Red Hook (22 page)

Jack turned to his partner. “Did you check this alibi?” Daskivitch shrugged. “I never thought he’d be a suspect.” Jack turned back to Ramon. “All right, kid, what’s your work number?”

Daskivitch got up to make the call.

Ramon kept shaking his head dramatically, muttering, “I can’t believe it! This is so
wrong
, man.”

Jack crossed his arms over his chest and settled back to wait.

A knock came at the door. Tony Ruiz admitted a big man with the look of an athlete gone to seed—an overweight bull. Ruiz introduced his partner to Jack and then stepped outside to confer with him. When he came back in, he was frowning. “Ramon,” he said. “I want you to go talk to Detective Carlucci out there.”

Ramon sullenly rose to his feet and walked out.

“What’s goin’ on?” Jack said.

Ruiz sank sheepishly into a chair. “Looks like we screwed up. My partner found a busboy who was working in a Wendy’s on Fulton Street where the fight went down. He says he watched it through the front window and that it happened just the way Ramon says. The girlfriend pulled the knife out of her backpack. When Fulgencia waved it at him, Ramon tried to grab it away. An Arab guy selling incense at the curb tells the same story.”

Ruiz frowned. “The girlfriend’s friend broke down and gave us some background: it turns out Fulgencia is some kind of Army/Navy store freak—he’s got a collection of brass knuckles, nunchuks, knives…”

It was Jack’s turn to groan. And groan again: a minute later Daskivitch returned to say that the bodega owner had confirmed Ramon’s alibi.

Jack closed his eyes and rested his face in his palms for a moment. He’d been overeager—he should have thought it through. Ramon might have killed his cycle buddy due to some sort of rivalry or moment of anger, but how would he have moved the body all the way to the canal? And how would he have tracked down the barge captain?

“This case is a pain in my ass,” he muttered. Abruptly, he stood up. Many cops wouldn’t have bothered with what he was about to do.

“Where you going?” Ruiz asked.

“I’m gonna go out and apologize to that jerk kid.”

B
EN LEIGHTNER CAME UP
from the subway onto Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, struck as always by the neighborhood’s bustling mixture of Greeks and other immigrants. Within a couple of blocks, you could buy a souvlaki sandwich, a sari, or a plate of pierogis.

Steinway Books was a tiny used-book shop, tucked between a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Korean nail salon. Ben ducked his head to miss the low doorway and squeezed in amid the crowded, disordered stacks. At the counter in the back, nearly hidden by more piles of paperbacks, he found a gaunt, disgruntled-looking man whose long, frizzy white hair was tied back in a ponytail.

“Hi Avery,” he said. “Is my mom around?”

The aging hippie couldn’t be bothered to answer. He looked up at the ceiling and picked up a battered telephone. “Louise,” he muttered into it, “your kid’s down here.”

Ben’s mother lived over the shop. She’d moved there from Brooklyn several years after the divorce. The jumble of books reminded Ben of the house he’d grown up in. His mother had never been a fanatical housekeeper, but after his father left she almost completely gave it up. She’d do the laundry, but leave piles of clothes on the couch, the stairs, the kitchen table. She stopped cooking, and the two of them lived off TV dinners. She withdrew from all of her social contacts, and spent most of her time doing crossword puzzles or reading.

Avery picked up an open book; he didn’t make small talk. Despite his distinct lack of charm, Ben’s mother kept him on because he was the only employee who understood her Byzantine filing system. He understood it better than she did—once he’d saved the store during an IRS audit.

Ben browsed while he waited for her to come downstairs. Ironically—considering his father’s occupation—the largest section was given over to mysteries. Mystery readers were among the most devoted of buyers, but that wasn’t the only reason. During the first hard years after the breakup, his mother had become an avid consumer—she preferred the “cozies,” books set in quaint English towns where some feisty little spinster always set the chaotic world to rights. For years after the divorce, Ben worried she’d end up a spinster herself. During his senior year of high school, he was both relieved and dismayed to find that she’d taken on a “boyfriend.”

“Is everything all right?”

