Bad to the Bone (12 page)

Money was communally held. Workers signed their checks over to Hanover House, then filed weekly requests for an allowance.

Decisions concerning Hanover House were decided by democratic vote and subject to my approval.

I siphoned off nearly fifteen percent of Hanoverian revenues. Less in the beginning, when we were struggling to pay the mortgage. Then more and more as my ‘project’ developed.

The young girls were the absolute best. As I said, we pulled them away from their parents in infancy. Their only loyalty was to Hanover House, and
I
was Hanover House. My rule of thumb was ‘old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.’

Droit de seigneur
,
señor
?

Here, Poochie.

I
N SOME WAYS, STANLEY
Moodrow’s afternoon was going splendidly. Traffic in Manhattan, for instance, was almost nonexistent. The warm Sunday afternoon, the first of the new year, had lured many New Yorkers away from their island, to the country or the beach. Still, luckily enough, Moodrow was having no trouble finding people at home. He was interviewing former Hanoverians, trying to place Florence Alamare and her son, Michael, within Hanover House in the recent past. The list of ex-cultists had been compiled by an unofficial NYPD squad that dealt with subversive organizations, political or spiritual, passing (also quite unofficially) pertinent information to other individuals or organizations with a ‘need to know.’

Private Investigator Stanley Moodrow certainly had a need to know, but as he was a nothing PI instead of, for instance, chairman of a congressional subcommittee, his need would have gotten him exactly nothing, if he hadn’t been a friend of Detective Lieutenant John Flaherty, who ran the squad. Flaherty was on a list of acquaintances Moodrow had begun several years before. The list included every precinct and every special squad and who, in the course of a thirty-five-year career, Moodrow knew well enough to ask for a favor.

Moodrow had begun his interviews at ten in the morning, working patiently through the afternoon and early evening. Now it was nearly eight o’clock and he was headed out to Brooklyn and the last of the ex-Hanoverians living in New York City. All told, he’d seen seven people. Or yelled at them through closed doors. Or cursed them quietly as he walked away from total silence. That was the one fly in the day’s ointment. The witnesses were easy to find, but they wouldn’t talk to him about Hanover House and its master, Davis Craddock.

They were afraid, of course, obviously afraid. The few who’d spoken to Moodrow civilly had given the same message: upon leaving the cult, they’d signed a ‘contract’ in which they’d ‘agreed to keep silent’ about ‘day-to-day life’ in Hanover House. The words and phrases were repeated exactly. As if they were created for district attorneys or reporters or nosy rent-a-cops like Stanley Moodrow.

Moodrow knew that only fear could evoke such precise responses. The one woman who’d opened up a little (strictly ‘off the record’), Felicia MacDowell, had admitted as much. “Look,” she’d said, “the way I feel is that I was lucky to get out at all. It’s like applying for an emigration visa in Moscow. ‘Many are called, but few are chosen,’ if you take my meaning. Everybody I know who left Hanover House (I’m talking about the ones who were there for more than a few months) made the same deal. We don’t talk about it. Not even to each other. Not ever.”

“What are you so afraid of?”

The question had been purely rhetorical, but MacDowell had answered anyway. “Maybe some of us left people behind, boyfriends or even children. Maybe some of us were born scared.”

“Scared of
what
? Violence? How tough could they be? They’re psychologists, for Christ’s sake. I know cops who’d love nothing better than…”

Felicia MacDowell had smiled, then started to close the door. Moodrow, in good cop fashion (once you get ’em talkin’, don’t stop for nothin’), had sputtered one more question.

“Off the record. Okay? We’re trying to get a slant on a Hanoverian. Florence Alamare. Did you know her?”

He went on to describe Florence’s present physical state, hoping to elicit a sympathetic response, but MacDowell had only hesitated for a second before closing the door.

“Florence Alamare,” she said softly, “is—or was—one of the reasons we’re scared.”

The one thing Moodrow had never done was work for the money. Not that he hadn’t cashed his paycheck readily, but the amount had never been large enough to influence his decisions. A cop who’s in it for the money, he’d concluded early in his career, is bound to put his hand out, sooner or later. Now the money had become important (especially because, at Betty’s insistence, he’d spent a good piece of it on a paint job and a rug for his new apartment) and, whenever he thought about it, he was convinced that Connie Alamare would use the fact to bludgeon him if he didn’t get quick results.

