Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

“Old Hyman’s loaded. Owns real estate all over the place, but he’s also a bisl meshugge. You understand?”

  “I speak some Yiddish, Doc, yeah. The old man’s a little crazy. How so?”

  “Maybe the camps did it to him. I don’t know. He drives a car that’s practically falling apart, wears clothes a bum would be embarrassed of, and runs a fix-it shop even though he owns the building it’s in and half the rest of the block. The man is wealthy, and doesn’t enjoy a penny of his money. He dotes on his granddaughter, though. Bought her that ridiculous French car in their driveway.”

  I stood to go and shook Doc Mishkin’s hand. Thanked him for his advice. Then I remembered the tone in his voice when he’d first approached me outside. It wasn’t a very welcoming or friendly tone. I realized that he hadn’t recognized that it was me standing in front of his house until I turned to face him.

  “Doc, when you came up to me on the street, did you know it was me standing there?”

  “Nope. It’s that we’ve had a little crime in the area recently, and I didn’t like you loitering out in front.”

  “Crime?”

  “Yes. Earlier this week, Bob Schwartz, a friend of mine from down the block, had his Caddy stolen from right out in front of his house.”

  “A Caddy. What kind of Caddy?”

  “A beauty. A silver ’67 Coupe de Ville with a black vinyl roof. They found it smashed up over in Midwood somewhere during the snowstorm. The insurance company took it as a total loss.”

  I forced myself to answer calmly. “That’s a shame. Well, thanks again, Doc. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  No lie there. He had given me a lot to think about. That, and some answers.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On the way over to visit my real girlfriend — the one in the coma, not the make-believe one whose period was two weeks late — I had a lot to chew on. I believed in coincidence more than the hand of God or fate or karma, but even I had my limits. There were just too many connections here to slough them off as mere coincidence. One thing was for damn sure: Bobby Friedman was, for some reason, the eye at the center of this storm. It seemed to me that all the new violence in my world somehow swirled around my best and oldest friend and I wanted to know why; I needed to know why. If he hadn’t shown up at 1055 Coney Island Avenue last night, I might not have seen Bobby as so central to what was happening; but he had shown up and with a set of keys.

  No one is immune from willful ignorance. I wasn’t. I’d looked the other way and pretended not to see things: friends stealing, friends cheating on tests, friends cheating on their girlfriends. Guys are like that. I can’t explain it. Maybe it comes from playing team sports all our lives. It’s like we’re in some sort of club with a silent understanding that it’s always us against them. The “us” was constant. The “them” was situational. I don’t really know. What I did know was that this was different. I couldn’t ignore the fact that those keys Bobby had weren’t just any keys to just any building. There’d been a dead body in that building, the body of the man who’d beaten Mindy into a coma. They were keys to a building that burned to the ground a few hours after his visit. I wasn’t willing to ignore the fact that the Cadillac that nearly killed Bobby and me had been stolen off old man Bergman’s block. Bergman, the owner of the building that had burned down. It was impossible for me to ignore the fact that Bergman’s granddaughter was probably the person who’d torched her grandpa’s building, dead body et al. Sitting there in the hospital lobby, waiting the few minutes until visiting hours were to begin, I thought back to the fight I’d seen between grandfather and granddaughter. And as I reflected on what I’d witnessed, it struck me that I wasn’t the only man in Brooklyn who thought Susan Kasten, the quiet girl from my Romantic Poetry class, was guilty of arson. Grandpa seemed to think so too.

  “Visiting hours have begun. No children under the age of twelve will be permitted on the upper floors. Please do not …” came the announcement over the loudspeaker.

  I took the stairs to the third floor. I took them slowly as I was still aching pretty bad. Mindy’s parents were already in her room when I arrived.

  “Moe, it’s wonderful. A miracle! Come look,” said Beatrice Weinstock, tugging at my arm. “She’s opened her eyes.”

