“Is it Susan Kasten?”
“Nah. I wish.”
And suddenly, even before he said another word, I knew why he’d brought me here. It was Lids. Had to be. It was the only thing that made sense. In all the commotion of the last few days, I’d almost forgotten about Lids. His parents had called a few times, but I’d been so freaked out by things that I never got back to them. Trust me, nearly getting killed screws with your head and tends to rearrange your priorities. The other night, when I’d recounted how I’d stumbled onto the bomb plot for Detective Casey, I’d fudged Lids’s part in helping me. I’d strategically neglected to mention Lids’s connection to the late Billy O’Day. I’d emphasized Lids’s nervous breakdown and his paranoia, and left out the part about him being a pusher. The way I’d told it, Lids was pure as a spring lamb, sort of an innocent bystander who got caught up in stuff he had no part in.
“If I hadn’t asked Bobby to find Lids for me and to keep an eye on him, I wouldn’t even be mentioning him to you,” was what I said to Casey the night we’d met at Coney Island Hospital. “Bobby told me Lids was safe, but that was all he told me. He didn’t tell me who he was with, or where he was. Do you know where he is?”
Casey had sworn he didn’t have a clue. That was days ago. Now I was pretty sure he had a good idea of exactly where Lids was.
“It’s Lids’s body, isn’t it? You found him.” That strange smile of Casey’s cracked across his lips, so I asked, “Why are you smiling?”
“I know he was your friend and all, but you’ve got a good head for this work. You’re sharp.”
I didn’t say anything to that. As we came over the crest of a last fetid hill, he eased off the gas. About a hundred yards ahead of us was a huddle of official-looking vehicles: two black and green patrol cars, a ridiculously conspicuous unmarked police car, a city ambulance, a bulldozer, and a few Department of Sanitation vehicles. There was another car parked there too, one that was foreign to me: a black or dark brown station wagon with blackened back windows.
“What’s that car there?” I asked.
“The meat wagon,” he answered as if those two words explained it all. I suppose they did. The Galaxie came to a stop. “Listen, Moe. The first time is a little rough. It’s rougher when it’s someone you know. You sure you wanna do this?”
Of course, this wasn’t my first time. There was Billy O’Day and Abdul Salaam. “No, but I’m gonna do it anyway,” is what I said. “You didn’t drive me all the way here to have me sit in the car.”
“This kid, Lids. He’s not my case, you understand?”
“Yeah.”
“This isn’t my crime scene either. After we spoke the other night, I put the word out on your friend and I got a call this morning. These guys called me as a courtesy. The detectives will want you to take a look before they contact his parents.”
“Okay.”
“You listen to what the detectives tell you. Your friend, he’s in pretty rough shape. That’s what they told me over the phone. You understand what that means?”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t.”
When I opened the door, I got smacked full in the face with that rotting garbage smell. The odor was acrid and sour and sickly sweet all at once. It was burnt rubber and curdled milk and rotted vegetables and decayed flesh blended together. And it was worse than just a smell. It hung heavy in the air like a film, tainting my exposed skin, my clothes, my lungs. I could taste it too. It was meat spoiling on my tongue, maggots and beetles sliding down my throat as I swallowed. I didn’t make it five feet before I bent over at the waist and heaved up my breakfast. Man, was I happy I’d only had toast. Looking up, I noticed a group of older men — some in uniforms, some not — having a good laugh at my expense.
“Don’t sweat it, kid,” one of them said. “Welcome to the club.”
Then, having had their laughs, the old men turned back around to whatever was the focus of their attention. It wasn’t hard to guess what that was. Detective Casey stood me upright, urging me forward. Above our heads, set against a steel gray sky, swirling gyres of feathered scavengers chirped and cawed and wailed, raining stained white streaks of feces down on the piles of garbage below. What from a distance looked so poetic, so much like an aerial ballet, was raw and feral, a thing much more menacing and desperate from where I now stood. Nature red in tooth and claw. I think I finally understood what that meant.
I walked up just behind the line of uniforms. Casey stopped me, asking me one more time if I was ready for this. I wanted to ask him if anybody was really ready for this. Was he? How could anyone be ready for this? Some people were. Some people had to be.
