Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  There was a fair amount of traffic in both directions on Coney Island Avenue when I stepped out of the shadows to cross the street. At least a minute passed before I could even make it halfway across. When I got stuck there on the double yellow lines, I looked up at the third floor windows. I got weak in the knees and lightheaded thinking about what I was going up there to do. But when I looked up, I saw orange light dancing in the windows of the bedroom where the body lay. Before I could take another step, flames completely engulfed the room. I was frozen in place. Then I remembered what Sue Kasten had said to her flunkies: “We don’t have much time.”

  As my eyes shifted down one story, there were two loud explosions. The second and third floor windows blew out, showering the street below and the cars below with jagged glass shards, bits of plaster, and wooden shrapnel. The hallway coughed flames out onto the sidewalk. Some of the debris flew over my head. Some of it bit into the blacktop around my feet. More than just fire had caused that blast. Gas, maybe? Molotov cocktails? I couldn’t say. The explosion unfroze me and I ran. As I did, I kept thinking that I’d asked Lids to get me an address so I might find some answers. What I got instead were more questions wrapped in other questions. I’d worry about that later. First I had to get back to the car.

  • • •

  Bang!

  This explosion was of a completely different, more personal nature. I guess I wasn’t paying careful enough attention to the world outside my head, because under most circumstances I would’ve seen it coming. Not only didn’t I see it coming, I wasn’t even sure what it was: a length of pipe, a baseball bat, a two-by-four? That was kind of beside the point as whatever it was knocked the wind so far out of me I felt like I would have go to the Bronx to retrieve it. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I had already taken a shot across my midsection and was currently writhing on the sidewalk next to my brother’s car, the kick in my ribs was like the cherry on top of the icing on top of my indignity cake. It got even worse still when powerful hands grabbed the shoulders of my coat and flipped me over onto my back. Then those same hands twisted themselves around my collar and yanked me up onto my knees. A big man in a full ski mask stood over me, the knuckles on his fingers pinching off the blood to my brain.

  “Listen ta me, ya fuckin’ amateur. Stay outta this shit or I’ll have ta really hurt ya. Ya understand, asshole? Don’t be playin’ on the big boys’ court no more. Ya understand?”

  He could have repeated that question fifty times, but I was in no position to answer. I already couldn’t breathe, and he was pressing on my neck so hard I couldn’t speak. I suppose he finally figured out my answer when I kind of moved my head in a feeble nod.

  “All right, you hippie piece a shit. Remember what I said. Stay outta this.”

  Hippie! Me? I thought the ski mask was supposed to prevent me from seeing his face, not prevent him from seeing mine. My hair wasn’t that long. I was clean-shaven, and there wasn’t a peace sign anywhere to be found on my clothes. Anyway, if you came from my family you knew better than to think love was the answer for all the world’s ills. I might’ve even laughed at him if he wasn’t busy interfering with the bodily processes required to produce laughter. Then I felt his grip relax. Blood rushed back to my brain, and I could feel my lungs were once again in working order. But when he fully released his grip, I went crashing back down onto the cement. As I lay there like a dishrag on the frozen sidewalk, I realized the bruise on my shoulder would have new friends to keep it company.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was early; early enough that I heard the Daily News being delivered by our apartment door; early enough so I could swipe the Post and the Times from in front of my neighbors’ doors without fear of getting caught; early enough so that my family was asleep and would remain so for a few more hours.

  The stories about the fire in the morning papers failed to mention whether or not human remains were found in the debris at 1055 Coney Island Avenue. In fact, all the articles were stingy on details. No surprise there — according to the papers, the fire department hadn’t gotten the blaze under control until around midnight. That was less than seven hours ago. Oh, yeah, that was the other thing: the stories were very vague on whether it was just a fire or an explosion and a fire. The Post said one thing, the Daily News something else. Even the sacred New York Times gave it a few inches, but it didn’t exactly usurp the continuing coverage of the fire that had destroyed the Apollo 1 capsule in late January. Nor had it pushed aside coverage of Vietnam. The war was getting out of control, just like Bobby had warned me it would when we were seniors at Lincoln.

