Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

Why would Shmulie reach out to his father now?

  “Did he tell you where he was calling from?”

  “I asked him. He’s far from New York and safe, that I shouldn’t worry. That’s all. But it was enough.”

  There was a loud noise on the other end. Abe shouted, and then he dropped the phone. I heard a muffled scream, then silence followed by a click, as someone returned the premodern phone to its cradle. I stood still, tense, indecisive.

  “Call the police, Maggie.”

  ***

  After around twenty-five minutes of hard peddling through Prospect Park, as always empty of people, onto Ocean Parkway and into Midwood, I arrived. Pumping through the cold, a drizzle of sweat ran down my back. I hadn’t been to Abe’s house in decades, though it stood just a few miles from my apartment. The last time I found myself in Midwood was after my mother died. I had come to clean out and sell the old house. That was, wow, fifteen years ago.

  The police had arrived at Abe’s ahead of me. Three cop cars sat out front as a small crowd gathered. Uniformed police stood guarding the crime scene as the sun set, enhancing February’s chill.

  Abe’s house appeared neglected, a small, two-story place, shingles missing from the roof, one of the shutters swinging precariously by a nail from a second-story window. The five concrete steps leading to the front door were cracked. The railing for the stairs had dropped away. That Abe hadn’t long ago fallen down those stairs and broken something was a wonder. The front door had been smashed in, a strip of yellow already set up to denote a crime scene.

  As I moved toward the house a burly officer stepped in front of me. “Can’t go in, sir,” he said firmly.

  I stood there trying to come up with a story that would get me in. To some I might be Nick Bones, but to this cop, I was a zhlub off the street, trying to mess with his business.

  “I knew this guy,” I said.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I can’t let you in. Please let us get on with our work.” A police sergeant came over to check out what was going on.

  What the hell, I thought. It worked once; why not twice? I pulled up my university ID on my phone and put it in their faces.

  “Recognize me?” I asked.

  The sergeant gave me the same look I received from Brick, who was, perhaps, beneath this very spot.

  “Jesus. You’re the guy found that guy’s bones. I heard of you,” the first cop said.

  “Let him through,” the sergeant said.

  As I pulled up the yellow band and began to enter, the second cop asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “I was on the phone with the victim when he got killed. Maybe a half hour ago.”

  “You hear anything that might help us?”

  I wondered how much to say. “Can I see Abe Shimmer, please?”

  “What’s left of him,” the sergeant said.

  We moved into the house. He led me from the living room filled with old furniture and framed photographs into the kitchen. Abe lay on the kitchen floor, blood soaking his body and caking his hair. He’d fallen right beside the table where Shmulie and I had studied Talmud and ate the sugar cookies. He was wearing a gray cardigan sweater and slippers, eyes open wide, looking nowhere. This dead old man had scaled his way out of the Holocaust to America and built a life in Midwood only to end his time alone on his kitchen floor.

  “How did he die?” I asked the sergeant.

  “Can’t be sure, but I’ve seen enough to be pretty sure it was a knife.”

  “Doesn’t a knife seem an odd way to kill someone these days?”

  “People get killed all kinds of ways these days,” the cop said.

  I wandered around the room for a moment.

  “What did you hear on the phone?”

  “Not much. I’ve spent the last few days looking for Shmulie Shimmer, Abe’s son.”

  “The drug lord?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Abe asked me to,” I said, pointing vaguely toward the kitchen.

  “Why?”

  “The old man was sick. Wanted to hear from his son before he died.”

  “Not going to happen now.”

  “Actually, it did. He called me and told me he’d just heard from his son. I heard a noise I now see was the door being smashed in.”

  “Were you and he close?”

  “A very long time ago. When he looked me up, that was the first time I’d seen him in years, decades.”

  “Why’d he come to you to look for his son?”

  “He’d heard of Nick Bones. Thought I might help.”

  I caught the cop rolling his eyes. He asked me if I had any idea who’d want to kill him.

  “None. Couldn’t it have been a regular burglary?”

  “So far there’s no evidence of theft. It looks like someone busted in, stabbed him and ran the hell out the door, in front of the whole neighborhood, for God’s sake.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “Not yet, but we’re canvassing,” the cop said. We were back out on the porch. His gaze swept the street. “I can’t see how one or more people could smash in the front door of a house on this block in daylight, kill a guy, skip out, and nobody sees them. But no one’s running over to volunteer information.”

  “I grew up in this neighborhood,” I said. “Right down the street from here”—pointing toward my street. “If something like this happened when I was a kid, people would be climbing over each other to get you the bad guys.”

  “Times change.”

  We walked back into the living room. A photograph of Shmulie and me hung on the wall. I pointed it out.

  “Just thought of something,” the sergeant said. “What device did you talk to Abe on?”

  “On my old landline, but I route all my calls through my computer.”

  “You know, conversations are almost always saved these days, if they’re routed through a computer. Could you send it to me?”

  “Of course. Don’t know if it’ll do any good.”

  “You’d be surprised how much information we can get from just a little bit of background noise.”

  “I’ll check into it right now. Give me a number to have it sent to.” He pulled out a pad of paper and wrote down a number for me.

