Bad to the Bone (8 page)

For a quick moment, Moodrow felt a rush of familiar male annoyance. Where did Betty get off—a woman and an amateur—telling him how to operate? Then he came back to the professional cop, the capital ‘D’ detective willing to accept any help from any source, especially when the suggestion was eminently reasonable. He recalled a time when he’d jumped at the chance to use a psychic in the search for a missing girl. The psychic turned out to be a miserable asshole who’d led him from one vacant lot to another. “This is the one I see in my vision. This is the one I see.” Moodrow had dug up half of Brooklyn before he dumped the psychic. The girl was never found.

“That’s a good idea. I’ll get the lawyer to get the cops to call the hospital. You never know what’s gonna happen down the road.”

“There’s one other thing I think we could do. I think we should trace the kid, Michael, through pediatricians.”

“That’s another good idea.” Moodrow was a little surprised by the ‘we’ in Betty’s suggestion, but he let it go. “How would you go about that?” he said, pointedly.

“I guess I’d call pediatricians in Manhattan and ask them if they’ve ever had a patient named Michael Alamare.”

“Forget it. You’re talking about a thousand doctors. At least. You’d never get to them on the first call and most of them wouldn’t cooperate, even if you did. You’re not even law enforcement. Just a private citizen taking up time when the doctor could be making money. Most of those offices are geared up to bring in three hundred bucks an hour and the last thing the doctor wants to do is spend twenty minutes bullshitting with a lawyer.” Moodrow had spent most of his career canvassing neighborhoods. Or contacting ‘every car rental agency in the city.’ Sherlock Holmes would not have understood, but the main thing separating good from mediocre detectives is efficiency.

“So what are you saying? Give it up?”

“Not at all. You just have to be a little smarter. First, do it by mail. You can address, stamp and seal a thousand envelopes in one day, if you organize it right. Second, Connie Alamare has a picture of the kid when he was around two years old. Get it blown up and copied. Third, write a tear-jerker letter: ‘Please help me find my grandson.’ No mention of any criminality. Just a missing kid and ‘can you help me.’ That’ll get the attention of whoever opens the envelope. The Medical Society’ll be glad to supply you with a list of New York pediatricians.”

“Why do I get the feeling I’m being hustled?”

“When you thought you were doing the hustling?”

“Yeah.”

“I think your idea is good. I just don’t have the time for it, right now. I’m gonna spend the next few days trying for a quick pay-off. I got an interview with Davis Craddock.”

“I can’t believe he’s willing to talk to you.”

“First call I made. No problem. I’m gonna see him on Monday morning, after I track down a few ex-Hanoverians. There’s a special NYPD squad that keeps track of cults. I got one of the detectives to give me a list of Hanoverians who’ve left within the last two years.”

“You think they’ll cooperate?”

“I think so. There’s bound to be some who’re nursing a grudge. Maybe they lost their money or something. Anyway, all I need is one to either put Flo Alamare in the cult or say that she left when Davis Craddock says she did. I don’t wanna go out there with a closed mind, one way or the other. I saw Flo Alamare’s picture when I was in the apartment and she looked like the Virgin in all the paintings. A small face, all dark eyes and curly dark hair down over her shoulders. There’s no doubt in my mind that she could trade that beauty for a free ride, if that’s the way she wanted to go.”

They got as far as the Queens Boulevard exit on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway before the traffic stopped dead. Moodrow waved his miniature retired cop badge at a cruiser, then asked for the cause of the problem. A jacknifed tractor trailer, he was told, on the far side of the Kosciusko Bridge, with a resulting fuel-oil spill. A story so commonplace that alternate routes had already been prepared. Moodrow, still thumbing his notebook, steered the Mercury onto the Queens Boulevard exit ramp. He’d weave through industrial Queens, head into Brooklyn over the Pulaski Bridge, pick up the expressway at McGuiness Boulevard.

“What do you think about a salad of escarole and arugula?” Betty asked. “With capers.”

“I think it’s the real me,” Moodrow said, still thumbing through the small notebook.

