Red Hook Read online

  Out on the bay, the Staten Island ferry slid past like a glowing apartment building. A couple of seagulls appeared overhead, pieces of paper tugged by the wind; they planed off, cawing, and disappeared into the night.

  The good old days. It was easy to see them through rosy glasses of nostalgia, but Jack knew better, Yes, there was sometimes trouble in the projects now, but when he was a kid crime had flourished like barnacles on the piers, the Mob working hand in hand with the longshoremen’s union to loot and pillage the incoming shipments, to control who worked and who didn’t, who fed their families and who starved. When he was a boy, the top mobster had been Albert Anastasia of Murder Inc., also known as “Big Al” and “The Mad Hatter.” Neighborhood kids used to scare each other whispering about his chief enforcer, the notorious pipe-wielding Totto Mack, nicknamed “Totto” for Salvatore and “Mack” because he was almost as big as one of the trucks shouldering down to the docks.

  In 1957, Anastasia was whacked by Larry and Joey Gallo while he sat in a barber’s chair in Manhattan’s Park Sheraton Hotel. After that, Jack saw members of the Gallo gang standing around on Hook corners in their dark wool coats, porkpie hats, pointy black shoes. “If I ever see you talking to those bums,” his father told him, “you’ll never leave this house again.”

  Some things got better. Just a few yards away from where Jack sat now, a giant concrete pipe had once opened out onto the bay. Back then, before anybody called themselves an environmentalist, the neighborhood’s raw sewage funneled directly into the water. On a hot summer day that didn’t stop kids from jumping in.

  His brother Petey, two years younger, liked to joke around a lot. Acting as if he’d been shot by Al Capone (Red Hook’s most famous criminal son), he’d hold his side and fall into the water…

  Nobody could figure out why Jack and his brother were so different. Jack didn’t like to swim—he wasn’t very good at it—but Petey had been a champ. He’d won a trophy for it over at the Bay Street pool. Not to mention his prowess at baseball. Adults in the neighborhood used to stop him on the street all the time, tell him how much they enjoyed watching his games. The kid was blessed. A natural athlete, handsome, always grinning. Even the old man rarely raised his hand against him. Everybody loved Petey.

  Jack sighed and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, pushing away the memories of his brother. Over thirty-five years he’d become very adept at that.

  He stood up and looked at his watch. Detective Lutz was probably wondering where the hell he was.

  Which was only a couple of blocks away from 7 Coffey Street.

  After almost a week’s work, he had no idea why Tomas Berrios had been killed, or even where. He had a corpse, and a possible witness in the barge captain, but not a shadow of a suspect. If he wrote the case off now, nobody but the guy’s family would particularly care, though Sergeant Tanney wouldn’t be thrilled to see another Unsolved added to the year’s stats.

  Blocks away, a dog barked. It was eerie how sound traveled in the neighborhood, each shout or car horn as distinct as an object in the desert.

  Jack took one more deep breath of the ocean air. He’d go check in with Lutz, punch out, and then…What? He was not far from Sheila’s apartment, but surely it was better to be alone than to put up with her bitterness. Bad sex wasn’t necessarily better than no sex at all.

  Here he was, half a century old—shouldn’t he have figured life out a little better by now?

  One afternoon, after Ben was born, he and his wife had taken the baby on a walk through Prospect Park. They crossed a stone bridge over a lily-pad-covered lake. It was autumn and brilliant red and yellow leaves were falling on the water, perfect as a calendar picture. He looked at his young wife and little Ben burbling away in the stroller and it struck him that they were a family. After all the doubts and worries of the pregnancy, suddenly he was completely happy and sure that he’d made the right choices.

  Now he was going to go home and drink a beer and watch TV by himself.

  How had he screwed it all up?

  “Where d’you go?” Lutz asked when they met back at the Seven-oh.

  “I had to make some calls. How’s the case?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “You got good witnesses?”

  “Are you kidding? I should start a glee club—I’ve never seen so many yos willing to sing in my life. For once they had a chance to stick it to a white guy. You wanna talk to the perp?”

  “No, thanks. I’m gonna call it a night.”

  On the way back to Midwood, his beeper went off. He pulled over in front of a deli and checked the number: Gary Daskivitch.

  The young detective picked up on the first ring. “That you, Jack?” He sounded excited—it must be a good break.

  “What’s up?”

  “You doing anything tomorrow night?”

  “No, I’m off. Why?”

  “I talked to Jeannie.”

  “Who?”

  “My wife. Remember what we were talking about? She’s got someone for you, and she’s free tomorrow.”

  Jack scratched his ear. “Tomorrow? What are you talking about?”

  “I talked you up to Jeannie; Jeannie talked you up to her friend. Bing—she wants to go out with you.”

  “Listen, kid—I appreciate the effort…” He was about to tell the younger detective to mind his own business, that he was a grown man and perfectly capable of getting his own dates—but he realized that wasn’t true. Aside from Sheila, who didn’t quite count, he hadn’t been on a “date” for many months.

  He watched a teenage couple smooching on the corner outside the deli, kissing as if they were each other’s only source of air.