  My heart went from zero to sixty before I could take another breath. I could feel it thumping at the walls of my chest. In that instant, none of the rest of it mattered. None of it. Suddenly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass if Bobby was at the head of a Soviet spy network, the criminal mastermind behind a plot to rob the Federal Reserve bank, or both. And damn it if it wasn’t true: Mindy’s eyes were wide open.

  “Hi, Min,” I whispered in her ear, kissed her cheek. I stroked her hair. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry I never told you that before. I’m not sure if I even knew it. I love you.”

  But she didn’t respond in any way. My thumping heart sank into my shoes. It occurred to me that her eyes weren’t seeing anything more than Pink Blotches’s dead eyes had seen the night before. When I snuck a peek at Herbie Weinstock, I saw that he had reached a similar conclusion.

  “That’s wonderful,” I shouted to Mrs. Weinstock. “Wonderful. Listen, you guys stay here and enjoy the moment. I’ll be back later.”

  Herbie nodded. I nodded back. There it was again, that guy thing, that silent understanding. It even crossed generations. Beatrice had already returned her focus to her daughter, willing Mindy to do more than open her eyes. I left them that way. Outside the door, I ran into Mindy’s doctor, Steven Curtis, a svelte and delicate man with piano fingers and the bedside manner of a wrecking ball. I’d had the displeasure of talking with the good doctor a few times. He wasn’t anything like Doc Mishkin. When Doc Mishkin told you the truth, no matter how harsh, you were comforted to know it. The truth from Curtis was a serrated edge. Trailing behind Dr. Curtis were five bright-eyed interns.

  I blocked Curtis’s way. “Could I talk to you for a second?” I asked, my eyes letting him know there was only going to be one acceptable answer.

  “Later, young man. As you no doubt see, I am doing rounds.”

  “A second,” I repeated.

  When he saw that I didn’t pray at his altar and I wasn’t moving an inch, he relented. “Very well.”

  I stepped away from his pack and he followed.

  “Her eyes are open,” I said.

  “They do that sometimes. It isn’t necessarily significant.” He said they as if he’d been talking about heads of cabbage or fruit flies.

  I put my face up close to his. “Well, do me a favor, Doc, don’t shit on her mom’s joy. She needs to believe Mindy will be okay, and if Min’s eyes being open gives her hope, let her have it. If you have to discuss the truth with the interns, ask Mindy’s parents to step outside or use terms they don’t understand. Okay?”

  “Fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”

  • • •

  I found Lids in his bedroom in his parent’s apartment in Trump Village. Village, my ass. Trump Village bore about as much resemblance to the traditional sense of a village as an elephant to an oyster. It was a series of huge brick apartment buildings that soared twenty-plus stories over the streets of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. There are pictures in my high school yearbook of the buildings being constructed, their massive girders dwarfing the school. When Trump — none of us called it Trump Village — opened in ’64, the influx of the thousands of new families totally changed the nature of the neighborhood. The Lesters, Lids’s parents, had moved to here from the Bronx partially in the hope that their son might fit in better in Brooklyn. No such luck. Larry wouldn’t’ve fit in on the Starship Enterprise. He wasn’t a fitting-in type of guy.

  His sad little parents were happy to see my face. For them, I guess I represented a connection to normalcy for their son in kind of the same way I represented a nonradical political connection to Mindy’s folks. Funny how I never thought of myself as normal. Does anyone ever consider himself
normal? Would anyone want to? My brother Aaron, probably. At my age, I think he’d fancied himself as normal. It’s not like I minded Lids’s or Mindy’s parents seeing me the way they did. I didn’t feel any pressure from it. I liked making people feel better. I always had, though I’ve no clue where that ability came from. My dad maybe. Surely not from my mom. She was so persistently pessimistic that I don’t think she would have been shocked if one day the sun didn’t come up. She would just say, “I knew it. I knew it.”

  Larry Lester was sitting in a chair, rocking, staring out the window at the elevated subway ten floors below. He did that. It helped him think and theorize, he used to say. His room hadn’t changed in the thirteen years I’d known the guy. I’m serious. It was like he’d died as a kid and his mother, grief-stricken by her son’s death, had preserved his room in museum condition. There were posters of Howdy Doody and Davy Crockett on his walls. Even mad genius drug dealers have their quirks. Larry had more than his share.

