Red Hook (25 page)

“Jackie Leightner! Haven’t seen you around here since Artie Benvenuto’s funeral. How long ago was that?”

“I dunno. Maybe four, five years.”

“You look tired. Hey, how’s the family? I hope this is just a social visit.”

Jack loosened his own collar. “Not really, Larry. It’s a work thing. I need your advice. You have a few minutes?”

“Sure. I’m having a slow day here.”

“Why don’t we go for a drive?”

Jack stopped for a red light at the edge of the Red Hook Houses. Scraps of trash dotted the dried-out lawns between the buildings. A group of young toughs glared at the car, then melted into the interior of the projects.

“Jesus, things sure have changed since our day,” Jack said, glancing at a flashy sports car double-parked at the curb. Even through the closed window, he could feel the angry bass of the car’s stereo thumping out into the world.

Larry chuckled. “Remember Mr. Anselmo, with his withered arm, shouting at us to stay off the lawns?”

“He swung that arm at Pat Spillane. Knocked him on his ass. Nobody gives a shit about the lawns now.”

“That’s not true,” Larry said. “There are a lot of good people in the Houses. I’ve been spending a lot of time in there.”

“What, are you kidding?”

“You remember when those three white kids from the Gardens beat the shit out of that black kid last year?”

“
Yeah
, I remember. Some of those kids were
connected
.”

“Well, that’s what I’m working on. The kids in the Houses see most of us in the Gardens as racist mobsters, and a lot of people in the Gardens think everybody in the Hook is a ghetto hood. I’m trying to set up programs to get kids from both sides together.”

Jack whistled. “Good luck. The place is a mess.”

“Maybe—but you can understand how it happened.”

“
Yeah
, a lot of people discovered that it’s easier to sell drugs than to do a real day’s work.”

“Work? What work? There are no jobs, You know how many longshoremen we had in Red Hook before the Second World War? Over ten thousand, You know how many were left by the mid-sixties? About a hundred.”

“If people want work, they can find work. Look at my old man. He came to this country hardly speaking English, without a dime in his pocket.”

“Hold on,” Larry said, “Your father and my father came to this country because the government let a certain number of foreigners in to do the shit work—dig the ditches, build the railroads, unload the ships. Now most of those jobs are gone.”

The light changed and Jack drove on past the Houses, toward Van Brunt Street and the waterfront.

“Everybody acts as if the poor were just dropped here by God,” Larry said. “As if it’s just a fact of life. We don’t look at the history.”

Jack watched two teenage boys on a corner shoving each other around in a mock fight. “I know, I know. Slavery and all…”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. After World War Two, Big Agriculture was wiping out the small farms down South, so we had millions of blacks moving north, looking for jobs. And Puerto Ricans. By the time they got here manufacturing was dying out, the docks were fading. All those people couldn’t find work and they weren’t allowed to train for the new industries. That’s when you get into welfare and drugs and the rest of this mess. It’s not a mystery how the neighborhood ended up this way.”

Jack shrugged; he had more pressing concerns. They parked in front of the city tow pound on Conover Street and walked down to the tiny Garden Pier.

“We’re trying to build some new parks here,” Larry said. “There’s almost no place left where the public can get to the water these days. We want the city involved in getting this neighborhood going again. Did you hear they’re finally cleaning up the Gowanus? It’s gonna take a lot of work to get all the sludge and poisons out of there. This may sound crazy, but I think that one day it could be like San Antonio, with restaurants and parks all along the canal.”

They sat on a bench and watched the Staten Island ferry chug out across the bay.

“Listen, Larry—you probably know more about this place than anybody. I need to know why a big Manhattan real estate guy would be interested in such a fucked-up neighborhood in Brooklyn.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Randall Heiser.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He keeps a low profile. Have you heard of a company called Sumner International?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“What’s been going on around here, real-estatewise?”

“The neighborhood’s been on an upswing in the past few years. Since that school principal got shot, your buddies in Narcotics have been running sweeps in the projects and we get more patrol cars on the street these days. Some artists and yuppies have been moving in, buying up old houses. But that’s penny-ante stuff, not something a big shot would be involved with.”

