Gravesend

by J. L. Abramo

  He carries the tool satchel and hides a long pry bar under his coat.

  The night is damp and foggy, creating eerie haloes around the lamps of the light poles on both sides of 69th Street.

  Tall trees also line the street. Oak. Maple. Apple. Cherry. Elm. Nearly every kind of hardwood tree grows in Brooklyn. Aside from a few lonely evergreens, the trees are bare, leafless. Through the fog, the branches appear to be long, menacing arms and tentacles, reminding him of creatures in the picture books scattered across the floor of his son’s room. He wonders about the fascination that children have with monsters, about the strange attraction adults have to fear.

  He walks silently up the dark alley between Bay Ridge Avenue and 68th Street to the rear of the empty house. He passes through the gate of a tall cedar fence, crosses the small back yard and reaches the door that comes off the kitchen. He quickly pries open the lock and finds the door held by a short chain. He uses the pry bar to break the chain, closes the unlocked door, leaves the satchel behind a small hedgerow under the window and walks back home.

  He walks into his son’s room and sets the alarm clock.

  He sits on the floor and reaches for a coloring book.

  A tree branch taps against the window.

  Detective Murphy sits in his three-room apartment on Marine Avenue in Bay Ridge, not far from the Fort Hamilton Army Base at the Brooklyn foot of the Verrazano Bridge. The fort was built to protect the Narrows, the long waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the New York City Harbor.

  Murphy swallows the last of his fourth bottle of Samuel Adams lager while the beat-up sofa tries to swallow him. He is half-watching Jay Leno interviewing someone Murphy can’t quite place.

  It is past two in the morning.

  Murphy wonders what kind of losers are up at this hour watching the repeat of a TV program that wasn’t worth the time or effort when it aired three hours earlier the same evening. Realizing that he is doing just that, Murphy turns his attention to Ralph.

  “I should be out with a redhead on my arm,” Murphy says, “painting the town the color of her hair. Instead, I’m sucking down beer that tastes as if it was in and out of the cooler at Maury’s Deli at least three times, being slowly devoured by this fucking sorry excuse for a piece of furniture and complaining to you.”

  Ralph has no comment.

  Three weeks earlier, Murphy had spent his birthday in much the same way.

  On that mid-January evening he had made it to Joe’s Bar and Grill on Avenue U just in time to be on hand when Augie Sena dropped a full keg of beer on his own leg, breaking Augie’s limb in two places.

  At just about this time on his thirty-fourth birthday, Murphy had been sitting in a hospital emergency room while doctors worked on Augie’s leg.

  Looking into the vacant eyes of a man who had just lost his child.

  Hell of a way to celebrate.

  Murphy extracts himself from the spongy sofa with the intention of collecting another bottle of the ruined beer from his refrigerator.

  One look at Ralph lets him know that his best friend needs a walk in the park.

  Murphy and his dog walk past John Paul Jones Park toward the Shore Road promenade. A heavy fog engulfs the ancient cannon and the stack of cannonballs left over from another revolution.

  They walk down to the water’s edge.

  Murphy can hear the scurrying of small animals in the dense bushes.

  Ralph is all ears.

  Murphy stands at the railing, gazing out at the bridge while Ralph chases shadows.

  The massive, concrete piling is the tomb of a luckless construction worker who fell and disappeared into a molten grave. Another immigrant who came to build a new world.

  Murphy looks out across to Staten Island, once only accessible by ferry. Beyond the island, New Jersey and California and all of those unknown places in between.

  And beyond, the Pacific and all of those unknowable places that Murphy has only read about.

  Murphy takes an unsung pride in the fact that people from nearly every foreign land beyond both seas have come here, have carried their children, their hopes and their dreams to Brooklyn.

  The Narrows beats up against the rocky shoreline below.

  The alarm wakes him at two-thirty in the morning. He finds himself on the floor of his son’s room. Surrounded by toys.