“Malone,” Casey called out.
“That you, Casey?” a voice asked from beyond the line of uniforms.
“Yeah.”
“Hold your water, I’m comin’.”
A few seconds later the line of uniforms parted, and through them stepped a rotund, bald man in a cheap, ill-fitting overcoat. He couldn’t have closed the buttons on that thing for all the money in the world. He was smoking the shit out of a cigar that wiggled like a hula dancer when he moved his lips. Never in my life had I so welcomed the smell of cigar smoke.
“You Casey?” Malone asked, holding his hand out to the man who brought me. He jerked his head at me and spoke as if I wasn’t there. “This the friend?”
Casey nodded yes, shaking Malone’s hand.
“Over here, kid,” Malone said, tugging me by the arm. We climbed up a low mound of churned up garbage. “He don’t look so good, your friend.”
“I know, Detective Casey warned me.”
“Look out, Phil,” Malone barked at his partner standing over the body. “The vic’s friend is here.”
Malone walked me over to where the other detective had been standing. The body was nude and the colored parts of his eyes had gone kind of milky white. His skin was a waxy gray-white in most places, but it was battered and bruised in others. There was a really nasty ring of bruises around his neck. Jagged spikes of broken bones jutted out through the skin of his left thigh and right arm.
Malone seemed to anticipate my question. “The bones stickin’ out like that probably happened after he was dead. They found him when the bulldozer was pilin’ up the garbage. We think it was the bulldozer that done the damage to him like that.”
“But not the bruises?”
“No, kid. The murderer done that.”
I was okay until a bug crawled out of one of the body’s nostrils into the other. After that things got hazy there for a second and my knees got rubbery. I felt arms holding me up.
“Easy, kid, easy.”
“It’s not him,” I said. “He’s the right height and age and everything. His hair’s the right color, but it’s not him.”
“It’s not who?” the other detective, Phil, shouted at Malone.
I shouted back. “It’s not Lids. It’s not my friend.”
“You sure about that, kid?” Malone asked. “Fifteen seconds ago you was so lightheaded I thought you was gonna take a dive. Take another look to be sure.”
Even though I knew it wasn’t Lids, I looked again. “Sorry, Detective Malone. It’s not him.”
Phil wasn’t happy. “Ah, shit! Just what we needed, another John fucking Doe.”
“Okay, kid,” Malone said. “Thanks. You done yourself proud. You can get outta here now.”
The line of uniforms stared at me in anticipation as I walked back toward them. I just shook my head. While they didn’t seem disappointed, they didn’t seem pleased either.
“It’s not him, Detective,” I said to Casey.
Casey didn’t ask me if I was sure. “Let’s split. I swear if I have to breathe this stuff in another minute, I’m gonna throw up everything I ate since I was ten years old.”
I was all for leaving. I was relieved to be getting away from the stench and away from the birds. I was relieved that the body wasn’t Lids. I was relieved, sure, but I wa
sn’t exactly happy, either. Whoever John Doe was, he had a family too. Somewhere they were worrying themselves sick, and someday only grief would end their worry. And then I had a sadder thought: What if his family didn’t care? What if there was no one to worry about him? I think I learned more about life in those few minutes in the Fountain Avenue dump than I had during the rest of my time on earth.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I knew I had to get in to see Bobby, but the first thing I did was go home and take a hot, soapy shower. And even though I got the film and smell off me, I couldn’t get it out of me. I brushed my teeth so long I was in danger of wearing away the enamel. I dipped a Q-tip in a Dixie cup of Aqua Velva and stuck it up my nostrils. It stung like hell and it proved to be a waste of time. The sting lasted longer than the relief and when the alcohol evaporated the stink of the dump filled up my head once again. I would’ve burned my clothes in the building’s incinerator if I could have afforded to. Instead I gave my mom my clothes to wash.
“I just washed these,” she yelled, shaking them at me. “They’re fine.” I thought she was going to puke when she put them to her nose to prove me wrong. She didn’t yell at me after that.
