The James Deans (2 page)

OUR PRECARIOUS EQUILIBRIUM had returned. I was grateful for it. Even in the previous day’s incident I could see an end to the grief in sight. Katy snapped back more quickly each time and had finally started working on some long-neglected accounts. She was down in her studio and Sarah was next door with her friend Mary. I was busy watching the second act of a twin bill slaughter of the Mets by the Astros.
Macbeth
had been less bloody than this, certainly more humane.

Still, I could not get Moira Heaton off my mind, nor could I get my head around Mr. Geary’s cryptic lecture about the art of golf. Considering my history, I understood my fascination with Moira. Geary was a different story. All my life I’d been told that rich people were different. Of course, having grown up in the ass end of Brooklyn, my concept of rich was somewhat skewed. To me, a kid who had his own room and no hand-me-downs was like a king. People who owned their own homes and two cars … Forget about it! Both college and the job had expanded my horizons some, but not as much as you’d think.

Until Aaron and I opened our first shop on Columbus Avenue five years ago, I never really dealt with people of any significant means. Black or white, Jew or gentile, clean or corrupt, almost everyone I had contact with up until then was in the same boat as me. Some sat at the captain’s table, some traveled in steerage. Nevertheless, it was the same boat. So I understood them. I was them. I didn’t get men like Geary. What allure could some political hack hold for Geary? How rich was rich enough? I couldn’t help but remember my father’s pitiful mantra:
If I could only put twenty grand together
… That was my dad’s problem; he dreamed small and failed big.

There wasn’t a thing I could do or wanted to do about Geary except wait for his call. Moira Heaton, on the other hand, may have been missing, but not from the public record. Unfortunately, the parts of the public record I wanted to see were behind the beige brick walls and locked doors of the Sheepshead Bay branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I tried thinking back to Thanksgiving Eve of ‘81.

I had been a little too preoccupied to have paid much attention to the news of Moira Heaton’s disappearance in those weeks. Thanksgiving Eve 1981 was the night Arthur Rosen hanged himself. Rosen had tried to hire me to look into the death of his sister Karen. Fair enough, but there were these two minor sticking points: Arthur was as mad as a March hare, and Karen, a high school classmate of mine, was one of seventeen workers who had perished in a Catskills hotel fire in 1966. I turned him down flat, throwing him unceremoniously out of the shop.

Days later, when I went to apologize, I found Arthur’s body, his neck in a belt, and my name scrawled in blood on his bedroom wall. It was just my name, but it felt like an accusation. I changed my mind and took the case. Maybe too late to do Arthur any good, but not too late for me. I spent the next week or so up in the Catskills. Crazy Arthur Rosen had been right in the end; the fire that killed all those kids so many years before had been no accident. Though, as it happened, I doubt he would have clicked his heels up at the truth. The dead had been spoken for, finally. The guilty paid the bill, belatedly, but in full. So it was no wonder to me that Moira Heaton had escaped my notice.

“Katy,” I called down, opening the basement door, “I’m going out for a few hours, okay? Sarah’s next door. I’ll bring back a pizza.”

“No problem. I’m almost done anyway. Where ya going?”

“I’m not sure.”

In some sense, I wasn’t.

I RACED THE sun along the Belt Parkway. Less than a mile into the trip, I drove past Coney Island, the neighborhood in which I’d spent most of my life and nearly my entire career as a cop. It was a stretch I drove every day whether I was headed to Bordeaux in Brooklyn or City on the Vine. I made the trip so often that I no longer noticed the landmarks. They were no longer even blurs or random shapes or splashes of color. Familiarity breeds a kind of blindness. Today, I took the time to notice. Katy wasn’t the only one coming out of a coma.

Pete Parson was a broken-down old cop like me. These days he was a minority partner in a grimy artists’ hangout in TriBeCa called Pooty’s. Even if I had come by just to play the juke, he would have been happy to see me. It had been a slow Sunday to begin with, as half the population of Manhattan was out on the southeastern tip of Long Island. Anyway, Pete had a low tolerance for the artsy-fartsy posers who populated his bar arguing over Twyla Tharp and Mapplethorpe instead of the Yankees and the Mets.

