Redemption Street (23 page)

“Is that you,
toteleh
?” Sam, the consummate performer, spoke before I could get two words out. “I was panicked already. Where are you?”

“The doctor’s office in town. Can you come get me?”

“I’m on my way.”

Fifteen minutes later, Sam pulled his Caddy up in front of Pepper’s office. I’d spent the time rehearsing what to say. I had a pretty good idea of the sorts of questions Sam would ask. The problem would be to strike a believable balance between ignorance, suspicion, and knowledge. Playing dumb and playing dumb well are two very different things. If I didn’t act somewhat wary of Sam, he wouldn’t buy the act. On the other hand, if I let too much slip, he’d clam up and cover his tracks.

Doc Pepper locked the door behind me. Sam was out of the car, helping me into the front seat. I was careful not to thank him, not to get emotional one way or the other. I would wait him out, just like Katy and her dad did to me. A clever man like Sam would expect as much.

“Is it bad?” he asked as we neared the road out of town.

“The wrist? It’s not broken, but it’s not great. I just have to keep it wrapped and keep ice on it.”

“And the rest of you?”

“I’m still breathing.”

That was the extent of our conversation until we got back to the Swan Song. Then it was my turn to take the offensive. He was waiting for it. After pulling up to the old hotel, Sam made a show of trying to help me in, and I let him. He took his coat off and poured us some cognac.

“Some plan we had, me and you, huh? A broken-down cop and dirty-mouthed comic, what were we thinkin’?” I winced from laughing. “I just made it to the hedges and three guys jumped me. You know, Sam, I couldn’t help noticing your car pulling away a little earlier than scheduled.”

“I saw a state trooper coming my way. I didn’t want him to pull over, so I moved up the road a little. I’m sorry,
boychik
So,” he puzzled, “what happened to you after you got whacked around? It’s almost twenty-four hours already since I dropped you off.”

If I blew this answer, the game was over. I was being tested.

“I woke up in this little cemetery they got in back of where the Fir Grove used to stand. I think it was when the cops showed up at the front gate—the commotion must’ve brought me around. I was hurtin’ pretty bad. Between the knock on my noggin and my wrist, my balance wasn’t great, and I was kinda disoriented. I wandered into some woods, but not the woods I’d come through. I found some old discarded shit like garbage bags and a ripped-up boat tarp. I used some sticks and pitched a little tent for myself, covering it with snow for insulation. Fucking thing collapsed on me. My part of Brooklyn doesn’t produce too many Eagle Scouts, you know what I’m saying?”

His laugh came easily, and the upturn of his mouth was matched by the corners of his eyes. He was buying it—maybe not lock, stock, and barrel, but enough.

“At least the snow did my wrist some good. Around dawn I began trying to work my way through the woods. I had less luck with that than with the fucking tent. It took me hours, and a few times I wound up back near where I started. A few hours after noon, I found my way onto a road. By nightfall, I hitched my way into town, and I’ve been at Doc Pepper’s ever since.”

He didn’t like that quite so well. It was too neat. I had the timing down too pat, like I’d sat at a desk with a calculator and worked backward.

“It took so long to hitchhike into town? Why didn’t you get to a phone and call me?”

Good question.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly, Sam.” I sounded almost apologetic. “You’re right. I shoulda called.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re mostly okay. That’s what’s important. To your health!”

We clinked glasses and took our cognacs in one swallow. I excused myself, saying I needed to get some sleep. He was back to believing me, I think, and asked if I needed help upstairs. I told him to take an anatomy class, that I didn’t walk on my hands.

“Gay cockum af in yom,”
he yelled to me.

“You go shit in the ocean, old man,” I shouted back.

“Good,” he said, “at least your hearing works fine.”

Upstairs, I didn’t waste a second before retrieving the copies of the
Catskill Tribune
I’d taken from Arthur Rosen’s room the night of his death. As I suspected, one of Andrea’s poems appeared in each edition. I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. When I checked the dates, they confirmed something else: the earliest of these papers dated back nearly three years. Now the time frame made sense.

