Red Hook (3 page)

As the detectives climbed back onto the roadway, raindrops spattered down out of the leaden sky. Jack hunched his shoulders and lifted the collar of his sports jacket. “It’s Murphy’s Law—on rainy days, the bodies are always outside.”

The windshield of the young detective’s unmarked Grand Marquis fogged up quickly. Jack rubbed his handkerchief across the glass and watched the thundershower scatter the audience on the bridge. Down by the canal, the Crime Scene Unit was scrambling to spread plastic tarps inside the perimeter.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little white packet.

“What’s that?” Daskivitch asked.

“It’s a hand wipe. “You want one?”

“No, thanks,” his partner said, amused.

Jack ripped open the packet and wiped down his hands, pleased by the familiar stinging scent of the alcohol. He knew the gesture was mostly futile—the world was teeming with hostile bacteria—but it made him feel better.

The ugly little mouth of the victim’s stab wound opened in his mind and he shivered.

Daskivitch looked glum. “I wish I didn’t catch this one. I’ll take a grounder any day. The jealous wife—you get to the scene and she’s standing there with the Ginsu knife in one hand and her husband’s stones in the other. Baddabing: case closed.”

Jack didn’t answer. He wished his partner would stop talking, and especially that he’d stop talking about knives.

“Why do you think the barge captain phoned it in anonymous?” Daskivitch asked.

Jack shrugged.

His partner answered his own question. “The guy’s probably shitting bricks. He thinks he witnessed the end of a Mob hit, and the guys who did it saw him, and he’s gotta pass by here every day. You think it was Mob?”

“I doubt it.” Though the side streets of nearby Carroll Gardens were home to a number of known Mafia
soldieri
, the neighborhood was quiet—they didn’t do business where their wives and children lived. Mobsters would have taken the body out and dumped it in the harbor, or by some distant parkway. Secondly, the victim was Hispanic, and stabbing was a Hispanic MO. A knife was often associated with domestic violence—the first weapon handy—but Jack couldn’t see some angry woman beating the shit out of this guy and then hoisting his body over a fence. He lacked the patience right now to discuss all this, so he just said, “If it was a Mob hit, they’d probably have just shot the guy.”

Daskivitch pondered the matter. After a moment, he chuckled. “How’d you like the look on that rookie’s face, huh? ‘Blue-jean jacket and Air Jordans’!”

Jack didn’t answer. He pictured the hilt mark next to the wound, indicating that the knife had plunged all the way in.

His partner drummed on the steering wheel with his index fingers, a habit Jack remembered from the last time they’d worked together. “You
like
the mysteries,” Daskivitch said, his tone a mix of admiration and annoyance. “You’re the only detective I know who doesn’t mind a dump job.” Nearly impossible cases sometimes turned up in car trunks or Dumpsters, decomposed, without ID, without witnesses. Jack had a reputation on the task force for pursuing such cases as far as he could. It wasn’t always a good reputation: spending too much time on a few hopeless cases could drive down the team’s clearance rate.

A slight tightening of his face was Jack’s only response. He looked out the side window. A CSU man’s red umbrella bobbed alongside the canal, a small splash of color against the unrelenting gray of the scene.

He loosened his tie, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. Rain rattled on the roof.

The stab wound was directly above the heart. The victim might have bled to death, or the trauma might even have stopped the muscle directly. Sweat beaded Jack’s lip again.

Daskivitch drummed his fingers on the wheel. “What do you say we go find the barge captain? I know the shift’s almost over, but we could pick up some good OT.”

Jack opened the door and stepped out. The red lights of a patrol car parked on the bridge slapped him repeatedly in the face. Cars slowed as they neared the bridge, their tires making a sound on the wet asphalt like tape being pulled up. He bent down to speak through the window.

“I’m gonna head home. We can do it first thing in the A.M.”

He turned away from Daskivitch’s look of surprise. They had a hot murder; the rookie was excited to pursue it. And here was the infamously dogged Detective Leightner, ready to call it a day.

Daskivitch shrugged. “All right, bunk. You okay?”

Jack was already walking toward his car.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, he arrived home in Midwood, a quiet Brooklyn suburb of stucco and brick. The houses kept close company; tulips filled small front yards often marked by one special tree—a weeping willow, a Japanese maple, an exotic pine. When he moved there after his divorce, Jack knew nothing about the neighborhood save that it was populated largely by Orthodox Jews and had a very low murder rate. He was Jewish himself, but the religious makeup of the neighborhood didn’t matter to him—he just needed to live somewhere he didn’t have to worry about what was happening in the streets.

