Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Soon, Shakespeare, soon. How do you know that’s where Mindy was?”

  “Because I know, man.”

  “Wrong answer.” I turned to walk away.

  “C’mon, man. Where you goin’?”

  “To tell your connection you gave me gotz and that you’re full of shit.”

  “C’mon, man, don’t do that. Don’t be that way.” He dropped to his knees. “Don’t make me beg you.”

  “Begging’s not the issue. Answers are.” The guy was a wreck and I guess I ached for him a little. It would have been hard not to, but aching for him wouldn’t get me the information I needed.

  He wiped his nose with his sleeve again. “Okay, okay, all right. Answers.”

  “I’m waiting,” I said, acting like a hard guy.

  “Mindy, that’s your old lady, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s a part of, like, this group.”

  A little bell went off in my head and I remembered what Susan Kasten had said the night before. “The Committee,” I said, “is that the group?”

  Shakespeare’s bloodshot eyes got wide. He didn’t answer, but nodded yes over and over again.

  “Is Susan Kasten a member of the Committee?”

  “Yeah, man, yeah. Can I go now?”

  “You ask me that again and I’m gonna kick your ass. You understand me? And get up off your knees, for chrissakes.”

  He stood, but immediately doubled over in pain. “Sorry, man. Sorry. It’s just that I gotta get well. I gotta.”

  “Okay. So, Mindy and Susan are part of this Committee. Who else?”

  “I can’t, man. I can’t.”

  “Just a few more questions and then you can go.”

  “You’ll tell Lids I did the right thing? You’ll tell him?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “You promise, man? You wouldn’t fuck with me like that.”

  “I promise, Shakespeare.”

  “God bless you.” He was back on his knees, grabbing at my hands.

  I pushed him away and he toppled over like a rootless tree. “Get up. Get the fuck up, already.”

  As he struggled to get up, I thought I heard something: the creaking of a boardwalk plank, shuffling feet in the sand. But when I looked around, Coney Island was just as dark and deserted as it had been a few seconds before. Shakespeare got as far as his knees. When I saw that was probably as far as he was going to get, I started up again.

  “Black guy with pink blotches all over his face and hands,” I said.

  “Abdul?”

  I played along. “Yeah, Abdul. Tell me about him.”

  “What about him?”

  “Anything.”

  “He calls himself Abdul Salaam. Means soldier of peace.” He laughed that snorting, machine gun laugh. “But his real name is Ricky Barnett. He comes from some little town in the Midwest somewheres, Effingberg or Effingham, some shit like that.”

  “Great. Now that we got his bio out of the way, tell me what he — ” I stopped, because whatever it was I’d heard before, I heard again. “Get up, Shakespeare. Get up!” I yanked him to his feet by the shoulders of his coat. He was as light as a bag of leaves. “Get the fuck outta here. Run! Run!”

  It was no good and it was too late anyway. Instead of running, Shakespeare just kind of melted. He collapsed into a ball of himself, throwing one arm over his head and the other around his ribs. I spun to look behind me, but before I had fully turned I was tackled from behind. Two sets of strong hands held me down. A gag was shoved in my mouth, and a bag or pillowcase was slipped over my head. Tape was rolled around the bag to hold it closed around my neck, but not so tightly I couldn’t breathe. My hands were taped behind my back, my ankles taped together, and I was dragged across the boardwalk — the toes of my Converse sneakers made a dull sound as they caught in the spaces between each plank — down the steps, and onto the sand. I was shoved face first onto the sand and then … nothing. I heard the soft shushing of feet walking away from me and then their pounding on the boardwalk stairs. Was I scared? Yeah, I was pretty fucking scared, but for some reason not as much as I should have been. I sensed that whatever this was about, it wasn’t about me.

  Then I heard Shakespeare doing what he did best: begging. “Please, man, don’t hurt me. I’m hurtin’ so bad already, man.”

