Redemption Street (29 page)

“Give me the book, idiot,” Sam ordered. “You know, if you had listened to me in the first place, this wouldn’t have been necessary.” Then Sam turned to me. “It’s his fault you and Sleeping Beauty are going to die, you know. I told him not to rough you up when he gave you the file, but because you hurt his pride and his little fingers he had to hurt you. Then I told him to make the beating in the woods seem authentic, but no. He couldn’t be bothered.” Turning back to Bailey: “You fat putz!”

“Shut up, old man,” Bailey sneered, and grabbed me by the throat.

“Don’t! Schmuck!” Sam barked. “No marks on the bodies. It will ruin everything.”

Bailey let me go. Molly stirred slightly. There wasn’t much time now.

“Where’s the box?” Bailey groused at Sam. “It better all be in there.”

“It seems you underestimated Lieutenant Bailey,
boychik,”
Sam said. “I guess he liked his career a little more than you thought. You gave us both an out.”

Molly moved again, this time raising her arm off the floor.

Sam handed a small cardboard box to Bailey. “Here, you prick. It will be a relief to not have to deal with such an idiot anymore.”

“Is this all of it?” Bailey demanded of the old comedian.

“All of it. Look for yourself.”

Bailey opened the box and rummaged through it. Obviously, whatever Sam had been holding over the corrupt cop’s head was supposed to be in there. I didn’t like the smile on Bailey’s face when he was done.

“Satisfied?” Sam asked.

Molly’s eyes fluttered. If I was going to make a move it would have to be now.

Bailey put the box on the recliner and took the shotgun from Sam. He moved toward me. He
was
going to enjoy this.

“Enough stalling, moron!” Sam egged him on. “Do it!”

Bailey raised the shotgun, but swung it around and buried the butt end in my solar plexus. I collapsed, unable to breathe, choking for air.

“You really are a fucking idiot,” Sam yelled. “Now you’re gonna have to blow a hole in him there to cover the bruise.”

Bailey ignored Sam, talking to me instead. “That’s for the kick in my nuts. Now we’re even.”

I could barely breathe, but managed to get to my knees. When Sam opened up his mouth to say something, Bailey pointed the shotgun at him.

“Shut up, you old cocksucker. Just shut up!”

“He set the fire at the Fir Grove!” I whispered, desperate to buy time.

“No he didn’t,” Bailey said. “But I can’t blame you for trying that.”

“Will you shoot him and let’s get this over with already?” Sam coaxed. “The fat girl’s coming around. I don’t want her to know what’s happening to her.”

At least Sam was consistent: he only killed women in their sleep. Molly rolled over on the couch.

“I told you to shut up. I’ve taken fucking orders from you for years, and I’m through listening. Get Molly out of here,” Bailey said to me. “And don’t say a word about this to anyone. I’ll handle it.”

“What are you doing?” Sam screamed. “You’re going to screw it up again!”

“I’ve done a lot of shit for you, old man, but I never killed nobody. What did Molly ever do to me?”

Sweating and looking very unnerved, Sam suddenly very much resembled the young comedian whom I’d just watched flop on national TV.

“Bailey, Bailey, okay, you’re right.” Sam put up his hands. “Don’t kill the fat girl. We’ll figure something out, you and me. We always have before, right? But him we gotta get rid of.”

“Get her out of here!” Bailey prodded me with the shotgun. “Go!”

I got to my feet and gathered up Molly as best I could. She was still out of it, and it was a struggle getting her to the car. I laid her across my backseat. I got behind the wheel and started up the engine, but I couldn’t just let Bailey kill Sam in cold blood, though Sam seemed perfectly eager to have Bailey do the same to Molly and me.

“Don’t do it!” I shouted, coming back through the door.

Sam looked puzzled, but relieved.

Bailey was angry. “I told you to get the luck outta here.”

“It’s murder, Bailey. You said it yourself, you never killed—”

The lieutenant turned to face me. “Get the fuck outta here!”

Sam, seeing Bailey was distracted, reached for something under his jacket. It was a big army-issue.45. Bailey wasn’t that distracted, and he let Sam have it. The old comedian’s head exploded, spraying blood and bone on the cabin walls and the TV screen, which still held the young Sam frozen in time. Sam’s body, blown back by the force of the buckshot, crumpled in a heap. Even twisted and headless, Sam’s body seemed to exude a kind of evil energy. Then, as if on cue, the pause function clicked off, and there was Sam retreating from the stage in defeat.