  He tries not to think about the other boy, the boy he had to kill and leave up on the cold roof.

  He washes his face with cool water from the kitchen sink and goes out to his car.

  He reaches the dairy on Ralph Avenue as the young man is leaving to begin his route. He follows, always staying at least a block behind and waiting out of sight each time the truck makes a stop for deliveries.

  He knows this route very well by now.

  He wants to be sure he has chosen the best spot to do what he needs to do the following night.

  FOUR

  The following day. Break of dawn. Detective Murphy is coordinating a house-to-house canvas that will cover West 10th Street between Avenue T and Highlawn Avenue and Avenue S between West 9th and West 11th. Landis and Mendez are there in addition to four uniforms borrowed from traffic control. Fewer parking tickets will be issued this morning. Fewer residents will sleep as late as they planned to sleep on a Saturday morning.

  Did anyone see a man at or near the apartment building early yesterday afternoon? Alone, or with a young boy, or carrying a child? Anyone acting suspicious, any person or persons unknown? Any unfamiliar vehicle, alongside or near the building? Anyone? Anything?

  Nothing.

  The two-man forensic team is back on the roof, picking up where they left off before losing daylight after being called down to the apartment where the boy was apparently held. Nothing more was found in the rooms, nothing further discovered on the roof, nothing at all to help identify the perpetrator.

  Murphy stops into the grocery store across from the apartment building for coffee and a buttered hard roll.

  “It’s almost impossible to believe that this guy drives up, carries the boy up the fire escape, then up to the roof, comes out again, and drives away with not a single witness,” says Murphy, stirring far too much sugar into the light coffee.

  “When I was a kid, growing up here,” says Joe Campo, “a stranger couldn’t walk down West 10th Street without having twenty pairs of eyes glued on him every moment he was on the block.”

  Brooklyn neighborhoods are much like small, individual towns and villages. Varying degrees of acquaintance and recognition. Family. Friends. Neighbors. People known to each other by name, or only by sight. The other patrons of the coffee shop, the grocery, the bank, the pizzeria. Familiar faces on the bus, the subway station. Shopkeepers and regulars. Bank tellers and patrons. Bus drivers and commuters. Fellow pedestrians. Good morning, John. How are you, Millie. Or just hello to the woman recently met at the checkout in the local pharmacy, the man who stood in line at the local movie theater.

  “Good morning, gents,” says Bill Meyers, bouncing into Mitch’s Coffee Shop and taking a seat at the counter. “Long time, no see, Gabriel.”

  “Been very busy, Bill,” says Gabriel Caine, working on a plate of eggs and home fries at the adjacent stool.

  “I’ll have the special, Mitch,” says Bill, “scrambled well and with a little less hair.”

  “I add the hair for the extra protein,” says Mitch, breaking two eggs onto the griddle.

  “Drop a few fingernail clippings into my coffee cup,” says Meyers. “That should take care of my minimum daily requirement. Been working, Gabriel?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “I just started a major renovation over on Ovington Place,” says Meyers. “Remodeling the kitchen and bathroom and finishing a basement. Should keep me in groceries for the rest of the month.”

  “How well done do you want these eggs, Bill?”

  “Burn them. Are you taking a vacation this winter, Mitch?”

  “You bet. A week from tod
ay. Thirteen days in sunny San Juan,” says Mitch Dunne. “Which reminds me, I’d better get a sign up on the door saying that we’ll be closed.”

  “Closed?” says Harry Johannsen, walking into the shop.

  “Vacation,” says Mitch, plating the eggs.

  “Where am I going to get stale rye toast while you’re gone?” asks Harry, grabbing a seat next to Gabriel.

  “I’ll fix you a few orders to go before I leave,” says Mitch, placing the plate on the counter.

  “Where’s the hair?” asks Harry, checking Bill’s food.

  “Mitch used it all up in my omelet,” says Gabriel.

  “Pass the ketchup,” says Bill.

