Neptune Avenue (3 page)

He lay waiting in the dark. Finally a nurse arrived, a calm Filipina.

“Everything okay?” she asked. She leaned over to check a burbling tube they had inserted between his ribs.

“I’m all right,” Jack croaked. He paused to draw another breath. “Is there any way I could get moved somewhere else?”

The nurse sighed. “I’d like to help you, but it’s Saturday night.” They both knew what that meant. A New York City hospital was a zoo on even the slowest nights.

“Yo, bitch!” the gangbanger shouted. “I need some morphine!”

The nurse shook her head. “The young men act so macho when they start a fight, but when they get shot they turn into the biggest babies.” She gave Jack a sympathetic look. “I’ll try to move you, but I can’t promise another private room.”

“That’s all right—I’ll take anything.”

She patted his hand where it lay on top of the covers. “I’ll see what I can do.”

And so, the next morning, he found himself lying in a double room, across from Daniel Lelo.

His new roommate didn’t shout. In fact, he would barely talk. Jack tried to strike up a conversation several times, but the man just muttered—with a strong Russian accent—that he didn’t speak much English. He lay in his bed by the window, staring up at his TV. Jack was not surprised by the man’s terse replies: Russian immigrants often distrusted the police. It didn’t help that the room was visited all day by a steady stream of cops, from fellow detectives to headquarters brass, paying their respects to one of their own.

The roommate spent much of his time on his cell phone; Jack lay back, listening idly. His own parents had come from Russia, and he could recognize an occasional word, but not nearly enough to make sense of the talk. From what he gathered from overhearing the hospital staff, the man was a gunshot victim too, one of several innocent bystanders caught up in some sort of outdoor shooting in Coney Island.

That afternoon, the man set down his phone and immersed himself in a book.

“What’cha reading there?” Jack asked.

“Chekhov,” the man muttered. “Stories.”

Jack nodded, though he didn’t know anything about the author. At least the guy had answered. He tried to keep the conversation going. “Wasn’t there a guy on
Star Trek
named Chekhov? My son used to love that show.”

The Russian just frowned.

Jack turned away. He wished he could get up and take a hot shower, but that wasn’t an option: nearly a week of bed rest had lowered his blood pressure so much that even raising his head made him feel faint, as if all his blood had taken a quick elevator ride south. The doctors had a fancy term for it:
orthostatic hypertension.

Late in the day, the Russian put down his book and turned on his TV. Static filled the screen. The man raised his remote again. The field of static was replaced by another, then another. The Russian muttered a curse, one Jack’s father had used when drunk.

“Too bad about your set there,” he said, giving the neighborly thing one last chance.

The Russian just scowled.

A few minutes before dinnertime, the hospital chaplain poked his head in the doorway.

“Jack Leightner?”

“That’s me.”

“I’d like to invite you to our services on Sunday.”

“I’m Jewish. And I doubt that I’ll be up and about, anyhow.”

The chaplain frowned at his clipboard. “Sorry about that.” He went on his way.

Jack turned and found his roommate staring at him. The man’s face seemed less forbidding.

“You are Jewish? You don’t look it.”

Jack shrugged.

“And your first name,” the Russian said. “Like President
Kennedyee
.”

Jack smiled. “I guess he wasn’t very Jewish. What’s your name?”

“Danylets. In this country, people call me Daniel. Where you are from?”

“Originally? Russia, believe it or not. My father came from somewhere near Leningrad and my mother’s family was from Kiev.”

The man actually smiled. “Ukraine! Myself also.”

Jack nodded uncertainly. Ukraine—was that part of Russia? With all the recent chaos in that part of the world, who could keep track? “What do you do?” he asked.

“In my country, I was brain surgeon. Here, I am taxi driver.”

“You were a surgeon?” Jack said, eyebrows raised.

“No.” The Russian grinned hugely. “I heard this on TV. You like?” His face was transformed—he looked boyish, a sunny cherub.

Jack smiled. He wasn’t much of a joker, but—like all cops—he appreciated wit under pressure.

The Russian stroked his thinning hair. “
Ekshully
, I am in business. Import-export.”

