Little Easter (18 page)

“Ben,” I rapped my knuckles on the inside of his office door. He sat with his back to me, thin wisps of white hair limply hanging over the top of his chair.

“What?” he swiveled around. “Oh, it’s you, Dylan. I thought it was that pimply-faced twit the high school saddled me with. Used to get good interns once.”

“Kate Barnum, for instance?”

“For instance,” he raised his Fuller Brush eyebrows. “You here to talk or collect my bar tab for MacClough?”

“The former.”

“Talk, huh? Shut the door and sit.” He waited for me to follow his instructions. “Katy Barnum,” Ben began, sensing what I’d come about, “was the best damned intern that travesty they call a high school ever sent me. At seventeen, Katy could out-think and out-write most of the cigar-smoking old farts I’d run across at the city papers.” He grabbed a dormant pipe out of an ashtray and put a lighter to its bowl. “But I don’t suppose you came in here to discuss Katy as an intern,” Vandermeer blew sweet smoke my way.

“Maybe another time.”

I flipped my safe deposit box key into his ashtray. I slipped a signature card out of my pocket and asked him to fill in the blanks. He did so without question and slid the card back into my palm.

“I’ll drop this off at the bank,” I waved the signature card at him. “I promised Kate Barnum a story, but there’s a chance I may not be around to keep my word. I think I’ll be okay, but you never know. Even if I maintain my health and boyish good looks, there’ll be some people pretty anxious to get their mitts on the stuff in that box. If anything should happen to me . . . You know the script. And if nothing happens, I want someone known only to me with access to the goods.”

“Big story?” the old newspaperman tried to act nonchalant, but I knew he could almost taste it.

“Barnum thinks so.”

“Why give me the key? Why not your Brooklyn soul mate or, better yet, Katy herself?”

“I’ve got reasons, Ben. Look, if you don’t wanna get in-”

“The key’ll be in my safe when you want it back. You just call me if you need any other help.” He extended his hand and I shook it.

“Remember Christmas Eve, Ben?”

“I remember about sixty-five of them,” Vandermeer choked on pipe smoke, giggling at his rare wit. “When you found Jane Doe on the platform? I remember.”

“Was Kate assigned to work late that night?”

All the giggly merriment went out of Ben Vandermeer’s face. Something had just occurred to him that had come to me in my night of black flashing dreams. He didn’t need to answer. His face had already spoken.

“The
Whaler
’s closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It’s tradition,” he put lyrics to the sad music of his expression.

“Strange thing, Ben, your Katy just happening to be conveniently on the scene; pad, pen and mini-recorder in hand.
Newsday
carried it as a wire service story and didn’t even have a reporter call me until the day after the holiday. Was she in town working on anything?”

“No reason for her to be around that I can think of. The
Whaler
isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of investigative journalism,” the pipe smoker tested a smile and failed it. “And what’s in Sound Hill to investigate on Christmas Eve anyway?”

“Zoning variances?” I prodded.

“Any newspaperman knows the right questions to ask. Only the good ones know what questions not to ask. Dylan, I’ve always flattered myself by believing I fall into that second grouping,” Ben put down the pipe and ran his age-spotted fingers through the sparse white clouds of his hair, “but I’m gonna ask you one I shouldn’t just the same.”

“So ask.”

“How deep is Kathy involved?”

“I don’t know yet,” I took a breath big enough for two. “But if she’s in up to her toes or the shit’s above her eyeballs, it doesn’t really matter. Does it Ben?”

“I thought that ugliness at the
Times
might’ve taught her something,” the old reporter went limp with defeat. “Her career was shot and I was hoping she’d adjust to it back out here in the boonies. I was gonna turn the
Whaler
over to her someday.”

“If you were an all-star backstop for the Mets and got thrown out of baseball for drugs or gambling, how would you adjust to being the bullpen catcher for Oneonta?”

“I never looked at it that way.”

I nodded and started out of Ben Vandermeer’s office, but his curious voice called me back.

“If she’s dirty, Dylan, why give her the story?”

“Dirty or not, she’s worked harder for it than you could ever know. In an odd way, Kate’s earned it.”

I never made it to the bank. Dusk had crept into town while my back was turned and all humanity had fled the confines of Suffolk Midfork Trust. The cash machines in Dugan’s pantry had no use for signature cards and I no use for them. The safe deposit box routine was pulp novel kitsch, yet I’d seen it work to perfection.

