catholic,” he’d say. Crazy Charlie didn’t care how big you were, who you were, or who you knew. If you pissed him off-and, trust me, it didn’t take much to piss Crazy Charlie off-he was going to smack you. Of course, throwing the first punch didn’t always equate to victory I’d seen Charlie get the shit kicked out of him on more than a few occasions. There’s no future for guys like Crazy Charlie. Last few times I saw him was in the mid-’70s when I was still on the job. I’m walking by the holding pen at the Six-O and I hear someone calling my name.
“Moe fuckin’ Prager, that you?”
“Crazy Charlie, what the fuck you doing in there?”
“I ain’t Crazy Charlie no more, Moe. I mean, I’m still crazy, but it ain’t dignified for a man, that name, you know what I’m saying?”
“What are you going by these days?”
“Charlie Rolex.”
“Selling fake watches, huh?”
“Good fakes. But yeah, a man gotta make a livin’ right?”
“Right.”
“So you should come by one day and have a beer with me.”
“You still on Manhattan Court?”
“Yeah. My dad bit the big one, but Mom’s still kickin’.”
“Okay, Charlie Rolex. I’ll do that.”
And I did.
When I went over to his house that last time, he was shirtless, wearing an army helmet, and drinking beer out of a mixing bowl. Oh, yeah, he also had a loaded police special on the table. He let me drink my beer out of the can and we talked about the nutty stuff he used to pull. After a few minutes of reminiscing, he leaned over to me conspiratorially and whispered, “You’re a Jew, right?”
“You know I am, Charlie.”
He looked around to make sure no one was listening. “You don’t see any of your people in jail.”
Well, actually I did, but Charlie wasn’t up for a debate.
“No, Charlie, you don’t.”
“See, that’s what I’m saying.”
Frankly, I had no idea what he was saying and I got out of there a little while later with fake Rolexes for Aaron, Miriam, and me. They all broke the first time we put them on. A few years later I heard Charlie had taken to living on the streets. From there it was only a short drop off the edge of the earth into oblivion. Like I said, there’s never any future for guys like Charlie Rolex.
I put Charlie right out of my head the minute I turned left onto Manhattan Court from East 6th Street. Carmella and Brian Doyle were probably already here. I told them to park blocks away and walk into their positions: Carmella across the way on the even side of the street and Brian Doyle atop the garages around back. There was good reason for the precautions. Martello hadn’t shown up for his shift that day-neglecting to call in sick-nor, apparently, had he returned to his house in Great River. Missing a shift without calling in meant he was getting sloppy, and sloppiness from a guy like Martello was a sure sign of desperation. To me it felt like he was preparing to cover his ass and that meant trouble for the kid.
I scanned the cars parked on both sides of the street. I had already circled the surrounding blocks a few times checking for pewter Yukons. None in sight. It was a good sign, but didn’t mean Martello hadn’t taken the same precautions as Carmella and Doyle. He was, after all, a cop and knew what we knew. At this juncture, however, I was certain he would be more concerned with being expeditious than judicious. I parked my car directly in front of number sixty-nine, collected the kid’s five grand, and got out. Traffic was streaming in both directions along Ocean Parkway as I stepped up onto the stoop. I found comfort in the din of the traffic. I felt for the bulge at the small of my back and found comfort in that too.
The heavier front door pushed right back, exposing the staircase that led up to the second floor apartment and, on my right, the door to the kid’s apartment. Ignoring the bell, I rapped my knuckles hard on the kid’s door and waited. I could hear the sound of the TV coming through the door, but no footsteps.
“Hey, kid! Patrick, it’s me. Open up.” I wasn’t shouting exactly. I tried the bell and waited a minute. Still no footsteps. I called the kid’s cell phone. I heard ringing through the door. The ringing stopped when I hung up. I dialed Carmella.
“What?” she whispered.
“Maybe trouble.”
“You want me to come across the-”
“No, stay put and keep your eyes open. I think the kid may have bolted or is ready to bolt. Call Brian and give him the heads-up.”
“Okay.”
I knocked again. Nothing. I tried the doorknob. It turned easily and the door fell back, but stopped after only a few inches. A dim shaft of light filtered through into the dark hallway. I pushed harder without completely shouldering the door and it moved a bit more, but not much. There was definitely something propped against the other side. I peeked through the four inches of space I’d managed to clear and was relieved not to see arms and legs. While I still couldn’t look around the door to see what was blocking it, I saw the kid’s cell phone on a beat-up coffee table. The sound from inside had come from a boombox stereo sitting on the bare wood floor, not from a TV.
“Kid. Patrick. Come on, it’s me, Moe,” I called, a little more urgency in my voice this time. No response. I hit the door square with my right shoulder and it gave way. I patted the wall for a light switch and found one. An overhead fixture came on and I saw the red plastic milk crate full of dumbbells and weights that had held the door shut.
