Redemption Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “To both the victims and to science. You know, I’ve read some articles recently about DNA testing. You know about DNA, do you?”

  “It was discovered by Abbott and Costello, right? No, sorry, Watson and Crick.”

  “A smart-aleck detective.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “Next thing you know, you’ll be making Dr. Pepper jokes like every eight-year-old comes through that door.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me until you mentioned it.”

  “So, as I was saying, they say they’ll be able to identify bodies beyond any question with only cellular amounts of tissue. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Yeah, I thought, and they’ll send the results over fax machines. I remembered all the stupid promises for the future they made at the ‘64 World’s Fair. The last time I checked, my turbine-powered, self-guided rocket car hadn’t yet arrived. I’d just have to use my wireless videophone later to check in with my car dealer on Moon Colony Alpha. Oh, I forgot, he wouldn’t be in today. He was being fitted for his nuclear-powered mechanical heart.

  “Amazing,” I seconded.

  We parted ways, with him wishing me good luck. Though I tried to pay his wife, she wouldn’t take my money. Maybe I wasn’t that wrong about the rest of the world.

  It was well past lunchtime, but I thought I’d go back to Town Hall and see what Molly was up to. She’d already eaten and, she said, in spite of how quiet it seemed, she really had a lot of work to do. Naturally, she warned me that this spontaneous visit didn’t relieve me of my duty to see her before leaving town. She was only half serious. That half was serious enough.

  I stopped by the stationery store to see if my documents were in. “They were,” said the distracted woman behind the counter. “Sam came in himself and picked ‘em up a few hours ago. Sorry.” She went back to reading the Enquirer before I could thank her or ask if I owed her any money. I looked at the cover of the rag she was reading and immediately understood her rapture. It wasn’t every day that a nine-year-old dying of old age was impregnated by the ghost of Elvis.

  Sam was waiting for me, folder in hand, when I walked through the main entrance of the Swan Song. He was quick to tell me he had picked up the material himself. I wondered why. The stuff was important to me, but wasn’t exactly gold dust.

  “I couldn’t get any of the local kids to do it. All back in school. And none of the alter kockers,” he lamented, pointing at the old folks in the lobby, “were going into town today.”

  “Thanks, Sam. What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not silly. I added it to your bill plus twenty percent. So, boychik,” he whispered, putting his arm around my shoulder, “how did it go with Molly the other night? We didn’t get to speak yesterday.”

  “She was right where you said she’d be.”

  “So—did you shtup her?”

  “I’m married, Sam.”

  “You’re married, not dead.”

  “I’m in love with my wife.”

  “That’s different, Moshe.” He patted my face affectionately. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I hope it lasts. Too bad about Molly. I like fat girls. More bang for the buck, if you take my meaning.”

  “With so few bullets left in the chamber, I guess that would be important.”

  He wagged his finger. “Sticks and stones may break my bones …”

  “At your age, Sam, a strong wind could break your bones.”

  “This is way too much discussion of my bones. Get upstairs before I give you a zetz.”

  Upstairs, I spread out across the bed the papers Larry Mac had sent me, but regardless of how I tried to look away, my eyes were drawn to the mug shots and autopsy photos of Arthur Rosen. One look into his eyes and anyone could see there was nothing fun or funny about mental infirmity. Even in death he didn’t seem completely free of the pain. Maybe that was my job, to free him of the pain at last. Was that what he wanted from me? I don’t know. I must have stared at his pictures for twenty minutes. I had no answers.

  The Higgins boys, on the other hand, provided answers to any number of questions. Not only was the father, as Sam had said, a serious drunk, but he was a petty thief, a low-life mutt working his way up the ranks to skell when his liver gave out. He died in some godforsaken local jail in some county in Pennsylvania I’d never heard of. I think I’d rather die in the street in the freezing rain than die alone in jail. I bet you no one paid for roses to be placed at the foot of his grave.

