The James Deans (22 page)

I had no reason to feel particularly positive about the prospects of the book that was to follow
Redemption Street
in the Moe Prager series.
Redemption Street
, the follow up to the critically acclaimed
Walking The Perfect Square
, had been, to put it politely as I can, a struggle from the start. Nothing about the process, not even finding the appropriate cover image, had gone smoothly. Ignored by the critics, it pretty much debuted in the remainder bin. These were not the conditions under which any sane writer—now there’s an oxymoron for the ages—would choose to author a make-or-break book. But I didn’t have a choice. I guess we’d all deal ourselves four aces if we could.

Yet in spite of the less than conducive atmosphere, I felt positive about
The James Deans
from the first day I touched finger to keypad. As I don’t outline, I am useless at trying to predict how a book will turn out. I write one word at a time; each new word amplifying the last, justifying the next. I operate under the theory that if I’m interested enough by what’s coming, so too will the reader. Although I may sit down with a notion of where a book should start and how it might end, each new book is nearly as much an adventure for me as for the reader. Still, there are rare incidents when, in a flash, a plot appears to me in
toto. They Don’t Play Stickball In Milwaukee
—the third book in my earlier Dylan Klein series—happened that way and
The James Deans
happened that way as well. One moment it wasn’t there. The next moment it was. As in the earlier instance, once I had the book, the title came easily to me.

Since I’m asked about the title all the time, I’ll get to that first. I knew the novel was going to include two murders: one recent, one old; the more recent crime inevitably the result of the more distant one. Knowing the time frame of the two homicides, I realized that the first murder would have to have taken place in the mid-50s and that it would be tied to a gang initiation. Who, I wondered, would the members of a white boy, suburban gang of that era admire? The natural choices might have been Marlon Brando or Lee Marvin of
The Wild One.
I might have chosen Vic Morrow of
Blackboard Jungle
or even Montgomery Clift, but I kept coming back to James Dean.

Given the setting of the older crime—an affluent town in New Jersey—I thought the teenagers of that town, in that era would more closely identify with an intelligent, defiant, brooding, handsome, confused kid than a strutting black leather peacock on a motorcycle or a junior delinquent city kid or some strangely ethereal loner. I also realized that James Dean had a morbid advantage over my other choices. Whereas the others had become sad, bloated caricatures or had fallen out of favor or died morbid or lonely deaths in middle age, James Dean died young and pretty. In my mind, in the readers’ minds, James Dean would be that eternal teenager from
Rebel Without a Cause.
Because the iconic image his name evokes is devoid of the warts of time, he was the natural choice. I have often joked that things might’ve turned out very differently had the book been called
The Lee Marvins.

I don’t believe in revealed knowledge, so I am well aware that the plot for what was to become
The James Deans
didn’t simply condensate out of motes in the void. Or maybe that’s exactly what happened. I am aware of where the plot came from, but only in retrospect. In a sad instance of art imitating life, the germ for the plot was born out of two crimes: one older, one more recent. Unlike in the book, these two crimes were disconnected, coming together only in my head.

I moved to Long Island from Brooklyn—Don’t tell anyone, but Brooklyn is at the far western tip of Long Island. Brooklynites live in denial of this fact—in 1983. Back then Long Island was another world. In New York City—the boroughs of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, and Staten Island—there were 1833 homicides in 1982; so many that they all seemed to run together in a single amorphous blood-stained blur; one murder forgotten as soon as the next occurred. On Long Island, even with its proximity to New York City, murder is neither so frequent nor easily forgotten, and when it happens to a young boy or girl, it’s never forgotten. So people were still talking about the 1979 murder of John Pius when I moved to the sleepy hamlet of Sea Cliff on Long Island’s Gold Coast in ‘83.

In April of 1979, 13-year-old John Pius took his bicycle out for a ride. He never returned home. His body was found the next day buried beneath logs and leaves behind a local elementary school. He had been suffocated, several marble-sized stones having been shoved down his throat. The most shocking aspect of the case was that he was murdered by four boys who were his neighbors and that their motive had to do with a dispute over an old mini-bike frame. To this day the case echoes across the Island. In 1989, my wife and I moved to Smithtown, where the murder occurred. Although we have since relocated, I still play basketball most spring and summer days in a Smithtown park near where the murder took place.

Although the first crime is known only around the New York Metropolitan area, the second crime garnered national attention. Just about a year prior to the release of
Redemption Street
, Chandra Levy’s remains were discovered in a wooded area of a Washington DC park. Although I try very hard not to pay attention to the sensational and salacious aspects of the news, I was not immune from the rumors about Miss Levy’s involvement with her congressman boss and the speculation that he had somehow been responsible for her death.