“What else?”

“A guy in the neighborhood’s been buying up some of the old piers. He’s turning them into artists’ studios, homes for small businesses. If you’re still with Homicide, though, I guess you’re looking for something a little more sinister.”

“Sinister enough to kill somebody over. Let me come at this from another angle. What could some Manhattan real estate developer be doing over here that he’d want hushed up?”

The funeral-parlor owner considered the question as they watched a couple of seagulls struggle against a stiff shore breeze. He pointed out across the water. “That might be your answer right there.”

Jack leaned forward, staring. “What?”

“You can’t see it from here, but I’m talking about the Fresh Kills landfill over there on Staten Island. It’s the largest dump on earth and the biggest thing ever built by human hands. The city sent most of its garbage there.”

Jack sighed. “That’s great, Larry, but what does this have to do with Red Hook?”

“Fresh Kills finally got too big. Hey, pretty good name for a murder investigation, huh? ‘Fresh Kills’?”

Jack groaned
“Larry.”

“The point is, the city just closed the place down. Which raises the question of where is all that trash gonna go? They wanna send most of it away somewhere, but first it has to go to waste transfer stations.”

“What does that mean?”

“That’s where regular garbage trucks transfer the stuff to bigger trucks so they can haul it out of town.”

“What does that mean for Red Hook?”

Larry tossed a pebble into the water. “If you’re the government, and you have final say over where these stations are gonna go, how do you decide? Red Hook already has a lot of property zoned for heavy industry, and it’s missing the most important obstacle.”

“What’s that?”

“Voters. There are only about eleven thousand people here now. And most of them are black or Latino, and poor. They’re not organized and most of them don’t even vote. If they manage to scrape together some money, they get the hell out of the ’hood as fast as they can.”

Jack frowned as he stared out across the water.
Garbage.
If the two men attempting to dispose of Tomas Berrios had been Mobbed up, it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear that garbage was involved. What was it with the Mob and its attraction to such elemental industries? Concrete. Gravel. Trash. They were playgrounds for brutal, primitive men who liked to use their hands. The city had done a major crackdown on Mafia involvement in the trash-hauling trade, but that hadn’t necessarily finished it off.

“So the city can just go ahead and put the station here?”

“Not so fast. You got me and a group of other people who are gonna make a hell of a noise if they try. We’ve already got petitions going, and we’re holding meetings. If they put a big station here after all the work we’ve done to turn the neighborhood around, we’re screwed. How many people are gonna want to buy a house here if you’ve got hundreds of stinky garbage trucks barreling through the streets? The neighborhood has taken a lot of hits over the years, but this could be the last nail in the coffin.”

Jack imagined the Hook finally dying under a heap of trash. Burying all of the good memories along with the bad. He felt helpless again.

“What could you do?”

“If they want to put it on city property, we can hold all sorts of public hearings, maybe tie them up in the courts.”

“What if they put a transfer station on private property? What if a private contractor runs it?”

“Now you’re asking some good questions.”

Jack stared out across the harbor. “Larry, can you do me a favor?”

“Anytime.”

“I need you to look into some real estate stuff for me, but you gotta be real low-key about it, ’cause it could be dangerous. Ask around and see if you can find out if this Sumner International has bought up any chunks of property in Red Hook recently. They’d probably have done it under some other name—it might be a company called, hold on a minute”—he pulled out his steno book and flipped through the pages—“P and L Enterprises. They own a garage at Seven Coffey Street. That would be a big help to me.” He turned away from the water and looked back to Red Hook. “And maybe it could be a big help to you too.”

“I’ll be glad to do it,” Larry said, “but why don’t you just run this through your NYPD research people?”

Jack bent down and picked up a pebble, shook it in his cupped hand. “I would, but I’ve been told not to stir up trouble. “You know how it gets when you start dealing with rich people.” He squinted. “Speaking of which: this transfer station—would there be much money in it?”

Larry Cosenza stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. “Fresh Kills received thirteen thousand tons of garbage every friggin’ day.
You
do the math.”

T
HE NIGHT SKITTERED BY
in uneasy dreams: a corpse crying in a closet, a rumbling mountain of trash, a knife wound like a little red mouth.

