Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Bobby walked past the fix-it shop’s door, heading directly to a white wooden door a few feet to the right of the shop’s front window. The white door was the entrance to the apartments above the shop. Bobby reached up with his right arm — to ring the bell, I guess — and waited. About half a minute passed and Bobby rang the bell again. A minute passed. This time, he stepped back on the sidewalk and craned his neck to look up at the apartments. He shook his head, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out his keys. I recognized his key ring even from across the street. I recognized it because dangling from it was the same stupid rabbit’s foot that had been dangling from his key ring since we were twelve years old. It was white and plush back then. Now the fur that remained was dirty gray. He’d won the rabbit’s foot in Coney Island for shooting a red star out of a piece of paper with a BB submachine gun.

  “Shooting a red star,” I’d said. “Don’t tell your parents or they’ll send you to Siberia.”

  I remember he’d just kind of laughed, but I think he’d kept the stupid rabbit’s foot as a kind of Fuck you to his parents.

  I was right about the keys, because soon enough, Bobby was stepping through the white door and closing it behind him. I fought my natural curiosity, sat tight, and waited. My patience was rewarded. Less than five minutes after he went in, Bobby came flying through the white door. His head was on a swivel, turning right, then left, then right again. He was breathless, panting, his chest heaving, but it was the panicked look on his face that really got my attention. Sucking in big gulps of frosty air, blowing staccato clouds of steam out of his mouth, he seemed to be trying to calm himself down before taking another step. Then, after he’d seen that no one was walking his way from either direction, Bobby rushed into his Olds and fishtailed away, smoking his rear tires on the slick pavement as he went.

  I didn’t remember opening the car door or crossing Coney Island Avenue, yet there I was, standing in front of the door Bobby Friedman had just burst through in a panic. And in his panic, Bobby had neglected to shut the door behind him. That wasn’t like him. Whatever he’d found upstairs had scared the shit out of him, and he didn’t usually scare easy. Under any other set of circumstances, I would have gotten out of there faster than Superman, but these weren’t other circumstances. Maybe old man Bergman really didn’t know anything, but there had to be a reason Lids’s guy had given me this address. There was no chance I was going to walk away from this. No chance. Not now.

  The staircase was fairly dark with some very weak light filtering down from the second floor landing. The stairs were crooked and cranky, moaning under my weight. The banister was loose and about as trustworthy as an aluminum siding salesman. The air smelled like my wet gym socks, but there was another raw scent too: the stink of an unflushed toilet. And present between the must and stench was one more pungent odor, one that I didn’t quite yet understand. It mixed and mingled with the other smells, but managed to rise above them and crown itself king. It was vaguely familiar. I remembered being at my aunt’s house as a kid and finding a broken jar of baby food in a kitchen cabinet. Ground lamb, I think it was. Not only did it reek, but the meat had seemed to be alive. I had noticed the little bits of white squirming about in the sickly gray meat like wiggly grains of rice. Only later did my aunt explain about fly eggs and maggots.

  At the second floor landing I was greeted by an unadorned, low wattage bulb and, to my left, a black steel door with two serious-looking padlocks. There was a sign on the door:

  STORAGE

  KEEP OUT

  OR ELSE

  God love Brooklyn. Anywhere else, the words “Keep Out” would have been warning enough, but here you had to turn a warning into a threat. Problem with Brooklynites is that we take threats as a challenge. I tried the door. No luck. It didn’t budge a millimeter. I had the sense that if a small nuclear bomb hit this building, that door would still be standing. I got down on all fours and sniffed under the door. Nope. Wherever the stink was coming from, it wasn’t here. Besides, there was nothing here that would have freaked Bobby out. I looked up toward the third floor landing. It was totally lightless up there, but sometimes there’s just no going back.

