Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Relax, Moe. She’ll be okay. She has to be. Since you’re not going to class, come with me. I’ve got to make an airport run.”

  Airport runs were Bobby’s latest and craziest money-making scheme. He would pick you up at your door, drive you to the airport, and carry your bags into the terminal for free. The thing was, if you took him up on the offer, you had to take out flight insurance and name Bobby as the sole beneficiary. If there were two of you, both of you had to take out policies, if there were three … I’m not kidding here. Sick as it was, he had about two people a week take him up on the offer. Word of mouth really was the best way to advertise. He’d been doing it for about six months and so far, thank god, he hadn’t cashed in.

  “Matter of time,” he used to say when I’d bust his chops about it. “Matter of time.”

  “You have a better chance of getting killed in a car crash on the way home from the airport, you sick bastard. What do you do, listen to the radio all day to hear if the plane goes down?”

  “Sometimes,” he’d answer with a poker face. “You don’t understand business very well, do you, Moe? It’s a risk vs. reward kinda thing: small risk to me, long odds, big payoff. Besides, you don’t need to worry about me, buddy. I got more than this one oar in the water.”

  He was right. I didn’t know much about business, and didn’t want to. I don’t know whether I was just born this way or if it was that my dad hadn’t set a very good example. He wasn’t skilled at making money or at business in general. His only talent was for bad investments and failure. As it was, money never much mattered to me. I wasn’t stupid. I knew money would be nice to have, but other things just mattered more to me. Love, family, girls, sex, books, sports — they were always more important to me than money. Maybe my outlook would have been different if I’d had any money to begin with. Maybe if I could have experienced what having money was like and then losing it, then I might have invested more of my being into getting more of it or getting it back. I’d tried, I’d really tried to will myself ambitious, to be more like Bobby and Aaron. I’d tried to trick myself into putting money at the top of my pyramid. No luck. And Bobby needn’t have bothered to comfort me that he’d be all right even if the airport runs never paid off. Bobby Friedman was golden, bulletproof. Somehow you just knew he would always land on his feet.

  As crazy and twisted as his airport runs were, I was glad for the distraction, glad to be invited along, glad to have someone making small talk. For the moment, I conveniently ignored Mindy’s dire warning about keeping away from Bobby. My frustration over what had happened to her, my need to do something about it, and my impotence in the face of that need were eating me up. My guts were on fire. We picked up Mrs. Cohen — Stevie Cohen’s grandma; he was one of our Burgundy House brothers — at her apartment building on Ralph Avenue, settled her comfortably in the big back seat of Bobby’s Olds, and headed off to the Eastern Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nothing had changed, nothing but everything. I just didn’t know it yet.

  Bobby and I had gone to visit Mindy on the way back from the airport. Only Beatrice Weinstock was there when we arrived. She lit up again at the sight of us. I guess that made me feel a little less useless, but not a whole lot less. She’d sent her husband out to get something for them to eat — “He was making me completely meshugge with his pacing.” She said the doctors had good news, that her daughter’s vital signs had stabilized and that there was brain function. This was all good, according to Bea Weinstock. It was good too, that none of Mindy’s other injuries proved to be life threatening. It’s funny how when things are really bad, good comes to mean anything less than catastrophic.

  Bobby and I took turns comforting Mrs. Weinstock and sitting with Mindy. When I was there with Mindy, I held her hand. I suppose I would have kissed her on the mouth if there wasn’t a tube stuck down her throat. I cried some too, for me, I think, as much as for her. You grow up in Brooklyn, you like to think you’re tough, that your skin is thick and concrete hard and that you come out of the womb all grown up and prepared for anything life can throw at you. Bullshit! I wasn’t any tougher or any more prepared for the darts life throws at you than a Kansas farm boy. The tears? Growing up … I think that’s why I was crying. I’d had some bad things to deal with before this — my dad losing his business, my zaydeh dying, stuff like that — but this thing with Mindy was different. Up to now, my life had been pretty much cake, a nearly twenty-one-year childhood consisting of stickball, the Cyclone, textbooks, stuff served to me on a plate. Real tragedy was always one step removed. With Mindy in a coma, one she might never come out of, I knew the bell had rung. Ding! Childhood was officially over.

