Neptune Avenue

by Gabriel Cohen

  Upstairs, he found Mr. Gardner sitting in his murky front room, in his duct-tape-patched recliner, watching the local news. The old man had always been short and stocky, but the weight had melted off after his stroke a couple years back, leaving behind a shriveled, bespectacled garden gnome. Jack handed him a can of Schaefer and then dropped down onto the spavined, nubbly couch.

  On the TV, a massive old console that had probably once displayed the original Honeymooners, a reporter with starched blond hair was delivering a report about a pothole in Forest Hills, intoning so gravely she might as well have been describing the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Jack shook his head. Where did they find these people, these puffed-up androids?

  During a commercial for maxi pads, both men instinctively turned away from the screen’s blue glow. Mr. G trained his thick eyeglasses on his tenant. “Hey, whatever happened with that lady friend of yours, that … what was her name? I ain’t seen her around for a long time.”

  Jack stared down at his beer, working up a fib. “She, ah … she got a job out in California.”

  Thankfully, Mr. G—easily distracted—had returned his attention to the TV, where they were showing footage of a factory explosion in Tennessee. (Which had nothing whatsoever to do with local news, but fulfilled the station’s mission of constantly providing viewers with something to gawp at.)

  Now that they had gotten past the one subject Jack didn’t want to discuss, they sat in a companionable silence. Jack glanced around the dimly lit room: a shelf of knickknacks collected by Mr. Gardner’s long-deceased wife, a bookcase holding rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a pair of shriveled leather slippers lying on the worn carpet. Mr. G lived a lonely life, enlivened only by visits from his health care aide or much rarer visits from his uptight son. Jack thought of his apartment below: was his own home life so different? He had been divorced for more than fifteen years, had settled into a comfortable bachelor routine where he didn’t ask for anything outside of his work—and then romance had given him a whole new life. He had become spoiled, and it had blown up in his face. He was learning to accept less all over again.

  When the local news gave way to “entertainment news”—celebrities falling in and out of rehab, making babies, then bailing out on their childish marriages—his tolerance meter pushed too far into the red. He rubbed his hands on his knees and stood up.

  Mr. Gardner turned away from the TV, its light reflecting sideways on his thick bifocals. “You okay, Jackie?”

  Jack frowned. The old man knew; he didn’t miss a trick. He reached out and squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “I’m fine, Mr. G.”

  Downstairs, he heated up the remains of the chow mein and ate it on his kitchen table with The Daily News spread out in front of him. He couldn’t focus on the words tonight. He rose, placed his dirty plate in the sink, then walked through his empty apartment. He had done his best to remove all traces of Michelle: some lotion she had left in the bathroom cabinet, bobby pins on his dresser, the earplugs she had used when he snored … Wincing inside, he went to his small office at the front of the apartment, sat at his desk, and reached under a stack of medical papers. (He’d been shot in the chest two years before, after an ambush on a dark street in Red Hook. His insurance company had supposedly covered his surgery and hospital care, but the bills kept coming.)

  There was one romantic memento left, this snapshot he now held in his hands, taken by his friend and colleague Gary Daskivitch. The big young bear of a detective had introduced him to Michelle in the first place, had set up their original blind date. Occasionally they had all gone out together, Jack and Michelle, Daskivitch and his cute little red-haired wife.

  He stared down at the picture. Wood paneling in the background, light glinting off rows of bottles. Monsalvo’s bar, a local dive he’d frequented for years, for a quick draft after work. Both couples had sat in a back booth, laughing, when they weren’t gathered around the jukebox—Dolly Parton singing “Crimson and Clover,” Sinatra crooning “The Way You Look Tonight”—or waltzing across the ancient linoleum floor or playing a new video bowling game old Monsalvo had (shockingly) installed, trying to keep up with the times. In the picture, Jack sat with Michelle leaning against him, her head on his shoulder, her black hair shining faintly in the dim light, eyes closed, a beautiful, soft look on her face. He had cupped her cheek in his palm and gazed down at her, heart full of love He sighed. Enough of this crap. He had worked hard to harden himself, just like he did at work. Nothing personal, that was the credo. He carried the picture into the kitchen and lit a burner on the stove. I’m through with romance, he said to himself, and lifted the photo toward the flame—but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t give up this bittersweet vestige, this last sadly pleasurable source of pain.

