Red Hook (16 page)

“Get out,” he screamed at them. “Get out of here. Private property,” he shouted, pointing to a battered sign that hung on some chain-link fencing.

The men in the kayak looked at him and each other and then at me. I was a few feet away. I went over to the fat guard and took out my badge and shoved it in his face.

“I don't remember anyone owning the river,” I said. “I don't remember this being private property.”

“It's fucking private property now,” the guard said.

“Whose property? Who hired you?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Some company. Listen, I get eight bucks an hour to make sure no one ties up any boats around here, so that's what I do.”

“What company?”

Reaching in his pocket, he backed off, found a card, tossed it at me. “These people,” he said, and scrambled back into his toy car and buzzed off.

“Hey, thank you,” said one of the men in the kayak. “Thanks.”

I said, “That kind of thing happen a lot?”

He said, “All the time now. People are fighting over property out here like crazy. They want to put in a cruise ship terminal. They want to put up parking lots. You get a decent developer who wants to make it nice, plant some trees, someone else comes and tries to screw with it. You get them fighting. You get other people
squeezed. You get people who figure they own the place because they been here, even if they didn't do anything to fix it up, and others who figure they own it because they arrived the day before yesterday. New York. We're killing each other for a place to live,” he added.

I said, “You know Sidney McKay?”

The second man looked up. “Sure,” he said. “Everyone knows Sid. He comes and goes, but we see him once in a while at the bar over on Van Brunt. On the water once in a while. He had a nice little boat. Nifty little sailboat,” he added. “Swedish, I think.”

“It had a name?”

“Who?”

“The boat?”

“Can't remember,” the other guy said, and waved and they paddled away and I went back to my car.

By the time I got through to the number on Sid's machine, I was already on my way back to the city. The number belonged to Sonny Lippert and I had given it to Sid in case of emergency.

I wasn't back in Manhattan and inside Sonny Lippert's apartment thirty seconds before he told me Sid had been beat up and was in a coma, next door to dead. No chance, Sonny said, and I turned and made back for the door.

It was my fault. I should have acted. Sid was scared; Sid knew someone was after him. He told me whoever was after him went for Earl by mistake and now they had gone after Sid.

“There's nothing you can do, man,” Sonny said. “He's in the hospital. He's hooked up to every fucking life support. His family is there. There are people on this. Sit down. You knew Sidney McKay, from a long time ago, you told him he could get me at home, right, man? It was you gave him my number.”

I said, “What are the chances he'll come out of it?”

“No chance. One in ten million. One in a hundred million,” Sonny said.

“How did it happen?”

Sonny was on the balcony of his apartment, sitting on
a green canvas chair, drinking tomato juice. He had moved here after his divorce, and it was a depressing place, the leather and tweed bachelor furniture that looked rented, the desolate little balcony where he sat and read and thought about his childhood in Brooklyn.

He held the glass of red juice and examined it with distaste as if it were blood; he was coughing like he would spit out his lungs. Emphysema, the doctor told him. Bad heart. Bad lungs. The machinery rusting, he had said. Like the docks out by Red Hook. Like the sugar refinery that had burned and twisted and rusted.

“You called him? You knew?” I stood over him.

“Sit down. Yeah, I called him. He called me, he left me a message yesterday, but I didn't call back until this morning. I was too late. And how the hell did you get my message off his machine, by the way? You were at his place? You're on this case? What? Sit the fuck down, man, there's nothing you can do for him.”

“He's not going to make it?”

“I told you: no.”

“How did you hear?”

“Someone from the hospital called me. Someone found my number on Sid. Piece of paper in his pocket.”

“How did it happen?” I leaned into Sonny's face, my skin drenched with sweat. Sid had been attacked. He was in a coma. He was dying. I was involved. “What hospital?”

“Give me a cigarette,” Sonny said and I tossed him the pack.

“Sid said he didn't have much time. He said to me, please come. Please hurry. Then he said he was going
out of town. He was a lot more scared than I took it, he knew he was in trouble. I just figured some of it for his getting old,” I said.

