Red Hook (25 page)

He was cool. Most people, a cop asks them where they were during the time someone they know was murdered, they get disconcerted. Alex looked at his watch.

At the end of the pier, we leaned against the low wall. I fumbled for my cigarettes in my pocket. It gave me a couple of seconds to look at Alex.

“He named you for Pushkin?” I asked.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Arms crossed, Alex stood still, waiting. He had an eerie ability to stand almost motionless; maybe it was his profession; maybe he was always waiting for the right light, the right shot. Even his face was still, but he watched you very carefully. His eyes were two different colors, one blue, the other hazel.

“So, how was it?”

He said, “Who for?”

“For you? For him? The not getting along,” I said. “The not speaking, finding him like this after so much time.”

“I gave it all up years ago,” Alex said. “I just quit caring or worrying about what he thought of me, you know?” He looked out at the boats on the water. “It's windy,” he said and shaded his eyes from the sun.

“That bad?”

“That nothing,” he said. “My father was there for everyone, he was a guy who loved the whole world, but he was too busy, too self-obsessed to care much about me. Everyone loved Sid, he would bring his young reporters to the house, he would stay up late reading their copy, he was always there for them, boys, girls, the ones he slept with, the ones he didn't sleep with. And he had these ideas of justice and truth that he couldn't break with, so if anyone strayed, you were fucked. I mean, tell a lie, he froze you out even if you were a kid. I'm talking any lie, like, you ate the Almond Joy candy bar, and you said you didn't and he found out, you got the deep freeze for days. He did it with everyone. So I went away to boarding school when I was sixteen. Up in Vermont,” he added.

“What about your mother?”

He shrugged. “What's the difference?” he said. “She died when I was in college. She drank. Quietly. I didn't even know, I thought she was always drinking glasses of water, and sitting by herself, and it was gin. She kept it in tonic bottles in the fridge. So I went back to live with
him for a while, I think I kept waiting for the redemptive moment, you know, for the good stuff to click in, the way it's supposed to. Never mind.”

“Any idea who killed him?”

We started back to Sid's. Alex threw away the remains of his joint.

“I don't know,” he said.

“You'll be around?”

“I'll be around for a few days. Few as possible. Fucking New York.”

“Yeah?”

Alex said, “Me, I love LA. I love it where I am, it's suburban and plastic and clean and the cars are fast, we have a house with a pool, the girls are pretty and people are superficial, that's what he felt, anyway, it's everything my daddy hated. I hated New York before. I hate it worse now, people, noise, everyone scared, pretending they're not scared, I feel like the whole thing could sink into the harbor and it would be no bad thing, you know? My father sold the beautiful house he grew up in, and bought an apartment in Brooklyn Heights he never used, then he sets up at this rundown warehouse.” He gestured to the building. “What's he want with Red Hook? To me it's a dump. Apparently he was obsessed with it.”

“There was a story about an old Soviet ship that ran aground here in the early 1950s,” I said. “Sid said he met some of the sailors. He said one of them never went home. He tried to find him. He wanted to write a book.”

“It sounds like one of his stories.”

“You think he made it up?”

“He didn't make things up, he was a hawk for truth. Trouble was it was his truth that mattered,” Alex said. “So you're what? You said you were a cop.”

“Yeah, but it's not my case,” I said. “I'm just someone your dad helped out once.”

He laughed bitterly. “Didn't he always.”

“How long will you be here?”

“You already asked. Until I can arrange a funeral. I have to worry about the family.”

“You talk a lot about the family. I mean, what is it?”

“I was an only child. Far as I'm concerned my father and mother probably fucked once and they got me.” He stretched his arms over his head, then let them hang loose, then cracked his knuckles, stretched again. “I get tight,” he said. “It's the job.”

“You keep talking about the family.”

“They're all very social and they do things a certain way, God help me, you don't know what I'm talking about, do you? You ever hear of the Boule Club, or the Link? Jack and Jill? The élite of African-American society?” He snorted with derision. “You should have seen the debutante balls, even when I was a teenager, all those black kids turned out in ball gowns and white tie and tails, fraternities, sororities. I ran like hell. California was my salvation. The sunshine, the movie business, be who you want to be. Everyone from somewhere else.”

