Onion Street (19 page)

Coney Island Hospital was a white brick box at the corner of Ocean Parkway and Shore Parkway. It was known in the neighborhood as the butcher shop. It was a city-run hospital and the kind of place where big doses of apathy were handed out like after-dinner mints. Incompetence too. The emergency room was renowned for casts that were put on too tight, and bones that had to be rebroken and reset because … well, because they just didn’t get it right the first time. I knew guys with broken arms and legs that had driven themselves to other hospitals to avoid the place. But Coney Island Hospital was less than ten minutes away from Hyman Bergman’s house, and with Bobby in such bad shape I didn’t think I could risk being choosy.

About five minutes after they wheeled Bobby into the emergency room, I was herded into a dark room by two uniformed cops. When I asked what was going on, they told me, “Get the fuck in, sit the fuck down, and shut the fuck up.” Charm school graduates, both.

The room was a windowless box with a rolling desk chair that didn’t roll, a metal desk, and metal shelves bending under the weight of cardboard boxes dating back to a time before the Dodgers moved away from Brooklyn. I waited in there for a half hour or so, trying to come to grips with what had happened to me over the last few hours. I had just watched two men shot to death in front of me. And I don’t mean killed at a distance. One of them, Jimmy, had his brain blown out the back of his head. Neither the Choirboy nor Jimmy had been more than ten feet from me when they died. I kept waiting to feel something other than numb, but I just didn’t. I was cold inside, so cold that I shivered.

There was a knock on the door and it pushed open. In walked a man who didn’t exactly bring an end to my shivers. No more than five foot six, he was a nasty-looking little fireplug of a man with a gray and brown brush cut. He wore his face red and angry, and a lit cigarette dangled from his snarly lips. He carried a ridiculous gray fedora in his hand, and he was twenty years too old and thirty pounds too heavy for his John’s Bargain Store suit. That, and his black shoes squeaked when he walked. Hanging out of the hanky pocket of his suit jacket was a gold and blue enamel detective shield.

“I’m Nance, Detective Nance,” he said, leaning his face right up close to mine. His breath smelled of onions, cigarettes, and whiskey.
Yummy
. He squeezed my cheeks together till they hurt. “We’re gonna be pals, you and me.”

I said nothing. He didn’t like that. Apparently his other pals were more talkative.

He slapped the side of my head and then grabbed my collar. Why did everybody do that to me? My collar had been grabbed more in the last week than in my whole life. “Listen to me, you little shit. You’re gonna tell me what happened in that basement tonight and how you came to be there. You don’t, I’m gonna slap the cuffs on ya, beat the piss outta ya, and then you’re gonna take a ride to the Tombs to spend the night.”

I said nothing. What I was in the middle of an hour ago, that was worth being frightened over. This guy bullying me … not so much.

He slapped me in the side of the head again, this time a lot harder. “You deaf, asshole?”

“What?”

“Very funny, ya hippie draft-dodgin’ piece a crap. Tell me what happened tonight.”

This time I had something to say, but I knew he was going to like it even less than my silence. “I’ll tell someone, but not you. Get Wallace Casey in here and I’ll talk to him, only him.”

He was back to tugging at my collar. “You obnoxious little cocksucker. Who the fuck do you think you are, ordering me around like I’m your boy?”

“Wallace Casey,” I repeated.

He changed tactics. Instead of tightening his grip on my collar, he pushed me and the chair over backwards. “Start talking.”

I obliged him. “
Wallace Casey
.”

Nance kicked me in the ribs. It hadn’t escaped my attention that Nance never once asked me who the hell Wallace Casey was. I was pretty sure he knew exactly who Wallace Casey was. I assumed Casey was either standing on the other side of the door or was on his way over. Because there was little doubt that the second an incident involving Bobby Friedman had occurred, Casey would be notified. I knew the truth and the truth was this: the deceased Jimmy might have been a lot of things, a belligerent asshole for sure, but he wasn’t the informant. No, Bobby Friedman was. I might have been a little bit in shock, but I wasn’t stupid. A lot of things made sense to me now that didn’t quite fit before. The only two people who could tell me if I was right or wrong were Bobby and Casey, and Bobby was in no shape to tell me anything.

