Empty ever after mp-5

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Tape show anything about the driver?” I asked.

  “Well, the good thing is that this tape was brand new, so it’s much cleaner than the other one I gave you. No murky images on this one.”

  “But…”

  “But you can’t tell anything about the driver. The windows are slightly tinted and there’s some sun glare.”

  “Can I have the tape?”

  “I knew you’d ask that.” He shoved a plastic evidence bag across the desk. “Here you go.”

  “Any news on the lab?”

  He started laughing. “The damned explosion registered on earthquake sensors. That was no small operation there, my friend. Somebody’s not going to be happy about it going boom.”

  “I don’t suppose they’re going to file any insurance claims.”

  “I suspect not.”

  I got up. “Thanks for the tape and for the accommodations, Pete. I better get back down to the city and see if I can figure out how to come at this from another angle.”

  “Sorry the SUV thing didn’t work out for you.”

  “Me too. Later.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  There are times when Brooklyn feels more like home than others. This was one of those times. I considered stopping at the office, but decided against it. I’d stop by later and drop off the new videotape and see if Devo had made anything of the answering machine tape and the original security video. Without tag numbers, it was a waste of time to put people on tracking down the Yukon. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of Yukons registered in New York State. Crank and the SUV had been worth a shot, but the sheriff was right, it was a dead end. Dead ends, unlike closing doors, are not very Zen. When one door closes, it’s said, another opens. When you hit a dead end, you make a U-turn. I needed to clear my head and think. I used to do my best thinking in Coney Island.

  I strolled down the boardwalk toward the looming monster that was the Parachute Jump: its orange-painted girders rising like dinosaur bones two hundred and fifty feet off the grounds of Steeplechase Park. What a silly beast it was, after all, serving no purpose but to remind the world of its impotence. It might just as well have been a severed limb. Besides the salt air, the boardwalk smelled of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, Italian sausages frying with sweet peppers and onions: the fat from the sausages hissing and spitting on the grill. It smelled of sun block too. The beaches were crowded, but not so crowded as when I was a kid. The beaches weren’t as much of a magnet for city kids as they once had been.

  With Sarah fully grown and nearly all my old precinct brothers moved or dead, I didn’t find much cause to come back here as I used to. I still loved the wretched place. How could I not, but it had never been the same after Larry McDonald’s suicide. This is where I saw him alive that last time in ’89, the ambitious prick. He had been a murderer too, though I didn’t know it then. I guess it broke my heart a little to find that out about Larry. That day back in ’89, Larry and I stood on the boardwalk directly over where his victim had been found. Larry threatened me and my family. He said he was desperate. Maybe he was. Somehow his words and deeds had tainted the place a little. It was the divorce too. Divorce does more than split things apart. It taints things, all things, especially the good ones.

  As I walked I thought back to my chat with Mira Mira and how she said the older guy with the eye patch was a cop. Maybe there was an angle in that, but intuition didn’t usually stand up under scrutiny. It had been my experience that people who insisted they knew things for sure didn’t necessarily know shit. I don’t care if every one of the tattoo artist’s relatives was a cop. Just because a man is a chef doesn’t mean his kid can cook.

  I thought about how much money was involved in arranging for the audition ads, for paying the kid and fixing him up to look just like Patrick. I thought about what it had cost to fly around the country for the auditions and to have arranged for the roses and the dramatics at Jack’s grave. I estimated it had cost between ten and thirty grand, maybe a little bit more, to stage this little charade. A nice chunk of change, yes, but not big money. Any regular schmo, if he was motivated enough, could come up with that kind of scratch, so the money was another dead end. It all led back to the motivation. In the end, it was the only way I could figure to come at this. There was someone out there who wanted to hurt me and wanted to use my family to do it. For now, I had to go back to stumbling around in the dark, to interviewing everyone I could think of who might have a reason to want to hurt me.