I could only imagine how Arthur had stumbled onto the poems. He must have been up here on one of his little crusades to get the investigation reopened. Maybe he was sitting in the anteroom of Hammerling’s office, or out in the hallway across from Molly’s desk. Arthur, bored and frustrated, picks up the

Tribune
like he’s done on many of his other visits to Old Rotterdam. Usually, he doesn’t get through the whole paper. The stories are silly. Who really cares about the biggest pumpkin in county history, or whether they’re going to zone Route 42 for strip malls? His sister is dead. That’s what people should care about.

“Is Councilman Hammerling available yet?” he nags Molly.

But Hammerling, categorically prompt and respectful of Arthur’s grief in the past, isn’t in the mood for Rosen’s badgering today. Today the bill to reopen the inquiry into the Fir Grove fire has once more been tabled in committee. The consensus he worked so hard to build has fallen apart yet again. So Arthur must wait a little longer. Arthur reads a bit deeper into the paper. And then he sees it, the poem, one of Andrea’s. He doesn’t believe it. He’s grown so weary, too doubtful of his own judgment and sanity over the years to be sure.

Maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. How it happened was beside the point. That it did happen was the thing. The big questions remained for me to answer. If Andrea was alive, where was she? And what did all this have to do with Sam? I thought I had a pretty good idea where Andrea might be. I didn’t want to think about Sam. It would be hard enough to play out the string as it was. That he had arranged for my two most recent beatings and seemed perfectly willing to pin seventeen potential murders on another man would make it nearly impossible. The thing that haunted me, though, was that I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him.

Chapter Fourteen
December 7th

Sleep had come quickly, dreamlessly. There were no omens lurking around the bends in the dark corners of my night. I despised omens. Omens were what you made them. I showered, dressed, packed my bags, and left Room 221 without looking back. With any luck at all, the place would crash around Sam’s head before I returned. But that would be luck at the expense of justice, and too many lives had been sacrificed to make that trade. There’s an old quote by a British jurist about justice alone being insufficient. It’s not enough for justice to be done, he said. Justice must be seen to be done. Could there ever be justice for the dead, I wondered, seen or unseen?

Sam couldn’t control his shock and dismay when he caught sight of my bag. Then I reminded myself that just maybe he was controlling them perfectly.

“I’ve got to get down to the city for a day or two.”

He was decidedly suspicious. “Why? What besides everything they got in the city I don’t got here?”

“I couldn’t’ve said it better myself.”

“So …”

“I’ll admit I was beginning to have my doubts about Harder.” I began with the truth before switching to my cover story. “But now I’m sure he did it. He’s been acting guilty since I went up to the old Fir Grove that first time. That’s what the vandalism and the fire in the shed were for. He tried to make me think that stuff was about his anger, but it’s all about the, Fir Grove fire. It was his clumsy attempt at changing the subject. He’s probably had me followed around.”

Though he liked what he was hearing, Sam couldn’t reconcile my leaving. “Why go to the city if the arsonist is here?”

“For one thing, I can’t trust the cops up here, especially Lieutenant Bailey. For another, I want to go have a talk with an old friend, an arson investigator with New York’s Bravest. I want to know how some teenage kid could burn down a big building and fool everybody for sixteen years. And it’s an anniversary I don’t want my wife to spend alone.”

“Mazel tov!”
Sam beamed. “How many—”

“Sorry, Sam, it’s not
our
anniversary. It’s a sad anniversary.”

“Pearl Harbor?” He was trying to be funny.

On December 7, 1977, I was alone in my apartment at 3000 Ocean Parkway. I was recuperating from knee surgery, quite probably out of my gourd with painkillers and Dewar’s, and feeling sorry for myself. Several miles away, in TriBeCa, at an artsy-fartsy little bar with the best jukebox in lower Manhattan, a handsome young man was pouring drinks at a college fund-raiser. At around 1:00 A.M., he was swallowed up by the cobblestone streets of the city like a thousand men and women before him. His name was Patrick Michael Maloney. I was married to his sister. For Katy, today marked the anniversary of his disappearance. Of course, my father-in-law and I knew better. Maybe that’s why I felt compelled to finish this job, not to speak for Arthur Rosen or to deliver justice to the dead. Maybe it was my way to atone for continuing to keep the truth about her brother’s disappearance out of my wife’s grasp.