  There was no response. I winced, expecting Shakespeare to take a beating. I knew this was no mugging. For one thing, the guys who dealt with me had left my watch on my wrist and my wallet in my pocket. For another, muggers in Brooklyn didn’t make like the Mission: Impossible team just to rob two schmucks on the boardwalk. Besides, one look at the two of us would have told even the most amateur thieves that we weren’t worth the effort. No, this wasn’t about robbery. As I waited for the beating to begin, I imagined the snap of Shakespeare’s bones, his screams. None came. What I heard instead was this:

  “Thank you, man. Thank you. God bless you.”

  A few seconds later I heard something being dragged, tha-dump, tha-dump, tha-dump, across the boardwalk. Feet scurried. Then there was just the sound of the subway, the waves, the whining of the wind through the rides to keep me company. When I was sure I was alone, I began moving my wrists in opposite directions. At first the tape gave only a tiny bit, and my arms wearied pretty quickly. Still, in about a half hour I had worked the tape loose enough so that I could free my right hand. I was totally free of everything else in short order. Shakespeare was free, too: free of the cold, free of hurt, free of pain, free of this world. I found him seated on the bench where we’d met, a belt strapped tightly around his left bicep, and a needle sticking out of his left forearm. There were so many needle marks stretching along the underside of his forearm that it looked like a subway map. At rest, without his constant movement, he looked much more in tune with death than life. I suppose that would have been okay with me if dying had been his choice and not someone else’s. It might also have helped me a little if I didn’t feel like I was as much to blame for his death as the needle sticking out of his arm.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  None of it seemed like a dream. People always say this or that felt like a dream, but nothing feels like a dream but a dream or, in this instance, a continuous nightmare. After last night I thought I might never sleep again. I ran all the way from the boardwalk to Lids’s building, my legs churning as much out of panic as anything else. First, I ran to get away from Shakespeare’s body. Then, as it dawned on me how close I’d just come to my own death, I ran harder. Once I’d been hooded and bound, those guys could have done anything to me and there wasn’t a thing I could’ve done about it. They could have shot me in the back of the head or carried me into the shallows and dropped me in the surf to drown. That really freaked me out, not the drowning so much as the thought of dying cold and alone. I didn’t want to die cold and alone. Just thinking about it had me crying as I ran. I’d shed some tears at Mindy’s bedside, but before that it had been a long time since I’d cried. I used to pride myself on that. There were no more tears by the time I got to the lobby of Lids’s building. He wasn’t home.

  “Who knows where he is?” his mom said to me when I got to their apartment door. “You know better than me where he goes to, no?”

  No, I really didn’t. The only places I knew to find him were in his room and just off campus, walking his drug corner. Beyond those two places, his life was a mystery to me. I thanked his mom and asked her to have him call me.

  As I walked home, I realized I could have called Lids from any one of ten pay phones I had passed on the way and saved myself the long run to his house, but I hadn’t been thinking clearly. It was hard to think clearly when you’d sort of just witnessed a murder. It was one thing to walk in on a body that had been dead for days. It was something else to find the body of someone who’d stood a foot away from you thirty minutes ago. It struck me, too, that a call to Lids wasn’t the only call I hadn’t made. Two bodies in two nights, and neither time did I call the
cops. If I was like Bobby, raised to hate the police, or like Lids, a pusher, not calling the cops would have been consistent with who I was. But that’s not who I was. I wasn’t raised to hate the cops or to love them. I was raised to avoid them. The preceding two thousand years of Jewish history had taught us to love and respect the law, but to be wary of those who enforced it. I hadn’t called the cops because I wanted to protect Bobby and Lids.

  So, yeah, I was wound up, my mind so muddled by the time I got home that I was sure there was no way I’d sleep again. Except like with most things I was sure about, I was wrong, dead wrong. Because when the phone rang, waking me from sleep, the sun was in my eyes. I was on top of the covers, still fully dressed, pea coat and all. At first I was startled at the feel of grit on the covers. Sand? How did sand get in my bed? Then I remembered how it had gotten there. At least Aaron wasn’t home to chide me. He had slept over at his girlfriend’s house. Thank heavens for small favors. Then the phone stopped ringing.