He worried about his landlord, though. As he entered the front hall, he cocked his head for sounds of life upstairs. At eighty-six Mr. Gardner was alert and active, but his wife had died the year before and now he lived alone.

Radio voices, a clanking of dishes—thank God, the old man motored on.

Jack stooped to lift a bundle of mail from the Astroturf-carpeted floor. (Mr. Gardner was a big fixer-upper, but he improvised with found materials.) He sensed that he was not alone—an orange cat sat on its haunches at the top of the stairs, regarding him coolly. The cat belonged to his landlord, as much as it belonged to anyone. Jack respected its self-sufficiency: the old man fed it once a day, but otherwise it took care of itself.

Inside his apartment, a floor-through with faded wallpaper, he hung his jacket neatly in a closet and fished his NYPD paycheck out of a stack of junk fliers and credit card offers. In the kitchen, he scrubbed his hands and turned on a radio for background noise while he gathered a makeshift dinner: a can of sardines in mustard, creamed spinach in a boilable pouch, a packaged microwaveable potato. Bobby Darin crooned “Beyond the Sea.”

While he ate, he read the back of a cracker box, which suggested accompaniments, including a slice of cheese. What kind of moron, he wondered, needed to be told that cheese went well with a cracker? The answer bounced back: the same kind of moron who couldn’t bake his own potato.

The food sat heavy in his stomach while he washed the dishes. As he rinsed the sardine can, he nicked his finger on the sharp rolltop. A knife wound—ugly little mouth—opened in his mind’s eye. He flushed with shame.
Indigestion.
That was the reason he’d gotten sick that afternoon. To hell with Alvarez.

He wandered into the living room and picked up the newspaper. Dropped it. Wandered back into the kitchen. The evening stretched ahead. He regretted turning down Daskivitch’s suggestion that they work late, but he hadn’t felt up to dealing with the kid’s concern.

Mr. Gardner’s footsteps clomped across the ceiling.

Jack reached into the fridge for a couple cold cans of beer. Several nights a week he went upstairs to keep the old man company. Sometimes the favor was mutual.

When Mr. Gardner opened the door, Jack half expected to look over his shoulder and see Mrs. Gardner in the kitchen, bending down to pull something from the massive old stove. She would reach a hand back to support the base of her spine, turn, hold up an angel food cake. She’d smile a crinkly big-toothed smile and her dentures would shift, click. Hair white as sugar. “Siddown,” she’d say. “Have a piece a cake.” Her voice deep, husky, kind. But Mrs. Gardner was gone.

“Hey, Jackie, come on in.” Age had brought stocky Mr. G. even closer to the ground. He wore a time-grayed white shirt, faded chinos, cracked shoes. His eyes peered big and droopy through thick black-framed glasses. Leaving the door open for Jack, he reached up into a cabinet and pulled down two delicate china coffee cups. He set them on the kitchen table next to a Tupperware container filled with coupons and reached for a bottle of cheap bourbon.

“Here’s how!” he said; they downed the warm liquor.

This ritual dispensed with, Mr. Gardner invited Jack into the living room. “You’re just in time,” he said, easing back into a duct-tape-repaired La-Z-Boy recliner. Jack handed his landlord a beer, then settled into a nubby brown armchair. They sat before the TV in silence, the muteness of men.

On
Wheel of Fortune
, Vanna White was still going strong, waving at all the lovely prizes. The empty white tiles of a mystery phrase appeared on screen. Players bought letters,

Vanna flipped tiles.
A­ _ _ AST F­_ _ _ T_ _
_
AST.
Jack glanced at Mr. Gardner. The old man rarely ventured a guess, but that didn’t stop him from chuckling and nodding in satisfaction at the solutions. Aside from his grief over his wife’s death, the man seemed complacent about his life. At least, he never complained.

Most nights Jack would have been content to relax and sip his beer too, but tonight he was restless and the endless commercials didn’t help.

During an ad for Maxi-Pads, Mr. Gardner muted the volume. “Have you heard from the Gangbuster?”