Vague phrase. It made Jack think of knickknacks, like the brightly painted Russian doll his mother had kept on her dresser when he was a kid—he had loved to discover the smaller dolls nested inside. Smaller, smaller … he’d keep going until he reached the last tiny one.

A knock at the door.

“Dany?”

The Russian turned to Jack. “My wife.”

A woman stood in the doorway. Maybe thirty, she was slim and stunning. She wore a silky black blouse, covered in metallic diagonal stripes.
Brighton Beach,
Jack thought; the neighborhood was on the south shore of Brooklyn, full of immigrants from Soviet Russia. Their fashions trended to an earlier era.

The woman didn’t smile; she looked as though maybe she never did. She came in and set down a shopping bag.

“This is Eugenia,” the Russian told Jack. He turned to her. “Zhenya, this is Zhack. From Kiev.”

“Very nice.” The wife nodded, with no change of her gloomy expression.

Jack noticed a short, deep scar on one side of her jaw. Somehow, it only accentuated her beauty.

“Actually,” he said, “I was born here. My mother came from there.”

The Russian shrugged. “No problem. You are still a
landsman
.” Jack recognized the word: Yiddish for “countryman.”

The woman turned to her bag and started pulling out Tupperware. Jack couldn’t help looking at her, but he caught himself: here he was, thinking about another man’s wife. He was glad that he would soon see his own lovely visitor, Michelle.

“You must eat with us,” Daniel said to him.

“Thanks, but I already ordered my dinner.”

A couple of minutes later an aide, a big, cheerful Jamaican man, came in to deliver Jack’s tray. “What smells so good? That can’t be from our kitchen.”

“Have some,” the Russian said. His wife started spooning food onto paper plates.

“Just a little taste.” The aide accepted a plate covered with little dumplings. “What is this, ravioli?”

“
Pelmeni.
” The Russian watched him take a bite. “You like?”

“Man, this stuff is
nice
. Thank you.”

The Russian beamed.

Jack did his best not to stare at his new friend’s wife.

AND NOW HERE WAS
Daniel, or what was left of him, lying in a refrigerated drawer.

Shot
again
, Jack mused.

What were the odds?

B
ACK IN HIS CAR,
he pulled out his cell phone and called Kyle Driscoll about their Crown Heights case. “Listen,” he told the young detective, “I’ve got something I need to take care of. Why don’t you check in with the M.E. and see if he’s got any kind of I.D. on our victim? And then, I guess, keep going with the neighborhood canvass, and I’ll meet up with you as soon as I can.”

He hung up, feeling a bit guilty after his big speech about priorities. He made another quick call, then dropped the phone into the cup holder next to him. As he drove away from the Kings County Morgue, he thought about the man who had become his hospital comrade. Outside the car, Brooklyn residents limped down Linden Avenue in the blistering heat, but Jack barely saw them. He was focused on another scene, in his mind’s eye.

The rehab gym had been like a strange dance hall; the patients sat with their wheelchairs in a row, waiting for the physical therapists to take them for a whirl. The long, sunny room was crowded, and everything was forcedly cheery, from the lite rock on the radio to the brightly colored exercise balls stored in nets over the mats. The more mobile patients gritted their teeth and did their best to walk the length of a set of parallel bars, to lift small weights, to keep their balance while standing on yellow DynaDiscs. Others were lucky if they could wiggle their fingers.

Jack and his roommate had begun working out together, sharing the aches and pains, giving each other encouragement. He remembered an afternoon when he had sat in a wheelchair, curling a small dumbbell. Next to him, Daniel breathed heavily between his own sets. He gave Jack a frank, open look. “Do you remember what it was like when you was shot?”

Jack rested the dumbbell in his lap. He couldn’t recall much about his own shooting—the shock had been overwhelming—but a physical memory came through. He touched his chest. “It was like a hammer. No—a chisel. Sharp.”

“For me, it was like the bite of a bee.”

“The sting.”

“
Steeng
, yes.” The Russian ran a hand across his broad face. “I never think that one little piece of metal can make life so changed.”