On my way over to the Star Spangled Deli, more than the wind gave me a chill. The lights in the Scupper were flicking off and a few seconds later MacClough’s paws appeared at the front door flipping over the “We’re Open” sign. Eventually the busy hands vanished and the sign read, “Sorry, We’re Closed.” Johnny would leave through the alley. That was natural enough. Only problem was, normal closing time was seven hours away.

I thought about following him. Don’t believe that TV shit about cops. Cops can’t follow their own shadows without a roadmap and an itinerary. And they couldn’t spot a tail if it was stuck to their asses. Johnny was better than most. I’d seen evidence of that myself, but he was still a cop; retired, but a cop just the same. Cops wear uniforms to stick out, to be a presence. They want to be seen. They strive to be seen. Even their unmarked cars stick out like armadillos at a dog show. And because they’re so accustomed to being observed, they have trouble spotting individuals in the audience. It’s a difficult mind-set to shake.

Insurance investigators, even rusty ones, are like road chameleons. But to shadow MacClough, I’d have to be a stealth fighter or just plain invisible. He knew my car and, given my refusal to back off, he might be looking over his shoulder for it. After a minute’s meditation, I realized there was no need to follow. I knew where he was headed. His time to act had come. I ran back into Ben Vandermeer’s office and commandeered his phone.

Mr. Wizard

I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, but I was going. I didn’t know how I’d find MacClough when I arrived. Maybe I’d just wait for the sound of gunfire and follow its report. For months the tension coiled and now the spring was unwinding. As I raced foolishly along the snowbanked expressway, I wondered about the spark that had initiated the gyre’s unraveling and who might be felled by its blind momentum. The answers lay an hour away, across the bridge in Staten Island.

At the Knapp Street exit of the Belt Parkway, my soul shifted moods and, for a few moments, I could ponder summers of stickball and fireworks at the beach. Knapp Street marked the far border of my old neighborhood and until my ancient Volkswagen passed Cropsey Avenue, my heart would refuse all thoughts of Mafia kings and fallen maidens. From the parkway you could see D trains crossing noisily overhead. Their metal wheels shooting stars at the night, grinding along the tracks to and from Brighton Beach. Just east of the subway trestle sat the concrete bunker that had been my junior high school. I often imagined Hitler taking more comfort there than any seventh grader.

Further on, where the road rises and falls over Ocean Parkway, you pass the white brick butcher shop called Coney Island Hospital. Then, just ahead, came Lincoln High School. I always looked in back of the school at the football field, for it was there that I’d known my only moments of glory. It’s tough to stare forty in the face having left your glory in the grass and mud behind your high school. Tonight my glory was entombed in a gray foot of Brooklyn snow. But the skeleton skyline of the Coney Island rides, rising above the horizon like the bones of dormant dinosaurs, pulled my heart up through the snow and into the present. I was passing Cropsey Avenue. Soon, I would see the bridge.

There, spreading out across the moonlit narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, was the Verrazzano, its cold, ashen paint negating the span’s majesty. I could recall a time when only ferries held the two boroughs together and trips to New Jersey were partly a sea adventure. And when bridge construction began, two slab footings rose up from the water like tombstones. But the bridge’s completion meant more than easy trips to Jersey, for with any bridge comes migration. Once the Staten Island Express-way was flanked by sad houses on lonely hills. Now town houses and shopping malls dominated the landscape. Why should Staten Island be any different from the rest of America?

The Verrazzano had other effects beyond the destruction of the Brooklyn ferry. White, blue collar families—mostly Italian, some Irish, a few Jews—with a stomach for the stink of Jersey, the perfume of landfill, and disregard for increased cancer risk, ran gladly across the span to a suburb in the city and away from the Great Society, overcrowded streets and the
melanzane.
In Italian,
melanzane
translates into dark skin. In slang, it translates into niggers. And like all migrating hoards, the blue collars brought along their parasites. A handful of Mafia dons, always out of place and out of touch on Long Island, found nirvana in Staten Island. From their gaudy castle compounds in the Todt Hill section of the borough, they could run the family business by the swimming pool and be just fifteen minutes and a toll away from their territories. I was headed for one of those castles right now, but I doubted if the Gandolfos were out back taking a swim.