Bailey turned the shotgun on me. “This is the last time I’m telling you. Get out!”

I did, grabbing Andrea’s journal and my empty .38 as I went. I could not afford to leave any record of my having been there. I pulled away, driving way too fast down the unlit mountain road. Almost to the main turnoff, I checked my rearview mirror. In it, I could see flames snapping at the black night. Sam’s cabin was afire. Given the cabin’s isolated locale, it was unlikely anyone would notice for quite some time. I thought of Karen, half out of her mind with panic, setting light to Andrea’s lifeless body. It occurred to me that the Fir Grove fire had never been put out, that it had burned quietly for sixteen years, the embers smoldering in the hearts of the evil and the innocent alike. I realized that the final body count was much higher than the papers had reported, and that grief has a very long shelf life. As I turned onto the deserted main road, the flames disappearing from view, I wondered if it would all end now, here, finally, whether there would be some measure of peace and redemption found in the cold ashes of Sam’s cabin, or if the Fir Grove fire would continue to burn forever.

Epilogue
Ashes

When you look at the light of the stars, you are looking into the past. When you look at a fresh grave, you are looking into the future. Life is the thirty seconds between starlight and the first shovelful falling.

Andrea Cotter, April 14, 1965

Not everything Andrea wrote was brilliant or original. Though you probably couldn’t have convinced me of that until I spent a lifetime at the Swan Song Hotel and Resort. The bit about looking into the past was a paraphrase of something our old high-school science teacher used to say. The rest was pure Andrea. Her journal was crammed with her woman-child philosophy, her poetry and pain. I was both guilt-stricken and exhilarated reading her words. It was a feeling not at all unfamiliar to me.

There is a certain voyeuristic quality to police work. Even the lowliest uniform is thrust into the midst of people’s lives—usually very low points in those lives. There were times when I went from buying a cup of coffee one minute, to standing by the crushed and bloodied remains of a woman who’d just thrown herself off the roof of the projects. You are once removed. You watch the curious eyes in the gathering crowd. You listen to their gossiping. A relative of the dead woman arrives. She breaks down. The detectives come. You move on. You buy another cup of coffee. After your shift you drink a beer and tell yourself you are untouched by the desperation of the woman who jumped off the roof. You know it’s a lie.

For a time I considered not reading the book at all. An albatross, Karen Rosen had called it. I would weigh it down, I thought, and toss it off the footbridge at Ocean Avenue in Sheepshead Bay. I would burn it, as it should have perished in the first place. I would put it in the safe at the store, or in a box in the attic, leave the pain for someone else to deal with. But what to do with the book was my de-facto responsibility. How would I know what to do with the journal without first reading it?

The night of the fire at Sam’s cabin, I drove straight into Old Rotterdam. I called Hanrahan’s from a corner pay phone and asked for Sally. She sounded as thrilled to hear from me as she would have been at the prospect of doing shots of Liquid Plumr, but I was determined that none of the grime and ash that had washed off on me should touch Molly. At first Sally resisted my request that she take a break and meet me around the corner from the bar. She resisted until I told her Sam was dead and that the tapes of her were gone.

She took her break and helped me get Molly home and in bed. We worked out our story. If the cops asked, I told Sally to say Molly ran into Sam at the bar. That they had a few drinks together, but Molly wasn’t feeling well. Too many drinks too fast. Sam mentioned as much to Sally. Sally asked Sam to take Molly home. As far as Sally knew, Sam had done just that. Molly had been in bed ever since.

“If they want confirmation,” I instructed, “you were so concerned, you came over here to check during your break. Molly was passed out in bed, sleeping it off. I don’t think she’ll remember anything.”

Sally was curious to know what really happened. I did not tell her. It wasn’t a matter of trust. People cannot repeat what they don’t know. If the cops ever worked their way back to Sally, it would be a dead end. At worst, she could point the finger at me, but Molly would be out of it.

I dropped the barmaid back around the corner from Hanrahan’s. I promised Sally that her past was her own, that no one would hear about it from me. “The other night,” I said, “when I mentioned your having worked for Sam—I didn’t know then, but I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too, for a lot of things.”

