The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  Jack rested his elbows on the counter, thinking of a little boost of sweetness to counter the futility of the day. Statistically speaking, after the first forty-eight hours the chance of solving any homicide case dropped like a stone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AFTER THE DAY’S TOUR of duty was over, Jack drove back to Cosenza’s funeral home. A wake was about to begin and the deceased’s family and friends were filing in, squat old women packed into tight black dresses, gangly teenagers squirming under the pressure of unfamiliar suit collars, and big beefy men with mullet haircuts demonstrating their manly handshakes and slapping each other on the shoulder. A couple of professionally grave men, employees of the home, stood at attention at the sides of the front door, hands folded over their crotches, doing their best not to look bored.

  Across the street, Jack saw Larry Cosenza step outside for a moment, and he pushed himself away from the hood of his car and called out.

  Cosenza looked up, startled. A little too startled, perhaps … He glanced up and down the street, then gestured at Jack. Inside.

  “How about putting up some nice track lighting?” Jack teased as they walked back into his old friend’s somber office. “Or some pictures of the beach?”

  The funeral director pretended to be irked. “Hey—I don’t come over where you work, tell you how to use your goddamn sheriff’s badge.”

  Jack chuckled. “The place looks great. Really.” He settled into an armchair.

  Cosenza picked up a tray of Italian pastries from his desk. “Want a sfogliatella? They’re left over from a wake, but still nice and fresh.”

  Jack picked out one of the shell-shaped pastries and bit into it, savoring the ricotta filling, with its hint of orange peel; he held his hand under it, but a few flaky crumbs still ended up on the rug. The taste was like an instant time machine back to his childhood. Which, of course, reminded him of the reason for his visit. “I don’t mean to bug you, but have you had a chance to think over what we talked about? You got any leads for me?”

  Cosenza sat deep in his chair, dug a finger in his ear, then turned and looked out the window. “Leads. Christ.” He turned back to Jack with an embarrassed look. “I’m sorry, but nobody around here wants to rehash ancient history.”

  Jack felt all his own amiability ice over. “I told you: there’s nothing ancient about this for me. I’ve been living with it every day since I was a fucking kid.”

  Cosenza grimaced. “I’m sorry for that, Jack. Really I am. But you asked for my help, and I’m helping you. I’m telling you the best course of action here: you need to let sleeping—”

  Jack nearly launched himself out of his chair. “Don’t say it, Larry. Don’t ever say that. We’re talking about my brother.”

  Cosenza raised his hands in apology. “I’m sorry. But I’m looking out for you.”

  Jack stood up. “Did somebody tell you something, Larry? Did somebody ask you to warn me off?”

  Cosenza sat back and raised his hands. “Just let it go. There’s no good going to come of this, not for you, not for anybody.”

  Jack stood silent for a minute. “All right. I get it. You still live here. You’ve got a wife and kids, a business.” He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Cosenza stood too, a pained expression on his face. “Hell. Don’t go away mad.”

  Jack just gave him a disappointed look, then turned and walked out.

  HE DIDN’T GO FAR.

  He got back in his car and drove a short distance west through Carroll Gardens. On Court Street, he passed the old hiring hall, once presided over by the Longshoremen’s Union in close conjunction with a string of Mafia capos; the big boxy building had even featured a stained-glass portrait of Albert Anastasia, chief executioner of Murder, Inc.

  The place was now a medical center for elderly dock-workers. The rest of the area had not changed much, though: old Italian bakeries remained, a butcher’s, a coffee shop, the St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Church. Jack continued on toward Red Hook, toward the waterfront, toward his childhood.

  As soon as he crossed the elevated Gowanus Expressway, the rows of small but dignified brownstones, homes to generations of Italian families, gave way to the rough and tumble world of the Red Hook Houses, big redbrick hives, booming with gangsta rap. Deeper in, nearer the harbor, he passed vacant lots full of weeds; parking lots full of yellow school buses; small factories and machine shops. To the south, the old Todd Shipyards lay fallow, a wasteland of crumbling brick.

