Red Hook (23 page)

Keenan yawned. “Those Crime Scene guys are taking their goddamn time. You wanna watch the tube? He’s got cable.”

“No. Go ahead if you want.”

Jack’s new partner didn’t move toward the TV. Instead, he perched on a stool, careful not to disturb anything on the counter. The clock in the kitchen ticked loudly. The refrigerator hummed. Keenan shifted on his seat. “You remember the first time you saw a body?”

“A body?” Jack said. A chill flicked the base of his spine.

“Yeah. Not at a funeral—I mean, out on the street.”

Jack looked down and pinched some carpet lint off his knee. “I don’t know,” he lied. He had been fifteen years old. November 14, 1965. One o’clock in the afternoon.

“I guess when I was in the Army,” he said instead.

“You saw somebody get shot in Nam?”

“No. It wasn’t a gunshot. And it was in Germany. I was stationed there for a few months before I got shipped to the Philippines. It was winter, and we had to go walk guard duty—it was so cold that sometimes our feet would literally freeze. We’d start up a jeep, then take off our boots, sit on the back, warm our feet in the exhaust. One night this grunt was doing that and some hot dog swung a personnel carrier real fast into the compound, crushed him right into the back of the jeep.”

“Oof.”
Keenan grimaced.

Jack wandered over to a sleek black answering machine. The counter said three messages. He pulled on a glove and then pressed play.

“Bruce, it’s your mother. Your father and I were wondering if you’d like to come up for the weekend. You can bring a friend if you want. What was that nice girl’s name—Laurie? Anyhow, call us. We might have a barbecue on Sunday.” Beep.

“Serinis, you stud-muffin, it’s Alan. That chick looked pretty wasted by the time we left. What a cow. So, did you fuck her? Let me know—I’m at work.” Beep.

“Yo, Brewster, man, it’s Dingo. Can I come over and get something later? Like around midnight? I’ve got the cash right now. Call me at home. Thanks.” Beep.

Jack turned to his new partner. “Could be our perp right there. If some cokehead was dumb or stoned enough to leave a message like that, he might have been dumb enough not to erase it after he did the murder.”

“We need to find old Dingo.”

“Let’s look for an address book.”

“Hold on.” Keenan walked over to a desk in the corner, where animated tropical fish swam across a computer screen. He nudged the mouse and the Desktop blipped into view. He sat down and clicked on various icons.

“I’ve got an address list,” he said after a minute. “No ‘Dingo,’ though.”

He returned to his clicking and scrolling. “Wait a minute. Here we go. Boy, he did a great job of hiding the file—he called it ‘Cheech and Chong.’ Phone numbers, even addresses. And here’s our friend Dingo.”

“Tell you what,” Jack said, sitting wearily on a stool. “If you want to go pick up our boy, I’ll wait here for the Crime Scene guys. Get some backup before you go over there.”

Keenan grinned. He made a quick call to request that a couple of patrol units meet him at the location.

“I’ll let you know how it goes down. Thanks, Leightner.”

Jack sat in the silent apartment, remembering a victim in Germany. And another one in Red Hook.

To shut out the past, he went over and stared down at the present vic.

Bruce Serinis was dead. He wouldn’t be attending the Princeton alumni reunion marked by the invite on the coffee table. He wouldn’t watch any of the programs listed in the
TV Guide
for the rest of the week, would never again call any of the customers in his computer file. But Jack could watch the TV and he could pick up the phone. That was one of the strange lessons of the homicide squad: a life could be snuffed out in an instant, but the world went right on.

Serinis lay in a twisted, awkward position. The side of his face was smashed into the carpet and his mouth sagged slack. Human life was a battle to stand up, take steps, fight gravity. With a blow or gunshot—
bang
!—gravity suddenly won. Every crime scene was a testament to that victory.

Looking at the slumped, wasted bodies, Jack found it hard to believe in an afterlife. It was difficult to look at Serinis and consider him more than just blank flesh. And he didn’t feel his usual curiosity about the victim. That was partly due to an instinctive distaste: he didn’t like the rampant sense of irony in the apartment, from the posters to the victim’s T-shirt, which read: Welcome to New York. Now Fuck Off. He didn’t like the sound of the friends on the answering machine; didn’t like the picture of a shallow and slobby life. He had dealt with all sorts of mutts as victims, but they didn’t have the opportunities this kid had had. It was one thing to sell drugs if you were trying to break out of the ghetto, but this graduate of an Ivy League school should have made better use of his head start.

