“Hello, I’m—”
“Uncle Jack,” a little boy shouted in my ear. “Mommy, it’s Uncle Jack.” The excitement in the boy’s voice told me Jack had a nephew who loved him.
“Sorry, son, but I’m not—”
“Hello, Jack,” Mommy got on the phone. “Jack, are you in New York or calling from the office?” Mommy had a throaty, inviting voice with a bit of sadness around the edges.
I looked at the picture in my palm and decided to drag out Detective Bosco, N. Y.P.D., yet again. If it ain’t broke, so the saying goes. But I would have to tone down the “dems and dose.” New Yorkers can spot a fellow New Yorker’s theatrical Brooklyn accent faster than a pig finding fungus in a truffle truck.
“Sorry to disappoint you and your son, ma’am, but I’m not Uncle Jack.”
That was followed with a few seconds of confused breathing and silence. When the woman at the other end refused to pick up the baton, I introduced myself as Detective Bosco. Not of Missing Persons this time, but of Homicide.
“Homicide?” she repeated with equal parts of shock and skepticism.
Beside the delicate dialect problem, skepticism was something else I was likely to encounter with a New Yorker. After only three syllables, I could tell this wasn’t going to go as smoothly as my calls below the Mason-Dixon line. Hey, no knock on southerners. It’s nice to deal with people who don’t consider trust passe. Growing up in New York, you lose your diapers and then you lose your capacity to trust. Maybe it has to do with how we’re toilet trained.
“You must be mistaken, Detective Bosco,” she assured me with grave certainty. Then the ramifications of who I was pretending to be sank in. “God, nothing’s happened to my parents. God!” she was panicking. I could hear her son in the background asking if everything was okay with Uncle Jack. “It’s not Uncle Jack, Max. Please, shut up for a minute,” she screamed at the poor kid. He was crying now. I was feeling pretty low.
“No. No. Nothing’s wrong with your parents,” I tried sounding as reassuring as a Hollywood priest. And, before she could ask: “And as far as I know, everyone else in your family is fine, Missus . . .” I wanted her to fill in the blank.
“You don’t know my name?” the panic was replaced by a mixture of anger and good old skepticism. “How dare you call me up and scare me like that? I want your badge number. What kinda cop are you?” She went on that way for a minute or two. I let her. I deserved it.
After she calmed down, I explained that her phone number was included on a list the police had found at the scene of a homicide and that it was my job to check all the numbers out. She wanted to know who’d been murdered. I told her. She didn’t know any Terrence O’Tooles or Johnny MacCloughs. She had never heard the name Azrael before, but liked it. She’d heard the name Gandolfo before: “Doesn’t he pitch for the Mets?”
I laughed. She laughed. She told me her name: Leyna Morton. It was unfamiliar to me and I was certain she didn’t pitch for the Mets. I suggested that her husband might have a connection to some of the people I’d mentioned. She thought it unlikely. In any case, they were divorced and he didn’t have access to her phone number. It had been an ugly affair, their divorce; custody battle et al.
My heart sank when I heard that. I’d found a painfully logical reason for Leyna Morton’s number to appear on a sheet of paper in a dead cop’s abode. It wasn’t the reason I’d been fishing for. So much for my hunches. Nostradamus was safe. Obviously, Mrs. Morton’s ex had hired O’Toole to do a little divorce work. Divorce work is pretty profitable and lots of cops do it on the sly. You see, it’s easy for cops, even retired ones, to acquire unlisted phone numbers and addresses.
“Do you have work and home numbers for Mr. Morton?” I went through the motions of getting info on her ex-husband. I’d call him and coerce him into admitting he’d hired O’Toole. Detective Bosco strikes again!”
“His name’s not Morton,” my phone companion informed me. “It’s Tanzer. Mine’s not Morton either really,” Leyna swallowed her words. “I’m a little punchy from the divorce and I wanted to make certain you really were a cop and not some guy my ex-husband hired to track me down,” it was irony worthy of Dickens. “My name’s Leyna Brimmer.”
“It’s okay. I understand,” I was the Hollywood priest again.
“It’s funny,” she said more to herself than to me.
