Red Hook Read online

  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?”

  “Excuse me one sec.”

  Jack got up and walked past the end of the bar into a phone booth. Inside, he pushed the door shut to block out the noise. He closed his eyes and leaned forward to feel the cool glass against his forehead. Was this what a confessional would be like?

  All of a sudden, he wanted to call his ex-wife. He thought of her body, of the first time he’d ever touched her. Modest, she’d worn loose-fitting clothes the first couple of times they went out. One night he drove her home from a movie, kissed her in the front seat, slipped his hand up inside her blouse. He’d been so surprised by the fullness of her breasts. He pictured her in the bath, tits rising up out of the water, slippery pink islands. She had a wonderful body and they’d always enjoyed each other that way. In the beginning, anyhow.

  He remembered the bad times and the urge to call ebbed away. He left the booth, tossed some money on the bar, and walked out into the night.

  He drove slowly down a side street, scanning the houses to the left. He was only half a mile from the Gowanus Canal, but even in the dark it was clear he was in a much different neighborhood. People lived here, and the houses were well kept, if not fancy like the brownstones of nearby Brooklyn Heights. The only thing separating Boerum Hill from the tide of gentrification sweeping the rest of downtown Brooklyn was the low-income housing project around the next corner. Every year Brooklyn South Homicide made at least one visit to the Gowanus Houses.

  He pulled up in front of a vaguely familiar red row house. His son had moved onto the block two years earlier, but Jack had only been to the house once, to pick Ben up and take him to a local restaurant for an hour of awkward non-conversation. Light filled a third-floor window, but he didn’t know if that was the boy’s apartment. The boy, that was how he still thought of him, though Ben was now—he made a quick calculation—twenty-three years old. He’d been eight when the divorce went through.

  An iron fence separated the house from the sidewalk, and Jack was glad that a bright light shone over the stoop. There were no bars on the windows, though—not very wise in this neighborhood. Up in the window, a shadow moved past the curtain so quickly he couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Did Ben have a girlfriend? He didn’t even know.

  His son had worked since college as an assistant to a commercial photographer, but the last time Jack saw him, Ben announced he was trying to become an independent filmmaker. “Experimental documentaries,” whatever that meant. (Jack didn’t understand the things the boy was interested in. His ex-wife had encouraged the kid to go to a fancy college up in New Hampshire, and Jack had paid for it. Sometimes he felt like a sucker.) The conversation had dried up and he’d driven his son home; Ben didn’t ask him in. The memory still rankled. Like Mr. Gardner’s son, the kid never called, unless there was an emergency or some communication his mother wanted to pass along. Jack gripped the wheel.

  What are you doing here, anyhow? Running a takeout on your own son?

  Up on the third floor, the light went out.

  three

  BEN LEIGHTNER TURNED ON his stereo and played the first half of the first song of three different CDs. He turned the stereo off.

  He picked up a filmmaker’s magazine and flipped through it, unable, for once, to fantasize himself into its pages. The new Orson Welles? The new Scorsese? Tonight he couldn’t even imagine himself the new Ken Burns.

  He glanced at his phone, which sat mute on his editing desk, a door laid on two sawhorses. He ran through a mental list of his friends—which didn’t take long—wondering who he might call. One had a new girlfriend and never went out these days. Another had recently taken a job writing for a cable-TV cartoon and couldn’t seem to talk about anything else…He gave up on his list and sat staring at the phone, willing it to ring. The room was so quiet he could hear the c
lock plunking away the seconds. I got a phone that doesn’t ring—it would make a good line for a blues song, some old Mississippi Delta singer rocking on his porch. Blind Lemon Pledge.

  He got up, wandered into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, shut it. He returned to the living room, flopped down on his futon couch, clicked on the TV. For a few minutes he watched a sitcom, the star a young guy his age who sat on his couch in his apartment and was visited by an endless parade of friends and pretty girls and relatives and coworkers. He clicked the set off. Every TV show was about people who always had other people to talk to. You never saw a show about a guy who lived alone and read a lot.