  It was no wonder that Devo’d had trouble tracking down Judas Wannsee. First off, the name was an obvious alias, a construct of the most hated Jew in history, Judas Iscariot, and of the Wannsee Conference at which the Nazis worked out the details for the Final Solution. Headquartered in the Catskill Mountains, his cult, the Yellow Stars, rejected the concept of assimilation and believed that the only way to avoid Jewish self-hatred was to announce your Jewishness to the world, to brand yourself a Jew, and to avoid the false comforts of fitting in. Most of the members did this by wearing the eponymous yellow star on their clothing to mark themselves as the Nazis had marked the Jews of Europe. Some went so far as to shave their heads and don the striped pajamas of those herded into concentration camps. In a few extreme cases, they had numbers tattooed on their forearms and ate a meager diet of stale black bread and potato soup.

  If Karen Rosen had sought refuge from any other group, cult, or religion, Judas Wannsee and I might never have crossed paths. Karen was one of the three girls from my high school who had allegedly perished in a Catskill Mountain hotel fire in the summer of 1965, so you can imagine my response when her lunatic older brother Arthur came to me in 1981 claiming not only that the fire was no accident, but intimating that one of the dead girls wasn’t dead at all. As it happened, he was right on both counts. Not only had his sister survived the fire, she started it. Exhausted from guilt and years of hiding, she found her way back to the Catskills and joined the Yellow Stars. Why she joined them is hard to say. Maybe she thought she could fashion her own murderous self-loathing into something that could be exorcised by slapping on the yellow Juden star. Maybe it was proximity to the scene of the original crime. By the time I found Karen Rosen at the Yellow Star compound and got to discuss it with her, liver cancer had since rendered her more dead than alive. When we spoke, she wanted from me something not in my heart to deliver: forgiveness.

  Years later, I read an interview with Wannsee in a magazine. Although he gave no specifics, he discussed the issue of giving refuge and how the sins of those he had harbored over the years had come to weigh heavily upon him. Yeah, tell me about it. Shortly after the interview appeared, buzz over the group faded. Then the Yellow Stars went the way of their buzz. It was a stretch, I know, but I wondered even then if he blamed me for pulling the first stone from the foundation upon which his little semi-secular temple had rested. Back then, it hadn’t interested me enough to bother tracking him down. It did now.

  Given his fanatical rantings against assimilation, there was a kind of perverse symmetry in his latest incarnation. Judas Wannsee had gone from the ultimate outsider and gadfly to faceless bureaucrat, from messianic to mundane, from bright yellow stars to grays and inspection stickers. The Department of Motor Vehicles office on Route 112 in Medford on Long Island was the perfect physical manifestation of the anonymous new life Wannsee had chosen for himself. It was tucked neatly into the corner of one of the gazillion strip malls and shopping centers that scarred the island. Long Island had been transformed from a place of endless trees and beaches to a land of ugly, mind-numbing repetition. Deli. Chinese take-out. Dojo. Pizzeria. Card store. Phone store. Deli. Chinese take-out. Dojo. Card store. Phone store. Deli. Chinese take-out…

  As I stood on the information line and listened to the beige woman at the desk endlessly repeat How can I help you? I had to snicker. There were several layers of irony in Judas Wannsee’s transformation.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’d like to speak to your supervisor,
please.”

  “What’s this in reference to?”

  “Just tell him it’s about Bungalow number eight. He’ll understand.”

  She hesitated and shook her head. Apparently, this situation had not been covered in Information Desk 101, so she handled it as she would if I’d come in to surrender some old license plates. She hit a button that generated a white numbered chit-A 322-and handed it to me.

  “Take a seat. Next! ”

  I did as she asked, taking a seat on a long pew. The pews faced numbered stations where bored-looking clerks did what clerks do. The pews also faced big electronic boards that posted chit numbers and stations in red lights:

  F121 12

  D453 10

  A320 08

  And whenever new numbers were posted, a bell would ring. The place seemed to have been designed by a bingo-playing priest heavily influenced by Pavlov. A322 12 flashed up on the screen quickly enough. The woman at window 12 directed me to walk over to a door. When I reached it, she buzzed me in.