“All right, ya little kike shit,” Nance barked, flicking his lit cigarette into my face. “Stay where ya are and we’ll see what we’ll see.” Then, before leaving, he gave me a goodbye kick for luck.

I really didn’t like that man. I hadn’t had many direct dealings with the cops in my life, but if Nance was representative of the way most cops acted, it was easy to see why not many people my age gave them much respect. I picked myself up and the chair too, stamped out the cigarette, and waited some more.

This time when there was a knock on the door, it was followed by a question. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

Wallace Casey stood front and center. He was even more imposing close up than at a distance, but he wore what I guess passed for a smile on his face. He held a hand the size of a baseball mitt out to me. “I’m Detective Wallace Casey. I hear you been asking for me.”

I shook his hand. “We’ve met before,” I said. “The night 1055 Coney Island Avenue burned down. You were wearing a ski mask at the time and whacking me across the belly with a baseball bat. You called me something like a long-haired hippie freak.”

His smile broadened. “Jeez, you know, for the life of me, I don’t remember that,” he lied. “Maybe you’re confusing me with somebody else. I hear you and my wife are good pals, huh? Students for a Fair Draft, right? You have that petition on you? I’d like to sign it.”

“Jeez,” I parroted him. “You know, for the life of me, I don’t remember that.”

“Okay, Prager, now that you got that outta your system, you wanna let me know why you needed to see me so bad?”

“First things first, Detective. I don’t suppose this will matter to you or that you’ll do anything about it, but that guy, Detective Nance, who was in here before you …”

“What about him?”

“Well, in the five minutes we were together, he slapped me, kicked me, pushed me onto my back, choked me, threw a lit cigarette in my face, used a religious slur, and threatened me. Other than that, it was love at first sight. Don’t you guys ever stop to wonder why my generation hates you so much?”

“He’s an asshole. Aren’t any of your friends assholes, Prager?”

“Yeah, sure, but they aren’t bullies.”

He shook his head. “No, that’s right. Your friends just try to blow up entire city blocks and kill as many cops as they can.”

“As a general rule, I don’t believe in killing people. And just so you know, Susan Kasten and that bunch aren’t my friends.”

“You sure about that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Detective?”

“Isn’t Bobby Friedman your best friend?”

“Bobby works for you and don’t even try to deny it. I saw you pick up or drop off the package in his trunk at the airport the other day. Explosives, right? I followed you and the van to the Onion Street Pub, and then out to that garage in College Point. If I hadn’t run out of gas, I probably would have found you out that day.”

He applauded. “Keep going.”

“Bobby was your way into the group. I don’t know how you coerced him to turn on his friends, but you did. You supply the explosives to him. He supplies them to the Committee, and he supplies you with information. I knew that airport run thing he was doing was bullshit. I just couldn’t figure out the angle, but I never could keep up with Bobby that way. It was all pretty neat until Jimmy found out about it and ratted Bobby out. So don’t talk to me about my friends being involved.”

“Some are closer than friends, like Mindy Weinstock, for instance.”

“Mindy? Mindy’s in the hospital. She just came out of a coma, for chrissakes! I just saw her tonight. She can barely speak. And it was one of Susan Kasten’s flunkies, this guy named Abdul Salaam, who put her in the coma in the first place. How can she have anything to do with this?”

“Come on, Moe. I can call you Moe, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re a smart guy, a very smart guy. Look how far you got on your own.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

“What’s funny, Moe?” he asked. “Most people I know don’t think I’m very funny.”

“Susan Kasten said almost exactly the same thing about how far I got.”

“She was right. Without hardly any resources, you nearly got to the bottom of this thing.”

“All I did was stumble around.”

“Well, you stumbled around pretty fuckin’ good, better than my whole task force and half the federal agencies in this country. Maybe we should try stumbling around a little more often.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But don’t change the subject. Mindy had nothing to do with this.”

“She had everything to do with this.”

“Bullshit!”

“You think so? I don’t. I think your girlfriend’s in this up to her eyeballs.”

“Prove it.”

“I won’t have to. You can do it for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

He said, “Come with me.”

