Brooklyn on Fire

by Lawrence H. Levy

  Confident that he had wiped the snide smirks off the three men’s faces, Huntington took his leave, now sporting a genuine smile. It had turned into a good day after all.

  “FROM WHAT LITTLE I can recollect and from all accounts of my relatives, my uncle John—actually, he was my great-uncle—was no saint,” Emily Worsham told Mary. “Of course, there were reasons.”

  “There always are for poor behavior,” Mary interjected. “Funny how people never cite reasons for behaving properly.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Emily Worsham responded, “though extenuating circumstances did exist. Richmond was destroyed during the war—”

  “I take it you mean Richmond, Virginia?”

  A tinge of hauteur crept into Emily Worsham’s voice. “Is there any other Richmond?”

  “Yes—in Texas, Michigan, and California,” Mary replied in a matter-of-fact manner.

  “My, you are a geographic wonder,” said Emily Worsham, genuinely impressed.

  Mary laughed. “I read a lot. So, in the spirit of our discussion, can I also assume the war you mentioned is the Civil War?”

  “You mean the war. It’s the only war where I come from.”

  “I wanted to make sure. That was twenty-five years ago.”

  “We’re still fighting it. Southern gentlemen call it the War of Northern Aggression, but most describe it in other terms a lady doesn’t repeat.”

  “It was an awful war with tragedies on both sides.”

  “We were cruel and moronic, and we deserved what we got. But you Northerners tend to overlook that there are Southerners who abhor slavery.”

  “I never doubted that. Human beings are human beings, and in spite of Northern propaganda, logic alone dictates that there had to be a decent amount of people who opposed it.”

  Mary could see that if she let this conversation continue the way it had so far, they’d soon be discussing the moon. That would be okay if that was where Uncle John was killed, but she highly doubted it.

  “Though I am a history buff of the first order, we should return to your uncle John.”

  “Yes, of course. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, getting sidetracked so.” Emily Worsham was suddenly filled with sadness. She pulled a handkerchief from her purse, wiped a tear that had emerged from the corner of her right eye, then continued getting sidetracked.

  “I was only six years old when I last saw Uncle John, but I’ll never forget him. He was always so gentle with me, so kind. I had a very stressful childhood, Miss Handley. It’s not easy growing up in the South looking like I do.”

  “Children can be very cruel, and you’re being much too hard on yourself.”

  “Please, I came to terms with who I am many years ago.”

  Mary sympathized with this woman, but she wanted to avoid any further digressions in order to get to the facts of the case. “So you haven’t seen your uncle in about twenty years?”

  “Twenty-one to be exact.”

  “How do you know for certain that he was murdered?”

  “My uncle was a good faro player, and he opened a faro parlor in Richmond after the Civil War. A fairly successful one, too. Nearby, an Isabella Yarrington ran a boardinghouse of questionable repute. Even though Uncle John was well into his forties, he became infatuated with Isabella’s nineteen-year-old daughter. In no time, they were married, and she got pregnant. Uncle John moved the whole family, including Isabella and her other children, to New York City, where he bought a home large enough to house them all. It was there that his son, Archer, was born. Within a year, Uncle John was dead, and the Yarringtons had all his money and the house.”

  “That’s a very compelling story, but, again, how do you know it was murder?”

  “Everyone in Richmond knew the Yarringtons were social climbers, but it wasn’t until I was older that I heard about my uncle’s wife carrying on an affair with a much wealthier man. Divorce would have tainted her, and there was absolutely no chance my uncle would have given up his son. There was only one way out.” Emily Worsham sighed. “So there you have it. I can pay you two weeks in advance if you’re amenable to it.”

  “That’s perfectly fine. And you’ve told me everything?”

  “Everything I know.” And Emily Worsham was finally quiet.

  In one respect, Mary wanted to celebrate the silence, but the detective in her knew the information she had been provided was thin at best.

  “To be honest, your story is full of unproven accusations, but considering what few facts we do have and your strong feeling, it’s worth investigating. When exactly did your uncle die?”