  “You’ll see, Moe. They tell you it’s about preserving freedom and about preventing the domino effect in Southeast Asia, but that’s a crock of shit, man. It’s sleight of hand, like when Tony Pizza does those silly magic tricks. You think it’s about this hand when it’s really about that one.”

  “Then what’s the war about?”

  “What it’s always about: money. Even Ike, not exactly anybody’s definition of a Commie or a dove, warned us about the military industrial complex. War is a money maker. It’s a beast with an insatiable appetite. You just watch what happens. By next year, we’ll be so involved in the war we’ll never get out. It wouldn’t be half as bad if the beast only ate machines, but it doesn’t. It eats people and if we don’t watch out, it’s gonna eat us too.”

  Until six months ago, I’d thought Bobby was being a little hysterical about the war, spouting his lefty propaganda. Then Michael Ruggio, a guy we knew from the neighborhood, came back home from Nam with no legs, one arm, and brain damage. Seeing Mike like that changed my mind to Bobby’s way of thinking. So when I went to register for the draft at the Shore Theatre building on Surf Avenue across from Nathan’s, I was scared, really scared. I guess I was still pretty scared, but today it was for different reasons.

  I was also in pain. Even before last night, I’d been eating aspirins like Cap’n Crunch. Now, just as the shoulder pain had become tolerable, I had sore ribs, an aching kidney — I’d pissed a little blood when I got up — and swelling above my liver. Whoever the guy in the ski mask was, he understood the mechanics of inflicting pain. At least there weren’t any bruises on my neck from his knuckles. Not that I had a clue about any of this, but I was more confused by what had happened to me at the end of the evening than the rest of it. How did that guy know to wait for me by Aaron’s car? Who was he? What part of this mess was I supposed to stay out of, exactly, and why? Was I supposed to just sit on the bench? There was already such a jumble of questions in my head, I couldn’t deal with any new ones.

  One good thing: it was Saturday, and that meant I could swipe my dad’s car for the day. And that’s exactly what I did. Maybe it was a sign I was getting older that I’d begun noticing the weather. That’s an exaggeration, because when you grow up close to the beach, like I did, you know that the weather reports you hear on TV are a waste of time. Near the ocean, the weather is about much more than temperature. It’s about a thousand things, large and small — the wind, for instance, or where the sun is in the sky at any time of day. I don’t know how or when it happened, but one day I realized I could sense snow. I could read it in the sky’s subtle shades of gray, smell it on the breeze. Finally, I understood what my mom meant when she said it was raw outside. And raw was just what it was when I left my building. The wind was up, the air damp. The cold cut right through me as if I was wearing a bathing suit instead of a coat.

  It was way too early to visit Mindy, so after buying a cup of coffee and a bialy in Brighton Beach, I turned my dad’s Rambler American left onto Coney Island Avenue. Traffic was light at that hour. As I went, I noticed the old Jewish men of Brooklyn going to temple for Saturday services. Like most of my other Jewish friends, I hadn’t gone to shul on the Sabbath in years. Unlike our fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers before them, we didn’t view our bar mitzvahs as a rite of passage into manhood, but paradoxically as emancipation from the wei
ght of tradition and our legacy of victimization. Still, I sensed I would never truly be free of the tradition and the legacy no matter how far I turned my back on them, no matter how I tried to drown out the cantors’ sacred songs with the Rolling Stones.

  I could smell the remnants of the fire from a block away: the tang of melted plastic, the soggy charcoal stink of burned-out timbers. I suppose every kind of death has a unique, lingering odor. There was some rubbernecking, so I was already going pretty slowly as I passed what was left of 1055 Coney Island Avenue, which wasn’t much. The roof was gone and only the bare bones of the top two floors remained. Hyman Bergman’s fix-it shop would need more fixing than it was worth. Its glass door and windows had been smashed in or blown out, and the sooted interior looked like a cancerous lung. I had to laugh at how the ominous storage room door, bowed and twisted, its black paint burned off, still stood, swinging in the wind. Milky gray icicles hung off every available surface. There was char on the buildings to either side of 1055, but they seemed to have survived mostly intact.

