I wanted this over. I was going up to confront Sid; I didn’t call, I just went. He had said he was leaving town. He had said he was heading out to Long Island, but when I’d called his place in Sag Harbor, a woman answered and said Sid had not arrived. She had come in to clean, she said, and there was no sign of him at all. Sid didn’t answer his home phone; he didn’t answer any of his phones.
Maxine was waiting for me at the shore, and I wanted to get down to Avalon, hang out with her and the kids, lie in the sun on the beach, swim, forget Lily, forget the city for a while. It was Tuesday morning. I had a few days more on call, and then I would be gone. Thursday night I’d be on the road. I didn’t have much time. I had to be there.
I didn’t like it that Sid had not showed up on Long Island. Where was he?
If Sid was involved in any way, if he had covered something up, maybe I could help fix things the way he had helped me when I needed him so bad. I thought about Sid and how he reached out to you without talking about it.
Sweating now, climbing the stairs in the old warehouse, I focused on this. I made myself concentrate. Do this, confront Sid, I thought, and get the hell out of the city.
I banged on Sid’s door and when no one answered, I pushed at it hard; it was unlocked, and I lost my balance and stumbled forwards. I stuck my head inside, called out. “Sid?”
There was no answer.
Dread pushed down on me. For a split second I felt as if a heavy wooden press was coming down on me and I couldn’t stop it.
From the floor below came music; from outside, the water lapped around the edges of the brick building, and the rotting wooden docks. I reached inside the door and switched on a light, then, feeling for my gun, went in.
“Sid?”
I was pretty sure the place was empty but I went in slowly. Out of the high windows at the end of the loft, pale sun lit up the water.
I took out a cigarette then put it away. I didn’t want to mess with any smell Sid might have left, anything that would tell me if he had been here or when he’d left, if he was alone, or with someone else.
On the desk was an ashtray but it was empty and had been wiped clean. A blanket was folded neatly on the couch where he sometimes spent the night. I picked it up, a rough Hudson Bay blanket, cream with a wide red and black stripe, and sniffed it. It smelled of new wool, but nothing else, nothing human, no smell of smoke or sweat or sex, only wool and a faint reek of cleaning fluid as if it had been bagged in plastic; it was a different blanket from the one I’d seen the day before. I thought it was different, but I wasn’t sure.
Did it mean anything? I didn’t know. Maybe Sid never slept on the couch. Maybe he sat up all night like he said. The loft was his office, his publishing company. Maybe he went to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights but I had stopped by on my way, and it was shut up tight and an old lady in the basement apartment said she hadn’t seen him in weeks.
Suddenly, my beeper vibrated. I grabbed it, called the number. There was a message to go up to Madison Square Garden and the Republican Convention that day; somebody needed a cop who could talk Russian. I scribbled down the name of the contact on the back of a piece of paper I had in my jeans and shoved it back in a pocket and went to look around Sid’s place.
Above the bookshelves that ran the length of the brick wall were the old prints of Brooklyn, some from the nineteenth century, some newer, some hung neatly, others propped on the top shelf. There was a framed faded photograph of a Russian ship and I took it down and went over to the window where the light was good. I probably needed glasses, but I didn’t want to admit it.
I held the picture up to the light. I could just make out the name of the freighter in Russian: Red Dawn. The ship that had run aground off Red Hook.
Stuck in the corner of the frame was a small black and white snapshot, the edges already turning brownish yellow from age, the paper brittle. In the picture was a boy with a Russian sailor’s cap, looking straight at the camera, wary, worried. He was probably fifteen or sixteen, but so small he looked like a kid; after the war, everyone in Russia was small; a whole generation of children had grown up, starving.
I turned the picture over. June ’53; they must have put the dates on snapshots in those days, I thought. 1953. The year my parents got married. Stalin dead. My own father, only a little older than the boy in the pictures, had been in the navy before he was in the KGB. He had loved the sea and he had taken me fishing, though mostly to a river outside of Moscow. We went on weekends and fished together standing in the river, or sitting on the bank we ate sandwiches and ice cream and talked and he tried to show me how to read the water. I was lousy at it.