I cannot say what inspired me to connect these two cases. I can only tell you that something did. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to bed panicked over my inability to find the right way to move a narrative along and woken up at 5 a.m. with the solution. There is no way for me to explain it because I am not conscious of doing the work, only having done it. Over the years, I’ve come to trust my unconscious mind.

Still, with all these elements in place, a book’s worth can only be judged by the quality of its writing. They don’t give out awards for the best plans or plots or outlines. They give them for how they’re executed. I have heard it said that the first chapter of a novel should contain all the elements of the entire work. That when a reader finishes a novel, he or she should be able to go back to the first chapter and find the seeds for what has played out in the remaining pages. Not before, not since, have I been as successful in accomplishing this as in
The James Deans.
Those opening pages broke my heart when I wrote them and, as anyone who’s heard me read that chapter can attest, they still break my heart.

Perhaps the thing about
The James Deans
that works best is the dovetailing of plot, subplot, and theme. It’s more than that. In
The James Deans
those three elements don’t simply come together, they become the same thing. The underlying theme in all the Moe books is that the past is present, that the very notion of moving on without resolution is an absurdity. Faulkner said it best, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” The pages of the novel are rife with characters whose own pasts haunt them. Whether it’s Steven Brightman covering up an old murder with a newer one or Moe feeling secretly to blame for the miscarriage or Wit still coming to terms with the murder of his grandson, nearly every character in the book from Joe Spivack to Preacher “the Creature” Simmons to Thomas Geary to Klaus is acting today because of a past that isn’t past.

My faith in the book was cemented when I received my editorial letter. You may not believe this, most people don’t, but the only meaningful suggested cuts consisted of editing down two paragraphs. One alluded to the World Trade Center—part of that paragraph remains intact—and the other was a throwaway paragraph in the epilogue about a minor medical procedure Moe was to undergo. It was thrown away.

Even the things that went wrong with the book went right. Only months before the book was to come out, my then agent called me to inform me that I had a choice: I could hold my publisher to the terms of our contract and force them to do hardcover and paperback editions of
The James Deans
or I could go along with their decision to put the book out as a paperback original. My then agent strongly advised I go with the latter. It killed me to do it, but I agreed. That decision led to a great cover image and a greater commitment by the publisher to sell the book. It also allowed
The James Deans
to be considered for awards in the paperback original category. I can’t really argue with the results.

Reed Farrel Coleman

May 20, 2008

Lake Grove, New York

Originally published in
Crimespree Magazine
, Issue #6 (2005). Copyright © Reed Farrel Coleman.

IT HAD BEEN years since Pete Parson had moved south and they’d turned Pooty’s Bar and the space above into money sponges in the shape of lofts. Tribeca, once a bohemian refuge, had long since been declared an artist free zone by the City of New York; the last starving painter tarred, feathered, and exiled to Williamsburg during the end days of the last millennium. The neighborhood was scrubbed and bleached of real character so that now it was sprayed on the streets after dark and chipped into the bricks by Mexican day laborers for a hundred bucks cash and lunch.

But still I came to look at where Pooty’s had been. I’d walked over from the Brooklyn store, across the bridge, down Chambers and up Hudson Street; the whole time with the book in my hand. Book indeed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a book for pleasure or even held one that didn’t have something to do with wine or the business. I tried counting back the years to when Sarah was a little girl and Katy and I would read her to bed. Sarah, a woman now, self-contained, moved away, a veterinarian, her curls gone to light brown with only traces of little girl red peeking out at her dad at Hanukkah.

So here I was, bent paperback in hand, standing outside a building that had since forgotten me or what itself had been. I tried seeing it, superimposing my memory of it over what stood in its place. No luck. Works better in movies than in a man’s life, that. Things gone are gone. There’s a deep truth there. Lord knows what it is. I couldn’t find it. I made to step away.

“Ya grow up here?”

“What?”

“Jaysus, the way you were staring at the place … You looked like a man thought he saw his lost love.”

Definitely Irish. He was thin as a wire, but not erect. There was a sway to him, more a blade of grass than a man, a weary blade of grass. No, a twisted root, I think. You see them at craft fairs sometimes, bush roots shaped remotely like a man that the artist has cajoled into a more striking resemblance. The summer breeze off the Hudson whipped his hair into a gray swirl. He had a hollow, lined face that had once been a calling card. There are all sorts of lines on all sorts of faces, but these were hard lines, etched lines, sharp and jagged under a microscope. These were not lines of slow, smooth erosion. Life had used a knife on him.

