The James Deans

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I did it.”

  He sat opposite me. “So, little brother, I guess this means good-bye.” He tossed the shield onto the desk. “It’s not like I thought this day might not come, but shoving that thing in my hand wasn’t exactly the most subtle approach. Why didn’t you just pay a guy to skywrite it over Brooklyn? It would have saved you the trip.”

  “Sorry about that. Besides, I haven’t made up my mind yet. Right now, it’s just an offer.”

  “Don’t take me for a yutz, Moses. You’re going back, because you have to. It’s unfinished business for you. You wanna be like Daddy, always wondering what could have been? I won’t let you do that.”

  “You won’t let me, huh?”

  “That’s right. What, you think you’re the only insightful one in the family, that Miriam and me are brain-dead?”

  “Not Miriam.”

  “Fuck you.” He raised his hand playfully. “I know that you only got involved in the business for my sake. This was never your dream. Christ, Moe, it’s only even half mine. A lot of this is for Daddy. Your share of the business will be here when you get back. I suppose you know this means we’re gonna have to hire new help and give Her Royal Highness, Klaus, a raise.”

  “I know. Thank you, big brother.” I stood, walked around the desk, and hugged Aaron. I hugged and kissed him.

  “What was that for?”

  “For Katy. She told me to kiss you. I guess maybe she knows you better than I thought.”

  “Make us proud, Detective Prager,” he said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  AND SO IT was done. If I could still shoot straight, I was to be reinstated as of September 26, 1983. My physical exam had already been seen to, the doctor conveniently neglecting to examine my knees. I would be a detective third grade. In the interim, I’d be back at the academy a few days a week brushing up on changes in the law and procedure. To get a feel for where I might want to be assigned and to get my feet wet, I would also be doing ride-alongs with different detective units. As Larry Mac kept reminding me, this wasn’t just like getting back up on the horse. I’d grown used to regular hours and the easy life. Five years away from the street had taken the edge off.

  If Katy had any mixed feelings about my return to duty, she hid them well. Like Aaron, she understood that this was an opportunity that would not come again. She knew this wasn’t going to last forever. I was going to hit forty in a few years, and unlike Larry McDonald, I had no ambition beyond detective. Katy also got that detective work tended not to be very dangerous stuff. I think if they had offered to put me back on the street, Katy wouldn’t have been nearly so gung ho. Nor would I.

  Aaron was as good in deed as in word. Maybe even a little too good. Initially, he resisted the notion that I take a cut in my share of the business. In the end, though, he saw the wisdom in doing it my way. He was taking on a huge burden and deserved to be compensated for it. A wise man once said you can’t have a fifty-fifty partnership if one of the partners does one hundred percent of the work. So he gave Klaus a raise, began interviewing new people, and elevated my old buddy Kosta to manager. Kosta, whose previous claim to fame had been managing failed punk bands, nearly fainted at the prospect of earning a substantial income.

  Then the envelope came. I recognized it the moment the mailman pulled it out of his pouch. It had been ten days since I had spoken to Judith Resnick that last time. The check was mailed, and in all the fuss surrounding my return to the job, I’d nearly forgotten HNJ1956. It had receded to that place where curiosities go when left immediately unfulfilled. I remembered back to the first time I’d heard Moira Heaton’s name. Thomas Geary had spoken it to me at his daughter’s wedding. A wedding that now seemed long long ago. I had been so curious the next day, that Sunday, when I went to Pete’s place. Then the curiosity had faded. If Geary and Brightman had not elected to rekindle my interest, Moira would have been forgotten like a windblown leaf tumbling across my path.

  The envelope was the shade of a paper grocery bag. I held it in my hand for what seemed like a half hour but was probably no more than twenty seconds. It was both thick and light, as one would expect an envelope stuffed with newspaper clippings to be. Walking to the office, I wondered whether I should bother opening it, or just let the past be. Moira was dead. Her murderer was behind bars. Nothing in this packet was going to change that. Looking back, I felt almost stupid for having pursued the matter with such fervor in the first place. In some ways it had all been about my ego. I thought I owed John Heaton an apology. Maybe I’d get around to it someday.