“What is?”
“I don’t really know my family name. I’m adopted,” she sighed. “You try not to think about it, but—”
“Please hold,” I put the receiver down, ran back to my files and did some quick arithmetic. “I’m gonna ask you a strange question, Miss Brimmer,” I wasn’t in the mood to get permission. “Were you born in March of nineteen sixty-seven.”
“Good guess,” she sounded wary, “but no cigar. April sixty-seven. Why do you ask?”
“Just a hunch.”
So full of my own genius, I got off the phone without getting the husband’s numbers. Unconsciously, I guess, I didn’t want to speak with him. No. I didn’t want to hear him contradict my theories. Because, if I was right, the blurry picture in my palm had just sharpened considerably. Some questions would be answered and others would simply disintegrate like cotton candy in your mouth. I might even be able to answer the question that had plagued Leyna Brimmer her whole life.
Their Own Shadows
I did a rarely sensible thing and paid a visit to my safe deposit box. In it I placed the pertinent documentation I’d gathered, stolen, or stumbled onto since the night before Christ’s birthday. I also managed to squeeze in two other items; a few neatly word-processed sheets outlining what the hell I thought was going on and the bundle of one hundred large in its original envelope. In a giddy moment, I’d entertained thoughts of just depositing the big money directly into my account and giving the teller apoplexy. Even in these days of junk bonds, arbitrage and leveraged buyouts, a hundred thousand dollar cash deposit will raise eyebrows and blood pressures. And let’s face it, Suffolk Midfork Trust ain’t the Bank of England.
I stood out in the street and the snow for a minute, admiring the bank. The bold Victorian dated back to the dying reign of Conrad Dugan. This quirky conglomeration of clapboards, granite, gingerbread spindles, turrets and a widow’s watch was to have been Dugan’s great house. His empire failed before he’d slept a night inside. The bank took it. The bank kept it. It had been a bank, with one name or another, ever since. I wondered what Conrad Dugan would think of automatic teller machines in the pantry. I think he’d probably like them.
I turned my back on the bank and trudged down Main Street to the less than considerable offices of the Sound Hill Whaler. I’d been in bigger cab stands and in train station toilets that were cleaner and less cluttered. But the first amendment says something about the press being free, not clean. An acne-faced teen-age boy I took to be a high school intern sat at a computer terminal mesmerized by its orange light, picking unconsciously at his acne-ravaged nose. Whistina Knox, the Whaler’s waspy, matronly business manager, was on the phone arguing the merits of advertising in her publication as opposed to the local pennysaver. She didn’t seem to be winning, but managed to smile at me politely and acknowledge my existence. I pointed to my left and mouthed the name, “Ben,” to her. She smirked and waved me in.
Ben Vandermeer’s family went back to a time when most Long Islanders wore feathers and buckskins and Jay Gatsby was still a few centuries away from moving to West Egg. Vandermeer’s family had been old money, but thanks to Black Tuesday, only the old remained. Ben learned his craft at the News, the Brooklyn Eagle and the Tribune. Mailroom clerk to managing editor; he’d done it all. In the late sixties he bought the Whaler and has been its only editor ever since.
“Ben,” I rapped my knuckles on the inside of his office door. He sat with his back to me, thin wisps of white hair limply hanging over the top of his chair.
“What?” he swiveled around. “Oh, it’s you, Dylan. I thought it was that pimply-face
d twit the high school saddled me with. Used to get good interns once.”
“Kate Barnum, for instance?”
“For instance,” he raised his Fuller Brush eyebrows. “You here to talk or collect my bar tab for MacClough?”
“The former.”
“Talk, huh? Shut the door and sit.” He waited for me to follow his instructions. “Katy Barnum,” Ben began, sensing what I’d come about, “was the best damned intern that travesty they call a high school ever sent me. At seventeen, Katy could out-think and out-write most of the cigar-smoking old farts I’d run across at the city papers.” He grabbed a dormant pipe out of an ashtray and put a lighter to its bowl. “But I don’t suppose you came in here to discuss Katy as an intern,” Vandermeer blew sweet smoke my way.
“Maybe another time.”