I shook the framed picture and a second snapshot fell out from between the picture and the glass. I picked it up from the floor. The same Russian sailor was in it, and next to him was a skinny black teenager holding on to an old-fashioned Schwinn bike. Behind them was the faint outline of the Statue of Liberty. In the black kid’s face you could just see the ghost of Sid McKay. Not the ghost, I thought, the precursor, the boy who would become Sid. There was no one else, no sign of Earl, Sid’s half brother. Maybe Earl had taken the picture. I put the two snapshots in my pocket. I needed a cigarette.
For a minute, I sat on the edge of the desk chair, rocking back and forth, listening to the wheels squeak, looking at the boats on the water, barges, sailboats. Over by Jersey cranes picked at the sky like giraffes. It was addictive, the view, the sense of space, the way you were surrounded by water. It lulled you.
A police boat cruised up to the edge of the basin and sputtered away, maybe routine, maybe checking for problems. The port was vulnerable; the word had come down early in the summer that the ports were easy targets for attack.
Then I saw that the red light was flashing on the answering machine on the desk. I hit the play button. A petal with brown edges fell off a rose that was in a glass jar and dropped on to a pile of about thirty manila folders stacked on the desk, and while I listened to the messages, I opened the top folder. It contained newspaper clippings.
Sid’s phone messages included a reminder of an appointment with his orthopedic surgeon because of his ankle, someone from the New York Times about lunch, a real estate guy who wanted to buy Sid’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights, a woman asking him to a dinner party on St Luke’s Place. Nothing. I kept looking at the folders.
Information, Tolya had said. Sid had information, but all I saw were news clippings and some scribbled notes about Red Hook’s history.
“Call me back,” said a voice on the answering machine that I recognized. “Call me back, man. Call me!” No name, just a number.
I knew the voice. My stomach turned over. I listened to it again, and called the number, and it was busy. I picked up the files on the desk and put them in a plastic bag I found in a desk drawer.
Again I looked around. Nothing seemed out of place. It looked as if Sid had simply walked out, leaving the door unlocked. Maybe he had gone out to get cigarettes. Or someone had called and he had gone to meet them and forgotten to lock up. There were keys hanging on a hook by the door, and I took them. I wasn’t sure why, but I took them.
I stole Sid’s keys, his files, closed the door and left it unlocked in case he came back.
I needed nicotine. I lit up as soon as I got outside Sid’s, then went downstairs and tried to find the loft where the music had come from. I banged on the door, it opened, a young guy, maybe twenty-five, looked out. Behind him was a huge mass of metal. There was some New Age music on a stereo; it sounded like dripping forests.
“Hi,” he said.
“Yeah, hi. Listen, sorry to bother you.”
“It’s OK, man.”
“You know Sid McKay?”
“Sure. Yeah, sure I love Sid. He’s the only other guy around here who’s up early like me, sometimes in the winter it’s pitch-black and I’m still awake trying to like make fucking sense of this sculpture shit I do, and there’s Sid, going out for a walk on the pier, or to get
coffee. He always bangs on my window and asks if I want something and sometimes I go out and walk with him.”
“You saw him this morning?”
“Every morning. Sure.”
“What time?”
He laughed. “Don’t know. But early. Maybe five. Six. I saw him out of the window. I knocked on the glass, he tapped back like always. Sure. Something wrong?”
“You saw him come back?”
“No. I waited, too, he said he’d bring coffee, and I wanted to talk, but I didn’t see him, so I went to bed. Maybe I should have called. You think he’s OK? You a friend of his?”
“Thanks,” I said, my phone still in my hand, redialing the number on Sid’s machine, already heading for my car when I noticed a pair of guys in a kayak floating towards me.
I stuck the bag with Sid’s files in the trunk of my car and walked out on the pier towards the little boat.