  I tossed the envelope in the trash, but realized there was a balance due. If I didn’t open up the envelope … Screw that. I’d call Judith and get the tab and thank her personally.

  “Hello,” a younger, unfamiliar female voice answered, “Media Search, what’s up?”

  “Is Judith Resnick there?”

  “She’s not in. Her dad passed away yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have an address I can send—”

  “Hold on, yeah, here it is. Twenty-four Montrose Place, Melville, New York 11747.”

  “Thanks,” I said distractedly as I jotted the zip down. “If you don’t mind me asking, to whom am I speaking?”

  “Janey.”

  “Are you an employee, Janey?”

  “Nope. They’re all at the funeral. I’m a temp, just here to answer the phones today.”

  “So I guess you wouldn’t be able to help—”

  “Mister, if it don’t involve picking up the phone, I can’t help you.”

  “Thanks again, Janey.”

  I had a basket of fruits and chocolates sent to the house at 24 Montrose Place and then fished the Media Search, Inc., package out of the trash. The least I could do was to pay the bill and get on with the newest chapter in my life.

  I dumped the contents of the envelope out onto my desk. There was less inside than I had thought, about forty photocopies of newspaper stories and an invoice. Most of the girth of the envelope, as it happened, resulted from a thick layer of protective stuffing. Ignoring the clippings, I plucked out the invoice. The balance was a tidy one hundred dollars. Attached to the invoice was a note from Judith.

  Moe—

  Sorry, but this is all we came up with. Though you asked for only 1956, we found one story in particular that reappeared for several years hence. We included those articles at no extra charge to you. Hope this is what you were searching for. Maybe we can have a drink sometime.

  Regards,

  Jude

  It turned out that 1956 was a big year for bicycle giveaways in New Jersey towns that began with the letter H. I suspect that was true in many towns across the country. Nineteen fifty-six was a prosperous year, a good year unless you were a Communist or a Brooklyn Dodger fan. In Washington, D.C., those two disparate affiliations were often seen as one.

  In Hackensack, a boy named Jeffrey Bigdow won a Schwinn for his eleventh birthday by simply entering his name in a drawing. Annie Gault won a pink Huffy in Hobbs End and Calvin Brown, a bright Negro student at St. Mallory’s, as the Hoboken Journal described him, won a Raleigh English Racer. The saddest story, and the only one I thought might have interested Moira, was about Hildie Steen, an eight-year-old girl who was dying of an incurable childhood disease. These days we call that cancer, but back then you didn’t write the words “child” and “cancer” in the same sentence. Hildie had been given a two-wheeler by Hasbrouck Bicycles for her birthday, but died before it was delivered to the hospital. I put that story aside.

  The remainder of the clippings referred to the story Judith had mentioned in her note. It had nothing to do with promotional giveaways or little girls with incurable diseases. It had to do with homicide. The stories were in chronological order. The first one, dated October 17, 1956, was from the Hallworth Herald.

  MAYOR STIPE’S BOY MURDERED

  Hallworth, N.J.—Carl Stipe, the nine-year-old son
of Mayor Michael James Stipe, was found murdered last evening in the woods near the reservoir. The boy had been reported missing by his mother earlier in the afternoon when he failed to return home from school at the expected time. The case has already been turned over to the New Jersey State Police, who have thus far refused comment. No details about the condition of the body or cause of death have been released. One member of the search team that combed the woods did say the boy’s bicycle seemed to be missing. The mayor and his wife are …

  Other, more detailed stories, from bigger area newspapers, appeared with headlines like STIPE’S SON SUFFOCATED BY STICKS, STOLEN BIKE STILL MISSING, STATE POLICE STUMPED. DRIFTER PICKED-UP, DRIFTER RELEASED, STIPE DRIFTER DROWNS.

  Even couched in the less graphic language of the day, the papers detailed a rather gruesome murder. The police theorized that Carl Stipe had been attacked while taking a popular shortcut home from a friend’s house. His attacker had knocked Carl off his bicycle and had tried to molest the boy. The cops pointed to the boy’s torn clothes as proof of this. But the boy must have struggled and started to scream. In order to keep his victim quiet or to satisfy some deviant fetish, the attacker grabbed a stick and shoved it down the boy’s throat. That first stick snapped and the attacker shoved in another stick, then another. The sticks blocked his trachea, and the Stipe boy quickly suffocated.