  Jack dug down in his memory, trying to dredge up names of neighbors from long ago, or people his father had worked with. There was Pat MacEgan, pipefitter, one of his old man’s drinking buddies—Jack remembered coming across him one night on Van Brunt Street, rooting around in the backseat of his car. Jack asked what he was doing; the man answered, “I can’t find the goddamn ignition.” And there was Al Garbarino, shipyard purchasing agent. (Al’s big story, repeated way too many times over shots of Seagram’s: how he had bet the same number for six years in a row, then given up in disgust—only to have that number hit big the very next day.)

  Other names eluded Jack, like minnows in murky water, partly due to his middle-aged memory but mostly because he had gone to such lengths to dissociate himself from Red Hook after Petey’s death.

  He soon discovered just how well he had succeeded in losing touch. At what had been Pat MacEgan’s house, a tousled hipster girl with black-rimmed eyes and a nose ring answered the bell. Another stranger—an old woman—answered the door at Al Garbarino’s house: she informed Jack that the unlucky gambler had died back in ’87.

  He drove north. The neighborhood changed, became more residential, though still quiet. Back in the day, this had been such a bustling area! He passed Union Street, which had been jammed with pushcarts selling fruit and vegetables, except in winter, when they’d sell hot chestnuts. The area had hopped with bars, and movie houses, and social establishments, like the Impala Club, which had been a block east, above Nino’s Pizzeria.

  Old landmarks caused memories to bloom. There was the corner where Bobby Salesi lost three fingers when a zip gun blew up in his hand. There was the home base of the Kane Street Stoppers (a teen gang who sometimes rumbled with the Black Chaplains) and their younger cohorts the Kane Street Midgets. It had been a tough neighborhood all right; Jack recalled hearing some punk refer to his switchblade as a “Red Hook boxing glove.” Jack passed various churches—Brooklyn had once been known as the City of Churches—and remembered how the local mobsters had run gambling games there, “collecting for the saint.”

  Wiseguys. The neighborhood had been full of them. He would see them on the corners or in front of their social clubs, resplendent in their two-tone shirts and camel hair coats and fedoras with wide brims. These days, it was hard to imagine how intense their control over the neighborhood had been. Sure there’d been patrol cops walking around, wielding their nightsticks if a kid got out of line, but many of them had been in the pockets of the Mob. And if two neighbors had a beef with each other, they wouldn’t take it to the police or to the courts; they’d go to a “table,” a sit-down with the local capos, who would tell them what to do, like neighborhood kings. You needed their permission to get work on the docks, but also to open any kind of business, and then you had to offer up tribute, including a regular cut of the profits, as well as a few bottles of booze or a turkey at Christmastime.

  Jack circled back into a part of the neighborhood now known as Cobble Hill. Its genteel brownstones brought unbelievable prices these days, and he saw yuppie mothers pushing expensive baby carriages along the quiet streets. The Gallo brothers had once lived in a tenement here; the entrance, he recalled, had been presided over by a midget named Armando, whose claim to fame was that he had been an extra in the film Samson and Delilah; Jack could still picture the little thug clearly, with his high hairline and heavy brow. But Armando was not the most unusual feature of the operation. Joey and his brother Larry had bought an aging lion, perhaps off t
he same movie set, and kept it in their basement. If someone owed them too much money, the brothers would tell him to go down in the basement and “talk to Leo.” (The threat had proved remarkably effective, but the lion had not lasted long; it stank up the place, and soon the Health Department came to call.)

  The Gallos were flamboyant, public men; they threw silver dollars to the neighborhood kids, let them swim in their backyard pool, and played the big shots during local religious feasts, as John Gotti would do a couple of decades later in Queens. But their charm had major limits. They made most of their considerable profits by demanding protection money from the local businesses, the tailors, the shoe stores, the butcher shops. The misery these men spread was beyond estimation; if you crossed them in any way, your days might become a living nightmare. Your neighbors would avoid you, you couldn’t work, couldn’t feed your family—and worse, you had to live in fear of a sadistic beating or even death.