  “Down the hall,” she yelled to me as I closed the door behind me.

  The man I had known as Judas Wannsee sat behind a metal desk, shuffling and scribbling on papers. The walls were white and blank except for the mandatory notices about sexual harassment, emergency procedures, and handwashing when leaving the rest rooms. They were devoid of pictures, posters, of anything that might have given a visitor insight into the man who occupied the office. He was twenty years older and it showed. He had thinned, as had his hair. He was stooped somewhat and gravity had taken its toll on his face, but the eyes still burned bright.

  “Mr. Prager,” he said without looking up. “Bungalow number eight, indeed.”

  I knew he would remember. Bungalow 8 was where Karen Rosen had spent her last days, where we spoke that final time.

  “I figured it was better than asking for Judas Wannsee or throwing a felt star on the counter.”

  “I suppose,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Or you might simply have asked for Howard Bland. But no, as I recall, the simple way was not your way. You have a weakness for the dramatic turn. Please sit.”

  I sat.

  “How did you find me?” he asked.

  “I’m a detective.”

  “Lost is what you are, Mr. Prager. You always have been and I sense you will always be so.”

  That stung some. I didn’t try to hide it. “And you’re a hypocrite. What happened to all your speeches about not fitting in and showing yourself to the world as a Jew as a black man shows the world he is black? Look where you are now. You’re a glorified clerk: faceless, pointless, invisible. Polonius too was full of high sentence, but at least he moved the plot along.”

  “The lost detective… who quotes from Prufrock, no less.”

  The less I liked his attitude, the more I liked him for what had happened to Katy.

  “I was paraphrasing, not quoting.”

  “Polonius? I think not. My speeches are like the soft tissue of dinosaurs, lost to history.”

  “Talk about a flare for the dramatic. Besides, that’s no answer.”

  “And why should I be obliged to answer your questions at all?”

  I suppose I could have grabbed him by the collar and twisted. It might have given me some short-term satisfaction, but would’ve ultimately proven counterproductive.

  “You’re not obliged, but I might tell you how I tracked you down if you cooperate.”

  “You know, Mr. Prager, upon brief reflection, I find I’m not really so interested in how you found me. In fact, maybe how is beside the point. Let me ask, why?”

  Again, I had a choice. I chose the non-violent option and explained. He never took his eyes off me as I spoke. He still had that ability to make you feel as if he could see right into you, into the darkest places, places where you stored your most shameful thoughts and unshared secrets. I was convinced he could detect the slightest hint of pose or artifice. When I finished, he considered what I had said before speaking. He still had it, the charisma. A lot of people want it. Some think they have it and don’t. He had it in abundance.

  “I can understand why you might have suspected me,” he said, “but I’m sorry to disappoint you. I have nothing to do with the crimes perpetrated against your family.”

  I didn’t want to believe him, yet I did, instantly. “Fair enough.”

  “I was quite piqued at you there for a time, I must confess. Your stumbling onto Karen did disrupt things for me. The group went on, even grew larger. I still believed in what I preached, but your presence caused me to have to look beyond my own belief system and motivations and to examine more carefully those who would follow my lead or, like Karen, seek refuge with us. You’d planted the seed. You see, I began the group because I believed in a set of values, not because I had a need to lead or a lust for power. Leadership and power are onerous, heavy yokes, not pleasures. Yet they were burdens I was glad to take on if it helped the misguided Jews of this great country.

  “ What I discovered, Mr. Prager, was that you could worship watermelon pits or sacks of gray pebbles or anything else for that matter and people would follow. Sadly, the world is populated by a lot of lonely, hungry, and lost souls. They all want to belong, to be loved, to be fed, to be anchored. Beliefs, unfortunately, are cold cold things. They give no comfort, no acceptance, no sustenance. Only other people can minister to those needs. Beliefs may inspire the founding of a group, but yearnings are the fuel that drives its growth engine. After years of self-exploration, of denial, and of rationalization, I knew what I had to do.

