They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee (12 page)

“The next time you ask a question, make sure you're ready to hear the answer.”

He hung up before I could say another word. I tried in vain to muster some enthusiasm for going to Cyclone Ridge with MacClough. Giving up, I rang John's room and begged out. He said he understood and that I would probably have just gotten in his way. He was right. In the shape I was in, I was of no use to anyone, particularly myself. I closed my eyes and, more out of the need for escape than exhaustion, I fell deeply into dreamless sleep.

I got up around noon and noticed the message light on my phone was flashing red. I buzzed the desk. Kira had stopped by to say she would see me tonight around 8:00. I didn't like it. It didn't feel right. She had always played the guessing game with me; would she show up or wouldn't she? Why, I wondered, the change in tactics. Maybe she wanted to show me how much I was missed. Maybe she got paid extra for that.

Without trying to lose my entourage, I took a walk about campus and asked around for Guppy. Like Valencia Jones, everyone seemed to know about Guppy's reputation. No one seemed to know him or how to get in touch with him. Guppy was the kind of guy who gets in touch with you. One kid told me that he had heard that Guppy lived in the tunnels beneath campus. I asked the kid if he had taken his meds today.

Having struck out on my hunt for the great Guppy, I went over to the Riversborough public library and sat down with a copy of my first book,
Coney Island Burning.
Ich! It was really hard reading my own work, especially the early stuff. So I read the liner notes and hoped I would get whatever it was Larry Feld had hinted at. They went like this:

While looking into the suspicious death of an old basketball buddy, insurance investigator Wyatt Rosen finds himself trapped in a racial firestorm. With New York City's African-American community ready to explode, Rosen, along with his best friend—ex-NYPD detective Timmy O'Shea—race against the clock to prove his old friend's murder was a crime of passion, not police brutality.

In their quest, Rosen and O'Shea are forced to enlist an unlikely cast of characters including a radical black preacher, a Hasidic rabbi and a reformed underworld hitman. Rosen and O'Shea spend as much of their time juggling the diverse agendas and personalities of their team as they do fighting against the political and social forces aligned against them.

Rosen and O'Shea lock horns with Janson Whitehurst, an ambitious assistant district attorney who will stop at nothing to further his career, and his band of loyal toadies. There is nonstop action as O'Shea goes undercover to weed out the bad cop whose greed and carelessness opened this Pandora's box of ill-gotten gains, backroom deals and murder.

Along the way, Rosen runs into his first love and desperately seeks to rekindle the romance he had turned his back on years ago. Come for the ride as O'Shea confronts the man he is convinced is responsible for the death of his former partner, Jack Spinner, but who may also hold the fate of the city in his grasp.

At its core,
Coney Island Burning
is a hard-boiled novel with a 90s edge . . .

I didn't get it, not right away. I braced myself and began turning past the title page, past the copyright, past the dedication and acknowledgments to the first chapter. Then, I'm not certain I know what made me do it, but I turned back to the dedication and acknowledgments. And there were their names, separated by only a few lines:

“For my brothers, Jeffrey and Josh, who showed me that heroes can have clay feet and still stand tall.

I would like to thank my friend and technical advisor, John MacClough, for his inspiration and support.”

I tried remembering the date of the Boatswain kidnap ping. March of '72, I seemed to recall. That would put my assistant district attorney brother and uniformed police officer John MacClough in the Bronx at the same time. They had never actually denied knowing each other. I had always just assumed they did not and they let me assume. I wanted to believe I was simply jumping to conclusions, that they
had
never met before I introduced them, but I knew it wasn't so. Larry Feld was a lot of things, but inaccurate wasn't one of them. There had to be a connection.