  After Higgins the Elder woke up on the wrong side of the dirt, Robby bounced around from one foster home to the next, eventually taking leave of the system without bothering to ask anyone’s permission. I doubt the system sweated the details. He’d been an angry handful from the day his dad’s “career” forced Robby into the machinery of the state. His sad adventures might’ve interested Charles Dickens, but I was more concerned with the details of his less-than-extensive criminal record.

  Robby Higgins had engaged in the sorts of activities one might expect from a bright, angry, wounded teenage boy. Many a storefront window and mailbox had met their fate at his hands. There were the requisite graffiti arrests, the usual shoplifting of a six-pack at the local convenience store. Only two of his arrests were of particular interest to me. He was caught making a small pipe bomb, with which, as he confessed as part of a deal for reduced time in a county facility, he intended to put a scare into a foster father who had taken a belt to him. The other arrest, the one as an adult for arson, was the one that really caught my attention.

  In 1972, at about the same time the firemen and I were pulling the battered but breathing Marina Conseco out of the water tank in Coney Island, Adolph X aka Robert John Higgins was burning a cross into the lawn of the Beth David Synagogue of King’s Landing, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately for all those involved, Adolph used a wee bit too much accelerant, and the fire spread to a utility shed. It also spread to his pants leg, which is how the cops tracked him down. They arrested him at a local emergency room.

  I should have been thrilled to read this information. I wasn’t. Though this was the sort of thing a detective or a prosecutor might look at to establish a pattern of behavior, I just didn’t see it that way. For me it cut in the opposite direction, against Robby Higgins’ being responsible for the Fir Grove fire. As for the cherry-bomb incident Molly told me about, so what? Me and every kid in my neighborhood had set off more fireworks than I could begin to count. My friend Ralphy was particularly fond of blowing up mounds of dog shit with M80s. The results were very Jackson Pollock. I set off a stink bomb in assembly once, so I guess the only difference between Robby Higgins and me was that he got caught.

  What can I say about the pipe bomb? I don’t know. My dad cracked me with his belt once or twice, and the second time he did it I was mad enough to kill him. At least I thought I was, or I remember it that way. He was in one of his I’m-a-failure-the-world’s-against-me moods, and I said the wrong thing or looked at him the wrong way or didn’t do anything at all. But someone was going to pay a price for his bad day, and Aaron wasn’t around. He never hit Miriam, not because she was his baby girl, but because she could see through his cowardice and he knew it. It took me years to see it. Aaron didn’t see it then and never will. So Robby Higgins was going to put a scare into a man, not his father, who’d beaten him. From what I could glean from the material Larry Mac had sent me, Higgins hadn’t really meant to do the man physical harm.

  The cross-burning said something very different to me. What it said to me was that Robby Higgins had found a target for his rage instead of himself. Well, I think it would be more accurate to say someone else found the target for him and cultivated his anger. His name change told me as much. Disaffection and rage are the fuels that feed hate groups. I can’t say who or what he had latched on to or who or what had latched on to him. Maybe he fell in with a group of skinheads. Maybe he picked up a copy of Mein Kampf or The Protocols. I can’t say, and it�
�s irrelevant in any case.

  Regardless of how detestable I found the Adolph X’s or Anton Harders of the world, I would always understand Robby Higgins. There were a lot of Robbys in the public-housing projects at the deep end of Coney Island. Rage was as available in the projects as nickel bags, but it cost less and did more damage. And though I was working backward with only hearsay, arrests records, and social workers’ reports to go on, I just couldn’t see Robby Higgins as the torch of the Fir Grove. That didn’t mean that he didn’t do it or that I’d scratch him off the list. It meant only that I wasn’t prepared to march into anyone’s office and offer him up as a scapegoat.

  I’d hit a wall. History, as life in general, defies easy answers. Without Anton Harder to serve up as the answer to Old Rotterdam’s sixteen-year-long nightmare, I had nowhere to go. Never any good at chess, I had trouble seeing my next move, or even if I had a next move. What I had were some new acquaintances, hotel bills, a paint job in waiting, and the stink of other people’s cigarettes on my dirty clothes. I also had the stink of their fire in my nostrils. I cursed the day Arthur Rosen set foot in my store.

