Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “You’re Samantha’s friend from Brooklyn,” her mom said. “Old Hattie from the general store called and mentioned you were in town. Please come in.”

  I wiped my shoes on the welcome mat and stepped inside. “Yeah — I mean, yes, ma’am, I’m Moe, Moe Prager, and I knew your daughter.”

  “You went to visit with her. Hattie told me about the flowers too.”

  “I did.”

  Mrs. Hope asked, “Did you have a nice visit with her?” I must have looked completely confused by the question, so she came to my rescue. “Sorry, Moe, that’s between you and Sam.”

  “No need to apologize, really.”

  “Moe,” she said, “is that short for something?”

  “Moses.”

  “My favorite figure from the Old Testament.”

  “My brother’s name is Aaron, and my little sister is Miriam.”

  That turned Mrs. Hope’s polite smile into a beacon. “Good for your folks. Come in, sit down. You must be hungry. Can I fix you something to eat, get you a drink?”

  “Thank you, yes, Mrs. Hope. I’d like that very much.”

  “That’s settled, then. Take your coat off and sit yourself down at the table. We can talk while I get your lunch ready.”

  I did as she asked. The interior of the house was a mirror of the outside: neat, simple, clean. The furniture was all clean lines and upholstered cushions. The dining room set was colonial. A big copper lamp that had been refitted for electricity hung over the table for light. Then, as I scanned the walls, my heart did that flip-floppy thing. It wasn’t the pictures of Sam at different ages that did it to me, but rather all the plaques in the living room that featured the names of various police organizations and images of badges and stars.

  “What does Mr. Hope do for a living?” I called into the kitchen, but there was no answer.

  “Were you Samantha’s boyfriend there in New York?” she asked instead.

  “No,” I answered, standing up, walking into the living room. “I’m her boyfriend’s best friend.” Apparently, old Hattie hadn’t shared all the information with her friend. “His name is Bobby Friedman and he’s still too broken up about what happened to deal with it.”

  That was the second time I’d said those words or ones just like them in the last few hours, but I hadn’t thought about them, really considered them until that moment. Were they true? Yeah, probably, but I couldn’t help wondering why Bobby hadn’t come here for the funeral after Sam’s body was released to her family. We never discussed it. Maybe we should have.

  I stood in front of one of the many plaques on the wall and read silently to myself:

  For service above and beyond the call of duty on the date of August 6, 1956, this commendation is awarded to Trooper Samuel Hope.

  All the plaques and awards were much alike except for Samuel Hope’s rank; he’d risen to the rank of colonel. I’d often wondered why Samantha didn’t talk much about her family or where she was from. I understood now. Tough to think of your dad as the enemy. Samantha didn’t resemble her dad at all, but they had had many photos taken together, many of which were on proud display — some on the walls, some on the coffee table, others on the mantel over the fireplace. I went and sat back down in the dining room.

  “Was Samantha named for her dad?” I called in to Mrs. Hope.

  “Yes. Samuel desperately wanted a son to follow in his footsteps. Strange though, that husband of mine loved his daughter more than he could ever have loved a son, I think. They were close, much closer than Samantha and me. They were inseparable, those two. Here you go,” said Mrs. Hope, stepping from the kitchen into the dining room. She carried a floral print metal tray. On it was a glass of milk, a white bread sandwich containing some sort of pink-hued meat — probably ham — potato chips, a pickle spear, and an apple.

  Clearly, Mrs. Hope wasn’t up on the rules of keeping kosher. Technically, Jews can’t eat dairy products and meat together, and they can never eat pork, dairy or no dairy. Me, I would never be mistaken for a Talmudic scholar or an observant Jew, though the concept of milk and meat, ham or otherwise, did make me a little queasy. The queasiness didn’t improve when I found that the ham was slathered not with mustard, which I loved, but with mayonnaise. Yet, I didn’t want to insult my hostess or lose whatever goodwill I had earned with her.

  “Delicious,” I said, taking big bites and swallowing with little chewing. I savored the chips and the odd-tasting pickle. Kosher dill pickles weren’t sweet, but this pickle spear tasted like it had been cured in sugar syrup. I kind of liked it.