The cops did speak to Sally, but only to establish the time Molly and Sam had left the bar. When they talked to Molly, she could barely remember anything. She had passed out in Sam’s car, and she woke up in her bed the next morning with a deluxe-sized hangover. The cops never bothered getting in touch with me.

They didn’t find a body or any identifiable remains in Sam’s cabin. He just seemed to have disappeared. They found his abandoned Caddy in the Bronx on Christmas Day, propped up on cinder blocks, stripped down to the frame. Again there was no sign of Sam. I had no idea what became of Sam’s body. What did it matter? That was Bailey’s business.

I try not to think too much about Bailey, though I wonder about him sometimes. Would he have been so noble about the act of murder if Molly wasn’t there that night? Would he have really killed Sam if the old man hadn’t stupidly gone for his .45? I’d like to think that Bailey was just going to throw a scare into Sam. Who can say? I hear that Bailey’s still on the job in Old Rotterdam and that he’s up for captain. I guess he’s not worried about me exposing his past deeds. He’s right not to worry. I’m a lot of things, but ungrateful’s not one of them.

I hung around Old Rotterdam for another two days just to see how things played themselves out. Besides, I didn’t want to call attention to myself by leaving town so close to Sam’s sudden and unexplained disappearance. I stayed at a roadside motel. I’d had my fill of old Borscht Belt palaces.

When Molly recovered from her hangover, I took her to dinner as promised. She picked some chop house up near Cooperstown. The place had a huge fiberglass steer out front. When you passed by, the steer pawed the ground with a robotic hoof and steam came out of its nostrils. We stood outside while we waited for our table, and watched two little girls run back and forth in the snow in front of the steer. They got a kick out of the steam. We got a kick out of the kids.

Inside, the tables were all red-and-white gingham and the waitresses wore cowboy boots and big straw hats. Whenever the wait staff got a big tip, they played a tape of some guy screaming “Yahoo!” at the top of his lungs, and of a bullet ricocheting off a cow bell. After a while, you barely noticed. The food was okay and the beer was cheap. We laughed a lot, too much maybe. I could see in Molly’s eyes that she wanted to ask about that night. She never did, and I didn’t volunteer any information.

When I dropped her home, I thanked her.

“For what?” she wanted to know.

“For saving my life, Molly.”

I kissed her as I had done that Saturday night at Hanrahan’s and left it there.

The next morning, I went to say goodbye to Dick Hammerling. Hammerling was no fool. He could read the papers and put two and two together. He asked if I had anything to do with the fire at Sam’s cabin, or with the old comedian’s apparent disappearance. He believed my denials about as much as I believed in the tooth fairy. He told me he was getting out of politics and going back to college.

“Maybe I’ll get back into politics again someday, but for the right reasons.”

I wished him luck.

Molly was waiting outside in the hall, just as she had that first day. I thanked her once again for all her help and for dinner. I saw that question in her eyes. This time she got up the nerve to ask it.

“What really hap—”

I put my finger across her lips. “Shhh! Did you ever have a dream, Molly, where you tell yourself you’ve just got to remember, but when you wake up it’s gone? What really happened was like that, like one of those dreams. It’s gone.”

I turned north out of town, toward the old Fir Grove and what had once been Koppelman’s Bungalow Colony. Karen Rosen, I thought, for all her sins, had a right to know she hadn’t really killed Andrea. I actually turned into the parking lot before reconsidering. In that moment I realized there was nothing I could say to set things right. Telling her she hadn’t killed Andrea would only make it worse. At least she believed that part of the nightmare was an accident. Maybe she had taken some measure of comfort in that over the years. Did she really need one more torment so close to her own death? Then again, I could afford to be generous. There were sixteen souls counting off the remaining seconds of Karen Rosen’s life who would be far less magnanimous.

I met Anton Harder at the Red Apple Rest on old Route 17. No one knew us there. We were just two men having a conversation. It was uncomfortable and awkward for both of us, but, I think, especially for me. He had helped me, and I had given him my word. Any way I handled it, however, would only serve to feed his anti-Semitism. If I had left town without fulfilling my end of the deal, I would have been the perfect example of the lying, scheming Jew. And if I told him the whole story, the gory details included, I could only imagine what effect that might have. No matter how I might try to dress it up, Harder would hear: This old, scheming, money-grubbing, two-faced Jew pimp and two Jewess whores conspired to burn your poor, innocent mother to death….