In my head, I ran through the parts of the plot of
Coney Island Burning
I could remember. Other than the obvious and superficial resemblance between my brother and the A.D.A. in my book, I was at a— That's when it hit me; MacClough had suggested the character of Janson Whitehurst, the corrupt A.D.A. He wasn't my invention. I tried recalling the other sections of the book John had suggested. Feverishly, I thumbed through the pages to the section where a dirty cop tortures information out of and then kills a drug dealer:

“. . . hit him again and again in the kidneys with a tightly rolled newspaper. Gonzales stubbornly refused to give in, furiously shaking his head no.

“Tough spic, huh? Big
cojones.
Okay, macho man,” Murphy said, patting his prisoner affectionately on the cheek. “We'll see about that.”

Murphy reached not for his service revolver, but pulled up his pant leg to reveal a short-barrel .38. Smiling broadly, he unholstered the gun from his ankle, pulled back the hammer and put the barrel to Gonzales's temple. Murphy loosened the gag in the dealer's mouth and let it fall to the floor. Gonzales gasped for air.

“
Agua
,” he coughed, “water.”

“Here's something to put in your mouth.” Murphy snapped Gonzales' head back by yanking on his thick, black ponytail and moved the gun barrel from his prisoner's temple into his mouth. He began to count: “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.

“Okay, okay,” Gonzales relented, sweat pouring down his face.

Murphy pulled the barrel back slightly so Gonzales could speak more clearly. “Go ahead, spic.”

“The money is in employee locker 12 in Nathans' back room.”

“You bullshitting me,
pendejo
?”

“I'm in no position to bullshit you.”

Murphy smiled again. “I guess you're right.”

As Gonzales began to smile with relief, Murphy shoved the .38 back into the dealer's mouth and calmly blew his brains out the rear of his skull. Murphy wiped the gun clean, untied the dead man's hands and wrapped the fingers of Gonzales' right hand around the handle of the little .38.

Using an untraceable second gun to make an unrighteous kill or just plain murder look like suicide was a time-honored trick. You wouldn't find the second gun trick in any manual or textbook, but it was one of those things old school cops learned before they ever set foot out of the academy.

Murphy continued the setup, wiping the whole house clean of his prints and making sure he took the rope, the gag and the newspaper with him. He really wasn't worried about getting prosecuted, not with his connection in the D.A.'s office. In a day or two, Murphy would drop a dime and make like an anonymous tipster. By that time, no one would connect him to Gonzales' death.”

I was nauseous. MacClough had nearly dictated that part of the book to me. It seemed so real to me then, I hardly played with it. Now I knew there was a good reason for that. I could feel myself getting dizzy.

“You all right, sir?” A librarian shook me by the shoulder. “You don't look well.”

I didn't answer. I stood up and stumbled up a half flight of stairs. When I looked back, I noticed the librarian studying my picture on the rear of the dust jacket. I smiled. It was a hollow smile.

After wandering around snowy Riversborough, I found myself drinking coffee in the coffee house I'd gone to with Kira a few days before. It seemed like quite a long time ago to me now. I laughed at myself, but no one was there to hear it. The waiter was in the back and there were no bongos or bad poetry at this hour of the day. I read the graffiti carved into the table for entertainment.

“Excuse me,” a melodic voice interrupted my reading, “but I was wondering if I might have a seat with you? I do not enjoy my afternoon tea alone and you look so much like a friend of mine.”

“I do?” I said, looking up into the dark, sweet face of a man of undetermined years. His hair was shiny and black, as were his eyes. I thought he might be Indian or Pakistani, maybe an Arab. “Sure, have a seat. What's your friend's name?”

“Oh,” he smiled and sat, “that is of no matter. He is lost to me and speaking his name will not bring him back.”

“Don't I know it.”

“You too have lost someone?” he wondered.

“I hope not. I'm still looking.”

“That is as it should be. Keep searching. A man searching may find many things, unexpected things.”

“Some unexpected things can kill a man.”

“Maybe so,” my table mate agreed. “But they can enrich him as well.”

“I didn't catch your name.” I put my hand out. “Dylan Klein.”

