Midnight Club (12 page)

37

John Stefanovitch; Ridgewood, New Jersey

BEAR KUPCHEK DIED
in the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital, one of the city’s best facilities. Stefanovitch had gone there with his unconscious friend, traveling in the back of a speeding EMS ambulance. He’d watched as the Bear was finally pronounced dead.

When a policeman or fireman arrives in critical condition at a New York hospital, the best doctors and nurses usually assist, trying everything to save the injured officer. There was nothing any of them could do this time. The shock and sadness of the emergency room staff was obvious, both touching and maddening to Stefanovitch.

On June 28, he drove north out of New York on the crumbling West Side Highway, then across the split-level expanse of the George Washington Bridge. The world was feeling fuzzy at the edges, unfamiliar and unreal to him.

Why Kupchek? What had the Bear found out? What was the missing clue? The words were being shouted inside his head. Everything but cymbals were crashing, creating a powerful effect, like the end of Hitchcock’s
The Man Who Knew Too Much
… except that Stefanovitch didn’t know too much.

He was headed toward Ridgewood, New Jersey, where he would attend Kupchek’s funeral. He couldn’t imagine anything worse that he’d have to do for the rest of his life.

As he reached Route 17, he remembered happier times, when the Bear and his wife, JoAnne, had used their combined incomes to buy a home in Jersey. It was during Kupchek’s third or fourth year with the force. Recently, he’d told Stef that the value of their house had gone from under sixty thousand to almost four hundred thousand. The manager of the Yankees lived in the same neighborhood. Stefanovitch had been out there to visit in May. There’d been humongous steaks grilled on the Weber, a closely contested NBA play-off game, too many Coronas for him to drive home that night. He loved Bear’s family. They loved Stef back.
This was so god-damn hard, so bad.

As he drove past the shopping malls of northern Jersey, Stefanovitch began to think about another kind of small-town life, back in Pennsylvania, where he had grown up. All kinds of bittersweet memories were sweeping through his mind on the morning of Bear’s funeral. His parents’ farm. A soup kitchen they ran for poor people. A flood of images.

His grandfather had been a route driver for a regional bread company out near Minersville. For many years, George Stefanovitch had driven a beaten-up truck over the Catawissa Mountains to his territory, a nest of tiny villages.

He had given his grandson some free advice on careers one morning when Stef was helping out with the deliveries. His grandfather had been a god-awful singer who nonetheless loved to sing as he went over the Catawissas to work each morning. He’d told Stef that he didn’t care whether he became the president of the United States or a ditchdigger when he grew up. Only one thing was important: “When you go over the mountain to work every morning, make sure you’re singing, make sure you’re happy to be going on that trip every day. The same way I am in this broken-down bread truck. I am happy, Stef.”

Stefanovitch had never forgotten the advice, and somehow, through luck or good management, he found that he usually went to work singing, or at least humming along with the car radio. For whatever crazy reasons, he loved the job.

And if he could get through this particular day, he figured, he could get through any of them.

As he exited off Route 17, Stefanovitch could see crisp white church steeples silhouetted against the backdrop of Ridgewood. Majestic elms and oaks and lindens towered along both sides of the country road. At the church itself, dark blue dress uniforms were everywhere: hundreds of police uniforms dotted across a bright green patch of beautifully maintained lawn. Everything was so perfect that it made Stefanovitch feel ill, nauseated for a moment.

The funerals of police officers were usually part pageant, part small-town parade, part Greek tragedy. Perspiration bubbled on his forehead, and on the back of his neck. He braced himself for the act of getting out of the van, putting together his chair.

38

HE COULD HEAR THE
motorcycle contingent approaching for the funeral. It was such a foreign and otherworldly sound. He thought that, had there been any way, the Bear would have carried him inside the church.

Finally, he began to push himself across the macadam lot toward the chapel. The sun over the high spires looked like a shattered bulb. His body felt numb.

Along the way, Stefanovitch was recognized by several police officers. Most shook his hand and muttered kind words. Then they continued on in their own private funks. A few shared quick Bear Kupchek anecdotes.

Blue dress uniforms were everywhere, like a graduation at some kind of military academy. A loudspeaker voice was asking that people proceed inside the church for the service.

Once he was in the vestibule, Stefanovitch was disturbed that he couldn’t see the altar. That made him feel even worse than he had outside.

There was a light tap on his shoulder.

He swiveled in his chair and was surprised to see Sarah McGinniss beside him at the rear of the church. She had come out to New Jersey for the funeral. Somehow that buoyed his spirits.

Sarah bent forward and spoke to him. The lightest hint of her perfume reached his nose. The physical closeness reminded Stefanovitch of their day working together at the beach house on Long Island.

