They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The chapel hadn’t changed much since the service for my mother seven years earlier. It was only slightly more awful. There were faux bricks and faux beams and faded decals on the windows meant to give the appearance of stained glass. There was mylar wallpaper depicting scenes from the Old Testament and avocado cushions on the pews. With a splash of bad taxidermy you might mistake the place for a Hadassah hunting lodge.

  Josh, the Klein brother with the misfortune of being born between Jeffrey and me, was up to do the eulogy. He said that he had found himself strangely ill-prepared for my father’s passing. Me too, Josh. Me too. It was strange because we had been in dress rehearsal for his death since we could cross the street by ourselves. My dad had been stricken with a particularly insidious form of cancer. Excruciatingly painful and snail-like in growth, it killed him in pieces. Tenderness being one of the earliest casaulties. Harry Klein had collected scar tissue like some men collected baseball memorabilia. He had averaged one surgical procedure for every year of my life. I would be glad to see that streak come to an end. Josh said just that. We would all be glad the pain was finally over.

  I forced myself to look at the cherry-wood coffin that held those few pieces of my father that had not been divvied up between the surgeons and the sarcomas. For me, the doctors and the disease were two sides of the same coin: two gangs of clumsy thieves who had taken forever to make off with the goods. I remembered lying awake as a boy, praying for my father just to die. Some kids might have prayed for miracle cures, but even then I had dreadfully low expectations of the Almighty. But rather than killing off one embittered grocery clerk, God took the path of least resistance and murdered my faith instead. If my dad had died when I was young, I might’ve been able to imagine him as a man composed of something more than hard edges. In my fantasy, he might even have been capable of loving me back. As it was, I saw him much like I saw the dented and discounted cans he brought home from work. I saw him as he saw himself, as damaged goods.

  At the cemetary, only the noise and backwash of passing jets prevented the rabbi from setting another speed record. I wondered if he kept a stopwatch in his pocket. When we finished taking turns at throwing our spadefuls of dirt on the coffin, people fractured into cliques. Talk turned to food. It’s traditional for Jews; suffering and food. Aunt Lindy and Uncle Saul visited other graves. Their world had just gotten much smaller. Now they were the only two left from their generation.

  “Whadya think of L.A.?” MacClough asked, squeezing my hand.

  “I think Los Angelenos are lucky God feels bad about Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “Terrible, huh?”

  “Worse.”

  The preliminaries out of the way, we hugged. Our embrace saddened me more than I could say. Never once had my dad and I held each other in such an unselfconscious way. Surely now, we never would.

  “Give me a ride back to Sound Hill?” I wondered.

  “For a fee, my boy.”

  “I think I’ve got a spare quarter, you shanty Irish prick.”

  “Yeah, I missed you too, ya heathen Jew.”

  Jeffrey came away from one of the limousines and walked over to us. We hugged out of habit. Jeff’s awkward embrace was not unlike my dad’s.

  “We need to talk,” he said, taking a step back.

  MacClough turned to go: “Meet you by my car.”

  “Stay,” Jeffrey fairly commanded.

  “I’ll pass,” Johnny kept going.

  “No, please,” Jeffrey insisted. “I want you to hear this.”

  To say that MacClough and my oldest brother were enemies would be an overstatement, but not much of one. Cops, even retired ones like Johnny, tend to develop a reflexive distaste for lawyers of Jeffrey’s ilk. And Jeffrey’s affection for the MacCloughs of this world was tepid at best.

  “What is it, Jeff?”

  “Zak’s missing,” he answered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Par for the course.”

  Jeffrey shoved me. “You really are such an asshole, Dylan. Isn’t it bad enough that he looks like you? Why does he have to put his parents through the same shit you pulled on Mom and Dad?”

  There he was displaying the anger I was telling you about. But when I tried to display a little of my own, vice like fingers held back my left fist. John might have been weathering badly of late, but there wasn’t a thing wrong with his grip.

  “What do you mean he’s missing?” MacClough asked, putting himself between Jeffrey and me.

  “Let go of my arm!”