  He looked at the phone again, that dead piece of plastic. Dropping all ironic detachment, he sent two deep, silent questions out into the ether. Why am I different? And What’s wrong with me?

  He sat limp on the couch for another minute and then finally—disgusted with himself—he got up and turned off the lights. He’d just been avoiding work, was all; he’d feel better once he started. He popped a tape in the VCR, clicked the remote, and the TV sprang to life. On screen, the late-day sun caught the reds and oranges and earth tones of Red Hook’s brick warehouses and bathed them in a special honeyed light.

  The Hook was screwed up, but Ben loved it.

  Earlier that afternoon, he’d packed up a couple of cameras and set out for the waterfront. With the weight of the camera bag and tripod pressing on his shoulders, he felt as if he were going to work, like his grandfather striding down to the docks with his longshoreman’s hook.

  He walked across Smith Street, where black and Latino kids hung out in front of the bodegas; beyond Court Street, where yuppies pushed baby strollers into video stores and cappuccino cafés; on past the swanky brownstones of Cobble Hill. He didn’t see many people outside there, though he could glance into the windows of their brownstones to see them sitting in their living rooms, under expensive Tiffany lamps.

  The edge of the neighborhood was marked by a deep gash, a channel cut into the earth for the Gowanus Expressway. He crossed a bridge over the highway into Red Hook. The direct route would have been south-west, but that would have taken him through a giant low-income housing project. The Red Hook Houses stretched for block after block in the center of the neighborhood. He would have loved to film there, but a young white guy wandering around with a camera would undoubtedly raise suspicion. In his mental map of the neighborhood, the Red Hook Houses were an uncharted area, like the edge of an ocean populated by fantastical sea monsters. With drive-by shootings and drug deals gone bad, several people got killed there every year. (Which meant that his father, the Big Homicide Detective, had probably been inside. Ben considered asking if he could tag along sometime, but it had been months since they’d spoken.)

  Instead of entering the projects, he turned west toward the waterfront, along a deserted side street called Seabring. He loved the exotic, vaguely Shakespearean names of the streets. Imlay, Verona, and Beard. King and Delavan. Visitation. Pioneer. An old dock-worker had told him that the neighborhood itself was named for an Indian chief, but he researched the matter and found that early Dutch settlers had named it Roode Hoek for the color of the soil and the shape of the land curving out into New York Bay.

  Once upon a time, the waterfront had been one of the busiest ports in America. Now it was almost a ghost town. Just across the harbor rose the crazy bustling Erector set of Manhattan’s southern skyline, but the Hook was so quiet that the wind was a presence; it whispered over the cobblestones and flowed around the deserted warehouses; it sifted through primitive, fernlike ailanthus trees. In the distance you might hear the faint fairground tinkling of a Mr. Frostee ice-cream truck, or the ringing of a buoy out in the harbor. Breathe deep and your lungs filled with salty ocean air.

  In the Brooklyn Historical Society, a turn-of-the-century mansion paneled with dark, ornately carved wood, he’d sat in front of a computer calling up grainy old photos of the Hook as it had been a hundred years before: humble row houses; ships docked at mist-shrouded piers; horses straining to pull coal wagons; bleak-eyed immigrants staring defiantly at the camera. A world of brick and water and hard manual labor.

  He planned to make a film exploring what had happened to the neighborhood. Interviewing old-timers or digging through library files, he liked to think that in his own way he was a detective, like his father. Though Jack Leightner had grown up in the Hook, he never brought his son there—the man seemed to have bad memories of the place and never spoke of his early life.

  The Hook was a place of mysteries, not the least of which was his own father’s past.

  He stopped in a bodega for some coffee. A chubby little girl next to the counter stared at him—because he was white? Because he was so tall and thin? Because of his acne-scarred face?—but she brightened when he pulled out a Polaroid, took her picture, and handed her the snap.

  He walked on past block-long factories, old buildings with rusty shutters more beautiful than any painting in the Museum of Modern Art. The late sun cast shadows through chain-link fences onto vacant yards, or lots filled with sleeping old delivery trucks. There was still some shipping along the waterfront; down at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal a few huge loading cranes reared up over the horizon like dinosaurs. The tin-covered windows of an abandoned warehouse caught the sun and filled with gold, a broken El Dorado. Though Ben was alone here, he never felt lonely.

