Soul Patch (7 page)

“Prager, how the hell are you?” Fishbein, normally cool and shrewd, couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “What can I do for you?”

“Maybe I can do something for you, Mr. D.A.”

There was a profound silence on the other end of the phone. His prayers had been answered.
Praise the lord!

“Like what?” he wondered, more composed.

“I can’t really say now, but it could be big. I’ll need your help.”

“You’ve gotta give me more than that, Prager.” He was anxious, not a fool.

“Drugs and cops,” I said.

More silence. Then, “What do you need?”

“For now, I need to know everything about the body that was found in Gateway National Park last night. I mean everything.”

“That’s federal.”

“C’mon, Mr. D.A., let’s not dance that dance, okay?”

“Do you have a fax machine?”

I gave him the number.

“You’ll have it within the hour,” he promised. “Anything else?”

“Just one thing.”

“And that is?”

“If this amounts to anything, you might have some jurisdictional issues. In the end, you might be stepping on some very sensitive toes.”

“You let me worry about that,” he said. “I can step very softly when I have to, or step down really hard when it suits the purpose. If you catch my meaning.”

I caught it all right. The flip side of his desperation was fury. I was being warned about playing with fire—hellfire. If I was involving him now in something that resulted in a second public embarrassment, he wasn’t going to suffer it alone. I was going down with him and I was going down hard.

“I was a good gloveman in baseball,” I said. “Caught almost everything hit my way.”

“I’m glad that we understand one another, Mr. Prager. Because to extend your baseball analogy, I’m the manager of a team on the wrong side of a one-run game in the bottom of the ninth, and we’re down to the last strike. We lose the game and—”

“—you’re looking for a new managerial position,” I said, regretting I had started us along this metaphorical road.

“Yes, we’ll both be out of the game for good.”

Time to put an end to this. “I’ll be waiting for your fax.”

I rang off before he could give me the bunt sign.

 

I SAT AT my desk in the office of Red, White and You, watching the fax machine. As a way to pass time, it ranked right up there with reading James Joyce. At least I didn’t have to pretend to enjoy it. Fishbein
was prompt. The machine began chittering away less than twenty minutes after we’d gotten off the phone. I resisted the urge to read the fax sheet by sheet. I had already gotten too far ahead of myself and didn’t see the point of drawing and redrawing conclusions with each page received.

The unease I felt at the breakfast table proved well-founded. The body discovered in the reeds between Rockaway Boulevard in Brooklyn and Crossbay Boulevard in Queens had been positively identified as Melvin Broadbent, a.k.a. Malik Jabbar, born May 26, 1959, in the maternity ward of Coney Island Hospital. By the look of his rap sheet, Malik’s favorite pastime seemed to be getting arrested. Most of his arrests were for petty crap and he’d done the bulk of his penal tour at local venues: first Spofford as a kid, then the Brooklyn Tombs, then Rikers. Many of his arrests were for minor drug offenses, but he walked on almost all of those. He had done a short bid in Sing Sing or, as it was referred to these days, Ossining. Funny thing was, there seemed to be no record of his recent arrest for that coke taped to his dashboard.

I moved on to a less amusing section of the fax: his autopsy photos and report. No wallet or other ID had been found on the body, but the bracelet was discovered in the wet sand beneath him when the cops rolled him over. Good thing the fax had included a photo of Malik from one of his myriad arrests, because homicide had taken a toll on his boyish good looks. The two hollow-point loads put into the back of his head had removed large swaths of his face on the way out. And what the bullets had started, sand crabs and insects had finished. The autopsy photos were hard to look at, even for me. I decided to have a seat and to keep my lunch where it belonged. I’d gotten the gist of the report. I took down Malik’s address, phone numbers, etc., and placed the fax in a folder.

“You all right?” a customer asked me as I stepped out of the office. “You’re pale as can be.”

Nauseous
. “Fine,” I answered.

“Good, then can you please explain to me exactly why you charge a full three dollars more for Moët White Star than Crates and Carafes in Roslyn?”

“I would be happy to.”

And for the first time in years, I was.