  That was yesterday. When I opened my eyes to the sound of the subway rumbling, I wasn’t in a much better frame of mind than when I shut them. At least I opened my eyes. I had a choice about that. I was there, alive, conscious. My first thoughts were of Mindy, of where she was, of wherever one goes in a coma. The motherfucker who did that to her would be wherever he was, doing whatever he was doing. Was he scared? Did he hear footsteps coming up behind him? Did he even give a shit? I brushed my teeth, wondering about where you go in a coma. Was it like a movie? Was it like dropping acid? Was it like a bad trip? Was it Alice through the looking glass? That was the thing, speculating wasn’t working for me. Suddenly, taking a philosophical point of view felt like more bullshit, like I was cheating somehow, distancing myself. No, I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to protect myself from this. I thought about going to school for about a millisecond, and knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  The phone rang, and it shook me out of that bad and lonely place. I suppose I should have been grateful. I wasn’t. There was a whispering voice on the other end of the line. “This isn’t the man, is it? Are you the man?”

  “What? Who is this?” I asked, annoyed.

  “Are you the man? The pigs?”

  “No,” I said, like it would matter. If I was the cops, would I say so? “Who is this?”

  “Never mind who this is.”

  “Then fuck you. I’m not in the mood for — ”

  “Lids, man. Lids gave me your number.”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry.” I stopped there and waited for him to say something else, but he needed a prompt. “Lids told you to call me and …”

  “You got something to write with?”

  I grabbed a pencil and the newspaper off the kitchen table. “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “1055 Coney Island Avenue,” he said and stopped.

  “What about 1055 Coney Island Avenue?”

  “Listen, man, Lids asked me to do him a solid. That’s what I’m doing. He said you needed an address. Well, now you got one. He didn’t say nothing about giving you more than that. Don’t forget to tell him you got a call.”

  “From who?”

  “He’ll know.”

  “You one of Lids’s customers?”

  “I thought you said you weren’t the — ”

  “I’m not. Forget I asked. Thanks.”

  A click and dial tone were the last things I heard from him. It took me a second to collect my thoughts. I didn’t have a car. I had a license, just no car. With bus and subway stops basically out front of our building, it’s not like I needed one. When I went out on dates I borrowed my dad’s car, or, in a dire emergency, Aaron’s. I hated borrowing Aaron’s car. I loved my big brother, but I always felt judged by him. I always felt like he was waiting for me to screw up. I always felt like he was waiting to say, “See, I was right. I knew it.” Besides, borrowing his car involved a longer prejourney checklist than a Gemini mission. And the next morning he would debrief me, check the mileage on the odometer, and see if I refilled the tank.

  I started dialing Bobby’s number, but snapped the phone receiver down before the dial completed its seventh spin. I remembered the timing of Mindy’s warning about staying clear of Bobby, and the things that had happened since. I rubbed my st
ill sore shoulder, thinking that someone had already tried to run Bobby down and that Mindy had been savagely beaten. Coincidences? I thought back to the night I’d bailed Bobby out of jail, about how Mindy’s whole attitude had changed over the course of two hours. I stared at the address I’d written on the back of the paper and realized that maybe it would be better for both Bobby and me if I left him out of it. If not better, then at least safer.

  • • •

  Other than its name, Coney Island Avenue didn’t have much to recommend it. Four potholed lanes that ran in a straight line from the knee bend at Brighton Beach Avenue to the tip of Prospect Park, Coney Island Avenue was a startlingly ugly thoroughfare. It was an endlessly repeating stream of funeral homes, mom and pop groceries, car dealerships, pizzerias, luncheonettes, kosher butcher shops, pork stores, and grubby little storefronts with rental apartments above. Even when the sun shone through a cloudless blue sky, Coney Island Avenue was darker than the neighborhoods through which it ran — louder too. And the soot and stink of diesel fumes from trucks and city buses seemed to stick to the sidewalks and buildings like a layer of rotting skin.

