This man, the man in the blue smoke with a wasted skeletal physique and loose, yellowy skin, his hair thin and gray and lifeless, looked nothing like Tony Bennett. He barely looked human, more a twisted root grown vaguely into human form. He tried not to smile. I didn’t have to try.
“Moe! Jesus, come in.” He offered me his hand. I took it, if not out of friendship, then out of pity. He scrambled about, tossing dirty laundry onto his cot and chucking empty beer bottles into a D’Agastino’s bag. “Can I get you a beer or something?”
“No, thanks.”
He lit another cigarette, but didn’t smoke it with quite the same gusto as Larry. I surveyed the room. Old cop habits die hard. It was what you’d expect, only more so: peeling paint, splintered floorboards, junkyard furniture, a coffin-sized bathroom. Above his cot was his only memento, a picture of the Three Stooges in our dress blues. Choked me up, that. In the next room, a headboard was being pounded against the wall.
“Ay, conjo! ” a woman screamed.
The pounding stopped.
“Twenty bucks or four vials of crack and she’ll do just about anything you want,” Rico said, tilting his head at the now silent wall. “Marisa’s still pretty new at the game. She tries to enjoy it. I let her suck my cock once in a while. You see the little fat girl downstairs? That’s her kid.”
I needed a shower.
“So to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he asked, the inevitable bitterness leaking into his voice. “Wanna talk old times, buddy?”
“In a way, I guess, maybe I do.”
He wasn’t ready for that, seemed to stumble reaching for an empty bottle to use as an ashtray.
“Don’t fuck with me, Moe. You don’t have that much credit with me to fuck with my head.”
“So I’ve got some? That’s good to know.”
“Was you who gave up on me, brother. Not the other way around. You were a big part of my life and the next day. . pfffft! I was cut out like a tumor.”
“Your metaphor, Rico, not mine. And it’s not like you had no part in that. You tried playing me. You-”
“Yeah, I used you. Blah, blah, blah. You’re like a broken fucking record, man. What’s it been, like ten years since you seen me? In the hospital, right, when your father-in-law had that stroke?”
“Eight years. 1981, I think.”
“Eight fucking years and you still can’t let it go. Well, you can stop playing that tune. I’m bored with it. I played it over and over again in my head when I was inside. We’re not friends anymore. Okay, I get that. So what is it you’re doing here?”
“Larry Mac.”
“What about him?”
“No one can find him.”
He burst out laughing. It was wild, manic laughter. His sluggish brown eyes came to life, darting madly. His lips curled back, exposing his stained teeth and thick, grayish tongue. The laughter took its toll and he launched into a coughing fit that seemed to last for hours. These were coughs from down deep, coughs so raw and raspy they hurt my throat. When the coughing finally died down, Rico made smooching sounds.
“Mmmhhhh! Mmmhhhh! Larry, where are you?” he looked under the dirty laundry on his bed. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
“Very funny.”
“He ain’t here.”
“I didn’t think he was.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“I gave up wanting that in 1978.”
He winced. I knew the tough guy shit was an act. He missed me as much as I missed him. Only difference was I’d had a life to fall back on. He’d pissed his away.
“I thought you might know where he is,” I said, not interested in inflicting any more pain. “I know you two are still close and that you keep in touch.”
He was thinking that one over. It was an opening he chose not to take. I guess he’d had enough hard feelings, too.
“Haven’t heard from him since last week. He did tell me you and that asshole brother of yours opened another store.”
I let it go. He never liked Aaron much, especially because my big brother refused to let Rico invest in the business when we were first starting out. Aaron was smart that way.
“Yeah,” I said, “out in Brookville.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. So did Larry sound okay? Did he seem like the ambitious prick we both know him to be?”
Rico thought about that, dragging his fingers and palm across a week’s worth of beard. I could read the answer in his expression, but I let him say it anyway.
