Neptune Avenue (15 page)

PLACED SMACK-DAB ON THE
center of a wall in the Homicide squad room was a bold little sign that read
GOYAKOD
.
It was an acronym and stood for Get Off Your Ass And Knock On Doors, a reminder that the bulk of cases—as Jack had told his young partner on the case—were closed not with TV-style forensic magic, but old-fashioned shoe leather. And so it was that Jack and Kyle Driscoll and a bunch of uniforms spent the rest of their day canvassing the neighborhood around the little community garden.

After the young victim had been taken down from the tree but before the M.E.’s boys had done their carryout, Jack took some Polaroids of the girl, taking care to close her eyes so that she wouldn’t look so grim. And then they’d left the garden and fanned out, climbing stoops and ringing doorbells, asking if anyone had seen two or more people enter the dark garden the night before, if anyone knew the girl in the photos.

Kyle was professional but a bit frosty toward his partner from Homicide. Jack bore it in silence. What was he going to do, stir up a whole community on uncertain evidence?

They had hardly been welcomed into the neighborhood, yet it didn’t take long for them to get an I.D. Another stylishly dressed young woman, walking down a street two blocks away, recognized the victim as a fellow student in her jewelry design class over at Pratt Institute in Fort Greene.
Shantel Williams
. And then they talked to Shantel’s grandmother, with whom she had lived, and who was frantic because Shantel had never come home the night before, and then they tracked down a couple of girlfriends who had spent the early part of the previous evening hanging out with her in a couple of trendy new neighborhood watering holes. As Jack discovered after some tactful prodding, it turned out that Shantel had a drinking problem that could make her become rather unpleasant to be around, so her friends had left her in a bar around midnight. And so it was that Jack and Kyle spent the last couple hours of their tour visiting bars, asking if anyone had seen someone chatting up the girl or maybe escorting her away.

But there the trail went cold, and then the tour ended, and Jack passed his info on to the evening Homicide squad, and he got in his car, glad to be headed back to Brighton Beach and Zhenya Lelo’s waiting arms.

T
RIBES. THOUGH THEY ALL
lived in the same nation and shared the concrete and asphalt of a single city borough, Brooklynites had come to America from all over the planet, and for every citizen who was happy to shed the past and assimilate, there was another who held fast to some other culture, some other place. There were Poles in Greenpoint and Mexicans in Sunset Park, Italians in Carroll Gardens and Pakistanis in Midwood. Ideally, a cop here should be a walking ethnic encyclopedia and a speaker of several dozen languages.

To make life more complicated for the humble detective, each tribe was divided into smaller camps, some of them fiercely different from one another. A casual visitor might see men in side curls and big black hats and think “Hasidic Jews,” yet be ignorant of the fact that Satmar Hasidim lived in Williamsburg and Borough Park and were severely religious and strictly insular, while the Lubavitchers of Crown Heights and Midwood were more relaxed in their religious rules and somewhat more open to New Yorkers of other stripes.

That relative openness did not provide much comfort to Jack Leightner now, sitting in front of two visitors to the Seven-one Precinct House. Business seemed slow in the squad room; other detectives glanced idly over at the pair of Lubavitchers parked next to Kyle Driscoll’s battered gray desk. The men were volunteers; they served as liaisons between their community and the local police.

One of them was a stooped old man. “My name is Mandel,” he said. “This is my grandson Oren.” Both men wore full beards, side curls, black fedoras, and—amazingly, considering the almost nonexistent air conditioning inside the building—full black suits. The grandson looked to be about twenty; he shared his relative’s pinched face and pronounced Adam’s apple. His granddad had the twinkling eyes of a department store Santa. (Maybe not the most appropriate comparison, Jack realized, but still …)

“Thanks very much for coming,” Kyle said. This time,
he
had insisted on doing the talking.

“We’re glad to help,” the young man said. He wore braces, and his voice sounded as if it had just broken.

“Can I get you anything?” Kyle said. “A soda?”

The visitors shook their heads. The old man had a cane; he rested both hands on top. “What can we do for you?”