  The attacker panicked and, using the boy’s bicycle, fled. Unfortunately, the leaves and pine needles that covered the ground near the crime scene and the windy weather made it impossible for the police to retrieve any tread or footprint evidence. The only lead the cops had concerned a “drifter” two town kids had spotted leaving the vicinity on a bicycle. The boys, acquaintances of the victim, could not say for sure if the bicycle was Carl Stipe’s.

  About a week later, a man named Andrew Martz was picked up for questioning in the nearby town of Closter. Martz, with no current address and a history of psychiatric problems, seemed like a good fit to the state police. However, the town’s boys could not positively identify him, nor did the state police have any physical evidence tying Martz to the victim or the crime scene. They were forced to release him. Some weeks later, Martz’s body washed up on the New York side of the Hudson. He had drowned, but whether it was homicide, suicide, or an accident, no one could say.

  After Martz had turned up dead, the interest in the story faded. Most folks in the area simply accepted that Martz had been the guilty party and got on with their lives. The following October an article appeared in the Hallworth Herald marking the one-year anniversary of the as yet unsolved murder of Carl Stipe. Articles just like it appeared every year until 1968. By then, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the assassinations, the space program, the Beatles, and free love had squeezed out the memory of a murdered little boy.

  Then in 1974, articles of a completely different nature began appearing. Carl Stipe’s murder had apparently given rise to a peculiar Halloween ritual. Teenagers, most not yet born when Carl Stipe had been murdered, would dress like either Carl Stipe or Andrew Martz, meet in the woods by the reservoir, and reenact the murder. They’d light a bonfire and hold a séance, trying to contact the dead boy’s spirit. By ‘76, the local cops had put an end to the macabre ceremony. The last mention of the murder came in a 1980 obit for the former mayor of Hallworth, Michael James Stipe.

  It was all very interesting and terribly sad, but not any more connected to Moira Heaton than Annie Gault or Calvin Brown or Hildie Steen. Maybe John Heaton, drunk as a skunk most of the time, had gotten it wrong about the kid and the bicycle. Maybe he was just fucking with me. Whatever HNJ1956 might have been, it was no longer of concern to me. I wrote out a check to Media Search, Inc., for the balance, attached a note of condolence, and stuffed it into an envelope for tomorrow’s mail. And if I had any lingering doubts, they were put to rest by Sandra Sotomayor when she rang me up later that afternoon.

  “Hey, Sandra, what can I do for you?”

  “It bothered me for a long time after you called about Moira and that file, so I went back to look over all of Moira’s work. I found a file where she was helping a woman try and locate a man she had immigrated with in the fifties. I see here that the man’s name was Hernando N. Javier” —enunciated with the perfection of a native speaker—“and Moira made a notation, HNJ1956. There are copies of notes from Moira to the INS and from the INS saying they needed more information to locate the man. I think Moira was doing this thing for the woman on her own.”

  “You’re probably right, Sandra. Thank you very much.”

  So I had been sent on a wild goose chase by John Heaton and spent two hundred bucks to read sad, old newspaper clippings. My maternal grandmother, Bubbeh, we called her, never read a newspaper or listened to the news a day in her life. Aaron once asked her about it.

  “Jews, ve got tsuris enough of our own. Ve don’t need to borrow from strangers.”

  She had a point.

  Chapter Sixteen

  NEVER THE BEST shot on Earth, I still managed to qualify at the range. Up to that point, I had been reluctant to let Katy start inviting people to the reinstatement/promotion party she, Aaron, and my sister, Miriam, had planned. I’d just finished doing a ride-along with detectives from Midtown South and I was pretty well wired. Oh God, how I remembered that feeling, the bizarre combination of elation and exhaustion. I wanted a drink, but the detectives who’d been saddled with me all shift long had families on Long Island that needed getting home to. I decided to kill two wild turkeys with one call.

  Wit was glad to hear from me and even more pleased to share a drink. Although he had not profited directly from the solution of Moira’s murder, his exposé on Brightman in this month’s Esquire had thrust him squarely into the limelight, a place he rather much enjoyed. He was now the subject of nearly as many interviews as Steven Brightman.