  “Gary,” he said. “The truth is, I’m just too old for this stuff.”

  “Too old! Jack, listen—I’ve seen this woman. If you say no, you’re making a big mistake.”

  fifteen

  SINCE HE’D JUST TAKEN his turn in the rotation, Jack was able to spend the next day in the squad room catching up with paperwork and worrying about how he’d somehow agreed to a blind date.

  It was Saturday. When he was young he’d looked forward to the weekends. Now they were just busy shifts for the Homicide Squad, an excuse for mutts and businessmen alike to pop each other in bars, run each other off the roads, stagger home and put a premature end to their marriages.

  After work, he took a shower, then wasted ten minutes trying on one shirt after another. Too formal; too casual; unflattering color. Jesus, a blind date.

  He looked at his watch. Five twenty-five. He wasn’t meeting the woman—Michelle Wilber was her name—until seven. He changed shirts again.

  He drove, as instructed, to the western edge of Prospect Park. A row of ornate Victorian mansions faced a line of grand old Brooklyn sycamores, which bowed in the breeze like dancers at a ball. Fifteen minutes early.

  He parked and stood in front of a bronze monument dedicated to the Marquis de Lafayette. A little boy had climbed up the base of the statue and was earnestly trying to break off the tip of the marquis’s sword. If Jack thought the kid had any chance of succeeding he would have ordered him to stop, but he was already conscious enough about looking like a cop. He’d tried to dress casually, but as he scanned the crowds drifting in and out of the park, he noticed that he was the only man wearing a sports jacket.

  Along the edge of the park, clusters of black working-class families enjoyed elaborate barbecues—they wore baggy shorts, basketball jerseys, bright T-shirts. The air thumped with competing boomboxes. At the entrance, a mostly white contingent from Park Slope funneled in for the concert—they wore straw summer hats, linen pants, and fancy sandals; carried expensive picnic hampers. They walked as if they believed themselves terribly important.

  As the few single women approached, he searched for Michelle’s identifying red shoulder bag. Is that her? he wondered. I would be glad if this was her…I hope that’s not her…

  He glanced at his watch again, seiz
ed by an urge to bolt, go home and crack a beer, maybe watch a little TV with Mr. Gardner.

  A uniform emerged from a squad car to shift the wooden barrier blocking the entrance to the park. Jack remembered a case he’d once worked inside there. The victim was a stockbroker who lived in a nearby brownstone. Because a few ritual santería objects had been found under a nearby tree, a rumor soon spread that the broker had been the victim of a voodoo cult. (Later, it turned out he’d simply been jumped by a couple of kids who wanted his deluxe mountain bike.) The press had gone crazy, and not just because of the voodoo angle: any time a Wall Streeter was killed, it hit the papers big.

  Jack turned to watch a little boy run shouting after a radio-controlled toy car as it scooted along the side-walk. When he turned back, a woman with a red bag was walking toward him.

  She wore jeans and a white buttoned blouse and she had slightly frizzy long black hair and long legs and a nice body and she looked far more at ease than he felt and much better than he’d expected. He’d been picturing someone homely, somebody who couldn’t get a date on her own—which was, of course, unfair, coming from him—and he’d steeled himself for an evening of small talk and faked interest. She was—as he’d made Daskivitch find out—in her early forties.

  He imagined his partner winking, giving him a wicked I-don’t-hear-you-complaining-now grin.

  “Jack Leightner?” she said.

  “How did you know?” His self-description over the phone—“medium height, brown hair…”—had been so vague it could fit half the men in the city.

  “I got Jeannie to make her husband describe you,” she admitted with an embarrassed grin. “I wasn’t going to go out with just any guy, you know.”

  “I hope I’m not a letdown, then.”

  She grinned wider. “Not at all.”

  They strolled into the park and found the bandshell and bought some dinner at a food stall. At another stall they found some delicious fresh-brewed Brooklyn beer. They made small talk about the park, and the weather, and how he’d met Daskivitch, and how she knew Jeannie, and she didn’t rush to grill him about what it was like to be a homicide detective, for which he was grateful.

  There was the usual awkward moment when she asked if he had any brothers and sisters. “No,” he said, which was true, technically.

  He narrowed his eyes and sipped his beer.

  When they got around to discussing his job, Michelle didn’t ask the usual first questions. (Does it gross you out seeing dead bodies? Have you ever shot anybody? Do you watch NYPD Blue?)

  They were sitting on a grassy hill overlooking the stage. On their laps they balanced Styrofoam plates heaped with fried chicken and collard greens and candied yams. The audience wandered in, a crazy-quilt assortment of New Yorkers: a group of Rastas with big knit caps; a tall Japanese woman in a miniskirt, perched on Rollerblades; two Indian men in khaki shorts and polo shirts…A trio of uniformed cops leaned over a metal crowd barrier, relaxed as hell, enjoying their plum assignment. Down on the stage, roadies scurried around adjusting microphones and drum stands, which glinted under the bright floodlights.

  Michelle turned and asked, simply, “Does your job make you sad?”