  These stairs were in even worse shape than the ones leading up to the black door. I think habit was the only thing that stopped them giving way. They bent pretty good as I went. I noticed something else too: the stench was getting more intense as I climbed. The door to the top floor apartment was just cheap bare wood with a lock in the knob like you might find on a closet or bathroom door. It turned in my hand and I pushed it open. When I did, the stink hit me full in the face and it was all I could do not to vomit. Now I understood why Bobby had been breathing so fiercely when I’d seen him out on the street. I put my hand inside the sleeve of my coat and pinched my nose closed. It was incredibly hot inside the apartment, like a sauna at one of those bathhouses my zaydeh and all the old European men favored. I touched the cast iron radiator with the tip of my finger. No wonder the apartment felt like a sauna. The radiator was hot enough to cook on. It didn’t help that the windows were sealed shut.

  I found a wall switch to my left and clicked it on. Two out of three bulbs in the old-fashioned ceiling fixture popped on. The room was barely furnished. There were two blue bean bag chairs, a few plastic chairs, a portable Zenith TV on an upturned milk crate with aluminum foil on the antenna, and not much else. Burgundy House looked like a designer showcase by comparison. I stepped further inside. To my right was a little galley-style kitchen. A few dishes were in the drying rack next to the chipped and rust-stained porcelain sink. In the fridge there were a few six-packs of Piels beer, a paper bag with a few ounces of pot in the vegetable bin, a carton of sour milk, and nothing else. I wished the sour milk was the reason for the awful smell in the place. It was just that: a wish. For when I finally got the courage to go down the short hallway, past the bathroom, and into the bedroom, I saw the real reason lying on the bed.

  I was no doctor, and I was no mortician. Still, I knew a dead body when I saw one … when I smelled one. Now I understood Bobby’s panic. He’d run, and I guess if I hadn’t taken a second look at the dead man, I’d have run too. There were some ugly bruises on his face and a big gash across his forehead that was covered in crusted, dried blood. He looked like someone had taken a tire iron to his face. His brown eyes were open, unseeing, and clouded over. I guessed he was about my age and would’ve stood six-two or -three. He had on a pair of bell-bottom jeans, worn shiny at the knees, and tan work boots. He wore a gray, blood-stained sweatshirt with a horse head logo across the chest, with the words Effingham Mustangs printed below. Yet it wasn’t his wardrobe or the color of his eyes or his wounds that kept me there. It was his short-cropped Afro haircut, the light shade of his brown skin, and the once-pink blotches on his face and hands that got my attention. So this poor dead bastard was the son of a bitch who’d put Mindy in a coma. In the movies, they would have had me spit on him or kick him for good measure — I’ll show you to hurt my girlfriend — but I just didn’t see the point. Even though I was close enough to touch him, he was beyond my reach.

  I couldn’t say if the stench was finally getting to me or what, but I suddenly felt the need to get out of there. I wasn’t stupid about it. I didn’t want my fingerprints all over the place, so I used my sleeve and wiped down every surface I’d touched: the doors, the light switch, the fridge, the milk carton … What was really weird was how the farther away from the body I moved, the more intense my nausea got. I could feel the vomit in my throat, taste it in my mouth. My head was pounding and I was sweating through my clothes. I made it down to the second floor landing before I could no longer hold back. I puked my guts out on the floor, some of it splashing onto the black steel door. OR ELSE indeed.

  When I collected what was left of me, I wobbled to the ground floor on very shaky legs. My first lungful of the brutal outside air made me sick again and if I’d had anything left to give, I would have given it up right there on the street. I
nstead, I dry-retched some and staggered through the sparse traffic until I made it to the safety of Aaron’s Tempest. It was strange how much that stupid car seat felt like home. I was in too much shock to drive away, never mind make sense of any of what I’d just been through. My life lessons were now no longer restricted to the stickball court or the sand beneath the boardwalk.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I don’t know how long it took me to get to Burgundy House. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there, what streets I’d taken, or if I’d bothered stopping at red lights. The drive over wasn’t just a blur; it wasn’t even a memory. I was there, then I was here. In that time, however much time it was, I don’t believe I’d had one clear thought pass through my brain. It was so bizarre because when I was standing there in front of the body, I’d been pretty calm. Then, in the next second, my calm had begun to unravel. Now, I was a total mess.

