Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Geno smiled and nodded in agreement. “Yeah, he’s no lookin’ so good. He smacked his car up real bad. Had a crash wid a big truck.”

  “Where, on the Gowanus?”

  “Nah, someplace in Pennsylvania somewheres.”

  For the second time that day I got lightheaded, but this time it wasn’t from watching a bug crawl out of dead man’s nose. “You know where in Pennsylvania?”

  “I don’t know, somewheres in the mountains someplace. You know, it’s a funny t’ing, Moe.”

  “What?”

  “The last time you was in here, that night a few days ago, Tony got a phone call. Remember?”

  “Yeah, what about it, Geno?”

  “It was some cop in Pennsylvania callin’ to tell Tony about Jimmy’s accident. He had to go get Jimmy from the hospital. Hey, Moe, whatsamatta? You don’t like my pizza no more?”

  At first, I didn’t say anything at all. But Geno was right: the pizza had turned to sawdust in my mouth. When I realized that it was Jimmy Ding Dong who’d tried to run me off the road that night I was coming home from visiting Samantha’s grave, I lost my appetite. Truth was, I was suddenly nauseous and very close to panic. It was one thing to have escaped from Susan Kasten and her band of radical idiots. It was something else to have just missed getting my bell rung by Jimmy Ding Dong. What I was trying to figure out was why Tony P — Jimmy never acted without Tony’s say-so — should want me dead? More importantly, I wondered if I was still on his hit list.

  “Moe!” Geno shouted.

  “No, the pizza’s great. It’s me. I don’t feel so good. I gotta go.”

  “Hey, Moe,” Geno called after me.

  “What is it?”

  “Not for nothin’, but the pizza’s not free.”

  “Right,” I said with all the conviction of a zombie and threw a five-dollar bill on the counter. “Listen, Geno, do me a favor, okay? Don’t tell Tony or Jimmy we talked about what happened in Pennsylvania.”

  Geno had been around long enough to understand. “Sure, Moe. Far as I know, you wasn’t even here today.”

  I walked out of the shop without collecting my change. What did the walking dead need with money, anyway?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  My brother was at the desk doing his weekly sales reports when I walked into our bedroom. I didn’t even try to sneak the shearling jacket past him. I think I would have preferred him killing me and just getting it over with, but he must’ve seen the look on my face.

  “What’s wrong with you, little brother? You’re white as a ghost.”

  Ghost! If you only knew. “I’m sorry about borrowing the jacket, but — ”

  “I didn’t ask you about the jacket. I asked you what was wrong. Is it Mindy?”

  I choked on a laugh. “She’s the least of it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If I even tried to explain it, it would blow your mind,” I said, brushing off the jacket and placing it back on its hanger. I pulled the plastic bag down over the jacket and hung it back in its place.

  “Try me.”

  “Oh, and I borrowed your Chuck Taylors too.” I lifted up my left foot to show him.

  He jumped out of his seat and grabbed me by the shoulders. “What’s wrong, Moe? You’re not making any sense.”

  “I’ve gotten myself into something that I can’t get out of.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Nothing like that, I swear. I’m not even sure what it is, or how I got into it.”

  “What?” he asked, relaxing his grip on my shoulders. “Does it have to do with the cop that was here today?”

  “He’s a detective.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Attila the Hun, for chrissakes. Does it have anything to do with him?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure,” I said, my mind racing, the rest of me numb with fear.

  Aaron let go of me completely and pulled a suitcase out from under his bed. “Does it have anything to do with this? I found it in the trunk of my car last night.”

  At first it didn’t register. Then I remembered. It was Samantha’s suitcase, the one that I’d pulled out of her landlady’s attic. I’d put it in the Tempest’s trunk the night Susan Kasten and her Halloween-masked friends had snatched me off the street. In the whirl of events that followed, I’d completely forgotten about it.

  “I don’t know, Aaron. Maybe.”

  “What the fuck do you know?”

