New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  “Naw. Naw,” Scoop says. “The cutter—may his creases rest in peace—is long since gone. Molly married again, an artist. She’s got a place in Brooklyn Heights, right there looking over the southern tip of Manhattan.”

  I know Scoop has no other sisters or brothers and this “nephew” definitely does not run in Sylvia’s family. I put it to him: “This kid, I.F. Izzy. He is or is no Molly’s son?”

  Scoop shrugs, comes as close as I’ve ever seen him to blushing, starts fumbling for a butt. I’d stake him to a White Owl, but it is definitely not a good idea to light up a fat stogie in a precinct house when you’re being held for murder.

  “He’s no nephew,” Scoop says like he’s breaking the Lindbergh case. “The kid is my son. Not by Sylvia. Sylvia and I couldn’t have kids—not in the cards for us.”

  I’m sitting cool as a cucumber, no how do you do, it’s all news to me It’s a confession, right out of Bernard Macfadden’s True Story, Truer Romance, Truest Experience. A marriage gone lightly sour, a career diving for cover, not much happening except for poker with the boys and a chippy who likes to sing duets. Scoop tells me he picked up I.F.’s mother in a journalism class he was teaching part-time at L.I.U. twenty years ago.

  “A good kid. I really liked her, had a lot of respect for that babe. Would have broken up with Sylvia for her, but she—Martha Gellhorn Washington—would you believe it, named for one of the great foreign correspondents of her time, who also never won a Polk Award. Anyway, Martha said it was just a fling. I was too old for her, not really her type. But she wanted to have the kid. When Martha’s number was up, got hit by an external fuel tank jettisoned from a F14 Tomcat, something like that, there was our kid hanging in there, out in L.A. He thinks I done her wrong, set his mamalochen up for disaster. He drops the line to Sylvia. The rest of the story you can write for yourself.”

  Pablo is flashing a signal. I lip read: Son las dos en punto. I got to wrap it up now that it’s 2 o’clock.

  I say, “So your kid, I.F., winds up living with you and Sylvia. And the day of the poker game—was I.F. there for the Last Lunch?”

  Scoop raises his hands and slaps them on the desk. “Turns out Sylvia is crazy about the kid. Moves I.F. right in with us, signs him on for Senior’s full time. He’s with her, day and night. Night and day. You are the one. Only you beneath the moon and under the sun. Whether near to me or far …” Scoop cuts out for the solo, but I got no time for musical interludes.

  “Answer the question, Scoop,” I say. “Where was I.F. when the mustard hit the fan?”

  Scoop tells me I.F. was right there. “Matter of fact …” Scoop lowers his voice. I got no idea who he thinks is listening to us, but I register that this is prime cut information. “I’m not sure I.F. picked up those sandwiches from Junior’s for us. Sylvia would hit the ceiling if she knew my guys and me were not even considering Senior’s mini-stuffed. We are strictly Junior’s disciples until—pardon the expression—until the day we die. We always order the same,” Scoop says. “Sherlock and Front Page go halves on a pastrami and corned beef. For me it’s white meat turkey, lettuce and tomato, with Russian on the side. The first week of each month we split a hunk of cheesecake.”

  “And the mustard?”

  “I noticed a little blob on my jacket when James L., the old man who works part-time for Sylv, handed it back to me as I was coming out of the crapper after lunch. I may have took a swipe at it and smeared it on my cuff and fly. Who knows? I was deep into the game. I don’t even remember unwrapping my sandwich. Once we upped the stakes to one and five and I’m down big bucks, what do I know from mustard? I’m thinking about losing C notes and lots of ’em. Last I remember before the guys caved in was pouring the tea for Front Page, the decaf for Sherlock, the straight java for me,” says Scoop, and breaks into song. “I like java. I like tea. I like the java jive. It likes me …”

  He’s into the soft shoe as Pablo Sanchez escorts him back to the holding cell.

  * * *

  As soon as we check out of the precinct house, Sylvia is all over me. “I knew you could solve it, Pistol Pete. So tell us, who done it?”

  I say, “Slow and easy, sweetheart. Like I told you, I’m a little out of shape, been sitting on the bench too many years.” Then I tell her I got to get a look at the scene of the crime.