  BROOKLYN SOUTH HOMICIDE WAS headquartered in Coney Island. When Jack stopped by early the next morning, he noticed two things in quick succession.

  First, he veered into the back room, where he discovered that—pet peeve—nobody had bothered to refill the old Mr. Coffee maker that sat on one of the storage shelves.

  And then he came back into the squad room, glanced up at the wall, and stopped short. A big erasable bulletin board held the names of all of the victims in current homicide cases. A new name jumped out at him. And he knew that his claim about taking every case impersonally was about to get shot to hell.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DANIEL LELO.

  He had hoped there might be another Brooklynite with the same name. Even as the attendant pulled out the drawer, he held on to that slim chance. The morgue was freezing, especially after the August heat outside, but now a deeper chill ran up his spine.

  The victim had a bullet hole in the center of his forehead, and undoubtedly the back of the head would be a pulpy mess, yet the stern, round face was easily recognizable. Jack noticed powder burns speckling the skin, which indicated that Daniel had been shot from a distance of less than eighteen inches. Killed in his car, the report said. On Neptune Avenue.

  Jack stared down at his friend. Daniel had been a big man, with a body like a seal’s; it was hefty, but you sensed that there was plenty of muscle underneath. And here was his tattoo: a mermaid drawn crudely on his left shoulder.

  The man had been lying down when Jack had first seen him two years ago, when they had been in the hospital together, but warm blood had coursed through Daniel’s veins, and his eyes had been able to move, at least enough to follow an overhead TV. …

  AT FIRST, JACK HAD been given a private room. He’d felt like a dog hit by a car: he just wanted to curl up and sleep. Across the hall, though, lay a wounded gangbanger who shouted and complained all night long.

  “Gimme some morphine!” the kid whined. And “Where are my goddamned Mar’boros?”

  Jack wanted to march over, put a stop to the noise, and give the poor nurses a break. But he couldn’t even sit up.

  The racket went on. At 2 A.M. he managed to reach the call button. While he waited for someone to come, he fingered the bandage on his chest. The entry wound beneath it was only the size of a dime. As a veteran homicide detective, this didn’t surprise him—he had seen more bullet holes than he could remember, and they were often modest. Inside, though, the burning metal had passed through his lung and a fragment had lodged in one of his vertebrae—its heat had shocked his spinal cord, causing temporary paralysis from his chest down.

  He lay waiting in the dark. Finally a nurse arrived, a calm Filipina.

  “Everything okay?” she asked. She leaned over to check a burbling tube they had inserted between his ribs.

  “I’m all right,” Jack croaked. He paused to draw another breath. “Is there any way I could get moved somewhere else?”

  The nurse sighed. “I’d like to help you, but it’s Saturday night.” They both knew what that meant. A New York City hospital was a zoo on even the slowest nights.

  “Yo, bitch!” the gangbanger shouted. “I need some morphine!”

  The nurse shook
her head. “The young men act so macho when they start a fight, but when they get shot they turn into the biggest babies.” She gave Jack a sympathetic look. “I’ll try to move you, but I can’t promise another private room.”

  “That’s all right—I’ll take anything.”

  She patted his hand where it lay on top of the covers. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  And so, the next morning, he found himself lying in a double room, across from Daniel Lelo.

  His new roommate didn’t shout. In fact, he would barely talk. Jack tried to strike up a conversation several times, but the man just muttered—with a strong Russian accent—that he didn’t speak much English. He lay in his bed by the window, staring up at his TV. Jack was not surprised by the man’s terse replies: Russian immigrants often distrusted the police. It didn’t help that the room was visited all day by a steady stream of cops, from fellow detectives to headquarters brass, paying their respects to one of their own.