  In the darkened front seat of the car, I couldn’t get warm. I was cold from the marrow out, and the Tempest’s heater was as useless to me as corners to a bowling ball. I took my hands off the steering wheel and watched them shake. I was helpless to do anything about it. The harder I tried willing them to stop, the harder they shook. Compared to what was going on inside me, my shaking hands were the least of it. Nevertheless, shock and shaking hands weren’t going to stand up in court as reasons for not calling the cops. Sure, the only things I knew about police work I’d learned from Mannix and The Mod Squad — which I watched because I thought Peggy Lipton was hot — but you didn’t have to be J. Edgar Hoover to understand that I was obstructing justice by not telling the cops I’d found a corpse, one that had met a pretty violent end. And that when I’d wiped away my fingerprints, I’d probably wiped away others as well.

  To distract myself, I listened to Cousin Brucie on the radio. When I was a little kid, I loved his goofiness. Lately, he drove me nuts. In all fairness, it wasn’t only his endless talking over the music that made me crazy. I mean, I liked the Monkees as much as the next guy, but how many times can you stand to listen to “I’m a Believer” in the course of a day before sticking needles in your eyes? I found myself daydreaming about a radio station where DJs talked in human voices, played songs from your favorite albums that weren’t hits, and spun long songs that didn’t get butchered down to three minutes. Yeah, like that was ever going to happen. I might as well have hoped for wireless telephones or good-tasting American beer. Dream on. After a few minutes, I noticed my hands were no longer shaking and that I could actually put two reasonable thoughts together about something other than AM radio together without freaking out.

  That’s when it hit me: What the fuck had Bobby been doing at 1055 Coney Island Avenue to begin with, and why did he have keys to the place? I’d been so caught up in what was happening that the illogic of his presence hadn’t registered. There was a split second, I think, when I first spotted Bobby’s car that I wondered about what he was doing there, but then what followed overwhelmed the question. I guess dead bodies have that effect on me.

  Okay, I was pretty confident that Bobby, no matter what he was doing there, hadn’t killed the guy. For one thing, Bobby wasn’t up there long enough to have struggled with him. Besides, the bedroom window faced Coney Island Avenue, and as I was watching the upstairs windows from across the street, I would have seen a struggle. And though the apartment was pretty much a mess, there were no signs of a struggle: no broken furniture, no cracked plaster, nothing like that. And the body was ripe. My lack of a medical education notwithstanding, even I knew it would take at least a few days for the body to get that way. Still, none of that explained away Bobby’s being there and having keys to the place.

  Then, a sick, niggling thought wormed its way into my brain: What if Bobby wasn’t just going there, but going back there? I only had one connection, Lids, and he’d found someone to supply the address to me in less than twenty-four hours. Bobby had a million connections, and he always had money. So it was easy to see that if he wanted an address, Bobby would get it. If he got the address and found the guy who’d attacked Mindy hiding out there … Now, you’ve got to understand this about Bobby: he had the potential for violence. Although he was generally a gentle, happy soul, he wasn’t a weak one. He was a tough bastard, thick through his chest and arms. His union-organizer dad wasn’t big on hugging his son, but he had taught him all the tricks of the trade. Bobby was a sight to behold when peace demonstrations turned unpeaceful. I’d seen him knock more than one cop and a few construction workers flat on their asses.

  So yeah, Bobby had violence in him. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine him talking his way into the apartment and then taking a piece of pipe to Mindy’s attacker. But why come back? Maybe to see if he had actually killed the guy, or to make sure he hadn’t left any evidence behind. Bobby was tough, not stupid. Then there was another possibility, one I really didn’t want to think about. What if Bobby was sheltering the man who’d attacked Mindy, and was going there to check on him? The keys — in some ways, it was all about the keys. Maybe Bobby’d taken them from the guy after killing him. If not, that meant Bobby already had keys to the place. And if he did, I was back to square one: What was he doing there, and why did he have keys? Were they Bobby’s or the dead man’s?