  He offered to have me to the Yale Club again, but I declined. I thought we might do the Yale Club for dinner another time. Katy, I told him, was a bit of an Ivy League wannabe and would just be thrilled to enter the realm of the Elis. He told me to consider it done. I decided Pooty’s, Pete Parson’s soon-to-be former bar, would be a good place to meet. I could get that drink and invite both of them to the party.

  Pooty’s was doing brisk business. Pete, wearing a rather sour puss, was working up front with a bartender who made Joey Ramone look tan and healthy. Not only was this guy sickly looking, but he moved at a pace somewhere between super slo-mo and catatonic. He aspired to lethargy. Pete’s face brightened when he noticed his two newest customers.

  “You want me to jump back there and give you a hand?”

  “Thanks, Moe, but don’t worry about it. Hey, Wit.” Pete reached over and shook our hands. “One Wild Turkey rocks, one Dewar’s rocks coming up.” Pete placed them on the bar and took a moment to share a Bud with us.

  “Can that guy move any slower?” I asked.

  “Are you kiddin'? This fucking guy’s so slow we have to scrape the moss and barnacles off him after every shift.”

  Wit liked that. “Can I steal that line, Pete?”

  “You, Mr. Fenn, can take anything you’d like. It’s because of you this joint is so crowded.”

  “How’s that?” Wit wondered.

  “Your Esquire article,” Pete said. “Look around and behold. This ain’t our regular crowd. When you mentioned me and my kid and this place … And it was perfect timing, too,” he chortled. “My buyout from my partners is based partially on this month’s sales.”

  That got my attention. “You mentioned Pooty’s?”

  “I’m crushed,” Wit said, putting a hand to his heart. “You haven’t read the piece?”

  “Oops! Sorry, Wit. I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. By the way, I wanted to talk to both of you about that. Katy and my brother and sister are throwing a little party for me on September 28 at Sonny’s in Brooklyn.”

  Pete squinted suspiciously. “A party?”

  “To celebrate your what, exact
ly?” Wit was curious too.

  I pulled out shield number 353. “On the Monday following the party, you two will have to refer to me as Detective Prager.”

  “Holy shit! Congratulations, Moe.” Pete reached across the bar and patted my back. “I know it’s what you always wanted. Okay, everybody, listen up!” Pete shouted the barroom to a hush. “Your next round is on the house. We’re celebrating.” He leaned over to Wit and me. “Excuse me, guys. I gotta help Mr. Inertia over here. I’ll join you in a few.”

  Wit’s reaction was more reserved, his journalistic skepticism switch locked in the on position. “Yes, Moe, congratulations. This detective thing is sudden, isn’t it?”

  I gave him a brief rundown on the offer. “I guess it was Larry Mac’s way of saying thanks. He owes me from way back and he knows how much it means to me.”

  “Yes, exactly. He knows how much this means.”

  “Look, Wit, I got screwed out of a shield a long time ago. Then I turned it down once. I’m a big believer in the rule of threes. If I turn it down now—”

  “I’m sorry, Moe. Please forgive me. It’s just the reporter in me. I see conspiracies hidden in every good intention. An occupational hazard, I suppose.”

  “That’s okay, Wit. Cops suffer from a similar syndrome. Just ask Pete.”

  Wit didn’t ask Pete. Instead, he led a toast to me with the free round of drinks our host had provided. He was rather eloquent in his praise and hope for my future success, yet his skepticism had put a damper on things. Not that you could tell by how we were acting. By ten that night, Pete had performed “Danny Boy” three times, once as Donald Duck. Wit had done several card tricks and regaled the bar with stories of the rich and the dead. Not so talented as my friends, I simply drank myself silly.

  DRY-MOUTHED AND nearly sober, I found myself pacing the kitchen floor at four in the morning. I would have given anything for the house to not be so quiet. When paranoia and suspicion are toying with your head, a quiet house can be your worst enemy. It wasn’t so much what Wit had said that bothered me, it was more the way he’d said it. And his face! It was evident he thought I was somehow being bought off. Now I regretted not having discussed it with him further.