“I’m sorry, Stef,” she said in a church whisper. “I’m so sorry you had to lose your friend.”

Some of the emotional unrest, the chaos of bereavement, seemed to stop for an instant. Stefanovitch felt a quiet acceptance of Kupchek’s death at that moment, as much as he was going to, anyway. “Thank you for coming. It means something that you bothered to make the trip.”

Sarah craned her neck, watching things in the church he obviously couldn’t see. He was feeling as helpless as a child. He remembered being a little boy back in Pennsylvania, unable to see inside some mysterious, incense-filled church.

“Listen, you have a pretty bad spot picked out for yourself here.” Sarah leaned down close to him again. “Can I help out a little?”

“Yeah, I guess you could. I think I’d like to have box seats, down a little closer, for this one.”

Sarah began to push his chair up through the thick and somewhat resistant jam of police officers. The fact that it was John Stefanovitch, Kupchek’s partner, helped to part the waves of blue. Then, Stefanovitch could finally see the main altar.

“This works pretty good at airports, too,” he smiled and said. “It’s one of the few benefits of the wheelchair, which I’m not afraid to play up.” Sarah had found them a spot closer to the front. They settled near the side entrance, where heavy oak doors with metal rings sealed off the vestry.

The back of Stefanovitch’s shirt was already soaked. Airconditioning was blowing down on his neck and shoulders. None of it really mattered.

He wasn’t going to see the Bear again.
That
mattered. How many real friends did you get in your lifetime? Four or five at the most? If you were lucky. Now one of his was gone.

After a few minutes, a trumpet struck the first familiar and dreaded notes of taps. Bear Kupchek’s funeral was beginning.

39

AFTER THE SERVICE,
Stefanovitch and Sarah McGinniss left the church together. They went over to the Kupcheks’ house in his van. Sarah had come out to Ridgewood with a representative from the police commissioner’s office. She needed a ride anyway.

The Bear’s oldest son, Mike, Jr., was only fifteen, but he already resembled a football middle linebacker at the college level. He was a junior Bear in almost every way, lumbering and cuddly at the same time. Stefanovitch didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he hugged Mike, Jr., as he talked to the boy about nothing, mostly, desperately needing to communicate affection to the Bear’s son.

Later on, Stefanovitch and JoAnne Kupchek talked in the kitchen for over an hour. They drank Glenlivet from the same water glass. They held each other, trying to find comfort, eventually singing an old Polish love song from JoAnne and the Bear’s wedding. They were both missing him terribly.

Stefanovitch had promised Sarah that he’d drive her back to New York. It was past five when they finally got onto Route 17 again, heading toward the George Washington Bridge.

They were stalled in heavy commuter traffic at the bridge. Cars were backed up a mile from the tollbooths. For the first time that day, they talked about the murder investigations; what Kupchek might have found out the night he was killed; whom he might have seen. Neither of them really had the heart for the talk.

Back in the city, Stefanovitch turned onto Fifth Avenue. Sarah asked him to make a left on Sixty-sixth. Her apartment was between Park and Madison.

“That’s the place. The green canopy,” she said a few moments later.

Stefanovitch stopped the van in front of a prewar building with a forest green canopy. A spiffy doorman was there, Johnny-on-the-spot. A huge directory desk was visible through the open door into the lobby. Fancy place.

“Please come in for a minute. Don’t play the hard-nosed New York City cop. Not right now, not tonight. Have one drink with me, Stef? Please?”

Sarah didn’t give Stefanovitch a chance to answer. She called out the open window to the doorman, who was already approaching, cleaning his wire-rimmed eyeglasses as he lumbered forward.

“Mr. McGoey, will you take care of Detective Stefanovitch’s car? Find a spot for it?”

“Of course, ma’am. No trouble at all.”

A rustic fieldstone fireplace dominated the living room of Sarah’s apartment. She started a modest blaze, and it seemed peculiar at first—the warm, crackling fire with the air conditioner on—but the aromatic smells of oak and pine quickly permeated the room and made it special.

The two of them began talking. They shared ironic perceptions and stories much more comfortably than they had at the beach house.

Stefanovitch eventually told her about growing up in coal-mining country, about his three years of globe-trotting, and finally finding himself in the navy, then his four-year marriage to Anna. For her part, Sarah finally told some stories about Stockton, California. Her humor about growing up was mostly self-effacing, and Stefanovitch liked her for it. Putting herself through school, she’d been an onion topper, cherry picker, Mexican-café hash slinger, McDonald’s girl, Baskin-Robbins ice cream girl, plus a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson for one day in Oakland, actually for four and a half hours.

Stefanovitch suddenly realized that he wasn’t used to having a woman as a friend. He thought that most men still weren’t ready for that—no matter how many claimed that they were. The new male was emerging, but he wasn’t quite there.