I was standing in the living room. The coffee table and the boombox were the only things in there. This apartment had the same layout I remembered from Crazy Charlie’s. There was a dining room ahead and to my right, a galley kitchen off that, a hallway to the left of the dining room with a bathroom on the right, a large bedroom on the left, and a small bedroom at the end of the hall. I slid my arm around my back, under my jacket, and pulled the. 38 from its holster. I knelt down and killed the music.
“Kid. Patrick. I’ve got your five grand in my pocket.”
I too
k the slow, measured steps of a tightrope walker, letting my gun hand lead. The dining room and kitchen were clear. There was no furniture in the dining room and no food in the kitchen. The living room closet set beneath the stairs up to the second floor was empty. When I stepped into the hallway a little gust of wind hit me square in the face. There must have been a window open in one of the bedrooms. A thunderstorm had been brewing all day and I smelled its inevitability in the air. There was another scent in the breeze that I couldn’t quite make out.
The bathroom was the size of a closet and nothing much larger than a water bug could have hidden in there. The small bedroom was even more empty than the other rooms. It was totally barren except for cobwebs and the window was shut tight. No one had set foot in the room for weeks. The uncorrupted layer of dust on the floor told me as much. Stepping back toward the last unexplored room in the house, I caught another rush of air. Now I knew what that other scent was hiding behind the humid musk of the storm: blood.
“I’m coming in there, motherfucker!” I screamed like a madman and kicked the door above the knob. The door flew away and I ran in blind, fueled by fear and weeks of frustration. Crazy Charlie would have been proud of me. Not five feet through the door I tripped over something and crashed to the floor. Looking back, I saw what had taken my feet out from under me. This time, it wasn’t a fawn.
When I crawled over to the kid, my hand slid in a pool of what I supposed was his blood. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but it was fresh. I held my bloody palm up near my face. In the dimness, the blood almost looked like chocolate syrup. I put my other hand over the kid’s heart and got nothing. He was still warm, as warm as he would ever again be. I found his neck. There was no pulse to feel. As I stood up, lightning flashed and I caught a glimpse of the kid. I didn’t have to see him clearly to know he was dead. I found the light switch.
The kid’s shirtless body lay so that his open eyes seemed to be looking straight through the ceiling, through the roof, into infinity. How’s the view, kid? There wasn’t a lot of blood anywhere except around his body, but the only visible wound was a long, diagonal gash across his liver. The blood that had seeped out of it was thick and dark. Yet as grisly as the gash was, I couldn’t believe it could account for all the blood puddled on the floor. My bet was the detectives would find some nasty wounds in his back when they rolled him over. I dialed 911 and listened to myself talk to the operator as if from another room.
I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I was frozen, as incapable of movement as the kid. He did indeed resemble Patrick, but from here, in the stark light, it was clear he was no twin. He even looked a little different from that morning. I suppose getting murdered will do that to you. I knew he wasn’t Patrick, not my Patrick, but his death dredged it all up again and the past twenty-two years-the lies, the secrets, and deceptions-came crashing down around me. Only this time it came down all at once. I tried distracting myself, gazing around the room at anything but the body.
There was an unfurled sleeping bag, a few pairs of jeans, some rock t-shirts from bands I never heard of, and two pair of those stupid Shinjo Olympians. The window was wide open and I thought I could already hear sirens, an army of sirens, coming my way. The wail of the sirens unfroze me and I stepped into the living room to wait. Living room. The phrase took on new meaning. Outside rain fell in solid sheets.
I must have been hallucinating about the sirens, because it took ten minutes for the first unit to arrive. The two uniforms were named Kurtz and Fong. Kurtz was nearly as old as me, too old to still be in a uniform without stripes, and Fong was a fresh-faced Asian kid trying hard to act blase. By the time they came in, I had sufficiently recovered my wits and had since called Carmella and Brian and filled them in. I told them to stay away as the situation was going to get complicated enough without involving them. I did ask Carmella to give one of our lawyer contacts a heads-up.
I had my old badge out to show the uniforms. Neither Kurtz nor Fong were much impressed. After they patted me down, removing my. 38 from its holster, checking out my wallet and credentials, we got to know each other a little. I didn’t bother going into great detail about the reasons for my being at 69 Manhattan Court. I was a licensed PI working a case. Blah, blah, blah… They seemed satisfied I hadn’t killed the kid. Yeah, Prager, whatever… Besides, making the case wasn’t their headache.
“Hey,” I said, “what took you guys so long to get here? I thought I heard sirens almost immediately after I called.”
Both uniforms turned to each other and laughed. I must have missed the joke.