  He didn’t. “Shut up and let your brother talk.”

  Jeffrey opened his mouth to speak and stopped when he noticed the three of us had attracted a wee bit too much attention. Even Rabbi Rocketmouth let himself be distracted. MacClough let go of me and we all just stood there smiling like a trio of fools. When everyone realized there would be nothing more to see, they let us out of their sights.

  “Do you still own that bar?” Jeffrey asked MacClough.

  “The last I looked, yeah.”

  “What time do you close tonight?”

  “Don’t worry about when I close,” Johnny said. “I’ll see that it’s slow when we need it to be.”

  “Thank you.” Jeffrey about-faced.

  “Don’t forget your investigator’s file,” I called after him.

  “How’d you know—” he started.

  “I know you, Jeff. That’s all I need to know. You would never come to me first.”

  He walked on. He was scared. And now, so was I.

  Three Legs

  Sound Hill is an old whaling village out toward the end of Long Island, some eighty miles east of the New York City line. George Washington never slept here, but he built us a clapboard lighthouse. It’s got a bronze plaque on it and everything. We’ve got local Indians. We’ve got potato farms, sod farms, vineyards, and wineries. We’ve got several Victorian mansions, some shotgun shacks, but no high ranches. That pretty much sets us apart from the rest of Long Island. Sound Hill—The Last Bastion of High Ranch-lessness West of the Atlantic. But what we were proudest of was our lack of a golf course. That was us.

  The Rusty Scupper, on Dugan Street off the marina, had been the only bar in town for a hundred years when MacClough bought it. He had owned it for two years when I moved my office from the City to a room above the bookstore. Sound Hill needed an insurance investigator about as much as it needed a greenskeeper, but I moved here anway. Business was bad in Brooklyn, I hated high ranches, and I wasn’t much of an investigator. If I had a company motto, it would have read: If you want mediocrity, you want me. I think I’m maybe one of the eight people in history who actually believed he’d make more money as a writer. Luckily, I convinced a few editors.

  Jeffrey, on the other hand, was Jeffrey. Operating according to some master plan the rest of us mere mortals were not privy to, Jeffrey acted like an escapee from the cast of Götterdämmerung. I have never been one to subscribe to the axiom that you can’t argue with success, but my brother’s list of achievements did make argument a difficult proposition. Summa cum laude at NYU, editor of the law review at Columbia, top litigator at Marx, O’Shea and Dassault, a seven-figure income, a beautiful wife, two healthy kids, and five acres overlooking the Hudson River, Jeffrey had reached about as high as most men dare to dream. If only he could have managed to tone down his imperious manner, I might have been able to share the same room with him for more than ten minutes. Don’t misunderstand, Jeff was my big brother and I loved him. I admired him in ways I could not express. I only wished I liked him a little more and loved him a little less.

  MacClough was true to his word without trying. During the summer, when Sound Hill enjoyed a modest seasonal boom and benefited from the Hamptons’ overflow, the line at the Scupper’s bar would have been three deep at 9:30. Such was not the case during the last week of February. The locals were all done with their Budweisers by 8:00. The college crowd was all dart-and-eight-balled out by 9:00.

  Johnny and I had earlier agreed
that we would not waste our energies speculating about Zak. We were both sure that Jeffrey’s news would be taxing enough without us helping it along any. A few minutes before my brother’s scheduled arrival, MacClough put Patsy Cline on the juke and began rumbling around under the bar out of my sight. He only ever played Patsy when he was thinking about lost loves or absent friends. That was the thing about her voice, it just ached. And she always sounded as if she knew the next hurt was never more than a breath away.

  Johnny reappeared. He put two glasses on the bar next to as fine a crystal bottle as I had every seen. It was nearly empty. Still, he poured two amber fingers full in each glass and waited for Patsy to finish her lament.

  “Amen, Patsy. Amen.” He bowed his head. “Klein! Get your flat Jewish ass over to this bar.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what this is?” MacClough pointed at the decanter as I came his way.