“How the fuck did I ever wind up in this place, Moe?” he asked, clapping me on the back. “When I was working the job, all I ever dreamed about was owning my own place, some neighborhood joint with pretzels and a pool table and guys reading the
Racing Form.
Someday I’m gonna move down south and open up a wine shop for you and your brother.”

“Yeah, sure, Pete, Merlot in Macon. If you think you got nothing in common with your clientele now … Besides, you couldn’t tell Ripple from a Côtes du Rhône with a road map.”

“Fuck you. What a ya havin'?”

“Dewar’s rocks.”

“Not that I’m not happy to see ya, but you haven’t been in since—you know. How’s Katy holding up?”

He put my scotch on the bar and opened a bottle of Bud for himself.

“Better. She’s doing better. We all are, I think.”

“Cheers!” He tipped his bottle to me. “So what’s up?”

“Remember I told you about working that case up in the Catskills?”

“That was like two years ago, right? The thing with the fire, all them kids. Yeah. What about it?”

“Nothing about it. It’s just I know you’re good at keeping up with the news, and when I was up in the mountains, there was something I guess I missed.”

“What was that?”

“A girl disappeared.”

“Girls are always disappearing.”

“This one was working as an intern for a state senator.”

“That Brightman thing?”

“That’s the one.”

“Jeez, Moe, she was a cop’s kid. Other than that, I don’t know what I can tell you.”

“Whatever you can tell me is more than I know, so …”

“So what’s this got to do with you, anyways?”

“I don’t know yet, probably nothing,” I said, only half hoping it was true. “Was there any indication of foul play?”

“Nothin’ obvious, no signs of a struggle, no blood or nothin’ in the office, as I recall. One minute she was there and the next minute she wasn’t. Sort of like …” He drifted off. “So, you ever hear anything about him?”

He didn’t have to specify which him. I knew his name like I knew my own, better maybe. Patrick Michael Maloney, Katy’s younger brother, had walked out of this very bar in December 1977 and into oblivion. It was bizarre how months could go by without anyone mentioning Patrick, and then his name would start rolling off people’s tongues like hello. Yesterday it was Geary. Today it was Pete. When Patrick’s name started getting bandied about, it was never a good omen. It usually meant people wanted something, specifically, something from me.

“Not a word, Pete. Every once in a while we get some schmuck looking to make a quick buck off the reward money, but the tips never pan out. Between you and me, I think Patrick ran as far away from here as he could get and he’s never coming back. Given my asshole father-in-law, I can’t say that I blame him.”

“Amen to that.”

Pete had gotten a bellyful of Francis Maloney Sr. after Patrick vanished. My father-in-law, once a big-time fund-raiser for the state Democratic Party, pulled strings in order to get Pooty’s bar license revoked. That was Francis Maloney for you. His son disappeared, so heads would roll. Whether those heads bore any responsibility for his son going missing was almost beside the point.

The Dewar’s was turning to dust in my mouth. Any protracted discussion involving my father-in-law did that to me, but it wasn’t all on Francis. There were things I knew and things I knew he knew about his son’s disappearance that we kept silently between us. These were dangerous things, these secrets, like time bombs sitting in the hall closet. They would remain dormant as long as Katy stayed out of the loop. One word, one leak, one slip, and we’d both lose her forever. Tick … Tick … Tick …

I decided to get back to the subject at hand before I needed a second scotch to wash down the one that had turned to dust.

“You remember any other details of the Heaton girl’s disappearance?”

“Christ, Moe, that was a long time ago. There was some rumblings about hanky-panky between the girl and Brightman. You know, the papers tried playing that up.”

“They would.”

“Hey, it sells papers.”

“Did it have any legs?”

“Nah,” Pete said, grabbing the Dewar’s bottle. “He denied it, put up reward money, cooperated with the cops. Let ‘em search his home, his office, whatever. He was clean.”

“Clean, huh?” I waved a second drink off. “Clean is always a matter of degree.”

“Clean ain’t clear, though. Brightman’s political career took a big hit. They were grooming him for the major leagues, the next fair-haired superstar.”

“Yeah, they all start out as the next Jack Kennedy and end up fixing parking tickets for the local head of the chamber of commerce.”

“Fuckin’ politicians!” Pete shook his head in disgust. “You know, if you really wanna find out about the guy, there is someone who would know better than me.”

