Red Hook (12 page)

The mechanic shook his head.

Greenlee groaned. “Get in there,” he ordered. “Finish it.
Rápido.
” He turned back to the detectives and shrugged apologetically. “The customer is supposed to pick up any minute. What can I do for you?”

Jack held up the photo. “Do you know this man?”

The manager removed his sunglasses and considered the picture. Jack noticed that his eyes were red and wondered if he was some sort of user. He looked up and smiled pleasantly. “Nope. Never seen him.” Suddenly he sneezed. He took out a handkerchief and rubbed his nose. “Sorry, I got hay fever. Most people just get it in the spring or the fall, but…” He shrugged.

“Were you here last Sunday morning?”

“Nobody was here. We were closed. We’re always closed Sundays.”

“The garage was locked?”

“It better have been. Leo here is usually the last one out on Saturday nights. It would have been locked unless he screwed up. Which wouldn’t be surprising. No, wait—I opened up on Monday morning and everything was fine.”

“Would you mind if we stepped in to look around?”

“I don’t see why not. We run an honest shop. Would you mind if I asked what this is all about?”

“We’re conducting an investigation,” Jack said. “Homicide.”

“Whoa,” the manager said. “I thought maybe you guys were looking for chop shops or something. What does this have to do with
homicide
?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” Jack replied. “Can we come in:

Greenlee suddenly sneezed. “Whoo—pollen, ragweed, I don’t know what it is. Uh—maybe I should call the owner.”

“Who would that be?”

“It’s a company. Maybe I should get permission from them.”

“You can do that, but if they say no, we’ll just have to come back with a warrant. It’s up to you.”

The manager threw up his hands. “Hey, listen, we’ve got nothing to hide here. Go ahead. I was just doing my job.”

Jack and his partner stepped under the garage door. The SUV was up on a lift and Leo stood beneath it, hammering away at the chassis. A
Playboy
centerfold of a big-breasted blonde in farmer’s overalls was tacked to the wall, over a workbench. Idly, Jack wondered at that: in this politically correct era, what did female customers make of the display? But then, Red Hook had always been behind the times.

The shop seemed clean and well run, with all of the tools hanging neatly. Any one of them could have battered Tomas Berrios’s face, but only lab tests could tell. Jack glanced down, looking for bloodstains, but the concrete was only soaked with oil.

A phone rang in the back corner. “Excuse me a second,” Greenlee said, and trotted toward the back.

“Whaddaya think?” Daskivitch said.

Jack frowned. “I don’t know. Why would Berrios come to an auto body shop if he didn’t own a car? Could he have been looking for a job?” He glanced over at the manager, deep in a phone conversation. “Do these guys seem hinky to you?”

“Not really.”

Jack nodded. Both men seemed okay to him too.

Greenlee hung up and hurried back, wiping his nose again. “Sorry about that.”

“What’s the name of the company that owns the place?” Jack said.

“P and L Enterprises.”

Jack wrote that down in his steno book. He took another look around.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Greenlee asked. He tucked his handkerchief in his coat pocket.

“Not right now. Thanks for your help.”

They ducked out under the door. Jack lit a cigarette.

“What do we do now?” Daskivitch said.

Jack walked over to the little house next door and rang the buzzer. A moment later, an unshaven old man popped his head out the door. His frizzy hair was wet and he wore an ancient plaid bathrobe.

“Yes?”

Jack held up his badge. “We’re police officers.”

The usual “I didn’t do anything but I’m nervous anyhow” flashed across the man’s face. “Yes?” he repeated.

“The garage there—are they usually closed on Sundays?”

The man nodded. “Always.”

“Were you here last Sunday?”

“No, sir. I was in Arlington, Virginia. Visiting my grandson.”

“Does anybody else live here?”

“Nope. Just me.”

“Who’s on the other side, that warehouse?”

“Nobody, That’s been shut up for years.”

Jack sighed. “Sorry to bother you.”

Relieved, the man pulled his head back in.

Jack looked across the street. Another long, windowless factory wall took up most of the block.

“Let’s roll,” Daskivitch said.

Jack didn’t argue. They climbed into the car and took off, turning onto Van Brunt Street.

“What do you think?” Daskivitch said.