  I picked up the phone to call Katy, but my mood was so foul I wasn’t going to inflict myself upon her. A long time before I knew Katy existed, I promised myself that my father’s penchant for striking out at those closest to him would die with him. Sometimes his rage leaked out of me, but only in words, never in deeds. I didn’t beat myself up for it. A lot of his good leaked out of me, too. I miss him sometimes. I miss him a lot.

  I was thinking of him in his coffin when there was a knock at my door. I hoped it was Mr. Roth. It was Sam. Maybe it was better that it was Sam. Sam didn’t much remind me of my dad. As before, the old comedian made himself quickly at home, walking right on in without a hint of an invitation. He saw the papers spread out on the bed, but didn’t ask about them.

  “It’s late, Sam.”

  “For who, your great-grandma?” He looked at his watch. “I’d be in the middle of my first show at this time. At midnight I’d be out onstage again. At three I’d begin unwinding, and when the sun came up I went to sleep. Come on, let’s go down to Hanrahan’s and have a drink.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What kinda bullshit is this?” he chided. “You don’t even have to invite fat Molly. Just me and you, kindeleh. Come, make an old man happy.”

  “I’m tired, Sam, and I’m not in a very good mood.”

  “So! Look at me. I was born in a shitty mood. How’s this, I get you to laugh, we go have a drink. Doesn’t even have to be Hanrahan’s. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Now, don’t interrupt me, understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “So—there’s a priest, a minister, and a rabbi,” Sam said, giving the setup for a million old jokes, all of which I knew by heart. “And the three men of the cloth are discussing how to divide up the collection money between charitable causes and their salaries. The priest says, ‘What I usually do is draw a big circle around me. Then I throw the collection-plate money up into the air. What lands in the circle is mine. What lands outside the circle is for God’s good works.’ The minister says—”

  “Sam,” I broke my promise. “I’ve heard—”

  “Shush! You promised to let me finish, so let me finish. We got a deal.”

  “Okay.”

  “The minister says, ‘I draw a big checkerboard on the floor. I toss all the money up into the air. What falls on red is mine.

  What falls on black is for God’s good works.’ The rabbi compliments his fellow holy men on their wisdom and says his method is not so different from theirs. ‘I don’t draw anything on the floor, because I have such faith in God’s powers. I throw the money up as high as I can. What God catches, he keeps. What falls to the ground is mine.”

  “Bah dum dah,” I imitated a rim shot. “I heard that joke in the womb, Sam.”

  “Oy, I guess I didn’t make you—” Just then, he stopped talking, grabbed his stomach, and let go a sonic boom of a fart. “Sorry, toteleh. By the way, do farts have lumps?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m in a shitload of trouble.”

  Now I was laughing.

  On the way down to the lobby, I took my symbolic hat off to Sam for his rare talent. He said he learned to bomb onstage, so to speak, when he was bombing onstage.

  “Gas by itself,” he explained, “ain’t so funny. But if you can do it and make believe you didn’t notice it yourself, or if you can control it and point to people in the audience and go with it … Once, I did it by accident and I went with it. You gotta go with what works for you. So, whenever I was dying onstage, I added some sound effects and I was dying no more. Always gets a laugh, every time.”

  “I’ll have to remember that.”

  “You want I should drive?” he asked, fishing for his keys.

  “No. I’ll drive. Hanrahan’s, right?”

  “Doesn’t have to be, but okay.” As we stepped outside, Sam asked: “You sure you don’t wanna give the fat girl a ring?”

  “I’m sure, Sam.”

  Walking around back, to where my car was parked, I thought I smelled smoke.

  “You smell something?” Sam spoke before me. “Smoke maybe?”

  “You think?”

  I ran. As I came around the edge of the main building, I spotted flickering light and shadows in the vicinity of my car. Great, I thought, another car up in flames. My car had been torched as a warning to me during my search for Katy’s brother. I didn’t think my insurance company was likely to renew me now. When I got close enough to get a good look, I was relieved to discover that it wasn’t my whole car up in flames, just the hood. The flames were dying, but their presence was no less a message to me than if they had actually burned the whole car. I was being warned.