For the first time, Alex cracked a smile. He bent over and touched his toes, straightened up, and said, “As long as you're good, or pretty or sharp, you can reinvent yourself in LA. You can make up your own fucking myth. Why the hell am I telling you this?”

For the first time I liked him. Like me, he'd fled somewhere else.

“Get away from what you grew up on,” I said. “The system, the rituals, the crap.”

“You said it,” Alex said and asked me for one of my cigarettes.

“Go on.”

“Did my father ever talk to you about color, I mean actual color, the whole thing about passing or not? My grandfather passed for white in order to do certain deals, but it was also about status, for a sense of who you were. They didn't quite want white babies, they wanted very light-skinned babies, and they paid a whole fucking lot of attention when every kid was born, especially the older ladies who came to look at them.” Alex stopped. “Do you understand?”

“I'm not sure. Sid talked about it a little, but go on.”

“They inspected the skin and felt the texture of the hair. People thought about skin color, you knew it from the time you were little. The women talked about it in private, the way people in some families talked about disease. Silently. Quietly. Even the texture of the hair. One old lady would say about a little girl, ‘She'll have trouble with that nappy hair.' Nappy hair, they'd say. ‘She'll have to stretch it if she can.'” Alex paused. “Everyone in my father's family was light-skinned, except him. My father came out darker. Not black, but darker than some of the others who were very light and freckled, that generation of babies, they came tumbling out some even with blond hair. So they actually laughed at him when he was little. It made me like him better
except when I found out he played the game, too, and when I started dating, I could see every girl I brought around he was looking at her color. He married a white girl, of course; except it turned out he didn't like girls. Fucked up or what?”

“Did he ever talk about his half brother, Earl?”

I noticed for the first time that there were men repairing the dock, maybe making sure no sign remained of Earl's murder. I had tried to get a copy of a police photograph of Earl, see what he looked like, didn't have much luck. For Sid's sake, I'd keep trying. I didn't figure the family kept his picture, and I wasn't surprised when Alex McKay snorted in response to my question. Weird to think if Sid had been telling the truth, and Earl looked like him, then Alex looked like Earl, too.

“You heard my aunt. No kids named Earl in the McKay household,” he said. “Listen, I have to get on the phone. I want it over and out of my life. You think he was murdered? You think it was some boy he picked up? It would sure as hell freak them out.”

“What would?”

“That it was a sex crime. Dead from a heart attack, my father would have been a McKay. Even suicide they could handle. They could say, well, Sid was a writer, you know? He was sensitive. Murder is much too sleazy. We don't have murders in our family, Alex, darling, they all said to me. That's what they'd like,” he said. “Who do you think killed him?”

“I think he was murdered because he had information that people wanted, or didn't want him to have, or didn't want him spreading around.”

“Information was all that mattered to him,” Alex said. “Or truth. Whatever. He was obsessed. In the last few years with so much news being manipulated and politicized it made him a little crazy. He kept notes on everyone who screwed with the news. He sent e-mails about it. He made people crazy. He was fired from his job. He became an old man suddenly. Sad. Everything was about justice for him and this was injustice. He believed in justice for the world, but real people, that was something else. He had a young reporter once, guy worked for him, he could do no wrong, then he fucked up, it was over. The guy begged him. Jack said, please, come on, Sid, I remember, I heard them once. It was principle. He told me as a point of pride. You know what my middle name is? Justice. Yeah.” He laughed, bitter.

“What was his name?”

“Who?”

“This reporter? This Jack?”

“Santiago,” he said. “Why?”

“They made it up? He forgave Santiago?”

“Who knows. Probably. If Santiago begged. Why do you care?”

“But they were close?”

“Yeah, they were real close. He figured Jack could be the good son.” Alex hesitated. “You know what, maybe he was. Maybe he was the good son. I spent years hating him and then I met him once, and he was OK. I have to go.”