  “In the fall of 1870. I’m sure you’ll find it was murder for profit.”

  “A twenty-year-old murder will make it more difficult, but the wait is understandable. You were a child when it happened. Is your uncle’s widow still alive?”

  “Indeed she is. After living with this torturous information for many years, I finally decided to save up for this trip north, if for nothing else than to soothe my conscience. I got as far as her front door, then realized I wouldn’t know what to say when she answered. It’s a wonder how people like that seem to live forever and thrive where truly good, upstanding human beings—”

  Mary’s look was enough to make Emily Worsham realize she was rambling off topic again. She stopped and got to the point.

  “She’s remarried and is living quite well now, on Park Avenue.”

  “It would help if I knew her name.”

  “Of course. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. How are you supposed to find her if—”

  “Her name, Miss Worsham.”

  “Arabella. Arabella Huntington.”

  3

  SHORTY WAS IN a terrible mood. It had been two weeks since he had completed his last job, and he still hadn’t received his final payment. Granted, the old witch hadn’t given him much trouble, though setting foot into that pigsty was enough of a challenge. I’ll never understand how rich people—hell, anyone—can live like that, he thought. And somebody should’ve told me about the cats. Dogs are fine, but cats are sneaky little shits. His problem with most clients was that they would swear they had told him everything, and they had always overlooked something. But that had nothing to do with getting his money. The work was done. An agreement was an agreement.

  Shorty tried to calm himself. He hated freelancing, but full-time employment wasn’t an option in his line of work. Most of his clients had jobs that paid them regularly, yet they still didn’t think twice about making him wait to be paid. I wonder how they would feel if their weekly checks were delayed, Shorty thought. Then maybe those bastards would understand what they do to me.

  Calming himself wasn’t working. He needed to let off some steam. He was in his favorite place for it, too: a barroom in Brooklyn. Shorty had honed his skills in barrooms all over Brooklyn.

  In 1858, as a five-year-old child, little Kieran Timothy Kilpatrick, Shorty’s birth name, by which almost no one ever called him, had contracted infantile paralysis. It made his right leg flaccid and useless. The doctor shook his head, not really knowing what to do. He suggested making a brace for his right leg, then expressed his relief that at least his particular case was an anomaly and not part of an epidemic.

  Shorty asked what those words meant. His father, the class act that he was, replied, “It means you’ve been fucked.”

  Shorty had no idea what that meant either, but being a street kid in Brooklyn, he only had to go outside and ask. It obviously wasn’t good, but he still needed to know about the doctor’s words. He couldn’t read yet, so he went to the nice lady next door, the one his father would visit for hours a day, and she looked them up in her dictionary. She told him that “anomaly” as the doctor used it meant an exception, most probably an unusual case that happened to only one person, whereas an epidemic was something that had spread to a lot of people.

  Shorty stunned the nice lady when he screamed, “The old man’s right. I’ve been fucked!”r />
  He was angry. Why should he be the only one with this disease? If he had it, everyone else should have it, too.

  As his nickname indicated, Shorty was little for his age, but that didn’t stop him from getting into his share of scrapes—in fact, much more than his share. Kids would mercilessly taunt the little boy with a leg brace, and without exception, Shorty would see red and attack. Eventually, he became so overly sensitive that a mere look, sometimes even an innocent one, would set him off. He didn’t win many fights, but he acquired a reputation as a kid who never gave up no matter how badly he was losing.

  When he turned twelve, Shorty realized he was never going to grow to be very big and decided to do something about it. He was tired of losing, and he needed to get stronger. Giving up fighting was never a consideration. The release he felt from it was by far his greatest joy in life. And as he grew into adulthood, it became apparent to him that fighting provided him with even more pleasure than sex ever would.

  Shorty’s family was poor, bordering on indigent. His father had abandoned them soon after Shorty was diagnosed, and his mother was a drunk. He lived with her in a shanty on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, an area that was aptly named Young Dublin for the vast number of poor Irish immigrants living there. Shorty knew purchasing barbells would cut too deeply into his mother’s whiskey money. He had to get creative about his bodybuilding.