“Who’s that?”

Pete suddenly looked as if he’d swallowed a beehive and washed it down with Black Flag. I suppose he hoped I’d figure it out on my own.

“Who, Pete?”

“You know.”

“Who, for chrissakes?”

“We were just talkin’ about him. Katy’s old man.”

I decided I wasn’t that curious, not by a long shot.

THAT’S THE THING about curiosity—like a craving, it will fade if given enough time. Mine had faded into the routine of work and family.

Wednesdays were my days to open the new shop. Located on Montague Street, Bordeaux in Brooklyn had a bit of a different feel than City on the Vine. Some of that was because Brooklyn, no matter how you dressed her up, would never be Manhattan. She would always be the poor relation in last year’s dress; pretty enough, but a half a step behind. Another contributing factor to the different atmosphere was the actual physical layout of the place. The Brooklyn shop was in the basement and on the first floor of a converted old brownstone with apartments above. And because we were located in a historic district, we were very limited as to the type of signs we were permitted to use.

BORDEAUX IN BROOKLYN
IRVING PRAGER & SONS, INC.
Purveyors of Finest Wines and Spirits
Established 1978

So read the gilt lettering on the front door and the plate-glass window. Of course my father had died years before we opened either store. The corporation name was a tribute to his memory. Aaron and I were determined that Irving Prager’s name should be remembered not for his failures but for his sons’ success.

I liked my days in this shop not only because it was less of a schlep back and forth from home. I liked it because I once again got to hang out with Klaus. Klaus, the store manager, had been with us since ‘79 and was sort of a cross between Calvin Klein and Johnny Rotten. He knew more about the fashion and the music scenes than most people whose business it was to know. Klaus came from out west somewhere, from a family who found the distance now between them a convenient tool for ignoring their son’s homosexuality.

Klaus liked Wednesdays as well. He missed working with me as much as I missed working with him. I was a far more receptive audience for his antics than my brother. Popular culture still really interested me, whereas Aaron’s interest had come to an end during the early years of LBJ’s presidency. “I love your brother,” Klaus had once confessed, “but he is more a fugue than a frug kind of guy.”

But it was another man, not Klaus, waiting for me on the front steps of the old brownstone. He was a pudgy little man in a cheap brown suit speckled with dandruff and old sweat stains. He had a pasty, humorless face and a fat vinyl briefcase in his paw. His one concession to convention was his unsuccessful attempt at camouflaging his civil service karma with a quarter bottle of Aramis.

“Mr. Prager?” he asked, reaching into his pocket.

“Yes.”

“Moses B. or Aaron F.?”

“Moses B. Who wants to know?”

He handed me a card. “Leon Weintraub,” he said, not offering me his hand. “I’m an investigator for the New York—”

“—State Liquor Authority. Yeah, that’s what the card says.”

Now he showed me his official ID. I finished opening up the shop and asked him in before getting to the subject of his visit. As I opened my mouth, Klaus came through the front door.

“Klaus,” I said, cutting off any possibility he might start in on our guest’s sartorial ineptitude, “this is Mr. Weintraub from the state liquor authority.”

Klaus turned on the charm. “Can I get you gentlemen some coffee? Some pastry?”

Weintraub did something with his mouth that was his excuse for a smile. “Black, two sugars. Seeded roll, extra butter.” A civil servant was never born who could turn down free anything.

Klaus was shrewd enough to not bother waiting for a please and thank-you. He’d lived in New York long enough to know better. “Usual for you, boss?”

I nodded, but as Klaus retreated he could not help pulling a face behind Weintraub’s back. He pinched his nose with the fingers and feigned gagging. I almost bit through my tongue trying to keep my composure.

“Come on into the office, Mr. Weintraub. What can we do for you?” I asked as I showed him downstairs.

“Just a routine spot check.”

Routine spot check my ass! I’d been around the block enough to know better. Go ask Pete Parson if you don’t believe me. The liquor authority was one of the most politicized institutions in the Empire State. In a state where “Patronage, Nepotism, and Influence” is the unofficial state motto, that’s really saying something.

“Fine,” I said. “Have a look around. Let me know how I can help you. Here’s the office. Klaus will be down with your breakfast in a minute. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish opening up.”

