The James Deans (3 page)

“Far from it, I’d say. That’s part of the reason you’re here at all.”

“Pardon me if I don’t thank you, but that’s been bugging me all weekend long,” I confessed. “And now that I’m in this office, it’s bothering me even more. Why do you need me? I’m a part-timer with no network. I mean, look around you. This guy is major league. He’s a former U.S. marshal. They’re like fucking bulldogs.

What can I do to find Moira Heaton that Spivack and Associates and their network and friends and informants couldn’t?”

“Would it suffice to say you come highly recommended?”

“No.”

“I didn’t suppose it would. How about this then?” he asked, reaching into his inner jacket pocket.

I knew even before his hand reappeared what it would hold. “
Gotham Magazine
,” I said, “pages seventeen through twenty, continued on page ninety-three, far left column.”

When Katy’s brother Patrick vanished in ‘77, an ambitious reporter for
Gotham
had done a piece about the disappearance and subsequent search. The reporter, correctly sensing there was a lot more to the story than what the press had been spoon-fed by the family, thought the story had Pulitzer Prize written all over it. Unfortunately for him, the people who knew the truth, myself included, kept it to themselves. The story turned into more of a puff piece and part of the puff was about me or, more accurately, about me and a little girl named Marina.

On Easter Sunday of 1972, Marina Conseco, the seven-year-old daughter of a city firefighter, went missing in Coney Island. Several days later, while searching the area with some off-duty firemen, I got the idea to check out the wooden rooftop water tanks on some of the older buildings in the neighborhood. We found Marina, battered but alive, in the third or fourth tank we checked. In an undistinguished career as a cop, finding her was my one shining moment. People would forget Patrick, but never Marina. It was this same story that had brought poor Arthur Rosen to me. However, there was nothing remotely poor or needy about the man who stood in front of me at the moment.

“Bravo, bravo.” He applauded, his left hand hitting the folded pages in his right. “Bravo.”

“That was eleven years ago when I found the girl.”

“Don’t be modest,” he said coolly, the smile running away from his face. “I know much more about you than you’d think.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, beginning to feel light-headed.

He didn’t answer, checking his watch instead. “We can discuss your fee at a later date. I assure you you won’t suffer financially. As I said previously, you can expect the fullest cooperation from Mr. Spivack. I must be on my way.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Why me?”

“In a word, luck. You’re lucky, Mr. Prager.”

“We’re not on a first-name basis anymore, huh, Tom?”

He ignored that, too. “Spivack is good, as good as good gets. We’ve had two unproductive years of good, Mr. Prager. It’s time for a little luck.” He about-faced, reaching for the doorknob.

“One condition,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Prager,” he answered impatiently. “What is it?”

“I interview Brightman, alone.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be—”

“That’s my condition. You won’t meet it, forget about my luck. You can threaten me and try to intimidate me till the fucking cows come home and I won’t take the case. I need to look into your boy’s eyes.”

“I’ll arrange for it. In the meantime, get to work.”

He closed the door behind him without bothering to look back.

WHEN I GOT back to the shop, Klaus was quick to tell me that Aaron had called in a panic. Apparently, one of Mr. Weintraub’s colleagues had paid our Columbus Avenue location an afternoon visit. I doubt if Geary knew it at the time he arranged for it, but he’d done me a big favor. My absence from the business for the foreseeable future would be much easier for my big brother to swallow now that he’d gotten to experience firsthand the depth of Thomas Geary’s influence.

The business meant everything to Aaron. Would he sacrifice his family for it? No. My charm and less than encyclopedic knowledge of wines was another matter altogether. Besides, one of the conditions of our partnership was that I had the option to take vacation time to work cases. I’d exercised the option only once in five years, when I went up to the Catskills.

“City on the Vine,” Aaron answered the phone.

In those five syllables alone, I could hear the worry in his voice.

“New York State Liquor Authority,” I taunted.

“Fuck you.”

“So I hear you had a visit.”

