Red Hook Page 10

  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.

  When Ben was little, the other kids envied him. What could be neater than having a dad who was a real, live policeman? One time he wanted to bring his father’s gun to show and tell. Naturally, his father said no, so Ben asked for his nightstick. No. He finally settled for the hat. At least the other kids were impressed.

  Later, when he was in high school, having a cop for a dad took on a whole new meaning. He got a lot of flack, heard a lot of pig jokes. In college, the word “fascist” came up a lot.

  But basically, his dad being
a cop just meant that he wasn’t around a lot when Ben was growing up.

  He considered telling his father about his plan for the Red Hook documentary. Maybe the old man would open up more about his past if the issue was put in a historical context. He was just working his way around to raising the subject when his dad asked about his mom. That made Ben’s neck itch. Sure, whatever happened between them must have been complicated, but his mom was the one who’d suffered. As for her boyfriend, his dad didn’t need to know. Ben could hear an edge in his voice whenever he asked about Ted. It made him think about the gun he knew his father carried inside his sports coat.

  The moment to bring up Red Hook seemed to have passed. They finished their meal in silence. Ben’s chest constricted at the thought that they might have completely run out of conversation. He didn’t know why it was so hard to talk to his father, couldn’t explain to himself his mysterious dread.

  Jack took a sip of coffee, “You making any movies now?”

  His son stirred a cup of herbal tea. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

  “Where do you get the actors?”

  “I don’t use actors.”

  “You don’t? How can you make a movie without actors?”

  “I told you. They’re documentaries.”

  “Oh.” Jack stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. There was a lot of money to be made in Hollywood, but documentaries didn’t sound like the way to do it. What the hell, let the kid figure it out on his own; he was single, with no responsibilities.

  He took out another cigarette, tapped the end on the table, lit it.

  His son frowned and waved the smoke away.

  Jack flashed on a moment when Ben would have been three or four.

  The kid had reached up and knocked a pack of cigarettes off the dining room table, spilling them out on the rug like pickup sticks. Jack shouted, and suddenly he heard his own father’s bitter voice coming out of his mouth, felt his father’s stern wrath clenched in his own hands. He pictured his belt slipping out of the loops, imagined slashing at his son’s little back—and it terrified him. He hadn’t only withdrawn from his wife. Being a father meant getting angry sometimes, being willing to say no, to exercise discipline. But if he backed off, he could spare the boy the abuse he himself had lived through as a child. And so he’d pulled away.

  Sometimes you did wrong just trying to do right.

  “I thought you gave that up,” Ben said.

  He shrugged. “With my job, it’s hard not to smoke.” Usually, he smoked to calm his nerves. Sometimes, he needed the cigarettes to block out the smell of a decomposing victim.

  His son fingered the tuft of hair under his lip.

  “Nice soul patch,” Jack said casually.

  “How do you know what it’s called?”

  “I know a lot of things,” Jack said, enjoying the shocked look on his son’s face. He knew soul patches. He knew do-rags, nipple rings, ear cuffs, tattoos, and many of the other things young people wore in order to proclaim, I exist. He knew about them because they made convenient markers for identifying the youngsters after they died.

  For the first time, his son looked interested.

  Under the table, Jack’s beeper went off. He unhooked it and read the message.

  “Sorry, son. Gotta get back to work. I can drop you home on the way…”

  “That’s okay. I can walk.”

  Grudgingly, Jack stood up. If they’d only had a few more minutes, they might have worked past the small talk.

  At least the kid seemed relatively healthy, no major crises. Jack wanted to hug him, but the kid would probably balk.

  “Take care.” He reached across the booth and they shook hands, like strangers concluding a business meeting.

  He went to the cash register and paid, then went back to a corner outside the bathrooms where he could take out his cell phone in private. While the phone rang, he watched his son walk out of the coffee shop, awkward, gangly.

  His heart ached.

  fourteen

  THE VIC WAS A little kid.

  The cops hated that.

  Officers with kids of their own hated standing here at night inside this bright-lit Laundromat, listening to the child’s young mother as she sat sobbing in a molded orange plastic chair. Even if they were childless, they hated it because—unlike the drug dealers, wife beaters, drunk drivers, and other skels who comprised the greater part of the victim pool—this kid was an innocent. And they hated the fact that the shooting robbed them of their most potent weapon against the death they faced every day: their ability to joke. Dark humor could be discovered in the grisliest of adult crime scenes, but not even the most hardened wisecracker could find anything funny about a dead kid.

  Several uniforms stood out in front of the Laundromat, making sure that the onlookers, residents of the housing project across the street, stayed behind the cordon. Normally the homeboys in the crowd would have been busy eye-fucking the police, but even they were subdued by the sight of the small corpse visible through the window.

  Jack stood just inside the door, taking in the crime scene. After almost a week on the Berrios case he was still free to pursue it, but he’d been put back in the task force catching rotation, and this was his new case.