  Detective Marina Ivanov has returned to the apartment building where the Ventura boy was found. She is sitting with Irina Kyznetsov and a police artist in the woman’s kitchen. They are trying to put together likenesses of the three men who had come at different times during the week to view the apartment where the boy had been held. Later, in spite of strong opposition from her husband Mikhail, the building superintendent, Irina would accompany Ivanov to the 60th Precinct to look at photographs.

  The night before, Paul Ventura arrived back at his apartment on Ocean Parkway at three in the morning. The two uniformed officers approached him with the news of his son’s death. Ventura had just come off a ten-hour shift driving a cab for the Empire Taxi Company out of a garage on Fourth Avenue and Warren Street, following eight hours at the counter of a Pep Boys store on 86th Street. After being questioned, Ventura called his estranged wife and then drove over to the house on 81st Street to be with Mary and their daughter.

  Early Saturday morning, Samson is making visits to the taxi garage and the auto parts store to check that all of Ventura’s time the previous afternoon is accounted for.

  When Tony Territo arrives at Angelo’s Coffee Shop on 18th Avenue he finds his father, Vincent, sitting at the counter. Angelo pours a second cup and, after a few quick words of greeting, Vincent leads his son to a booth in the rear of the shop.

  “Tell me what Colletti said, Anthony, word for word.”

  “He fucking threatened my family,” says Tony, loud enough to attract attention from nearby tables.

  “Calm down, tell me exactly what Colletti said.”

  “He said that I was responsible for the death of his worthless nephew, Johnny. He said that whether or not the kid was working for me, it’s clear that Johnny intended to come to me with the vehicle since I’m running the South Brooklyn business. What kind of fucking logic is that?”

  “Control yourself, Anthony. Please don’t make me have to say it again. What else did Colletti say?”

  “He reminded me that I couldn’t sell a hot dog let alone a hot vehicle if it weren’t for his blessings.”

  “And that’s true, Anthony,” says the older man. “Tell me how he threatened you.”

  “That’s the thing. The old fuck didn’t threaten me, he threatened Brenda.”

  “Please. What did he say precisely?”

  “He tells me what I need to do to make him happy and begs me not to let him down. Then he says, in the same fucking breath, and how is your lovely daughter?”

  “Perhaps it was an innocent inquiry.”

  “You weren’t there, Pop. You didn’t hear the way he said it. If that fuck comes anywhere near Barbara or the kids, I’ll tear his heart out.”

  “Anthony, you are talking about Dominic Colletti. Be very careful. What does he want you to do?”

  “He wants me to kill the kid who shot his nephew.”

  Vincent Territo sighs deeply and places his hand on his son’s arm.

  “You will do nothing and you will say nothing. You will stay clear of Colletti and you will not speak disrespectfully of him to anyone.”

  “Pop.”

  “Do you understand me, Anthony?”

  “Okay, yes, I understand.”

  “I will talk with Dominic. Wait to hear from me.”

  Lou Vota has had the luxury of sleeping in late this Saturday morning at Lorraine’s apartment in Park Slope. He is thankful for the weekend off, but he understands that Murphy also had the weekend off and Murphy is beating the streets in Gravesend. Detective Vota is next in line if something should come up.

  And something always did.

  Vota opens his eyes to a new day. He doesn’t know precisely what he is wishing for, but he hopes it will be different.

  Lorraine DiMarco is already out of bed. She stands in front of the bathroom mirror struggling to remove the cap from a large plastic bottle of Excedrin. The pain behind her eyes that violently woke her is exactly the same as the pain behind her eyes that she went to sleep with the night before. And the night before that.

  Only worse.

  She might have complained about the stabbing pain to Vota, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

  Not tonight, Lou, I have a terrible headache.

  Vota calls to her from outside the bathroom door.

  “How about one of my famous potato, egg and onion frittatas?” he asks.

  “Sounds great,” she answers.

  Barely able to hear the words above the thunderous roaring inside her head.