When it came to my Converse All-Stars and my pea coat, I didn’t have many options. Hell, they smelled even worse than the rest of my clothes. Even if I’d been willing to hold my nose and put them back on, there was no way they’d let me in to see Bobby, smelling like the Fountain Avenue dump. So I did what any red-blooded American male would’ve done in my situation — I stole from my brother.
Although he was slimmer than me, we both had monkey arms and I could usually squeeze myself into things like Aaron’s sports jackets, coats, and sweaters. We did wear the same shoe size, at least. The thing was, Aaron treated all of his possessions with the same sort of obsessive care with which he treated his car. Whereas my sneakers looked like they’d been robbed off the feet of a Bowery bum, Aaron’s looked new out of the box. In fact, he kept them in the box with the tissue paper still stuffed inside. And when it came to his coats, Aaron stored them in his closet in the cleaners’ plastic bags. I didn’t figure he would kill me for “borrowing” his sneakers. They only cost eight bucks. It was his shearling jacket that worried me. That jacket was his most prized piece of clothing, which, when it came to my brother, was really saying something. There would be no forgiving me if I somehow messed it up. Thank goodness Aaron was still at his girlfriend’s house, or I would have had to go to the hospital in a bundle of sweaters and my silly dress shoes. As it was, Miriam nearly sounded the alarm when I snuck out the front door past my mom and dad.
The steely gloom that had hung overhead earlier this morning had lifted or been burned away by the sun. Though the sky above Ocean Parkway had brightened, the weather had turned frigid. Aaron’s jacket kept most of me pretty toasty during my short walk to the hospital. I made it up to Bobby’s floor without bother. There I saw that most of the cops who’d been guarding Detective Casey’s most precious rat had gone. Now only a single uniformed cop, his head buried in a copy of Sports Illustrated, sat outside Bobby’s room. I tried to just walk past him, but he wasn’t having it.
“Where the fuck you think you’re goin’, son?”
Son? “Going to see my friend, officer.”
“No, you ain’t neither.”
“Okay, let’s get Detective Casey on the phone and see what he says.”
“Listen to me, junior. I don’t know no Detective Casey and even if I did, I don’t take orders from no little hippie freak.”
Little hippie freak! That almost made him calling me “son” and “junior” reasonable.
“That’s enough!” I growled at him. “What’s your name? Okay, your badge number is three — ”
That did it. He grabbed me by the arm and marched me toward the elevators, but the thickness of the coat sleeve made it hard for him to get a good grip on my arm. When I felt his hand relax to re-grip, I spun away and ran for Bobby’s room. When I burst through the door, I got a big surprise. There, standing over Bobby’s bed was Tony Pizza. At the foot of the bed was Tony’s muscle, Jimmy Ding Dong. Jimmy did different kinds of magic tricks than his boss. Whereas Tony P made coins disappear, Jimmy Ding Dong made whole people vanish. Only Jimmy displayed no talent for making them reappear. Once they were gone, they stayed gone. Word was that Jimmy was the guy responsible for disappearing Chicky Lazio and Petey Cha Cha, two guys from the Anello family who’d tried to muscle in on Tony P’s turf.
I didn’t know how Jimmy got the nickname Ding Dong, but it wasn’t from eating Hostess cakes. This guy from the neighborhood told me it was because “when Jimmy rang your bell, it stayed rung forever.” Who knows? I wasn’t going to ask Jimmy. Built like a big cat — lean and sinewy, always ready to pounce — Jimmy’s attitude was purely crocodilian. His eyes were cold and devoid of humanity. At least, I thought, cats play with their prey. Jimmy didn’t play. Actually, it was Jimmy who saved Tony P and his magic tricks from seeming ridiculous. He was the reason people in the neighborhood gave Tony Pizza as much respect as he got, and why no one called him Tony Pepperoni to his face. There was nothing ridiculous about Jimmy except his nickname.
Funny thing is, Jimmy looked nearly in worse shape than Bobby. His left forearm was in a cast and his face was a roadmap of long, thin scabs. There was a two-by-two-inch gauze bandage taped to his forehead and another one taped to the side of his neck, but it wasn’t Ding Dong’s face that interested me. Bobby’s face was still pretty battered, although all the swelling had gone down and you could see his eyes again. It was the fear I saw in those eyes that caught my attention. That famous smile of his was nowhere to be found.
