Onion Street (24 page)

On a Friday night two weeks after the events at the warehouse, Detective Casey picked me up at my folks’ apartment and we went drinking at the Onion Street Pub. Although I didn’t know it then, the Onion Street Pub was a cop hangout. The place was crowded and loud and full of cigarette smoke. The jukebox was blasting, and the atmosphere was much friendlier than I’d found it during my first visit. Even Angie, my dance partner, was there, but she’d let her blonde hair down. Of course, I didn’t realize until later that she was a cop groupie. A lot of bar patrons stopped by our spot at the bar to pat Casey on the back. He had, after all, just made one of the biggest heroin finds in New York City history.

“Six fucking kilos,” one drunk cop said, hugging Casey around the shoulders. “How the hell did you do it, man? I didn’t even know you were working narcotics.”

“Clean living,” Casey said, “and luck.”

“There’ll be a bump in it for sure, you lucky son of a bitch. Let me buy you and your buddy here a shot to celebrate.”

It was apparently bad form to turn it down, so Casey agreed and the bartender lined up three shots of Scotch. We clinked glasses and gunned the shots in single gulps, slamming the overturned glasses down on the bar when we finished. After another round, this one on Casey, the drunk guy faded back into the crowd.

The good cheer vanished from Casey’s face. He turned, staring straight ahead. “Pretty amazing.”

“What, the Scotch? I never really drank it before, but it’s not bad. What kind is it?

“Cutty Sark. Smooth as razor blades,” he said. “But that’s not what I’m talking about, Moe.”

“Then what?”

“The anonymous phone tip I got telling me where to find all that heroin.”

“Like you said, Detective Casey — ”

“Just call me Casey,” he said. “Everyone calls me Casey.”

“Like you said, Casey, it’s luck. Maybe it’s like they said in the papers.”

He curled up his lips into a joyless smile. “That it was the Anellos. I don’t buy it. Those guys would rather eat their young than rat out even their worst enemies.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Who knows?”

“You’re right, and besides, not all my luck has been good. The garage where I keep the van I used to deliver the dummy explosives was broken into.”

“Can’t be a good thing to steal a police car. I hope the moron who did that got outta town quick.”

“I didn’t say the van was stolen, Moe. Only its window was busted, and the guy took my shotgun and the shells I kept in there for protection.”

“Hope it turns up.”

“I doubt it will,” he said. “My bet is the shotgun’s at the bottom of a lake somewhere.”

Before Casey could see me turn pale, two more well-wishers stopped by and bought a few more rounds. By the time they left, I couldn’t see straight.

Casey said, “I hear your buddy turned up, but that he was in rough shape.”

“Huh? Oh, Lids, yeah. I heard that too.” I wasn’t sure if it was my head or the room that was spinning, nor was I sure it was all a product of the Scotch. Casey was scaring the shit out of me with his talk of the shotgun and the drugs. I needed some fresh air, and I bolted.

Outside, the cool early March air was giving me some relief. Relief or not, I found it difficult to stand, so I sat down on the sidewalk, my back to a cold brick wall. Above my head, lazy jet after lazy jet, engines whining, followed the end of the glide path to the runways at JFK. I was so drunk that I swear I thought I could make out the faces of individual passengers. Some of them seemed to be staring right at me, pointing down at me. Why I should matter to them was beyond me. I wasn’t a circus freak. I wasn’t feeling guilty about things. I hadn’t killed anyone. I hadn’t gotten anyone killed.

Mostly, besides feeling woozy, I was feeling profoundly lost. Before all this happened, what I thought of as being lost was really just aimlessness; I was adrift. School was then at least an anchor, if not a sturdy one. Now even that was gone to me forever. I had tried going back to class, but it was no good. I just couldn’t force myself to care after seeing so much death, and the capacity for darkness inside people’s hearts. There had to be something in the world for me to keep me out of the dark. I was watching another jet when the silhouette of a man blocked my view.

“Having fun out here?” It was Casey. He stepped out of my way and sat down beside me.