As the first light filtered in through the window, Jack heard his son tiptoeing through the living room. He rolled over blearily. “Hey, kid. You on your way to work?”

Ben nodded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“S’okay.”

His son navigated around the futon and several piles of books. He lifted a canvas bag and a tripod off the desk, then continued on toward the front door. His hand was on the knob when he stopped and turned, “You gonna be around later? Like around six or seven?”

Jack yawned. “I dunno—why?”

Ben scratched his little tuft of beard. “I was thinking maybe I’d make some dinner. If you were gonna be around.”

Jack was eager to get back to sleep, but he was awake enough to notice that the kid was making an effort to be more sociable. He squinted with one eye open. “Okay. Sounds good.”

Ben nodded and went out.

Jack rolled over and burrowed as best he could back into the hard futon.

He had the day off; he managed to sleep in for a couple more hours, then got up and went out in search of food. Under normal circumstances, he would have asked Sergeant Tanney if he could come in to work, but his boss was clearly not in favor of pursuing any small leads against Randall Heiser. That was okay—the trail would still be there when he returned to the office. There was no concrete evidence that Randall Heiser had anything to do with the murders, but the man had lied about being in Red Hook. It was a loose thread—and the key to good detective work was having an eye for such threads. You never knew when you’d pull one and the whole mystery would unravel.

If—to play with a possibility—Heiser had been involved in the murder, what was the motive? What could Tomas Berrios have done to set him off? Had he re-entered Heiser’s apartment? What could he have messed with inside? The man’s wife? Jack doubted that. Was Berrios sleeping with the maid? That didn’t seem like a reason for homicide, unless perhaps Heiser also had a thing with the Romanian girl. No—if he was having an affair with Marie Burhala and then caught her with the porter, he’d hardly have kept her around after.

Just before the day of his death, Berrios had hinted to both his wife and his large-headed friend about a financial score. A drug deal? A robbery? Considering his reputation and lack of a serious criminal record, neither scenario seemed probable. Could Berrios have been involved in some sort of shady deal with Heiser in Red Hook? That also seemed unlikely. Why would a big real estate mogul need the services of a humble porter?

Maybe the score was based on some sudden opportunity. Maybe Berrios had seen something valuable in Heiser’s apartment and grabbed it. Or could he have seen something he shouldn’t have and decided to blackmail the tenant? It was all pure speculation. There was still no proof that Randall Heiser had committed any crimes greater than arrogance and dishonesty.

The day was already shaping up to be a scorcher. A couple of blocks past his son’s apartment, Jack walked by a wizened man sitting on a folding chair in the shade of a store awning. On the sidewalk stood a wheeled cart lined with bottles of syrup in Day-Glo colors: blue, orange, red, yellow.

The little man peeled back a piece of burlap from a block of ice. “You want?”

Jack hadn’t even eaten breakfast, but he was in unusually high spirits. He nodded and pointed, curious what flavor blue would be.

The vendor scraped shavings into a little paper cup, poured syrup over it.

Jack stood on the corner in the sun, savoring his snow cone. Mint. Soon he was squeezing the last cold slush out of the bottom of the cup, wondering if his lips were stained blue.

Tomas Berrios might have bought cones for his kids at this same stand.

Recina Berrios sat out on her stoop. She wore a faded housedress; Jack noted the dark circles under her eyes, the way she looked thinner in just two weeks. She watched him listlessly as he walked up to the gate.

He held out his gold shield. “Do you remember me, Mrs. Berrios? We talked at the funeral.”

Her face came alive. “Did you find him? Did you find who did this to my husband?”

Jack scratched his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. We’re still working on it. Believe me.”

Her face turned off and her gaze returned to some vague middle distance.

The bedroom was small, with barely enough room to walk around the queen-size bed with its shiny silver comforter. Several diamond-shaped mirrors were set into the black-and-white headboard: Art Deco, purchased cheap. Studio photos of the kids covered the walls; they posed stiffly in their Sunday best, little pastel suits and dresses. A wooden crucifix hung over the bed, Jesus looking sadder than ever.