I flipped my safe deposit box key into his ashtray. I slipped a signature card out of my pocket and asked him to fill in the blanks. He did so without question and slid the card back into my palm.
“I’ll drop this off at the bank,” I waved the signature card at him. “I promised Kate Barnum a story, but there’s a chance I may not be around to keep my word. I think I’ll be okay, but you never know. Even if I maintain my health and boyish good looks, there’ll be some people pretty anxious to get their mitts on the stuff in that box. If anything should happen to me . . . You know the script. And if nothing happens, I want someone known only to me with access to the goods.”
“Big story?” the old newspaperman tried to act nonchalant, but I knew he could almost taste it.
“Barnum thinks so.”
“Why give me the key? Why not your Brooklyn soul mate or, better yet, Katy herself?”
“I’ve got reasons, Ben. Look, if you don’t wanna get in-”
“The key’ll be in my safe when you want it back. You just call me if you need any other help.” He extended his hand and I shook it.
“Remember Christmas Eve, Ben?”
“I remember about sixty-five of them,” Vandermeer choked on pipe smoke, giggling at his rare wit. “When you found Jane Doe on the platform? I remember.”
“Was Kate assigned to work late that night?”
All the giggly merriment went out of Ben Vandermeer’s face. Something had just occurred to him that had come to me in my night of black flashing dreams. He didn’t need to answer. His face had already spoken.
“The Whaler’s closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It’s tradition,” he put lyrics to the sad music of his expression.
“Strange thing, Ben, your Katy just happening to be conveniently on the scene; pad, pen and mini-recorder in hand. Newsday carried it as a wire service story and didn’t even have a reporter call me until the day after the holiday. Was she in town working on anything?”
“No reason for her to be around that I can think of. The Whaler isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of investigative journalism,” the pipe smoker tested a smile and failed it. “And what’s in Sound Hill to investigate on Christmas Eve anyway?”
“Zoning variances?” I prodded.
“Any newspaperman knows the right questions to ask. Only the good ones know what questions not to ask. Dylan, I’ve always flattered myself by believing I fall into that second grouping,” Ben put down the pipe and ran his age-spotted fingers through the sparse white clouds of his hair, “but I’m gonna ask you one I shouldn’t just the same.”
“So ask.”
“How deep is Kathy involved?”
“I don’t know yet,” I took a breath big enough for two. “But if she’s in up to her toes or the shit’s above her eyeballs, it doesn’t really matter. Does it Ben?”
“I thought that ugliness at the Times might’ve taught her something,” the old reporter went limp with defeat. “Her career was shot and I was hoping she’d adjust to it back out here in the boonies. I was gonna turn the Whaler over to her someday.”
“If you were an all-star backstop for the Mets and got thrown out of baseball for drugs or gambling, how would you adjust to being the bullpen catcher for Oneonta?”
“I never looked at it that way.”
I nodded and started out of Ben Vandermeer’s office, but his curious voice called me back.
“If she’s dirty, Dylan, why give her the story?”
“Dirty or not, she’s worked harder for it than you could ever know. In an odd way, Kate’s earned it.”
I never made it to the bank. Dusk had crept into town while my back was turned and all humanity had fled the confines of Suffolk Midfork Trust. The cash machines in Dugan’s pantry had no use for signature cards and I no use for them. The safe deposit box routine was pulp novel kitsch, yet I’d seen it work to perfection.
On my way over to the Star Spangled Deli, more than the wind gave me a chill. The lights in the Scupper were flicking off and a few seconds later MacClough’s paws appeared at the front door flipping over the “We’re Open” sign. Eventually the busy hands vanished and the sign read, “Sorry, We’re Closed.” Johnny would leave through the alley. That was natural enough. Only problem was, normal closing time was seven hours away.
I thought about following him. Don’t believe that TV shit about cops. Cops can’t follow their own shadows without a roadmap and an itinerary. And they couldn’t spot a tail if it was stuck to their asses. Johnny was better than most. I’d seen evidence of that myself, but he was still a cop; retired, but a cop just the same. Cops wear uniforms to stick out, to be a presence. They want to be seen. They strive to be seen. Even their unmarked cars stick out like armadillos at a dog show. And because they’re so accustomed to being observed, they have trouble spotting individuals in the audience. It’s a difficult mind-set to shake.