“What’s going on, Moe? Klaus said something about it being a—”

“—message. Yeah, it’s a message to me. Remember how we couldn’t figure out why we got invited to Connie’s wedding?”

“Sure, but what the fuck’s this got to do—”

“Everything, apparently. Connie’s dad wants me to work a case for him, and today’s bit of muscle flexing was to help me make up my mind in his favor. At the wedding, when Katy lost it, I was out on the driving range with Mr. Geary. That’s when he first suggested it might be in my best interest to consider taking him on as a client.”

“And he thought strong-arming you was the way to go?” Aaron was incredulous.

“I guess he doesn’t believe in long courtships. He made his point pretty effectively, though. You gotta give him that.”

“What about …” Aaron hesitated. “Maybe we should—I mean, maybe you should call … Why don’t you call your father-in-law? He’s probably still got political contacts. Maybe he could insulate us from—” Aaron understood I loathed my father-in-law, but not why, exactly.

“Forget it! Just forget it! I can’t—
we
can’t afford to owe him. I’ll work the case hard for a week and we can all move on. You can spare me for a week.”

“Do you think he’s serious?”

“Geary? Would he really fuck with us if I turned him down? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I’m not in the mood to find out. Are you?”

“Consider yourself on vacation, little brother.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll get out my Hawaiian shirts.”

“Very funny. What’s this case, anyway, that Geary’s gone to all this trouble for?” Aaron was justifiably curious.

“All you need to know is there’s a missing girl at the end of it.”

“Oh, I get it,” he said, as if I’d explained quantum mechanics in a single sentence.

How nice, I thought. Now maybe he could explain it to me.

The wine business had always been Aaron’s dream. Even my taking the test for the cops had been on a drunken dare. A good chunk of my adult life had basically been the product of grafting my energies onto someone else’s schemes. Careerwise, the only thing I’d ever wanted for myself, the one thing that was mine alone, was the right to work a case or two here and there. And now that one footnote to my own destiny was getting yanked out of my hands.

“How the fuck did I ever wind up in this place?” I repeated Pete Parson’s question. It had been a good question on Sunday and was an even better one today. I opened up the accordion file and found a picture of a woman of whom I knew very little except her name. “I hope you’re worth it, Moira Heaton.”

God had infinite ways of displaying love and cruelty. Anyone over the age of twelve who hadn’t figured that one out was on his way to either beatification or long-term therapy. But it was the way he manipulated imperfection to such disparate ends that fascinated me. Reconciling holocausts and hurricanes was beyond me. I’d let the big questions turn my rabbi’s hair gray. I looked for God’s handiwork in people’s faces. And in Moira Heaton’s face I found ample traces of the Almighty’s mischief.

I’m uncertain of what I expected, but whatever it was, Moira Heaton wasn’t it. Not immune to the whiff of scandal, I suppose I had envisioned her as darkly beautiful or as a red-haired colleen, the kind of prize an older, accomplished man would be unable to resist. She was neither. Moira was plain. In a culture that values attention almost beyond anything else, even money, plainness is a curse.

I wondered what it said by her high school yearbook photo:
Most likely to be forgotten?
Moira’s life, over or not, had served some purpose. Maybe I wouldn’t be clever enough to figure it out, maybe no one ever would, but I’d taken notice of her and wasn’t likely to forget.

HEADING EAST ON the L.I.E., I passed the hideous twin giants of Queens County: the Elmhurst-Maspeth gas tanks. Rumor was they were going to deconstruct the corrugated steel monsters bit by bit and give the sky back to the moon, the sun, and the stars. Some neighborhood groups were actually protesting the move. No surprise there. When they started tearing down the big blue gas tank in Coney Island, a few idiots threw themselves in front of the demolition equipment. I guess if you stare at something long enough it begins to resemble Stonehenge.