2951 WEST EIGHTH Street, that’s the address of the 60th Precinct. It’s one of those hideous prefab buildings that lacks looks, character, and just about every other aesthetic quality you might think of. Its only saving grace is that it is located directly across West Eighth Street from Luna Park, one of the ugliest housing projects known to human-kind. The precinct house is also right next door to a firehouse. Now there’s some sharp thinking, huh? It’s like putting the hyenas and the lions next door to each other at the fucking Bronx Zoo. There were times during my service I thought lions and hyenas were more congenial.

A civilian employee—a heavyset black woman with lacquered hair—greeted me as I entered. She was so impressed by having an ex-member of the Six-O show up at her desk that she nearly fell asleep mid-sentence. Not that I blamed her, mind you.

“Can I help you?”

“This used to be my precinct,” I said, feeling immediately like an idiot.

“Y’all want it back?”

Then I compounded my stupidity by showing her my badge. Oh, man, that really impressed her.

“You wanna see mine?” she said, showing me the laminated credentials she had clipped to the overburdened waistband of her slacks. “Not as pretty, I know, but it don’t set off metal detectors or nothing. Now is there something I can help you with?”

I thought about it. My showing up here wasn’t exactly part of some master plan. It’s not the way I worked. Like I had any idea about that. Unconventional was a polite term for how I went about my business.
Fact is, I’m a stumbler, a lucky stumbler at that. Everyone who ever hired me mentioned that I’d been lucky and that they turned to me only after they had tried competent detectives. As Thomas Geary, the rich man who had hired me to look into Moira Heaton’s disappearances had said, “We’ve had two years of good with no success. Now it’s time to try lucky.” At least, that’s what I remember him saying.

Didn’t matter. Whenever they came to me, it was always with the
Gotham Magazine
article in hand or in mind. After my future brother-in-law went missing in 1977, some hotshot investigative reporter did a cover piece on the mystery surrounding Patrick’s disappearance. It was a natural. Francis Maloney Sr. was a big
macha
, a mover and shaker in the state Democratic party and one of its biggest fund-raisers. His eldest son had been shot down over Hanoi and his youngest son had vanished off the face of the earth. But what it always came down to was Marina Conseco. Within the body of the article about Patrick’s mysterious disappearance was an inset with my picture, Marina Conseco’s, and a brief description of how I’d saved her life back in ’72.

“Hey, mister!” She snapped her fingers. “Y’all want me to call the control tower for landing instructions or what?”

“Sorry.”

“No offense, but I am kinda busy here,” she explained.

Well, that was bullshit, but I couldn’t blame her for wanting to get rid of me. I had come here only because I knew I would eventually have to.

“So is there somebody you wanna see?”

“Yeah, is Rodriguez around?” I asked.

“Retired last year,” she said. I knew that.

“Lieutenant Crane?”

“Captain Crane now. He’s at One Police Plaza.”

“Stroby?”

“Never heard a him. Listen, Dancer and Blitzen, Doc and Dopey, they ain’t here neither. So—”

Just when she was getting going, the door opened at my back and the room filled with noise. I turned to look over my left shoulder. There, cursing up a storm in both English and Spanish, was a stunning woman in her mid-twenties with coffee-and-cream skin. She had thick pouty lips, straight jet-black hair, and brown eyes that were at once both fiery and cold. She was busy waving a rolled up
New York Post
at
an older, pencil-thin man in his forties. He dressed old-school Sears. She was Macy’s, but One Day Sales only. Her voice was familiar. I’d heard it before. Once. On tape.

“Jesus, enough already,” he said out of desperation. “Whaddaya want from me, I didn’t kill the schmuck.”

Another familiar voice, definitely Bronx Irish.

“Fucking Melvin! My big case down the crapper and this is how I find out, through the fucking
Post
!”

Fishbein’s help hadn’t gotten me much of a head start. Though I had more details than the papers about the life and demise of the late Mr. Jabbar, a.k.a. Broadbent, the daily rags had the essentials. I knew because I read about it myself this morning over coffee. The news of his identification and the scant details of his very small life weren’t exactly the stuff of banner headlines. The networks weren’t going to preempt their afternoon soaps and the world would continue turning on its axis. But some people would notice. Some already had. His was the kind of death that would cause a ripple on the surface of a silent sea. The ripple might quickly weaken and fade, forgotten like a fallen leaf. Or the ripple might plow the water into a wave, a wave to crash onto our heads, to sweep its victims into the sea without regard to their relative guilt or innocence.

