Soul Patch (13 page)

“Perhaps I shall. But there’s something else, something you are keeping from me.”

“Someone tried to kill me. I was in Coney Island and a car came straight for me. And no, Wit, it wasn’t an accident.”

“Would you like to inform me or shall I be forced to play twenty questions?”

Thought about playing coy. For as much as I had grown to love and respect Yancy Whittle Fenn, it was not lost on me that he had press credentials in his chest cavity where most people have beating hearts. I didn’t think he’d screw me, but the pull of a good story was as strong as the pull of bourbon. It would only take one slip.

“First tell me what’s the buzz and then we’ll discuss it,” I said.

“That’s just it. There isn’t any buzz.”

“Get the fuck outta here! The chief of detectives gasses himself, leaves no note, and everyone is happy with that?”

“The silence is quite astounding, Moe. I have good sources, the best sources, and none of them has anything to say.”

“Okay, let’s forget the cops for now. You can’t tell me that the media isn’t all over this thing. I mean, it’s got ‘big story’ with a neon sign and fireworks on it.”

He removed his tortoiseshell glasses and rubbed his eyes. “That’s just it. The press is all over it, but no matter how they shake it, squeeze it, kick or bribe it, nothing is coming out. Usually, there is someone in the department, some disaffected fool who has been passed over for a promotion or assigned to the rubber gun squad, who is simply clamoring to gripe and talk off the record.”

“Not this time?”

“It would seem not. Not a soul is talking and that is most peculiar. Cops love to gab. It is how I used to gather half my stories. A seat at the bar and bottle of Jameson can go a long way with a pub full of cops.”

“Cops and booze! Who’d’a thunk it? So, you think it’s a dead issue?” I said, knowing he’d take it as a challenge.

“No need to insult me. Just because no one is talking today, doesn’t mean the same will be true tomorrow or the next day. Someone always talks.”

“So you’re intrigued?”

“For the moment, yes,” he said. “Now, would you like to tell me the entire story that I might do my part in this more effectively?”

I told Wit about the tape Larry had given me at the opening of Red, White and You. I described the interrogation, the meeting with Larry on the boardwalk, his threats. I detailed Malik Jabbar’s assassination, my meeting with his mother, my dealings with Carmella Melendez.

“Well, Moe, this does get curiouser and curiouser, but it does explain the tight lips, does it not?”

“Yeah, well, no one likes a cop scandal except the press. This isn’t just some old cop who took a few free cups of coffee and spare change.”

“Drugs and murder, nice tandem. Juicy headlines.”

I agreed, sort of. “Maybe, but it’s not that simple.”

“Never is. I am certain that if the department felt they could simply sacrifice Chief McDonald’s memory and limit the damage to his reputation—”

“—lips would be flapping all over town. After all, the best kind of scapegoat is a dead one.”

“Indeed. Moe, have you any idea who this Malik character gave up to the D.A.?”

“Not a clue. All I know is that it shook Larry to his core. But I don’t even think there’s a record of Malik’s arrest. That’s why I need to figure out a way to deal with Melendez about what I know without giving too much away.”

“An interesting challenge.”

“Thanks.”

“You go do whatever it is you have to on your end, and I will do my share,” he said. “Not to worry.”

“I never do, not about you,” I lied.

I shook Wit’s hand and had walked a few paces when he called after me.

“Moe, watch out for the black-haired beauty. Don’t repeat a mistake so many men, including yours truly, have made.”

“What mistake is that?”

“Looking somewhere else for what you already possess.”

I thought to question him, but reconsidered. Wit was possibly the most intelligent man I’d ever met. Sage advice or not, I’d always been better at learning from my own mistakes.

When I rejoined the crowd, I noticed Kenny Burton and Rico Tripoli milling about. I asked them to wait for me while I arranged for Pete Parson and his son to drive Katy home. Pete, Katy, Sarah, and I had plans for dinner in a few hours, but what I had to discuss with my former precinct mates needed to be said out of earshot of any of the other funeral attendees.

