Red Hook (10 page)

“What thing?”

“For betrayal.”

“Go on.”

“A few weeks ago, the first time I saw the homeless man, nothing registered. He was disfigured, his face was covered in sores, he was sick and drunk, he looked like a very old man and he was in rags. He stank. I saw him a few times after that, at a distance, and I always walked the other way. I asked around one or two of my neighbors, and they said he was harmless. He liked to drink. Maybe he did some drugs if he could get them. He was harmless, but he scared me. He used to come after me asking for change, trying to get my attention, he'd just trot down the street following me, and I'd get away as fast as I could. The other day, Saturday, I saw him. I should have helped him.”

“I see.”

“You understand, don't you?”

“I think so.”

“It was Earl. It was him. That's why he looked at me so hard and why I felt that I was looking in a mirror. It's more than fifty years ago, Artie, but I knew. I betrayed him when we were kids by not telling anyone about him or helping him and I did it again, I betrayed him again. Yesterday morning, I went out early for coffee and I saw the body and I called 911 because I had a feeling it was him, and then later I got a look before they zipped up the body bag. Now it's over. Let someone know, Art, will you? Please. Make sure he gets buried right. I'll pay the bills. I'm sorry if I seemed to be calling in a favor from you, but I didn't know who the hell else to call.”

“How do you think he died?”

“I guess it was an accident,” Sid said. “An accident that I let happen. I left him alone Saturday night, I didn't give him money, I didn't call anyone, I just walked away and then the next morning, he was dead, maybe booze, maybe drugs, maybe he slipped, or someone pushed him, but he was just a bum, a tramp, a homeless guy who got beat up and drowned,” he added.

“I thought you said someone got to him instead of you, some Russian thug. You changed your mind?”

“I was probably wrong about that,” Sid said. “Maybe I hoped it might give some meaning to the death, that it was intentional, but I was wrong. It wasn't anything, it didn't mean anything, just grief. I'll probably get out of town for a while now, go out to Long Island. I meant to go yesterday. I'll go today, I think. I think I will. I feel there's not much time left for me. I meant to go.”

“Why?”

Sid shook my hand, and I saw on his face a look of unbearable sadness.

“So long, Artie,” he said.

I went over to the place on Van Brunt Street where I'd dropped Sid the morning before and went in and sat at the counter and ordered some eggs and fries and toast. The guy behind the counter poured me some coffee and put a plate of food in front of me, and I ate it. I was hungry.

He was a good-looking kid, tight T-shirt, sleeves rolled up over big biceps, veins popping, a pack of cigarettes in one of the cuffs of the T like a guy from a fifties movie. He wore black jeans and blue sneakers.

I said, “You know a guy named Sidney McKay?”

“Sure. I see Sid around a lot. He's a regular. Everyone around here likes him, he's like old-fashioned, you know, real courteous.” The kid had a southern accent.

“He ever meet anyone here?”

“What kind of anyone? You mean was he cruising people or what? Only one sticks out that I remember: a fat Russian. Like a man mountain, you know, maybe six-six, they came in together and sat over in the corner, and drank a lot of Martinis, and the Russian drank Scotch, too, and they were like this real odd couple, but they were obviously like really into each other. You think they were an item?”

I thought about Tolya, and laughed. “Friends,” I said.

“What about you?” he said, not really interested, just making conversation as he poured more coffee.

“I'm just a cop,” I said, and left, got in my car and cut across Red Hook, heading for the city.

On the way, I thought about Sid, about why he stayed out here. For a century, people had moved inland, away from the working docks, if they could, if they were aspirant or had money. When shipping moved out of Brooklyn, the docks were abandoned.

People were coming back; all over the city, people were buying into the waterfront, the last big land grab. The Hudson was clean; people sailed on the river; people swam around Manhattan; foreigners took wedding pictures at the old Fulton Ferry landing under the Williamsburg Bridge, squads of Chinese or Japanese in their big dresses and tuxedos with white limos and
champagne, posing, giggling, the river behind them, the Statue of Liberty for scenery.