Of course, he could always walk away. From the daughter
and
the money, but the problem was that he liked the problem. It had all kinds of interesting complications. In the past, he’d most often beaten his way to the solution of the crimes he’d investigated. Pick up the neighborhood and keep on shaking until the guilty party falls out—that was one of the pieces (and there were many) of advice he’d given Jim Tilley when they’d partnered together. Who would he shake now? He’d have to unravel the whole mystery before he could start with the heavy hands.

Connie Alamare, Moodrow finally decided, was like the traffic in Manhattan or the assistant district attorneys who sneered at you when you came to them for warrants. Or NYPD sergeants who chewed you out in the locker room while the whole precinct watched. She was going to be a pain in the ass, no question about it, but New York was filled with pains in the ass. As for her daughter, Florence…A detective’s cases are assigned. (The detective who receives a case is usually said to be ‘catching.’) In reality, the victim, as often as not, is as low a low-life as the perp. If it wasn’t for the money, the Alamare case would be like hundreds of cases he’d handled in the course of his thirty-five years in the job. Maybe he should phone Connie Alamare and reduce his fee…

“Stanley, you must be getting senile,” he said aloud. He was driving along Ocean Parkway, in Brooklyn, enjoying the warm evening and the large, stolid homes that marked the overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. “A house on Ocean Parkway” had summed up the dreams of two generations of Jewish immigrants. It was where you went when you worked your way out of the Lower East Side. Ocean Parkway, Grand Concourse, Queens Boulevard, Eastern Parkway. Broad, solid roads lined with the kind of austere brick housing that excites middle-class New Yorkers. Two of them had lost all pretense of gentility. The Grand Concourse, in the South Bronx, had become a desperate slum and was now making a comeback, while Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, was surrounded on both sides by some of the most devastated black neighborhoods in the country.

But that was New York. That’s the way Moodrow had always known it. Immigrants arrived, first from Europe and China, but, then, from every part of the globe. They clustered together for obvious reasons, not the least of which was the suspicions and prejudices of the immigrant populations that preceded them. Moodrow’s destination—Brighton Beach Avenue, near the southern end of Ocean Parkway—was in the center of a neighborhood undergoing just such an ethnic change. Brighton Beach, like neighboring Coney Island, had been Jewish, originally. Then Coney Island became Latino, mainly Puerto Rican, and slid from working middle class into stunning poverty. Brighton Beach, the locals predicted, would be next. It was already happening…

Urban blight was the phrase used by the media to describe the phenomena. People in the threatened neighborhoods characterized it somewhat differently.
They
were coming. With their dark skins, their drugs, their poverty and their crime. The inevitable result (given the understanding of the players) was white flight and what had happened in Coney Island was, according to the cynics, certain to happen in Brighton Beach.

There was no way, of course, for the locals to anticipate the actual course of events, that
they
, though undoubtedly foreign, would turn out to be Jewish. How, when you get right down to it, could the citizens who packed their worldly goods and took off for Long Island or New Jersey, know that the Soviet Union, pressed by every Western government, would allow its virtually imprisoned Jews to emigrate in larger and larger numbers? Who could predict that these Jews, who were not particularly religious, would reject Israel and choose America as their homeland? What crystal ball, in 1975, would have foretold that Brighton Beach would be their eventual destination?

They came all through the 1980s, just another wave of immigrants looking for a place to live. Until the media was as likely to call the neighborhood Little Odessa as Brighton Beach. For Moodrow, stepping out onto a street where the only language to be heard was Russian, it was like coming home. The Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he’d grown up, had been harboring immigrants for a hundred and twenty-five years. He was looking for a Russian nightclub called HEAVEN (perhaps in reaction to religious suppression back home) and Alyosha Budnov, father of ex-cultist Natasha Budnov.

Natasha had been the only former Hanoverian that Moodrow had bothered to phone. According to the NYPD, she’d lived in the commune for less than three months and he didn’t want to come all the way to Brighton Beach if she wasn’t about to cooperate. To his surprise, he’d gotten the father, Alyosha (“you will call me please Al, yes?”), on the phone. Alyosha had begged Moodrow to come out for an interview.

“Excuse me, please. Let me to explain. My daughter is from old schools. She will obey her father. I am promising this. And may that bastard, Davis Craddock, go forever to hell.”

