Brooklyn Bones Read online

  I have a place to stay, I know you are wondering, and yes I’m eating enough too. Stopped taking my vitamins, too expensive. Sorry.

  Hi to daddy. Don’t worry.

  And in the same hand, a note on paper decorated with a kitten:

  Hi, Debbie

  How’s everything in high school? I’m done with that shit. Met some kids who are starting a band (you bet, interesting substances around, as I know you are wondering), and they live together like a commune. Does that just blow your mind, your little hick friend in a commune? Picture this—it’s not like a movie with tall buildings, it’s a funny, falling down house with lots of stairs, and most of the rooms are painted PURPLE. With swirly glow—in—the dark designs. Too beautiful and strange. I stay with them and clean up instead of paying rent. Think of me when you’re waving those pom-poms. Ha-ha.

  Love from your sis in crime.

  On another kitten page:

  Dear mom and dad

  Getting cold here. Could use some of my winter clothes. I’m in New York, but don’t try to find me. You won’t be able to, and you’d hate it, it’s a big, busy place, not much like home. That’s why I like it. Send my stuff to GPO-Times Square. Having so much fun and my eyes are opening up to the whole magic of the universe. Love, me

  There was a sketched yin/yang symbol next to her signature, and no more hearts in the text.

  I saw that the handwriting was changing, too, wandering across the page, shaky and sloppy. Was she really having so much fun? Was she really eating well? I imagined her growing thin and waif-like, her eyes wide with the visions her new life was giving.

  I could not bear to look at this sad material any longer. This was supposed to distract me from obsessing about Rick, but it had only substituted a different heartache. I needed to stop, right then and there.

  I needed lunch too, but before that I needed something else. I called camp, reaching out to my own child. I wasn’t worried about her. This was for me.

  The camp secretary said she had seen Chris leaving the dining room, chattering away in a gang of girls. Did I want her pulled out of oil-painting class to talk to me? They normally did not allow that, but the director had put Chris on a list of exceptions. No, I said, that’s fine. I said it wasn’t important enough to alarm her. And it wasn’t.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It wasn’t as comforting as hearing her voice, but I could picture Chris in a smock covered with smears of paint, concentrating fiercely on her work in class, or giggling with Mel and other friends. Their faces were a blur, because I did not know them, but I could imagine their voices, and I was comforted.

  I headed out to the nearest coffee shop and took the Pastores’ albums along for lunchtime company. I had talked to the Pastores because I still I had some vague ideas about clues to the mystery in my own house, but the albums of unsophisticated snap shots turned out to be a time machine, bringing me a time and a place with touching immediacy. Someone in the family must have loved that simple camera.

  Here was the older Mr. Pastore, Uncle Sal, stopped at work and posing with a smile. In a series of pictures, he seemed to be updating the house, covering the pressed tin ceilings with 1970s-modern dropped ceiling acoustic tile, re-facing the wood kitchen cabinets with Formica, laying wall-to-wall carpeting over the parquet floors. I flinched at the aesthetic choices, but could not miss how proud he looked.

  Here were holidays, like the Christmas pictures Mrs. Pastore had shown me. Easter with lilies on the table, Thanksgiving with turkey and lasagna, and lots of people squeezed around the table. Older men and little boys in suits and ties, women in prim dresses covered with frilly aprons, little girls in crinolines and hair bows, teenage girls in tiny miniskirts and heavy mascara, with crosses around their necks.

  Here were block parties, too. One of them had a tiny carousel and another had pony rides. And here was my house on a few occasions, with a group of intensely scruffy young people sitting on the steps. Masses of hair obscured faces, both male and female. T-shirts and cut off jeans. Bare feet. Perhaps they were not scruffy, they were being fashionable.

  I was attaching tabs to page after page. This was a living block preserved in amber at a moment in time. I started to imagine a display with questions: what does this tell you?

