Brooklyn Bones Page 8

  “Oh, we’re just getting started. It will get worse.” He sounded happy about it. “We’re going to rip out your kitchen today. Hey, you are supposed to be happy about our progress.”

  I managed to mumble, as I turned back toward the stairs, “Guess I’d better get out of here.” Then I turned back.

  “Joe.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a heads up about the cops calling.”

  “Yeah, well, it would have been nice.” He didn’t look at me, but he sounded less chilly. I was going toward the stairs when he said, “Hey. I’ll keep the noise down until you leave.” Now he was laughing at me. What nerve.

  I guess that meant we were friends again.

  An hour later, showered, dressed, hydrated, medicated, I was in a coffee shop, inhaling a large, heavily sugared iced coffee. I was almost back to normal, and ready for my interview with Brendan Leary, former reporter, Brooklyn expert, curmudgeon. I found my way to his neighborhood, one that had seen better days. The address was a grimy brick apartment building, with cracked front steps and overflowing garbage cans. It too had seen better days. I rang the bell labeled Leary and he buzzed me in.

  When I emerged from the creaky elevator he was waiting in the hall, a fat, unshaven man wearing a stained t-shirt, sitting in a wheelchair. I was startled to see he had only one leg. I hoped I hid my surprise.

  “Ms. Donato? You’re early. Guess you found your way. Welcome to my palace.” He turned the chair deftly, and preceded me into the apartment.

  Newspapers and magazines were stacked in piles on the floor. Dirty dishes were stacked on every surface. An odor made me wonder when the garbage had last been taken out. It was dark. On this bright summer day, all the blinds were drawn.

  He shrugged. “A housekeeping aide comes once a week. I don’t bother much in between.” His smile was sarcastic. “Of course if you hadn’t showed up early, I would have had time to make it all nice for company and bake a cake.”

  “No traffic,” I said absently. This mess was certainly beyond the abilities of a once a week aide.

  “Let’s hit the road. I’ll grab a shirt.” He lifted a gaudy Hawaiian pattern from a pile of clothes on a chair. “Hand me my sunglasses on that table—light hurts my eyes —and my crutches are there by the door.”

  He wheeled himself into the elevator and out again. When we got to my car, he used the crutches to maneuver himself into the front seat and explained how to fold up the chair.

  “I hope you know how get from here to there. It’s way past my lunchtime, but I’m saving myself for Nathan’s. I can’t put up with getting lost and eating late.”

  Mmm, I thought. Mr. Charm. I responded with false calmness, “I’ve lived here all my life. I kind of think I can find my way out to the beach.”

  “That so? Turn left up here, then right, and we’ll be on Ocean Parkway. It’ll take us right out.” He opened a car window without asking, turned on my radio, changed the station, and closed his eyes.

  Exactly as I’d planned to do without his advice, I turned onto Ocean Parkway, the tree-shaded boulevard connecting Prospect Park to the ocean. We’d be able to zip there in twenty minutes, barring traffic problems, as I knew very well.

  He woke up with a start when I parked, barked commands to me about getting his wheelchair set up, and led the way down the paved path to Nathan’s vast snack stand.

  Gigantic signs shouted the availability of every fairground food known in the northeast. After Leary had put away two of the famous foot-long hot dogs, with mustard and sauerkraut, a couple of knishes, and a large order of French fries, he seemed marginally more cheerful. However, when I tried to ask him some questions, he said, “Put the damn notebook away. Can’t you see I’m eating?” One frozen custard later he said, “Take me for a walk. Maybe I’ll feel up to questions then. Maybe not.”

  We meandered along the boardwalk, where he could use his wheelchair. I knew the surrounding neighborhood had become tough over the years, and even dangerous, but on this bright summer day the amusement park itself didn’t look so different from what I remembered.