Before I could make any sense of it, I got tackled from behind. I reacted without thinking, and threw an elbow behind me that connected with something that felt like bone. Whoever it was holding me, let go with a groan. I spun around, up and ready for a fight.
“You little motherfucker.” It was the cop from the hallway, nightstick at the ready. He was rubbing his jaw with his other hand. “I’m gonna kick your ass and then I’m gonna — ”
“You ain’t gonna do shit,” Tony P said to the cop. “This kid’s with me. You understand what I’m sayin’?” The cop nodded. “Good. Jimmy, take a walk with the officer and give him something green to make his ugly puss feel better.”
Jimmy looked at me, his lip twitching up into a reptilian smile. I wanted to believe it was a sign of respect, but there was something else in it — a croc sizing up a future meal perhaps. When the door closed behind Jimmy and the cop, Tony P turned to me.
“Tough old-fashioned Jew, huh?” he said. “I think even with that nightstick in his hand, you woulda kicked the shit outta the cop. I always thought you was just schoolboy material, Moe. Maybe I had you wrong. Maybe I shoulda done business with you. But, hey, you can only play with the cards you get.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I could tell by the look on Bobby’s face he got the message perfectly.
“Listen, Moe, could you do me a favor? I know you went through a lot to see Bobby here, but I sorta bought the time. Maybe you could come back tomorrow, huh?”
Translation: Get the fuck out of here. Now! I paid the cop off and I got things to discuss with Bobby.
“Sure, Tony P.” I turned toward Bobby. “Take care. I’ll be by soon.”
Out in the hallway there was no sign of either Jimmy Ding Dong or the cop. I’d had more exposure to cops in the last two weeks than in my previous two decades, and I thought they were an odd breed. There were guys like Nance and this asshole guarding Bobby’s door who were either sadistic, corrupt, or inept. Then there were guys like Casey and Malone, and the highway patrol cop who found me sleeping on the side of the road. They seemed to care about people and their job. I guess you get all kinds in every job.
When I got back outside I realized I was hungry, that I’d left the toast I had for breakfast at the Fountain Avenue dump and hadn’t eaten anything s
ince. To tell you the truth, after I’d been to the dump, I didn’t think I’d ever want to eat again. One thing the cold air and the chemical smell of the hospital had done for me was to get the putrid stench of the dump out of my head. And with it gone, I was rediscovering my appetite. My appetite was even bigger after walking all the way to Brighton Beach.
Late in the afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to fade, was the perfect time to get to DeFelice’s Pizzeria. At that time of day, the lines were small and the tables empty. And there was one more perk: Tony P and Jimmy Ding Dong were otherwise engaged. I’d be able to eat in peace. No one was going to pull a quarter out from behind my ear, and no one was going to chop me up and throw the pieces into Sheepshead Bay. Geno was behind the counter, covered in flour, slapping dough out into a circle so he could toss it fully into shape.
“Hey, Moe, how ya doin’?” he asked, barely looking away from the whirling dough.
“Okay, Geno. Yourself?”
“Eh, you know. Same old t’ing.”
“Two slices and a large Coke.”
“I got fresh for you.” He twirled the dough and brought it to a soft landing on the white marble counter next to the oven. He slid over to where a bubbling hot pie sat on a round aluminum tray. With the skill of a surgeon, he carved out two perfectly symmetrical slices, put them on two overlapping paper plates lined with wax paper, and placed them atop the stainless steel counter. He poured my Coke and put it up next to the slices.
I decided to eat at the counter like I’d done when I was a little kid and only the grownups sat at the tables in the back. Besides that, I liked watching Geno make the pies. He was so expert at it, and it seemed so effortless for him. I think one of the things in life I enjoyed most was watching people who were good with their hands. When Geno tossed and twirled the flattened dough in the air, he wasn’t showy about it like some pizza makers. He just made it look so easy, the way some outfielders can track down fly balls without seeming to try. I was halfway through my second slice when he finished making the pie and slid it into the oven. Then, just to make conversation, I asked, “What happened to Jimmy, man? He looks like he had a fight with a box of razor blades and lost.”
Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery) Page 22