  I went back to the pages Mrs. Pastore had shown me first, the party for cousin Marco’s return from Viet Nam. First, there were pre-party pictures: a careful photo of the refreshment table, with its carved watermelon cornucopia spilling fruit salad out on onto a tray; the Virgin Mary shrine in the corner, with a bouquet of flowers in front of it; the grape arbor festooned with balloons.

  Then it looked as if the whole street turned out for the party. There seemed to be guests of all ages, even a few firemen in gear. Oh, right, there used to be a fire station on the corner, long since turned into an elegant private home. I imagined Uncle Sal as the kind of man who stopped to say hello to firemen, petted their dogs, and brought over pastry from Mrs. Sal. He would have said, “Stop in at the party. Everyone’s invited!”

  The roaming photographer caught some small girls hiding under a table with a large bowl of candy and a collection of dolls set up in a circle, and a lively argument among some old men under the arbor. What were they arguing about? The Yankees? The war? Frank Sinatra? I did not see the hippies from my house in any of the party pictures in the album, but here were some more, loose photos stuck into the album binding but not mounted.

  Here was the front of the house again, with the banner welcoming PFC Pastore back home, but this one included part of my house too. There was a large anti-war poster in the window. It seemed to show men in uniform with blood dripping from their hands but it was hard to be sure, as it was X-ed out with black marker in the photo. Next to it, someone had written “What nerve!” So all was not neighborly good will on the block after all. I definitely wanted that one for my display.

  On the next page, we were back in the garden. There were some young cops in uniform, burgers in one hand, drinks in the other. One was hoisting a bottle to salute the cameraman. There were some young couples with a familiar look. Those little boys they were feeding, were they occasional visitors back to the block, people I had met, now with children of their own?

  Everything in the albums looked familiar, known yet different, as if in a dream. I wanted more detail and wondered if I had a magnifying glass somewhere. Slogans on t-shirts, writing on posters, what were the flowers in front of the Virgin, what kind of dolls were the little girls feeding? I wanted to know it all.

  I had finished my lunch and the coffee shop was crowded. I needed to give up my booth and move on. This had been a pleasant break from Leary’s files but I had not forgotten about them. I checked for my phone messages when I left the coffee shop. No Leary. I was going right over to his apartment to pound on his door until he let me in.

  Mary accosted me on my way to my car. I hadn’t seen her in awhile.

  “Well, Mrs. Um-um —um. Where have you been, and how is your lovely daughter these days?”

  “She’s fine. She’s still away at camp, having a good time.” I edged away as I spoke, anxious to go on about my business. Anxious not to get trapped in one of Mary’s meandering conversations.

  “Ya, camp is good. Best to be away from here. Glad to see you. I was thinking about you the other day. You and something else. No, someone else. It was…it was…Aha, I got it. The man who brings you pizza? The tall guy?”

  Who was she talking about? It took me a minute to realize it must be Rick. She was out on the block that night, when he came with two big pizza boxes. The last time at my house. I didn’t think I’d tell her the rest.

  “He’s been on my mind, but I couldn’t think why. Nice looking fella, he was, but too young for me and too old for you.” She winked, then shook her head. “I dunno. The rest will come to me sometime. You know
what I mean?”

  Then she shuffled off on her mysterious business and I hustled off on mine.

  I got into Leary’s building by doing a convincing imitation of a resident who had misplaced her keys. Someone else unlocked the door and held it open for me without a second glance. It helps to be small, mature, white, and female.

  I switched off leaning on his doorbell and pounding on his door, until I finally heard sounds of movement inside.

  “It’s Erica Donato. I’ve been trying to reach you.” I took a deep breath and added, “Let me in. I’ll stand here shouting until you do.”

  “You’ve been trying to reach me?” There was no mistaking that slurred surly voice. “All right, all right, hold your horses.”

  I heard multiple locks clicking and the door finally opened. He looked even worse than last time I saw him, if that was possible. “Welcome to my palace. What do you want?”