  We’re in the neighborhood. A hop, skip, and jump and I’m sitting at a big table loaded with bowls of sauerkraut, pickles, jars of ketchup—mustard! There’s not a customer in the joint. But the walls are plastered with pictures—all shots of the great Dodgers of our past—Hodges, Reese, Stanky, Roy Campanella, and a blowup the size of a billboard on Times Square of Scoop interviewing the immortal Jackie Robinson.

  Sylvia ducks back into the kitchen to get us some eats. Never mind that I just come off half a late lunch. That’s her cover. She wants me to cut it up with I.F., so he can tell me what an Auntie-Mame-stepmother she’s turned out to be.

  Only it doesn’t break according to Sylvia’s script.

  I’m asking the questions and I.F., true to his name, talks straight. He’s known his father was a Brooklyn newspaper hack since he was five years old.

  “My mother told me his name, left me a number to call if anything happened to her when she ran off on foreign assignments. The Balkans, Middle East, Afghanistan, anywhere someone was taking a shot, dropping a bomb, throwing a stone, was Mama’s beat. I lived mostly in L.A. with grandparents and eventually foster homes. No complaints. When I heard my mother died, I checked in with the number she gave me. Sylvia answered the phone. She asked me who I was. I told her. I didn’t know Scoop never told her about me. I guess I blew it. Less than a day later Scoop calls. He’s wiring me money to come to Brooklyn. He and Sylvia have talked it over, he said. They want to meet me, get to know me, make up for all the lost years.”

  The kid is telling me all this without a blink, a snicker, or a tear.

  “So you come to Brooklyn,” I say, going for the extra base. “What happens next?”

  “I did a little preparation, beefing up.” For the first time I.F. half smiles. “When I want to know about a place I read the poets and study the baseball teams. Are you familiar with Marianne Moore’s ‘Keeping Their World Large’?”

  Before I can apologize or fake it, the kid is into a verse: “They fought the enemy,/we fight fat living and self-pity/ Shine, 0 shine/unfalsifying sun on this sick scene.”

  I say, “I’m gonna think about that.”

  The kid is on a run. “Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but lived for a long time on Cumberland Street in Brooklyn.”

  “Hey, that’s real interesting,” I say. “Marianne Moore. Soon as I reread Boys of Summer I’m gonna look into Marianne Moore.” Then, I send my fastball down the middle. “So tell me, you know any reason Scoop would have to do in Front Page and Sherlock?”

  I.F. shrugs, gives his Dodger cap a twist and twirl. “How many reasons you want?” he says. “Would about ten thousand dollars in debt from the poker games be a reason? Or the fact that he discovered soon as Sylvia heard about me she had a romp in the hay with each of them?” As he’s circling the bases, I.F. goes on with a dose of Walt Whitman. “I do not press my fingers across my mouth,/ I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,/ Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.”

  I’m getting that same uneasy feeling I get when his old man breaks into song. Songs, poetry, batting averages. Maybe I’m on to something. Call it the prayer gene.

  I’m thinking over my next pitch when Sylvia’s voice comes from the kitchen. “You boys ready for a little snack? This corned beef is right out of the brine. You never tasted nothing like it in your life.” I hear the slicer and then Sylvia comes to the door with this kitchen saw. I never seen a chef in high heels and an apron color coordinated with her hair dye.

  “So?” she says, pointing the slicer at me. “I can’t wait any longer, Pistol Pete. Who done it?”<
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  “Well, Sylv,” I say. “We got five possibilities here.”

  “Solving a murder is that logical, an exercise in Kant’s pure reason?” I.F. pulls the cap around so the Dodger logo is facing me.

  “Starting back to front there is always the possibility of suicide, but a double suicide over a pastrami and corned beef?” I get an immediate waiver on number one. “So we have two, three, and four. Number two is Scoop with the mustard stains, who has motive and clues.”

  “I didn’t hire you for that,” Sylvia reminds me. “Not Scoop. My Scoop may be a good-for-nothing—but he’d never spoil perfectly good corned beef and pastrami sandwiches with poisoned mustard.”

  “Scoop is the patsy,” I go on. “He’s set up. Try it this way—someone with a motive to knock him off frames him for a double murder.”