  He found a metal bar at a construction site, then got two old milk pitchers, filled them partially with dirt, and attached them to either end of the bar. He worked out religiously with his makeshift barbells for hours a day. Pretty soon he was filling the pitchers with more dirt to make them heavier and eventually had to get larger pitchers. When those pitchers became too light, he swiped a bag of cement from another construction site, dumped the dirt out of the pitchers, mixed the cement, poured it in, and let it harden. By the time Shorty was fifteen, his arms and chest were huge for his size, or really any size. None of the kids dared to tangle with him. Shorty seemed to be missing that tiny switch in a person’s brain that turned off the rage, telling him to stop when a person was beaten and helpless. He’d sent more than a few opponents to the hospital.

  On his sixteenth birthday, Shorty received what he described as his “best birthday present ever.” He saw the doctor who had diagnosed him with infantile paralysis walking toward him on the street. With a quick, “Hi, doc,” Shorty decked him with one powerful punch. As the doctor lay there, moaning, Shorty planted his braced leg firmly on his chest.

  “Don’t worry, doc. What just happened is an anomaly and not part of an epidemic. I’m real happy about it. How about you?” Then Shorty removed his braced leg from the doctor’s chest, stepped over him, and went on his way, a snide, satisfied grin on his face.

  The incident with the doctor was Shorty’s epiphany, and any epiphany involving Shorty also involved fighting. It was time for him to start fighting grown men. So Shorty began frequenting barrooms in Brooklyn, the rougher the better. He’d approach the biggest man there and pick a fight. For a while, it didn’t go very well. He was often beaten senseless. But Shorty never gave up, and he learned. He started winning some, and then he won them all, even rematches with men who had previously pummeled him. After six months, Shorty would walk into a barroom and grown men would hastily leave in order to avoid tangling with him.

  Now, over twenty years later, Shorty looked around the barroom. There were slim pickings, just a few neighborhood drunks. He was disappointed, but he soothed himself with the fact that it was late morning and it wouldn’t be too long until the lunch crowd arrived. Just as he was getting antsy, itching for some fisticuffs, a ten-year-old boy dressed in rags stepped through the doors.

  As the bartender was telling the boy to get lost, Shorty raised his hand, shushing him midsentence. The bartender immediately obeyed. No one wanted to risk upsetting Shorty, whose mind at that moment was churning away. His last job had been different from most. He had never met the client in person. Instead, he had been handed a sealed envelope by a local prostitute containing the details and a generous offer. All he had to do was nod to accept. The next day a carriage drove by him, and he was tossed an envelope with a sizable advance. And so now, maybe, just maybe, this kid was his payoff. The boy approached him, dug under his pants, and pulled out a thick envelope.

  “Here you go, mister,” said the boy, then he started to leave. Shorty opened the envelope, saw the wad of bills, then called to the boy.

  “Hey, kid, how did you know this was for me?”

  The boy looked at Shorty, then down at his bad leg and up again. “Think hard. I’m pretty sure you can figure it out.”

  Shorty winced, his eyes narrowed, and he gritted his teeth. The air in the barroom got very tense. It was abundantly clear to everyone that Shorty was going to pound the little boy, and they were all helpless to stop him. The boy also realized he had made a mistake. His mother had always warned him that his smart mouth was going to get him in big trouble one day, and this looked like it was going to be that day.

  Shorty took two steps toward the boy, gave him a chilling stare, and then burst out laughing. “You’ve got balls, kid, a giant set for such a little tyke.”

  The whole barroom broke into laughter, mostly out of relief. The boy instinctively knew he had tempted fate and had gotten away with it. He wasn’t going to do it again. He smiled at Shorty and got out of there as fast as he could.

  Shorty had just gotten paid a nice sum for a job that was relatively easy, and he was feeling really good. He shouted, “The next round’s on me!”

  His declaration was met with cheers, and as he stepped back to the bar, he motioned the bartender over to him. With lightninglike speed, Shorty flattened him with a roundhouse right. Suddenly, the room got very quiet.