  “Holy shit!” I could be so articulate. “That’s the Napoleon brandy your father—”

  “—pinched from the dead bootlegger. That’s right, Klein. You remember. But I bet you a fin you don’t remember the bootlegger’s name.”

  “Izzy Three Legs Weinstein,” I said without missing a beat.

  Raising his glass: “Screw ya, ya Christ-killer. To your dad!”

  “I hate brandy.”

  “It’s the only proper way to send a man to meet his god.”

  “You say the same thing when they polish the plaque on the lighthouse: ‘It’s the only proper way to celebrate the cleaning of the plaque’.”

  “Klein!”

  “John, I just can’t,” I was serious now. “There’s hardly another drink left in that bottle. You shouldn’t waste it on me. It’s part of your family.”

  “So are you, you idiot. Drink.”

  “To Harry Klein!” I knocked it back. “Feh.”

  “Feh?”

  “All due respect to family heirlooms, French emperors, and deceased bootleggers, but I can’t stand the stuff.”

  “Fuckin’ neanderthal,” he chided and slapped a five-dollar bill on the bar. “Here’s the fin I owe you.”

  I folded it up and slipped it into my jacket pocket next to the black skullcap from the funeral home. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t showered or changed clothes since getting off the plane that morning. The tops of my shoes were still powered with souvenir dirt from the grave site. When I looked up from my shoes, the crystal decanter and brandy glasses were gone. In their stead were a Black and Tan and a double of Old Bushmills.

  I went for my pint: “To Three Legs and five dollars!”

  Jeff walked in at precisely the wrong time.

  “If you’re this convivial on the day we bury your father and discover your nephew is missing, you must be a scream on good days.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, counselor,” MacClough jumped to my defense.

  “No, Mr. MacClough, I have it all right. I know my little brother.”

  “Get to the point, Jeffrey,” I said. “What about Zak?”

  He tossed a manila folder on the bar. MacClough grabbed it and skimmed through it as Jeffrey spoke.

  “Zak didn’t call home the week before February break. We weren’t particularly alarmed. He’s nearly as irresponsible as his Uncle Dylan used to be.”

  “Fuck you, Jeff. Just fuck—”

  MacClough threw his Bushmills past my ear. It landed the hard way on the cobbles of the old fireplace. The flying glass got our attention.

  “Either start acting more like brothers and less like a married couple or get the fuck out of me pub. Got it Klein?”

  “Got it.”

  “Counselor?” MacClough asked.

  “Understood.”

  “Go on then with what you’ve got to say, counselor.”

  “Even when he didn’t show at home the Friday evening of his break week, Tess and I weren’t worried. It wouldn’t have been the first time.”

  “Yeah,” MacClough smirked. “I got that impression.”

  “But by late that Sunday,” Jeff continued, “I was concerned. Tess too. To allay her fears I told her that Zak and I had a falling out over his schoolwork and that by not showing he was just acting out.”

  “I take it your wife had no problem believing you.”

  “No problem at all, Mr. MacClough. In the meantime, I called around to his friends and roommates. No one seemed to know anything. I made some discreet inquiries through a close business associate who is a well-connected alum of Riversborough.”

  “Zak goes to Riversborough College,” I said for no good reason. “Upstate, by the Canadian border.”

  “I figured that out, Klein.” Turning to Jeff: “Any help?”

  “None,” my brother sighed. “The next morning I went to the Castle-on-Hudson Police and reported Zak missing.”

  “No ransom notes? No threatening phone calls?”

  “I sort of wish there were,” Jeff said. “Then I’d have something to hold onto. I had to tell Tess eventually, but Zaks’s younger brother Lindsay doesn’t know.”

  “He knows,” I said. “Maybe not all the details, but he knows. How’s Tess holding up?”

  “She’s the strongest person I ever met. Until this thing with Dad, she barely showed any cracks. When the police came up empty, I hired Hench Security. That’s a copy of their case file to date.”

  “Hench?” I puzzled.

  “They’re good,” MacClough assured me. “All ex-FBI and ATF agents. They’re also supposed to have a few cybergeeks from the NSA on the payroll. But I thought their forte was industrial security, not missing persons.”