“Where’re we going?”

“To open up your eyes that last little bit.”

Casey refused to tell me where we were going even after we got into his chestnut Galaxie. In a weird way it felt nice to be inside his car instead of following around behind it. As we drove, he asked me to tell him about what had happened at Hyman Bergman’s house earlier.

“You know what
quid pro quo
means, Detective?”

“You scratch my ass, I’ll scratch yours.”

“I’ve never heard it put that way before, but yeah, like that.”

“So who’s scratching whose ass first?”

“I’ll tell you everything about what happened at Bergman’s house and what led up to it, if we can talk about Samantha Hope and Marty Lavitz.”

“We’ll see,” was what he said as he turned left onto Coney Island Avenue from Avenue Z.

“Not good enough.”

“For now, it’s all that’s on the table, Moe. Show me you’re as smart as I think you are. Take it.”

I took it. I didn’t see the point in holding back. Chances were they weren’t really going to let Nance beat it out of me, as much as he would have liked to, but I figured the cops had their ways. For all I knew, they would throw my ass in jail and charge me with murder. I could be stubborn, but not to the point of stupidity. I told him everything … well, almost everything. I worked backwards from Bergman’s house to the night I bailed Bobby out of the Brooklyn Tombs.

“That was smart thinking, telling them that Jimmy was the rat,” he said, turning off Coney Island Avenue onto Avenue I. “It probably saved your lives.”

“It was the only thing I could think to do. I knew they were gonna kill Bobby, and they were probably gonna kill me.”

“They would’ve had no choice.”

Even after I had a pretty good idea of where we were going, I didn’t comprehend why we were going there. We parked outside Burgundy House in the exact same spot Bobby’s car had been parked on the day of the big snowstorm. And for reasons I couldn’t fathom, I just broke down. I was crying like a little kid, sobbing so fiercely I could swear the car shook. It didn’t make any sense. Only a half hour before, I couldn’t feel anything about having watched two men shot to death practically within arm’s length of me. And now, suddenly, I was overcome at the sight of a darkened driveway at the entrance to a dirty little basement apartment. I might not have understood what was happening to me, but Detective Casey seemed to. He gave me as much time as I needed.

When I settled down, he asked, “Who said that thing about never being able to go home again?”

“Thomas Wolfe, I think. It’s the title of a book.
You Can’t Go Home Again
.”

“He’s right. You can’t.”

I didn’t get it, not then. “So we’re in front of Burgundy House, so what?”

“You tell me. What happened here?”

“Like I said, I met Mindy here after I bailed Bobby out of the Brooklyn Tombs.”

“And you said she was acting strange, right?”

“Strange isn’t the word for it, man. She was drinking bourbon and smoking. There was a sense of desperation about everything she did that night.”

“You think you know why?” he asked.

“I do. She must’ve just come from a meeting of the Committee where she found out that Bobby had betrayed them to you. They no doubt blamed him for what had happened to Samantha and Marty. Look, Detective Casey, didn’t I just go over this with you a few minutes ago?”

“I’m just a big dumb cop who doesn’t even know who Thomas Wolfe is. Humor me, okay?”

“At the same meeting of the Committee, Mindy also must’ve found out they meant to kill Bobby for his betrayal. She loves Bobby. They go way back. Bobby introduced her to me. That’s why she was so flipped out that night, and why she warned me to stay away from him. She was trying to protect me.”

“Okay. What else?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. Somehow the Committee found out that Mindy meant to warn Bobby, and they sent this Abdul Salaam guy after her.”

“Try again,” he said.

“That’s the best I got.”

“I doubt that, but skip it for now. What happened the next day, the day after Mindy warned you?”

“It was the day of the snowstorm. I cut class and came here to straighten up, but Bobby’s car was already here. He was stepping into the street when I saw this car coming at him out of the snow.”

“The Caddy stolen from Hyman Bergman’s neighbor?”

“Yeah. I ran across the street and shoved Bobby out of the way. The car clipped my foot and spun my shoulder into the bumper of Bobby’s 88.”