  Sylvia calls into the kitchen, “James Lamar, we need coffee. Black with those sandwiches.”

  “That could be you, Sylvia,” I say quietly. “You’re number three on our suspect list.”

  “Me?” Sylvia stamps her foot and switches on the slicer.

  Her eyes are shifting fast as Koufax’s curveball. “You got to be out of your mind. I put up with that son of a bitch lying, cheating all these years, and you can’t see I love him?”

  “The motives are there for you, Sylv,” I say again. “And you had the opportunity. How tough would it be for you to smear the mustard and plant the clues on Scoop’s shirt, cuff, fly? Knock ’em all off with one big splash of doctored Gold’s Own, or was it French’s?”

  I.F. has been sitting cool and easy but now he stands up, starts smacking a fist into a palm. “We don’t use Gold’s mustard,” he says. “That’s Junior’s special blend. But when Junior’s delivers, it’s packets—no pre-smeared.”

  “You’ve obviously given this a lot of thought, sonny boy,” I say to I.F. “So, you’re telling me the sandwiches were made at Senior’s? You got your old man and his two cronies squatting right there in your step-mamalochen’s deli and it’s your call on what to do about them ordering out.”

  “This is too much. You’re insulting me.” Sylvia switches off the slicer and plunks into a chair. She’s sitting under a shot of Sandy Amoros’s spectacular running catch of Berra’s fly ball in the seventh game of the ’55 Series.

  “Let’s assume the sandwiches were made here that fatal day. Nothing to do with Junior’s. That suggests our killer is a home team spoiler.”

  “James Lamar, where are you when I need you?” Sylvia says again. “I want that coffee black.”

  “You’re saying my father has been framed, and the killer, the person who smeared the mustard, works right here at Senior’s?” The kid breaks off and, with a wry smile right out of the L.A. handbook, We Own the Dodgers Now says, “Why not me? Abandoned son. Oedipus knocks off King Laius, also known as Seamus ‘Scoop’ O’Neil, and in the next act, according to your script, I marry Iocasta, also known as Mama Sylvia, and I inherit the Kingdom of Senior’s.”

  “Marries his mother?” Sylvia repeats. “That is the most disgusting story I ever heard. I’ve had enough of you, Pistol Pete. I shoulda known better …”

  “Let him talk,” I.F. says, as the door from the kitchen swings open and a guy must be my age comes limping in carrying a tray of mini-deli sandwiches and a decanter of java.

  “Tea time,” I say, trying to change the mood. “Don’t mind if I do.” I move to the tray like Robinson feinting off third base. Then I sit back and say, “I’m not saying it is, just could be.”

  “So?” I.F. says. The Dodger cap is rotated so the logo no longer faces me. “Sylvia or me—who’s your pleasure?”

  “Youse want skimmed or regular with the coffee?” James Lamar is wearing a baseball cap, too, with the logo facing the wall. “Wese outa half an’ half.”

  “Excuse me, James Lamar,” I say. “Anybody ever call you Dusty?”

  The smile is big as Willie Mays’s glove making the basket catch. “For shure. For shure. And how’d you know dat?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I say like Walter Alston calling Clem Labine in from the bullpen, “we got our deus ex machina.”

  James Lamar—Dusty!—plunks the tray down and makes a move for the mustard jar.

  I’m on my feet, pull out the ole Smith and Wesson for which I plunked down 250 smackeroos for the permit just last year without any thought of ever using it again. “Not so fast, Dusty,” I say. “And if you don’t mind, would you be so kind as to pull the visor of that cap around?”

  Sylvia is still not convinced. “What’s that got to do with anything? What is going on here? And that Day Ox you was talking about …”

  “Deus ex machina,” I.F. corrects her. “God from the machine. Introduced at the last minute often by a crane in ancient Greek and Roman drama to resolve an insoluble dilemma.”

  “On the button,” I say to I.F. “And if you will be so kind as to take a gander at Dusty’s cap, you can appreciate the motive for murder.”

  “I don’t see nothing,” Sylvia says, “only a crummy old baseball cap with an SF logo.”

  “The logo of the San Francisco, formerly New York, Giants,” says I.F. as the light is beginning to dawn. “We have here a former New York Giants fan who has never forgiven the Dodgers.”