  “I know that almost everything I thought I knew, about everyone I thought I knew it about, was wrong.”

  “Well, that clears it all up,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm.

  I grabbed the suitcase and hoisted it onto my bed. “Let’s open this up. Maybe you better get a butter knife in case it’s locked.”

  Butter knives are the Brooklyn Jewish take on Swiss Army knives. Between the five of us in my family, we’d used butter knives to do everything short of open heart surgery. It showed. All of our butter knives had blunted or twisted tips from being used as letter openers, screwdrivers, lock picks, or pry bars. Hell, sometimes we even used them to spread butter. Aaron, always the practical one of us, suggested I try the locks before he went to the kitchen. Smart man. Click. Click. Both latches snapped open when I pushed the two rectangular tabs to the side with my thumbs. My heart thumping with anticipation, I raised the case’s lid.

  My heart sank in disappointment when I saw that the case contained nothing more than a cheerleader’s skirt and sweater from Koblenz High, a graduation tassel, programs from school plays, a yearbook, and some other odds and ends. But I wasn’t going to give up just yet. I removed it all from the case. Nothing. That is, nothing that did more than make me wonder about Samantha as a younger girl.

  “Shit!”

  “Not so fast, little brother,” Aaron said, pushing me aside. “007 would be disappointed in you.” He ran the flats of his hands along the faded, satiny interior lining of the suitcase. Then he pulled back the pocket of the same material on the underside of the case’s lid. He stopped, his eyes lighting up. He grabbed my hand and placed it inside the pocket. “Feel that?” he asked.

  “Yeah, there’s something between the lining and the lid.”

  Aaron curled his right hand around the loosest part of the lining and gave it a sharp yank. The material, old and faded, tore away from the glue without much of a fight. There, taped to the underside of the lid, were two large brown envelopes. I carefully peeled away the tape and held the envelopes in my hands. I was surprised at just how heavy they were.

  “Do you think the envelopes are Samantha’s?” Aaron asked.

  “Probably. Look at the rest of the bag. It’s all beat up. The lining is saggy and faded, but the tape is fresh and unyellowed, not brittle like old tape would be.”

  “One way to find out for sure.”

  The flaps on the envelopes were held closed by the little spread wings of metal clasps. I knew Aaron was right, that opening the envelopes would tell us about who had concealed them, but I hesitated. I wondered if I shouldn’t just put them back inside the suitcase and ship it to Sam’s parents.

  Aaron shouted, “Open them!”

  I suppose if Sam had died under normal circumstances and if my world hadn’t been turned upside down just lately, I’d have kept them closed and mailed them to her parents. But Sam hadn’t died a normal death, and with me on Jimmy Ding Dong’s to-do list, I had to see what was inside the envelopes.

  I opened the first one by bending the clasp’s spread metal wings together, lifting the flap, and dumping the contents onto my bed. Three white, letter-sized envelopes fell onto the bedspread. One was marked “Last Will and Testament.” Another was marked “For Dad.” And one “For Mom.”

  “Is that Samantha’s handwriting?” Aaron wanted to know.

  “I think so. Wait a second.” I scrounged around the bottom of my closet looking for a particular shoebox. After a minute of frantic searching, I found the one I wanted. Pull
ing off the lid, I reached into the box and came up with a handful of holiday cards, birthday cards, and postcards. I searched through them until I came upon what I was looking for. “Here it is,” I said, holding up a postcard with a photo of the Steeplechase on the front. On the back was a note from Sam.

  Dear Moe —

  Please forgive me. I don’t know what got into me the other night. You are a good and loyal friend, which is more than I can say for myself. Getting to know you has been one of my favorite things about moving here. Please don’t let a few minutes of stupidity on my part ruin that.

  Love,

  Sam

  I held the postcard up to the writing on one of the envelopes. “It’s her handwriting, but I’m not going to open these up, Aaron. It’s not right.”

  “I agree. There’s nothing in them for us.”