I held the hastily scribbled directions against the steering wheel, alternating glances between word-map and road. Larry Feld hadn’t been eager to turn over the address nor had he coughed up the directions easily. He also didn’t appreciate my request that he not phone ahead to the Gandolfos. I understood his position. Although the where-abouts of the Gandolfo digs aren’t a national secret, the family would not be pleased with Larry for giving out the info without permission. But they could get over that. However, if Larry neglected to warn his client of impending danger—which MacClough’s behavior clearly represented—and some harm were to come to the Gandolfos, Larry was as good as dead. As Feld put it: “Those guys will make cutting my balls off seem like a suspended sentence.”

Let it suffice to say that it took all I had to convince Larry it was in his best interest to acquiesce to my demands. It was an amazing conversation, but that’s for some other time. After promising Larry that I’d never disclose who’d given me directions, I asked him if he knew what all this lunacy was about. He said he had a pretty good idea. I asked him if he knew a woman named Leyna Brimmer. He said he didn’t. That question made him curious, but I held him at arm’s length. I said good-bye. All he said was: “Watch out for the old man.” I promised I would, though I wasn’t at all sure what he meant.

At the moment I was busy watching out for landmarks and streetsigns. The roads were remarkably well plowed given the recent weather, but that’s always the case in an area with a concentration of top level Mafioso. I’d never been through this neighborhood before, but I was willing to wager the mail got delivered early, the garbage got picked up quietly and on time and that around here the crime rate dipped into negative numbers. Wiseguys have always understood the value of intimidation and big tips. No one servicing these homes got five bucks and Grandma’s fruitcake for Christmas.

I knew I was close to my final destination when I saw it. The “it” I refer to is the former residence of the late don Pauly “Ping Pong” Palermo. The Cemetery, as the estate is affectionately called on the street and in the press, was Don Palermo’s monument to ill-gotten money and bad taste. I had only heard about its pink-rock perimeter wall and statue garden replete with a black marble reproduction of Stonehenge, a plaster animal menagerie and a circular arrangement of eleven eight-foot-tall bathtub Marys painted alternately in red, white and blue and green, white and red. You could see where the place got its nickname. The main building was sort of a combination Bates Motel, amusement park funhouse and mausoleum topped off by a satellite dish big enough to gather residual radio waves from the Big Bang. The place was such a disaster, even Don Palermo had trouble cajoling and bribing the appropriate functionaries into letting him build it as planned. In New York, where the unofficial city motto is “I never met a bribe I wouldn’t take,” that speaks volumes. When “Ping Pong” went ding-dong outside a Brooklyn luncheonette, the cops said he was whacked by a rival gang member. I think it was the editor of
Better Homes and Gardens.

I left the Cemetery behind and rolled to a stop along the curb about a block down the hill from where Larry had said I’d find the Gandolfo stronghold. Mine was the only car parked on the street for as far as I could see ahead or behind me. I didn’t like that. Nor did I like being down-hill from the house. If I was forced to approach the place, Gandolfo’s soldiers would have a fair chance of spotting me no matter which direction I came from. Never underestimate the value of taking the high ground. Clearly, the Gandolfos didn’t.

Okay, so now I was here and no bands played Stars and Stripes Forever and the borough president wasn’t waiting to greet me. Back in Sound Hill I thought I might work out a plan by the time I got on location. The fact was, I hadn’t worked anything out and the only thing I could think of were the gargantuan Virgin Marys huddled like a football team in Pauly Palermo’s yard.

I stepped out of my car. The rotten-egg breeze blowing in from Jersey was strong, but not howling strong and the only sound on the street was the creaking of the trees like an old man’s knees in the morning. When the gusts died down, even the trees were silent. I hesitated to put my feet in stride for fear of their signature echoing in the silence and the sulphur of the night.

I waited for the wind to come up again. When it did, I walked further down the hill to the last intersection I’d passed. There were a few curb-parked cars adorning the cross street, but none of them was MacClough’s ’66 Thunderbird. I hadn’t really expected to spot it on the boulevard. He’d probably parked it a neighborhood away and taxied up here. Maybe he made the trek on foot. Maybe he wasn’t here at all. Yeah, and maybe we were all just angels dancing on the head of a pin. Johnny was around. I could feel it. I turned back to my car.