  She wouldn’t sit. Instead she hovered, fussing over me, brushing crumbs away, getting me another napkin. “I’m so glad you’re enjoying it.”

  “So, Sam’s dad is a state trooper. Must’ve been tough on your husband when … I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re right, Moe. It nearly killed Samuel to think that his girl had gotten all tangled up with radicals and hippie types. We will never understand how that happened. Her whole life, up until the time Samantha left for college, all she ever wanted to be was a trooper like her father. But people change, kids grow up, and you don’t know them anymore.”

  “There are female cops, aren’t there?” I said.

  She let out a laugh. “Not in this family. My husband wouldn’t hear of it. No daughter of Samuel Hope was going to wear a badge and strap on a gun. It was the only thing those two ever fought about. So, Moe, if you don’t mind me asking, can you tell me about what Sam was like the last year before … you know?”

  With that, I regaled Mrs. Hope with tales of her daughter. I explained about how all the guys had secret crushes on her, but not only for her beauty. I told her we thought her daughter was smarter and more worldly than any woman we’d ever met. I explained how, in spite of Bobby’s politics, that he was a good and loyal boyfriend who loved her daughter to distraction. I told her how we too were surprised by what had happened, that no one would have expected either Samantha or Marty Lavitz of being involved in any violence.

  After I washed up, I told her that snow was in the forecast and that I had to get on the road. She thanked me and gave me a long hug. I hugged her back.

  “You take care of yourself, Moses Prager,” she said, winking at me. “You come back and visit too. Sam was lucky to have a friend like you.”

  “Thank you. One thing, Mrs. Hope, if you don’t mind?”

  “Anything.”

  “Well, I guess we knew Sam was older than us, but I had no idea she was twenty-five.”

  “She did always look young for her age and she had that energy, you know?”

  I did.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I got about an hour outside of town before stopping to fill up. When I pulled out of the station, the flurries began to fall. At first they fell in big, lazy flakes. They would stop for a while and then start up again, but after another half hour, stopping wasn’t on the storm’s agenda. The snow grew steadier and heavier as the sky darkened. At least I knew how not to get lost on my way home, though the snow and dark made it unlikely that the return trip would take any less time. What I hoped for was that I would eventually get ahead of the weather, because the storm was predicted to stay north and miss New York City altogether.

  The roads were getting pretty slick and tricky, the snow accumulating so quickly that I could barely make out the black of the pavement beneath. Look, I’d had my license for less than two years and it wasn’t like I was Richard Petty or A. J. Foyt. I was good at city driving, real good. I was never scared of driving into Manhattan, but I knew adults who would break out in hives at the thought of driving over the Brooklyn Bridge and dealing with yellow cabs and crowded streets. This was something else, though. I didn’t have much experience with rolling hills and snowy country roads. The pressure of driving in my brother’s car wasn’t helping any either. I was several miles away from Route 80 when I felt the Tempest’s snow tires occasionally losing traction. That always made me nervous, the sense of impend
ing loss of control. Maybe that’s why I didn’t dig drugs that much.

  Each time I felt the tires spin, lose their grip, I slowed down a few miles an hour. Up to that point I’d been lucky in that I seemed to be one of the few idiots out on the road. So when I slowed, I wasn’t pissing anyone off. In city driving, that was always part of the equation: Am I pissing off the guy behind me? Is he going to get out of his car at the next red light and beat the shit out of me? Thinking about that made me smile and relax a little bit. Then when I looked in my rearview mirror, I noticed headlights that hadn’t been there before. They were back a ways, but the hills made it impossible for me to know how far back. I didn’t think anything of it at first. So what if there were two idiots driving around on these roads? But the next time I checked my mirror, I noticed that those headlights had made up a lot of the distance between us. The next time I looked, the headlights were gone. Well, at least one of us idiots made it home safe.