  “You got it right, kid,” Dusty snarls. “And I’m up to my keester with all this Dodger talk, all them pictures and not one shot of Master Melvin Ott, King Carl Hubbell, Sal Maglie, the Greatest Willie Mays …”

  Before he can run down all the rosters from ’35 through ’57, I throw him the spitter: “And we might add James Lamar ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, who come from nowhere to run off with the 1954 World Series.”

  “You better believe it,” Dusty says. “.667, two home runs, seben, I said seben runs batted in and dat was a four-game series. So where is Dusty on dis wall? Do I hear a woid, one stinkin’ woid from any of them wiseguys pitchin’ cards, talkin’ Dodgers, Dodgers, Dodgers. Dem Bums. And youse. Youse got the noive to talk Deus? Deus Latin prayers in this joint?”

  Dusty goes quietly after that.

  We spring Scoop the next afternoon. Sylvia wants to celebrate with a steak at Gage and Tollner’s. She’s had enough of the deli business—“Bad memories”—and declares this her farewell party.

  I.F. invites us to join him for a stroll through the Brooklyn Museum. “I’d like to take a look at Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rockies, Mt. Rosalie. A guy I met on the plane, flying in from L.A. last week, told me he’s a friend of Robert Levinson who was the chairman of the board and could recommend me for a job there. Then we can amble over to the lobby of the former Paramount Theater. It’s the Eugene & Beverly Luntey Commons of the Brooklyn Center, L.I.U. now. We could sit and read poems by Robert Donald Spector and maybe be lucky enough to run into JoAnn Allen or Mike Bush, all stars of their faculty.”

  Scoop breaks into a chorus of “Thanks for the Memories” and Sylvia takes his hand like two kids on their way to the boardwalk at Coney Island.

  Out of the blue, I.F. says to me, “Harold Patrick Reiser, 1941 through 1948, a Dodgers’ Dodger until he ran into a fence.” Then he gently nudges my holster. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Pistol Pete.”

  WHEN ALL THIS WAS BAY RIDGE

  BY TIM MCLOUGHLIN

  Sunset Park

  Standing in church at my father’s funeral, I thought about being arrested on the night of my seventeenth birthday. It had occurred in the trainyard at Avenue X, in Coney Island. Me and Pancho and a kid named Freddie were working a three-car piece, the most ambitious I’d tried to that point, and more time-consuming than was judicious to spend trespassing on city property. Two Transit cops with German shepherds caught us in the middle of the second car. I dropped my aerosol can and took off, and was perhaps two hundred feet along the beginning of the trench that becomes the IRT line to the Bronx, when I saw the hand. It was human, adult, and severed neatly, seemingly surgically, at the wrist. My first thought was that it looked bare
without a watch. Then I made a whooping sound, trying to take in air, and turned and ran back toward the cops and their dogs.

  At the 60th Precinct, we three were ushered into a small cell. We sat for several hours, then the door opened and I was led out. My father was waiting in the main room, in front of the counter.

  The desk sergeant, middle-aged, black, and noticeably bored, looked up briefly. “Him?”

  “Him,” my father echoed, sounding defeated.

  “Goodnight,” the sergeant said.

  My father took my arm and led me out of the precinct. As we cleared the door and stepped into the humid night he turned to me and said, “This was it. Your one free ride. It doesn’t happen again.”

  “What did it cost?” I asked. My father had retired from the Police Department years earlier, and I knew this had been expensive.

  He shook his head. “This once, that’s all.”

  I followed him to his car. “I have two friends in there.”

  “Fuck’em. Spics. That’s half your problem.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “You have no common sense,” he said, his voice rising in scale as it did in volume. By the time he reached a scream he sounded like a boy going through puberty. “What do you think you’re doing out here? Crawling ’round in the dark with the niggers and the spics. Writing on trains like a hoodlum. Is this all you’ll do?”

  “It’s not writing. It’s drawing. Pictures.”

  “Same shit, defacing property, behaving like a punk. Where do you suppose it will lead?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. You had your aimless time, when you got out of the service. You told me so. You bummed around for two years.”

  “I always worked.”

  “Part-time. Beer money. You were a roofer.”

  “Beer money was all I needed.”