T
HE FOOD AT MOODROW’S
housewarming was so good that nobody noticed the house. Which was just as well, because the white cubicles with their two-inch plastic baseboards had about as much charm as the view of the tenements south of Houston Street, the view from the front window. The drinks helped, too. They made it easy for Jim Tilley to forget the mornings he’d spent in the kitchen of Moodrow’s old apartment, drinking coffee and talking shop. The kitchen in Moodrow’s new apartment was an elongated rectangle the size of a coffin. It would never be cozy and it was painted an even glossier white than the rest of the place.

Moodrow had lost some furniture in the fire that forced him out of his old apartment, more to smoke than to flame, but what he managed to salvage easily filled the small rooms in his new home. Moodrow had bought his furniture in the fifties when the word mahogany meant more than a nearly transparent veneer. The table and chairs which had fit comfortably into Moodrow’s old kitchen, now crowded the sofa in his new living room. Moodrow, who was subletting the apartment, couldn’t believe that someone had paid more than a hundred thousand dollars for its 1250 square feet.

But the food definitely made it better. Rose Tilley (formerly Greenwood, formerly Carillo) had been born into a family of Italian immigrants. Her mother had made ravioli by hand, carefully folding the homemade strips of dough over little piles of ricotta cheese. The result had been exquisite, but not better than the meal cooked by Betty and Moodrow. Rose couldn’t imagine what role Moodrow had played in the preparation of the meal, but he was still wearing his apron when he met them at the door. Rose’s oldest child, Lee, had been especially amused.

Rose, a cup of espresso liberally dressed with anisette in her hands, was happy to see her son laughing again. The last few weeks had been very troubling, ever since he’d come home with the question she’d been dreading for years.

“Mommy,” he’d asked, “what color am I?”

Lee’s father had been very dark and both Lee and his sister, Jeanette, were a definite light brown. This would not be a problem if his mother and stepfather were black. It might even have been livable if
one
of them was black, but Rose’s skin was china-white and Tilley, the Irishman, was fair as well.

Rose had been expecting the question. (In African-American families the question would have been, “Mommy, what’s a nigger?”) But she had no ready answer, only a series of linked understandings that were far too complex for a nine-year-old child who needed a simple concept to defend. Of course, both children would have to see themselves as black, because that’s the way America would see them. But to lock a child (her child) into a fixed, self-limiting category was heartbreaking for Rose. Like most parents, she instinctively wanted her children to reach a place she had never seen. A place not marked by concepts like African or Italian or any kind of hyphenated anything.

Jim Tilley had been more practical. “What you wanna be,” he’d explained to Lee, “is your own color and not take a lot of shit from people who don’t like it.” Tilley had been a fighter. Over the course of a long amateur and a short professional career, he’d stopped caring what other people thought of him. He’d met his fear every time he went into the gym to spar and had beaten it down with courage. After a few years, he’d developed a rock-hard sense of his own personal value. Now he claimed that all fighters, from the flashiest champion to the most hapless ‘opponent,’ if they stick with their profession long enough, go through a similar evolution.

Tilley (along with Moodrow) still worked out in a local club, coaching the kids and staying in shape. When Lee had expressed an interest, Tilley had jumped at the chance to bring him down, and Rose, after a week of terrified refusal, had finally given her blessing. Now Tilley was bragging about Lee’s skill to Moodrow and Betty.

“He’s got attitude which is the first thing,” Tilley explained, looking over to Rose for confirmation. “He’s not afraid to throw punches and take his chances, which is what it’s really all about. He’s also fast as hell and get this, Stanley—he doesn’t blink in the ring. I’ve got him sparring two-minute rounds, and he doesn’t blink.”

“You better watch out,” Moodrow said to Rose, “or Jim’ll put him in the ring with Mike Tyson.”

“He’s nine years old,” Rose said.

Tilley, emboldened by the food and the alcohol, threw his hands in the air. “Hey, if the money’s right, what’s a few pounds?”

The object of their speculation, along with his sister, was in Moodrow’s spare bedroom, the one that passed as his office. They were watching a cop show on a small TV set. Lee was fascinated by cop shows and though Jeanette, at seven, would have preferred a sit-com (
any
sit-com), she worshiped her older brother. After all, he was almost through fourth grade while she was still in first.

Betty looked back toward the small room where the kids were playing. For what seemed the tenth time, Rose was praising her cooking. Asking her how she learned. Who taught her.