  On a normal evening, the scene inside would have been loud, like a men’s club, with groups of detectives standing around chatting amiably above the corpse, but the grave murmur of voices tonight was broken only by the occasional squawk of a walkie and the loud tichit! and FLASH of the Crime Scene photographer’s camera. The room bustled with men in varied attire: uniformed patrol cops, detectives in suits, undercovers in jeans and sweatshirts, the ME’s boys in pale blue scrubs. In the middle of the narrow fluorescent-bright room, a Crime Scene detective knelt to set numbered yellow stands next to bullet casings on the floor. Another detective stooped over a measuring tape, calling off the casings’ distances from the small body, which lay under one of the Laundromat’s folding tables.

  In a back corner, the kid’s mother sat clutching a pile of clean socks to her chest as if it were a doll; she was sinking into deep shock. Jack recognized Marry Lutz from the Seven-oh, a bullnecked, crew-cut detective, gently trying to extract a statement.

  Anselmo Alvarez stood watch over the corpse. The Crime Scene chief shook his head gravely as Jack approached. Below the table, little basketball sneakers stuck out from under a white sheet. A red pool seeped out from the side onto the blue linoleum. Alvarez pulled back the sheet: the vic was approximately seven years old, male, black. A bullet wound gaped purple in his gaunt little chest. White soap grains dusted his close-cropped hair.

  The detectives looked down in silence. What could you say?

  Lutz flipped his steno pad closed and left the mother to her grief. He came over.

  “Ay, Leightner, how’s it goin’?”

  “What’s the story?”

  Lutz ran a hand over his flat hair. “From what we’ve been able to put together, this all started because of a broken dryer in the basement of the projects over there. A black male resident comes over here to finish his laundry. The place is full, so he takes somebody else’s clothes out of a machine.” Lutz pointed to where a Crime Scene detective wearing an air-filter mask was brushing print powder over the front of a dryer. “A white male comes in, ‘Hey, why’re you taking my clothes out when they’re still wet?’ They talk some shit. The white guy leaves, but five minutes later he comes back with a nine and pops off a few rounds. The kid was in the way.”

  The case sounded like a grounder: there’d been several witnesses to the shooting, and two of them even knew where the perp lived.

  Lutz glanced around. “The Crime Scene guys are going nuts because there’s a round unaccounted for, but they’ll find it.” The number of bullets had to match the number of casings.

  One of the uniforms at the door came over and tapped Lutz on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir. You’ve got a call.”

  The detective trotted off.

/>   A minute later, he returned, smiling grimly. “We got the bastard. Another criminal genius—he went straight to his mother’s apartment, in his own fucking building. Some uniforms picked him up.”

  Lutz stepped away to spread the good news. A muted cheer went up in the room. Alvarez bent over the little corpse.

  Jack drifted out of the Laundromat. He stopped to talk to one of the uniforms. “I’m Jack Leightner with Brooklyn South Homicide. Do me a favor: if Detective Lutz comes looking for me, tell him I’ll meet him down at the Seven-oh in a little while.”

  Below the concrete seawall, waves sloshed gently against the shore. It was cooler here because of the wind off the water. Out on the dark bay, the Statue of Liberty raised her torch and, beyond that, tiny orange lights twinkled on the Staten Island and Jersey shores. The Garden Pier was a tiny park, a patch of concrete down at the end of Conover Street, just beyond a city auto pound and a vast abandoned warehouse. In the dark, Jack could just make out the huge faded white letters on the side: Red Hook Stores.

  He sat on a wooden bench inhaling the briny air. Tonight the Hook didn’t tighten his chest. Tonight it was home. Out on the water, distant buoys rang gently, soothing. Far to the south, the light-beaded cables of the Verrazano Bridge swooped across to Staten Island. The park was a good place to clear your head of bad pictures.

  Even if there wasn’t a heaven, he thought, God ought to make one for the little kids.

  When he himself was growing up, he’d spent a lot of time down here. There were no official parks back then. You clambered out onto the rocky coastline, or snuck out onto one of the company docks.

  The White Rock soda factory was just around the bend. The workers were all locals, and when the bosses weren’t looking they’d hand out free cases to family and friends. Every household on these streets had as much soda as they could drink. Jack and his buddies tied rope around the cases and lowered them into the bay to cool.

  Soda wasn’t the only thing that magically made its way from the waterfront into the streets. In the days when the docks were crazy-busy, before security cameras and computerized inventories, crates disappeared so regularly from shipments it was like a neighborhood toll. There was a trade in evaporated goods. Why take the bus to the stores downtown when you could buy a toaster or a bottle of booze from the back of someone’s car for a fraction of the price? One legendary time, part of a clothing shipment disappeared off a dock—suddenly it seemed like every man in the neighborhood had happened to buy the same brown suit.