  “Hey, Larry,” I said.

  It was as if he hadn’t heard me. He just kept on rocking and staring. I waited another minute before trying again.

  “Yo, Larry. Lids!”

  “Moe, did you ever think that time is something that doesn’t really exist, that it’s something we impose on the universe?” he said, still not turning around, continuing to rock and stare.

  “Not really, Larry. I can see myself grow, watch my parents get older, watch things rust away. So how can time not exist?”

  “What if things aren’t linear in the way you just described them? What if the universe is a solid block of events that occur all at once? Maybe everything that ever happened is happening, and everything that ever will happen has already happened. Maybe it’s like a film with all the frames compressed together. We might only experience it one frame at a time, one slice at a time. Maybe time is merely experiential in nature.”

  “Are you tripping or theorizing now?”

  “The latter,” he said, finally turning to face me. “How’s your old lady?”

  “Mindy? She’s pretty much the same. She opened her eyes this morning, but apparently Dr. Mengele doesn’t think it’s significant.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yeah. So I wanted to thank you for getting that guy to call me. What’d it cost you?”

  His eyes drifted back to the window. “Forget it. Anything for you, Moe. Did his information help?”

  “Yes and no.”

  That got his full attention. “What does that mean?”

  “It means his information left me with a lot more questions than answers. I think I need to have another talk with that guy, face to face.”

  That set off his nervous ticcing. Larry’s head jerked slightly every few seconds and his eyelids fluttered. He touched every fingertip on his left hand to the tip of his left thumb and then reversed the order: index, middle, ring, pinky, pinky, ring, middle, index, index …

  “Easy, Larry, easy. It’s no big thing. I just wanna talk to the guy.”

  My words had no effect on him. His ticcing just got worse.

  “The guy who attacked Mindy is dead!” I shouted at him, hoping his parents wouldn’t hear. “The guy with the pink blotches is dead.”

  His left hand stilled. His eyelids opened wide. “Vitiligo,” he said. “I told you, those skin discolorations are vitiligo. He’s dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How? Did you — ”

  I cut him off. “Do you have today’s paper?”

  “On the kitchen table. My dad reads all of them every day.”

  “Go get ’em.”

  A minute later, I was showing him the stories about the fire. Like I said, I only had one source for information: Larry. I couldn’t afford to lose him, so I made the decision to tell him everything … well, almost everything. I sort of neglected to mention Bobby Friedman showing up with a set of keys. And maybe I pretended not to know the identity of the girl who’d dropped by to remove inventory from the second floor store room, the girl who’d torched the place. Other than that, I laid it all out for him.

  When I was done, I made my pitch. “So you see why I gotta talk to the guy who got me that address in the first place, right?”

  But Larry wasn’t there yet. “The body.”

  “What about it?”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Really scared, but I held it together for a little while.”

  “I’m not very brave, Moe. I wish I was, but I’m not. I’m never going to make it in this world. I grew up in this room, and I’m going to die in this room. It’s the only place in the world where I feel safe. When I was at MIT, I was scared all the time. It used to take every ounce of strength I had to get out of bed there. I think I knew even before I went there that I wouldn’t make it.”

  “But you deal drugs, Larry. Doesn’t that scare you? Aren’t you worried about Rikers or the Brooklyn Tombs?”

  He answered me with a smile, a smile as sad as a chick shoved out of its nest. “I’ll arrange for you to meet him, Moe. I’ll call you later.” With that, he turned back to the window.