He looked up to see his mother standing halfway down the narrow staircase in the back of the store; she peered over the top of her glasses. She wore purple sweatpants and an Emily Brontë T-shirt. After his dad left, she’d put on a shocking amount of weight, but after Ted came into the picture, she lost it all, thanks to endless laps in the local YWCA pool.

“You’re looking good, Ma.”

His mother shrugged. She came down the stairs and gave him a quick peck on the cheek—she wasn’t the demonstrative type.

“You wanna come up and have something to eat?” Another mother might have made a big deal about how skinny he looked—she went right for the practical.

They tromped up to her apartment, which was bright and airy, with hanging plants everywhere, suspended in mac-ram e holders. She lived alone, even though she and Ted had been going out for years. They both valued their privacy.

“How about a sandwich?” she said, opening the refrigerator. He was still surprised to see how well stocked it was with fresh vegetables and fruit, after the years of junk food.

“I’m okay,” he said, leaning on the counter.

“How’s work?”

He snorted. “The usual excitement. Yesterday, I had to listen as these corporate clients went on for hours about how the slice of pizza we were shooting wasn’t ‘glistening’ enough. We had to brush more oil on it, then I had to reset the lights about ten times.”

He watched his mother cut up a peach; he was impressed by her swimmer’s muscles.

“Jesus, Ma—you’re getting pretty strong these days.”

She didn’t respond, but smiled, pleased by the compliment. She dropped the peach slices in a blender. “I’m making us a fruit smoothie. So, how’s the filmmaking going these days?”

He toyed with a can opener he found lying on the counter. “That’s actually one reason why I came over. I’ve been working on a project about Red Hook.”

“Really? Why Red Hook?” His mother asked the question evenly, but he knew she’d see behind it.

“It’s an interesting place, with all of the history, the shipping, you know…I wanted to throw some family stuff in there too.”

“Have you talked to your father? Your could go see him.”

He spun the can opener around. “Actually, he’s been staying in my apartment for the past couple days.”

His mother raised her eyebrows. “He’s
staying
with you? Why?”

“His landlord had a stroke, and the son wants him to move out.”

She shrugged. “I hope you have better luck living with him than I did.”

These days his mother didn’t talk compulsively about his father, the way she had after the divorce, but the bitterness remained.

“Have you asked him about Red Hook?” she said.

“You know what he’s like.”

“I’m afraid I do. What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know…It just occurred to me the other day: it’s ridiculous, but I don’t even know his parents’ first names.”

“His mother was Doris. His father’s name I think was Maxim, but in this country he was just called Max.”

“And he was from Russia?”

“From somewhere near Leningrad. Or whatever they’re calling it these days.”

“Did you know him?”

“Not much. His father was a mean man. When we were dating, Jack never took me around to Red Hook. The old man died just a year or so after we got married.”

He stopped spinning the can opener. “Do you know what happened to Dad’s brother?”

His mother pressed a button and they had to wait a moment for the blender to stop whirring.

“Why do you ask?”

“Like I said, background for the film. Also, I was thinking that if I ever have kids, it’ll be weird if I can’t tell them about their own history.”

His mother looked up quickly. “Kids? Is there something I should know?”

He blushed. “No. Nothing like that. But what about Dad’s brother?”

She lifted the pitcher off the blender and poured two creamy drinks. “Your father was never very communicative, even at the best of times. All I know is that his brother was killed. Some sort of accident.”

“Jesus—all he ever told me was that his brother died young. If I try to ask more, he always tells me to drop it.”

His mother shrugged. “Don’t expect too much from him. He’s not a happy man.”

Ben wrinkled his nose. “When you started going out, you must’ve thought better of him. I mean, weren’t you in love?”

She shrugged. “I
thought
we were. But I don’t know if he’s really capable of loving someone else.”

Ben felt the same way he had as a little kid: he was impressed that his mother told him such grown-up things, but he wished she wouldn’t always cut his father down. Especially since his dad never turned the tables, never said a bad word about her.

He realized that his mission today was fruitless—he wasn’t going to get the truth about his father from his mom. He was only going to get
her
truth.

S
ILENCE WAS AT THE
heart of the job.

On TV detectives ran around waving guns, cars screeched and flipped over, bad guys shouted and jumped fences. In real life there was violence and noise during the crime, and there would be crying and confusion after, but in these first moments of discovery, the scene was still as a painting.