  And 1055 Coney Island Avenue wasn’t any meaner than the other nasty little storefronts with which it shared common walls. The dusty, sun-faded signage wasn’t missing any more letters than the signs on the stores between which it was shouldered. The painted brick façade of the building above the shop at 1055 wasn’t in a worse state of disrepair than its neighbors. There was no greater number of chipped bricks, the paint not any uglier or more flaked or pitted. The piles of filthy snow in the gutter out in front of it were no blacker. So in these ways 1055 Coney Island Avenue was unremarkable. I didn’t know what Lids had given or promised to the guy who’d called me, but I couldn’t help thinking I’d been played for a fool, for a stupid kid desperate for an answer … any answer.

  The business at 1055 was a fix-it shop. The old vacuum hoses hanging limply behind the smudged glass reminded me of the red-skinned roasted ducks in the windows of Chinatown restaurants. Suddenly, my nose filled with fragrance of garlic and ginger sizzling in hot oil. My mouth watered, but there was no duck, no ginger, no hot oil. There were only broken toasters, round-tubed TV sets, giant radios, and old-fashioned fans in the window, relics. Sun-faded paper price tags were attached to these items with little bits of bakery string. A closer inspection revealed that everything in the window was covered in a fine, downy layer of gray dust.

  A cockeyed Open/Closed sign hung in the door above where the store hours had peeled off and never been replaced. The sign said the store was open, but when I pressed my face to the glass, cupping my hands around my eyes, the only sign of movement was the flickering of a fluorescent tube in a fixture above the shop counter. To my surprise, the door gave way when I pushed, and I stepped inside. A rusted bell above the door made a half-hearted attempt to announce my arrival. Instead there was a single shrill and unwelcoming blare. With it, my visions of roasted ducks and the smells of Chinese cuisine vanished. The place was worse inside than out, smelling of machine oil, mildew, and disappointment.

  “What?” A man screamed at me from behind the wall in back of the front counter. When I did not answer, he shouted, “What? All right, I’m coming, already. Already, I’m coming.” He had a thick Old World accent like the old folks on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach.

  When he stepped out from behind the wall, hardly more than his head reached above the counter. He was short to begin with, and his hunched shoulders and stooped posture weren’t helping any. His bald head, paradoxically freckled and pale, had a wreath of unkempt gray hair stretching from temple to temple. He had a furrowed brow and wore heavily rimmed black glasses held together by Band-Aids, with thick lenses on a nose that would have given W. C. Fields a fright. He had that kind of skin with big, ugly pores. He was dressed in pants worn shiny with age that were held up by a length of rope. Over this he had on a T-shirt so frayed and yellowed it might have disintegrated before my eyes.

  “What, you picking up or dropping off? Well, you don’t got nothing in your hands, sonny boy, so give to me already the receipt.”

  “I’m not here for that,” I said, my voice faltering.

  “Then what, you come begging for charity? You come to sell me something? Gay avek! Go away. Whatever I had to give, those Nazi bastards already are taking from me.”

  “I’m not here to ask for money or to sell you anything, mister.”

  “Then what? I’m a busy man. I have to work hard to be this poor, sonny. So speak up or get out.”

  “My girlfriend’s in a coma in Kings Highway Hospital,” I said, panicked. What did I know about questioning someone? I wasn’t a cop. I didn’t even know how to start. But if I thought telling him about Mindy would at least get me a little sympathy or buy me time, I thought wrong.

  He crooked a gnarled finger at me. “At least she’s alive. My wife. My kids. All gone. Pfffft! Smoke out the pipe of the camp. Gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Save your sorrys for when they would matter. On me, they’re a waste. Besides, what has this to do with me, your girlfriend?”

  “Three nights ago, she was here.”

  “Here! Who was here?”

  “My girlfriend, Mindy Weinstock.”

  There wasn’t even a hint of recognition in his eyes.

  “And what time was this when Mindy Weinstock was supposed to be in mine shop?”