  “So far, your assessment is correct. They’ve interviewed everyone but Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife and gotten no further than the Castle-on-Hudson police.”

  “Have you called the papers?” I wondered.

  “No press, for chrissakes! No press!”

  “So,” John wanted to know, “what is it exactly that you expect me and your brother to do that the cops and the Mission Impossible crew can’t?”

  “Though thankfully retired from fraud investigation, my brother Dylan isn’t an amateur and will know how to stay out of your way. On the other hand, he loves Zak and won’t be inclined to let you take chances with my son’s life that a law enforcement agency or security firm might be willing to risk. He and Zak also share a certain unspoken affinity, a sixth sense for what the other is thinking.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “it takes one fuck-up to know another.”

  “Shut up, Klein,” MacClough scolded. “Keep going, counselor.”

  “I’ve always resented Zak and Dylan’s closeness, but now maybe some good can come of it. If Zak is close by, my brother will know it.”

  MacClough wasn’t buying it. “That’s a good case for your brother’s involvement, but where do I fit in with the Klein family psychic network?”

  “I’ve been checking up on you, Dectective.”

  “Retired.”

  Jeffrey ignored that. “I’ve also been reading your personnel file from the NYPD.”

  “That’s confidential!” Johnny screamed, red in the face, veins popping out of his neck.

  “Come on, detective. Don’t play dumb. In a city like New York, nothing is confidential, nothing is off-limits, especially to people like me. You know that.”

  “Yeah,” MacClough said, pouring himself a double, “I know. It sucks, but I know.”

  “Yes, I should think after the Hernandez case you’d be well acquainted with the vagaries and benefits of the system.”

  “All right, counselor, you made your point.” MacClough downed his drink in one gulp. “Leave the file. Your brother and me will be up to see the Castle-on-Hudson PD tomorrow morning. Do me a favor, don’t let ‘em know we’re coming. If they’re like most cops, they resent the shit out of people who they think expect special treatment. The fact that you’re a lawyer also works against you.”

  “It’s in your hands,” Jeffrey smiled, just brief
ly. He couldn’t help celebrating a victory even if his son’s life was in danger. “I won’t insult you by offering payment now, but I’ve transferred $25,000 into Dylan’s bank account for your use. I don’t care what you do with it. You don’t have to account for it. If you require more, you’ll get more within a minute of the phone call. All I want is Zak back safely.”

  “You know, counselor,” John said, “I would have helped just on Dylan’s behalf. Why bring Hernandez into it?”

  “When it comes to motivation, Detective, I believe in overkill. Good night.” He took a step to go, then stopped and looked me in the eye. “I’ve already made excuses for your absence at shivah.”

  “Oh yeah?” I was incredulous. “What did you tell them?”

  “That you sold your screenplay and had to go back to L.A. Maybe when Zak’s home, you will go back.”

  “I doubt it, but let’s find Zak first.”

  Jeffrey was gone. And before I got the name Hernandez out of my mouth, MacClough shooed me out of the Scupper. I had to change. I had to shower. I had to get some rest, he said. We had a long day ahead of us. He had to read through the file. He had to find someone to cover for him at the bar. He had a thousand things to do before tomorrow.

  By the time my wet hair landed on my pillow for the first time in a month, I had almost forgotten about Hernandez. Almost.

  Lovesong Lane

  We were two hours and three cups of coffee into the trip, just crossing the Tappan Zee, when MacClough began giving instructions. I was to do most of the talking, at least in the beginning. I was just a concerned uncle who had asked an old friend along for the long ride. Johnny would pick his spot and take over, but I was always to stand between him and the investigating detective. John threw the Hench Security file on my lap and told me to look through it. I did.

  MacClough was right, Hench was thorough. Not only did the file contain verbatim transcripts of all their interviews, bios, and background material on the interviewees, but there was a copy of the Castle-on-Hudson Police Department report and bios of the investigating officers. It was all so precise and the binding wasn’t bad either. Unfortunately, neither Hench nor the police nor any of Zak’s friends had any idea of his whereabouts or, if they had, they weren’t saying.