Brooklyn Noir (8 page)

“That could be you, Sylvia,” I say quietly. “You’re number three on our suspect list.”

“Me?” Sylvia stamps her foot and switches on the slicer.

Her eyes are shifting fast as Koufax’s curveball. “You got to be out of your mind. I put up with that son of a bitch lying, cheating all these years, and you can’t see I love him?”

“The motives are there for you, Sylv,” I say again. “And you had the opportunity. How tough would it be for you to smear the mustard and plant the clues on Scoop’s shirt, cuff, fly? Knock ’em all off with one big splash of doctored Gold’s Own, or was it French’s?”

I.F. has been sitting cool and easy but now he stands up, starts smacking a fist into a palm. “We don’t use Gold’s mustard,” he says. “That’s Junior’s special blend. But when Junior’s delivers, it’s packets—no pre-smeared.”

“You’ve obviously given this a lot of thought, sonny boy,” I say to I.F. “So, you’re telling me the sandwiches were made at Senior’s? You got your old man and his two cronies squatting right there in your step-mamalochen’s deli and it’s your call on what to do about them ordering out.”

“This is too much. You’re insulting me.” Sylvia switches off the slicer and plunks into a chair. She’s sitting under a shot of Sandy Amoros’s spectacular running catch of Berra’s fly ball in the seventh game of the ’55 Series.

“Let’s assume the sandwiches were made here that fatal day. Nothing to do with Junior’s. That suggests our killer is a home team spoiler.”

“James Lamar, where are you when I need you?” Sylvia says again. “I want that coffee black.”

“You’re saying my father has been framed, and the killer, the person who smeared the mustard, works right here at Senior’s?” The kid breaks off and, with a wry smile right out of the L.A. handbook,
We Own the Dodgers Now
says, “Why not me? Abandoned son. Oedipus knocks off King Laius, also known as Seamus ‘Scoop’ O’Neil, and in the next act, according to your script, I marry Iocasta, also known as Mama Sylvia, and I inherit the Kingdom of Senior’s.”

“Marries his mother?” Sylvia repeats. “That is the most disgusting story I ever heard. I’ve had enough of you, Pistol Pete. I shoulda known better…”

“Let him talk,” I.F. says, as the door from the kitchen swings open and a guy must be my age comes limping in carrying a tray of mini-deli sandwiches and a decanter of java.

“Tea time,” I say, trying to change the mood. “Don’t mind if I do.” I move to the tray like Robinson feinting off third base. Then I sit back and say, “I’m not saying it is, just could be.”

“So?” I.F. says. The Dodger cap is rotated so the logo no longer faces me. “Sylvia or me—who’s your pleasure?”

“Youse want skimmed or regular with the coffee?” James Lamar is wearing a baseball cap, too, with the logo facing the wall. “Wese outa half an’ half.”

“Excuse me, James Lamar,” I say. “Anybody ever call you Dusty?”

The smile is big as Willie Mays’s glove making the basket catch. “For shure. For shure. And how’d you know dat?”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I say like Walter Alston calling Clem Labine in from the bullpen, “we got our
deus ex machina.”

James Lamar—Dusty!—plunks the tray down and makes a move for the mustard jar.

I’m on my feet, pull out the ole Smith and Wesson for which I plunked down 250 smackeroos for the permit just last year without any thought of ever using it again. “Not so fast, Dusty,” I say. “And if you don’t mind, would you be so kind as to pull the visor of that cap around?”

Sylvia is still not convinced. “What’s that got to do with anything? What is going on here? And that Day Ox you was talking about…”

“Deus ex machina,”
I.F. corrects her. “God from the machine. Introduced at the last minute often by a crane in ancient Greek and Roman drama to resolve an insoluble dilemma.”

“On the button,” I say to I.F. “And if you will be so kind as to take a gander at Dusty’s cap, you can appreciate the motive for murder.”

“I don’t see nothing,” Sylvia says, “only a crummy old baseball cap with an SF logo.”

“The logo of the San Francisco, formerly New York, Giants,” says I.F. as the light is beginning to dawn. “We have here a former New York Giants fan who has never forgiven the Dodgers.”

“You got it right, kid,” Dusty snarls. “And I’m up to my keester with all this Dodger talk, all them pictures and not one shot of Master Melvin Ott, King Carl Hubbell, Sal Maglie, the Greatest Willie Mays…”

Before he can run down all the rosters from ’35 through ’57, I throw him the spitter: “And we might add James Lamar ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, who come from nowhere to run off with the 1954 World Series.”