Insurance investigators, even rusty ones, are like road chameleons. But to shadow MacClough, I’d have to be a stealth fighter or just plain invisible. He knew my car and, given my refusal to back off, he might be looking over his shoulder for it. After a minute’s meditation, I realized there was no need to follow. I knew where he was headed. His time to act had come. I ran back into Ben Vandermeer’s office and commandeered his phone.
Mr. Wizard
I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, but I was going. I didn’t know how I’d find MacClough when I arrived. Maybe I’d just wait for the sound of gunfire and follow its report. For months the tension coiled and now the spring was unwinding. As I raced foolishly along the snowbanked expressway, I wondered about the spark that had initiated the gyre’s unraveling and who might be felled by its blind momentum. The answers lay an hour away, across the bridge in Staten Island.
At the Knapp Street exit of the Belt Parkway, my soul shifted moods and, for a few moments, I could ponder summers of stickball and fireworks at the beach. Knapp Street marked the far border of my old neighborhood and until my ancient Volkswagen passed Cropsey Avenue, my heart would refuse all thoughts of Mafia kings and fallen maidens. From the parkway you could see D trains crossing noisily overhead. Their metal wheels shooting stars at the night, grinding along the tracks to and from Brighton Beach. Just east of the subway trestle sat the concrete bunker that had been my junior high school. I often imagined Hitler taking more comfort there than any seventh grader.
Further on, where the road rises and falls over Ocean Parkway, you pass the white brick butcher shop called Coney Island Hospital. Then, just ahead, came Lincoln High School. I always looked in back of the school at the football field, for it was there that I’d known my only moments of glory. It’s tough to stare forty in the face having left your glory in the grass and mud behind your high school. Tonight my glory was entombed in a gray foot of Brooklyn snow. But the skeleton skyline of the Coney Island rides, rising above the horizon like the bones of dormant dinosaurs, pulled my heart up through the snow and into the present. I was passing Cropsey Avenue. Soon, I would see the bridge.
There, spreading out across the moonlit narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, was the Verrazzano, its cold, ashen paint negating the span’s ma
jesty. I could recall a time when only ferries held the two boroughs together and trips to New Jersey were partly a sea adventure. And when bridge construction began, two slab footings rose up from the water like tombstones. But the bridge’s completion meant more than easy trips to Jersey, for with any bridge comes migration. Once the Staten Island Express-way was flanked by sad houses on lonely hills. Now town houses and shopping malls dominated the landscape. Why should Staten Island be any different from the rest of America?
The Verrazzano had other effects beyond the destruction of the Brooklyn ferry. White, blue collar families—mostly Italian, some Irish, a few Jews—with a stomach for the stink of Jersey, the perfume of landfill, and disregard for increased cancer risk, ran gladly across the span to a suburb in the city and away from the Great Society, overcrowded streets and the melanzane. In Italian, melanzane translates into dark skin. In slang, it translates into niggers. And like all migrating hoards, the blue collars brought along their parasites. A handful of Mafia dons, always out of place and out of touch on Long Island, found nirvana in Staten Island. From their gaudy castle compounds in the Todt Hill section of the borough, they could run the family business by the swimming pool and be just fifteen minutes and a toll away from their territories. I was headed for one of those castles right now, but I doubted if the Gandolfos were out back taking a swim.
I held the hastily scribbled directions against the steering wheel, alternating glances between word-map and road. Larry Feld hadn’t been eager to turn over the address nor had he coughed up the directions easily. He also didn’t appreciate my request that he not phone ahead to the Gandolfos. I understood his position. Although the where-abouts of the Gandolfo digs aren’t a national secret, the family would not be pleased with Larry for giving out the info without permission. But they could get over that. However, if Larry neglected to warn his client of impending danger—which MacClough’s behavior clearly represented—and some harm were to come to the Gandolfos, Larry was as good as dead. As Feld put it: “Those guys will make cutting my balls off seem like a suspended sentence.”
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