  There was a black and green patrol car stationed out front, and a rectangle of police sawhorse barricades blocking off the sidewalk. Parked behind the patrol car was a conspicuously unmarked Plymouth Fury. At one side of the barricades, I spotted old man Bergman standing between a tall man dressed in a blue tunic and a white cap — probably a fire inspector — and a squat man in a rumpled trench coat — a detective. Bergman kept gesturing at the upper floors and shrugging his shoulders. He was saying something too. Although I’d only had the displeasure of meeting the gnome once, it was easy for me to fill in his dialogue.

  Watching Bergman as I passed, I got an idea for how to move ahead. I hadn’t really had one up until then. My original plan, such as it was, was to drive by, see what I could see, maybe go hang at Burgundy House until visiting hours at the hospital. I thought that I’d use the phone at Burgundy House to call Lids and ask him about the guy who’d given me the Coney Island Avenue address in the first place. Maybe I’d ask him to do a little more digging for me to find out about Susan Kasten’s scene. Or maybe he could get me some information about the black guy with the vitiligo. As far as I could figure, there were only a few people who knew Pink Blotches was dead: Susan Kasten, Bobby, me, and the man who’d killed him. I hoped Bobby wasn’t two out of the four. But as I watched Bergman fading in my side view mirror, I remembered the feeling I got when I was in the shop yesterday, and that glint in his eyes when I mentioned the black guy with vitiligo.

  It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. Even in a borough of bruised and dented used cars, Bergman’s rusted wreck of a Ford Fairlane stuck out. It was parked on Coney Island Avenue, about a block past the burnt-out shell of the building. I parked a few cars behind it and waited. I was doing a lot of that lately, waiting. After forty-five minutes and a lot of thumb twiddling, the brilliant idea of following Bergman around seemed a lot less brilliant. When a full hour went by, it didn’t seem brilliant at all. I was about to give up on the notion completely when I spotted the old man coming my way. Man, his gait was painful to watch. I imagine it wasn’t any less painful for him. Each step looked like it should have been his last. He musta been one tough son of a bitch. He was sure as shit nasty enough. Who knows, maybe that was what had helped him survive the camps. He certainly hadn’t charmed his way out.

  I followed Bergman back toward my part of Brooklyn, except he went left after crossing the Coney Island Avenue bridge over the Belt Parkway. Five minutes later, he pulled into the driveway of a big — by Brooklyn standards — Tudor house off Oriental Boulevard in Manhattan Beach. Manhattan Beach was the fanciest, wealthiest area in my part of Brooklyn. The working stiffs, blue collar mugs, cops, firemen, fishermen, teachers, clerks, secretaries, and construction workers lived in Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and Sheepshead Bay. The people with money, they lived in the fancy houses in Manhattan Beach. Here, the kids got their own rooms and their own cars, and went on family vacations that ranged a lot farther than hotels in the Catskills. What, I wondered, was Bergman doing here? A guy like him, a guy who used rope to hold up his pants, who drove a car made out of rust, I figured, must do pickups and drop-offs if sufficient money was involved. So I parked and waited for him to leave. The thing was, he never left.

  More than a half hour had gone by when I realized I either needed to leave myself or to check out the house. Before getting out of my dad’s car, I looked around for something, anything that might prevent Bergman from recognizing me if he spotted me lurking. There it was on the floor of the backseat, my dad’s silly pork pie hat. My dad had grown up during a time when most men wore hats, but he hated that Aaron, Miriam, and I teased him about it. He pretended he’d stopped wearing one altogether, though we knew he just stashed it in the car. It was one of those little charades that made a family a family. Secretly, I think the three of us admired him for hanging stubbornly onto his tradition while trying to fool us. It gave us something to admire him for, and there wasn’t much else to choose from. Kids, especially sons, need to admire their dads.