As I left the tanks behind, I couldn’t help but wonder what the nineteen flips of the calendar had done to John Heaton since the last of his daughter. Moira had not been removed from his life one piece at a time. She was there, then she wasn’t. Over the past five years I’d seen firsthand how Patrick’s disappearance, the uncertainty about his fate, had eaten away at my mother-in-law. I looked in the mirror. I looked at my wife. I had seen what the miscarriage had done to us. I didn’t like thinking about what would become of me if anything ever happened to Sarah. In the end, it wasn’t Geary’s threats or the potential size of the retainer that interested me. It was the human cost. It always was.

I pulled off the L.I.E. at Queens Boulevard. Mandrake Towers was a ten-unit apartment-building complex in Rego Park. It was one of countless characterless projects which had sprung up like redbrick weeds during the building boom of the fifties and sixties. I’d lived in places just like it. The facelessness of these buildings did not end at the exterior walls, but rather turned inward, pervading the hallways, elevators, bedrooms, and baths. Each apartment as much a cell as a home. You had your friends in the building, but most of the people on the other side of the wall, the people above your head and beneath your feet, were strangers.

The security office was in the basement of Building 5, between the garbage compactor and the laundry room. It wasn’t exactly the war room in the basement of the White House. The door was ajar and through it came the sweet sound of Marvin Gaye’s voice rudely interrupted by the static-filled squawking of walkie-talkies. I knocked, didn’t wait for an invite, and walked in.

A large, heavyset black man in a khaki uniform that had fit him ten years and thirty pounds ago sat behind a long card table reading the
Daily News.
Before him on the table sat a walkie-talkie, a phone, his trooper-style hat, a full ashtray, and a radio.

“What can I do for y’all?” he asked, not looking up from the paper.

“John Heaton around?”

That got his attention. His relaxed demeanor seemed to run out through the bottom of his shoes. He stiffened, put the paper down, shut off the radio.

“Who wanna know and why?”

I showed him my old badge. As it didn’t come stamped with an expiration date, it usually helped cut through the bullshit. Not this time.

“That’s only half the answer, man.”

“It’s about his daughter.”

“They find her?” He perked up.

“Nah, I’ve been hired to have a fresh look into it.”

The room got very chilly. “Hired? You a cop or ain’t you?”

“I’m retired,” I confessed, showing him my investigator’s license. “I’m working this private.”

“He ain’t here,” the guard stonewalled, standing up in sections to unfurl all six feet eight inches of himself. I guess he wanted me to get that he meant business.

“Come on, I’m not here to bust his balls or anything. Look, Officer … Simmons,” I read his name tag, which was now just a little below my eye level. “I know I shouldn’t've flashed the tin, but—”

“He ain’t here ‘cause he don’t work here no more.” He shook his head and pantomimed taking a drink. “They let him go, if you know what I’m sayin'. He was doin’ awright for a while, but jus’ in the last few months, he couldn’t handle it no more. He loved that girl. Moira was a good girl.”

“I’m not here to say different.”

“Then what you here for? Little late in the game, don’t ya think, to start nosin’ around? All you gonna do is hurt the man.”

“You know the man and I don’t. I’ll give you that,” I said. “But don’t you think he’d trade a little more pain for a chance to find his daughter?”

“He ain’t got much left to trade, mister. He and his wife split. She move down to Florida with their boy. I s’pose you could have his soul, but there ain’t much a that left neither.”

I said nothing. There was no answer to that, no way to dress it up and take it to the prom. As a cop, I’d seen people kill themselves in all sorts of ways. Some more violent than others, but the saddest suicides were the long marches of self-destruction.

I held my hand out to Officer Simmons. “Moses Prager,” I said. “Most people call me Moe. I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I’m really not the asshole I appear to be.”

“Preacher,” he offered, his hand fairly swallowing mine. “Most people call me Officer Simmons.” A mischievous smile flashed across his face. “And I am the tough-ass motherfucker I appear to be.”

“Preacher Simmons,” I mumbled to myself, something stirring in my memory. “Preacher ‘the Creature’ Simmons? Boys High, 1964 all-city team, right?”