  “I had already made my initial journey and come out the other side. I was a proud Jew by the time you and I had met that first time. I realized that if the group had true strength, it would survive and prosper without me at its center. If, however, I left and it collapsed, then my cause was folly. In the end, my decision to leave was set in motion by Karen’s impending death and your arrival, Mr. Prager. It took me years to build a new identity into which Judas Wannsee might vanish. Even then, it wasn’t as easy to let go as you might expect. No man wants to feel that what he’s lived for has all been an illusion, a heat mirage on the asphalt in summer. Yet, eventually, Judas Wannsee faded slowly into the backdrop. So you see, I owe you not antipathy, but thanks. Just as my brother soldiers had inspired my first journey of self-exploration, you sparked my second.”

  “But this…” I said, gesturing at the generic office. “Why the anonymity?”

  “My first journey required the participation of others. I needed the rest of the world to react to my declarations of proud Judaism. The star, the tattoo, the pajamas, the name were all props meant to elicit responses. My growth, my self-discovery was a function of my reactions to those responses. And by confronting that daily friction, I was conditioning myself out of the shame and self-hatred of the assimilated Jew.

  “This second journey has been a purely internal and personal struggle: Could I sustain my transformation without the participation of another soul? Could I be a proud Jew even if the rest of the world didn’t know I existed? Could I remain unassimilated in the midst of utter assimilation? We have all heard the cliche, ‘What a man believes in his heart, is what matters.’ That was what I needed to discover, what I believed in my heart. For this question to be answered, I needed to remove all external things from my life that might serve to give me reinforcement, that might elicit response. Until the moment you walked through my office door, I had been remarkably successful.”

  “Hasn’t it been long enough for you to get your answer?”

  “Yes and no, Mr. Prager. What I have come to realize is that the answer requires one last journey. At the instant of my death, I will know for sure.”

  “A little late in the game, don’t you think?”

  “It’s always late in the game for everyone. We’re all of us on several journeys at once, different journeys, yes, but we all get the answer to the same question at the same time. I am ready for that answer whenever it may come.”
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  “Goodbye, Mr. Bland.” I nodded, standing. “Be well.”

  “And you, Mr. Prager. Although there is great value in being lost, try and find something in the meantime. There is no shame in comfort.”

  As I walked back down the hallway toward the bingo parlor, his words rang in my head. Just as his words had stayed with me for the last twenty years, these would stay with me until the day I died. But unlike Mr. Bland nee Wannsee, I was not ready for that answer, whatever it was and whomever its deliverer might be.

  Right now I had to focus on closing chapters in my life. And with the exception of Judas Wannsee, all the significant people connected to my time in the Catskills were dead. Karen Rosen and Andrea Cotter, my high school crush, were gone. Everyone from R.B. Carter-Andrea Cotter’s billionaire brother-to Anton Harder-the leader of the white supremacists-was gone.

  Closing chapters, that’s what I was trying to do now, at least until I could think of a more inspired approach. When I was done reconciling the books, I’d take a look at the landscape and see who remained standing. One of them would be the man or woman behind the grave desecrations and the appearance of Patrick Michael Maloney’s ghost. And since I was already on Long Island, I decided to make one more stop. It would no doubt be an unpleasant one.

  A middle-class hamlet with pretentions, Great River was tucked neatly between East Islip and Oakdale on Long Island’s south shore. For many years Great River had resisted the Gaudy-is-Great infection spreading wildly across the rest of the island, but just lately its ability to fend off the disease had weakened. Acre lots that had once sported comfortable colonials and solid split ranches had begun sprouting giant “statement” houses, beasts that featured design elements from styles as disparate as Bauhaus and French Provincial. But the house that had to have won the Good Housekeeping’s seal of disapproval boasted minarets, a faux moat, and scale model marble mailbox sculpted like the Pieta. In place of Michelangelo’s name, it read-in gold leaf I might add-Mr. Michael Angelos and Family. Visitors to the home were probably confused as to whether they should purchase a theme park pass or prayer cards.