  Near the water, he walked down a narrow cobbled street of little houses, aluminum-sided, working-class. Had his father grown up in one of them? This one with the wild roses growing up the side, or that one with a small American flag flapping listlessly in the breeze?

  He pulled out a video camera, set up the tripod, and filmed some wind-chewed leaves shimmying in the branches of an old sycamore tree, its trunk covered with flaking patches (like bad skin). He concentrated so hard on framing the shot that he forgot the world outside the viewfinder. When he looked up, a Latino kid about ten years old was sitting on the curb several yards away. The kid wore a Knicks jersey that hung down over his knees; his hair looked like his mother had trimmed it around a bowl. The boy shifted a jawbreaker from cheek to cheek and squinted up.

  “Yo, mistuh. Why you wanna be filming a tree? Ain’t nothin’ up there.”

  Ben ignored him.

  “You, mistuh,” the kid said. “Why don’t you take my picture?”

  Ben grinned. “All right.” He turned the camera and peered through the viewfinder as the kid transformed himself into an awkward little marionette. “Relax,” he said. “I have to focus. I’ll say ‘cheese’ when I’m ready.” The kid let out a big breath and his shoulders slumped. He scratched his head. Ben filmed him while he was waiting.

  Now he sat on his couch, reviewing some footage he’d grabbed at the end of the day, a zoom shot down a side street toward the Red Hook Houses. Just a few seconds of tape because a group of sullen homeboys had sauntered down the block in his direction and—panicking—he’d stuffed the camera back into the bag.

  If his father had been with him, he wouldn’t have had to worry. But then, there was never a cop around when you needed one.

  four

  THE NEXT MORNING, JACK arrived at work half an hour late. He’d slept badly, woken every few hours by roiling dreams. Toward dawn he finally sank into a deep sleep which swept him past the clock’s alarm.

  The Homicide Task Force was based in a modest building on Brooklyn’s southern edge, on Mermaid Avenue, two blocks from the Coney Island boardwalk. Unlike most precinct houses, the building was new and clean, with fresh white paint and smart green trim. (No graffiti, no handprints on the cinderblock walls, no stale reek of human desperation.)

  Jack parked in the gated lot in the back, then jogged in past two uniforms lounging behind the front desk like fish sellers awaiting the morning’s catch.

  “So don’t say hello,” called Mary Gaffney, a tall, pretty cop with red hair pulled back in a tight bun.

  Without missing a beat, J
ack spun around and kissed the back of her hand. He enjoyed flirting with the woman but she was married, with a two-year-old daughter.

  He climbed the back stairs and then unlocked a couple of security doors to reach the Homicide squad room. It could have been an insurance company office with its central row of double desks, its wheeled aquamarine desk chairs. The wanted posters on the front door were a giveaway, though, as were the computers lining the back wall—no self-respecting private company would have put up with such outdated machines. The walls were thick with the usual clutter of bulletins and photos, charts and signs. Two computer-printed banners ran across one wall. He who is not pursued escapes. Socrates. And one which always gave Jack a chill: If a man is burdened with the blood of another, let him be a fugitive unto death. Let no one help him. Proverbs 28:17.

  He signed in to the command log, annoyed that he’d missed the usual confab with the departing shift; he liked to know what had happened in the borough overnight.

  “Nice of you to drop in,” said Carl Santiago, one of the four other detectives on his shift. They were all casually attired: khaki pants, short sleeves, bright ties. The members of the task force didn’t go for the designer suits and expensive watches favored by some of the precinct detectives. They didn’t need the flash—they’d been selected as the most mature, stable, and seasoned of cops. The unofficial squad motto summed it up: “The Best of the Best.”

  Jack made his way back to the supply room. Another reason to be on time: the coffeepot on one of the gray metal shelves was empty save for a congealing puddle of tar.

  Detective Sergeant Tanney, the squad supervisor, poked his head in the room. “Can I see you a minute, Leightner?”