That knocked about half the smile off his face. He was happy I remembered, but afraid I’d remember more. I did. Preacher “the Creature” Simmons had gone on from Boys High to Georgia Atlantic and gotten mixed up in a point-shaving scandal. Unlike Connie “the Hawk” Hawkins, who had, thanks to the ABA, salvaged at least some part of what might have been one of the brightest futures in basketball history, Preacher had fallen off the radar screen. No wonder. It’s hard to spot a man so far below ground level.

“Preacher ‘the Creature’ been gone since before we landed on the moon, Moe. I been jus’ plain Officer Simmons now for near fifteen years. I owe that to John Heaton. He got me this gig.”

“Judging people’s not my business, Officer Simmons. Finding them is.” I handed him a card. “There’s plenty of numbers there you can reach me at if you can think of anything that might help me. I don’t suppose you’d wanna tell me where I can find John now?”

“Wine stores, huh? You jus’ a jack a all kinda trades.”

“I’ve never been great at anything.”

“I have,” he said, his smile having fully retreated. “It’s overrated.”

Ready to leave it at that, I thanked him and turned to go.

“Glitters,” he called out to me when I was nearly out the door.

“Glitters?”

“It’s a topless joint in Times Square. John workin’ there off the books doin’ this and that. Down there, they don’t judge people neither.”

THE THINGS THAT become of people’s lives. That’s what I was thinking about as I pulled my car out of the lot at Mandrake Towers. In his day, Preacher “the Creature” Simmons was as much a legend as Lew Alcindor. It’s sad when the mighty fall or when injury diminishes greatness, but I felt sick at the sight of Preacher Simmons, forgotten by the world, living out his days in a cinder-block bunker. I wondered what would kill him first, the cigarettes or the what-ifs.

Anyway, I hadn’t the heart to argue with him when he suggested too much time had passed to start looking into Moira’s disappearance. If my investigation into the Catskills fire had taught me anything, it was that the passage of time, even sixteen years, cuts both ways. Sure, cold leads freeze over and witnesses move, forget, die off. But though time tightens some tongues, it greases others. As years pile up, perps can get overconfident, sloppy, and alibis rot away like unbrushed teeth. Guilt can set in and fester. But time’s greatest benefit is distance. Distance allows for perspective. All manner of things become visible that were previously impossible to see. The passage of time had helped me get to the truth of the Fir Grove Hotel fire. Whether it would help lead to Moira Heaton, I could not say, but what it had done to her father was clear enough.

Glitters was what the guys on the job so affectionately referred to as a titty bar. Preacher’s calling it a topless joint had been unfairly generous. It was more a bucket of blood with tits and ass thrown in. When new, the dump was probably just cheap and ugly. Now cheap and ugly was something to aspire to. And the stink of the place! Between the spilled-beer carpeting, cigarette smoke, sweat, and cheap perfumes, it smelled worse than the Port Authority men’s room.

I guess Glitters was no different than a hundred other places in town, maybe no different than a thousand other places in a thousand other towns. We had a bar just like it in my old precinct.

It was too everything: too dark, too smelly, the drinks too watery, the women too old and too much the victims of gravity. Everything about the place gave credence to the line about all that glitters not being gold. At that place in Coney Island, a lot of the girls turned tricks for drug money. But none of its myriad faults put a dent in its popularity with my precinct brethren. Maybe that was because head was on the house for the local constabulary. As our precinct philosopher, Ferguson May, was wont to say: “It sure beats the shit out of free coffee.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a topless place. Probably some cop’s bachelor party. What a silly concept. I think the last time bachelor parties served a useful purpose was during the second Eisenhower administration. I’m no prude and no one’s ever mistaken me for a saint, but I’ve never been much of a fan of places like Glitters, even the ones that don’t smell like the insides of my sneakers. Maybe it’s the pretense of it all. I mean, a lot of the performers were gay and were as enthusiastic about being pawed by the patrons as burn victims were eager to receive skin grafts from a leper colony. Maybe it was just the mercenary aspect of it all. Who knows? Some things defy logic.

