“What the fuck’s eating you?” I asked Carmella, who had just slammed down the phone.
“Brian.”
“Brian what?”
“I told him the lawyer wanted both digital and Polaroids of the accident scene and that brain-dead asshole only took digitals. Now he’s gotta go all the way back to the Bronx again today. Remind me why we hired him again.”
“The knucklehead’s trying,” I said, regretting the words even as they left my mouth.
“Trying! What the fuck do you get for trying in this fucking world?”
She had a point, but there was something else going on. I knew better than to make a frontal assault. Carmella would just clam up completely if I kept questioning her.
“I got us a new client.”
But instead of leaning forward as she normally would, she found something quite a bit more fascinating about her Starbucks cup.
“Hey, Carmella, did you hear me? Earth to Melendez, please come in.”
She forced herself to look my way. “A new client, yeah. Who is it?”
“Me.”
That got her attention and I explained about what had happened the day before. She did what a good detective does: she listened. When she was young, she’d been too much of a shark, too aggressive. Listening was a skill that had come to her over the years.
“Describe the tattoo again,” she said. As I spoke, she pulled something out of a brown shipping envelope on her desk. “Did it look something like this?”
“Holy shit!”
Wrapped in clear plastic, it was a perfect likeness of a small illustration Patrick Maloney had done of the Chinese character and rose. He had given it to Jack when they were together. Jack left it to Mary. Mary had sent it to me in 1986 after her brother’s death. I’d given it to Katy during our first try at reconciliation. As far as I knew, she still had it.
“When did you get this?” I asked.
“Friday, in the mail.”
“Fuck.”
“Hey, Moe, if you spent more time here instead of at those stupid wine stores…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Let me have a look at that envelope.”
She handed it over. “No return address.”
“Mailed from… Dayton, Ohio.” I got that sick feeling in my belly.
I flipped it over a few times, not sure what else I expected to find. There are few things in the world more generic than brown shipping envelopes.
“Bag it just in case,” I said, handing it back.
“In case of what?”
“I don’t know yet. Someone’s fucking with me and I don’t like it. Here, take this too.” I handed Carmella a list of names. Next to the names were addresses, phone numbers, descriptions. “Some of them are probably dead and a lot of the other info is old. Put Devo on it now. I want as much info as I can get on these folks by the time I get back.”
“Back from where?”
“Dayton.”
“What’s in Dayton?”
“Not what, who. Mary White, for one. And the person who mailed that package.”
“Whatever.”
Normally, I would have expected to get shit from Carmella for acting like the boss and telling her who to assign to what. And she would have been justified in giving it to me. Although I had put up seventy-five percent of the money to start the business, she was the one who did the heavy lifting. Carmella hired the staff and managed the office. She also worked the tough cases. For the most part, I worked cases here and there and collected my share of the profits. While I split my time between the wine stores and the office, Carmella was fully committed to Prager amp; Melendez Investigations, Inc.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked.
“So long, Moe. Bring me back some cheese.”
“That’s Wisconsin.”
“What’s Ohio got?”
“Buckeyes.”
“I’m not even goin’ there.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Mary White smelled of sweet perfume and mixed feelings when she greeted me at the door of her house. I think she was glad to see me as I was one of the few living connections to the best months of her brother’s life, but unhappy about why I’d come. I wasn’t too thrilled about that part myself.
“Come on in the kitchen. I’ll make us some tea.”
Jews are comfortable in the kitchen. As a people, we find vast comfort in food. We aren’t great cooks, but we are great eaters. I sat at the Formica table and watched Mary fuss with her pot and cups. She seemed out of sorts. But what did I know about her, really? We’d only met once before-at Patrick’s funeral-and spoken a couple of times on the phone. I did think having me there made her a little nervous. As heavy as Jack had been skinny, Mary wasn’t the type of woman to have had droves of gentlemen callers. She kind of reminded me of my Great Aunt Florence. Nice, but a bit socially awkward. A spinster, my mother called her. What an odd word, spinster.
The little brick house on the outskirts of Dayton was a 1950s museum piece: neat and clean and with all the original equipment. Mary caught me staring.
“This was our folks’ house and I inherited it. I suppose if Jack had lived longer, we might have sold it eventually. When you’re done with your tea, I’ll show you Jack’s old room.”
Walking around Jack’s perfectly preserved boyhood room was more than a bit spooky and only reinforced that museum feel. It was also reminiscent of my first visit to the Maloneys’ house. It was the second time Katy and I were together. The first time, we’d stood over a floater that had surfaced in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The cops thought it might’ve been Patrick. I couldn’t help thinking things might’ve been easier if the body had been Patrick’s. Anyway, Katy showed me Patrick’s room that day much as Mary was showing me Jack’s.