  This time the word KIKE, not JEW, was spelled out in flame, not spray paint.

  “Anti-Semitic bastards!” Sam hissed breathlessly, finally catching up to me. “I’ll kick that little pisher’s ass myself, that son of a—”

  “Take it easy, Sam. You’re outta breath. I’ll deal with that cocksucker in my own good time, on my own terms. We had some unfinished business to begin with. This is just one more item on the agenda, that’s all.”

  Suddenly the idea of walking into Dick Hammerling’s office and offering up Anton Harder as a likely suspect for the Fir Grove fire became very appealing—guilt or lack thereof notwithstanding. But Harder’s type would probably enjoy the media circus. He could use it as a platform for his warped worldview. I could hear his voice in my head: “See how it is the Jews who persecute me. They control the media. They control the money. They …” Like I said to Sam, I’d deal with him in my own way.

  Sam frowned. “I guess this means we ain’t gonna have that drink.”

  “Bullshit! I’m not gonna let that asshole fuck up my life. But can we take your car?”

  Sam said that we could, and that in the meantime he’d have one of his employees clean up the hood of my car as best he could.

  “You sure you don’t wanna report this to the police?” he wanted to know before having the hood cleaned.

  “Nah. Besides, you don’t need that kind of publicity for this place anyhow.”

  Sam drove exactly the kind of car I expected he would: an electric blue ‘59 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It was all tailfins and flash and weighed more than a showroom full of Hondas. Other than the aroma of cigar smoke which oozed out of the white vinyl seats, the beast from Detroit was in immaculate condition.

  And given the speed and recklessness with which Sam drove it, its museum condition was more of a surprise.

  “I’m not sure you call enough attention to yourself in this thing, Sam.”

  “Again with the smart remarks. Remember, you’re the straight man. You want a stogie? It’s top-shelf, from Cuba. I got a customer brings ‘em down from Canada.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know how to use one of th
ese things?” Sam wondered, producing a diamond-studded gold cigar knife. “You make like a mohel and take a bissel off the top.”

  I took the fancy tool out of his hand and clipped off the tip of the big cigar. “Maybe I should go into circumcisions, I did that so skillfully. I hear there’s money in it.”

  “With a cigar it’s okay to clip a little too much. With a petseleh, you go too far and the mother will hunt you down like a dog.”

  “Good point.”

  “Oy! Now he’s making puns.”

  I had to confess, the cigar was exceptionally smooth, though not quite so velvety as a chocolate shake. The burning tobacco was both earthy and sweet. As we rode into town enjoying our cigars, listening to Keely Smith and Louis Prima, I got to thinking about Sam. He didn’t seem to spend a dime extra on his hotel—duct tape being its most prominent design feature—yet the car, the cigars, the bejeweled knife were not inexpensive items. Who was I to judge how a man spent his money?

  “That old black magic …” Sam sang along. “I opened for Louis Prima, you know. Great musician and such a character. You know Louis Prima?”

  “My folks.”

  He understood. “Such a character,” he repeated.

  Then we sat silently, just listening to the music, until we got to Hanrahan’s. Luckily, the cigarette brigade wasn’t out in force tonight, and a man could actually breathe and see his hand in front of his face. That said, it occurred to me that Sam and I were smoking cigars the size of small cannons. What fun would life be without hypocrisy?

  The barmaid from Saturday night recognized Sam immediately, but took a second to place me: “You’re Molly’s friend, right?”

  Without Molly around, I could confess to Sam that I thought the barmaid pretty damned attractive. She had long, thick black hair, dark skin, and pale blue eyes. My bet was she cleaned up in tips.

  “See,” Sam gloated, “I knew you weren’t dead.”

  “I’m not bedding her down,” I assured him.

  “Good thing. Her husband’s a professional wrestler.”

  “What’ll you have?” I asked, pulling out my wallet.