Redemption Street (22 page)

Propping myself up on my right elbow, I took a better look around. From all appearances, I was alone. Beyond the end of the bed was a little den area, and beyond that was a tiny kitchen, tiny even by New York City apartment standards. You couldn’t fit two cooks in there with a tub of Crisco and a shoehorn. I was in a camper or trailer of some sort. Who it belonged to was a mystery.

That little guy with the dull hammer told me to get off my elbow and lie back down. I paid careful attention to his instructions, but not quickly enough. The camper was spinning. Shutting my eyes helped a little to slow it down, but I just knew that when the spinning stopped I wouldn’t be in Kansas anymore. Waves of nausea rolled over me. Eventually, the waves calmed and the spinning stopped. I think they did. They must have, because I fell hopelessly asleep.

When I reopened my eyes, there was no appreciable light coming through the glass of the aluminum slider over the bed. It was nighttime wherever outside of Kansas the camper had come to rest. The fluorescent tube above my head still had its tic, the bed still reeked, the mattress was no more comfortable, I still felt like I’d been dropped out of a B-52 without a parachute, but something had changed. I was no longer alone. I heard a racket coming from the little kitchen. Maybe a fat chef had gotten himself wedged in between the sink and stove. Remembering the last time I elevated my head, I thought twice about trying to peer into the galley. My host saved me the trouble.

“You’re up.” It was Anton Harder.

“This is pretty ironic,” I said, not realizing how sore my jaw was until I used it. “I was on my way to see you last night. Was it last night? What day is it?”

“It’s today,” he answered blankly. “If you’re asking when we found your trespassing carcass bleeding on the property, then, yes, that was last night.”

I repeated: “I was coming to have a little talk with you.”

“Your soup’s almost ready.” He ignored me. “Your wrist is broken, but we have a former army medic here. He says it should be fine until you get to a hospital and have it set properly.”

I raised my broken wrist. “You didn’t do this to me?”

“To what end?” he wondered. “You think we would have kicked your stupid ass and then fixed you up because we felt guilty about it? We don’t want the cops around here.

Somebody might have shot you by accident. You would have deserved it, too, but no one from around here did this to you.”

“Where did you find me?”

“By my mother’s—By the grave,” he mumbled.

“I know your mom was Missy Higgins. Sam Gutterman told me about her. She died in the fire.”

“Yes, over there.” He wasn’t interested in talking about his mom.

“I was attacked on the other side of the hedges by two or three men,” I explained. “They purposely dumped me over on—over there.”

He was curious. “What for?”

“I think they thought if they were really lucky you’d finish the job for them and kill me. But mostly I think they wanted me to believe you did this to me. This way, when the cops showed up, I’d point the finger at you. Somebody’s trying very hard to have me think the worst of you.”

“Cops! How did you know about the cops if you were unconscious?” he demanded.

“The cops were part of the plan. They were supposed to be a diversion. When they showed up, I figured they would draw everyone’s attention away from the rear of the property. I guess that part of the plan worked pretty well. Unfortunately, there were parts of the plan nobody bothered sharing with me.”

He gave me a big bowl of canned soup. As I ate I studied my reluctant rescuer. Though he was a man by all measures, he seemed like such a boy. Maybe it was his diminutive stature. I think maybe it had more to do with the humanizing effect of Molly Treat’s stories. He was cute once, she said. They’d kissed. And, having read his psych evaluation, I had trouble seeing him as anything but a wounded little boy. Wishing to be a monster doesn’t make it so. Wishing never does.

“So,” he asked when he thought I’d gotten enough soup down, “why did you want to talk to me?”

I told him about the other incidents. He did not shy away from taking responsibility for my car being vandalized at the Fir Grove. In fact, he seemed disturbingly pleased with himself. However, he vehemently denied having anything to do with the fires at the Swan Song. I told him that I already knew as much, but that someone was deeply invested in trying to pin the Fir Grove fire on him. Though Harder was curious, I played dumb about who that someone was. Until I knew the whys of what was going on, I was going to keep my own counsel.