“Pearl Harbor, yeah,” I said. “An uncle I never met died on the
Arizona.”

He didn’t know how to take that and I didn’t care. When I tried to pay my bill, Sam was wounded. “Your money’s no good here,
toteleh
. Go buy your wife a gift or something.”

My instinct was to fight back. This was no free ride. Sam was as genuinely magnanimous as the Grand Inquisitor. This was blood money: my blood, his money. But fighting back too hard would raise his suspicions. Friends accept gifts from friends, graciously.

“You sure, Sam?”

“Put your money away. Don’t insult an old man.”

I shook his hand. “Thanks.”

“You coming back?”

I squeezed his hand tightly as reassurance. “Oh, I’ll be back soon. That’s a guarantee. Take care of yourself.”

At the offices of the
Catskill Tribune
there was no need for a pack of lies, a badge, or an explanation. Maurice, a young black intern who was working on his journalism degree at Syracuse University, was happy to help. Actually, he confessed to being bored out of his skull and regretted taking this internship as opposed to the one in Buffalo. If nothing else, he said, at least the snow in Buffalo was dramatic. Nothing about the Catskills was dramatic. Even the decline of the Borscht Belt had taken so long it elicited only yawns.

Maurice dug out the film files as far back as the fire. “The last big story in these parts,” as he put it. He was right. For weeks the fire dominated the news. Though the fire itself was not what I was here about, I couldn’t help skimming through many of the stories, as I had done previously at the library. But I think I spent at least fifteen minutes just staring at the pictures of the dead, three pictures in particular: Karen, Andrea, and Missy Higgins. My heart still beat fast at the sight of Andrea, but now it was for more than a long-dormant crush.

From the date of the fire, there was a four-year gap until one of Andrea’s poems appeared on the green-bean page of the
Tribune
. Most years, poems by Anonymous appeared twice a year, at six-month intervals. Some years, as many as four poems made it into the paper. That was a little too regularly to suit me. Why always the
Tribune?
Why not some other rag? Surely there were a thousand local papers and small presses across the country that would have published her work under any cockamamie name she chose. I remembered Andrea as a bright girl. Would she risk having her secret discovered, as twice it had been, just to satisfy some egotistical whim? I didn’t think so. There must have been some message component to her method. And I had a pretty good fucking idea who those messages were for.

I thanked Maurice and asked him to refer me to the editor in charge of the green-bean page.

“The green-bean page,” he repeated, laughing. “I like that. Can I use that line in a book someday?”

“Be my guest.”

Mary Heggarty was the editor of everything that went into the
Tribune
other than sports and international news. She was a frazzled chain-smoker with leathery skin, a take-no-prisoners demeanor, and a voice that was a cross between an umpire’s and Lauren Bacall’s. She would have been happier to have root canal than to give me five minutes. She had a paper to run.

“What?” she barked.

I showed her hard copies of all the poems Maurice had so graciously made for me. “What can you tell me about these?”

“They’re poems.” She coughed. “Didn’t they teach you that in school?”

“Why do you publish them?”

“Because I like them,” she said, turning down the curmudgeonly editor routine a few notches. “Have you taken a look at the other poems I’ve had the pleasure of publishing over the years?”

“ ‘I love 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 …’ “ I quoted from Edith Cohen’s classic. “Yes, I’ve had the pleasure.”

“This
is poetry, mister,” Heggarty said, waving the photocopies at me. “This girl’s got talent. I suppose I publish them in the hope that the Edith Cohens of the world will catch on.”

“You said, ‘This girl’s got talent.’ How do you know Anonymous is a g—”

“Look, Prager, anyone with half a brain can tell these were written by a girl, and even after all these years of editing this beshitting paper, I’ve still got half a brain.”

“Do the envelopes come with a local postmark? Are they hand—”

That got her attention. “You’re the third person in ten years to ask me that question about local postmarks. What gives?”

“Let me guess. One was a detective type who tried giving you some bullshit story about a runaway wife or daughter. That was about ten years ago, right? Then, three years ago, there was a crazy-eyed guy with a beard who wouldn’t tell you why he wanted to know.”