Klaus quickly tracked me down once he’d delivered the complimentary continental breakfast to our uninvited guest.

“So what’s that grubby little man doing here?”

“A spot check?” I sipped my coffee.

“A spot check indeed. He needs to do one on that hideous suit of his. Oh … my … God! I thought that color brown was outlawed by the Geneva Convention. I know several homeless men who wouldn’t be caught dead in—”

“All right, I get the point.”

“But what’s he really doing here?”

“Sending a message, Klaus, sending a message.”

It didn’t take long for the other shoe to drop. About an hour after Weintraub waddled out the front door, the phone rang. I didn’t race to pick it up, but I knew it would be for me.

“Boss, pick up!” Klaus called on the intercom.

I pressed the flashing button and put the receiver to my ear. “Prager, Moses B.,” I spoke into the mouthpiece. “Message received loud and clear.”

There was an almost imperceptible laugh on the other end of the line. “I’d like you to meet me at Spivack and Associates, Suite 1404, Forty Court Street. Are you familiar with the building, Mr. Prager?”

“I am.”

“In an hour?” It might have been phrased like a question, but it wasn’t.

I didn’t bother putting the phone back in its cradle. It was my turn to start making calls.

“Intelligence Division, Detective Steptoe,” a woman answered.

“Sorry,” I said, going over the number I’d dialed in my head, “I thought this was Detective McDonald’s line.”

“Who?”

“Larry McDonald, Detective Larry—”

“You mean Captain McDonald?”

“If you say so.”

“Let me transfer you.”

With the passing years my contacts in the NYPD had withered. Some of the guys had, like me and Pete, gotten hurt on the job and been put out to pasture. Many made their twenty years, trading in their badges for golf bags. To the kids coming up as I was headed out the door, I was a relic, a fossil who didn’t understand the job or the day-to-day bullshit they had to put up with. I remembered feeling the same way about the guys who’d come up before me. Whenever they started a sentence with “In my day …” I, too, would roll my eyes. But I could always depend on Larry McDonald. We’d worked together for years in Coney Island, and he owed me, big-time.

“
Captain
McDonald. Should I just genuflect or do I have to kiss the ring, too?”

“You gimpy Jew bastard, you couldn’t genuflect if your life depended on it. Shit, I haven’t heard a peep from you in years. I thought you were dead.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“Wha’d'ya need, brother?”

“State Senator Steven Brightman.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“I’m the one who’s supposed to be dead, Larry, remember? Hello …”

“This a fishing expedition, Moe? ‘Cause if it is, I can’t have any part in this. A politician and the missing daughter of an ex-cop; it’s not a winning combination for anyone.”

“Calm down. Calm down. I’m not out to fuck the guy. Fact is, I might be working for Brightman. Someone’s got his ear that thinks I might have some luck finding the girl.”

“Come on, man. You know what happened to her. You were a fucking cop before that piece a carbon paper fucked up your knee. She’s a pile of bones somewheres out in Bethpage State Park or in the Gowanus Canal.”

“Probably you’re right, but I don’t think I’m gonna have much of a choice about working the case. I need everything on both Brightman and the girl, Moira Heaton.”

Again, there was an uncomfortable silence. The last time Larry helped me out he hadn’t yet made rank and the information had come from departments outside the city. Now the landscape had changed. This was Larry Mac’s own little fiefdom. Traditionally, each bureau or division within the NYPD jealously defends its turf. It was hard enough getting these various entities to share information with each other, let alone a guy like me.

“Christ, Moe, I don’t know,” he hemmed and hawed like a man asked to pick his own pocket. “It’s not like back in the day. They keep closer track of things than they used to.”

“Yeah, yeah, Big Brother and all that, but 1984's still six months away. Why don’t you just see what you can do and I’ll check back with you, okay?” I knew not to argue with him.

“All right, let me see. Gimme a day or two.”

“Thanks, Larry.”

“Don’t thank me yet and don’t send me good champagne either. My wife just makes mimosas with it.”

When we were done, I thought about making a second call, a much harder call to make. I put the phone down instead. There’s an old baseball adage about some of the best trades being the ones you don’t make. I didn’t fool myself that it applied here. The call was going to get made, just not yet.