“Yo! You got a problem?”

It took me a few seconds to get that the Latina detective was talking to me. I also realized I had been staring at her. Well, I’m not sure staring is the right word, precisely. I was more than staring. It was like the rest of my visual field went blurry at the edges while her image was hyper-sharp, almost painfully so. And my hearing took on that muted, head-under-water quality. Yes, she was very pretty but something else about her commanded my attention. Even after she barked at me, I could not turn away.

“Do I know you?” she asked impatiently.

“I’m sorry, no, I don’t think so,” I heard myself say, and finally looked away.

She and her partner walked by, the partner shaking his head but relieved for a few seconds of distraction. Then, before they got all the way down the hall, she started up again.

“I got enough shit on my plate without some middle-aged shithead stalking my ass.”

That hurt. No one enjoys being called middle-aged. It’s like when you turn forty you begin the long process of being dismissed. You’re no longer your own person, but just another ant in the colony. Fergie May used to say that a man knew he was middle-aged when he became invisible to hippie chicks. Well, hippie chicks might have gone the way of the Edsel and moon landings, but there was no arguing the essential truth of his philosophy. I was invisible, and if I hadn’t exactly been dismissed, I was being handed my coat and gloves.

“Who was that?” I asked the woman at the desk.

“Her? That’s Detective Melendez. Bitch!” she whispered, loud enough for me to hear.

We both smiled at that.

 

I DROVE TO Bordeaux In Brooklyn, our store in Brooklyn Heights. Situated on the lower floors of a lovely old brownstone on Montague Street, it was my favorite of our three locations. With its gilt lettered signs on green pane glass, globe fixtures, and intricate woodwork, the place had a distinct nostalgic feel reminiscent of the Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlors that used to dot the borough. There were many reasons to love that store: the weird customers it seemed to attract, its proximity to the Brooklyn Bridge, the breathtaking views of lower Manhattan from the Promenade. I can remember a hundred spring days when I felt as if I could simply reach across the East River and rake my fingers along the ridges of the Twin Towers, or take a running jump and land on the South Street Seaport.

In my heart of hearts, I know I loved that store best because of Klaus. Klaus, the store manager, had been with us for years. He knew more about music and fashion and popular culture than anyone I had ever met. Born out west somewhere, Wyoming or Utah, I think, Klaus came to New York to escape his family, or maybe it was to let them escape him. The two thousand or so miles between son and family served both parties well. The distance made it easier for his folks to deny his gayness, and he could love his folks back without constantly chafing against their beliefs.

When he started with us he was a total punk. He was all ripped clothes, piercings, weird haircuts, and attitude, but he made it work. Klaus spent more time at Dirt Lounge, CBGBs, and Mudd Club than at work. Yet he was never late, never called in sick, and learned how
to peddle wine a lot quicker than at least one of his employers. I hired him as a sort of petulant “fuck you!” to my brother. I’d show him for getting me involved in a business I always knew I’d come to hate. In the end, Klaus was the best hire either of us had ever made. Not even Aaron could deny that. Klaus had long since forsaken his Dead Kennedys t-shirts for silk shirts with French cuffs and power ties.

“Excuse me, mister, you got any Ripple?”

“Hey, boss!”

Klaus came around the counter and hugged me.

“Please, I’m a married man.”

“Oh, yes, and how’s that working out for you?”

He knew what he was asking; Klaus had become one of my closest friends. He was familiar with the rough spots in my life. It’s odd, but it seemed that I had spent the last dozen years shedding most every old friend I’d ever had. That’s what aging is, I think, shedding your old lives like snake skins. And what represents a man’s life better than the friends he’s made and lost along the way? Along with Klaus, there was Kosta, Pete Parson, Yancy Whittle Fenn, and Israel Roth: a gay, a Greek, an old cop, a drunk journalist, and a concentration camp survivor. Not exactly the A-Team, I know, but men who I could trust more than Larry McDonald.