  He was about to tell her that you got used to it, that detectives were professionals and they didn’t get emotionally involved, that you had to look at the bodies objectively, scientifically—but he stopped himself.

  “Sometimes.”

  Overhead, up in the trees, cicadas whirred like 1950s movie spaceships.

  “Do you like your work?” she asked. “I mean, can you like it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s a people job.”

  She laughed, then covered her mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s just that, they’re dead people.”

  “That’s just the beginning. We have to deal with the crime scene, where there’s all sorts of people I work with: other detectives, the technicians, the medical people…After that, it’s about a network of people. “You figure out who lives around the victims: their friends, their enemies, their loved ones…“You talk to them—that’s a big part of it.”

  “It sounds fascinating.”

  “Every now and then. Mostly, it’s a lot of boring details.”

  Down below, the seating area was filled rapidly. “Do you want to find some seats?” she asked.

  “Not really. I like it here, with the trees and all.” He pulled back a piece of crispy chicken skin. “What about your job?”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I work for a company that rents out equipment for parties.”

  “Equipment?”

  “Glasses, plates, chairs…that sort of thing. It’s not very exciting, compared to your job. Although…”

  “What?”

  She grinned. “We had a client last month, this Wall Street guy, a multimillionaire who was throwing himself a fortieth-birthday party. It was great for us: he ordered everything top of the line, the finest plates, silverware, linens…The party must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the guy was a nightmare to deal with, rude, arrogant, really unpleasant. The party was in a ballroom, with two hundred stockbrokers in black tie and their wives in designer dresses. At the end of the dinner, he wanted a line of waiters to march in carrying flaming desserts.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, they lit the desserts and the waiters all tromped in—and it set off the sprinkler system all over the room.”

  Jack grinned. Like all cops, he relished a good story and he admired Michelle’s economy. If his ex-wife had told it, she would have described each plate, each piece of silverware, the color of the napkins—it would have taken three hours to get to the climax. “Sounds like your job’s kind of exciting, after all.”

  He got up and threw their plates into a heaping garbage can.

  Michelle rubbed her hands together. “As long as you’re up, would you mind getting some napkins?”

  “Here.” Jack reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a couple of hand-wipe packets.

  “Do you always carry those around?”

  Jack nodded sheepishly. “It’s not that I’m a neat freak, or anything…The job can get kind of messy.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Yikes.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  Michelle twisted a silver ring on her little finger. “Jeannie tells me you were married.”

  “Boy, she really gave you the full report, huh?” Jack picked up a twig and bent it, testing to see when it would snap. “I got divorced fifteen years ago.”

  “And you never remarried?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I’ve been busy with work.” He looked at Michelle. “Have you been married?”

  “Yes. My husband died.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jack pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I knew he was ill when I married him. He had emphysema.”

  Jack winced. “You don’t probably don’t want one of these, then?”

  Michelle shook her head.

  He put the cigarettes back in his pocket. “You knew he was dying when you married him?”

  “I didn’t know it would happen so soon.”

  He considered this, wondering what kind of woman would make such a brave—or foolhardy—move.

  “Why did you get divorced?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking…”

  Where to begin? The early days when he and Louise made love every night or morning; the nights when he began to notice that she wasn’t quite returning his kisses; her complaints about his overwork, his lack of involvement with their child; the arguments about money; the times she pushed him away; the mornings he noticed they no longer made love in the mornings; the nights when he lay next to her unable to sleep, rigid with anger, desire, frustration, hurt. He’d blamed her, called her cold, but some deep nights he lay awake wondering what was wrong with him, why he couldn’t seem to be the hus
band or father he should have been…

  “It’s kind of complicated,” he said. He opened his towelette and wiped his hands. “I guess we just grew apart.”

  The treeline grew dark, but the sky flared with the last evening light. The band filed out onto the stage. They plucked a few strings, adjusted some levels—and suddenly they took off like a horse bolting from a gate, one guy sawing away at a fiddle, another squeezing the hell out of an accordion, a guy up on a riser slapping a piano, the ponytailed drummer hunched over his kit, flying…

  “What is this?” Jack shouted over the music.

  “It’s called zydeco,” Michelle shouted back. “From New Orleans.”

  “What’s that guy scratching?”

  “It’s a washboard. He’s got thimbles on his fingertips.”

  The seating area turned into a sea of standing, bobbing people. Jack glanced over his shoulder: all around them, under the trees, couples danced.

  “Do you dance?” Michelle shouted.

  “Not really,” he said, but that didn’t stop her from pulling him to his feet. He twirled her away, pulled her back, spun her around. Grinned like a fool.

  Later, after the music was over, she found her shoes on the grass and he picked up his sports jacket and folded it over his arm. They slipped into a horde of people streaming toward the exit.

  He was stunned by the novelty of being out on a Saturday night, of walking through a crowd with someone at his side, keeping an eye out to make sure she was close.

  She sat in her car. He stood outside, leaning over with one arm against the roof. “I had a really good time tonight.”

  She smiled. “Me too.”

  “I have to admit, I wasn’t really expecting to.” He caught her expression and hastened to add, “Nothing personal, you know. It’s just…the whole blind date thing…”