Onion Street (16 page)

“Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry. Where are you?”

“Where did you aim the gun, you moron?”

“Oh, yeah, right. I’m coming. I’m coming.”

That was my cue to exit. I jumped down off the top of the subway car and ran for the hole in the fence. I was no longer worried about being stealthy. Five minutes and another climbed fence later, I was heading along the bank of Coney Island Creek. When I made it to Neptune Avenue, I walked back out onto the street and I let myself exhale. I didn’t relax, not totally. I wasn’t sure I would ever fully relax again, or stop looking over my shoulder.

No ringing telephone this time, just Aaron shaking me awake. Given a choice, I preferred the phone.

“What? What’s up?” I said, my head still foggy with sleep.

Aaron dropped me and I collapsed back onto my bed. My big brother didn’t let me go back to sleep, though.

“Get up, Moses. Get up right now,” he barked at me.

When I didn’t respond quickly enough to suit him, he dumped a glass of cold water on my face. The water did a better job of getting my attention than the shoulder shaking.

“What the fuck?” I sat up, wiping the water off my face with my T-shirt.

“Go do your business and I’ll meet you in the dining room in five minutes.” It wasn’t a polite request. It wasn’t a request at all.

Normally, I don’t respond real well to my brother bossing me around or his attempts at being a third parent, but there was something, maybe the tone of his voice, that compelled me to do as he said. So five minutes later and slightly more awake, I found myself at the table. Aaron had a cup of my mother’s reheated death coffee waiting for me. I drank some of it, too much of it, and wondered how much worse could Drano have tasted and how much worse for you could it be.

“Okay, big brother, what’s the word?”

“You may be fooling Mommy and Daddy, but not me. What’s going on with you? Is it drugs? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Bullshit.”

Of course it was. I didn’t believe it myself. How was he supposed to swallow it? He held up a piece of paper and read his car’s odometer numbers to me.

“Thanks for the wine. It’s a nice gesture, little brother, but I’m not stupid. Where the hell did you go to put on all that mileage?”

“The Sea of Tranquility.”

“The moon shot’s not scheduled until two years from now. I want the truth.”

That’s what I gave him, if only a little piece of it. “I went to Koblenz, Pennsylvania.”

“Never heard of it. Why would you go there?”

“Because Koblenz, Germany, is too far away and I don’t have a passport.”

“You’re especially not funny in the morning, Moses. What were you doing in Koblenz?”

I gave him another sliver of truth. “I went to visit Samantha Hope’s grave.”

“Wasn’t she the girl who — ”

“Yeah. Bobby’s girlfriend, the one who got blown up in December in Coney Island.”

“Bobby has a car. Why didn’t you take his?”

“I didn’t go with him. I went alone.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Don’t be an ass. You sound like a five-year-old.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.

“Okay, forget that for now. What’s this?” Aaron held up my coat. “And don’t say ‘it’s my coat.’ I know it’s your coat, but it’s filthy and it’s torn and there’s dried blood all over it. Your sneakers are caked in mud, and the bottoms of your Levis are still damp. Your shirt stinks from sweat.”

It was tough to argue with the truth. I had been so full of adrenaline last night, and then so exhausted when I got home, that I hadn’t given a second thought to my clothes. Apparently, my brother had done that for me. I had to say something or Aaron would keep pushing. He was like the prosecutors on
Judd, for the Defense
. He was better than them because he didn’t lose. He’d missed his calling in life.

“I guess I got into a fight last night.”

“You guess?”

“I got into a fight.”

“With who?”

“With whom,” I corrected. “It’s ‘with whom did you get into a fight.’ It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s over now. It’s done.”

“This is Brooklyn, Moe. Fights are never over.”

He was right about that too, especially this time. Susan Kasten wasn’t done with me, nor did I think Jimmy — George Wallace — was going to forget that I broke his nose and nearly smashed his windpipe. I decided to go on the offensive, or I knew Aaron would wear me down.

“We’re not kids anymore, big brother. You can’t fight my fights for me. You can’t protect me.”

“Well, you need protecting because you’re acting like an irresponsible idiot. Like I said, you may have Mom and Dad snowed, but I know you haven’t been going to school. You can’t just not go to school like that.”

“How would you know? You haven’t taken a fucking risk in your whole life. You’ve never drawn outside the lines. All you ever do is follow the rules and toe the line.”

“I’m not going to apologize for doing the right thing or for having goals and trying to achieve them. What do you have? Do you even know what you want? You’re wandering around BC like a moth looking for a flame. Now you’re not even doing that. Do you want to be like Dad?”

“I know who I am.”

“You don’t know anything, least of all who you are.”

“You’re right,” I said, “I don’t. The joke is that you don’t either. You just think you do. You think you are defined by the rules you follow and the plans you’ve made. You think being good defines you. It’s the other way around. They stop you from defining yourself.”

“I hear Psych 1 and Introduction to Philosophy, but I don’t hear my brother talking.”

“You can hear whatever the hell you want. I wanna go back to sleep.”

Aaron shook his head at me in disgust. “Go back to bed. Go do what you want. You’ll just do it anyway.” He walked away.