“The cops thought you did it, you know?” I said just to see his reaction.

“Fuck what the cops thought. That was my mother who died out there in that fire. My mother.” His thin chest heaved. “How could they think I would kill my own mother?” he whispered haltingly, choking back tears.

“Cops think stupid things sometimes. It’s their job.”

Hearing the sympathy in my voice made him furious. “Tomorrow morning I’ll have someone drive you to the hospital.” Harder sneered. “Then, if you should do me a favor and drop dead, it won’t be my headache.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t ever come back here!” He slammed the trailer door behind him.

In spite of everything he represented, I could do nothing but feel terribly sorry for the pieces of Robby Higgins that lived inside the pint-sized man. He couldn’t possibly loathe me as much as he loathed himself. That was very sad, very sad indeed.

I shut my eyes for a while, trying to fall back asleep. It didn’t work. I was sore as hell, not tired. My eyelids were beginning to twitch synchronously with the fluorescent fixture. I leaned over the edge of the bed to see if I could find something to read. I hadn’t perused
Mein Kampf
since college. Alas, the only things to read besides the soup can on the kitchen counter were two copies of old reliable, the
Catskill Tribune
. Unfortunately, both were days old.

I buzzed through the December 4 edition without getting the slightest bit drowsy; not that reading the
Tribune
was remotely like wading through the Sunday
New York Times
. It was more like reading your high-school newspaper, only with more advertisements for foundation garments. In desperation, I reread the December 3 edition, the one with the green-bean-salad recipes. It had put me to sleep once before. Maybe it would do the trick again. Sure enough, as I read down that same page my eyelids began to shut. But as I drifted into the world that existed between waking and unconsciousness, I heard an unsettling voice. I had heard it before, urging me to pay more attention. This time I did.

I surrendered my hard-fought battle for sleep, forcing my eyes open. I reread the green-bean-salad recipes for the third time. I hated green beans in any form, but especially in a casserole with a can of condensed cream-of-broccoli soup, peanuts, and fried onion sticks. The key to my universe was not to be found in that recipe, so I scanned farther down the page. Mary Obenessor, eighty-one, of Old Rotterdam was dead of pancreatic cancer. Jim Moody and Eileen Barker were pleased to announce their engagement. There was going to be a Christmas festival at Town Hall on the 18th, and the Candle Commune on Beacon Road was having a charity sale.

At the bottom of the page, in the last column to the right, was a section called “Poetry from the Soul.” I was getting nauseous again. There’s nothing like bad poetry. Poetry, everyone thinks they can write it, and it’s perhaps the hardest thing to write well. I considered rereading the green-bean-casserole recipes yet again. It was an impossibility to hate green beans as much as I hated haiku. The voice didn’t let me go back. The first poem was a little ditty by that bard of the Catskills, Edith Cohen, called “I Love the Sunshine.”

I Love the Sunshine

Hove the sunshine in the air of blue
.

I love the green grass and its mossy dew
.

I love the truth because it is so true
.

And I love my love beca use it is for you
.

I love the sunshine
.

The next poem had the catchy title “A Capella 132” and it was penned by anonymous. But it wasn’t anonymous at all. I’d read poems just like it before, poems entitled “A Capella 77” and “A Capella 24”. The same poet had written “Trio for Two and One” and “Coney Island Wheels.” It had been a long long time ago, in high school, that I’d read them. I’d even heard “Coney Island Wheels” read aloud in our school auditorium.

My heart was beating so incredibly fast that I actually clutched my chest. Sweat gushed out of every piece of me with a pore. I stood for the first time, and in spite of the racking pain, I ran around the trailer in a panic. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to scream, but I had no words to give, no shape for my mouth. What could I do? What do you say when you read a poem written by a girl who’s been dead for sixteen years? Arthur Rosen was right: one of the dead girls wasn’t. And I knew exactly what to do. I fell down on my knees and cried like a fool. Suddenly things fit, the loose ends were knitting themselves more tightly by the moment. That voice inside my head fell finally silent.