He moved left and right, craning his neck as if looking for someone to show.

“Nice limp you got there,” I said.

“Noticed you’ve one as well, pal.”

“Yeah, slipped on a piece of carbon paper in the late seventies. Three knee operations. Then a few years later, someone took a baseball bat to the back of my legs.”

“Hurly,” he said as if that explained it all.

“Hurly?”

“A baseball bat done Irish, hardwood roughly in the shape of a human femur.”

“What’s it used for besides leg-breaking?”

“Hurling. Combination of field hockey and murder.”

“Sounds like politics.”

“Life’s more like it.”

We shook our heads in silent commiseration.

“Smoke?” he offered up a green pack of cigarettes the likes of which I’d never seen.

I waved him off. He put the pack close to his crooked lips and the unfiltered nail seemed almost to jump into his mouth. Next out of his pocket was a heavy, silver Zippo, the kind my dad used when I was a kid.

“Ya mind, fella?” he positioned me to block the wind.

Christ, the damned cigarette emitted more pungent fumes than a city bus. He slipped the lighter back into his suit pocket. It was a cheap blue suit, someone else’s cheap blue suit, a quick pick off the discount rack at a retro store. Salvation Army, more likely. Still, ill-fitting as it was, it seemed right on him, even as it clashed with his highly polished and paradoxically expensive brown shoes.

“Well …” he seemed impatient. About what, I wasn’t sure. He got tired of me trying to figure it out. “Were ya raised here?”

“Nah. Brooklyn. Coney Island. There was a bar here once, Pooty’s. Friend of mine had a share in it. The grout in the tile was dirtier than my mechanics fingernails, but it had the best jukebox in New York City.”

He was skeptical. “The hell, you say. In the whole city?”

“Duke Ellington, the Dead Kennedys, John Lee Hooker, the Beatles, the Clash, Howlin Wolf, the Ramones … Fell in love with my wife here. Took an actress here once when I was on the job.”

He smiled wryly. “A copper?”

“Once. You?”

“In a manner of speaking, back home in Galway.”

I was curious, but there was something in his demeanor that warned me not to ask, that I wouldn’t like the answer and he wouldn’t like giving it.

“What is it you do now other than stand and stare longingly at buildings housed old pubs?”

I own wine stores with my big brother.
“Private investigator.”

“Jesus and His blessed mother.”

“You too?”

“In a manner of speaking. They don’t have a name for it. Like most things in Ireland, there’s shame attached to the profession.”

I took him at his word, glad he hadn’t asked to see my license. I still kept it in my sock drawer.

“You investigating an author?” He pointed at the nearly forgotten paperback. “Love books. Only thing’s kept me above the dirt this long. Balances out the drink and these.” He waved the cigarette at me, then flicked it in the gutter. Lit another. “The book,” he prodded.

“Some novel a friend recommended.” I held the cover up for him.

“What a load a shite. Author’s an ejit.”

“You know him?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He was nothing if not consistent. “Don’t waste your time with that crap. Read McBain. There’s an author.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Lovely offer, but I’m waiting on someone.”

I held my right hand out to him. “Moe Prager.”

He took my hand, his grip was deceptively strong for such a bony bastard.

“A pleasure,” he said, letting go of my hand. “Ah, here she comes now.”

I looked over my shoulder to see a very little girl sort of waddling her way toward us. I was never good with age, but she seemed far too young to be walking alone down even the safest of streets in the smallest of towns. There was something odd about her gait, a bouncy sort of looseness in her small strides. It was only when she got closer that I noticed she had Down’s Syndrome. She looked right past me and raised her small hand up to the root man.

“There you are,” he said to her and softly cradled her hand in his. “Mind yerself, Moe.”

I watched them disappear around the corner. Even after they disappeared, I could not get them out of my head. Maybe it was that the smell of his cigarettes lingered in my clothes or maybe it was my shock about the girl. But gone they were. Like things, when people are gone, they’re gone.

I found a pub a few blocks away, put the paperback down on the bar, ordered a pint of Blue Point Toasted. I had hoped the barman would be an old-timer, someone I could shoot the breeze with about how the neighborhood had been back in the day. But the barman was a woman no older than my Sarah and her back in the day was like last week.

As I was about to leave, she asked, “What you reading?”

“Nothing,” I said, sliding the paperback her way, tucking a five spot in as a bookmark.

“The Guards
,
“
she said. “I’ve heard it’s great.”

“Yeah, well if you see a guy in the neighborhood in a cheap blue suit, keep that opinion to yourself.”

The walk back to Montague Street seemed much easier without the weight of the book.