“Then you heard the car crash around the corner, and you and Bobby went to check it out,” he said, putting the Ford in gear and slowly driving around the corner. “Show me where you found the car smashed into the tree.”

“Here! Right here.”

He stopped the car. Even in the dark, we could make out the scar in the bark the Caddy had left in its wake. “Oak tree wins that battle every time. Musta been an ugly scene, huh?”

“Real ugly,” I said. “The car was totally fucked up. The windshield was smashed. The driver and his passenger had split, but I knew they were hurt pretty bad. There was blood all over the Caddy’s interior and in the snow. I guess we could have tried catching up to them, but my shoulder was killing me and Bobby convinced me to go back to the house and get some ice on it. Besides, the snow was falling like crazy.”

Casey put the Ford in gear again. “So the driver and passenger left the scene of the accident? Why do you think they did that?”

“You’re joking, right?” I asked. “They didn’t want to get caught in a stolen car. Why else would they run?”

“You tell me.”

We were moving again, down Avenue I, right onto Ocean Avenue. He drove at a snail’s pace. There wasn’t much traffic at that time of the morning, so no one protested. As we drove, I got that sick feeling in my gut again. It was a feeling I’d become intimately familiar with in recent days, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I should have been feeling it at just that moment.

“You don’t look so good,” Casey said to me as we turned off Ocean Avenue onto Glenwood Road. “What’s wrong?”

I didn’t answer because a niggling thought forced its way into my consciousness, because I suddenly saw how the dots connected in a way to make me look like a lovestruck idiot. Detective Casey saw the realization in my eyes just as we pulled up to the corners of Glenwood Road and East 17th Street.

I pointed down East 17th. “They found Mindy over there.”

“They did.”

“Okay, Detective, I get it now. Let’s go,” I said, never having felt quite so low or so stupid as I did just then. “You made your point.”

“I need you to say it, Moe.”

“What, that I got it all wrong? That I refused to see the most obvious answer?”

He shook his head. “You know what I need to hear.”

“Fuck you!”

“That wasn’t it,” he said, and we were off again. “Not even close.”

Less than two minutes later we were parked in front of the burned-out rubble that had once been Hyman Bergman’s fix-it shop.

“The old man’s dead. That last shot you heard when you were carrying Bobby out of the basement was Bergman blowing his own head off.”

“So where’s Susan?” I asked.

“First things first, Moe. You wanna know about Kasten, you wanna talk about Samantha Hope and Martin Lavitz, fine. It’s all on the table now, but I need to hear it and
fuck you
better not be the words that come outta your mouth. We understand each other?”

I didn’t give him what he wanted. “But why? You already know the truth. What’s the value in hearing me say it?”

“We’ll discuss that later.”

The pigheaded part of me wanted to tell him to shove it up his ass, but I needed him to talk about Sam and Marty. I gave him what he wanted.

“Mindy and Abdul Salaam were the people in the Caddy that tried to kill Bobby, and it was probably Mindy at the wheel. That’s why she warned me to stay away from Bobby, and that’s why she missed when I shoved Bobby out of the way. Salaam was there as insurance, to make sure she carried out her assignment. It makes a sick kinda sense, really, having Mindy be the one to kill Bobby. It was a way to test her loyalties. After she missed us, when they tried to speed away in the snow, Mindy lost control of the car and smacked into the tree. Mindy wasn’t beaten into a coma. Nobody beat anybody. Both Mindy and Salaam were hurt bad in the accident, but they couldn’t afford to let us find them. They took off on foot, Salaam probably dragging or carrying Mindy. My guess is that they were coming here,” I said, nodding at the rubble.

“Salaam was trying to get them to the upstairs apartment to wait out the storm or to get help from Bergman. But Salaam couldn’t make it, not with his injuries and not carrying Mindy. He dropped her on the street to lighten his load. Salaam finally made it here, but the shop was closed because of the weather. He got upstairs, crawled into bed, and probably died of his injuries. That’s how I found him. That’s how Bobby found him. That’s how he was when Susan Kasten lit the place on fire. You happy now, Detective Casey? Pretty ironic how I got involved in all this shit so I could find out who put my girlfriend in a coma. Well, okay, I found out. Joke’s on me, I guess. Go ahead, laugh. It’s okay. I deserve it.”