  In the kiddie section, tiny screaming children rode the miniature rides and begged in Chinese or Russian or Spanish, as well as English, to please, please go again. Groups of tourists—or were they recent immigrants?—in saris or Muslim scarves or bright African head wraps took photos in front of the famous roller coaster, holding up souvenirs gaudily decorated with feathers and sequins. Groups of teenage boys challenged each other to win a teddy bear while their girls giggled and egged them on. Didn’t I have one of those bears stashed away somewhere? Now probably moth-eaten and moldy.

  I was jerked out of my reverie when Leary snapped, “Stop now. I’m tired of moving the chair.” We parked it at the end of a bench and sat silently, taking in the waves, breeze, and sun.

  I was surprised when he said softly, “I grew up not far from here. I watched them build the Aquarium, when they moved it out from Manhattan.” He sighed. “I always loved the beach. Nothing like it to calm you down. I’d be running all over the city, chasing stories, drinking too much—getting crazy—sometimes I’d get home about dawn and come out and…ah, well, it was a long time ago.”

  After another quiet few moments, he said, “We had a deal. Whadda you want to know?”

  “You knew Park Slope really well back when. I’ve pulled all your old stories that I could find, but I don’t know if I found all of them, and then I bet there were stories you never wrote, too.”

  “Well, you’re a smart little one, aren’t you? Oh, yes, there were plenty. Of course my specialty was landlords and tenants and the G word.”

  “What?”

  “Gentrification, of course.”

  “I should have known.”

  “Yeah, you should have. Obvious. So you already know, I would hope, that in the fifties and sixties everyone who had even a prayer of being middle class wanted a nice new ranch house? Modern kitchen, air conditioning, patch of lawn?”

  “Suburbia called and they listened. Mostly the people still there were ones who couldn’t figure out a way to go, or didn’t care.”

  “Oh, sure. Pardon me for forgetting you are a historian. So, in the seventies, some young families wanted more space than they could get, or afford, in Manhattan, but they were the ones who grew up in the suburbs—they’d slit their wrists before moving back to conformityville.”

  “And that’s when things changed again. They looked at those old brownstones and saw the potential for life in the city, but with space and a garden. And cheap, back then.”

  “You got it. Lots of those old houses had been chopped into apartments, or even rooming houses, pretty crummy, and landlords were making a nice, nice living owning slum housing, more or less.”

  “Wait! I know what happened then. I found it in old news stories. The landlords wanted to sell out, now that there were buyers, so they were harassing tenants to get them to move.”

  “Yep. That’s the one that ended up in court. A couple of them went to jail and my stories helped put them there. At least I liked to think so, and they sure did, too. Hated my guts, I’m proud to say. Yeah. Rogow, Lensky, Donnelly, couple others I can’t remember. Equal opportunity slumlords.”

  “That Rogow name keeps coming up in my life. I got a call from a Nelly Rogow—it’s not worth explaining why—and I’m going to go talk to her.” I decided to do it at that moment, as the words came out of my mouth.

  “Yeah? Could be same family, his wife, or maybe his daughter. That old s.o.b. died years ago, but I have an idea his daughter went into the family business. Ahh, it was so long ago, I don’t remember anything else about those crooks. Read what I wrote back then.”

  He turned his chair and started rolling. “Come on! All this strolling down memory lane has been swell, but I need a beer
and then I want to go home.”

  He suddenly speeded up, rolling headlong into a flock of gulls, laughing when they rose into the air in feathery, squawking panic.

  He watched them and shrugged. “Got to get my excitement where I can.”

  Later, he dozed off in the car. He didn’t look well. His color was off and when I woke him, he was sweaty and disoriented. He finally shook his head and mumbled, “I need a shot. Get me up into my apartment, and damn quick!”

  I tried to hurry, fumbling with the chair. When we got upstairs he angrily refused my offer of help and disappeared into the bathroom for a very long few minutes. I paced back and forth, unwilling to sit on his filthy furniture and not sure what to do.

  He looked somewhat better when he emerged. “You’ve used up all my sociability for today and the whole rest of the week too. I’m going to take a nap and I don’t care for company, so go on.”