  I opened the second brown envelope, turned it upside down, and let gravity do the rest. There was another white, letter-sized envelope within. It was marked “To Whom It May Concern,” but it was the remainder of the contents that made me go cold inside. Next to the white envelope on the bed lay a NYPD badge and a thick packet of black-and-white photographs. The photographs were of Bobby and Tony P, of Bobby’s car — trunk open — at the airport parking lot, of a light-colored van parked behind it. There was a series of photos of a man loading something from the van into the trunk, but the man in the photos wasn’t Detective Casey and the things being loaded into the trunk weren’t wooden crates of dummy explosives.

  “Holy shit!” I thought I heard myself say.

  Aaron grabbed the photos out of my hand. “What is it? What are those things in his hands?” he asked, pointing at the plastic- and tape-covered bricks being loaded into Bobby’s trunk.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Aaron didn’t like it when I got sarcastic. He especially didn’t like it when it made him feel dumb or out of touch. “No, I’m not kidding, jerk. Remember whose clothes you’ve been wearing today and whose car you’ve been driving lately.”

  “Sorry, you’re right, big brother. Those bricks are bricks of heroin or cocaine. I’m not sure which.”

  “Get the fuck outta here! Bobby wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’re wrong. You wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that, but I’m not sure there’s anything Bobby wouldn’t do if a lot of money was part of the equation.”

  Aaron wasn’t believing it. “Big money or not, Bobby’s a shrewd guy. He wouldn’t risk going away to prison for — ” I was already laughing before he could finish. “What’s so funny?” he wanted to know.

  “I swear I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “In fact, even though it looks and sounds like laughter, I’m really crying.”

  “You’re talking crazy, Moe.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Aren’t you going to open the white envelope? It’s addressed to Whom It May Concern, not to her mom or dad.”

  “Not now,” I said. “Not here.”

  “When?”

  “I’m not sure,” I lied. I knew exactly where and when I was going to open it.

  “What about the photographs? Are you — ”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “Okay,” he said, but his expression was full of worry. Rightfully so.

  My brother knew my heart better than I thought he did. What was even more amazing was that in spite of knowing that I was basically an aimless fuck-up, he trusted me. That I hadn’t expected, because I wasn’t sure that I’d ever done anything to earn his trust. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to trust somebody. I was about to test that theory out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Bobby was sleeping when I walked into his room at Coney Island Hospital, but it wasn’t the sleep of angels. His face, his long brown hair were bathed in sweat. His fingers twitched. His head jerked violently from side to side. His lips curled and moved. His arms struck out wildly at an invisible enemy. Maybe it was a nightmare. Or maybe he was being crushed beneath the weight of his deals with various devils. I didn’t much care either way, as long as he suffered. I stood there watching him for what might have been an hour, trying to feel something other than anger. I think I could have stood there for days and not felt anything else. Eventually Bobby’s night terrors calmed, and he fell into a more restful sleep. I sat down, reading while I waited. He stirred again at around eleven, this time opening his eyes. I got up. I wanted to be standing over him when he woke.

  “Hey, Moe.” He yawned, stretching his muscles, not without pain. “What time is it? How did you get in here with — ”

  I might have told him what time it was. I might have told him that I had called Detective Casey to make sure I could get past the relief cop at the door without any hassles. I did neither. What I did instead was to toss something onto Bobby’s chest.

  He grabbed at it. “What the fuck is this?”

  “It’s a dead cop’s badge.”

  “What the — ”

  “Shut up, Bobby. For once, just shut the fuck up. I’m already sorry for saving your life. Don’t make it worse.”

  “About that,” he said, “about saving my — ”

  “Twice, Bobby. I saved your worthless life twice. So please shut up. Shut up!”

  He put his hands up in surrender. “Okay.”

  “We’ll talk about the badge later. First, I wanna talk about this.” I handed him a photo of the big guy loading up his trunk with drugs. “Are the bricks heroin or cocaine?”