Even now, standing just inside the front door, as the music blared so loudly I thought my ears would bleed, I could barely bring myself to look at the women onstage. I paid my ten bucks to get in, but that was as far as I wanted to go. I asked the doorman if John Heaton was around. He didn’t quite ignore me. He was distracted, having trouble making change for a twenty for the guy behind me. When that was taken care of, I repeated the question. This time he ignored me on purpose.

The doorman was a real musclehead: handsome, with a store-bought tan and perfectly coiffed hair. He looked strong as an ox but tough as tissue paper. He was the window dressing meant to dissuade the casual assholes from getting too drunk or carried away with the girls. Somewhere, lurking in the shadows, would be the real muscle; a smaller man, an ex-boxer or ex-cop. If any serious trouble started, you wouldn’t see him coming. Maybe that’s what Heaton was doing here, supplying some backup muscle. At this rate, I was never going to find out.

I considered flashing my badge, but thought better of it. Instead, I found myself a seat at a lonely little two-top set back from the stage. As ineffectual as Adonis at the door might be, he couldn’t afford to get caught accepting a bribe. Besides, he seemed to have trouble counting past twenty. A cocktail waitress at a table in a dark room was more likely to be accommodating.

“Dewar’s rocks,” I shouted just to be heard.

The waitress had no trouble filling out her black lace blouse, velveteen hot pants, and nosebleed heels, but she was a little long in the tooth to be up onstage, and the shade of her blonde hair wasn’t on God’s original color palette.

“Eight bucks,” she screamed back, a come-and-get-it smile painted permanently across her face.

“Here.” I threw a ten and a twenty on her tray. “The ten’s for the drink and a tip. The twenty’s for an introduction to John Heaton.”

She sucked up the ten like a sleight-of-hand artist, but put the twenty back on the table. “Listen, mister, my job’s to get you to buy as many drinks as your wallet can stand. My only concern around this place is me, myself, and me. See on the stage up there? For all I care, Marilyn Monroe could be playing ‘Yankee Doodle’ on JFK’s dick. You catch my meaning?”

She was talking a lot and not saying anything.

“Okay,” I said, placing a business card and the twenty back on her tray. “Keep the twenty as a gesture of goodwill. If you should happen to make some room in there between me, myself, and me for John Heaton, give me a call.”

“I’ll be back with your scotch in a minute.” This time, she didn’t return the twenty.

A different waitress brought me my scotch. I asked her about Heaton just to be consistent. Though equally unforthcoming, she wasn’t quite as chatty about it.

I finished my drink, moved over to the bar, and switched to beer.

“I dated a guy named John Healy once, but he’s dead now,” one of the barmaids said. “He had to lay down his Harley and wound up under a semi. I don’t remember where he’s buried. Why you lookin’ for him, anyways?”

That was the closest thing I got to an answer at the bar. Luckily, the men’s room was downstairs and not too far away from the dancer’s dressing room. I wasn’t stupid enough to try and worm my way in. In the movies it’s all just a lighthearted romp, sneaking into the women’s dressing room. In real life you get the shit kicked out of you. I was nearly two years removed from my last ass-kicking. Call me crazy, but I just wasn’t quite up for another.

I waited to catch one of the dancers at the end of her shift. First, I hung out just inside the lavatory door, holding it open far enough to give myself a reasonable view down the hall. Above my head, the ceiling literally moved with the thump thump thumping of the only kind of music that made me rue the evolution of rock and roll. Then I made believe I was on the pay phone for ten minutes. Too bad nobody was on the other end of the line. I was funny as hell.

A woman I recognized from the stage upstairs slipped out of the dressing room and walked past the pay phone. They called her Domino, and she had done this dominatrix shtick to Devo’s “Whip It.” She’d worn a shiny black latex getup, thigh-high boots, and a leather mask and strutted about with a riding crop. Now she was dressed in a halter, jeans, and sandals.

“You’re Domino, right?” I said like some goofy stage-door Johnny. “You were great.”

She yawned. “Thanks, buddy, but I’m tired, and it’s against house rules to mix with the gentlemen.”