The two men, middle-aged, both in T-shirts and shorts, worked hard keeping upright. They paddled seriously, intense, benign expressions on their faces, heading towards the inlet where the homeless guy, Earl, had been found. One of them turned his face towards the sun.
Suddenly, from around the corner of the warehouse, a three-wheeled vehicle appeared and stopped short. A security guard, a fat nimble guy with an angry red face the color of pastrami, leaped out and ran to the edge of the water where he leaned over and put his meaty face as close as he could to the guys in the kayak.
“Get out,” he screamed at them. “Get out of here. Private property,” he shouted, pointing to a battered sign that hung on some chain-link fencing.
The men in the kayak looked at him and each other and then at me. I was a few feet away. I went over to the fat guard and took out my badge and shoved it in his face.
“I don’t remember anyone owning the river,” I said. “I don’t remember this being private property.”
“It’s fucking private property now,” the guard said.
“Whose property? Who hired you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Some company. Listen, I get eight bucks an hour to make sure no one ties up any boats around here, so that’s what I do.”
“What company?”
Reaching in his pocket, he backed off, found a card, tossed it at me. “These people,” he said, and scrambled back into his toy car and buzzed off.
“Hey, thank you,” said one of the men in the kayak. “Thanks.”
I said, “That kind of thing happen a lot?”
He said, “All the time now. People are fighting over property out here like crazy. They want to put in a cruise ship terminal. They want to put up parking lots. You get a decent developer who wants to make it nice, plant some trees, someone else comes and tries to screw with it. You get them fighting. You get other people squeezed. You get people who figure they own the place because they been here, even if they didn’t do anything to fix it up, and others who figure they own it because they arrived the day before yesterday. New York. We’re killing each other for a place to live,” he added.
I said, “You know Sidney McKay?”
The second man looked up. “Sure,” he said. “Everyone knows Sid. He comes and goes, but we see him once in a while at the bar over on Van Brunt. On the water once in a while. He had a nice little boat. Nifty little sailboat,” he added. “Swedish, I think.”
“It had a name?”
“Who?”
“The boat?”
“Can’t remember,” the other guy said, and waved and they paddled away and I went back to my car.
By the time I got through to the number on Sid’s machine, I was already on my way back to the city. The number belonged to Sonny Lippert and I had given it to Sid in case of emergency.
12
I wasn’t back in Manhattan and inside Sonny Lippert’s apartment thirty seconds before he told me Sid had been beat up and was in a coma, next door to dead. No chance, Sonny said, and I turned and made back for the door.
It was my fault. I should have acted. Sid was scared; Sid knew someone was after him. He told me whoever was after him went for Earl by mistake and now they had gone after Sid.
“There’s nothing you can do, man,” Sonny said. “He’s in the hospital. He’s hooked up to every fucking life support. His family is there. There are people on this. Sit down. You knew Sidney McKay, from a long time ago, you told him he could get me at home, right, man? It was you gave him my number.”
I said, “What are the chances he’ll come out of it?”
“No chance. One in ten million. One in a hundred million,” Sonny said.
“How did it happen?”
Sonny was on the balcony of his apartment, sitting on a green canvas chair, drinking tomato juice. He had moved here after his divorce, and it was a depressing place, the leather and tweed bachelor furniture that looked rented, the desolate little balcony where he sat and read and thought about his childhood in Brooklyn.
He held the glass of red juice and examined it with distaste as if it were blood; he was coughing like he would spit out his lungs. Emphysema, the doctor told him. Bad heart. Bad lungs. The machinery rusting, he had said. Like the docks out by Red Hook. Like the sugar refinery that had burned and twisted and rusted.
“You called him? You knew?” I stood over him.
“Sit down. Yeah, I called him. He called me, he left me a message yesterday, but I didn’t call back until this morning. I was too late. And how the hell did you get my message off his machine, by the way? You were at his place? You’re on this case? What? Sit the fuck down, man, there’s nothing you can do for him.”