  The roommate spent much of his time on his cell phone; Jack lay back, listening idly. His own parents had come from Russia, and he could recognize an occasional word, but not nearly enough to make sense of the talk. From what he gathered from overhearing the hospital staff, the man was a gunshot victim too, one of several innocent bystanders caught up in some sort of outdoor shooting in Coney Island.

  That afternoon, the man set down his phone and immersed himself in a book.

  “What’cha reading there?” Jack asked.

  “Chekhov,” the man muttered. “Stories.”

  Jack nodded, though he didn’t know anything about the author. At least the guy had answered. He tried to keep the conversation going. “Wasn’t there a guy on Star Trek named Chekhov? My son used to love that show.”

  The Russian just frowned.

  Jack turned away. He wished he could get up and take a hot shower, but that wasn’t an option: nearly a week of bed rest had lowered his blood pressure so much that even raising his head made him feel faint, as if all his blood had taken a quick elevator ride south. The doctors had a fancy term for it: orthostatic hypertension.

  Late in the day, the Russian put down his book and turned on his TV. Static filled the screen. The man raised his remote again. The field of static was replaced by another, then another. The Russian muttered a curse, one Jack’s father had used when drunk.

  “Too bad about your set there,” he said, giving the neighborly thing one last chance.

  The Russian just scowled.

  A few minutes before dinnertime, the hospital chaplain poked his head in the doorway.

  “Jack Leightner?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’d like to invite you to our services on Sunday.”

  “I’m Jewish. And I doubt that I’ll be up and about, anyhow.”

  The chaplain frowned at his clipboard. “Sorry about that.” He went on his way.

  Jack turned and found his roommate staring at him. The man’s face seemed less forbidding.

  “You are Jewish? You don’t look it.”

  Jack shrugged.

  “And your first name,” the Russian said. “Like President Kennedyee.”

  Jack smiled. “I guess he wasn’t very Jewish. What’s your name?”

  “Danylets. In this country, people call me Daniel. Where you are from?”

  “Originally? Russia, believe it or not. My father came from somewhere near Leningrad and my mother’s family was from Kiev.”

  The man actually smiled. “Ukraine! Myself also.”

  Jack nodded uncertainly. Ukraine—was that part of Russia? With all the recent chaos in that part of the world, who could keep track? “What do you do?” he asked.

  “In my country, I was brain surgeon. Here, I am taxi driver.”

  “You were a surgeon?” Jack said, eyebrows raised.

  “No.” The Russian grinned hugely. “I heard this on TV. You like?” His face was transformed—he looked boyish, a sunny cherub.

  Jack smiled. He wasn’t much of a joker, but—like all cops—he appreciated wit under pressure.

  The Russian stroked his thinning hair. “Ekshully, I am in business. Import-export.”

  Vague phrase. It made Jack think of knickknacks, like the brightly painted Russian doll his mother had kept on her dresser when he was a kid—he had loved to discover the smaller dolls nested inside. Smaller, smaller … he’d keep going until he reached the last tiny one.

  A knock at the door.

  “Dany?”

  The Russian turned to Jack. “My wife.”

  A woman stood in the doorway. Maybe thirty, she was slim and stunning. She wore a silky black blouse, covered in metallic diagonal stripes. Brighton Beach, Jack thought; the neighborhood was on the south shore of Brooklyn, full of immigrants from Soviet Russia. Their fashions trended to an earlier era.

  The woman didn’t smile; she looked as though maybe she never did. She came in and set down a shopping bag.

  “This is Eugenia,” the Russian told Jack. He turned to her. “Zhenya, this is Zhack. From Kiev.”

  “Very nice.” The wife nodded, with no change of her gloomy expression.

  Jack noticed a short, deep scar on one side of her jaw. Somehow, it only accentuated her beauty.