  “Do I need to call for help? Are you OK?” He fixed me with a hostile stare and I added quickly, “Yes, yes, of course you are. May I call to ask some more questions? And come again?”

  “You’re almost as bad as a reporter. Annoying little mosquito.” Then he sighed. “What the hell. Come again but not too soon. Tell you what…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got some files you might like to have. Make a deal? Come take me out again next week and you can have them.”

  “You have files? From the period I need?’

  He turned the chair into a back room. I was astonished to see it was lined with meticulously labeled cabinets. A clean desk and a computer table stood at one end of the room.

  “I guess you still write.”

  “If you’d call it that. It sure isn’t reporting. Yeah, yeah, I can see you’re dying to ask, so I’ll tell you. I quit reporting when diabetes took my leg. Doctors seemed to think a few decades of smoking and drinking did some damage, too. Imagine my surprise. So now I write men’s adventure novels. I can turn one out in six weeks. Crap, but it pays the rent. Satisfied now?”

  “But I didn’t ask…I…”

  “Nah, but you were wondering.” True. “Can’t kid a kidder or something like that. And don’t think about looking for any of them, either. I sure don’t use my real name.” He turned to the file cabinets. “Try the fourth in, third down.”

  The drawer was perfectly organized, files color-coded, meticulously labeled by topic and date. Not a speck of dust on the surfaces.

  I wondered if he knew how much this told me about him. Then again, would he care?

  “They’d be just a loan. And no quoting without permission and credit!”

  “Well, of course not.” I could hardly contain my excitement. “And I’ll take good care of them. You won’t regret this.”

  “Yeah, I might. I already do. I just had an unusual moment of weakness.” He slammed the drawer shut. “After our next outing.”

  The thought crossed my mind that he was lonely.

  “Now you answer a question for me. I’m tired but I’m not dead and I want to know. You never said why you’re so stuck on all this old stuff.”

  That stopped me. “I don’t know, exactly. Because it’s news again? Haven’t you seen the stories? The same issues keep coming back. And because I live there myself and—I don’t know—I don’t quite fit in—but my daughter does—and I guess I’m trying to understand it. Sometimes it seems like a foreign country to me, too.”

  “Yeah? Whereabouts do you live?”

  I told him and he gave a short, raspy laugh. “I could tell you some stories about that end of the neighborhood, back in the day. Wild old times back then. Next time.”

  I took a deep breath. “There was a skeleton hidden behind the wall in my house. We just found it.”

  His whole face lit up. “Jesus H. Christ, what a story! If only I was still who I used to be.”

  He yawned. “But I’m not that guy anymore. Get going. I’ve had enough visiting for today.”

  I headed out, mulling over what he had told me and knowing that I would call Mrs. Rogow as soon as I had a chance. I could ask her all kinds of questions about her husband’s business. It might give me a wealth of interesting details to play with, and I thought I ought to get the landlord’s point of view on all this. I was skeptical that I would be persuaded by it, but I had to admit that it was a missing piece. It was now obvious I should not mention Leary in that conversation and I understood Steven Richmond’s work was confidential, but I knew I might learn something he could use. Or at least, I hoped so.

  And in the back of my mind, I wondered if she could tell me something about my own house, and who had lived there. The fact that I had ordered Chris to leave it alone, and sent her away to make sure she didn’t ignore me, certainly did not mean I could not ask some questions myself. I am a mature, careful and sensible adult, unlike my daughter. It was different for me. Of course it was.

  And I was a historian, living in a house with some real history. I couldn’t be expected to walk away from that.

  Back at my car, I reflexively checked my phone for messages. Nothing from Chris. Not that I was expecting anything. Nothing from work. And still nothing from Rick. With no child at home now—and wouldn’t she be insulted to hear me call her a child!—and this not being a workday, I was completely free. I made a snap decision to drive over to Rick’s house in Queens and lean on his doorbell. Or leave him a note, at least. With traffic it could take awhile, but what the heck? I was already in the car, and I was fed up with his disappearing act. And underneath it all, I thought that if he was in some alcoholic or other trouble, then he needed me.