“Nah, something was up with him. He was quiet-like, you know, sorta thoughtful and philosophical almost. That ain’t Larry. Ferguson May, maybe, but not Larry Mac.”
“Anything else? Did he actually say anything out of the ordinary? Do anything out of the ordinary?”
Rico hesitated, a veil of genuine concern on his face. “Yeah, well. . he. . he threw me an extra hundred bucks. But he did that sometimes.”
“This time was different, right? I can see it in your face.”
“Different, yeah, but I can’t say how. An extra C-note is an extra C-note is an extra C-note. I can’t afford to be too. . You know how it is.”
I didn’t, but I could guess. He noticed the pity on my face as I stared at the appalling condition of his room.
“Better to live in a shitbag room like this than in a fucking cell, Moe. A cell’s no place for a man. Once you go in, you never really get out.”
The conversation was going in a direction I wasn’t willing to follow.
“Can I use the head?”
“Sure,” he said.
I closed the door behind me. After I pissed, I ran the water a little and took five twenties out of my wallet. I slipped them under Rico’s disposable razor and closed the medicine cabinet. When I came out, I handed him a business card and asked if he needed a few bucks to hold him over.
“No thanks, Moe.”
“Okay. You hear anything from Larry, you call me.”
“I’ll call.”
This time I put my hand out to him. He took it, but not too eagerly. Ten years of hard feelings and hurt weren’t going to disappear in ten minutes.
“I didn’t ask about Katy and Sarah because Larry tells me about them,” he said, embarrassed.
“That’s okay, Rico. Let’s just worry about Larry for now.”
As I walked down the hall I heard the locks clicking shut. When I reached the stairs I nearly ran into the chubby girl who had since shed the one-eyed cat. Her impassive expression had been replaced by one of loathing and disgust. Her near-black eyes cut deep. I thought she might spit at me, but she moved on. I understood. She had mistaken
CHAPTER SIX
It was nothing, a small piece in the Daily News that only a few days before would have meant less to me than the death of a moth. At first, the words didn’t quite register. I read past the article and accompanying photo, and went back to it. Two hikers in the wildlife preserve area of Gateway National Park had stumbled over a body. The unidentified man had some holes in his head besides the ones God included in the original design. It’s not like dead bodies never turned up in the preserve.
Once, decades ago, before the coastal area that stretched from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to the Rockaways to the approaches around Kennedy Airport had been turned into a national park, the reeds, marshes, and murky inlets along Jamaica Bay had been a favorite dumping ground for the prematurely dead. But since the area was now federally protected and the nearby Fountain Avenue landfill closed, murderers had had to find alternative, less conspicuous places in which to discard their trash. I didn’t give the subject much thought.
I was too busy staring at the black-and-white photo of what was described as a gold and diamond-encrusted ID bracelet. The bold block letters spelled out the name MALIK. Malik was described as a light-skinned black male, five-foot-seven inches tall, weighing one hundred and fifty-five pounds, approximately thirty years of age. He had light brown eyes, no fa
cial hair, and a close-cropped haircut. Although these days Malik wasn’t exactly an uncommon name, I suddenly felt very uneasy. I sensed the fan blades spinning faster and that the shit was moving in their general direction.
Another round of calls to all the people Larry and I had in common netted me nothing. I had avoided getting back to Margaret until
Those calls, the ones to Margaret and my old acquaintances, were easy compared to the one I was about to make. The single condition of my partnership with my brother was that I be allowed to work cases whenever I wished. The reality of it was that I averaged about one case every two years, and even then I used vacation days to account for my time away from the business. In my heart I knew that Aaron had agreed because he believed my passion for the job would fade like the taste of a first kiss. He was a smart man, my brother Aaron. Money in a man’s pocket, a nice house, a new car, and a comfortable life can kill passion as effectively as a thousand different poisons. But what Aaron forgot is that the taste of some first kisses never fade.