  “Early evening, between six and eight.”

  “Sonny, the only things here at those hours are broken toasters and roaches.”

  Okay, I thought, that was something, a place to start. “How about in the apartments upstairs?”

  “How about them?”

  “Do you own the building? Do you live upstairs? Do you know any of your neighbors? Stuff like that.”

  “Look, sonny, it’s too bad from your girlfriend in the hospital, but I got no time for this stuff. I’ve got work. You wanna keep standing there, look for her fingerprints in the dust, be mine guest. But me, I got no time for nonsense.” The gnome made to head into the rear of the shop.

  “How about a black guy with pink blotches on his face and hands?” I shouted.

  That stopped him. He looked up at me. I thought I saw something this time, a glint maybe, behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Or maybe it was wishful thinking on my part.

  “You’re talkin’ crazy now again, a schwartze with pink blotches. Gey avek before I’m calling the police already.” This time the gnome retreated behind the counter wall.

  I did not move, not immediately. Although I had no idea of what I might find, I didn’t expect to get dismissed out of hand. But even if I had come to the realization that growing up in Brooklyn didn’t imbue me with a thicker skin or bless me with magical street smarts, I sensed something wasn’t right; not with the old man and not with this musty little place. Okay, sure, camp survivors had it bad. I had seen The Pawnbroker. I’d seen the vacant-eyed survivors, their tattooed forearms swinging under the summer sun as they strolled zombie-like along the boardwalk. In their shoes, I might not have been the most pleasant bastard on the planet either. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things to know here. Screwed onto the countertop was a wooden business card holder that looked like a junior high shop class project. It held a few sun-yellowed cards. I took one because, if for no other reason, I was determined not to walk away empty-handed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I told Aaron I needed his car to see Mindy. It wasn’t the first time I’d lied to him. It was unlikely to be the last. What my brother didn’t know was that I’d already spent two hours at Mindy’s bedside during afternoon visiting hours. Amazing how much time there is in a day when school is no longer a part of it.

  I got back to the fix-it shop at around six and parked directly across Coney Island Avenue. It felt much later than six, as if night had already taken hold. That’s the thing about winter, isn’t it, how it always feels later than it is? Over the l
ast few days I’d come to think that maybe life was like that too.

  Now the flickering fluorescent light from inside the darkened shop gave it an eerie feel, like something out of a bad sci fi movie. Oh, master, look, the creature lives! I sipped my coffee, ate my bialy with cream cheese, and stared out the car window. At 6:10, the flickering stopped, the shop went completely black. Two minutes later, the hunched old man — Hyman Bergman, according to the business card I’d taken earlier — was on the street, fiddling with the lock. He walked a few paces away, stopped, turned, came back to the door, retried the door handle, and then went on his way. He limped along the street. My eyes followed him until he got into a beat-up ’63 Fairlane that was now more rust than steel. He pulled out into traffic and I quickly lost sight of him.

  At least I had the good sense to wait a quarter of an hour before making a move. My mom, like old man Bergman, had the habit of checking and rechecking things such as doors and gas jets. I had observed her doing this for nearly twenty-one years and knew that she had a fifteen-minute threshold. If she didn’t come back to check something within that amount of time, she wasn’t coming back. It was stupid to judge Bergman’s mishegas by my mother’s, but what other measure did I have?

  Just as I put my fingers on the driver side door handle, I caught sight of something across Coney Island Avenue. It was a car, a car I recognized — Bobby’s car. He parked the Olds 88 between two dirty snow drifts right in front of the fix-it shop. I did not move. I did not breathe. It was as if I hoped my stillness would somehow render me invisible. Not fucking likely, because as Bobby got out of his car he seemed to stare directly across the street at Aaron’s Tempest. I could swear he looked right at me, but there was no recognition in his eyes, no change of body language. Maybe it was the darkness, or maybe he didn’t make sense of my brother’s car being in that setting. Whatever the reason, Bobby acted as if I wasn’t there. I let myself exhale, if not relax. I didn’t dare risk moving, not yet.