Sarah brought him another Irish whiskey, his second or third, or maybe it was his fourth. Stefanovitch glanced at his watch, and he couldn’t believe the time. It was twenty past ten. He’d been at her apartment drinking and talking for almost four hours.

Sarah noticed him checking his wristwatch. It was suddenly too quiet in the living room.

“I did need to talk to somebody tonight,” Stefanovitch said. “You were right about that.”

He lightly fingered his drink, hearing the cubes clink. He was nervous, and he knew Sarah could probably see that. He couldn’t talk about what he was feeling, though. Not yet, not right now. Not tonight especially.

“Sarah, thank you. I have to go home and sleep some,” he said finally. “I have to go home.”

40

Isiah Parker; Harlem

ISIAH PARKER WAS
dressed so that he wouldn’t stand out on the street. He had on an old Lee sweater, faded black corduroys, worn high-top sneakers. He was a contemporary version of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man.

He hadn’t been able to sleep inside his walk-up apartment on 116th Street. There were too many random thoughts speeding through his head. He felt nervous and paranoid. Was he really on the side of the angels? The more he thought about it, the less certain he was.

He could visualize a single face so clearly now, every detail. He could
see
his brother inside a sleazy SRO hotel on the Bowery—the Edmonds. He remembered everything about that day.

The incident had occurred six months ago. It had been his RDO, his regular day off. When he received the news, Parker had hurried downtown to the Fifth Precinct, an old, traditional station house on Elizabeth Street. From the Fifth, he had gone by squad car to the Bowery.

At least a dozen leather-jacketed policemen were loitering outside the seedy Edmonds Hotel. Up and down Grand Street, vagrants and bums were sleeping it off. They congregated on crumbling doorsteps, on cast-iron grates where minimal heat came up from the subway tunnels.

One mange-haired black man wobbled around at the corner. He was trying to wash the windshields of cars stopped at the traffic light. Somehow, he made the glass grimier than it was before he used his paper towel.

Parker finally lowered his head, and he walked toward the transients’ hotel. What had Marcus been doing at a place like this? How had he wound up here, at the very end of the earth? How could this have happened to his brother?

He had to step over the depleted bodies of two men sleeping on the stairs outside the hotel. He stopped again, on a gritty stairwell inside.

Isiah Parker sat down hard on the stairs. His legs felt like rubber, and he was beginning to choke away tears. His hands started to claw uncontrollably at his jaw. He couldn’t catch his breath…
because he knew.

Parker finally tucked his head down low and away from his trousers. The single cup of coffee he’d had that morning began to spill onto the broken tile-and-stone steps…
He knew.

His brother, Marcus, was upstairs.

Somehow, his brother had died up these broken stairs—in some mysterious way, the middleweight boxing champion had died inside this transients’ hotel in the Bowery. How could that be? How could it have happened?

Parker struggled to his feet, and he began to slowly climb the last stairs. There were two more flights, but the odor was already indescribable.

At the top of the stairs, a policeman in a gas mask came up to Parker. “You better put one of these on before you go in,” he said.

Isiah Parker was already entering the open door, ignoring the warning. He peered at the soiled, dismal living room. Black grit was on everything, like foul little bug eggs ready to hatch.

He walked inside a soot-covered bathroom. A fingerprint technician and a photographer from Police Plaza were working there. Both policemen wore gas masks and plastic gloves that went to their elbows.

His brother’s naked body, bruised and broken, was slumped faceup in the bathtub. The color of Marcus’s skin was dark in places, purple in others. His brother was ghostly pale from the neck up.

“They fed him a ton of junk,” one of the police technicians said. “Must have been shooting him up with smack for a couple of days. Like they wanted to make him some kind of example.”

The medical examiner was an insensitive man whom Parker knew by sight. He spoke in a muffled drone. “He OD’d on junk. His heart went pop. Couldn’t take the strain.”

A broken heart,
Parker thought. His brother, Marcus, who had always been so proud and strong, had died in the Bowery of a broken heart.

Now, standing on Ninety-sixth Street, Parker was remembering the scene at the Edmonds Hotel. Sometimes he would be walking somewhere, anywhere, and the images just came to him, flew at him like attacking birds. Would he ever be able to forget the Edmonds? The sights and smells in that horrifying bathroom?

Isiah Parker stared south down the wide, deserted promenade of Broadway. He finally saw the men he had been waiting for on the street corner.

Jimmy Burke and Aurelio Rodriquez were just stepping out of a black sedan parked in front of McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts. The three detectives had to talk about next steps; about a final hit, the most important one of all.

The side of the angels?
Parker wondered once again.