  “Where did you get this?”

  I ignored him. “Heroin or cocaine?”

  He bowed his head. “Heroin.”

  “What a perfect setup, huh, Bobby? By volunteering to be Detective Casey’s rat inside Susan Kasten’s bomb plot, you got a pass from the cops that would let you drive all the heroin you could carry through the streets of New York without risking a day in prison. If you got stopped, like we did that day you got a flat tire coming back from the airport, you just told the cop to call the number Casey gave you and the cops would send you on your way. Those weren’t dummy explosives in your trunk that day. It was heroin, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You musta gotten a fucking hard-on when Casey explained to you about the number to call if you ever got jammed up. Me, I wouldn’t’ve been able to see a way to turn that into profits, but that’s always been the difference between us, Bobby. You could always see all the possibilities in any deal, whether it was trading baseball cards or smuggling heroin.”

  “Everybody’s good at something, Moe.”

  “Well, I guess that makes it all okay. Hitler was good at killing Jews, and you’re good at making money. So, whose idea was it to use your cover to smuggle drugs, yours or Tony P’s?”

  He looked like he was going to deny Tony Pizza’s involvement, but didn’t bother. “From when I worked for him a few summers back, I knew Tony was involved in all sorts of smuggling: jewelry, car parts, electronics, fireworks. You know about the fireworks. Everybody in Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island knows about the fireworks, even the cops at the 60th and 61st precincts buy their fireworks from him. At worst I thought Tony would ask me to move some hot jewelry or bottle rockets.”

  “Bottle rockets. If this wasn’t so fucked up, I might even laugh at that. But I guess when you went to him and told him about your sweet setup, he had bigger plans than bottle rockets.”

  Bobby shrugged his shoulders. “Once I told him, I couldn’t take it back, not if I wanted to keep breathing.”

  “Not if Jimmy Ding Dong knew about it.”

  “No excuses, but even after Tony mentioned drugs I thought the worst I’d be doing was moving some pot. Not even you could get bent outta shape over a little pot. I swear, I didn’t know it was heroin until I moved the first load. I told Tony I didn’t like it, but he just told me that was too bad for me, that I should just take the money and keep my mouth shut, so that’s what I did.”

  “I thought you two were old pals, you and Tony P,” I
said.

  “Guys like Tony and Jimmy, they don’t have friends. They see you as an asset or a liability.”

  “Better to be a living asset than a dead liability.”

  “Especially with drugs. Drugs are big money, Moe. Big as in huge block letters in neon lights. Big as in Times Square on New Year’s Eve big.”

  I was curious. “How much have you made?”

  His face lit up in spite of himself. That always happened when he talked money. “A hundred grand, give or take, and that’s just from the deal itself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’ve invested almost all of it in the stock market. It’s already up to almost half a million.”

  “Such blasphemy,” I said with mock scorn. “Karl Marx is spinning in his grave.”

  “Fuck Karl Marx.”

  “What about Samantha?”

  Bobby didn’t like that. “What’s Sam got to do with this? Why bring her name up?”

  “Because you got her killed, you asshole. That’s her badge on your chest. Sam was a cop.”

  He sat up in bed and swung his legs over the side. “What the fuck are you talking about, Moe?”

  I pulled the letter out of my pocket and threw it at him. “Read up, Bobby.”

  As he did, I explained to him how I’d gone to Koblenz, and about the discrepancy in her age. I told him about Sam’s dad being a Pennsylvania state trooper, and how Sam had wanted to follow in his footsteps.

  “It all adds up,” I said. “She was determined to be a cop, only no one knew about it. See there in the letter, where she explains that she was recruited to be in a special program to infiltrate radical groups using nontraditional means to finance their agendas. And when she hooked up with you, she thought she had hit the daily double. You were connected with every radical group at Brooklyn College and with major heroin trafficking. Just one problem. She fell in love with you. She had enough evidence on you to put you away for a hundred years, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.”