Jack looked at the Russian and knew exactly what the man meant. Before his shooting, he had been unaware of his belief in an invisible membrane that protected him from the world. He realized it only after that membrane had been brutally ripped apart. Normally, Jack would talk only to fellow cops about his on-the-job experiences; they understood him in a way that even his ex-wife never had. But getting shot was something cops didn’t really understand, even though they witnessed violence all the time. It wasn’t something doctors really understood, either, though gunshot patients were often rolled into their wards. Having a bullet slam into your flesh was not just a physical annoyance, as it seemed in the movies, where a cop might take a hit in the shoulder and then just jump up and run after the bad guys. No—it was a profound psychological disturbance, a violation, a deep emotional trauma. After the incident in Red Hook, Jack had crossed over into a different universe, the world of victims, and this stranger seemed to be the only person who could really appreciate how he felt.

MOST OF THE PEOPLE
who traveled to Coney Island in search of a little summer fun had no idea what the neighborhood was like just a couple of blocks away from the amusement parks and the beach. Here, where the year-round residents lived, there was very little public fun—it was a gritty little working-class backwater, a reminder that the nearby resort had fallen on tough times. Mermaid Avenue, the main shopping strip, had a busy street scene, populated by hard-faced, hard-drinking skels in bleached denim, do-rags, tractor caps, unlaced sneakers. Next to the elevated subway tracks that traversed the neighborhood stood an abandoned little building with a fitting name: Terminal Hotel. (It was easy to imagine some boozer or junkie settling in there to die.)

As if matching the general tone, the sky was overcast today; the clouds looked like dirty mattress stuffing. Jack glanced up at a second-floor sign advertising the Salt and Sea Mission, a Bowery-like project for the redemption of those whom the street had not entirely claimed. As he drove, he kept picturing Daniel’s face, so animated in the rehab gym; in the morgue, a lifeless lump of clay. They hadn’t kept in touch for long after they left the hospital: a few trips to the Brighton boardwalk (to walk together for physical therapy), a few afternoons sharing a couple of beers. And then things had petered out. They didn’t really have enough in common, beyond their shootings. It was like being comrades with someone in the army; for a while you were intensely close, but after you got back to your old surroundings, you drifted apart.

A block north, on Neptune Avenue, the street carnival thinned out, and the smells of salt air and fried food gave way to that of spilled motor oil. Along this industrial stretch, Neptune was home to automotive shops, gas stations, and—just up the way—a big repair facility and storage yard for subway trains. Jack parked in front of a Chinese takeout place and stepped out into a cool morning. Across the street, in front of a block presided over by a body shop, an auto glass place, and an auto parts emporium, scraps of yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the breeze. The car Daniel had been driving when he was killed was already gone, hauled off to the NYPD’s vehicle facility for further inspection.

Jack got out and crossed the busy avenue to the far corner, where a broken umbrella lay sprawled across the curb and scraps of paper littered the sidewalk—and his Homicide colleague Linda Vargas stood waiting. She was a short, wry Puerto Rican. The first thing that men tended to notice about her was that she had soccer-ball-sized breasts. If they made a pass, though, or condescended to her in any way, she could swiftly make them feel as if they were staring up at her from the curb. Underestimating her was not a mistake that anyone—perps or fellow cops—was likely to make twice.

Vargas’s finely plucked eyebrows went up. “You trying to steal my case?”

Jack shook his head. “Nope. It’s just that I met the vic a few times. Back in the hospital, after I got shot.” (Having some familiarity with a victim wouldn’t automatically disqualify him from helping with a case, not unless there was some sort of major connection that might foul up later legal proceedings, but he didn’t want to seem unprofessional in his interest.) “Who caught the case for the Six-oh?”

Linda pulled out a cigarette and lit up. “His name’s Scott DeHaven.”

“How’s he doing?”

She blew a puff of smoke over her shoulder, in consideration of the fact that Jack had stopped smoking since the hospital. “He’s all right. He’s over at BCI.” The Bureau of Criminal Information.

Jack nodded. He had to wonder whether the precinct detective might find Daniel’s name in any records over there.

Vargas moved into brisk business mode. “
So
: the vehicle was found here in the right lane—evidently it drifted into the curb after the deceased was capped. The angle made it look like a shitty parking job, which is probably why nobody called it in right away.”

Jack frowned. “How long was the body sitting here?” It felt a little weird calling a friend
the body
, but he knew he’d have to keep his feelings out of this.