  “Change of plans,” Shorty announced. “Drinks on the house!”

  The cheers returned as Shorty stepped behind the bar and over the bartender to serve drinks.

  AFTER EMILY WORSHAM left, Mary searched for Lazlo. He wasn’t in the bookstore. She went outside, peered down one side of the street and then the other, but didn’t see him. It wasn’t until she heard a sound from above that she looked up. The bookstore occupied the ground floor of a two-story building. Lazlo lived on the second floor, but the sound hadn’t come from there. Mary took several steps away from the building, until she was in the middle of the street. It was only then that she saw Lazlo on the roof with a metal pole in his hands.

  “Lazlo,” she called. “You’ve certainly chosen an odd spot to play Don Quixote.”

  “Don Quixote?” he replied. “I’m up here alone, unless you happen to see Sancho Panza by my side or an errant windmill. And if you did, I’d be concerned.”

  “I do spy a pretend lance, and Don Quixote was all about imagination.”

  “Ah, I see where you were led astray.” He raised the metal pole in the air. “This is a lightning rod. I’m finally getting around to installing it.”

  “Mr. Franklin and his inventions; I should have known.”

  “Wait there. I want to speak with you.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

  Lazlo didn’t answer. He put down the lightning rod, and in a few moments, he was down on the street with Mary.

  “What was so important that you couldn’t shout it from the rooftop?”

  “I wanted to know how your meeting went,” uttered Lazlo in a low voice with a very secretive, conspiratorial tone. He was almost childlike in his excitement.

  “She believes her uncle was murdered, and she wants me to investigate.”

  “So you’ve been hired. Good going.”

  “She paid me two weeks in advance, which begs the question—”

  “Of course. By all means, take the time off. I am your biggest fan.”

  “You may be my only fan.”

  “Don’t forget the lady who’s paying you.”

  “And don’t you forget to ground that lightning rod, or you might burn down the
house and God knows what else instead of saving it.”

  He removed a manual from his suit jacket pocket and held it up. “Don’t worry. I am following Benjamin Franklin’s explicit instructions.”

  “Make sure you follow the section on the lightning rod and not on flying a kite, or we’ll all be gone in a puff of smoke.”

  Lazlo smiled. “Not you. You’ll be off on a case.”

  Mary smiled back. It did feel good. She then turned and took off down the street.

  Lazlo watched, possibly even giddier than Mary over the fact that she had been given another opportunity to follow her dream. He would have felt differently if he knew what danger it would soon put him in.

  4

  ALFRED CHAPIN WAS feeling a great deal of stress, which was not a familiar sensation for him. If anyone could be said to have lived a charmed life, he certainly qualified. His family was well-to-do with a lineage in the United States that dated back two hundred and fifty years. Chapins had witnessed the colonial period, the revolution, the Civil War, and everything in between. Alfred had attended private schools, Williams College, and Harvard Law School. He had married Grace Stebbins, whose family had been similarly blessed, and had started a successful law practice. When he decided to enter politics, he won every election he ever entered and at forty-two was presently mayor of Brooklyn. Chapin exuded class and breeding. There was talk of his running for governor of New York or possibly senator, and for that he needed Hugh McLaughlin.

  Hugh McLaughlin’s life experience was almost the polar opposite. The son of Irish immigrants, he had come to the United States as a boy, and he had grown up in a Brooklyn slum where school took a backseat to survival. Using his fists, he worked his way to the leadership of a Brooklyn street gang, and the respect he earned on the streets translated to the flow of Irish immigrants when he got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Once he had the trust and respect of the people, it was a natural step to politics, and though he wasn’t very good at winning elections for himself, he found he was excellent at getting others elected. Now the head of the Brooklyn Ring, he had become the local kingmaker. McLaughlin ruled Brooklyn like Boss Tweed had once ruled New York City with his Tammany Hall machine. He doled out city contracts and supported candidates, receiving very handsome remuneration in return. The difference between McLaughlin and Tweed was that Tweed had been caught and prosecuted. McLaughlin had so far eluded the “do-gooders.”