He shook my hand, his eyes checking his watch. “Oh dear, look at the time. I must excuse myself.”

“Hey, what about your tea?” I called after him.

“Tea, I never drink the stuff. Keep searching. Maybe you will find my friend as well. Good day to you.” He hurried out the door.

Pretty bizarre, I thought, pretty fucking bizarre, but why should afternoon coffee be any different from the rest of my life? When the waiter came to refill my cup, I described my philosophical friend and asked if he knew the man.

“Sounds like Rajiv Gupta,” the waiter said without hesitation. “He's a clerk over at the campus bookstore. Nice guy.”

“Guppy!” I said aloud, but to myself. “Everybody's got clues but no answers.”

A Children's Book

I walked some more, made a second stop at the library, and headed back to the inn with the moon rising over my shoulder. Hesitating outside the door, I blew a good-night kiss to my escorts in the blue minivan. I was almost getting used to having them around. Truth was, they had kept their distance today, not interfering with me as I strolled the Riversborough campus hunting for Guppy. Maybe they were waiting for me to slug a lady professor. I could see no one on the street fitting the descriptions MacClough had given me of the ski dude or the federal agent. Then again, they were trying not to be seen.

“Dylan!” Kira rushed up to me, hugging me. “God, I've missed you.”

And for a second, I lit up. My heart raced. My cheeks warmed. I could feel the smile on my face. In spite of everything I knew about her, it was undeniable that part of me missed her as well. Not all of me though. I felt my smile harden, the blood rushing out of my face.

“Is everything all right?” she wondered, trying to look through me. “You don't seem yourself.”

“No,” I said, “I'm not all right.”

Jesus, she was good. Her voice quivered: “Is it Zak?”

“No, it's not Zak. I just found out today that a friend I thought I knew, I didn't really know at all.”

And the moment I spoke the words, I wanted to take them back. But like my mom used to say, once the words leave your mouth, you're no longer their master. It was the only truly wise thing she had ever said. I had been speaking of MacClough, of course, though Kira could have interpreted my words as meant for her. If she had taken it that way, her face didn't betray her.

“I'm sorry,” she said right on cue.

Trying to assure her that my words were not a warning, I pulled her by the hand into the ever-vacant guest lounge. Making sure that we were alone, I kissed her deeply. While pulling her hair back with my left hand, I slipped my right into her coat, under her sweater, and began massaging her left nipple. It hardened and I wondered how she had learned to fake that. She clamped her legs around my tight thigh and began sliding her groin up and down the length of my upper leg. Finally, she clamped down hard and shook the both of us.

And then, oddly, as if trying to convince me of her genuine attraction, she pulled my hand out of her sweater and pushed it onto the wet crotch of her blue jeans. She waited a few seconds before urging my fingers into her mouth. I no longer had any doubt why her employers had picked her to get close to me. The desk clerk said they paid the girls across the border a C-note and a half. I was willing to bet she came more dearly.

“I missed you, too,” I confessed. “And I'd like more than anything to take you upstairs and let you wear me out, but . . . It's gotta be tomorrow night. I'm sorry. There's just some stuff I've got to work out by myself.”

Not wanting to overplay her hand, she said, “I understand. I'm sorry that you've been hurt.”

“I'll live.”

“I hope so.” She winked. “Be in your room tomorrow night and maybe I will come.”

I walked her out to the lobby. My thousand dollar friend at the front desk was trying too hard to ignore us; whistling, checking and rechecking the empty mail slots. I wanted to smack him. As I leaned over to kiss Kira, I noticed John's image reflected in the glass door. I could make out his rugged features perfectly: the twinkling blue eyes, the crooked smile, the square jaw. Over the past decade, I had come to know his face as well as my own. Somehow that face looked different to me tonight there in the glass, but it wasn't MacClough who had changed. John MacClough had had nearly a quarter century to live with what he had done. I had lived with it for only a few hours.