“Hey, big brother,” I called after him. “You using your car today?”

He stopped and turned. “Why?”

“I need it.”

“For what? Wait — ” He held up his hands. “I don’t wanna know, do I?”

“Probably not.”

He tossed me the keys. “If this will help get whatever is going on with you out of your system, fine. Just bring it and you back in one piece. Understand?”

“Loud and clear.”

• • •

The next time, it
was
a ringing phone that woke me up. I wasn’t in a really deep sleep, anyway. I was never very good at going back to sleep after my mind was alert. My mom’s coffee hadn’t helped. I was tossing and turning over how things had deteriorated since I began digging into what had happened to Mindy. I had found the guy who’d beaten Mindy into a coma. So what? Abdul Salaam was in worse shape than her. There would be no waking from his sleep. I’d practically watched Billy O’Day murdered. Susan Kasten’s Committee, whoever the fuck they were, wanted to interrogate and now probably kill me. But everything seemed to come back to Bobby somehow.

Clearly, Bobby was mixed up in smuggling. What sort of smuggling, I couldn’t say. At least now I understood the reason for those stupid airport runs. They weren’t about hitting old people up for flight insurance policies. They were about giving Bobby cover for what he was really up to, but it was more than that. It had to be. The night 1055 Coney Island Avenue burned down, Bobby had shown up just after me and just before Susan Kasten. He had gone up to the third floor and seen Salaam’s body just like I had. Why? What were the odds that Bobby and Susan Kasten didn’t know each other? What were the odds they would show up at the same building on the same evening? Had Bobby smuggled in the boxes Susan and her two flunkies removed from 1055 Coney Island Avenue? What was in the boxes?

“Yeah?” I said, picking up the phone.

“Aaron Prager, is that you?” It was Murray Fleisher. “I can’t hear so good. Must be a bad connection.”

He was right. It was a bad connection between the nerves running from his ear to his brain.

“Yes, Mr. — Murray, it’s me, your future partner.”

“Wonderful.”

“I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”

“What? Did I call you too soon?” he shouted at me as if I was the one losing his hearing.

“No, Murray,” I upped the volume. “I said I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”

“Right, but I figured I would take the chance you’d be home. I got what you asked for … mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“First, grab a pencil and a piece of paper.”

“Got it.”

“One of the license plates belongs to a Ford registered to a Wallace Casey of 34 Trinity Street, Oceanside, New York, 11572. You know Oceanside?”

“On Long Island. It’s where they got the other Nathan’s Famous.”

“See,” Murray said, “I knew you were the sharp one. That’s it. The address is off Long Beach Road and Atlantic … around there.”

“Thanks, but what about the other plate?”

“What? Now your mother’s late? How is she, by the way?”

“No, Murray, sorry for whispering,” I shouted. “What about the other plate?”

“The other plate. That’s the rub, kid, the other plate. Are you sure you got the numbers right?”

“Positive.”

“Then we got a problem,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“The DMV tells me that plate number is registered to an official city vehicle.”

“New York City?”

“Of course. What else?”

“Did DMV tell you what kind of vehicle it is, at least? I think one of the witnesses who saw it clip my car said it was a white Dodge van.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone, a long silence.

“Murray, you still there?”

“I don’t get it.” He sounded almost hurt.

“Get what?”

“It’s a white Dodge van, all right, but why would an official city vehicle just pull away like that after denting your car?”

“Then it was the Ford that did it,” I said, not wanting Murray to get too curious. I didn’t want to have to lie to him anymore than I already had, and I couldn’t afford him showing up at our door.

“Sharp kid, very sharp. So, when is Murray gonna see you? We can have a little nosh. Have a drink maybe.”

“Soon, Murray. I’ll call. Thanks for the help.”

“Anytime, partner.”

What’s funny about Brooklyn is that it’s not its own place. Brooklyn is actually the westernmost tip of Long Island. Us Brooklynites don’t like acknowledging that fact, and it’s easy for us to pretend because we’ve got Queens as a buffer between us and the Nassau County line. Over the county line, Long Island stretches eastward beyond Nassau to the wild netherworld of Suffolk County. Coney Island isn’t an island, but a peninsula. Just don’t try and sell that notion to a Brooklyn native. If the world’s shape doesn’t suit us, we’ll reshape it as we see fit. Yet in spite of our willful ignorance of geography, there’s not another collection of people anywhere on earth who see the world or their place in it with a more honest eye. Good liars have to know the deeper truth of things. If nothing else, Brooklyn teaches you that, how to see those deeper truths.