Kyle cleared his throat and hunched forward in his seat. “This is, ah, it’s a matter of some delicacy. And we’re very grateful for your assistance.” He spread his palms out on his knees. “It’s about a couple of homicides. The body of a young woman was found in the neighborhood yesterday morning. And we found another woman several days ago.”

The old man’s cheery face grew puzzled. “Members of our community were murdered? We have heard nothing about this.”

Kyle looked uncomfortable, but Jack was not inclined to jump in and help. The Hasidim evoked complicated feelings in him. He could admire their stubbornness in maintaining their ideals in such a compromised, crass society, which celebrated
Baywatch
babes and celebrity cokeheads, yet—like a number of more secular Jews—he was embarrassed by how he felt embarrassed by them. They seemed trapped in an unhappy circle, the way they showed off their difference and righteousness—and then reacted to prejudice by becoming even more insular.

“Actually,” Kyle answered, “the victims were young African-American women.”

The younger visitor frowned. “I don’t understand. How can we help with this? You think one of us might have witnessed one of these killings?”

Kyle shifted in his chair. “Not exactly. As I said, this is a matter of some delicacy. And I hope you won’t be offended if I speak frankly. We, ah, we have some forensic evidence. It’s not at all conclusive, mind you, and we’re not making any accusations against anyone. We’re just looking for some advice.”

Both visitors seemed utterly confused.

“Look,” Kyle continued. “I know that your people are model citizens. An incredibly low crime rate, fantastic participation in community affairs …”

The Hasidim just stared.

Kyle plunged on. “I’m sure that if someone in your community was having a problem, you’d want to identify this person, right?”

The old man’s hands tightened on top of his cane. “What kind of a problem? Are you suggesting that one of us might have killed these women?”

Kyle cleared his throat. “As I said, we have some forensic evidence.”

“What kind of evidence?”

Kyle lowered his voice. “This is confidential information. We, ah, we found some animal fur at the scenes.
Beaver
fur.” He paused to let the implication sink in.

The old man frowned. “And this proves what, exactly?”

Kyle raised his hands in a placating gesture. “It doesn’t prove anything. But you have to admit, it’s pretty unusual.”

The old man looked at his grandson, and then both men suddenly rose to their feet. Mandel shook his cane at Kyle. “I’ll tell you what is
not
unusual, Mister Detective: this sort of slander against the Jewish people has been going on for thousands of years. And you should be ashamed of yourself.” He turned, grabbed his grandson’s arm, and both men marched out of the squad room.

The room went silent for a moment.

“Well,” Jack finally said, “
that
went well.”

At least Kyle Driscoll had the good grace to laugh.

“Excuse me.”

Both detectives looked across the room at a stout fireplug of a man with slicked-back hair. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a significant gold chain. Jack pegged him as an undercover. The guy had been talking to a couple of the squad detectives over in the corner, but now he was headed toward Driscoll’s desk. He stuck out a hand. “How ya doin? I’m Rob Tewks. I used to work with a Street Crimes squad here, before I got transferred to the Eight-four.”

Jack and his partner introduced themselves.

“You mind if I ask what that was all about?” the other detective said.

Kyle filled him in.

The man shook his head. “I wish I’d known what you were looking for earlier. I got just the guy for you to talk to.”

YOSI SILBERBERG WAS ALSO
a Lubavitcher. Unlike some of his stern compatriots, the Hasid was openly cheerful, a roly-poly, red-haired clerk who spent his days perched on a stool behind the counter of an electronics store on Atlantic Avenue, where he sold big automotive sound systems to young African-American men. (As often happened in New York City, commerce had a way of trumping—at least temporarily—all sorts of tribal differences.) The air conditioning inside was pumped up high, and Jack and the Street Crimes detective stood to the side, enjoying it, as Silberberg finished demonstrating a powerful new speaker system to a couple of homeboys wearing gold chains, gold-capped teeth, and incredibly slouchy jeans. He cranked up a volume knob, and the store practically shook with heavy hip-hop bass. Then he reached back, flicked the sound off, and turned back to the potential purchaser.

“Well, my friend? What do you think?”

The customer smiled at his sidekick. “Yo, dawg, that shit is bumpin’!” They knocked fists together in a dap.

The salesman winked at Tewks, then smiled at his customer. “That’s right—and I give it to you for fifty dollars off, today only.”