“Just thinking,” I said.

“I’ve been thinking too, Moe.”

“Yeah, about what?”

“About you.”

“What about me?”

“Look, I may seem like just a big dumb schmuck, but I didn’t get my gold shield by being one. The Suffolk County PD, they’ve got no reason to connect you or Bobby to those two dead assholes in the warehouse. On the other hand, it didn’t take me long to find that Irving Prager was one of the original investors in that warehouse. Frankly, the world’s a better place without guys like Tony P and Jimmy Ding Dong, so you got nothing to worry about from me.”

“I agree,” I said. “The world’s a better place.”

“You know, you’ve got all the makings of a great cop.”

“Pardon my manners, Casey, but get the fuck outta here.”

“No, I’m serious. Whether you’re gonna admit to anything or not, you got to the bottom of two huge cases. You busted up a major heroin ring, and you saved your friends’ lives. You did all that without an ounce of knowledge about how to do it. You’re tough. You’re smart and you give a shit. You’re already a better goddamned detective than I am. You do a few years in uniform, and you’re a lock for a gold shield. And there’s something else; you’re comfortable in there,” he said, pointing back at the bar. “It’s all cops in there, and you fit in.”

“Maybe because there aren’t any asshole cops in there like Nance.”

“You want things to change, make ’em change. Be a cop, set an example instead of whining about it. And it’ll get you outta the war.”

We laughed about that last part there. It got quiet between us for a minute after that. Casey didn’t realize at the time, but he’d given me the chance I’d been looking for since that night at the warehouse. I’d struggled with how to let someone inside the NYPD know that Sam and Marty had been murdered as a direct result of a dirty cop.

“Three cases,” I said, “not two.”

“What are you talking about?”

I didn’t answer directly. “You know a detective named Patrick Fitzhugh?”

“He’s a real prick. A face on him not even his mother loved. Why?”

Again, I didn’t answer directly. Instead I took Sam’s badge out of my pocket and handed it to him. “You found out about my dad owning part of the warehouse without too much trouble. Look into who that badge belonged to and see what you come up with.”

Feeling a little better, I got up and went back into the bar. I turned around to see Casey palming the badge and starting to put two and two together.

Through the front windows of my condo on Emmons Avenue, the sun was hinting at its rebirth. The oily sheen had returned to the surface of Sheepshead Bay, and the cold rain that had ravaged those same waters only a few hours before were now barely a memory. That is one of the glories of water: it has no memory. As I stared out at it, I imagined myself as water, as having no memory. Then, in the next instant, the images of that long-ago night in the warehouse came back into my head as fresh as the new day would come. I could feel Jimmy Ding Dong’s warm blood on my face and smell the acrid smoke from the blasting caps and from the shotgun blasts. I could almost taste the iron on my tongue from the spray of blood in the air. No, I was nothing like water.

Sarah, yawning, came and stood beside me. “What happened after Tony died?”

“Bobby got Lids out to his car while I tried to clean up any hints of our having been there, but I didn’t know how successful I was at it. We rode over to Lake Ronkonkoma and threw in Jimmy’s .45 and the shotgun. Strange thing is that years later, when I was working a case as a PI, I wound up by that lake again. I’d blocked it out of my mind that I’d been there before.”

“What case, Dad?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Oh,” Sarah said, “that case.”

“That’s right, kiddo. The one I fucked up that eventually got your mother killed.”

Sarah put her arms around me and squeezed. “Forget it, Dad. I forgave you for that. We can’t hold onto those things, not now. Did the police ever find the guns?”

“You know, there’s a legend about Lake Ronkonkoma that the restless soul of an Indian princess lives in the lake. They say she drowned in the lake centuries ago and is forever searching for her lover. Whenever a man drowns in the lake, the locals blame it on the princess. They say she pulled the victim in to see if he is her lover. I guess the princess took the guns and buried them as gifts for her lover’s return.”

“What happened to Lids?”