  “Actually,” he said, “I was born here. My mother came from there.”

  The Russian shrugged. “No problem. You are still a landsman.” Jack recognized the word: Yiddish for “countryman.”

  The woman turned to her bag and started pulling out Tupperware. Jack couldn’t help looking at her, but he caught himself: here he was, thinking about another man’s wife. He was glad that he would soon see his own lovely visitor, Michelle.

  “You must eat with us,” Daniel said to him.

  “Thanks, but I already ordered my dinner.”

  A couple of minutes later an aide, a big, cheerful Jamaican man, came in to deliver Jack’s tray. “What smells so good? That can’t be from our kitchen.”

  “Have some,” the Russian said. His wife started spooning food onto paper plates.

  “Just a little taste.” The aide accepted a plate covered with little dumplings. “What is this, ravioli?”

  “Pelmeni.” The Russian watched him take a bite. “You like?”

  “Man, this stuff is nice. Thank you.”

  The Russian beamed.

  Jack did his best not to stare at his new friend’s wife.

  AND NOW HERE WAS Daniel, or what was left of him, lying in a refrigerated drawer.

  Shot again, Jack mused.

  What were the odds?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BACK IN HIS CAR, he pulled out his cell phone and called Kyle Driscoll about their Crown Heights case. “Listen,” he told the young detective, “I’ve got something I need to take care of. Why don’t you check in with the M.E. and see if he’s got any kind of I.D. on our victim? And then, I guess, keep going with the neighborhood canvass, and I’ll meet up with you as soon as I can.”

  He hung up, feeling a bit guilty after his big speech about priorities. He made another quick call, then dropped the phone into the cup holder next to him. As he drove away from the Kings County Morgue, he thought about the man who had become his hospital comrade. Outside the car, Brooklyn residents limped down Linden Avenue in the blistering heat, but Jack barely saw them. He was focused on another scene, in his mind’s eye.

  The rehab gym had been like a strange dance hall; the patients sat with their wheelchairs in a row, waiting for the physical therapists to take them for a whirl. The long, sunny room was crowded, and everything was forcedly cheery, from the lite rock on the radio to the brightly colored exercise balls stored in nets over the mats. The more mobile patients gritted their teeth and did their best to walk the length of a set of parallel bars, to lift small weights, to keep their balance while standing on yellow DynaDiscs. Others were lucky if they could wiggle their fingers.

  Jack and his roommate had begun working out together, sharing the aches and pains, giving each other encou
ragement. He remembered an afternoon when he had sat in a wheelchair, curling a small dumbbell. Next to him, Daniel breathed heavily between his own sets. He gave Jack a frank, open look. “Do you remember what it was like when you was shot?”

  Jack rested the dumbbell in his lap. He couldn’t recall much about his own shooting—the shock had been overwhelming—but a physical memory came through. He touched his chest. “It was like a hammer. No—a chisel. Sharp.”

  “For me, it was like the bite of a bee.”

  “The sting.”

  “Steeng, yes.” The Russian ran a hand across his broad face. “I never think that one little piece of metal can make life so changed.”

  Jack looked at the Russian and knew exactly what the man meant. Before his shooting, he had been unaware of his belief in an invisible membrane that protected him from the world. He realized it only after that membrane had been brutally ripped apart. Normally, Jack would talk only to fellow cops about his on-the-job experiences; they understood him in a way that even his ex-wife never had. But getting shot was something cops didn’t really understand, even though they witnessed violence all the time. It wasn’t something doctors really understood, either, though gunshot patients were often rolled into their wards. Having a bullet slam into your flesh was not just a physical annoyance, as it seemed in the movies, where a cop might take a hit in the shoulder and then just jump up and run after the bad guys. No—it was a profound psychological disturbance, a violation, a deep emotional trauma. After the incident in Red Hook, Jack had crossed over into a different universe, the world of victims, and this stranger seemed to be the only person who could really appreciate how he felt.