Red Hook

by Gabriel Cohen

  Nowadays his own father would probably be called an alcoholic, though he hadn’t drunk steadily through the week. Paydays were the worst, when the old man would go on a bender, spinning like a tornado through the row of waterfront bars. But back then, you were simply a “drinking man” or “dry,” and there weren’t many of the latter down on the docks.

  On a bulletin board at the Homicide Task Force office, someone had posted a flyer for ACOA meetings. Adult Children of Alcoholics. Jack scoffed at the notion. Meetings, steps, counseling—it all seemed riddled with weakness. So what if he’d had a tough childhood? Who didn’t, down in the Hook?

  The red-haired man glanced at his watch. “Okay, let’s start with our qualifying speaker.”

  A young woman in the front row stood and walked up on stage. She sat and cleared her throat.

  “Hi, my name is Janet, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”

  “Hi, Janet,” everyone around Jack replied. Startled, he looked around, thinking that someone was sure to notice his silence.

  “I’m going to talk for a while,” Janet said. “Then we’ll open this up to anyone who wants to share.”

  She wore a businesswoman’s suit with a skirt and a silk bow, and her blond hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail. She looked as though she belonged in some suburban country club. She was pretty, Jack noticed—he glanced under the table and saw that she had great legs. Inwardly, he snorted—what hard-luck story could she tell? That she sometimes drank an extra glass of white wine after a tennis match?

  “I had my first drink when I was twelve,” she said. “I was a chubby girl. My parents were always pushing me to join different groups or take classes after school, but I never felt comfortable with other kids. I didn’t want to go to school at all because I was so scared of talking to people.”

  “My parents went out a lot to social events, political fundraisers and things. We got left with this baby-sitter who would fall asleep right away. My dad kept his liquor on a little side table in his den. There was this green bottle sitting there; I was curious, because my father always drank some when he came home from work. One night I went in and poured a little bit into the cap, like mouthwash. I swallowed it in one gulp. It tasted terrible. I swallowed a couple more capfuls and—this may sound strange—I realized immediately that I had found something I could be good at. I could be good at drinking.”

  Jack shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable on the hard metal chair. He glanced around. The other listeners sat back patiently, half of their attention focused on the speaker and half directed somewhere deep within themselves. A couple of them nodded their heads sympathetically.

  “Before, when I went into a room full of strangers, I was so scared I felt like I was going to pass out, but I found that if I drank a little first I could deal with it. It wasn’t that hard to get ahold of the liquor. My parents ordered a lot and they didn’t keep track of it. And drinking helped me to start making friends with other kids at school. We’d sneak off during free time and get people to buy us some Boone’s Farm or André cold duck.”

  The listeners chuckled, remembering their own drinking days.

  “When I was fourteen, I got shipped off to prep school up in New Hampshire. I don’t remember much from those years because I was so drunk most of the time. Or high. A lot of the kids had really good pot. Or quaaludes. We had ways to get into town and get adults to buy liquor for us. There were a lot of fucked-up kids there, kids whose parents were famous, or psychiatrists, or whatever. These were sophisticated kids: they didn’t drink cold duck. We had Amaretto drunks, Drambuie drunks…

  “I don’t know how I managed to graduate. I guess you had to do something really terrible to get kicked out of that school.

  “In college, it was easy to drink. It was even encouraged. I joined a sorority and we used to make the rounds of all the frat parties. We’d get wasted on grain-alcohol punch. It tasted like Kool-Aid.”

  “The second semester of my sophomore year, I went to this Halloween party. I must have blacked out. When I woke up I was in a storage room full of old bedframes and stained mattresses, and this guy was on top of me. He might have been raping me, or maybe I started it. I couldn’t remember. The next thing I knew there were a couple of his friends in the room. They gave me some shots of bourbon with Coors chasers. Boilermakers. And then they took turns fucking me. One of them even threw up on me.”