You could see Red Hook was changing: fancy little signs that hung out front of warehouses proclaimed that artists and film people had moved in. Political banners hung from a few windows, though the old row houses on the side streets mostly sprouted American flags.

A lot of the area was still pretty derelict, the rotting warehouses, waste ground surrounded by chain-link fencing, compounds for towed cars, empty shipping containers rusting into the ground, broken docks.

I'd stopped in at one of the bars over the years on my way back across Brooklyn from Brighton Beach when I was working cases out there. It was cheap to drink here and you could imagine the place as it had been. Red Hook looked ancient, suspended in time, the way it probably looked a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago, except then it had been jammed with people working the docks.

Red Hook had been cut off from the rest of the city when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was shoved through it years ago; the underside of the BQE as I drove through it was desolate and full of garbage; the beams looked rusty.

I drove up on to the elevated Expressway. I could see the river now. I thought about it when it was a streaming traffic lane packed with barges, tugs, freighters, steamships. Red Hook's inlets and canals were full of abandoned boats, a paddle wheel steamer, the skeleton of a burned out Staten Island Ferry. There was still some shipping, some working dry docks in the main part of
the Gowanus Canal, the huge inland waterway that cut into Red Hook.

Looking down at the tangle of streets below me, I could see the warehouses, docks, narrow streets, packed in tight against the water; most of the streets were empty.

I thought about Sid and his cousin, and Sid's obsession with Red Hook and his own past; he had come here to escape, he had said. He didn't like it when Earl showed up on his private turf, not the Earl who had become a homeless bum, a guy who stank.

I knew there was still plenty Sid didn't tell me. I didn't know why he said there wasn't much time for him to get away. There was nothing I could do now to help him.

“I'm sorry,” I said, kissing Max when I met her over near West Street. “Honest to God, I'm really sorry. I had a couple of things to take care of, I'll tell you about it later.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don't know. No. Not now.”

“OK,” she said.

She had on cut-off jeans and a red shirt that left her arms and shoulders bare, and yellow flip-flops.

“That was some party last night, God, honey, it was something, my mom and her friends and my cousins will be on the phone for a month,” she said. “They think I married a very connected guy. I mean Tolya and his shoes and the Paris thing, I mean, call me Cinderella. I'm on vacation. And we're going to the shore. And then when we get down there, we can leave the kids with my mom and we can go and eat a lot of lobster and fool around, and I wanted to surprise you, there's this really great bed and breakfast, so I booked us in for a couple of nights, just us.”

“Great.”

I'd come to meet Maxine straight from Brooklyn where Sid was going slowly crazy because his half brother had died trapped under a dock. Now I was in the city, a married guy, looking to buy an apartment with my wife.

It made me content that the regular stuff never stopped, not even for death. We had talked about it, me and Max, because she saw a lot of dead people in her job, too, and she got it. I didn't have to explain.

You could be on some case so horrible that it made you puke, that made you drink too much, and gave you ulcers and kept you up all night. The next day, if you were lucky, you could lose yourself in stuff, good stuff— hanging out with friends, servicing your car, worrying about money, looking for an apartment, ordering breakfast from a waitress who knew that you liked your bagel really well toasted, returning calls, playing pick-up ball over near Sixth Avenue, eating a bucket of popcorn at the movies, or a pizza at Totonno's with Maxine.

I looked at her. She fished a pack of the mentholated smokes she loved out of her purse, then hesitated.

“You quit last week,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe I should really quit and then we could get pregnant.”

“You want that?” I was surprised. “Do you? You never said anything.”

“What about you? Artie?”

“Do you?”

“You tell me.” She sounded impatient. “I asked first. Get off the fence.”

I didn't answer. She put the cigarettes back in her purse and we walked up the river towards the building where Maxine wanted to live. I had my arm around her, and I could feel her bare soft shoulders warm from the sun.