Jack shrugged. “I think we’ve put in a lot of hours with damn little results. This isn’t exactly a priority job—the press and Downtown don’t give a damn. I hate to leave a case open, but this doesn’t look very promising.”

“You want to call it quits?”

Actually, that sounded okay to Jack. “You had to be gung-ho to be a good detective. Maybe he was getting tired, jaded.

He thought of Berrios’s wife and the two little kids. “Let’s give it a little more time.”

Daskivitch pulled to the curb in front of a bodega. “Hey, I’ll spring for a couple of coffees.”

“Last of the big-time spenders.” His partner started to get out, but Jack stopped him. “It’s okay. I’ll get it.”

Inside, the bodega was cramped and not terribly clean, but the coffee brewing behind the counter smelled good. Café Bustelo, said the handwritten sign.

“Dos cafés,”
Jack told the woman behind the counter. He knew that much Spanish.

While she poured, an old-timer shuffled up to the counter holding a six-pack of diet soda. He looked vaguely familiar.

The man stared at Jack. “I know you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, sure I do. I used to live in the Houses. Don’t you remember me? Mr. Keller.”

“On the second floor? With the little dog?”

“That’s me. You were Petey Leightner’s brother, right? I used to watch him play ball. He woulda made the majors.” The old man shook his head. “That was such a terrible thing…Hey, where you going?”

Jack turned and pushed his way out of the store, ignoring the calls of the woman behind the counter.

“Let’s go,” he said, tight-lipped, settling into the seat beside his partner.

“Where’s my coffee?”

Jack looked down at his hands and discovered they were empty. “They were out.”

“What, are you kidding? A bodega that runs out of coffee! This
is
a fucked-up neighborhood.”

“H
OW COME YOU’RE NOT
at work?” Jack said.

“The studio didn’t have a shoot scheduled for today,” his son replied.

Jack picked up his menu. He worked on shootings; his son did shoots.

Their waitress came by. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“I’m good,” he said. He looked across at his son. “You want anything? A soda, anything?”

Ben shook his head glumly.

The waitress pulled a dupe pad from her apron. “Are you gentlemen ready to order?”

“I think we need a minute,” Jack said. He wondered if he shouldn’t have suggested a swankier place than this Greek coffee shop. No—he hadn’t seen the kid for a while, but it was better to keep things light, not make a big production out of it.

His son looked thin and pale; as usual, he compromised his tall frame by hunching his shoulders, sticking out his neck, storklike. The boy was dressed in jeans and a faded plaid shirt that looked too hot for the day. His curly hair was getting long and he had a little tuft of hair under his bottom lip. Jack flashed to the body by the canal, blinked.

The boy was a good four inches taller than his father, but that was America for you: the kid eats better than his old man. At Ben’s age, Jack had carried a lot more muscle, but he’d earned it in the Army and couldn’t wish such an experience on his son—being ordered around all day and bored to tears most of the time. (Of course, he wouldn’t have been bored if he’d been stationed in Nam.)

The kid always seemed shy. Jack was tempted to blame his ex-wife for that—she was the one who had done most of the child-raising. Then again, he was the one who had left his son without much of a dad. Who knew? Maybe it was just the boy’s personality. Though Jack loved his son, he had to admit—guilty thought—that sometimes there was something
unlikable
about the boy. He was so drawn into himself, so wrapped up in his own air of unhappiness…

Ben had a big angry-looking pimple emerging below his mouth. He propped his chin on his fist, as if casually resting it there, but it was clear that he was trying to hide the blemish. The human weakness of the gesture opened Jack’s heart.

After a minute, the waitress returned. “You know what you want?”

“I think I’ll get the veggie burger,” Ben said.

Jack set his menu down. “Why don’t you get a real burger?”

“I don’t eat meat.”

“Since when?”

Ben scowled. Message delivered:
You would know if you’d taken more of an interest in my life.

The waitress looked on patiently.

“At least get the Deluxe,” Jack said. “It comes with fries.”

“I don’t eat fries.”

“Why not?”

“Because. They’re bad for my skin.” The boy blushed.

Jack turned to the waitress. “I’ll have the meat loaf.”