I handed him a card with my number.

He said, “Yeah, yeah, I'll call if and when.”

“I'll let you know if we get anything.”

“Sure,” he said. “Thanks. It won't make any damn difference, but thank you.”

“Where are you staying?”

“My aunt's,” he said.

“You ever hear from Jack Santiago about Sid's death, since they were so close?”

“How would he know? We'll put the obituary in the
Times
tomorrow or the next day. We kept it quiet. Work the system. Try to get it recorded as an accident, accidental death by drowning, or some kind of genteel suicide, a man who couldn't cope. Whatever. There's no reason to contact Santiago, or for me to hear from him. “Why would I?” Alex hesitated.

“Something else?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

He looked down at his feet, then up at me. “I'm suddenly so fucking sad I didn't see him, you know?” Alex said. “I'm sorry for it, for him, and me. He wasn't bad. I miss him.”

At the inlet, the workers were sawing off pieces of the rotten dock now. The noise was jarring. It was Saturday and quiet.

Jack Santiago had been close to Sid. Jack said he had moved to Brooklyn, told me at my wedding. I was betting he lived close to Sid. I called information, but he was unlisted. I put in a call to someone who could help.

I started walking, waiting for a call back, maybe half looking for Santiago. In a studio space on the ground
floor of an old warehouse, through a door propped open with a brick, I saw a piece of beautiful blue glass on a stand. I went in and watched a man blowing more pieces. An open furnace glowed orange. He seemed to spin air on the end of a long metal rod and then he blew it and made another fantastic shape out of glass, gold this time. I bought the blue bowl for Maxine and went and put it in my car.

The park was a few blocks away on the other side of Red Hook, near the Expressway and the housing project where Rita lived. It was filled with people watching a soccer match. Little kids were out on the pitch; big-league players warmed up on the sidelines.

Latin music came from competing boom-boxes. People sat on fold-up chairs and on blankets on the grass.

On the sidewalk at the edge of the park were makeshift stalls where women set out food for sale. You could smell the meat grilling a block away. You could smell the onions and cilantro. A barbecue was loaded with yellow ears of corn roasting. There were stalls heavy with platters of tacos, tamales, fried plantains stuffed with cream, sausages and yellow rice and ribeyes and fried chicken. Everyone spoke Spanish.

Oil spit from a hot griddle where a woman was making patties out of dough, shredded pork and mozzarella. I bought one of the pupusas off her. She said she was from Salvador, but she spoke good English and I asked if she knew Rita, the Russian girl who made tamales. She shook her head. I bought a can of Coke.

At another stand, a guy was bagging chunks of papaya,
pineapple, watermelon, mango. The heap of bagged fruit grew. A little girl bought some watermelon and went away, picking pieces of the pink fruit out of the plastic bag with a plastic fork, the juice running down her chin. In a yellow shirt and satin soccer shorts, a boy of about nine marched up to a stand where bottles of colored syrup stood and bought an electric green snow cone. He went away, licking the mound of ice.

Finishing my Coke, I sat on a bench and watched, looking for Rita. I was a few blocks from the warehouses on the Red Hook waterfront, but I could have been in a different city and I was betting there was plenty of tension between the two communities; I wondered if Sid somehow got caught between them. I called about Jack Santiago's address again. There was no listing.

A little girl in a frilly pink skirt and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt putting out bowls on one stall waved at me with a yellow fork. I was wasting time. I didn't see Rita, I didn't see Jack. I didn't know how he was connected to Sid, but I wanted to talk to him. I threw away my paper plate.

Jack Santiago was plenty high by the time I found him propping up against the bar at a fancy new restaurant over in the Meat Packing District.

“Where's Val?” I said.

“In the restaurant,” he said. “Have a drink with me first.”

Valentina had told me that she liked the bars in the Meat District. When I called her in East Hampton a girl told me she'd gone back to the city. I had changed into a good shirt and clean pants and I was hoping I'd find her and Jack with her.