  I hadn’t been out there in a long time. He usually came to visit me, or took me out, wanting to see Chris or perhaps, as I often suspected, checking up on me. Queens streets confuse me. Avenues, drives and streets could all have the same number, but some of the old landmarks were still there. Turn right at the supermarket, I told myself, then left at the community center, right at the white brick apartment tower.

  I turned onto Rick’s street of modest homes on tiny lawns, and saw a whole flock of police cars. They were roosting right in front of his house.

  Chapter Nine

  Something was wrong. This wasn’t a social scene, not in patrol cars. I proceeded slowly down the block until an officer stopped me. Rick’s door was open and people were going in and out.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Police business, miss. Sorry. You’ll have to go around the block if you need access to the other end of the street.”

  “No. No, I was going here, to that house. The owner is a close friend.”

  Something shifted in his expression, away from his official mask mode to an expression I couldn’t read. It scared me, and I was already scared. He only said, “Wait right here,” and disappeared. He was back in a second with a plainclothes officer.

  She leaned into my car window. “Name, please.”

  “Erica Donato. I was coming to see Rick Malone, who lives here.” It took a huge effort of will, but I was keeping my voice firm and my gaze steady. “He’s a long time family friend, for my whole life, and I’d like to know…”

  She cut me off. “ID please.” I showed her.

  “Ah, Ms. Donato. I believe we’ve been looking for you. When was the last time you called here?”

  “This morning. I wanted to see him.”

  “I thought so. Yes, we heard your message on his phone. OK, we need to talk. May I get in your car?”

  Could I say no? I nodded, turned off the ignition, kept my hands glued to the wheel so they wouldn’t shake.

  “Do you have any idea who his next of kin is?”

  My heart, that big lump in my throat, sank like a stone.

  “What’s wrong? I know it’s something terrible.”

  “You need t
o answer my questions first. Next of kin?”

  “I don’t know that there is any. He’s divorced, no kids. He was an only child. He used to joke about how weird that was for an Irish kid.” I could hardly get the words out. “No, wait, he had some cousins at the Jersey shore he sometimes visited. Red Bank, maybe? Or Seaside?” I shook my head. “I don’t even know their names.”

  “He lists Len Shapiro as an emergency contact, but we’re not getting any response at that number.”

  There were tears on my cheeks now. I could feel them. “That’s my father. They were old, old friends. But Dad moved to Arizona last year.”

  “That explains it. It’s a Brooklyn number. You have the current one?”

  “I’m not telling you anything else until you tell me what’s going on. You know Rick is a retired detective? And I saw him, just a few days ago…”

  Her face softened slightly. “I guess we could tell you a little. I’m sorry to break this to you, but we got a call last night. He was found, he was identified, and he is deceased. It must have happened a few days back.”

  The tears fell harder but I only brushed them away impatiently until the detective handed me a handkerchief. I refused to start sobbing; I needed to know everything.

  “An accident? A heart attack?

  “I’m sorry. It definitely was not either of those. He was shot.”

  “What? Was it a robbery? In the house? Or on the street?”

  She shook his head. “Can’t tell anyone anything yet. You could tell us some things though, like when was the last time you saw him? Or heard from him?”

  Somewhere in there another cop joined us. I told them. I told them about the phone calls not returned, too. I told them Rick hadn’t said a thing about problems, but then he never did. I told them I knew next to nothing about his personal life. He always said with a sly smile that the details were not fit for my young ears.

  She nodded, wrote, didn’t say much.

  “I might be the closest thing he has to family. I’ve known him my whole life. He and my dad were friends since they were in second grade.” I had stopped crying, for the moment anyway, and could say firmly, “You should be treating me as family.”