The salesman and the detective had met several years earlier, when Tewks caught an assailant of Silberberg’s uncle—a mugging attempt gone bad. The young man had been very grateful.

After the clerk rang up his new sale, he turned to the two detectives. (Kyle had reluctantly agreed that it might be best if he waited outside in the car.) “So, Detective, what can I do for you today? Are you in the market for a ‘bumping’ new sound system for your police car?”

Tewks smiled. “No, thanks. This is Detective Leightner from Brooklyn South Homicide. We’re actually here to talk about hats.”

Silberberg’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Hats? I think you might have the wrong store.”

Tewks leaned forward and rested his forearms on the counter. “It’s for a case. We’re trying to identify someone.”

The clerk’s cheery face grew grave. “A killing involving one of us? I haven’t heard about it yet.”

Here we go again,
Jack thought. He stepped in before the other detective could explain. “We’d like to know about hats. I know there are different sects of Hasidic people here in Brooklyn. Do you all wear the same kind of hats?”

The clerk shook his head. “Oy—do you have a couple of days to discuss this? First of all, we don’t say ‘sects.’ We say ‘courts.’ And there are a number of these: the Lubavitchers, like me, the Satmars, the Ger, the Bobov, the Belz … All wear different hats. We Lubavitchers prefer the black Borsalino, a fedora. The Bobov like a good bowler; the Satmar, a wide-brimmed, flat-topped—”

Jack cut in again, seeing that he was about to get more information than he could handle. “What about fur hats? Which ones would wear beaver fur?”

The clerk considered the question thoughtfully. “We call this
biber.
Now, do you mean beaver
felt
or beaver
fur
?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Felt is made from wool or animal hair, compressed into a dense fabric. We call this material ‘smooth.’ Like my hat here,” he said, lifting a fedora from a shelf behind him.

“And the other kind?”

“There are a couple. Some wear hats with what is called a beaver finish, which is sort of like a thick velvet—but it’s usually made from rabbit.”

Jack shook his head, impressed. It seemed that the various Hasidic sects—no,
courts
—had a sartorial code as complex as that which separated the Crips and Bloods. And the rivalries were almost as intense. (He had heard stories—possibly apocryphal—of Hasidim from one group kidnapping a young man from another, throwing him into the back of a van, and cutting off his side curls.) “How do you keep track of all this?” he asked.

The Hasid just shrugged. “How do you keep track of what different police wear?”

“That’s my full-time job.”

The clerk shrugged again. “Being a Hasid? Also full-time.”

Jack smiled. “What about those big, round hats, shaped like, um, an angel food cake, made of thick fur?”

“Ah,” the clerk said, nodding. “Those are
shtreimel
. We Lubavitchers don’t wear them.”

“Who does?”

“The Satmars, and some of the others.”

Jack frowned; he was starting to go cross-eyed with the complexity of the topic.

Rob Tewks looked at his watch. “You okay here? I gotta run.”

Jack nodded and thanked the detective, who seemed relieved to split, like a schoolkid saved by the bell.

“So tell me,” the clerk said to Jack. “What did the hat of your victim look like?”

Jack pinched his lower lip, feeling a bit guilty about not explaining the details of the case, but not so guilty that he was prepared to ruin the interview. “We didn’t find a hat. Just some beaver hairs.”

The clerk stroked his red beard. “The victim—what did he look like?”

Jack shook his head. “We just found the hairs.”

The clerk frowned. “So you don’t know if there was a Hasid involved at all?”

Jack shook his head, rather sheepish.

Yosi looked pensive. “All is not lost. Tell me something: this incident, which I assume you believe is connected to a homicide—what day of the week did it occur?”

Jack scratched his head. “Let me see … there were actually two. One happened on a Saturday or Sunday, the other on a Thursday. Why?”

Yosi smiled, eyes twinkling. “This is good news. I think no Hasid was killed at all.”

Jack’s eyes widened. “How could you possibly know that?”

The clerk shrugged. “Simple deduction. First of all, the
shtreimel
hat is often actually made of sable or fox fur. And it is worn only on
shabbes
”—Friday nights—“or on holidays or special
simchas
.”