by Triss Stein
He nodded. “So kid, what are you doing here? Long way from home?”
Young Jackie stared back and the detective looked irritated. Before he made his next move, one of the guards blurted out, “Isiahson? You must be related to Tyler Isiahson!”
“No!” He looked up sharply and turned a few colors. “Am not, never heard of him.”
The cop turned to the guard, impatient and annoyed.
“Apologies. I shouldn’t have said nothing. I got carried away. That Tyler’s the hottest boxer coming up out of Brownsville since Tyson.”
The officer turned back to the kid. “No? Unrelated? You saying there are lots of folks in the same neighborhood with that unusual name? Ms. Lafayette, does any of this ring a bell to you?”
“I have more useful things to do than follow boxing. Boxing! And he still hasn’t said what he was doing being anywhere near my baby.”
“Don’t think I overlooked that. So we’ve got good statements from these two ladies? Ladies, you can go and we are moving this to the precinct. Stand up, kid.” In an instant he was being marched out the door. “We are going for a ride.”
Zora stood up. “I’m coming too. I want an answer. And my friend is coming with me.” She stood tall and straight, a woman who was not taking no for an answer, but her eyes were begging me to agree with her.
“No, you’re not. And Ms. Donato, you’re not either.” He sounded deeply irritated and not a little surprised. “You can’t be in the interview room. Even this kid has some rights. Besides, you’d only be in the way.”
She took a deep breath. “But there is something I can do. I have Savanna’s friends in my phone now. I can text them all, asking if they know him.” She made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t tell me that wouldn’t be useful.”
“You can wait in the lobby.” He looked exasperated. “But you get there on your own dime, not in a patrol car.”
We could walk it. Zora walked fast; I could hardly keep up. She wasn’t talking. I wasn’t sure why I was coming along, but I was swept up in the moment.
Finally she said, “Sorry, I’ve been lost in thought. I really, really don’t like that he was in her room. Who the hell is he, to be visiting her like that? And lurking after? You saw him in the waiting area. He was lurking, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, I’d say so. He was watching the elevator.”
“To see when I came down? So he could go back?” Her voice started to crack. “Who could possibly hate my baby so much? And why him? I don’t believe she even knew him, that pitiful excuse for a man.”
And then I wondered what other secrets Savanna might have. Did this connect with what Deandra had told me? Could this twerp be the confident Savanna’s secret boyfriend? Not a chance.
I took a deep breath. “Do you believe you knew everything about her life?”
She stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “Mostly, I do. I mean, she’s at school and it’s a magnet school, too, so her friends are from all over Brooklyn. I wanted her to know there’s a world outside of her ’hood, you know? So I’m not there following her every day. But I know where she went and with whom and what time she was coming home. She knew not to mess with a curfew. And all her school activities too. Everything I can be sure about, I did.”
I was not so sure and I could see that now she was not either.
She gave a decisive nod. “We go to the precinct—lord, I hate being there but I want to hear anything they learn right away. And I have a phone picture of that Jackie. Off it goes to her best friends.”
“What if they know but won’t tell?”
“Next step is I go and beat on their doors. They will be more scared of me than whatever else is stopping them.” She smiled. “There are some good things about being a tall woman. Intimidation does come naturally.”
I remembered her in class, all those years ago. She was telling the truth about that.
We sat in the uncomfortable chairs in the waiting area. She worked her phone, and I watched for the emergence of the detective, took notes, read the book I carried, sent a note to Chris.
I wondered how I could tell this hard-working, desperately worried woman that her daughter had a few secrets? To be honest, that conversation was a scary thought.
“Did she ever mention a friend called Deandra?”
“Mmm.” She was still busy texting. “Mm, no. Not that I…” She finally looked up. “From the library?”
“Yes. Younger? A nervous kid?”
Zora shrugged and went back to her phone. “She kind of adopted her. Not much of a home life there, I heard.”
I took the plunge. “She told me something about Savanna you might not know.”
“What did you say?” She wasn’t looking at her phone now.
“After Savanna…I was there at the library and she had something on her mind. She was anxious to just tell someone and she chose me.”
“You? Why was that?” She did not look friendly.
“I was safe, I guess. She thought I wouldn’t tell anyone in her world.”
“Give it up or I go scare it out of her myself.”
I looked right at her for a minute, not saying anything, and she started to crumble.
“Deandra? Oh, no. Oh, hell. Is she that little girl they found…? I heard about it. Oh, no. Poor baby. I did meet her a time or two.” She straightened up. “Now. Are you going to tell me what she said?”
So I did.
“I don’t believe that. I would know. She must have got it wrong somehow.” I had the sense to keep quiet. In a more subdued voice, she said, “Was that all? She didn’t say anything else?”
“No, not a thing. Just that it was a secret, that you would not like it.” She made a sound of annoyance. “And that he had people who would not like it either. I don’t know what that meant.”
She put her face down in her hands and didn’t move. When she looked up, her first words were, “It couldn’t be that kid could it, that Jackie?” She looked at me and suddenly started laughing. We both did.