  Jack looked around. He felt uncomfortable listening to this raw confession, but the others were impassive, still. It seemed incredible that someone would stand up and say such things to a group of strangers, and nearly as incredible that the strangers would calmly listen.

  “I woke up the next day,” she continued. “Somehow—I have no idea how—I got back to my dorm room. I should have felt horrible, but I didn’t let myself feel anything. I took a couple of quaaludes and went to this bar in town and drank three pitchers of beer.

  “After college I went to law school. To this day, I can’t imagine how I got in. Maybe the interviewer thought I looked cute. I was sort of conventionally pretty by then, and of course I was blond. I used my looks a lot. On the inside, I felt like I was really ugly, that I was just shit, but guys were always coming on to me, so I used it.

  “I was still a functioning alcoholic. I was able to do my schoolwork during the day and party just at night and on the weekends.

  “The pressure that first year was really terrible, with such a heavy course load, but I met this guy in the library who turned me on to speed. I started getting into coke too, into freebasing. I remember one time I went home for Thanksgiving and I was so wired that I almost ground my teeth completely down. My mother asked what was wrong, and I just told her that I was under a lot of stress with the studying. They didn’t know, my parents. They were too fucked up themselves. Five o’clock cocktails.

  “I hardly ever went out anymore. I’d just stay in my room, ’base, drink. I didn’t eat. I spent all the money my parents sent me on staying drunk, staying high. I would even drink in lecture classes. Take an orange soda and pour out half the can, fill the rest up with vodka.

  “The school finally kicked me out. I told my parents I was taking a semester off. I started hanging out with some really bad people. I would black out a lot, but somehow I always made it back to my apartment. I’d get phone calls, people telling me that they’d found my purse somewhere. I’d pass out on trains, get shaken by cops at the end of the line. Sometimes I’d wake up, and I’d have pissed all over myself. Or worse.”

  Jack winced. He looked around, but no else seemed to be judging the speaker. The others sat and listened, some of them nodding or shaking their heads ruefully, as if they knew exactly what she was talking about. A man sitting next to him quietly got up and went to a table in the back of the room, where he poured himself a cup of coffee. When he came back, he offered Jack a chocolate-chip cookie. Jack shook his head.

  “I started living with a man,” the speaker continued, “but I wasn’t in love with him. I’d never been in love with anybody, because I was afraid that if they got too close they’d freak out when they saw what a disaster I was inside. We hardly ever went out or even had sex—we’d just sit in the apartment and drink.

  “Sometimes I’d go out drinking with this woman, LeeAnne, the only friend I had left over from college. I think I really loved her—not in a sexual way, but because she was such a mess, and I didn’t have to hide anything from her. LeeAnne had shot smack, whatever. She would try anything. She was the only person I could really talk to. We cried together a lot.

  “One day she told me that she’d gone to a meeting and decided to get clean. I laughed and gave her shit about it. She stopped going out, but I’d call her up: Come on, we’ll just have one beer. Don’t be such a fucking goody-goody. She avoided me. I was pissed off that she’d abandoned me. I was so angry that I even…one time when she finally agreed to come over, she asked for a Seven-UP and I took a can of Bud and put it in one of those foam insulato
r sleeves so she couldn’t see the label. She must’ve smelled the alcohol, because she didn’t drink. She was so upset she refused to see me after that.

  “She was sober about four months.

  “And then one afternoon—I was living on Boylston Street—this dealer named Henry came by and told me she’d OD’ed. One day she was going to meetings, the next day she was just gone. I was scared shitless. I was able to think clearly enough to wonder what would have happened if I’d given her a little support.”

  Jack shifted again in his chair—not from restlessness, but because he felt his eyes watering.

  “One day,” Janet continued, “I was passing a community center near Inman Square. I saw these people walking up a stairway and I just followed them in. I think in some subconscious way I knew where they were going. I don’t know if it was God or fate that led me there, but I do know that if I hadn’t gone in, I’d be dead now.

  “That was my first meeting. I’ve got seven years sober.”