  There was only one way to find out.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I drove back to the fix-it shop, but made sure to park blocks away and out of sight of anyone who might know me or my brother’s car. As I walked, I tried very hard to focus on the cold, on the passing traffic, or just about anything I could other than what I had in mind to do. Did the idea of going back into that apartment and patting down a corpse scare the shit out of me? Yeah, it did, but the thought that Mindy might never wake up scared me more. It scared me more to think that my best friend might’ve murdered someone. And what scared me most of all was the opposite, that rather than killing the man who had nearly beaten my girlfriend to death, Bobby had a connection to him or had tried to save him.

  Again, as I’d done earlier from the safety of Aaron’s car, I watched and waited. This time, from the shadows of a doorway directly across the street. A light went on, not from the third floor bedroom where the body was, but from the storage area on the second floor where the sign on the black door had threatened OR ELSE. Frayed and puckered shades covered the windows. They allowed light to leak out their sides, but did not give up anything more than that. I checked the Bulova watch on my wrist that my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lenny had given me for my high school graduation. Suddenly, standing out there alone in the biting cold, high school felt like a chapter from someone else’s book.

  It was a little after eight. Only two hours or so had passed from when I’d first pulled up across the street. Two hours, the same amount of time that had elapsed between my conversation with Mindy and when I found her smoking and drinking outside Burgundy House on the evening this nightmare had begun. I’d been confused by her mood swing that night. What, I’d wondered since, could possibly have happened in two hours to make her change so dramatically? I was no longer as confused. If the events of my evening had taught me anything, it was that a lot more than moods could change in two hours — a lot more.

  At 8:16, an old, shit-brown Dugan’s Bakery truck, the company logo sloppily painted over, parked in front of the fix-it shop. Two guys about my age, dressed alike in woolen watch caps, army surplus jackets, and gloves, got out of the truck. The back door of the van swung open. When I felt it was safe, I moved four doorways to my right so I could get a better angle on what there was to see. I noticed that the white door to the upstairs apartments had been wedged open and that the two guys, neither of whom were familiar to me, were disappearing up the creaky stairs I’d navigated less than an hour before. For their sakes, I hoped they had nose plugs. The place stank badly enough before I’d deposited the contents of my digestive system on the second floor landing. I couldn’t imagine how bad it reeked in there now. I got a little sickly just thinking about it.

  When th
e two of them came down a few minutes later, they were each carrying small, rope-handled, wooden crates that they loaded in the back of the truck. I couldn’t make out anything about the crates from where I stood, but they must have been heavy because the truck sat down on its rear tires. Either that or the truck’s springs were shot. Frick and Frack made two more round-trips, each time carrying similar crates as on their first foray. On their last trip, Frick had a small duffel bag slung over his right shoulder. Frack was empty-handed. Then when Frick threw the duffel bag onto the floor of the truck box, Frack went nuts.

  “What the fuck are you doing, man? You wanna get us killed?”

  “Fuck you,” said the guy who’d slammed down his duffel. “You’re not the boss of me.”

  Then there was a third voice, a girl’s voice, one that cut through the night air like a straight razor. “Shut up! The Committee is the boss of us all, and they won’t be happy if these are damaged or if we get caught here. Now let’s go. We don’t have much time.”

  When the owner of that third voice stepped out into the ambient street light, my heart caught in my throat. I recognized her. How could I not? I’d sat next to her in Romantic Poetry class three times a week during fall term. Her name was Susan Kasten. She’d said about five words to me during that time, four of which were “shut up” twice. But those were five more than she uttered aloud in the rest of the class. She was a petite, mouse-haired, plain-faced girl who struck me as the kind of person who longs for invisibility. And if it wasn’t for her cat-green eyes, she might have been able to disappear into the background. I squeezed my eyelids shut, combing my memory to recall if there was anything about Susan that would connect the girl from class with the one barking orders at Frick and Frack. Nothing came to mind. The sound of the truck door slamming shut broke my trance. I looked up to see the Dugan’s truck pulling away, coughing big clouds of exhaust as it went. I was half hoping that Susan had slammed the white door shut behind her so that there’d be no way for me to get back up to the third floor. She hadn’t. In fact, she’d left it wide open.