“We dropped him off by the ER entrance to a hospital in Smithtown. Jimmy had broken him up really bad. He was barely more alive than Tony or Jimmy. He spent almost a year in the hospital and in rehab centers.”

“But what happened to him after he got out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was already on the job by then and living out on my own. I heard he came back to his parents’ apartment for a little while, but he was still so broken. They fixed Lids’s bones, but his mind was never right after MIT, and what Jimmy did to him only made it worse. He just left one day and never came back. My friend Eddie Lane said he thought he once saw a guy who looked like Lids panhandling on Telegraph Avenue in Berkley. That was the last I heard of him.”

Sarah went and sat back down on the couch. I made some French press coffee for us. Me, as an old cop and PI, I could drink swill and deal with it, but Sarah loved French press coffee.

“You want some eggs, kiddo?”

“No, Dad, I’m not hungry.”

I didn’t like the look of her. The mention of eggs kind of made her turn green around the gills and she hadn’t slept all night. “You okay? You wanna lay down?”

“Just tired, Dad, really. So what happened between you and Bobby?”

“Nothing. Bobby moved out of New York in the middle of March and I didn’t hear anything about him for five years. I got a call from Uncle Aaron one day. He told me to go buy a copy of the latest
Forbes
magazine. There was Bobby on the cover. Apparently he’d turned his drug profits and other investments into such a fortune that he was rich enough to lend money to God at low interest. The article called him ‘The Boy Wonder of Wall Street.’ But he kept his promise to atone for his sins. While he was away, he found his way back to Judaism, something his parents always fiercely rejected. He made it a habit to give away almost forty percent of his yearly income to all sorts of causes. Everything from a fund for the families of cops killed in the line of duty, to groups against gun violence, to drug treatment centers. My guess is that he left most of his money to charity.”

“Is that when you guys hooked up again, after the article?” Sarah asked, sipping her coffee and making a face.

“Isn’t the coffee okay?”

“No, it’s fine, Dad. So, you and Bobby …”

“One day in 1987 I’m in my office in Bordeaux in Brooklyn and I get a call on the intercom to come upstairs immediately. And when I get upstairs, there’s Bobby in all his glory, a gigantic smile on his face. Twenty years had passed, but there was the same smile he’d had on the night I bailed him out of the Brooklyn Tombs. He was dressed in a suit that cost more than two months of most people’s mortgage payments. He came down to the office and we talked. We worked it out. Our friendship from then on was more of a truce or understanding than anything else.”

“But you invited him to my bat mitzvah, and he was at my wedding.”

“Of course he was, and he no doubt gave you the biggest gifts for both,” I said, shaking my head, looking again into the past. “We were locked together forever, kiddo. I’d saved his life and he’d saved mine. But Tony P had a point about Bobby. I could never quite trust him again. I had some sleepless nights in the years following what happened to us. Bobby wasn’t supposed to show up at the warehouse that night. He was just so furious at Tony and Jimmy and at himself for what happened to Samantha that he couldn’t control his rage. To this day I wonder that if he hadn’t been so overcome with rage, whether Bobby would have been on the other end of the phone when I called. Part of me thinks Tony P was right, that Bobby would never have given up his money, and that he would have left me and Lids to die there.”

Sarah shuddered. “My God, Dad. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Neither do I, honey, but you asked. I guess what’s always plagued me is that I thought I knew the answer. The phone would’ve just kept on ringing.”

“Whatever happened to Susan Kasten?” Sarah changed the subject.

“She went underground, but not in the Mideast or Latin America. She was arrested in 1992 or ’93 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the most Republican county in the state. She was a housewife with three kids, a dog, two cats, a minivan, and a husband who was an executive for a firm that made missile guidance systems. I think she’s out of prison now and back home. Weird, huh?”

Sarah laughed. “A long way from Manhattan Beach and bombing the 61st Precinct.”

“A long way, yeah.”

“What happened to you and Mindy?”

“We got married and lived happily ever after.”

“Don’t be a jerk, Dad.”