“He’s not going to make it?”
“I told you: no.”
“How did you hear?”
“Someone from the hospital called me. Someone found my number on Sid. Piece of paper in his pocket.”
“How did it happen?” I leaned into Sonny’s face, my skin drenched with sweat. Sid had been attacked. He was in a coma. He was dying. I was involved. “What hospital?”
“Give me a cigarette,” Sonny said and I tossed him the pack.
“Sid said he didn’t have much time. He said to me, please come. Please hurry. Then he said he was going out of town. He was a lot more scared than I took it, he knew he was in trouble. I just figured some of it for his getting old,” I said.
Sonny snorted. “Yeah, well, aren’t we all, man.” Barefoot, in khaki shorts and a white polo shirt, Sonny was so thin he looked almost like a boy, except for his face; his face was an old man’s now.
“You better lay it out for me, Artie, man,” Sonny added and I sat down on a yellow canvas chair next to him.
“Look, Sid called me Saturday night about some homeless guy he said was stalking him. Calls again the next morning,” I said. “The guy’s dead in Red Hook, trapped under a dock practically next door to where Sid has an office. I went Sunday morning. He had some crazy fucking story about how someone was after him and they killed the homeless guy by mistake, then he changed his mind. I went again yesterday. I owed Sid, I gave him your number in case he needed anything. He was scared, and I gave it to him. I was going to be working the convention and going away to meet Maxine at the shore and I wanted Sid to have someone to call.”
“You didn’t want to share that with me, that you gave McKay my home number?”
“I’m sorry. It was stupid.”
The apology worked. It was what Sonny needed from me, and seeing him like that, seeing him small in his chair, I didn’t mind. Also I needed his help with Sid. For years I had hated it, the way Sonny told people he had invented me, that he got me my first good job, that he used me because I could speak languages and wear a nice suit, that I was his creature. I had hated it but Maxine made me see it didn’t mean squat, that it was just talk. Now I felt sorry for him. I sat down and tried not to look at my watch again.
I said, “Listen, the baseball, it was great. Place of honor in my house, Sonny. I mean, honest to God. You didn’t talk to Sid at all, is that what
you’re saying?”
“I never talked to him. He called me. I called him back, but it was too late. They found his body out near the docks, over by the Gowanus Canal where there are still some shipyards working, you know where I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone tossed him in the water near a wrecked boat, a burned-out boat nobody used for years. An old ferry boat, I think. Staten Island Ferry.”
“Go on.”
“So they pushed him in, and somehow his clothes got caught on a rusty anchor, something like that, I don’t know, from boats, but it caught him, and he hung from below the water level. You get it?”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“They found my number on him when they got him in the hospital,” Sonny said. “You have anything on the first murder, the guy who was stalking McKay?”
“How do you know it was a murder?”
“You think I didn’t check, man? You think I’m that useless? It looks like a murder, and I’m betting you know that, too, so how was McKay connected?”
“He found the guy.”
Sonny said, “Sid’s in the hospital, Methodist, over by Cobble Hill. They brought him in worse than dead. Someone beat him over the head with some kind of metal bar, rusted, a piece out of some machine by the docks. Someone picked up a metal plank and hit him and there were metal splinters sticking out of his skull. Then they dragged him on to that boat.”
“Christ,” I said, remembering Sid told me someone beat Earl over the head with a wood plank before he went into the water. It was as if they were using pieces of the old docks to murder people who got in the way, but in the way of what?
I stood up.
“Wait.”
“What for? I have to go to work and then I’m going out to see Sid.”
“You can’t help him.”
“Then help me.”
“Sit down,” Sonny said.
My skin was crawling. Someone had attacked Sid the same way they attacked his half brother, Earl; they beat him and then they pushed him off a rotting dock in Red Hook. I needed Sonny’s help, so I sat on the edge of the canvas chair and tried to listen. He was wandering the way he did these days, drifting back to his childhood.
Red Hook Page 12