Jack had discovered the apartment through the old man’s son, a file clerk at the Sixty-first Precinct. Neil Gardner rarely came by the house, or even called. His father had somehow gotten—or been given—the impression that the guy was busy with critical departmental affairs.

“He’s doing great,” Jack said, to make the old man feel better. “How was your day?”

Mr. G. shrugged. “Not too exciting, but what are ya gonna do? You can’t fight City Hall.” One of his stock sayings, applicable to bad weather, ill health, even wars. He said no more and Jack didn’t follow up. To be so old, to have so much time for reflection, for regret…He was struck by the musty, old-butter smell of the man’s skin.

The show returned and Mr. Gardner clicked up the sound. A second contestant bought more letters.
A B_AST

F
_ _ _
T_ _ PAST.
An
L
in the first open slot should have ended the game, but the contestants remained mystified. Mr. Gardner stared at the screen through his thick glasses, waiting placidly for the answer.

Jack imagined finishing his days that way. He downed the rest of his beer and stood up.

“What—goin’ so soon?”

“I got some work to finish up,” he lied.

Downstairs, before he left the house, he double-checked that the stove was off, the micro-wave unplugged, the windows all locked.

Monsalvo’s was the kind of place where the old men lined up along the bar in mid-afternoon. Not the Orthodox Jews, of course, but the bar was a lone outpost on the edge of the neighborhood. The decor hadn’t changed for decades: dusty statuettes of Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante behind the bar, a mournful deer’s head high above it, yellowed stills of Rocky Graziano, Joe DiMaggio, and Louis Armstrong along the back wall. A string of Christmas lights along the top shelf lent the only bright note. You could get Rolling Rock or Schaeffer on tap for a buck and a half and even a good shot of Jameson’s only cost three bucks. The prices were not the draw for Jack—he rarely drank more than a couple of beers—but Monsalvo’s drew no lawyers, no yuppies, and no cops, himself excepted. He could unwind there, as much as he could do so anywhere.

The evening had grown cool and he was glad to take his seat at the bar, to feel the presence of his fellow customers, like horses at a trough, content in the warmth given off by each other’s flanks.

Pat the bartender, a prematurely leather-faced young man, slapped a cardboard coaster down. “What’ll it be, Mr. Jack?”

“Just give me a Schaeffer. I’ll be right back—I’m goin’ to the can.”

“Don’t look in there,” Pat said sadly.

“Why not?”

“It’s Monsalvo. After forty-seven years, he suddenly decided to make an ‘improvement.’ You’ll see.”

Jack pushed open the swinging door of the men’s room, with its appalling, mossy urinals, decaying black-and-white tiled floor, mottled mirror. He was shocked and pleased to see a gleaming electric hand dryer affixed to the graffiti-scribbled wall. A plaque next to it offered a list of instructions:

1. Press Button.

2. Place Hands Beneath Air Blower.

3. Rub Hands Briskly Together.

Below that, someone had already written an addendum: “4. Wipe Hands On Pants.”

Jack grinned; must’ve been a fellow toiler for the city.

Back at the bar, he eavesdropped on an old-timer’s conversation.

“More than thirty years I knew the man,” said the humpbacked little guy, wearing a cap that might have looked sporty several decades before. “Every day he was out there on his route, delivering through rain, through sleet, through all that crap. Every day he came back to the PO and yakked about the high life he was gonna live down in Florida soon as he retired. Finally, last month, he gets the gold watch and flies down to his condo by the beach. Three days later we get a call from his wife: the poor bastid dropped dead of a heart attack.”

Jack picked up his drink and moved to an empty seat down the bar. He couldn’t even go out for a drink without hearing about bodies.

“Howya doon?” said a curly-haired young guy at the next stool. He nodded at the tag stitched to his uniform shirt. “Name’s Rich. I’m a plumber’s assistant. No jokes, please. Whaddaya do?”

“I work for the city,” Jack replied.

“Oh, yeah? What department?”

“In Brooklyn, You see the Mets game last night?”

“Tell him what you do, Jacko,” called a voice from down the bar. “He’s a homicide detective.”

A customer three seats down abruptly pushed back his stool, slapped some money on the bar, and strode out the door.

“Thanks a lot,” Pat said to the loudmouth down the bar. “You’re gonna empty out the fuckin’ place.”

“Homicide,” repeated the plumber’s assistant, clearly impressed. “Hey, listen, you ever watch
NYPD Blue
? “You think that shit is real, or what?”