  I went in before he could change his mind. “I have questions.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You bet. You send me material you don’t explain and then you don’t answer my calls.”

  “You’re not the only one.” He shook his head. “I can’t understand it but I’ve spent the last few days fighting off people with questions. Where am I now? What am I doing these days? No one I need to talk to. They’re all insects crawling out of the woodwork.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Oh, did I offend you?” He chuckled. I guess it was a chuckle. With him, it was hard to tell.

  “You sent me all that material and I didn’t have a chance to look at it until today. It was great, and thank you, but it only raised more questions. I can’t use it for my work without getting some answers.”

  “Make it worth my while.”

  “Money? You know we talked about that before.”

  “Ah, what the hell? I haven’t been out of here in…” He shrugged. “It’s been some days.” He chuckled. “If you’re chauffeuring, you can run me over to Prospect Park. I haven’t seen that zoo in a couple of lifetimes. You up for that?”

  “If you’ll answer my questions I’ll even take you for a ride on the carousel.”

  “Damn. I didn’t know that was up and running again.” His voice changed. “I remember that from…ah, forget about that. Get me out of here. I need that bag, over there, with my gear, and we can blow this dump.”

  He lived diagonally across the vast park from my neighborhood, only a few blocks off the end of the park I seldom got to. I could have walked there in the time it took us to get him out of the building, into the car, and then out again.

  His behavior hadn’t changed any, and neither had he. He didn’t look well. His complexion was even pastier than last time and there were dark circles under his eyes. When I asked him about it, he dismissed my questions with an irritable wave of his hand.

  He complained about how slow I was getting him out of the apartment and into the car, criticized my driving, argued about which path to follow into the park. I bought him some popcorn and ignored every annoying thing he said.

  We never did get to the zoo. The tinkling music of the carousel called to us. It is a brilliantly painted confection of Victorian art and today there was an ecstatically shrieking group of day campers, all in yellow t-shirts, riding around and around.

  I settled myself on a bench with Leary’s chair braked next to me, and we both enjoyed the cheerful scene for a few minutes. At least I did. Though cheerfulness never seemed an acceptable approach for Leary, he did say, “I haven’t seen this since…hell, must be decades. A bunch of decades.”

  “I can’t imagine you riding a carousel,”

  “Humph. You don’t know much about me. Don’t know anything, really.”

  I took a deep breath. “I know you sent me some very interesting and very old papers.”

  “You call thirty years or so very old? Ha. Shows you’re just a kid yourself. Well, all right. A deal’s a deal and here we are in the park. What do you want to know?’

  “Everything. And I’m sure you know it, too! What do you mean by being so mysterious?”

  I could swear he was grinning, ever slightly, but he just said wearily, “Not mysterious. Tired. Once I’d found that stuff, I wasn’t up to writing anything about it. And I wasn’t up to another visit from you either—all that talking!—so I just shipped it off. My home aide did it. Figured you’d find me if you wanted more.”

  “I did, and I do. So give. Where did it come from? And what does it mean?”

  “You wanted to know about what it was like back then, when the neighborhoods and everything else seemed to be cracking apart like an earthquake? That would be the early ‘70s.”

  “Go on.”

  “There was kind of an epidemic of kids running away. Part of that whole turn on, tune in, drop out deal. Some of them ended up in New York. Some of them had parents looking for them. So I sent that stuff for you to get a look at was going on.”

  “Leary! Not good enough. You know I can’t use this in an exhibit, not without some back up info, some kind of verification. Sheesh. I’m supposed to be a scholar, ya know? Where did you get them? Did you know the kids? Or wait —wait! Did you know the parents?”