The only problem was that HEAVEN wasn’t on Brighton Beach Avenue, where it was supposed to be. And the people Moodrow asked only shrugged their shoulders and muttered something in Russian. Even the counterman at the pizzeria and the proprietor of O’Roark’s Fine Men’s Furnishings. It is at such moments that the exotic is transformed into the annoying and Moodrow found himself wondering if the good citizens of Little Odessa were making him for a cop. Perhaps from the KGB?

It was a question that never got an answer. Moodrow finally found a Korean greengrocer who willingly (perhaps because Moodrow was looking for a Russian and not a Korean) pointed out HEAVEN’s true location on Brighton 6th Street, a few yards from the main boulevard. Moodrow had never been inside a Russian nightclub, but he’d imagined the scene on the drive over. He’d pictured a small grimy room with an enormous bearded folk singer engulfing a battered guitar. The patrons would be huddled over glasses of vodka and rickety chess boards. A great, Russian soulfulness would permeate the room—the ancient wail of the oppressed made into flesh and blood.

From the street, HEAVEN met all of Moodrow’s expectations. The capital letters were a faded green against a faded gray background. A peeling steel door, painted the same color as the peeling brick wall, might have led into the basement of KGB headquarters. Moodrow, smiling to himself, pulled the door open and stepped into a Russian birthday party.

The tables were covered with small plates of food, the plates stacked on top of each other with the smallest empty spaces occupied by bottles of vodka. The walls were lined with strips of aluminum that moved with the air currents, reflecting the light from a dozen chandeliers. On the bandstand, a sextet in designer clothes sang, “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Moodrow recognized the old Beatles’ tune immediately. In a way, he also recognized the men and women on the dance floor. They spanned every age, from eight-year-old girls unable to get a boy interested, to aged grande dames squired by adolescent grandsons. The men wore suits and smelled of after-shave. The women wore sequined evening gowns and sported diamonds and gold.

“It’s the fuckin’ Elks Club,” Moodrow muttered in disbelief. “They’re more American than I am.” His eyes swept the room, looking for some sign that the patrons of HEAVEN were Russian. There was the food, of course. He didn’t recognize anything on the plates. Then he saw a bone-thin, middle-aged woman in a low-cut satin gown fill a tumbler with vodka. Neither orange nor tomato juice was added, but the woman pulled on the drink as if it was a glass of lemonade. The gesture seemed purely Russian to Moodrow, even if the bottle of Absolut jarred somewhat.

A waitress in a gray T-shirt and plain black polyester skirt came up to him and shouted over the noise of the band. Unfortunately, she shouted in Russian.

“Alyosha Budnov.” Moodrow pronounced ‘Budnov’ like he was ordering a beer.

“Sorry,” the waitress said, throwing up her hands.

“The manager,” Moodrow persisted. “Al.”

“Al,” the waitress repeated, smiling this time. “Budnov.” She pronounced it ‘Boodnuv.’

“Yeah,” Moodrow said, handing the waitress a business card. “He’s expecting me.”

The music from the bandstand built up to a terrific crescendo, then stopped abruptly. The following silence was quickly filled with excited conversation. The only language was Russian. Then the bandleader, a platinum blond kid with hair down to his shoulders, announced, in English, that he was about to play, ‘The Russian Dinosaur,’ but first…”

The band launched into a slow, dirge-like rendition of “Happy Birthday” while the bandleader sang, in English. Moodrow smiled at the homey touch. Then the band repeated “Happy Birthday” eight times, the only variation being the name of the celebrant and Moodrow realized that the entire crowd consisted of birthday parties. Looking more closely at the tables stacked with food, he estimated the bill couldn’t be less than fifty dollars a person, even though the party closest to the bandstand consisted of more than a dozen people.

Russians must love birthdays
, Moodrow thought. Followed by,
Stanley
,
you shoulda been a detective
.

“Mister Moodrow, hello to you.” The man rushing up to pump Moodrow’s hand was as tall and broad as Moodrow. He sported a thick, black beard that seemed to reach up into his eyebrows. Its color matched his double-breasted silk suit and tie. Moodrow, reading automatically, made the suit for a thousand dollars. The ruby tie-tack and the star sapphire pinky ring…probably another two. Of course, it didn’t matter to Moodrow, but curiosity is a given with good cops and Moodrow’s first glimpse of the new immigrants was having the same effect on him as Toys “R” Us would have on a two-year-old.