The condo was expensive and freshly painted, the few items of furniture new and pricey, but the place was a mess. Dirty clothes lay in heaps around the bedroom and the hall, beer cans and junk-food wrappers spread like confetti in the living room, crusty plates were piled in the kitchen sink. As usual, Jack was afflicted by the desire to start tidying up, to make some sense of the disorder; as usual, he refrained. A few posters provided the only decor: a Bud Light ad; a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit model over which someone had pasted Hillary Clinton’s head; the ghoulish made-up face of some rock star called Marilyn Manson. The magazines on the coffee table—
Money, Entrepreneur, Playboy, GQ
—were addressed to one Bruce Serinis, who was currently splayed out on the living room carpet, DOA.

Jack had caught the fresh case so soon after his talk with Sergeant Tanney that he suspected his boss had tampered with the sacred rotation order. He was angry, but realized that little would be gained by a fight. Not until he had a solid lead on the Berrios case.

For now, he had this job in Park Slope. Most Brooklyn homicides took place in rough areas like East New York, which saw scores of drug-related slayings and simple diss murders—citizens popped just for looking at their neighbors the wrong way. But the Slope was a bastion of yuppies with baby carriages, health food stores, renovated brownstones. The rare homicides on the eastern side of the seventy-eighth Precinct were likely to be the result of a mugging gone wrong, not this sort of inside job.

It was a busy Saturday night—the usual crew of Crime Scene techs and other interested parties had not arrived yet. The local detective, one Tommy Keenan, was a clothes horse: cream linen jacket, red silk tie, gold bracelet on one wrist, a Rolex or a damn good imitation on the other. The linen jacket was not a great sign, Jack thought—it didn’t indicate any eagerness to get in close to the blood and guts of the job. And Keenan was a rookie.

Even so, he’d evidently been on the job long enough to become blasé about the sight of a murder victim. He seemed more interested in a photo of a half-naked woman than in the body of the late tenant. He whistled and held the picture up in a rubber-gloved hand. “Check it out. This is that chick from the new
Star Trek.
You know, the one who plays the shrink on the
Enterprise
?”

“That’s very exciting,” Jack deadpanned. “Make sure you include it in your Fives.”

It was clear from the get-go that drugs might be involved in the case—they’d found a professional scale on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room, a tin of silica gel packages in a drawer, seven boxes of sandwich-size Baggies in a cupboard, a stack of wax-paper squares for wrapping grams of coke. If that wasn’t enough, there were pot seeds in the crease of the Grateful Dead double album—an LP, historical relic—on the coffee table. An empty bong lay on the carpet next to a foul-smelling stain. Apparently the vic had been hit while sitting on the couch, then sprawled forward, knocking over the pipe.

“Thank God for AC,” Keenan said. Serinis might have been dead for a couple of days, but the apartment was so chilly that he hadn’t started to smell much—or at least not worse than the bong water.

“I remember the first DOA I ever caught,” Keenan said. “This guy’s neighbors smelled something bad coming out of his apartment—and it was the middle of a heat wave. We break down the door and there’s this old guy laid out on his kitchen floor; he’d been dead a long time and he was blown up like a parade float. My partner gives me a couple cigarette niters to put up my nose. I see this half-empty bottle of roach killer lying next to the vic. One of the neighbors walks in. ‘Oh, shit,’ she says. ‘He just come home from the clinic last week. They told him he had
roaches of the liver
.’”

Keenan dug a finger in the back of his collar. “Can you believe it?
Cirrhosis of the liver.
” He laughed, a ghastly booming noise, then moved closer to the body. “How do you see this? I mean, there’s no forced entry, so the vic probably knew the killer. Some customer comes over to make a buy, figures why give old Brucie the money when he can just take it, instead?”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “But it looks more personal than that.”

Keenan bent down for a closer look at the dents in Bruce Serinis’s forehead. “I guess you’re right.” The perp could have come up behind Serinis when he was cleaning the seeds out of his Maui Wowee—knock him over, take the money, get out. But this was a facial assault, which often meant that he had something emotional against the vic.