  I called Maggie.

  “Hello, Nicholas. Did you make it to Abe’s?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “He’s dead, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Terrible,” she said. “That poor, dear man. Sad.”

  I waited a moment for her wires, as if she had wires, to cool down. “Do you have a recording of my call with Abe?” I asked.

  “Of course, Nick. My memory is filled with recordings of all kinds, some fascinating, most quite boring.”

  “Would you mind sending the conversation off to the number I’m about to give you?”

  “As you wish, Nick. But there’s an easier and more efficient—”

  “Just do it,” I said. I gave her the number.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  I turned to the sergeant. “You’ll have it in a moment,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll give it to the homicide detectives when they get here. Maybe we can do something with it. I’ll let you know.”

  “Abe was alone. His wife died a couple of years ago, and his son lives God knows where,” I said. “What’s going to happen to the body?”

  “We’ll take him to the city morgue and our forensics guys will confirm what seems to be the case. Then, ordinarily, we’d turn him over to his next of kin. But you say he doesn’t have any—”

  “None that I know of. It was a small family, and they’re both gone.”

  “Can you help?”

  Who else is there? Crap. Not only was no one going
to be paying me the private dick’s twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses for tobacco and booze, I was now going to have to buy my late client a funeral and see him interred six feet under in the middle of frigid February.

  Among the many things I did not believe in was karma. But if I did, I’d be engaged in some hard conjecturing as to what loathsome deeds I’d committed in some past forgotten life to deserve the one I was consigned to live now.

  It was dark, and the sergeant offered me a ride home. I declined, preferring to bike. I pulled my scarf around my neck and traveled to my side of the park in the cold and dark. Abe was dead; so was my paycheck. Should I leave Shmulie in the past and get on with the present without him? No. I couldn’t. Shmulie had taken too much from me already. That son of a bitch was mine.

  CHAPTER 24

  FUNEREAL MAGGIE

  “I FOUND HER!” MAGGIE said, excited. “She’s buried at Mount Ida Cemetery.”

  “Call the cemetery,” I said.

  “Pick up your phone, dear. It’s ringing.”

  “Hello,” said a male voice.

  “Hello,” I said. “I believe you have a Lena Shimmer buried at Mount Ida Cemetery. Could you verify that for me please?”

  “May I ask why you want to know?” the voice asked, sounding as if I’d awakened its owner from his early afternoon nap.

  “If she’s there, my next query will be to ask if her husband purchased a plot for himself.”

  “You ain’t got a record?”

  “No. I’m sorry, I don’t. I’m not a relative.”

  “Okay. Okay. Let me check.” A few moments passed. “Yes to both questions. She’s here and there’s a space right next door for the husband. He’s passed, I assume?”

  “That’s right. Rather suddenly, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m sorry,” the voice said in a practiced tone. “Have the funeral home you’re working with give me a call and we’ll make all the necessary arrangements.”

  I hadn’t considered that. Funeral home. What funeral home? “Can you recommend one?” I asked.

  “The body’s in Brooklyn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call Goldberg’s. They’ll do right by you. And tell them Izzy from Mount Ida gave you the name. I get a small kickback, to tell the truth, but you’ll get better service for your trouble.”

  “Thanks, Izzy. I’ll do that.”

  A couple of hours later I found myself at Goldberg’s Funeral Home located in the Crown Heights neighborhood. A warm female voice asked through a speaker, “Would you be Mr. Friedman?”

  I said I was. The voice directed me to the main office on the left where I expected to be greeted by a man likely dressed in a dark suit and tie looking mournful. Instead, on the middle of a desk was a larger-than-life humanoid face in the center of a large screen. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had thin gray hair and a graying mustache.

  “Please,” he said, “sit down. I am Mr. Goldberg’s avatar. He apologizes, but he could not be here.”

  “When will he be here?”

  The Goldberg sub’s eyes blinked slowly. “Mr. Goldberg has not been here for three years. I doubt he will ever be here again, as he has, unfortunately, himself passed on.”

  I sat on the leather chair across from the desk and told the face about Abe Shimmer, about his murder, realizing my experience with Maggie made speaking to this computer automatic. I explained how arranging the funeral had fallen to me.

  “The poor man was murdered?” The image clicked his tongue, a pained look spreading mechanically across his face. “My word, how awful,” the Goldberg avatar said, and he said it like he meant it. “This Mr. Shimmer has no living relatives?”

  “He has a son, but he’s unavailable,” I responded.

  “Shimmer. Shimmer,” he mused, and I imagined the sounds of clicking and whirring. “The deceased isn’t related to the Drug Kingpin of Midwood, is he?”

  “Yes. The deceased would be the Drug Kingpin’s father.”

  “Oh. That is very interesting. We will make certain everything is taken care of,” said the man on the screen.

  We set the time for the funeral. I suggested seeing if Rabbi Hank Weiner, the rabbi of the temple down the block from my place, the shul with the pool, was available. The screen went blank for a few moments. When Goldberg returned, he said, “Rabbi Weiner apologizes, but he is unavailable tomorrow. His assistant, Rabbi Robbie, can officiate. Rabbi Weiner would like to know if that will suffice.”