“You better believe it,” Dusty says. “.667, two home runs, seben, I said seben runs batted in and dat was a four-game series. So where is Dusty on dis wall? Do I hear a woid, one stinkin’ woid from any of them wiseguys pitchin’ cards, talkin’ Dodgers, Dodgers, Dodgers. Dem Bums. And youse. Youse got the noive to talk
Deus? Deus
Latin prayers in this joint?”

Dusty goes quietly after that.

We spring Scoop the next afternoon. Sylvia wants to celebrate with a steak at Gage and Tollner’s. She’s had enough of the deli business—“Bad memories”—and declares this her farewell party.

I.F. invites us to join him for a stroll through the Brooklyn Museum. “I’d like to take a look at Bierstadt’s
Storm in the Rockies, Mt. Rosalie.
A guy I met on the plane, flying in from L.A. last week, told me he’s a friend of Robert Levinson who was the chairman of the board and could recommend me for a job there. Then we can amble over to the lobby of the former Paramount Theater. It’s the Eugene & Beverly Luntey Commons of the Brooklyn Center, L.I.U. now. We could sit and read poems by Robert Donald Spector and maybe be lucky enough to run into JoAnn Allen or Mike Bush, all stars of their faculty.”

Scoop breaks into a chorus of “Thanks for the Memories” and Sylvia takes his hand like two kids on their way to the boardwalk at Coney Island.

Out of the blue, I.F. says to me, “Harold Patrick Reiser, 1941 through 1948, a Dodgers’ Dodger until he ran into a fence.” Then he gently nudges my holster. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Pistol Pete.”

Standing in church at my father’s funeral, I thought about being arrested on the night of my seventeenth birthday. It had occurred in the trainyard at Avenue X, in Coney Island. Me and Pancho and a kid named Freddie were working a three-car piece, the most ambitious I’d tried to that point, and more time-consuming than was judicious to spend trespassing on city property. Two Transit cops with German shepherds caught us in the middle of the second car. I dropped my aerosol can and took off, and was perhaps two hundred feet along the beginning of the trench that becomes the IRT line to the Bronx, when I saw the hand. It was human, adult, and severed neatly, seemingly surgically, at the wrist. My first thought was that it looked bare without a watch. Then I made a whooping sound, trying to take in air, and turned and ran back toward the cops and their dogs.

At the 60th Precinct, we three were ushered into a small cell. We sat for several hours, then the door opened and I was led out. My father was waiting in the main room, in front of the counter.

The desk sergeant, middle-aged, black, and noticeably bored, looked up briefly. “Him?”

“Him,” my father echoed, sounding defeated.

“Goodnight,” the sergeant said.

My father took my arm and led me out of the precinct. As we cleared the door and stepped into the humid night he turned to me and said, “This was it. Your one free ride. It doesn’t happen again.”

“What did it cost?” I asked. My father had retired from the Police Department years earlier, and I knew this had been expensive.

He shook his head. “This once, that’s all.”

I followed him to his car. “I have two friends in there.”

“Fuck’em. Spics. That’s half your problem.”

“What’s the other half?”

“You have no common sense,” he said, his voice rising in scale as it did in volume. By the time he reached a scream he sounded like a boy going through puberty. “What do you think you’re doing out here? Crawling ’round in the dark with the niggers and the spics. Writing on trains like a hoodlum. Is this all you’ll do?”

“It’s not writing. It’s drawing. Pictures.”

“Same shit, defacing property, behaving like a punk. Where do you suppose it will lead?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. You had your aimless time, when you got out of the service. You told me so. You bummed around for two years.”

“I always worked.”

“Part-time. Beer money. You were a roofer.”

“Beer money was all I needed.”

“Maybe it’s all I need.”

He shook his head slowly, and squinted, as though peering through the dirty windshield for an answer. “It was different. That was a long time ago. Back when all this was Bay Ridge. You could live like that then.”

When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn’t say
when it was white, when it was Irish
, even the relatively tame
when it was safer.
No. When all this was Bay Ridge. As though it were an issue of geography. As though, somehow, the tectonic plate beneath Sunset Park had shifted, moving it physically to some other place.

I told him about seeing the hand.

“Did you tell the officers?”