“That kid with Savanna? That’s not possible, is it? Nooo!” For a minute, we were helpless with laughter. Then we stopped as suddenly as we had started.
“I have to think about this. I always thought…and I hoped…but girls will be girls.” She smiled wryly. “How do you think I got Savanna?”
“And I want to tell that cop.” She stood up. “I wonder how we contact him on the other side of that door?” She began a discussion with the desk sergeant and I thought about calling it a night.
The cop emerged. He didn’t seem too excited by my information but agreed it might pry something out of young Jackie.
“We probably can’t hold him, you know.” He sounded apologetic. “He didn’t really do anything.”
“You think he was in Savanna’s room to bring her flowers? Come on! You let him go and he’ll most likely try again, whatever he was up to.”
“Then next time we’ll catch him at it. We’ll be watching.”
“Oh, hell no. I’m staying right here until I know something.”
I went home though, luckily hopping a bus to take me from one end of the neighborhood to the other. Chris was already asleep and I collapsed on my bed.
Sometime in the night my phone pinged, but I didn’t get up. No one was calling me. Just a text. I went back to sleep. Maybe I even dreamed it.
In the morning I knew it was no dream. I had a photo on my phone. I couldn’t tell who sent it. It was a handle that didn’t look like a name, and that I didn’t recognize. But I knew the location. It was where we had found Deandra. There were some modest flowers wrapped in paper, or single blossoms, obviously from a corner deli; a teddy bear; balloons. It was an impromptu memorial for an unexpected death.
Chapter Fourteen
I had a date. Nothing as exciting as breakfast out, let alone any more inten
sive form of fun. I was expected at the Municipal Archives at ten sharp. Many subways converge there in downtown Manhattan. Parking is really not possible during the day unless I was prepared to pay a garage the equivalent of a week’s groceries and perhaps including my right arm. I was on the way to the subway stop in good time, properly loaded with laptop and the no-tech backup, a notebook and pens.
I hurtled down the station steps to the sound of an incoming train, slid in a second before the doors closed, and twenty crowded minutes later, I was getting off at my stop, a few blocks from my destination. It’s a non-descript part of the city, north of the interesting tip of Manhattan, filled with drugstores, bank branches, sandwich shops, cheap clothing, all services for the army of office workers from nearby towers. With no temptation to explore, I arrived ten minutes early. That could be a first in my over-scheduled life.
I think my mouth dropped open when I went in. I expected a plain, cheap, mass-produced office building. What I found was a vast lobby, with marble pillars and a riot of carving painted in pastels. The soaring staircases criss-crossed each other in an elaborate pattern. What in the world had this been originally? I would have to find out, but not today.
Today I went through a metal detector and down a hall into the modest space of the Department of Records library.
Labeled archival boxes were out on a sturdy wooden table, ready for my attack. And here was a copied page from a request-tracking sheet. Well, well, well. With a name and the information for these very boxes. James Nathan. The name still meant nothing to me, but I would look further. The page disappeared into my backpack for safekeeping.
And I dug in. It was a true scholarly effort. I had questions I wanted to ask these pages. These criminals’ own testimony about their activities would tell me a lot about them and how they saw their worlds and their careers. At least I hoped so. Personal memories about the time and place often conflicted, and were shaded by emotion. Here was the testimony, on the record.
Of course I had to consider that criminals, even under oath, probably lied with every word, claiming innocence when they were guilty, ignorance when they were right there, and importance that existed only in their own minds.
Besides answers to my prepared questions, there is this in searching in any collection of documents: you never know what you might find. That’s part of the fun. Of course, sometimes those discoveries derailed lots of work, too. That situation was key in a famous mystery novel I had read many years ago.
I sat at the table, looking at the boxes and thinking, “This could be an entire thesis, right here. And it’s just a chapter of mine. What have I done? I don’t even know how to get started. And where can I get more coffee?”
And then I did get started, because I did know how, once I got past my panic. There were finding aides, which meant a guide to the boxes, and one for each folder within, all very methodical. Each folder listing had a name, a date, and a few phrases to indicate what was held. I started at the end, hoping to find the summaries of the trial, and then I looked for some of the Brownsville names I had—the notorious Gurrah Shapiro; Lepke Buchalter; Kid Twist Reles, the guy who betrayed everyone; Pep Strauss, also known as Pittsburgh Phil and a few other names; Louis Capone, not related to the more famous Capone but in the same line of work. They were mentioned in many places but I wanted their own testimony, their own words, to give me some idea about what created them.
And their own words would liven up that chapter. Who says a dissertation has to be boring?
I looked up after three hours, my eyes bleary and fingers itching from the unavoidable dust. My biggest conclusion was that these were very boring human beings. I should have guessed that. You can’t be a person who kills for a living and have a lot of imagination.
And most of these guys, however vicious their actions, were not even as high as middle management in “the organization.” The old mob leaders like Luciano, Siegel, Lansky, Anastasia, the ones at the top? Were they really smart and innovative “businessmen?” Perhaps. For sure, that was how they wanted to be seen in their lifetime and after. But these hometown Brooklyn gangsters? They were privates in this army.