  “Before I wrap up, I want to talk about Steps Four and Five.”

  She picked up a booklet and read. “‘We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.’” And, “‘We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.’”

  She picked up a water glass and took a sip. “I was doing okay in the program for the first year, but those two steps scared the hell out of me. Nobody could make me do them, no way.

  “After I got my first year, my sponsor helped me work up the courage. I did both steps together in one weekend. I spent a whole Sunday morning in her apartment, telling her everything, even things so horrible that I always thought I would take them to the grave with me. Just talking about LeeAnne, I thought I’d die.

  “And you know what happened? I didn’t die. All of those things I was so terrified to say, even to myself—since then I’ve talked about them from podiums, I’ve shared them in meetings.

  “Though I can try to make amends to the people who are still alive, I know I can never go back and change the past. But at least I don’t have to pick up a drink tonight. Thanks for listening.”

  She stood up and returned to the front row.

  Other people took turns sitting behind the table. They thanked Janet and told her they identified with her feelings of being different and isolated. They joked about their own blackouts and lost wallets. Jack was nervous that someone would ask him to get up to speak, but he was too stunned by the confessions to leave.

  One man didn’t respond to Janet’s speech—he seemed too wrapped up in his own problems. He identified himself as an alcoholic and a sex offender. He said he felt bad because he’d spent the past weekend “acting out with pornography,” but that thanks to the program he had resisted the impulse to drink or to follow up on his “other urges.”

  Some of the other people in the group looked slightly uncomfortable, but no one criticized the man. Jack was amazed: it seemed that there was nothing a person couldn’t say in front of the group.

  When the meeting wound down, he got up quietly and slipped out. He suspected that the session would end with the members gathering around to chat with each other and he didn’t want to be there.

  Out on the street, he lit a cigarette and strode off, his mind whirling. He went back and spent another hour dealing with the crime scene. And then, the next thing he knew, he was sitting on a stool in a yuppie bar on Seventh Avenue, ordering a Bass ale.

  “You want a pint?” the bartender asked.

  “No, a short one will do it.”

  Do what? He didn’t plan on any heavy drinking. He just wanted to feel the frosted mug in his hands, to savor that first cold sip going down. He thought of all the people in the meeting, tormented by the one drink they couldn’t have.

  He remembered a joke he’d heard once sitting on another stool in another bar, a joke that seemed to explain a lot of stupid behavior.

  “Why does a dog lick its balls?”

  Because it can.

  twenty-seven

  THE MORNING BROUGHT GOOD news.

  First, Jack called the hospital and found out that Mr. Gardner had been moved out of intensive care to a semi-private room.

  Then, he was at work at the task force when a call came in from Tommy Keenan at the Seven-eight: the “Dingo” on Bruce Serinis’s answering machine had turned out to be one very jittery cokehead. After less than half an hour of interrogation, he broke down and confessed to the Serinis murder.

  “Incredible,” Keenan said. “The mook actually left his message on the machine.”

  Jack wasn’t surprised. He knew of more than one perp who’d accidentally dropped his wallet in flight from a crime scene. Another criminal genius lost an inscribed gold bracelet, then had the further brilliance to return and ask a uniform guarding the scene if he could look for it.

  He celebrated with a fresh cup of coffee from the supply room, then sat down with renewed energy to review his files on the Berrios/Ortslee killings, hoping to tease out some new angle or approach.

  He made a call to the Department of Transportation, trying again to find someone who might have been contacted as to the whereabouts of Raymond Ortslee. The call was forwarded deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of city, state, and federal bureaucracy, bouncing him like a pinball from the Coast Guard to the Maritime Administration office to the Port Authority. End result: zilch.

  On a hunch, he tried some background checks on Randall Heiser, the real estate hotshot who lived in Berrios’s building. Sergeant Tanney wouldn’t approve of further interviews, but the boss wouldn’t know if he made a few routine calls.

  He ran Lugs and tolls, a check of phone-company records to see if Heiser had made or received any calls from Tomas Berrios or Raymond Ortslee.