Originally, I’d gotten my P.I. license as a way to salve my wounds, a way to lie to myself that I wouldn’t let myself be swallowed up by the wine business. It was a conceit, a hedge against the “ifs” in life. Now, as I dug my license out of my sock drawer and stared at it, it felt like a lifesaver. I blew the light covering of dust off its black vinyl case and slipped it into my back pocket.
“City On The Vine,” Aaron answered on the second ring.
“Hey, big brother.”
“What is it? Is something wrong? Something’s wrong! I can hear it in your voice.”
“The Amazing Aaron, four syllables and he predicts all.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You always think something’s wrong.”
“So,” he said, “am I usually right?”
“Yes, you’re usually right about something being wrong. In this world, that’s an easy guess. But, this time, you’re wrong about something being wrong. I’m taking a few days to work on a-”
“What? Are you completely meshugge? We opened a new store less than a-”
“It’s a case. It’s our deal. No going back on the deal.”
“For chrissakes, Moe, grow up already! You’re off the cops twelve years and your chances have come and gone. This is your business now. This is your life.”
Ouch! That landed solid as a chopping right hook over a pawing jab.
“The deal’s the deal, Aaron. Kosta’s in town and he’ll cover for me.”
“But we-”
“I’ll be in the store for my shift later today and I’ll arrange everything with Kosta,” I promised. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry, he tells me. Am I allowed to ask what this is all about?”
“I’m not sure what it’s all about. Maybe nothing.”
“Why do I ask?”
“Good question. Why do you ask?”
The truth was, I didn’t know whether there really was something here or whether I just wanted there to be. I think maybe it was a little bit of both. If Larry Mac turned up tomorrow morning sporting a new tan and this stiff in the paper with the gaudy jewelry was a different Malik than the one I heard being interrogated by the cops, it was back to the sock drawer for my P.I. license and back to my exile in the French reds aisle. Katy, a graphic designer, was down working in her basement studio. It was my turn to drop Sarah off at school. As I sipped my coffee, waiting for her to come down the stairs, something else occurred to me, something ugly that refused to be ignored. If those two hikers had in fact stumbled over the Malik, a.k.a. Melvin, then his death stood to do a lot more for Larry Mac’s constitution than a week in the Caribbean. Dead men don’t hold up well under cross-examination.
Robert Hiram Fishbein bore an unfortunate resemblance to the late Groucho Marx, but in spite of his looks, he’d once been a political highflyer. The District Attorney of Queens County was an even more ambitious man than Larry McDonald. And that is really saying something. Fishbein, perhaps beyond any of us connected with the Moira Heaton investigation, had benefitted from its conclusion. Of course, if the real facts were ever made public, it would have done very few of us proud.
That said, D.A. Fishbein had parlayed the good press that followed in the wake of the Heaton case into a lot of goodwill, political capital, and, most importantly, into a nice fat campaign chest. Unfortunately, he’d ignored his handlers’ sage advice to run for state attorney general and overplayed his hand. Instead, he mounted a feeble campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and got squashed like a bug. His message played about as well upstate as a minstrel show in Brownsville. That was the difference between him and Larry Mac. Fishbein had let his ambition control him. Larry had the knack for modulating his ambition so that he could keep his eye on the individual steps on the way to the penthouse.
Fishbein, having squandered his big chance, had settled into a kind of comfortable purgatory. He could be Queens D.A. forever, and never anything more. But I understood ambitious men and knew he would not, could not accept his fate. For years, no doubt, he had tormented himself with false hope that there must be some way for him to crawl out of his dungeon and regain the spotlight. That’s why I knew he would take my call. I was a good luck charm. I’d gotten him to the main stage once before. Why not again?