But in the Maloneys’ living room, there’d been a shrine to the family’s real pride and joy, Francis Jr. There were glass display cases that held all of the dead pilot’s high school trophies, his game balls, ribbons, loving cups, and assorted memorabilia. The cases also held photos of him in his dress Navy blues, his wings, and posthumously awarded medals. Katy had since given the game balls and other sports memorabilia to the high school and packed most of the other stuff away. There were no such displays here. Jack told me once that when he came out to his parents, they thought the solution was for him to go to more Reds games with his dad. They weren’t the kind of people to build shrines to their gay son.
I offered to take us over to the cemetery, but Mary insisted on driving. We made small talk on the way, Mary chatting about the nearby Air Force base, indicating local points of interest. Given the circumstances surrounding my visit, I wasn’t terribly interested. As we neared the cemetery, her conversation took a more serious turn.
“I don’t know what you hope to find, Mr. Prager. Like I said on the phone this morning when you called, I got rid of all the roses and I scrubbed the painting off the stone myself.”
“Why’d you do that, scrub the paint off, I mean?”
“I don’t know. I was angry, I guess. I want Jack to rest in peace, not to be part of…” She collected herself. “I just want peace is all, for Jack and myself.”
That was easy enough to understand. I had been pretty vague with her that morning about what had been done to Patrick’s grave, but I thought the time had come to tell her all the details.
“My lord!” Mary slammed on the brakes. And to her credit, it wasn’t lip service. She seemed utterly horrified by what I described. “I’m so sorry, so very sorry.” She repeated it several times as we made our way slowly to the gravesite.
“It’s okay, Mary, it wasn’t your doing.”
“This is it.”
We’d stopped along the way to buy some flowers-not roses-to lay on Jack’s headstone. When Mary turned off the car, we both reached into the backseat to collect our bouquets. I asked Mary for a minute by the grave alone. She hesitated, her earlier discomfort once again showing through.
“Go on,” she said, if not happily.
I wasn’t a grave talker. I took no solace in speaking to bones, grass, and granite. Besides, it’s not like Jack and I were old buddies. I liked what little I knew of him and he had seemed really in love with Patrick. No small accomplishment. Although I didn’t know Patrick, I’d learned a lot about him during the course of my search for him. Much of what I learned, I didn’t like. I didn’t care that he was gay: not then, not now. I even felt sorry that he suffered from paralyzing OCD, but he could be a bully like his father. He’d even gotten physical with a girl he dated while working through his sexual identity. No, I hadn’t requested the time alone to chew the fat with Jack about his old boyfriend.
Like Mary said, the roses were gone, but I could see where she’d scrubbed the paint off the back of the small headstone. It wasn’t a grand thing, Jack’s tombstone. It was a low chunk of beveled granite: tasteful, modest, Midwestern. I liked that. I liked that a lot. I laid my flowers down and extended my hand to Mary.
While not exactly Father Blaney, Mary wasn’t much for touchy-feely either. She sort of winced when I held out my hand. I remembered her being warmer when we had her to New York, but this was her home turf and this was her brother’s grave. Patrick had been an abstraction to her, someone who only existed in her brother’s phone calls and letters. So his burial, twenty years after the fact, was almost surreal. Jack, on the other hand, had been very real to her.
“Hi, Jack,” she said, laying down her flowers, “Mr. Prager, Patrick’s brother-in-law, has come all the way out from New York to see you…”
I sort of tuned out to the rest of her chat. Mary was right, there wasn’t much to see. But sometimes you have to see for yourself that there’s nothing to see. It was like when I looked at the envelope in the office. I didn’t figure there’d be anything on it, but I had to look for myself. Suddenly, I was feeling pretty beat. There’d be time to rest that night. I was going to stay over in Cincinnati and fly out early in the morning.
When Mary was done, I picked up a pebble and placed it on Jack’s headstone. I did it without thinking. I noticed Mary staring at me and not with a glad expression.
“Why did you do that?”
“Habit. It’s a Jewish tradition.”
“But what is it for?”
“You know, Mary, I think it serves a lot of purposes. It shows other mourners that the person buried by that headstone isn’t forgotten. I guess it also lets the spirit of the person buried there know too, though I don’t think that’s in the Talmud. But a wise man I loved very much once told me it was symbolic of adding to the mound, to show that a memorial was an ongoing thing and would never truly be finished.”
“Oh.”
“I meant no disrespect. Would you like me to remove it?”
Her mouth said no, but her body language said yes. I chose to take her at her word. That’s what Israel Roth would have done. For the second time in two days I remembered our visit to the cemetery all those years ago. I was smiling as we pulled away, remembering Mr. Roth. I also saw that Mary could not take her eyes off that pebble.
I asked Mary if she’d like to go to dinner, on me, of course. She said no. I tried to contain my disappointment. It meant I’d have time to get a lot of rest and maybe call one or two of Jack’s old students. Not that I thought talking to them would get me anywhere, but again, I just wanted to hear it for myself. At first, Mary was reluctant to share any of the names or numbers with me, though she eventually relented. Again, I understood. Mary just wanted this over with so she could get back to the way things were. She liked her routines. The older you get, the less you like change. And the disturbance of her brother’s grave was a little more serious a change of routine than her dry cleaners moving to a new location.