  Jack’s father had escaped Communist Russia, and he already knew plenty about brutality before he ever hit these shores. The old man had often been drunk and angry, but he was also a hard worker. He had grudgingly surrendered the tributes and bribes, but he warned Jack and Petey that if he ever saw them going near the gangsters, he would light into them with his heavy leather belt.

  Jack remembered that threat, but now he was troubled by some other, deeper memories rising from the murk. Perhaps his father had not always been so set against the thugs. When Jack had been very little, some late nights he had peered out his bedroom window and watched his father get into a long dark car filled with men. Who were they? Where were they going? And why didn’t his father come home until the next morning?

  Somewhere along the line, those midnight trips had ceased, and his pop had begun to avoid the mobsters like the plague. And somehow, evidently, he had managed to seriously piss them off

  If Joey Gallo had been behind the lesson administered by Darnel Teague, the mobster had long ago received his just deserts: he had been gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street in ’72. But if it wasn’t Gallo, who could it have been? Jack remembered what his father had once told him: loud men like the Gallos received all the attention because they craved it. But it was the quiet men, the ones you never heard about, who really held the power.

  He sat there in his car, in the newly gentrified neighborhood, with its exorbitant real estate and its rich young Wall Streeters, who seemed to be the only ones who could afford it anymore. Who was left from the old dark days?

  He knew that he could just go over to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Unit and ask. But he thought of his brother and the justice Petey was owed. He thought about how he might never find enough evidence to make any official charge stick. Finally, he thought of the unregistered snub-nosed Charter Arms .38 Special that he had found during his career as a patrol cop and kept in the back of his closet. If he finally found the man responsible for his brother’s death, maybe it would be best if word had not gone out that he had been looking for him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “IT’S PEPPERONI, NO CHEESE,” Jack said, later that evening. “Just the way you like it.”

  He set the pizza box down on the coffee table in front of his landlord, along with a cold six-pack of Schaefer beer. The old man’s rather dingy front room was illuminated only by the flickering blue light of his huge old battleship of a TV.

  “I like cheese,” Mr. Gardner replied. He held his stomach. “It just don’t like me.” He sighed. “I’m too old to give up all’a life’s pleasures. Speakin’ of which—” He started to push himself up from his battered, duct-taped old La-Z-Boy recliner, but Jack put a friendly hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll get it.”

  Mr. G had difficulty walking these days, not just due to his age but because of a stroke he had suffered back in 2001. The man had once been quite robust, but his illness had stripped away the excess pounds and age had shortened him by several inches; now he looked like a bewildered garden gnome, staring up at the world through Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses. And though he had once been an avid home fixer-upper, he now spent most of his time parked in front of his living room window, staring down at life on the block, a life he could no longer participate in. Or he sat in front of the television, which was currently blaring the local evening news.

  Jack went into the kitchen, with its worn linoleum and time-browned, parchmenty window blinds. He reached up into the cabinets for a bottle of Seagram’s 7 and a couple of delicate little shot glasses made of pale green glass. Mr. Gardner had brought them back from Naples, which he had visited while in the Army, back in World War II.

  Jack returned to the front room. He cracked open a couple of beers, poured two shots of whiskey, and then he and his friend carried out their usual ritual.

  “Cin cin,” he said.

  “Salut,” Mr. Gardner replied from his throne by the window. The old man raised his glass toward a sepia photo on top of the TV, a portrait of his late wife—a rather horsey-looking woman, but very kind—then he and Jack clinked glasses and drank.

  Jack served up the pizza and they ate in silence for a few minutes. This was one reason he liked coming upstairs to visit; they could sit in a friendly quiet, without feeling a big need to gab. It was good to have some company in the evenings and restful to be sitting here, with the TV just distracting enough to take his mind off his current cases.