Sonny snorted. “Yeah, well, aren't we all, man.” Barefoot, in khaki shorts and a white polo shirt, Sonny was so thin he looked almost like a boy, except for his face; his face was an old man's now.

“You better lay it out for me, Artie, man,” Sonny added and I sat down on a yellow canvas chair next to him.

“Look, Sid called me Saturday night about some homeless guy he said was stalking him. Calls again the next morning,” I said. “The guy's dead in Red Hook, trapped under a dock practically next door to where Sid has an office. I went Sunday morning. He had some crazy fucking story about how someone was after him and they killed the homeless guy by mistake, then he changed his mind. I went again yesterday. I owed Sid, I gave him your number in case he needed anything. He was scared, and I gave it to him. I was going to be working the convention and going away to meet Maxine at the shore and I wanted Sid to have someone to call.”

“You didn't want to share that with me, that you gave McKay my home number?”

“I'm sorry. It was stupid.”

The apology worked. It was what Sonny needed from me, and seeing him like that, seeing him small in his chair, I didn't mind. Also I needed his help with Sid. For years I had hated it, the way Sonny told people he had invented me, that he got me my first good job, that he
used me because I could speak languages and wear a nice suit, that I was his creature. I had hated it but Maxine made me see it didn't mean squat, that it was just talk. Now I felt sorry for him. I sat down and tried not to look at my watch again.

I said, “Listen, the baseball, it was great. Place of honor in my house, Sonny. I mean, honest to God. You didn't talk to Sid at all, is that what you're saying?”

“I never talked to him. He called me. I called him back, but it was too late. They found his body out near the docks, over by the Gowanus Canal where there are still some shipyards working, you know where I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone tossed him in the water near a wrecked boat, a burned-out boat nobody used for years. An old ferry boat, I think. Staten Island Ferry.”

“Go on.”

“So they pushed him in, and somehow his clothes got caught on a rusty anchor, something like that, I don't know, from boats, but it caught him, and he hung from below the water level. You get it?”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“They found my number on him when they got him in the hospital,” Sonny said. “You have anything on the first murder, the guy who was stalking McKay?”

“How do you know it was a murder?”

“You think I didn't check, man? You think I'm that useless? It looks like a murder, and I'm betting you know that, too, so how was McKay connected?”

“He found the guy.”

Sonny said, “Sid's in the hospital, Methodist, over by Cobble Hill. They brought him in worse than dead. Someone beat him over the head with some kind of metal bar, rusted, a piece out of some machine by the docks. Someone picked up a metal plank and hit him and there were metal splinters sticking out of his skull. Then they dragged him on to that boat.”

“Christ,” I said, remembering Sid told me someone beat Earl over the head with a wood plank before he went into the water. It was as if they were using pieces of the old docks to murder people who got in the way, but in the way of what?

I stood up.

“Wait.”

“What for? I have to go to work and then I'm going out to see Sid.”

“You can't help him.”

“Then help me.”

“Sit down,” Sonny said.

My skin was crawling. Someone had attacked Sid the same way they attacked his half brother, Earl; they beat him and then they pushed him off a rotting dock in Red Hook. I needed Sonny's help, so I sat on the edge of the canvas chair and tried to listen. He was wandering the way he did these days, drifting back to his childhood.

“When I was a kid they used to train up the Murder Inc. guys out there by Red Hook, you know, it was their training camp, man, they ran the place, all of them, but this is fifty fucking years ago, when the Jewish mob ran it, and Italians, too, the longshoremen were tough as nails and their union was corrupt as fuck, we're talking
the old days. You ever see
On the Waterfront,
man? It was just like that, it really fucking was, and us kids we were never allowed out there, never, but we were like interested in the gangster thing, I mean, you were a Jewish kid in Brooklyn, it was baseball players and gangsters even if your mother said so be a doctor, you know?