They had trouble spelling the words in a threatening note. They used a grandfather’s funeral as an alibi. They used a dying mother as a way to avoid an assigned job they did not want to do. They said talking about having a conscience was too deep for them. One of them, at least, did not commit crimes on the Sabbath. They methodically mapped out escape routes while planning a job. That job was often murdering someone, and sometimes the someone was a close friend. It didn’t bother them. They compared their first killing to a DA giving his first speech in court; you’re nervous at first but you get used to it. They followed orders.
Sometimes they sounded like lovable Damon Runyon characters. Until they started describing what they did with a rope and an ice pick.
I wasn’t sure whether I had struck gold or pyrites. I was writing a PhD dissertation, not a blockbuster novel. This all might be too exciting. I had pages and pages of notes in my laptop now, right from the source. I would have to run all this by my adviser.
I tidied up the cluttered table, but as directed, left the files for the staff to return to order. I could not work anymore, but on a whim, I did some web surfing on James Nathan, the mysterious researcher of old Brooklyn crime. Nothing. I had an inspiration and wrote it in as Nathan James. Still nothing. There were lots of hits for the name, as it’s not uncommon, but none that were useful to me.
So he was not famous in any way. Never been in the news. Had never written anything that was published, whether in a national magazine or a scholarly journal or probably even a college newspaper. Evidently Mystery Man was neither a journalist nor a historian after all. Maybe he was merely a nut with an organized crime fixation.
One last whim. With Lillian’s voice in my mind, I skimmed through all the notes to the material, every description for every box and every file, just to see if her brother’s name came up anywhere. No, it didn’t. That didn’t prove he was not in the gang, of course. Maybe he was so obscure he was never mentioned in the testimony. Maybe he was there but not important enough to be listed in the index.
One overpriced deli sandwich later, I was ready to think about the rest of the day. With my mind filled with gangster names and stories of old Brownsville, I would hop on the train, spend the long trip organizing what I’d learned today, and go look at some of the real places I’d been reading about. And not beat myself up about why I had not had all this completely organized the first time I went there to look around. It’s a process, period. Sometimes you need a second look. That’s what I said.
I had the exact location of the Moonlight Min Candy Store, the corner of Livonia and Saratoga. The back room there had been the Murder Inc. headquarters. They certainly weren’t putting any of their profits into a luxury workspace. And I wondered how Min felt about it all? I’d been intrigued to learn today that there was a real Min and she was a criminally inclined tough old broad herself, nobody’s moll. Not a kept woman in any sense, but a female who fit right in with the big boys. She deserved a sidebar all her own. Or maybe she was a potential article subject. Not exactly a feminist example, not even a little, but women who defied, or ignored, the norms for their gender are always interesting.
My mind was speeding ahead with the speeding train, and I jotted it all down.
One more look around and then maybe I was done with Brownsville. I could write this chapter and move on.
The candy shop was easy to find. It’s right next to the station stairs. That was one of its desirable qualities in the old days, good transportation and on a busy corner. What it was then—and I knew because I’d seen old pictures—was the kind of all-purpose candy/stationery/soda fountain shop that was already disappearing from most of New York when I was a kid. You could get a birthday card for your mom, a box of candy for the wife on Valentine’s Day, the afte
rnoon paper, take your girl for a malted, use the pay phones.
At Min’s, in the back room, you could also place a bet with a bookie or pick up a game of pinochle, if you were so inclined and if Min let you. And order up a mob hit along with your sundae.
Now it was a mini-mart. No soda fountain, but you could buy bottled soda and beer and a quart of milk, plus a box of diapers or condoms or cigarettes. The Daily News. Hit the ATM for cash and buy a legal state lottery ticket.
The hatch in the sidewalk, allowing deliveries to be slid right into the basement, was still there and looked old enough to be original, but the front of the building had different windows, mostly covered with signs listing all the food stamp programs that were accepted. It was shabby and sad, and probably always was, but the old pictures did have a bit of the quaintness time brings.
Then I gave myself a mental slap. Was I a scholar or a nostalgic tourist? Old-fashioned Coca Cola sign above the door notwithstanding, this was never quaint.
I took some photos with my phone from the safety of the other side of the street, safe enough with people coming and going to the train and other stores. Finally I went across and looked in the windows. A shabby but legitimate business. I went in boldly and bought a soda to justify my presence. People went in and out, making the small purchases that keep this kind of business alive. Barely. Another reason to wonder if there wasn’t still some action in the back, perhaps drugs for sale.
No one that I saw went into the back room. Cartons from a beverage distributor blocked the entrance.
The woman behind the counter was ethnically unplaceable, with tan skin, long black hair, T-shirt decorated with a picture of a singer. Latina? South Asian? Arab? When I tried to ask about the back room she didn’t seem to understand, and responded, “No, no. Back? No!” I couldn’t place her accent. Not Spanish. In Spanish I might have muddled through. I didn’t believe she didn’t understand me.