  “Moses! It’s Bobby on the phone,” Miriam called to me.

  When I got out to the kitchen, Miriam and my folks were seated at the dining room table. I hadn’t looked in the mirror, but I didn’t have to. Their faces told me everything about my appearance I needed to know. It was also about then I realized I still hadn’t taken my coat off. I smiled in spite of myself. Miriam did too. My parents, on the other hand, had that worried look in their eyes. Is he on drugs? Is he turning into a hippie? I saw a little something extra in my mom’s eyes, the satisfaction of pessimism fulfilled. See, I knew it. I knew it.

  I tousled my little sister’s hair. “Thanks, kiddo,” I said, grabbing the phone. “Hey, Bobby. What’s up?” I stepped into the kitchen. It didn’t afford me much more privacy than if I’d stayed put in the dining room, but with apartment living the illusion of privacy is nearly as important as the real thing. “What’s happening?”

  “Wanna keep me company? I got another airport run. We can go visit Mindy first. How is she, anyway?”

  I filled him in on my brief Saturday visit and how she had opened her eyes.

  “That’s a good thing, right?” he asked.

  “Who the hell knows? Her doctor pretty much dismissed it.”

  “That guy’s an ass. He’s got all the charm of Lurch.”

  “I’m shocked. Your parents used to let you watch The Addams Family?”

  “Of course. They think it is a perfect representation of bourgeois decadence and how unbridled wealth feeds eccentricity at the expense of the masses.”

  “I guess they have a point. And what, they think The Munsters show how the working class is repressed and scorned by the capitalist lackeys?”

  He ignored that. “Moe, you coming with me or not?”

  “Sure, but I need to shower and shave.” I peeked into the dining room after I said that and saw the palpable relief on my parents’ faces. “Give me an hour.”

  “You got it.”

  I hung up and walked back into the dining room. I sat down, poured myself some of my mom’s death coffee and buttered a seeded roll.

  “What did the Knicks do last night?” I asked my dad, as if I wasn’t sitting there in my dirty pea coat, sandy Chuck Taylors, and filthy jeans.

  Even he had to smile about that. “They won. Beat St. Louis by two. Zelmo Beaty and Lenny Wilkens each scored twenty for the Hawks.”

  My mom just shook her head. “How did you get all full of sand in the middle of winter?”

  “I wore my white trousers rolled and walked along the beach.”

  “Oy, gevalt!” she looked up at the ceiling, arms raised. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”

  • • •

  Bobby picked me up downstairs. I’d agreed to go with him because I thought the time had come to find out from him as much as I could about what was going on. But I didn’t get in the car and start with the third degree. Besides, he seemed to be in a melancholy frame of mind. I’m not sure I had ever seen him that way in all the years I’d known him. I mean, he was pretty distraught when that thing with Samantha happened. It nearly wrecked him. That was more than melancholy, though. That was hurt, grief, disbelief. This was different. He just seemed sad.

  “I miss her,” he said.

  I knew who “her” was without asking. “Yeah, Sam was great.”

  “She was all that, Moe. I don’t think I’ll ever meet anybody like her again.”

  “Maybe not, but you’ll meet somebody who’s great but differently great.”

  “I like that — differently great.” He was smiling now, not his old smile. Like his expression when I got in the car, it was one I’d never seen before. “You should’ve kept writing poetry. You have a way with words.”

  Sometimes I forgot about my one literary accomplishment: a poem that had been published in our high school literary magazine. Bobby hadn’t forgotten. There wasn’t much that escaped him. “Thanks, Bobby, but I just couldn’t do it anymore after the fire when Andrea Cotter and the other girls died. Besides, there’s about as much money in poetry as there is in blacksmithing.”

  “Since when did you care about money?”

  “I never said I didn’t care about it. I just have no idea how to make it or much desire to try.”

  “Maybe I could help you with that someday,” he said, without any guile in his voice.

  I took that as my cue to get back to the subject at hand. “I know you don’t like talking about it, but do you have any idea of what happened with Sam that night?”