  Samson has had a busy morning. His visits to the taxi garage and the auto parts store confirmed very quickly that Paul Ventura had absolutely no opportunity to get anywhere near his son the previous afternoon. Samson had to use most of his time at each workplace vigorously assuring Ventura’s employers that the man had done nothing wrong.

  Samson then did what he could to determine when the boy had last been seen alive. Samson learned that Billy Ventura left his school building with two schoolmates a few minutes before two. The other boys lived on the same street as Billy, just across Stillwell Avenue. The three used the West 13th Street school exit, walked to Highlawn Avenue and turned to the crossing at Stillwell.

  At the corner of Highlawn and Stillwell, Billy decided to enter the Avenue Hobby Shop. He wanted another look at the Union Pacific locomotive that his father had promised for his birthday. The other boys went ahead, crossing the avenue and continuing to their homes on 81st Street.

  According to the store owner, the boy remained in the shop for ten or fifteen minutes, politely thanked the man and left. The next confirmed sighting of the boy was on the roof of the apartment building four blocks away, less than ninety minutes later.

  Samson and Murphy sit at a rear table in the New Times Restaurant across Coney Island Avenue from the 61st Precinct just after one in the afternoon. They each ordered the daily special. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes smothered in brown gravy, a side of kernel corn bathed in butter, salad with blue cheese dressing. Murphy attacks his lunch with fervor. Samson approaches his lunch with guilt, Alicia’s warnings about cholesterol buzzing in his ear.

  After filling Murphy in on his progress, Samson listens as Murphy does the same for him.

  “We found only one guy who had anything to contribute, if you can call it that. A Korean gentleman. He was driving past the apartment building on the way to his house further up 10th and saw a man he didn’t recognize leave the building with a cloth satchel. He didn’t pay attention to where the man went from there. I put him with the sketch artist,” says Murphy, shoveling a forkful of potatoes into his mouth before he continues. “What the artist managed to come up with vaguely resembled one of the sketches he had done with the woman who found the boy’s body. And both sketches vaguely resembled Jerry Seinfeld. Which can mean one of three things.”

  “Okay,” says Samson.

  “That all white males look like Jerry Seinfeld to Koreans, that the perp looks like Seinfeld, or that the artist can only draw likenesses of Seinfeld.”

  “How about the perp being Jerry Seinfeld?”

  “I ruled it out,” says Murphy. “We came across a woman who claimed to have seen a car she didn’t recognize. From the description she gave, I’m surprised she even knew it was a car. American make. Chevy, Pontiac or Oldsmobile. Old and be
at up. Two-door, maybe four. Gray or green. It sounds familiar. I put out an APB.”

  “So, we have nothing,” says Samson.

  “Nothing may be too generous a term. I saw the grocer this morning, Joe Campo. He’s quite a guy. He put his son through medical school selling milk, eggs, Genoa salami, cigarettes and lottery tickets out of that hole-in-the-wall corner store. He talked on and on about the way the neighborhood used to be. How everyone looked out for one another. The block parties. The slapball and stickball games in the street. The forts the kids built from fallen trees after a hurricane or from snow and ice after a winter storm. He says that everything has changed, even the climate. He made the old days sound idyllic. It had me thinking that I was born twenty years too late.”

  “No one is born too late, Tommy,” says Samson. “Some die too soon.”

  He sits on the floor, in the middle of the boy’s room, surrounded by toys no longer used.

  The silence in the house is deafening and has been since his wife took the younger child and ran off to her mother. Carried what was left of his family on a plane to sunny Florida.

  “I can work with my father down there,” she had said. “My mother can care for the baby. We need the money, until you can find another job.”

  “Don’t go,” he had said.

  “I can’t be here right now,” she said. “I can’t bear to look at the door of his room.”

  The room he sits in now.

  Surrounded by toys.

  Two weeks since driving them to the airport. Dropping them off in front of the terminal and seeing the taxi.

  4354.

  He reaches for the box of crayons.