“I’m not happy and I’m not laughing, Moe. I needed you to say it because, let’s face it, if I told you that story, you probably woulda thought I was full a shit. That I was another lying cop trying to set you up.”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t’ve believed you.”

“Now here’s the thing,” he said. “If I wanted to, I could get your girlfriend sent away for the next hundred years. By the time she got out, she’d be dead or she’d wanna be. You know and I know she was deep in this whole bomb plot thing and I could get her on attempted murder too — ”

“But — ”

“But I’m not looking to hurt her, and I need a favor from you.”

I was more than a little skeptical. “A favor from me?”

“Yeah. Stories are gonna come out in the papers and on the news tomorrow that won’t exactly fit the facts of what happened. Your name and Bobby’s will be completely kept out of it, but I need you to keep your mouth shut. I need you to promise me that.”

“This is the part on TV where you say,
or else
.”

“There’s no
or else
. This isn’t TV and we’re not all like that asshole, Nance. I think you’re a man of your word, Moe, and I’m asking for your word.”

“Where’s Susan Kasten?”

“Wish I knew. A year’s worth of work setting this up, and now she’s gone,” he said. “She was the candy inside the piñata, the big prize. We’ll never find her now. She’ll disappear into the underground and wind up in Cuba or Syria. We figured if we caught her red-handed, looking at life in prison, she’d cut a deal. She’d’ve given us a way into all the other groups that think bombs are a good way to make a point.”

“You mean like LBJ, McNamara, and Westmoreland?”

He wasn’t having any. “It’s different.”

“It’s killing.”

“People like Susan Kasten kill innocent people.”

“You watch the news lately, Detective? You think all the people under those bombs are guilty? A lot of them are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides, Susan Kasten would’ve chewed her own fucking arm off before making a deal with you. She’s a true believer.”

“And you’re not? A true believer, I mean?”

I laughed. “Me? Are you crazy? I’m not into
isms
. Since my bar mitzvah I don’t even do much with Judaism. Sometimes I think that’s why Bobby and Mindy like me, because all I believe in is a better world.” I turned in my seat to face him. “When I was in that basement, old man Bergman said the bomb that killed Samantha and Marty wasn’t his work.”

“Don’t look at me, Moe.”

“Why not?”

“Because that bomb in December nearly blew our operation. It made the Committee suspicious. It’s what made Kasten start looking for a rat inside her group. Then there’s a very practical reason why it couldn’t have been me.”

“What’s that?”

“Come with me a second.”

We got out of the car and walked around to the rear of the Ford. Even though the fire was put out days ago, the air still stank of burned plastic and rubber. Casey keyed open the trunk. And sitting there like a box of groceries was a box identical to the ones I had seen Susan and her two flunkies putting in the back of the old bakery truck. He reached down and pried off the lid with a small crowbar. He picked up a light tan-colored brick wrapped in clear plastic, ripped open the plastic, and handed the brick to me.

“Feels like Silly Putty,” I said.

“Essentially, that’s what it is. You can mold and shape it any way you want. Stick some blasting caps in it and you’re set to go. Of course, there’s also supposed to be stuff mixed in there that would blow the both of us into small pieces.”

“What do you mean ‘supposed to be’?”

“It’s inert, Moe. An atomic bomb couldn’t set this shit off. We couldn’t risk handing over live explosives to these nuts. In the beginning, I gave Bobby a few bricks of the real stuff, so he could prove he could get what the Committee needed. He tested it for them and they bought it hook, line, and sinker. We went through that whole elaborate charade at the airport many times just in case someone from the Committee was watching, but the stuff itself is harmless. You see what I’m saying, right? Whoever it was who blew up Bobby’s girl and the Lavitz kid, it wasn’t me.”

“And I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“That’s up to you.”

“If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t them …”

“It was somebody else.”

“But there isn’t any somebody else.”

“Let’s get back in the car. It’s cold, and it stinks out here,” he said, slamming the trunk shut. Before we drove away, he held his right hand out to me. “Do I have your word that you won’t say anything to the press?”

I shook his hand.