  I didn’t need to look to see that he was rocking. I could hear the legs of his too-small chair creaking.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Privacy was about all the boardwalk had to offer when the temperatures dipped below freezing and the winds off the Atlantic scoured your exposed skin with grains of sand from the long miles of empty ocean beaches. In spite of the frigid air and biting winds, the throttle on my senses was full out. Tripping was a little bit like this, and that’s what people who had never dropped acid didn’t get. It doesn’t so much fuck with your mind as it removes all your filters. Suddenly, it’s like all the instruments in the orchestra are playing all at once, loudly, and as fast as they can. So it was as I walked down from the handball courts toward the midway. The clank and squeals of the elevated subway echoed through the brick canyons, and the sea’s low roar was constant and undramatic. It was almost as if the ocean understood drama wasn’t worth its while with no one on the beach to be impressed. The salt air carried with it the unpleasant grace notes of the raw sewage from the plant around the bend beyond Sea Gate. The arthritic wood beams and sea-ravaged metal bones of the dormant rides moaned about their sad decay, about having to bear the sneering, taunting wind that whistled through their old bones.

  By the time I got to the bench in front of the Parachute Jump, I sympathized with the rides. Even my young bones were stiff with cold. My collection of bruises didn’t help. I checked my Bulova and saw that I was a few minutes early. I was always early. In my family, if you were five minutes early, you were ten minutes late. The Pragers were never tastefully late to a party. The phrase had no meaning for us. Don’t misunderstand; our promptness wasn’t so much out of good manners as gnawing insecurity. Aaron, Miriam, and I were raised with a sense of dread, living in the fear of missing something. What that something was, I couldn’t say. I think my parents felt cheated by their lives somehow. That if they had only been more vigilant, had slept with one eye open, had just gotten to where they were going a few seconds earlier, they would have escaped the trap life had set for them.

  I turned and looked up at the looming superstructure of the Parachute Jump, Coney Island’s central icon and, from now on, its quintessential symbol of impotence. For although it was scheduled to open again in the spring, the rumor was it would be its last season. At least they wouldn’t be tearing the damn thing down with the rest of Steeplechase Park. No, this was Brooklyn. We liked our scars. We wore our failures with pride. We lived in a world of what used to be, and what would be no more. Too bad they had bulldozed Ebbets Field. They should have packed it up brick by brick and rebuilt it in Coney Island at the foot of the Jump. Two follies, side by side: a parachute jump with no parachutes, a baseball stadium with no team. Greek tragedy? Nah, a freak show. We always did like our freak shows in Coney Island.

  “Hey, you Moe? You Moe?” a raspy whisper cut through the wind.
/>   I tilted my head back to earth and saw him standing there. To call him thin would have been high understatement. He was positively skeletal. If he hadn’t been as tall as I was, he might’ve been able to shop in the boys’ department at John’s Bargain Store. Maybe it was the lighting, but his skin had a yellow quality to it. When I noticed his beak-like nose running and caught a glimpse of the lit cigarette he held between his fidgety fingers, I decided the sickly shade of his skin wasn’t a trick of the light. If it was possible, this guy was even more fidgety than Lids. He moved so much he would have made a hummingbird cross-eyed. But unlike Lids, this guy needed a drink or a joint, not shock therapy. His gesticulations aside, it didn’t take a genius to see he was nervous about being here and that he’d rather be somewhere else, anywhere else. Still, Lids had gotten him to show up.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m Moe. And you are … ?”

  “Sick, man. I’m sick.”

  I was slow on the uptake. “I’m sorry to hear it, but I was asking for your name.”

  “You bein’ funny, man, or just stupid?”

  “Watch your mouth or you’ll be getting a lot sicker a lot quicker.”

  He made a series of rapid snorts that passed for laughter. “That’s funny. It rhymes.”

  “Thanks, Shakespeare, but I’m not trying to be funny.”

  “Sorry, sorry. It’s just that — ”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time. You’re sick. Now what’s your name?”

  “Man, forget my name. Just let’s get this over with. I need to get well. And I can’t get fixed up until I talk to you. So what’d’ya wanna talk about?”

  “1055 Coney Island Avenue,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “Why’d you send me there? What was I supposed to find there?”

  “Hey, man, look, I heard you wanted to know where your old lady was on a certain night between certain hours. Well, that’s where she was.” He wiped his nose on his ratty coat. He’d done that so many times, both sleeves had crusty, damp streaks. “Can I go now, huh? I answered your question.”