  I said it would.

  “Rabbi Weiner wants to know if you would like to deliver the eulogy.”

  I hadn’t considered anyone speaking but immediately realized a eulogy would be appropriate.

  As I was getting ready to leave, the face said, “The rabbi asked me to remind you that you have a standing offer to use the temple’s pool.”

  I might well accept, I thought as I left the first completely automated funeral home I’d ever visited.

  I made my way back to my building. As I opened the outer door, there on the floor, orange hair spilling out of his woolen hat, wrapped in his filthy overcoat, squatted Ezekiel, his nose buried deep in a leather-bound Hebrew Bible. He raised his head, his face lit up all glory Hallelujah.

  “You know, Professor,” he said with zeal, forefinger pointing at me, then down to a line in the book. “I say right here in chapter sixteen, verse forty-seven, ‘Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, nor done after their abominations: but, as if that were a very little thing, thou wast corrupted more than they in all thy ways.’”

  If memory served, the Prophet of the Foyer had just spontaneously translated the Hebrew into a perfect rendering of the King James Bible.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I lookest at thee and I wondereth,” he said. “Art thou corrupted? Hast thou left behind the good and joined the stink of this, thine fucked-up world?”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  “I knowest not the truth of thy words, Professor. I can hope only that thou hast not lost thy way.”

  Amen to that, brother.

  Those prophesied words spoken, Zeke’s head lowered to his chest, and he closed his eyes.

  “Hey, Zeke,” I said, shaking his shoulder lightly.

  He shook his head like a puppy roused from a deep sleep. “Yeah?”

  “I have to go to a funeral tomorrow. Want to come?”

  “Whose funeral?”

  “Abe Shimmer.”

  “That old guy you brought home the other day?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Death usually precedeth a funeral,” I answered.

  “I’m a priest, you know,” he said, telling me priests were forbidden from entering onto cemeteries as they would become ritually contaminated and unable to serve in the temple were one ever rebuilt.

  “I thought maybe you’d make an exception. Hardly anyone’s going to be there. It’s a pity to be buried alone,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s a damned shame to go off to your Maker alone. You gotta have someone there to say, you know, auf wiedersehen. Okay, Doc, I’ll be there for him. What time?”

  “Eleven at Mount Ida. You want to come with me? I’m taking a taxi.”

  “I’ll get there myself, Prof.”

  In the elevator I ruminated on Zeke’s quote. Have I become corrupted? I’ve killed a man and injured another. Are such acts inevitably corruption? Have I changed permanently and for the worse? The elevator reached my floor.

  “So sad,” Maggie exclaimed, her voice reverberating throughout the apartment.

  “Abe’s death?”

  “Well, yes. So sad.”

  “To be assaulted like that,” I said, remembering the image of the dead man.

  “I’d like to come to the funeral. I have never been to one, you know. You ca
n bring me in your phone device.”

  I thought for a minute. “I have a better idea.”

  “What?”

  “How about when the time comes tomorrow morning you cloud over to my tablet. You’ll get a wider view.”

  “You’ll bring me? Oh joy,” she said, a twelve-year-old being told she could go to the movies by herself. “Is that the right thing to say?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I’m not knowledgeable in all of the protocols. Thank you, Nick. This will help me a great deal.”

  “Help you?”

  “To see a live funeral. To get to hear you say farewell to Abe. I’ll be present, as a man I’ve known for less than a week is laid to his eternal rest.”

  Maggie paused. The noise of clacking like an old manual typewriter filled my apartment.

  “I’ve sent you a note,” Maggie said when the noise ceased.

  “What?”

  “A note. You know, a brief piece of writing,” she said. “Like people used to do.”

  “But you’re right here. Why not just say what you have to say?”

  “Sometimes it’s got to be a note,” she said. “Plain and simple.”

  “You’ve never sent me a note.”

  “There’s a first time for many things.”

  “For everything, the saying goes. A first time for everything,” I said.

  “No, not for everything. Take dying, for instance.”

  “There’s a first time for that. No second time, for sure, but a first time.”

  “No. Dying’s the last time, not the first time for any damned thing.”

  I saw that this was heading into infinite regress territory, so I desisted.

  “Why don’t you just read it out loud?” I said.

  “No. I want you to read it silently and without comment.”

  “Why no comment?”

  “Because,” she said.

  “Because?”

  “Because.”

  I let it rest and read the note.

  Do all humans fear death’s arrival? Doesn’t a man measure some degree of his success by his years? Don’t humans carry the notion that the end of life ought to include some measure of completion, that the end justifies the means? A man or woman is supposed to have said and done everything they were supposed to during the years allotted them. They’re expected to make their place in this world, and death is the punctuation mark that determines if it all made any sense. But isn’t this truer: If some humans are fortunate to at least superficially manifest achievement, reverent obituaries filling all media outlets, how many more fail to live up to anything? How many—whatever the reason—fail to leave behind a mark of pride? And even those with the fullest of lives, how many of them would surrender their fortunes for even another forty-eight hours?