  A loud car commercial ended and the news anchors came on—a man and a woman who both looked like slightly over-the-hill models for a department store catalog. Their usual forced joviality was not in evidence tonight: a big orange banner headline in the background read NEW TERROR THREAT. The woman stared gravely into the camera and announced that the Department of Homeland Security had raised the color-coded warning level “based on NSA intercepts of a higher-than-usual level of foreign chatter picked up among suspected terrorist-sponsored organizations.” She didn’t say if any specific information had actually been overheard, and Jack had to wonder what the point of the alert might be. It certainly raised some tension in him and the rest of the viewing audience but didn’t give them anything concrete to look out for or to do.

  “Why ain’t they caught that bin Laden guy?” Mr. G said, disgusted. “These guys got their heads up their asses. They should send you over there, Jackie—I bet you’d bring him back on a platter in a coupl’a days.”

  Jack smiled, grateful for the vote of confidence, but he couldn’t help thinking about the recent talk of radiation right here on his home turf, not more than a mile or two from where he and his landlord were sitting. What the hell had that been about? Could it have something to do with the news report he had just heard? Well, whatever was going on, the three-letter guys already seemed to know about it, and he figured that the NYPD’s own new counterterrorism squad must be on the case. (As long as they were all talking to each other, which was not exactly a sure bet …)

  After a while, Mr. G began to snore. Jack roused him gently and helped him back to his narrow old widower’s bed. (Otherwise, the man was liable to spend the night in his armchair.)

  Downstairs, Jack glanced at his watch: it was too early for his own bedtime, and he felt restless, agitated, as if he’d drunk too much coffee. He wandered through the few rooms of his apartment, turning his own TV on but then turning it off. He went into his front room, picked up a newspaper, tried to read a little, then let it drop. He turned off the lamp and sat there on his couch, in the dark, watching through his windows as the frothy, newly budding spring trees trembled in an evening wind.

  He thought—as he rarely did after almost twenty years—of his defunct marriage. He certainly didn’t miss the sniping and arguing at the end, but he remembered how sweet it had been to come home from a late tour and find his wife in bed, to kiss her and wake her, to make sweet love with her in the middle of the night. Or just to slide into bed next to her sleeping body and put his arms around her.

  He squinted down at the faintly glowing hands of his watch.
Not too late. He took out his cell phone and made a call.

  “Ben? Did I wake you?”

  “Dad. It’s only ten-thirty. Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I just called to say hi. How’re tricks?”

  “I’m fine. Listen, if it’s nothing important, I’m kinda in the middle of working on something right now.”

  Jack’s son was an aspiring filmmaker. He said that he made “experimental documentaries,” though Jack could never really figure out what that meant.

  He frowned in the dark. His kid didn’t have much time for him. He couldn’t complain, though. It was karma, right? He had always been out working so hard when Ben was little, and then the kid had resented him for the divorce. He tried not to sound irritated. “No problem. Listen, how about we have lunch soon? Maybe Friday?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ben said, clearly eager to get off the phone.

  “At the coffee shop?”

  “Sure. Okay. Gotta go.”

  “Take care,” Jack started to say, but the kid had already hung up.

  Conversations with his son were like eating meals that consisted solely of appetizers.

  He set his cell phone down and lay back on the couch, staring up into the dark. After a few minutes he felt his eyelids growing heavy, but he didn’t get up. He often conked out here on the couch. Why not?

  Soon he was fast asleep.

  THE POOL IS VAST but crowded. Kids splash, adults lounge on the sides, sunbathing under the Red Hook sky. Dreamy music plays in the background: Connie Francis, “Where the Boys Are.”

  Petey is next to Jack, and they hold their breath and plunge under the water, swimming in the sunlit blue like dolphins, trying to make it across without coming up for air. Jack feels as if his lungs might burst, but he makes it to the other side, where he fountains up, gasping. Strangely, the sun has disappeared behind lowering clouds, and he sees kids pulling themselves up out of the pool and families hurrying toward the exits; he suddenly realizes that Petey is nowhere in sight. Jack plunges back under the water, searching for his brother. When he comes back up, the whole huge pool is empty.