“She pretty much made a full recovery, but I stopped visiting her once I knew it was her who’d tried to kill Bobby. I couldn’t live with that. Any feelings I had for her ran right out of me. Besides, by the time she got out of rehab, I was in the academy. I was the enemy.”

Sarah said, “I guess I understand that.” She sipped at her coffee again, her face belying her previous assessment of my French press technique. “Did Casey put two and two together?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is that about six months later, they found Fitzhugh beaten to death at Bear Mountain. Every bone in his body was broken. A few weeks after that, about ten guys from the Luchese family were arrested on drug and corruption charges. Who knows? A month or two after that, it came out that Sam had been a cop. She was reburied with full police honors. I shipped her suitcase and documents to her folks, but I couldn’t bring myself to go up there for the reburial. I’d already said my goodbyes. And poor Marty Lavitz just moldered in his grave because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Did you ever figure out why Samantha put the moves on you that night?”

“I’d like to think it was for all the reasons she said, but I think the truth is much colder than that. My guess is she was trying to turn me into a spy for her. If I had slept with her, she could threaten to tell Bobby unless I kept tabs on him. We’ll never know.”

“Dad, you still haven’t answered my original question: how did you become a cop?”

“Okay, okay, already. Like I said, I left Casey on the sidewalk with Sam’s badge in his hand. He came back into the pub a few minutes later and some more guys came over and bought rounds of drinks. Around three in the morning, we were both blind drunk and — ”

Before I could finish the sentence, Sarah got up and ran to the bathroom. She ran so quickly, I didn’t even have time to ask her if she was all right. Ten minutes later, she was back. She looked much better and color had returned to her cheeks. Before I could ask, she told me that she was fine.

“You were blind drunk and …”

“And I turned to Casey and asked him to tell me why the place was called the Onion Street Pub. He said he wasn’t supposed to tell, but he said he would tell me under one condition. If I agreed to take the entrance exam for the police academy, he would explain the name to me. I told him I wouldn’t. So he goaded me, saying I was afraid I wasn’t smart enough to pass the test. That did the trick. You know how I hate that. I said I’d show him I could pass, but that he had to tell me why they’d given the bar the name Onion Street. He held out his hand, we shook on it, and the rest is history.”

“You became a cop on a drunken dare?”

“I did, and it was the best drunken thing I ever agreed to. Being a cop was the only job I ever loved.”

“So …”

“What?”

“Why was the bar named the Onion Street Pub?”

“Weren’t you listening?” I asked. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Dad!”

“Maybe if you tell me what’s going on. Why you volunteered to come down here so fast, why all the questions. Then maybe I’ll think about it.”

Sarah bowed her head. When she looked up at me, mascara-stained tears were pouring down her cheeks. I opened my mouth to speak, but she held her hands up to stop me and collected herself. “You’ve been so sick, Dad, and I had questions I needed answered.”

I went to her and wrapped my arms around her like I had when she was a little girl. It had been a very long time since we had been like this together. Although she had forgiven me for the events leading up to Katy’s murder, it wasn’t ever the same between us. I guess she couldn’t quite trust me, the way I could never quite trust Bobby again. Doubt, even a tiny shard of it, is a powerful thing.

“But why this question, kiddo? Why now?”

“Because I needed to know what to tell your grandson if your cancer comes back and you can’t tell him yourself.”

I was lightheaded, but for all the right reasons. God had finally answered with a yes. I looked up at the ceiling, and thought of Mr. Roth. “You’re preg — ”

“Almost five months, now.”

Later that day, after Sarah had headed back to Vermont, I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of Cutty Sark. I had moved up to Dewar’s decades ago, but remembering all those long-past events had made me sentimental for the taste of Cutty Sark. My oncologist wouldn’t have approved, so I toasted him, and I toasted Bobby Friedman, and I wondered about where Lids and Mindy had gotten to. I toasted the coming birth of my grandson. I toasted fulfilling my promise to my daughter. When the baby was born, I had vowed, I’d tell her why it was called the Onion Street Pub. We shook on it.

The End