When everyone was gone, the three of us stood around watching the backhoe driver unceremoniously dumping bucketfuls of dirt on Larry’s coffin. Got me thinking about how disconnected we were from death. It was easy to blame drugs, movies, TV, and video games for violence and the devaluation of human life. Bullshit! The real culprit was our lack of intimacy with death. When you’re unfamiliar with death, you’re disrespectful of life. No one dies in his or her bed anymore. People die in hospitals now, or in hospices or nursing homes or alone in cars along the side of the Belt Parkway. Kids don’t go to funerals. Strangers clean our bodies, dress and groom us. Machines dig our graves. Why should any of us respect death when we make it as remote as the mountains of the moon?

I have often wondered if it would be a little harder for a killer to pull the trigger or shove the blade in a second time if he had washed his dead brother’s body or dug his mother’s grave. What if he had watched his dad die an inch at a time from cancer and sat by the deathbed day after day after day? What if there were no church, no funeral home, no hospital, no way to pass the responsibilities of death off to strangers? How much harder would murder be?

“Fucking machine!” Burton growled. “I thought cemeteries was supposed to be quiet.”

“Larry don’t hear a thing,” said Rico.

“Yeah,” I said, “he’s too busy angling for a bump to archangel.”

We all laughed at that. The backhoe went silent and suddenly our laughter was the loudest thing in the universe.

“So, you guys think he killed himself?”

Rico frowned. Burton grunted.

“Yeah, well I don’t like it either,” I continued, “but there’s no evidence to say different. What they say is he drove over to Fountain Avenue, swallowed some pills, drank some Jack, and gassed himself.”

“The only part I buy is the Jack Daniels,” Rico said. “Why would Larry kill himself anyways?”

“That’s what I was hoping you or Kenny here could tell me.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” Burton wondered.

“What do you think it means?”

“Just like I said at O’Hearn’s, you’re a cunt, Prager. You know something, say it. Don’t dance around like a fag in a forest fire.”

Rico was confused. “A fag in a forest fire? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Okay, Kenny. Here’s what I know. Larry came to me and told me that when Rico and me started out, some of the guys in the Six-O were on Dexter Mayweather’s pad. He was worried that this was all gonna get dragged up again.”

“Shit, the day D Rex bought it was a sad fucking day for me,” the Caveman said. “Did you think I got that house in Breezy Point on my cop salary? You kiddin’ me? We made . . . what’s that Jew word, Prager?”

“
Bubkis
?”

“That’s the one. We made
bubkis
back then. Maybe I shoulda sent flowers to the funeral home or something, you think?”

Rico’s eyes got big, but he said nothing. A guy who took money, drugs, and hookers from the Colombians in exchange for protection was in no position to throw grains of sand, let alone stones. But Burton noticed Rico’s expression.

“Don’t even say nothin’!”

“What the fuck did I say? Moe, did I say anything?”

“No, but you wanted to, you low-life skell motherfucker. Me, I took a little ’scarole on the side to look the other way so a few niggers could deal some weed and ludes to their own. You gave fucking cover to the goddamned Colombians! Asshole spics near ruined the city. Hey, Moe, good thing the Nazis weren’t dealing coke or your best bud here woulda sold you and—”

Rico, as shabby and gray as he looked, still had quick hands. His right was already down at his side by the time Caveman reacted to the backhanded slap. At first, Kenny just rubbed his face, licked the blood off his bottom lip, and smiled. It was the kind of smile that wilted flowers.

“I hope you hit harder than that when it was shower time in Batavia.”

“Fuck you, Burton!”

Rico’s right shot out again, but I caught it.

“Cut this shit out. Larry’s fucking dead and I need to know if either of you believe he killed himself.”

“He’s dead either way,” Burton said. “Leave it be.”

“You would say that,” offered Rico.

Caveman positioned himself so that he held both Rico and me in his stare.

“Some cops the pair of you made—the bar mitzvah boy and the skell. Think, the both of ya! How could any of us get hurt by Mayweather’s murder getting dragged up now? Where’s the paper trail? You think old D Rex kept neat little ledgers, for fuck’s sake? If Larry McDonald suicided, it wasn’t over a few thousand bucks that a drug-dealing nigger threw his way or my way twenty years ago.”

He was right, of course. I hadn’t really thought it through before and I decided I wasn’t going to hash it out. Not here, not now, not with these two. I kept playing the suicide card.