  “Yes, sometimes, to both.” He nodded. “I knew cops, and the cops knew I knew neighborhoods, so when some of these parents showed up, looking for the kids, looking for help, sometimes I got to talk to them. The cops called me. And you know, some of those parents were stone hard s.o.b.s. You could see why the kids flew. But some were kind of sad. They’d have pictures—kids in braces, in Little League outfits, in ballet clothes—and these notes the kids wrote, the only clues they had for trying to find them. Plain, desperate, hick kind of people—you know, like midwesterners or from upstate little towns—who had no clue what happened to their kids at home and even less about what might have happened here.”

  “Nothing good, I bet.”

  He nodded again. “The ones that stuck around and kept looking, they started to figure out what might have happened to them. Then they were really scared. There’s a few of those parents I never forgot, even with all the garbage I’ve seen. Some things get stuck in your head for no special reason.”

  I cringed at the picture he was drawing for me. “Did any of them ever find their kids?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. And there were special phone lines by then, you know, that offered to call the parents for the kids, gauging if they’d be welcome home. And if the kids even wanted to go back. Course sometimes they found the kids in other ways.” He shook his head. “Dead. Addicts. In the prostitute life. And not even wanting out any more, sometimes. Some never did find them. Most gave up and went home after awhile. I’d hear from them every so often. Or hear about them. Still looking, years later.”

  I was speechless. There were tears in my throat. Then I had to make myself stop being a mom and go back to being a scholar asking questions. “I thought it was mostly in places like the East Village? Or Times Square, heaven help them, in the sleazy old days?”

  “Yep. But like I told you before, there were some little hippy enclaves in Brooklyn neighborhoods too. And I always figured some of those houses had runaways. I saw kids way too young to be on their own, going in and out. Or they might have been buying drugs. Could have been both. Couple of times I even walked distraught midwesterners around, watched while they rang doorbells carrying pictures of their lost children.”

  “Why didn’t you write that story?”

  “I did write pieces of it. Other people were covering it too, and after awhile it stopped being news. I moved on.”

  He had his head back as he spoke, eyes closed, as if he was too weary to keep talking. Or was he avoiding looking at me?

  I said, slowly, “Are you telling me that’s who our skeleton might be? One of those kids?”

  He sh
rugged. “Add up the evidence. You’re smart enough to do that.”

  I had an idea. “I have some photos from about that time. Would you want to take a look, see if they jump-start any memories? They’re in my bag. I didn’t want to leave them in the car.”

  “Why not? Nothing to lose.”

  He began to leaf through the albums, making little noises to himself and chuckling at times. He stopped at the photo of my house with a gang of youngsters on the steps.

  “This is your house? It looks kind of familiar. There were a bunch of group rentals on that block, students or hippies or drug dealers. Whatever. Run-down crummy places and a landlord who’d rent to anyone. It didn’t exactly generate a lot of good will with the other folks on the block. That was Rogow. That s.o.b. Did you read those clips?” He shook his head. “I’ve got some memories there, all right. He hated my guts.”

  “You knew him? In person? Not just as a subject?”

  “I’m proud to say I was one of the people who helped send him to jail. You didn’t know that?”

  “I knew you wrote about him.”

  “He could have written the how-to book on being a criminal landlord. Every building he owned was a danger to life or health. He didn’t care. He was getting rich. That daughter of his followed in his footsteps later.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You don’t mean she was a slumlord too? I’ve met her, and that seems pretty unlikely to me.”

  “Well, these days, yes. Then? Different story.”

  “But she claimed not to know anything about the Brooklyn business.”

  He looked at me as if I had “gullible” written on my forehead. Maybe I did.

  “She and I had a few run-ins over the years. Actually,” he said with some satisfaction, “she hates my guts too.”

  He squinted at the photos some more and said, “Hand me my bag. I want my magnifying glass.”

  “You carry a magnifying glass?” I thought, how useful. Exactly what I had wanted earlier.

  “You didn’t know diabetes screws up your eyesight? I carry it with my insulin and needles.” His expression became just a shade more sarcastic. “You never know when I might be in the middle of a big story and have to read some documents.”