THEY DIDN’T CALL it Court Street for nothing. You could throw a rock across the road from the lobby of number 40 and hit the State Supreme Court Building. If you took to heart Shakespeare’s line about killing all the lawyers, blowing up 40 Court Street would have been a good start. With its proximity to the court and the Brooklyn Tombs only a few blocks away on Atlantic Avenue, the dirty brown skyscraper was chock-full of lawyers. Where there are courts and jails and lawyers, there are investigators. Spivack and Associates among them.

When cops are on the job they love lawyers like lions love hyenas, only minus the mutual respect. But the minute a cop puts in his papers and goes into private investigations, he finds as many hyenas as he can and becomes an associate member of the pack. When you beg scraps, it pays to stay close to the pack. That’s why Spivack and Associates was such a natural fit in the brown building on Court Street. If I had gone into the business full-time, I too might have rented office space here.

Suite 1404, all glass, stainless steel, and uncomfortable furniture, had a rather antiseptic feel to it. I suppose they could always rent it out to local hospitals for ambulatory surgery. The receptionist barely got “Good day” out of her mouth when a drill sergeant type approached. Easily six foot three, he had a graying brush cut, a square chin and shoulders, rough features, and impatient blue eyes.

“I’m Spivack,” he barked, shaking my hand in spite of himself. “This way.”

Spivack wore a short-sleeve white shirt, black slacks, black tie, black shoes. He sort of looked like an angry escapee from 1950s middle management. His strides ate up carpet in big chunks.

He stopped. “Here,” he said, pushing open his office door.

His office, while not exactly inviting, was less antiseptic than the rest of the place. The chairs looked sat in, the desk was scratched and chipped. There were photos on the wall, certificates and diplomas, and a Lucite display featuring a green beret, an army-issue .45, and handcuffs. I took a more careful look at some of the photos. Several featured a younger Spivack in a U.S. marshal windbreaker escorting prisoners.

Mr. Geary was seated on a black leather sofa and waited for me to finish checking out the office before standing to greet me.

Spivack sat down behind his desk and glared even more contemptuously at Geary than he had at me.

“Hello, Moe,” Geary said, the butter melting in his mouth. “Good of you to come.”

“I know a command performance when I see one.”

Geary didn’t waste time disputing the facts. “I see you’ve met Joe Spivack.”

“Sort of, yeah.”

He beckoned me to come join him back on the sofa. I was amazed at how in command he acted in someone else’s place of business. He treated Spivack as another piece of furniture. I sat.

“Mr. Spivack’s firm did the original investigation into Moira Heaton’s unfortunate disappearance. I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say it was an expensive and thorough, if not very fruitful, exercise for Mr. Spivack and company.”

Geary gestured to Spivack as if he were calling the busboy to refill his water glass. Spivack handed an accordion file to Geary, who handed it to me.

“Don’t bother going through it now.” It wasn’t a suggestion. “This is the salient material. Take it home with you, Moe. I’m told there are several more boxes of ancillary material which we’ll have delivered wherever you’d like. Mr. Spivack will lend you all possible assistance and answer any of your questions.”

“Wait a second! Wait a second,” I barked, my patience wearing razor thin. “Mr. Spivack, is there a room where Mr. Geary and I can talk in private? There’s some stuff him and me have to get straight.”

“Will right here do?” Spivack asked, happy at the prospect of getting out from under Geary’s thumb.

“Works for me,” I answered.

If Geary was upset by being left out of the decision-making process, he didn’t show it. Spivack got up and left before that changed.

“I’m sorry, Moe,” Geary offered as soon as the door clicked shut. “I’ve behaved badly, I know. I’ve taken things for granted.”

“I don’t like threats, Mr. Geary.”

“Thomas,” he corrected. “Call me Thomas.”

Yeah, right, I thought. And we’ll go have some buttered scones and tea afterward.

“Like I was saying, I don’t like threats, even implied ones. I didn’t appreciate that little visit this morning from the New York State Liquor Authority. Not one bit.”

“It got your attention, though?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“That was my idea, I’m afraid. I would ask you not to hold it against Steven, Senator Brightman. He would disapprove.”

“I’m liking him better already.”

Geary smiled. “Then you’ll do it. You’ll look into this matter for us.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you will, won’t you?”

“I may have been a cop once, Mr. Geary, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”