“What do you think, Rico?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Burton’s right. Maybe Larry had other shit on his mind. I don’t know. I can’t think right now.”

Rico couldn’t think because he was in full thirst and needed a drink, bad. He had that whole body hunger thing going on that you see in drunks and junkies. He was swaying, twisting, bouncing slightly on his knees, caressing himself.

“Okay, I gotta get home. I’ll give Rico a lift,” I said.

“Well, you didn’t think I was gonna drive the cunt, did you?”

No one shook hands. Caveman lit a cigarette and blew some smoke in our faces. He flicked his unfinished cigarette onto Larry Mac’s grave as he passed. A fitting farewell from a man like Burton.

I didn’t talk to Rico in the car. That seemed to suit him just fine, consumed as he was by his aching thirst. I found a bar on Route 110, pulled over, and handed him all the cash I had in my wallet. He didn’t hesitate, not for a second. Neither did I, pulling away from the curb without glancing into my rearview mirror.

When I did finally look back, I noticed Melendez’s blue Impala on my bumper, waving for me to pull over. Like Rico, I didn’t hesitate. We both got out of our cars.

“Thanks for not making trouble today,” I said. “Larry was a good guy in his way and his ex didn’t need any extra aggravation.”

“Hey, the chief helped make my career. You think he didn’t take shit for putting that shield in my hand? I wasn’t going to show him any disrespect, not today.”

“So what were you doing there? Don’t you have any real cases to make?”

“Murphy’s out today,” she said, as if that explained it.

“And . . .”

“And I need you to talk to me or no justice is gonna get done here.”

Man, she
was
young. Justice is a word that gets beaten out of most cops before they make detective. I searched my memory trying to recall when I’d lost my “justice cherry.” The moment was lost with a million other forgotten milestones.

“Justice! Christ, Carmella. It takes more faith to believe in justice than in God.”

“I believe.”

“Why?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Wanna tell me why this case, if there even is a case, means so much to you?”

She showed me her shield. “This is why.”

Argue that. I couldn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “This is important to me too. What are you doing tonight?”

She blushed slightly, looking suddenly like a shy little girl. “Nothing.”

“Eleven o’clock. You tell me where.”

“Drinks?”

“Drinks would be good.”

“Crispo’s, do you know it?”

“You mean Rip’s in Red Hook?”

Her smile was my answer. I turned to go.

“Moe!”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not invisible to me either.”

THE RED NEON sign—
RI P ’S
—was like a bright smile with missing teeth. Crispo’s or Rip’s, on Visitation Place, was a dive.
Name me fifteen bars in Brooklyn that weren’t.
But there’s a kind of comfort in a dive, comfort like in a pair of ugly old shoes or a messy room. Rip’s was all of that. Inside was perpetual sepia. Neither the bar nor the plank floor had been refinished since the ’40s. The wobbly barstools were held together with white adhesive tape and glue, which, since the floor pitched and fell from foot to foot, was probably a good thing. Only place in Brooklyn you could get seasick sitting at a bar. Rip’s was the kind of place where old lipstick on your bar glass passed as garnish.

Red Hook, once the toughest neighborhood in the city—and that’s really saying something when you’re talking about New York—was a place in transition. Isolated from the rest of Brooklyn by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, its lack of a subway line, and spotty bus service, Red Hook had once been the thriving center of the borough’s waterfront. These days, the docks were inert and the memories of the tough guys who had once unloaded ships with hooks and ropes had receded into the cracks between the cobblestones that still lined its dead-end streets. As its fortunes fell, low-income housing projects rose up. For the majority of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, Red Hook, with its Civil War Era infrastructure and faceless factory buildings, was left to rot. It was as if the city hoped it would simply detach itself from the western tip of Long Island and sink into the East River.

Just lately, the yuppies—with their nose for cheap real estate, rustic charm, and loft space—had taken notice. It would probably be another ten or fifteen years before the last black, Puerto Rican, and artist was driven out by gentrification, but as sure as the sun would rise
tomorrow, it was coming. Inevitability comes in all manner of forms. One was waiting for me at the bar. Inevitability had an intoxicating smile.