She leaned against me, but she was already in some other place, smiling to herself, already imagining herself in the apartment. I tried to want it for her.

“Did you like the judge yesterday?” I said.

“Truth?” she said.

“Truth.”

“I kind of liked him but I didn't want to say exactly because I knew Sonny Lippert fixed it up for us, and I would have had to laugh if I said anything because the judge reminded me of, who's that actor? The one that sounds like God? James Earl Jones? The big booming voice, you know, and making us proclaim our vows very seriously and I could see the girls were cracking up. You think it's OK to laugh at your own wedding?”

“Essential, yeah, I think you have to, though how would I know?”

“I'm still hungover,” she said. “I never saw so much champagne in my life.”

“Me, too.”

“He's really something, your friend Tolya, you know, he also gave the girls presents, outfits, stuff for the beach, new bathing suits and sandals and all kinds of things, it was like we all left the party with goody bags. Santa Claus in crocodile loafers.”

I laughed. “He likes you.”

“As much as Lily?” she said softly, then added,
“Forget I said that.” We crossed West Street and walked another block, and Max got a piece of paper from her jeans pocket, looked at it, took my cigarette from me and smoked some of it.

“Which building?” I said.

“Next block.”

I had priced-out renovating my loft for the four of us, Maxine and the girls and me, and it would cost a fortune to do anything nice. The wiring wasn't great, there was only one bathroom. Maxie's place was too small. We had thought about a house in Brooklyn, and most weeks, on Saturday mornings we looked; for months we looked and eventually we found something in Bushwick that we could afford; it was still a grim area but Max said it was on its way up. We were getting ready to call the realtor and make an offer when Maxine had looked at me across her kitchen table where we were drinking wine and said, “You don't want to leave Manhattan, do you? I mean you really don't want it. It's going to kill you if you have to leave the city. Isn't it? Tell me, level with me, honey.”

“I can do it. I told you I even once thought about living in Red Hook.”

“Yeah, but you didn't, right? You can't, Artie, honey. It took you too long to get to New York, and you'll hate it, and then I'll hate it. Let's try something else.”

“What about you?”

“Why the hell do you think I went out with you? It was my chance to live in the city, right? My mother always said, you're the type of girl that will never make it out of Brooklyn, Maxine, and this is my one chance to prove she was wrong. Once in my life I want to be a
New York City girl for real. I do. In Manhattan, not some borough. I mean it.”

Maxie rarely mentioned her mother except in a practical context, babysitting, that kind of thing; she didn't really talk about her otherwise. Her father was dead. She never mentioned him at all.

Maxine was right: after twenty-five years, I didn't want to leave.

A block from the river, she stopped in front of an apartment building with a shiny pink granite façade that looked like plastic.

“Is this it?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Let's go in.”

In the lobby of the building the realtor was waiting for us; she was middle-aged, in good shape, wearing a beige pants suit; her hair was bright blonde and smooth, and her name was Sally; she was very enthusiastic.

We followed Sally into the elevator and out again and along a hallway that had beige carpeting and striped beige wallpaper that matched Sally's suit. I trailed behind her and Maxine through the empty rooms of three, four, five apartments, all of them with low ceilings and narrow windows. I tried at least to love the little balconies where, if you hung over the railing, you could glimpse the river.

In the fifth place we saw, I slid open the doors to the balcony and went outside, while behind me the two women talked about what Sally called amenities, doormen, a party room, a gym.

Out over the harbor, the sun was high and hot. Along
the river was a park and there was a bike path where a few people were out riding. A woman jogged. Another pushed a baby in a stroller. A class of elderly Chinese ladies practiced some elegant T'ai Chi exercises that looked like dancing; a couple of Chinese guys who could have been their husbands leaned against the railing and dropped fishing lines into the river and smoked.

Sid was still on my mind. He was out of town. He had gone to Long Island. He told me he was going.

It nagged at me. He had lied and maybe he was still lying, but it wasn't my case, and there was no reason to think that Sid was threatened except by his own demons, his own history.