I thanked her for her putting up with my visit. And when she said she was sorry for what had been done at the Maloney family plot, Mary got that sick face again. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that bothered her more than having Jack’s resting place messed with. She was tired and we kept our goodbyes brief. Tired as she might have been, I was willing to bet that the second I turned the corner, Mary would be heading back to the cemetery. That pebble I left on Jack’s headstone would have to go.
I returned the rental and caught a shuttle bus to my hotel. I got back early enough to have ventured into Kentucky or Cincinnati, if I was so inclined. I was not. I felt the allure of a quick meal and a long stretch in bed more than the need to feel blue grass between my toes or… What was Cincinnati famous for, anyway? Chili, right? I could get some of that from room service. But first I ordered a double Dewar’s on the rocks at the hotel bar and found a quiet table away from the TV. I took out the list of names and numbers Mary White had given me and punched the first number into my cell.
I left three messages before I got a live human being on the phone. Too bad, in a way. I was just perfecting my message.
Hi, my name is Moe Prager. I knew Jack White a long time ago in New York, and his sister Mary tells me you and Jack were close. I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes of your time talking to me about Jack. It would mean a lot to me if you could. My numbers are…
But like I said, someone picked up on my fourth call.
“Yo.”
“Hello, is this Marlon Rhodes?”
“Who da fuck wanna know?”
“My name’s Moe Prager.”
“Dat name s’posed ta mean sumptin ta me?”
“How about the name Jack White?”
That got Mr. Rhodes’ attention. “Say whatchu gotta say.”
“I knew Jack White a long time ago in New York. He was close with my brother-in-law Patrick. I was thinking about Jack this week and I asked his sister Mary if she could put me onto any of Jack’s old students because I knew he meant a lot to you guys.”
“Don’t be lyin’ to me, man. Dis about dat graveyard shit, right?”
“Right.”
“You Five-O?”
“A cop? I used to be.”
“Fuck y’all.”
So ended our conversation. I waited a few minutes and called back. He didn’t answer, so I left my finely honed message on his machine. I got two more of Jack’s former students on the phone and though the conversations were longer and more polite than the one I had with Marlon Rhodes, they were equally unproductive. Both liked and admired Jack and both had, on occasion visited his grave, but neither had made a habit of it and neither had been there for months.
I drank another scotch, ate a bowl of awful chili, and went to bed. I had a long dreamless sleep without insight, vision or revelation. It was just exactly the kind of sleep I needed.
CHAPTER SIX
During the plane ride home I realized I was doing it again. I was keeping secrets under the guise of protecting someone else. That’s crap. Secrets protect their keepers. I hadn’t told Katy about what had happened to Jack’s grave or that I was going to Dayton. When I spoke to Sarah, I severely minimized the extent to which the Maloney gravesite had been desecrated. If it hadn’t suited my purposes, I probably wouldn’t have shared all the details with Mary White. Had I shared them all? It gets hard to know. But if there is any justice, it’s that the protection of the secret keepers doesn’t last forever. For when any two people share knowledge, their secret is a shared illusion.
Looking back twenty-two years, it seems like madness to have not confessed to Katy what I knew about her father and brother. I was afraid to tell her I had found her brother and that I had let him go. Afraid to tell her that her father had been thrown off the NYPD in the early ’60s for a brutal assault and that it had been covered up. Afraid to tell her that her father and brother had been locked in a perverse game of chicken. Afraid to tell her that her father had ordered two of his underlings to beat the piss out of me on a SoHo street. The truth would have hurt her, sure, but it might’ve hurt me much worse. There’s a reason people say, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” I wasn’t
willing to risk losing the only woman I had ever loved by being the bearer of bad news. And my original mistake was compounded by the day, by the week, by the year, by the decade. Even now there were things I hadn’t told her, things she had a right to know.
It’s strange how they say you can’t teach instinct. Learned behavior is learned behavior. Instinct is inborn. Yet it’s become nearly impossible for me to distinguish between the two. Once you replace reason with self-preservation, secret keeping becomes reflexive. For me there was little difference between a secret and the blink of my eye. Only in retrospect can I distinguish between the two. So there on the plane home, in seat 24C, I decided for the second time since 1978 to come clean.
My resolve lasted the time it took to get to New York and have the wheels of the 737 hit the LaGuardia tarmac. When we touched down, I turned on my cell phone and found a long queue of messages. The first was a hang-up from Katy. The other four were from my brother Aaron, Sarah, Carmella Melendez, and Sheriff Vandervoort. All of them were looking for me on behalf of Katy and their tone ranged from desperate to angry. Something was wrong, but no one would say what exactly. When I tried Katy’s house and cell numbers, I got recordings. Now I was getting panicky. As a keeper of secrets, I was uncomfortable on the opposite side of the fence.
Although the Boeing was half empty, it took an eternity to deplane. When I finally managed to free myself, I did something I hadn’t done for quite some time: I flashed tin.
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