  Thirty seconds later, I felt my body tense, my hands tightening their grip on the wheel, my eyes wide and alert, my heart pounding. I wasn’t consciously aware of the thing that had caused me to react. It was as if my body, independent of my mind, had seen something or heard a sound above the road noise and radio. I clicked the radio off, and just as I did I was blinded by an explosion of light in my rearview mirror. Those headlights hadn’t disappeared at all. The driver of the car on my tail had simply shut off his lights in order to sneak up on me without me knowing, and when he was close enough, he hit his lights and brights at once. The shock of it almost sent me off the road. I shielded my eyes with my hand, turning away from the harsh light. I flicked the button on the bottom of the rearview that darkened the light reflected in the mirror. I sped up to try and give myself time to think, but the guy behind me just raced right up to the rear end of the Tempest, blaring his horn, flashing his lights. For about a mile we repeated this pattern, me racing ahead and him charging right up behind me. The last time I thought there was no way he wasn’t going to slam into me. I sped up at the last second, and there was no contact.

  As I drove, my eyes darted left and right, looking for someplace to turn off or turn around, or for a neon sign from an open store or gas station, but the two-lane road wasn’t lit and there was nothing on the roadsides except stone walls, hills, and drop-offs. There wasn’t even much of a shoulder to speak of. Basically, I was fucked. So I just floored my brother’s Pontiac, wishing it had been a GTO and not just a Tempest. Now I was getting bounced around as I came over the crests of the hills, and getting slammed when the car landed back on the road. Whatever the guy behind me was driving, it was having no trouble keeping pace. Realizing I was never going to outrun him, I lifted my foot completely off the gas pedal. If the pavement had been dry, I might’ve slammed on the brakes, but in snowy, slick conditions that wasn’t an option. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to make the move after coming over the top of a steep hill and the car didn’t slow as quickly as I’d hoped.

  At the bottom of the hill, the guy behind me let me have the brights again. He blared his horn as the nose of his car came close enough to my rear bumper to give it a kiss. Instead of ramming me, he took the opportunity to pull to my left and try and overtake me. When he did that, I floored the gas and got thrown back in my seat. We climbed the next hill nearly side by side, and that’s when I saw a flicker of light ahead of me coming over the crest of the hill in the other direction. I felt the sweat pouring out of me, gluing my shirt to the skin of my back. This was it. I slowed down as we got to the top of the hill to prevent the guy next to me from sliding in behind me. An air horn split open the night as the cab of a semi appeared. Now it was time for someone else to panic. I steered right to give the semi as much room as possible if he swerved to avoid the other car. The guy menacing me tugged his wheel hard left to avoid the cab of the semi. As I came over the top of the hill, I didn’t so much see what happened as hear it. There was a bang as the car smacked into the stone wall that bordered the road, and then there was another sharp bang as the semi clipped the car’s rear end. Air brakes chuffed and tires screeched, and a cloud of tire smoke and radiator steam filled up the air behind me.

  If I was smart or brave, I’d have gone back to look, to see who it was who’d tried to get me killed, if not kill me himself. But at that moment I wasn’t feeling terribly smart or brave. Mostly, I just felt lucky, and kept on going. I don’t think I breathed again until hours later when I saw the lights atop the George Washington Bridge come into view.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  As I came off the Gowanus Expressway onto the Belt Parkway, I was less than ten minutes from home. I was unaware I was much closer to eternity. One second I was listening to the radio, driving in the middle lane, doing a rock-steady fifty, and the next second horns blared, tires screeched, and I was bouncing up onto the shoulder of the Belt. When I snapped out of it, the car was a few hundred yards west of the Verazzano Bridge. I was slumped to the side, my head against the window, my hand on the wheel only because that’s where it had been when I drifted into sleep. I managed to pull fully onto the shoulder while shaking the sleep out of my head. Pretty ironic, I thought, to have avoided some lunatic trying to run me off the road in the Poconos only to fall asleep at the wheel and almost get killed within pissing distance of my house. The irony didn’t keep me awake.

  The next thing I was aware of was an insistent rapping of metal against glass. I held my eyes wide open, shook my head, and nearly had a heart attack when I saw a man standing just on the other side of the driver’s side door. He was staring in at me, tapping his wedding band against the glass. Then I noticed that he was wearing a squashed-down hat with a badge on its crown above the visor. Great, I thought, just what I needed to complete my night, getting arrested and having Aaron’s car impounded. When the cop saw that I was alert, he stopped banging at the window and made a circular motion with his index finger. I got the idea and rolled down the window.