“No.”

“The people you were with?”

“No.”

“Then don’t worry about it. There’s body parts all over this town. Saw enough in my day to put together a baseball team.” He drove in silence for a few minutes, then nodded his head a couple of times, as though agreeing with a point made by some voice I could not hear. “You’re going to college, you know,” he said.

That was what I remembered at the funeral. Returning from the altar rail after receiving communion, Pancho walked passed me. He’d lost a great deal of weight since I’d last seen him, and I couldn’t tell if he was sick or if it was just the drugs. His black suit hung on him in a way that emphasized his gaunt frame. He winked at me as he came around the casket in front of my pew, and flashed the mischievous smile that—when we were sixteen—got all the girls in his bed and all the guys agreeing to the stupidest and most dangerous tunts.

In my shirt pocket was a photograph of my father with a woman who was not my mother. The date on the back was five years ago. Their arms were around each other’s waists and they smiled for the photographer. When we arrived at the cemetery I took the picture out of my pocket, and looked at it for perhaps the fiftieth time since I’d first discovered it. There were no clues. The woman was young to be with my father, but not a girl. Forty, give or take a few years. I looked for any evidence in his expression that I was misreading their embrace, but even I couldn’t summon the required naïveté. My father’s countenance was not what would commonly be regarded as a poker face. He wasn’t holding her as a friend, a friend’s girl, or the prize at some retirement or bachelor party; he held her like a possession. Like he held his tools. Like he held my mother. The photo had been taken before my mother’s death. I put it back.

I’d always found his plodding predictability and meticulous planning of insignificant events maddening. For the first time that I could recall, I was experiencing curiosity about some part of my father’s life.

I walked from Greenwood Cemetery directly to Olsen’s bar, my father’s watering hole, feeling that I needed to talk to the men that nearly lived there, but not looking forward to it. Aside from my father’s wake the previous night, I hadn’t seen them in years. They were all Irish. The Irish among them were perhaps the most Irish, but the Norwegians and the Danes were Irish too, as were the older Puerto Ricans. They had developed, over time, the stereotypical hooded gaze, the squared jaws set in grim defiance of whatever waited in the sobering daylight. To a man they had that odd trait of the Gaelic heavy-hitter, that—as they attained middle age—their faces increasingly began to resemble a woman’s nipple.

The door to the bar was propped open, and the cool damp odor of stale beer washed over me before I entered. That smell has always reminded me of the Boy Scouts. Meetings were Thursday nights in the basement of Bethany Lutheran Church. When they were over, I would have to pass Olsen’s on my way home, and I usually stopped in to see my father. He would buy me a couple of glasses of beer—about all I could handle at thirteen—and leave with me after about an hour so we could walk home together.

From the inside looking out: Picture an embassy in a foreign country. A truly foreign country. Not a Western European ally, but a fundamentalist state perennially on the precipice of war. A fill-the-sandbags-and-wait-for-the-airstrike enclave. That was Olsen’s, home to the last of the donkeys, the white dinosaurs of Sunset Park. A jukebox filled with Kristy McColl and the Clancy Brothers, and flyers tacked to the flaking walls advertising step-dancing classes, Gaelic lessons, and the memorial run to raise money for a scholarship in the name of a recently slain cop. Within three blocks of the front door you could attend a cockfight, buy crack, or pick up a streetwalker, but in Olsen’s, it was always 1965.

Upon entering the bar for the first time in several years, I found its pinched dimensions and dim lighting more oppressive, and less mysterious, than I had remembered. The row of ascetic faces, and the way all conversation trailed off at my entrance, put me in mind of the legendary blue wall of silence in the police department. It is no coincidence that the force has historically been predominantly Irish. The men in Olsen’s would be pained to reveal their zip code to a stranger, and I wasn’t sure if even they knew why.

The bar surface itself was more warped than I’d recalled. The mirrors had oxidized and the white tile floor had been torn up in spots and replaced with odd-shaped pieces of green linoleum. It was a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood where such establishments are not yet celebrated. If it had been located in my part of the East Village, it would have long since achieved cultural-landmark status. I’d been living in Manhattan for five years and still had not adjusted to the large number of people who moved here from other parts of the country, and overlooked the spectacle of the city only to revere the mundane. One of my coworkers, herself a transplant, remarked that the coffee shop on my corner was
authentic
. In that they served coffee, I suppose she was correct.