“Aren’t there any fucking chairs in this place for a man to sit down?” Kurtz whined, rubbing his lower back.
“Nope.”
“You did hear sirens,” he said, still unhappy about the lack of chairs.
“We were right around the corner. You notice how wet we are?” Fong asked.
“Now that you mention it.”
The bottoms of their trousers were dark with rain and beads of water covered the bills of their caps.
Kurtz shook his head. “My partner’s not exaggerating. We had a traffic fatality at Avenue Y and Ocean Parkway. A guy ran right out into the traffic and got launched. When he came down he skidded and then got pancaked by like four other vehicles. It was ugly.”
“Sounds it.”
“Yeah, ugly,” Fong agreed with his partner’s assessment. “And really too bad. The guy was a cop.”
That got my attention. “A cop?”
Kurtz sneered. “Yeah, if you consider them glorified, overpaid motherfuckin’ meter maids in Suffolk County cops.”
My heart was doing that jumping into my throat thing again. “A Suffolk cop?”
“A sergeant,” said Fong.
“Was his name Ray Martello?”
Both Fong and Kurtz looked at me like Jesus walking on water. Lightning flashed again. If thunder followed the lightning, I didn’t hear it. I thought I heard the rain falling.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I sat with Paul Dukelsky in an interrogation room at the Six-One precinct on Coney Island Avenue. The Duke, as he was known around the city’s courthouses, was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in New York. Dukelsky was a shark with a square jaw, green eyes, and a good heart. For every rich scumbag he defended, there were two or three wrongly convicted men now walking the streets. We had done some work for his firm, but not enough to warrant his driving in from the Hamptons to play my white knight. That was Carmella’s doing. Like most straight men with a pulse and a libido, he had a thing for my partner. Good looks and confidence are magnetic qualities in any woman, but when she carries a gun and can probably kick your ass… well, then, that’s something else.
“So, Moe, let’s go over this again,” the Duke instructed, looking down at his wrist. I wasn’t sure if he was checking the time or his tan. I did know he hadn’t gotten his watch from Charlie Rolex.
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Between you and the cops, I’ve been over this twenty times. The details aren’t going to change. Ray Martello killed the kid, not me. Call Sheriff Vandervoort in Janus. Call my wife’s doctors, for chrissakes! They’ll tell you what’s been going on. I’ve had it. It’s what, like seven in the morn-”
“Eight-ten,” Dukelsky corrected me.
“I’m exhausted and hungry and I’m not doing this anymore.”
“As your attorney, I must insist you-”
“Go take Carmella out for breakfast or something and leave me the fuck alone.”
He flushed red. I’d hit a nerve. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything, Moe. I’m not here to discuss Carmella and me.”
“I didn’t know there was a Carmella and you.”
He bowed his head, clearly trying to regroup. It never failed. Beauty and desire cut through the bullshit. For all the trappings of success, the Duke was, on the inside, like every other man I knew: an insecure fifteen-year-old boy who wanted to sleep with the prett
iest girl in school.
“Listen, Moe…I wanted to talk to you about-”
There was a knock on the door. Whoever was on the other side didn’t bother waiting for permission before stepping into the room. It was Detective Feeney with Carmella Melendez in tow. Feeney was old school right down to his brush-cut gray hair, white shirt, and squeaky black shoes. He smelled of cigarettes and coffee and wore an expression that bespoke a perpetual sour stomach. The detective had his face in a file even as he walked. Carmella’s expression was hard to read.
“Looks like you were right about Martello,” Feeney said, pitching the file on the desk. “We’ve tentatively matched a hunting knife we found on his body with the weapon used to kill the kid. And there’s a bloody sole print by the bedroom window that’s a match for the shoes he was wearing. And I just got off the phone with that Vandervoort guy upstate. He confirmed your story.”
“Do you have an identity on the kid?”
“The vic? John James, born August 18, 1981, San Pedro, California. He’s got a sheet. Arrested several times by the LAPD for everything from shoplifting to sword swallowing, if you catch my meaning.”
“That was his name, John James? Did he have an alias?” I asked.
“If he did,” Feeney said, scanning the file, “it’s not on his sheet. Why?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” It was stupid, I know, but I was pissed off that the kid had lied to me about his name. I think maybe I was madder at myself for believing him. No one likes being played for a fool.
“We found Martello’s Yukon parked on Ave Y. The sick bastard had human remains in the vehicle, a bag of bones complete with skull.”
“My brother-in-law?”
“Probably. That’ll take a few days to confirm. We’ll be a week going over the stuff he had inside that SUV. All I know is, this guy musta hated you something wicked to go through this rigmarole. It was me and I wanted revenge, I’da just shot you.”
Dukelsky’s eyes got big. “I’m certain my client takes great comfort in that knowledge, Detective Feeney.”
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