  I must’ve looked as ridiculous as I felt with my dad’s hat on. I folded the brim down like in Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy bits. Pacing across the street from the Tudor house, I had a good view down the driveway through the winter bare hedges. Besides the rust bucket, a white Renault Dauphine and a blue Chevy Impala were parked there. I also had a fairly unobstructed view of the living room window. When two people appeared in that window a few minutes later, I couldn’t quite believe my eyes, because I recognized both their faces. Although I couldn’t hear what was going on, it was pretty obvious from their body language, their facial expressions, and their angry gesturing that they were engaged in a nasty fight. I found I wasn’t as curious about the subject of the fight as I was about the warring parties. Why, I wondered, was Hyman Bergman shouting at Susan Kasten, and what were both of them doing in the living room of this big house in Manhattan Beach? Just what I needed, more questions.

  “Hey, you!” A hand landed hard on my right shoulder at the same time I heard the man’s voice.

  I was so surprised I nearly pissed myself. Instead, I turned slowly in the direction of the voice. And when I did, I smiled, because this was yet another face I recognized. “Dr. Mishkin,” I said. “How are you?” Dr. Raoul Mishkin had a practice in Brighton Beach, and had been our family doctor for as long as I could remember.

  “Moses Prager. What are you doing in front of my house?”

  “You live here?” I deflected as I about-faced. “Nice house.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve known you since you were a little pisher. You can’t pretend with me, kid. I saw you pacing out here. So come on, out with it, why did you track me down? You got something to talk about with me that maybe you would be embarrassed to discuss in my office. Maybe something you don’t want your parents to know about.”

  Look, if this is what he thought, I wasn’t going to try and dissuade him. Making something up was going to be a hell of a lot easier than explaining what I was actually doing there.

  “It’s my girlfriend,” was all I said. He filled in the rest.

  Mishkin shrugged his shoulders. “Pregnant, huh?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. She’s two weeks late.”

  “Come, let’s go inside and talk. My wife will make something for us to eat and we can discuss your options.”

  Doc took me in, introduced me to his wife, and then we went into his library. Fifteen minutes later, his wife brought us lox and onion omelets with bagels and coffee. We ate pretty much in silence. After some initial small talk, he gave me a lecture about what my girlfriend and I needed to consider. Illegal abortion never came up directly, but he sort of talked around it.

  “If you and your girl are thinking about some other path, don’t rush to take it. It can be dangerous and you can get in a lot of trouble. Listen, I’m just a doctor, which, to tell you the truth, is like another name for being a fancy mechanic. As just a mechanic, I am no
t a wise enough man, not a philosopher to know what a life is or when it begins. Death, that I know a lot about, too much, I’m afraid. But once a life is ended, there are no second chances, no turning back, no do-overs. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Moses?”

  “I do, Doc. I do.”

  It was odd how I’d ended up in his library, but somehow I knew I would never forget his talk about a pregnancy that never was.

  “Good. You always were a sharp kid.”

  Then I had an idea, hopefully one that would finally lead to some answers. “So Doc, when I was standing on the street, trying to get up the nerve to knock on your door, I thought I saw someone I know in the house across the way.”

  “Susan?”

  “Yeah, Sue Kasten. We had a class together at BC last term. Does she live across the street?”

  “Yes, she lives there now with her grandfather, Hyman. He’s a horrible human being. I suppose I should be more forgiving because he lost almost his whole family in the camps, but …” Mishkin didn’t finish his thought. “Susan moved in two years ago. Her mom and dad live out west somewhere, Oregon or California, I think. They’re university professors. Sherry, Susan’s mom, is Hyman’s daughter. Well, Susan wanted to come east to study and to get to know her family here. Hyman and Sherry hated each other and then she moved out when she turned eighteen, but apparently Susan wouldn’t be denied.”

  “Big house they live in,” I said.