  No luck there.

  He called a friend at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  Three minutes later, brimming with excitement, he set down the receiver and grabbed his jacket.

  Daskivitch was behind his desk inhaling a jelly donut when Jack walked in to the Seven-six squad room. The young detective looked up sheepishly. “Want one?” he mumbled.

  “No, thanks,” Jack said. “I’m watching my figure.”

  “Wanna siddown?”

  Jack nodded and pulled up a chair. He grinned. “I got something you might be interested in.”

  Daskivitch wiped some sugar off his chin. “Like what?”

  “I decided to dig a little deeper on that guy Heiser we talked to the other day.”

  Daskivitch glanced around the squad room and leaned forward. “Quiet, okay? My boss busted my chops about our little visit to Manhattan. I guess that rich jerkoff must have griped.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Jack said. “The thing is, I checked lugs and tolls and came up short: Berrios never phoned Heiser from his home, or vice versa.”

  “That’s very exciting. But you shouldn’t have come all this way—

  Jack held up a hand. “I also called the DMV. Turns out our friend Heiser has several outstanding parking tickets. His last one was a summons issued on May eighth for a right on red. On Van Brunt Street. In Red Hook.”

  “Holy shit. He said he hadn’t been there recently.” Daskivitch paused to consider the implications. “Do you think we should bring him in?”

  “Not yet. With the flak we’re getting from above, I want to figure out what he was up to before we call him in. Let’s keep this between us for now. If we get some evidence on the bastard, they won’t be able to pull us off him. In the meantime, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “Actually, I’m in court this afternoon, but I’ll work with you as soon as I get past this other case. Great job, bunk. Let me know if you get anything else.”

  Jack stood up to go. “You better believe it, kid.”

  Carroll Gardens had once been part of Red Hook, until the Gowanus Expressway sliced the neighborhood in half. While the waterfront side had deteriorated over the years, the Gardens had maintained its strengt
h as a tight-knit Italian community. As Jack drove down Court Street, he passed little family stores advertising fresh mozzarella and ravioli. The neighborhood had a low burglary rate because every block had its grandmothers leaning out the windows—and because the Mafia soldieri didn’t tolerate any crime on their quiet side streets. As Jack got out of his car, he heard the Righteous Brothers singing “Unchained Melody” on a radio somewhere, and a grizzled old man who could have been an extra for Goodfellas trudged by pushing a baby carriage. The front yard of Cosenza’s Funeral Home looked like a patio in front of a pricey Italian restaurant: well-trimmed hedges, cherubs spraying water in a little aquamarine fountain, a four-foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary standing with open hands. The interior—dim table lamps, plastic-upholstered pale green couches, and sprays of orchids in marble urns—was gloomy, but Larry Cosenza was not. As Jack entered, he rose from his desk, a handsome, broad-shouldered, white-haired man who wore his tie loose at the collar, indicating how comfortable he was as the unofficial mayor of the neighborhood. He was also the local historian, philosopher, and community activist—in the 1960s, when hundreds of middle-class families were fleeing South Brooklyn for the suburbs, he’d organized to keep his neighborhood intact.

  “Jackie Leightner! Haven’t seen you around here since Artie Benvenuto’s funeral. How long ago was that?”

  “I dunno. Maybe four, five years.”

  “You look tired. Hey, how’s the family? I hope this is just a social visit.”

  Jack loosened his own collar. “Not really, Larry. It’s a work thing. I need your advice. You have a few minutes?”

  “Sure. I’m having a slow day here.”

  “Why don’t we go for a drive?”

  Jack stopped for a red light at the edge of the Red Hook Houses. Scraps of trash dotted the dried-out lawns between the buildings. A group of young toughs glared at the car, then melted into the interior of the projects.

  “Jesus, things sure have changed since our day,” Jack said, glancing at a flashy sports car double-parked at the curb. Even through the closed window, he could feel the angry bass of the car’s stereo thumping out into the world.