I hated Long Island, not because Brooklyn was part of it, not for any good reason, really. I always saw it as a kind of suburban East Berlin, a place where parents coerced their kids to go live in the lap of torturous luxury.
You will never again be allowed to wear hand-me-down clothing. You must never play sports on concrete and must suffer with pristine grass fields. You must sleep in your own bedroom. You will never be allowed to share a bathroom again. When you graduate from high school, you will be forced to accept a new automobile. And worst of all, you will be exiled to an actual university
. I suppose if I gave it any serious thought, my hate for the Island had more to do with jealousy than anything else. Don’t get me wrong: I love Brooklyn, and I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. But by the time I hit Brooklyn College, the blinders had come off. Even as a kid I knew my dad was never going to make it big. He wasn’t ever going to come home from work one day and say, “C’mon, everyone, we’re moving. I just bought a house in Glen Cove.” We were doomed to rent, doomed never to have anything to call our own. We were never going to have a little plaque outside our door that read
THE PRAGERS
. Dad was never going to magically make our lives a little bit easier. No one would.

I took a little ride to Oceanside. It was on the south shore of Long Island, a couple of miles east of JFK airport, across the county line. The town wasn’t exactly bustling, but it was loud. Located directly under the glide path for a runway at Kennedy, Oceanside was almost as noisy as Coney Island on a spring Sunday. The difference being that graceful, soaring jets are more majestic than bone-rattling, earthbound subway trains. It wasn’t all that fancy a place, either. Many of the houses I saw were smaller than those in Midwood, Mill Basin, Dyker Heights, or Manhattan Beach. For the most part, the homes were modest, well-kept affairs with tidy front lawns and small backyards. Unlike in the city, though, these houses here weren’t squeezed in and shoehorned together. People could breathe a little in a place like Oceanside.

Wallace Casey’s house was very much in keeping with the other houses I’d seen in Oceanside. His street was a street of such houses. There was nothing showy or chesty about it. Nothing about it cried out for attention. Nothing about it made you want to turn away. I don’t know much about architecture, so I can’t tell you in what style the house was built. It had red painted clapboards with white trim and black asphalt roofing shingles. The aluminum storm door had some scroll work on it with a fancified letter C in a circle at the center. C for Casey, was my guess. The flashiest things about the place were the white-painted flower boxes that accented the street-facing windows. There was a small gravel driveway and an attached one-car garage. There was no car in the driveway. That didn’t mean no one was home. In fact, someone
was
home. As I watched the house, wondering what to do, I saw the shadowy figure of a woman twice pass by the front window.

I didn’t have much of a plan. I just sort of hoped Wallace Casey wouldn’t be home. After nearly getting run over and run off the road, after getting smacked in the ribs, getting tied up, and nearly getting kidnapped, I wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation. Sure, I’d been tough enough to break a guy’s nose with a single blow, but that was more a matter of surprise and survival: his surprise, my survival. But those clowns with their stupid masks were strictly amateur hour. If Casey was the menacing bastard I thought he was, I didn’t like my chances against him. And even if I was wrong about him and he was a flower child at heart, he was a man who had a fondness for sawed-off shotguns. Either way, I would definitely be the underdog.

When I looked over into the back seat and saw a writing pad from Aaron’s company, I got an idea, an idea I hoped wouldn’t get me in any more trouble or put me in any more danger than I was already in. I grabbed the pad, found a pencil in the glove box, and hopped out of the car. I crossed to the Casey house side of the street and approached it as if I had just come from their neighbor’s house. I rang the doorbell and waited.

“Who is it?” a woman asked, pulling the door back slightly, as far as the door chain would allow. This may have been the suburbs, but many, if not most, of the people who lived here came from the city. Old habits and caution die hard. “Can I help you?”

“Hi, I’m Joseph Jones from the Students for a Fair Draft. We’re an organization that — ”

She stopped me. “You mean the draft like for Vietnam?”

“Exactly. I’m in your town today to collect signatures for — ”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’re for the war.”

It didn’t escape my notice that she said
we
, and not
I
. “That’s fine. Although I am against the war myself, our organization is neither pro nor con. What we are about is making sure that the draft is fair and that everyone has an equal chance of getting drafted. We don’t want the kids of rich and powerful people to be able to dodge the draft while poor kids go off to get killed far away from home.” I was encouraged. These were the first sentences she’d let me finish. “I was wondering if I could ask you to sign our petition, which we will present to Congress — ”

She stopped me again. “I’m sorry. I don’t think my husband would like me doing that. He’s a policeman and — ”

It was my turn to stop her. “Your husband’s a cop?”

“So what if he is?” She got understandably defensive.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I think a cop, a guy who puts on a uniform and risks his life every day, would really be for our cause.”

“Maybe, but I’m sorry. If you want, you can come back in a few minutes and talk to him. He’ll be home soon.” She closed the door.

I stood there for a few long seconds, stunned, unmoving, completely confused. Then, like a zombie, I crossed the street and got back into the car. If there hadn’t been a very real possibility that Casey would be rolling down the block at any second, I might have sat there for hours going over in my head the implications of what his wife had just told me. Instead I twisted the ignition key, put the car in gear, and drove. A few car lengths away from the corner, I caught sight of Wallace Casey’s chestnut Ford Galaxie in my rearview mirror. The nagging question repeated itself: What was a cop doing mixed up with the likes of Bobby Friedman? More importantly, why was Bobby Friedman mixed up with a cop? It wasn’t so much the questions that bothered me. It was that I couldn’t think of many good answers. No, I couldn’t think of any.