  “My girlfriend and poor, stupid Marty Lavitz got blown into little bite-size pieces. That’s what happened!” he snapped at me.

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

  “I also know you were into her and that you would’ve done anything to have her.”

  “Bullshit!” I lied. “I had Mindy. Sam was your girl. I never did anything to — ”

  “Of course you didn’t, Moe. Disloyalty isn’t in your genes, but it doesn’t mean you didn’t want to, and it doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I know all the guys were into her. Who wouldn’t be? Half the guys in Burgundy House tried to pick her up when I wasn’t around. You think I didn’t know that?”

  I opened my mouth to argue with him, then shut it. He almost had me, almost got me going, but I wasn’t stupid either. This was classic Bobby Friedman. When we played stickball and softball, Bobby, a left-handed batter — was there any doubt he’d be a lefty? — always hit to the opposite field. He was a classic opposite-field hitter, and a very good one at that. Deflection was his game, catching people off balance and keeping them that way. Although I’d caught him at it, what did it matter? He wasn’t going to answer my questions, at least not yet.

  There was something inherently depressing about hospitals that all the yellow and orange paint in the world couldn’t change. I wondered what it must’ve been like before hospitals were available to most people, when you were born, got sick, recovered, and eventually died in your own bed. I wondered how much better off we were as a race for having invented institutions where we could hide away unpleasant aspects of life: hospitals for the sick, sanitariums for the mentally ill, nursing homes for the aged, funeral homes for the dead. And there was something else about hospitals that got to me — their smell. They used pine-scented disinfectant in the same way they used yellow and orange paint — to mask unpleasantness. But like too much sweet perfume on very old women, it only made it worse. You couldn’t mask the smell of death and dying with perfume or pine. Death had a particular scent of its own. I knew that now, and I would never forget it.

  Luckily, I didn’t smell it on Mindy. Her folks had met us out in the hall and though they looked completely spent, they were happy.

  “She’s coming out of it, Moe,” her mom said, hugging me fiercely. “She’s moving her lips and blinking her eyes.”

  “What did her doctor say?” Bobby asked.

  “He’s not the most optimistic man I’ve ever met,” Herb Weinstock said, “but even he thinks these are
signs she’s coming out of it. Of course, he followed that up with all sorts of warnings and caveats about the long road ahead and all the things that could still go wrong.”

  We went and sat with Mindy for about an hour and there were times when it almost felt as if she were conscious of our presence. I know part of that was wishful thinking, but I allowed myself a little hope every now and then. Hope wasn’t usually an emotion on the Prager family menu. With my dad’s business failures and my mom’s dim worldview, it wouldn’t be, would it? Still, I’d like to think hope is a very human thing that not even my mom could completely kill in me the way she could cook the flavor out of chicken.

  Before leaving the hospital, I stopped at the gift shop to buy a Sunday paper. I hadn’t had time to check the papers at home for word of Shakespeare’s murder. If there was a mention of it in the paper, I thought I could use it to restart my questioning of Bobby. If not, I’d figure something out. And given that the person we were chauffeuring to the airport lived about fifteen minutes away from the hospital, I had plenty of time to talk to Bobby. And there it was, buried a few inches down among the stories of shootings, rapes, and stabbings. I smiled sadly when I saw that I hadn’t gotten Shakespeare’s name completely wrong: his first name was William. He had been William O’Day of Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn. Gerritsen Beach was like the Irish wing of Sheepshead Bay. The cops were treating it like just another OD, though there was some thought it might have been a suicide. His parents claimed that he’d been a good boy, deeply involved in politics at Brooklyn College, but that over the last year Billy’d lost his way. I loved that phrase, “lost his way.” It said everything and nothing. Now Billy was just lost.

  “You know a guy named Billy O’Day?” I asked calmly as if the question was unrelated to what I was reading in the paper.

  “Sure. Everybody knows Billy. His big thing is Irish liberation. He thinks the partition of Ireland was bullshit and that until Northern Ireland breaks away and joins the rest of Ireland that the true republic won’t exist. He believes in armed struggle against the British in the North. Why do you ask?”