  “You drunk, kid? Stoned?” he asked, shining a flashlight past my chin and checking out the interior of the car.

  “Just tired,” I said. “On my way back from the Poconos.”

  He was skeptical. “The Poconos, huh? Don’t see no skis on your car, buddy.”

  “Brooklyn Jews don’t ski.”

  He laughed at that. “Funny, kid, but that’s not an answer.”

  “I was visiting the parents of a dead friend, a girl I went to college with.”

  “How far you live from here?”

  “Coney Island.”

  “Okay. Get outta here and sleep it off in bed, not on the side of the Belt Parkway.”

  “Thanks, officer.”

  Two encounters with highway patrol cops in two days on the Belt Parkway. What were the odds of that? Okay, so the first time I wasn’t driving and it was ten miles away in the other direction, but still, what were the odds? At least this cop had given me a break, hadn’t slammed me against the car, hadn’t frisked or cuffed me. Was that because I didn’t have long hair like Bobby’s, or because this cop had a sense of humor? It was one of those questions that would never get answered, like “Did Oswald act alone?” When I pulled back onto the parkway, something was bugging me, but I was still too cotton-headed to make sense of it.

  I looked at the dashboard clock and figured I’d been asleep on the shoulder for about a half hour when the cop rapped on the window. Was I still tired? Sure, but now I was hungry too. I’d probably been hungry the whole time, but I’d been so close to unconsciousness I’d just failed to notice. So instead of heading straight home, I went to DeFelice’s Pizza under the el. The Gelato Grotto in Gravesend was the most celebrated pizzeria in the area. I loved their gelato, but hated their pizza. I’d take slices, regular or Sicilian, from DeFelice’s Pizza any day of the week over the Grotto’s. DeFelice’s regular crust was as thin as a cracker with a perfect char on the bottom, and they used fresh mozzarella, not that gummy crap they used at the Grotto that came in blocks and had the texture of pencil erasers.
And DeFelice’s sauce was sweet, not bitter like the Grotto’s. My mouth was watering even before I got off the Belt at Ocean Parkway.

  At that time of night there were spots out front of the pizzeria. I guess if I’d been less hungry or less tired, I would have noticed Tony Pepperoni’s ’56 Lincoln Mark II stationed out front. He loved that maroon beast almost as much as he loved to eat, which was really saying something. Sometimes he’d pay kids to stand out on the street and guard the car to make sure nobody got too close to his pride and joy. None of us kids ever had the nerve to point out to Tony P that the subway trains passing overhead shot out hot metal sparks and all sorts of shit that rained down on the cars parked below.

  “One regular slice, one Sicilian, and a small Coke,” I said to Geno at the counter, his face and hands white with flour.

  “I got fresh pies comin’ out in a few minoots. Go ’ave a seat. I call you when they ready.”

  I was alone in the tiny dining room, but knew I wouldn’t be for long. It wasn’t that I was a mind reader or anything. It was that the place was a tiny hole in the wall and the dining room was so cozy that the bathroom was situated just behind a thin wall at the back of the place. When the restaurant wasn’t crowded, which was almost never, and no subways were passing overhead — again, almost never — a diner had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the bathroom. So it was that night. The toilet flushed and the sink ran for a few seconds. The gentleman inside whistled “Volare” loudly enough to be heard over the hand dryer. The door creaked open, and into the dining room stepped Tony Pepperoni.

  The funny thing is that when he saw me, he looked surprised or maybe confused, like he expected to see anybody else there but me. Maybe it was just that he didn’t expect anyone to be there at that time of night. It didn’t matter, because whatever I saw in his expression was gone as quickly as it came. Tony may have had a complexion like the lunar surface, but he had a perfect neon smile. He flashed it as he walked up close to me. I thought back to Lids’s crazy ramblings about Tony P, and realized it was the first time I’d thought about Lids all day. Tony P didn’t give me a chance to worry about Lids or to wonder if Bobby had had success tracking him down.