Even the simplest talk led in the wrong directions. He looked around the coffee shop. Nautical theme: a deep-sea diver’s helmet, a big plastic lobster and crab trapped in a fishnet, a giant swordfish shellacked and mounted on a board. He considered asking his son if he had a girlfriend, but decided the question might seem too intimate.

“How come
you’re
not working today?” Ben asked.

“I am. Even a busy cop gets to eat lunch.”

“Anything exciting?”

“The usual. Still scraping ’em up off the sidewalks.” He’d never believed in bringing his work home. Even if he wanted to, there was no way to communicate the crazy things he saw to someone who didn’t know the job, and it wasn’t appropriate to talk about them with a little kid. Of course, Ben wasn’t a kid anymore, but what the hell. He wanted to get to know his son—the last thing he needed to talk about was work.

They shifted in their seats, looked around the coffee shop until the silence grew awkward. Finally, the waitress appeared with their food.

“How’s your mom?” Jack asked. He knew Ben didn’t like to discuss the subject, but felt that he ought to ask. And he wanted to know.

“She’s fine.”

Fine.
Jack drummed his fingers on the table. It was ridiculous: he knew twenty ways to get the most hardened street punk to talk, but he couldn’t get more than three words out of his son. Pretty soon they’d be discussing the weather.

“How’s Ted?” he asked. His ex-wife’s boyfriend. Or something—“boyfriend” didn’t sound right when applied to a middle-aged man. She’d been seeing the guy for a couple of years. He owned a blueprint-duplicating business in Bay Ridge. Or something—the details weren’t clear. “He’s fine,” Ben said.

Ben wondered why his father had suggested this lunch after he hadn’t bothered to come around for half a year.

Their visits were always few and far between. Sometimes they got together for the holidays. Neither was very religious, so they didn’t really celebrate Hanukkah. That didn’t bother Ben so much, but he always felt like he should be doing something family-oriented on Christmas Eve. (Christmas was a hard time of year for Jews: he spent a month every year bombarded by commercials, carols, and crèches, advertisements for a parry to which he wasn’t invited.) A couple of years back—out of loneliness? A sense of familial obligation?—he’d called his dad; they spent a glum evening watching a cheesy Hollywood movie and then eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant haunted by an odd crew of Jews, Muslims, and
Taxi Driver
—type loners.

And now, after all this time, his father took him out to a cheesy coffee shop. He spread some mustard on his veggie burger and glanced across the booth. His dad still drove him nuts the way he ate: he cut his meat into little pieces, then ate it—then ate all of his potatoes, then all of his vegetables. It got to a point where Ben wanted to scream.
Just eat it together, for chrissakes! It all ends up in the dame place!

Before they ate, his dad always had to go to wash his hands. He was an odd guy. The few times Ben had seen his apartment out in Midwood, it was so neat he almost couldn’t believe they were related. In the medicine cabinet, his father had everything perfectly laid out. On the ledge over the toilet, same deal: deodorant, razor, shave cream, all stretched out in a well-spaced row. If Ben put a cup down on the kitchen counter, he’d look back a few minutes later and it would be drying in the dish rack. Order, order, order. And this was a guy who dealt with murder and mayhem all the time at work.

The old man was dressed in gray slacks, a white shirt, a navy polyester sports coat, and a red and blue striped tie, probably also polyester. Ben remembered a few times when he was a kid and got dragged by his parents to a cop’s retirement dinner or some other NYPD affair. A few of the younger cops seemed mildly aware of modern fashions, but the older guys, all crew-cut, looked as if they’d ordered their clothes from a 1950s Sears catalogue. It seemed his father still had an account there.

His dad lit a cigarette. That was another thing: he didn’t understand how the man could smoke, You’d think that after looking at dead people all day, you wouldn’t want to rush your own funeral.

His father looked pale, shaken up somehow. He was just fifty, but today he seemed older. Ben wondered if something was bothering him at work, but when he asked, his dad gave the stock answer he’d heard a thousand times since he was a kid: “The usual,” the man said. “Still scraping ’em up off the sidewalks.” He was a pro at not giving anything away about himself. The strong, silent type. That might be good enough for John Wayne, but what about the Duke’s kids?

A couple of booths down, two little boys sat having lunch with their father. They swung their legs back and forth, dunked fries in ketchup, giggled. Having a great old time with Pop.