“It was straight compensation,” Betty finally announced. She was well on the way to getting plastered and she knew it. The knowledge, instead of making her cautious, only pushed her into speaking out. “I was married when I was twenty-one, right after I graduated from NYU. My husband was a high school teacher. I wanted kids, like every other woman in my generation, but I had four miscarriages in two years. The last one was really bad and the doctors predicted the next one would be worse. So I forgot about kids. I went to Brooklyn Law and I learned to cook. Both at the same time. My girlfriends showed off their babies and I showed off my coq au vin and my career. Twenty-five years later, my girlfriends’ kids are grown and gone, but I still have my chicken and my law degree. None of us, by the way, have our husbands. Which is a long way of saying I wish I had your problems with Lee and Jeanette.”

Nobody said a word. Moodrow took Betty’s hand under the table and pulled it over against his leg, but Betty wasn’t looking for comfort. “What I’ve been thinking about is Connie Alamare’s grandson, Michael. What if he’s really being held prisoner? He’s got no one to protect him out there. As far as the police are concerned, he doesn’t even exist. When I think about him, I think about the faces of the kids on the backs of the milk cartons.”

“
If
he’s alive,” Tilley said quietly. “You have to figure that if Michael Alamare’s existence is some kind of threat to the commune, Craddock wouldn’t be likely to keep him around.”

Rose threw her husband a dark look. “Aren’t we making some big jumps here? We’re taking a group of people who have a reputation for being straighter than straight and first making them drug addicts and then murderers. It’s nothing but speculation.”

Moodrow glanced at Betty before he decided to respond. She was following the conversation attentively. “It’s not as far-fetched as you think,” he said to Rose. “I took a walk around the neighborhood last night. By the Hanoverian commune. I found a character over there named Ephraim Borrano. The mutt’s been a junkie for thirty years. A genuine homeboy—born in the building where the commune is now. He says there’s no rumors that the ‘blancos’ (which is his name for all non-Latino white people) have started using drugs. But he did tell me one interesting story. You know how teenage kids are, right? Some of them have to show their macho every minute of the day. A few of them accomplish the transition from boy to man by attacking weaker people. I don’t know how they figure that sadism is macho, but I’ve heard it so many times, I have to believe it. On the Lower East Side, the twelve-year-olds mostly attack Jews, especially Jews with beards and long coats, but it seems that Ephraim’s cousin, Oliver, decided that the Jews were okay, but the Hanoverians had to go. He and his pal, Berto, started picking them off, pelting the men with stones, fondling the women, punching the kids. It was so much fun, that some of Oliver’s other playmates began to join them. Now I gotta admit that this is a pretty common story when ethnic groups are mixed together, but there’s a couple of interesting twists here. First, the Hanoverians never called the police. Second, Oliver and Berto were found in an abandoned building a month ago. Both dead. Both executed with a .22. Both shot behind the right ear.”

Rose was the first to speak. “That’s a good story, but it doesn’t prove anything. If Oliver and his pal were street kids, they might have been killed by anyone.”

“Oliver and Berto were part-time crack dealers, though Ephraim swears Oliver didn’t use crack. You know the bull—his family’s very poor and the kid was just trying to help out. Ephraim also swears that Oliver and Berto weren’t killed over drugs or territory.”

“How does he know that?” Tilley asked.

“Mostly, when street dealers are killed by their competitors, the word gets out right away. The executions are supposed to have a deterrent effect on future competitors. That’s half the point.”

Tilley nodded solemnly. “I remember Oliver and Berto. It was just after I got put on homicides. Me and my partner responded to the scene. We made the killing for drug related, but we couldn’t trace it to a particular crew. Nobody makes a big deal about a couple of crack dealers, but I remember thinking it was strange.”

“Even if the kids weren’t killed by drug dealers, that doesn’t mean they were killed by the Hanoverians,” Rose said.

Betty and Moodrow stood up simultaneously and began to clear the dishes. Jim and Rose stayed in their seats. The couples saw each other often and had decided that visitors were not allowed to help, which meant that, at every other party, you could stuff yourself without paying the consequences when you did the dishes.

“One thing for sure, if the Hanoverians actually did kill Oliver and his pal (and Ephraim is
sure
they did), they’re keeping their mouths shut. I guess that means they’re not drug dealers.”