I went out there once, a year back, nothing there except some lousy housing projects and a few yuppies making art or something, you know, and a lot of developers with itchy fingers, right?” Sonny picked up his juice. “I wouldn't go near the place, who the fuck wants to live in a dump like that? So I was surprised when some cop called me about my number being on Sid and I can't remember now if I told him Sid had left me a message. I'm not remembering too good these days, and I thought I called Sid back. Too late. I was vague, man, and you know the worst fucking thing, Art, man, I know it. I'm losing it and I know. I can read. I can read fine, Melville still makes sense to me, Tolstoy, Conrad, all the big bastards I always loved, but I can't make sense of anything around me. You think I'm crazy? I want a drink. I wish I called him in time.”

No one got back to Sid in time, I thought.

Sonny stared at me, and for a minute I wondered if he knew who I was, and then he smiled the old calculating sardonic smile, and said, “So, Artie, man, if Sid McKay was one of your pals, how come I didn't see him at your wedding?”

I needed Sonny's input because, however crazy he was getting, he knew his way around the city's network
of law enforcement, especially in Brooklyn which was always a foreign country no matter how many cases I worked there.

“I think we're all crazy these days, Sonny,” I said, as gently as I could and looked at my watch.

“You're in a hurry? You're working the Garden? Republican Convention in New York City. They're really milking it, man, all of it. War on Terror, load of horseshit, you know, the way they're doing it. I mean why didn't they just hold the fucking convention at Ground Zero? Drink one with me.”

I nodded.

Sonny went inside and came back out on the balcony with a couple of glasses in one hand and a bottle in the other. He looked at the Johnnie Walker, and said, “I used to love a Scotch called King's Ransom, can't get it anymore.”

He poured the Scotch. On the path down near the river, a few people were jogging. Sailboats were out on the smooth water, puffed up with humid wind. I could see the building where Maxine wanted us to live.

“You like it over here?” I said to Sonny.

“It's OK. Why?”

“Maxine wants to move here.”

“We could be neighbors,” Sonny said, sipping his drink. “Be nice to her, man. Maxine is a good girl.”

“You been to the doctor lately, Sonny?”

Sonny shrugged and looked over the railing of his balcony at the people on the path by the river.

“You know how many people in this city are on drugs, legal, illegal, or all boozed up?” he asked. “The
developers say New York is back, man, let's build some more skyscrapers, let's build a Westside stadium, let's make it great. Weird isn't it how all the yups want to live down here, look at them, jogging and biking and bouncing up and down there on that path by the river, and keeping real fit, look at them go, Artie, all those girls with their tits bouncing up and down, and the financial guys coining it, half the city's terrified of losing out on a good apartment downtown and the other half is terrified of getting hit again, and coughing their fucking lungs out. Asbestos, all the other shit that came out of the Trade Center, makes you think about what we get every fucking day, our buildings killing us. Freon, neon, asbestos, you know how many neon lights got crunched up when the planes hit, how much crap we're ingesting, stuff I never heard of, asbestos, who-the-fuck-knowstos?” He laughed. “But the real estate prices just keep going uppity up, man.” He gazed out at the boats. “New York Waterways, who run the boats to and from Jersey, the Staten Island Ferry people, you hear they're going bust? Everyone's so high on the waterfront. I hear they're fucking going bust, man, and no one mentions it.”

He had always been angry, but it was worse now that he was semi-retired; before, Sonny's ambition drove him, it made him cunning and kept him alive. He had too much time now. He got up again, went into the living room, put on a CD, an old Art Blakey album.

Back in his chair, eyes glazed, he jiggled his feet, beating out a rhythm on the arms of his chair. I was impatient. I started to get up.

“Sit down and fucking listen,” he said.

He loved jazz, which was the good side of Sonny; he had always loved the style; he had cast himself years before as a kind of 50s hipster, and once, when we'd been out late on a job and got drunk afterwards, we went to some club where Max Roach was playing. Roach was the coolest man alive, one of the last of the bebop greats. Sonny just looked at him, in thrall, and then I heard him whisper: “Smoking.” I had tried to forget about it. Finger-popping daddy-o, right Sonny? Right, he had said that night, that's me, man.