Maybe it wasn’t the victim. Maybe he was just getting burnt out on the job. Sick of all the corpses. He’d seen plenty of old workhorses who didn’t give a shit anymore, who just plodded toward their pensions. The Homicide beat didn’t foster an optimistic outlook. Dive bars and casual sex didn’t help. He had to cast far back to find moments—making love with his new wife, holding his infant son for the first time—when he’d been certain that the body was filled with a spirit.

The clock ticked on. He picked up the copy of
Playboy
from the coffee table and flipped through a pictorial. The July Playmate of the Month had tits that were perfectly round and so freestanding that they had to be fake. And she had one hand between her legs. Christ. He remembered
Playboy
from the days when he could really get excited about it, at thirteen, fourteen. Back then the models had big tits but they were real and slightly droopy. And the women were modest, wearing negligees coyly placed to conceal even the slightest trace of bush. He’d been thinking a lot lately about whether life tended to get better or worse—this seemed like a crazy way to mark the progress.

He remembered a stack of magazines in an old shed, a clubhouse where the more streetwise Red Hook kids smoked cigarettes and speculated about sex. He’d been initiated into the club after he boosted a carton of smokes from a five-and-dime. That was a time when, despite his father’s heavy hand, Jack had started taking pleasure in small acts of rebellion. His brother followed him to the clubhouse one day, but Jack told him to buzz off, to come back when he was older. If only he could take back those moments—if only he could go back in time and invite him in.

Peter, who left this world before he really lived in it. Who never saw men land on the moon. Never watched the Beatles turn hippie. Never knew that Nixon became president. Or Ford or Carter or the rest. Never used a computer, VCR, or fax machine. Never even had a chance to make love to a woman.

Jack sighed, then stood up. His heart was heavy, but he’d been carrying this weight for thirty-five years.

Out in the hallway a uniform kept guard, a beefy Irish kid. He held one hand to his belt in the stance of an aspiring gunfighter, but his eyes were dull with the boredom of the job.

Jack pulled the door closed. “Don’t touch anything in there, okay? If the Crime Scene guys show up, tell ’em I just went out for a cup of coffee.”

“Yes, sir,” the kid replied.

Jack pulled out a cigarette. He coughed as he took the first drag. A little voice in his head said,
Those are gonna kill you someday.
Another voice answered:
Everybody died.

The sidewalks of Park Slope buzzed with couples and hungry singles, crowds streaming across Seventh Avenue against the lights. A group of yuppies in rumpled business suits spilled out of a bar and swaggered around Jack without a single “excuse me;” the air was thick with alcohol and testosterone.

Happy faces floated past, but he was sinking. He thought of calling Michelle—he
wanted
to call Michelle—but her image in his mind was blended with a picture of Mr. Gardner lying helpless upstairs. Was that the only reason he didn’t call? No, he dug deeper into his heart and hit ice: he was afraid.

And tired: he hadn’t slept well in a week.

There was always Sheila. He hadn’t spoken to her since his last drop-in; now here he was considering a call. What a sad sack.

He could fall into a bar instead; he was in plainclothes, so who would be the wiser? He wanted to bury himself—in flesh, in alcohol, it didn’t matter.

Go home, he told himself. Go talk to your son.

He was afraid of that too.

Instead, he walked. Off Seventh Avenue, the side streets were quiet save for a few dog walkers and couples promenading in the warm night air. He turned a corner outside a church. Through a tall iron fence, a group of little white statues gleamed amid some dark ivy. A shepherd. A wise-faced little lamb. The Virgin Mary, sad and sweet.

He paused, weary. He supposed he should get back to the crime scene, but he was sick of the smell of bong water, sick of searching the remnants of Bruce Serinis’s wasted life. What was he doing? he wondered. A Jewish man standing in the dark outside a church? He didn’t have to be Christian to be moved by the Virgin, though. She had the face of any mother grieving over her murdered son.