I had to get out of there now. I couldn’t wait for tomorrow. I couldn’t wait five minutes. I fumbled to get my still-damp clothes on. Dressing is less complicated when you’ve got two good hands, but I managed nonetheless. I ran out the door of the trailer, forgetting I wasn’t exactly a popular figure in these parts. None of that mattered. I just stood out in the snow screaming for Harder.

He didn’t appreciate being summoned by the trespassing cop. Too fucking bad, I thought.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated, trying to push me back into the trailer.

“Now!” I demanded in a whisper. “Right fucking now.”

“Why?” he whispered so that the gathering crowd could not hear.

“Because I’m on the verge of answering a question that’s plagued you for sixteen years. If you get me to a hospital or Doc Pepper’s tonight, I’ll be able to find out what really happened at the Fir Grove.”

“Why should I trust you?”

I didn’t like the crowd. I didn’t think they’d do me any harm, but Harder was unlikely to allow himself to appear even remotely weak in front of his friends.

“Slap me in the face,” I whispered, “and push me up the stairs into the trailer.”

He didn’t ask why. For a twig of a man he hit pretty good.

“You’ve got my attention,” he said, slamming the door purposefully hard behind him. “Why should I trust you?”

“Because you’ve got nothing to lose. Just get me outta here so I can do my job. People besides yourself have been suffering for a long time, too. And whether you hate them or not, you know how they feel.”

“When you find out, no matter what it is, I want to know.”

I put my good hand out. He took it. “For what it’s worth, you have my word.”

When he let go of my hand, I gestured for him to start screaming at me. Again, he didn’t need more prompting. He went into an invective-laced tirade, calling me things I’d never even heard of. During his performance I grabbed the fluorescent tube that had haunted me throughout the day and smashed it against the door. He liked that, but not nearly as much as I did. I hated that damn bulb. He opened the door and pushed me down the front stairs.

“Peter!” Harder screamed to the man who days earlier had held the shotgun on me. “Do me a favor and get this asshole out of here. Take him into town. Take him wherever he wants to go, but get him out of here.”

“But—” Peter started to object.

“Now!”

“The wrist’s not broken,” Pepper explained, holding the X ray up to the light. “But you won’t be swinging a golf club for a few weeks. That was a professionally done splint you had on there.”

“Retired army medic.”

The old doctor shook his head proudly. “Thought so. The rest of you is just banged up, and there’s some blood in your urine. I think we can rule out bladder cancer. Somebody gave you a pretty good licking.”

“Pretty good, yeah.”

“Nothing a few days of bed rest and a bottle of aspirin won’t cure. Here.” He handed me some drug samples. “That’s in case the pain gets bad. They’ll either knock you out or make you forget about the pain.”

I thanked him, asked him to bill me at my home address, and requested the use of his phone.

“Use the phone at my wife’s desk.”

Katy was frantic. Why hadn’t I called? What was wrong? Was I okay? How could I do this to her? If someone hadn’t killed me already, she was prepared to do it herself. I told her she had every right to be mad. When I told her where I was calling from and why, she really went nuts. I let her get it out of her system before I dropped the bomb.

“I think Andrea Cotter’s still alive.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. She didn’t try arguing me out of it. Katy knew I would never say something like that for effect.

“Do you know where she is?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Somewhere up here, I think. I’m pretty sure I know someone who knows. But I’ve got to be careful about that.”

“Who is—”

“I can’t talk about it. I’ve got to go soon.”

“I’m coming up there.” Katy was adamant.

“No you’re not. If things go the way I think they will, I’ll be down in the city tomorrow. Can your mom spare you for a day? I’d like to sleep in my own bed for a night, if that’s okay with you.”

“My dad came home from the hospital yesterday. I’ll be back in Brooklyn whether they can spare me or not.”

“Bring Sarah with you.”

“I love you, Moses. Take care of yourself.”

“I love you, too, kiddo. And tomorrow I’ll let you take care of me.”

The next call was the more difficult of the two to make.