The Queens D.A.’s office might seem like an odd place for me to start, but frankly, Fishbein was about my best option. A cop may be a cop for life in his own head. The rest of the world, however, stops seeing him that way the second he takes off his uniform. As time passes, his old buddies barter their badges for golf bags and he’s left with no connections on the force. Of course I knew lots of cops, but unlike guys who moved around a lot, I had spent my entire abbreviated career in one precinct. The only guys I’d ever been really tight with had served with me in the Six-O. With Larry missing, Rico disgraced, Ferguson May dead, and the rest of my ex-precinct-mates possibly under suspicion for taking bribe money from a murdered drug lord, I didn’t have a lot of places to go.
“Prager, how the hell are you?” Fishbein, normally cool and shrewd, couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “What can I do for you?”
“Maybe I can do something for you, Mr. D.A.”
There was a profound silence on the other end of the phone. His prayers had been answered. Praise the lord!
“Like what?” he wondered, more composed.
“I can’t really say now, but it could be big. I’ll need your help.”
“You’ve gotta give me more than that, Prager.” He was anxious, not a fool.
“Drugs and cops,” I said.
More silence. Then, “What do you need?”
“For now, I need to know everything about the body that was found in Gateway National Park last night. I mean everything.”
“That’s federal.”
“C’mon, Mr. D.A., let’s not dance that dance, okay?”
“Do you have a fax machine?”
I gave him the number.
“You’ll have it within the hour,” he promised. “Anything else?”
“Just one thing.”
“And that is?”
“If this amounts to anything, you might have some jurisdictional issues. In the end, you might be stepping on some very sensitive toes.”
“You let me worry about that,” he said. “I can step very softly when I have to, or step down really hard when it suits the purpose. If you catch my meaning.”
I caught it all right. The flip side of his desperation was fury. I was being warned about playing with fire-hellfire. If I was involving him now in something that resulted in a second public embarrassment, he wasn’t going to suffer it alone. I was going down with him and I was going down hard.
“I was a good gloveman in baseball,” I said. “Caught almost everything hit my way.”
“I’m glad that we understand one another, Mr. Prager. Because to extend your baseball analogy, I’m the manager of a team on the wrong side of a one-ru
n game in the bottom of the ninth, and we’re down to the last strike. We lose the game and-”
“-you’re looking for a new managerial position,” I said, regretting I had started us along this metaphorical road.
“Yes, we’ll both be out of the game for good.”
Time to put an end to this. “I’ll be waiting for your fax.”
I rang off before he could give me the bunt sign.
I sat at my desk in the office of Red, White and You, watching the fax machine. As a way to pass time, it ranked right up there with reading James Joyce. At least I didn’t have to pretend to enjoy it. Fishbein
The unease I felt at the breakfast table proved well-founded. The body discovered in the reeds between Rockaway Boulevard in Brooklyn and Crossbay Boulevard in Queens had been positively identified as Melvin Broadbent, a.k.a. Malik Jabbar, born May 26, 1959, in the maternity ward of Coney Island Hospital. By the look of his rap sheet, Malik’s favorite pastime seemed to be getting arrested. Most of his arrests were for petty crap and he’d done the bulk of his penal tour at local venues: first Spofford as a kid, then the Brooklyn Tombs, then Rikers. Many of his arrests were for minor drug offenses, but he walked on almost all of those. He had done a short bid in Sing Sing or, as it was referred to these days, Ossining. Funny thing was, there seemed to be no record of his recent arrest for that coke taped to his dashboard.
I moved on to a less amusing section of the fax: his autopsy photos and report. No wallet or other ID had been found on the body, but the bracelet was discovered in the wet sand beneath him when the cops rolled him over. Good thing the fax had included a photo of Malik from one of his myriad arrests, because homicide had taken a toll on his boyish good looks. The two hollow-point loads put into the back of his head had removed large swaths of his face on the way out. And what the bullets had started, sand crabs and insects had finished. The autopsy photos were hard to look at, even for me. I decided to have a seat and to keep my lunch where it belonged. I’d gotten the gist of the report. I took down Malik’s address, phone numbers, etc., and placed the fax in a folder.
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