“The meeting’s down there,” someone said in the darkness.

Jack spun around. Under the little bit of light that filtered down from a street lamp through the dense trees, a man sat on the steps of the church, smoking. The stranger leaned over the railing and pointed. A flight of stairs led down below street level to a door. “It’s okay. It hasn’t started yet. Go on in.”

“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

The man sat back and took a deep drag of his cigarette. “Whatever. It’s an open meeting.”

Jack stepped away. He looked at his watch and realized that he’d only killed ten minutes. Chances were that the Crime Scene team hadn’t even arrived yet. On impulse, he turned back and walked down the stairs.

He felt awkward entering the church, even if it was only the basement. When he was a kid in Red Hook, some neighborhood boys had dared him to go inside Visitation Church. They told him he’d be hit by lightning because he was a Christ Killer.

He walked down a corridor to a large fluorescent-lit basement hall. Rows of people sat in folding chairs facing a low stage with a faded red velvet curtain and an American flag on a stand. It reminded him of his elementary-school auditorium. Out of old habit, he found a seat near the back.

A lanky red-haired man casually mounted the stage and sat behind a card table. “Okay, let’s get going,” he said. “If this is your first time here, you should know that we have a regular meeting every night, and on Fridays we have a special Step meeting after that.”

Jack glanced around and noticed small red-lettered signs on the walls which proclaimed One Day At A Time and Take It Easy. His eyes widened at a big scroll headed The Twelve Steps. He’d stumbled into an AA meeting. Would it suddenly stop when they noticed the arrival of an impostor?

Flushed, he was about to jump up, but when he looked around no one seemed concerned about his presence. The forty or so members sat calmly, many of them with arms folded across their chests. He’d never been to such a meeting before, but he’d imagined they’d be full of old men with stubbly beards, wearing dirty raincoats.
Alcoholics.
It hadn’t occurred to him that they might look like this, these people who might have walked in off a busy downtown street. People in suits and ties. Normal-looking people.

Nowadays his own father would probably be called an alcoholic, though he hadn’t drunk steadily through the week. Paydays were the worst, when the old man would go on a bender, spinning like a tornado through the row of waterfront bars. But back then, you were simply a “drinking man” or “dry,” and there weren’t many of the latter down on the docks.

On a bulletin board at the Homicide Task Force office, someone had posted a flyer for ACOA meetings. Adult Children of Alcoholics. Jack scoffed at the notion. Meetings, steps, counseling—it all seemed riddled with weakness. So what if he’d had a tough childhood? Who didn’t, down in the Hook?

The red-haired man glanced at his watch. “Okay, let’s start with our qualifying speaker.”

A young woman in the front row stood and walked up on stage. She sat and cleared her throat.

“Hi, my name is Janet, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”

“Hi, Janet,” everyone around Jack replied. Startled, he looked around, thinking that someone was sure to notice his silence.

“I’m going to talk for a while,” Janet said. “Then we’ll open this up to anyone who wants to share.”

She wore a businesswoman’s suit with a skirt and a silk bow, and her blond hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail. She looked as though she belonged in some suburban country club. She was pretty, Jack noticed—he glanced under the table and saw that she had great legs. Inwardly, he snorted—what hard-luck story could she tell? That she sometimes drank an extra glass of white wine after a tennis match?

“I had my first drink when I was twelve,” she said. “I was a chubby girl. My parents were always pushing me to join different groups or take classes after school, but I never felt comfortable with other kids. I didn’t want to go to school at all because I was so scared of talking to people.”

“My parents went out a lot to social events, political fundraisers and things. We got left with this baby-sitter who would fall asleep right away. My dad kept his liquor on a little side table in his den. There was this green bottle sitting there; I was curious, because my father always drank some when he came home from work. One night I went in and poured a little bit into the cap, like mouthwash. I swallowed it in one gulp. It tasted terrible. I swallowed a couple more capfuls and—this may sound strange—I realized immediately that I had found something I could be good at. I could be good at drinking.”

Jack shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable on the hard metal chair. He glanced around. The other listeners sat back patiently, half of their attention focused on the speaker and half directed somewhere deep within themselves. A couple of them nodded their heads sympathetically.