Redemption Street (30 page)

I told him the truth. I didn’t identify Karen or Andrea by name. He had already guessed at Sam’s involvement. He had read the papers. His reaction surprised me.

“I always liked Sam,” he said. “He had a way of making me feel special, like him and me were the only two people in the world.”

“I know exactly how that is.”

We shook hands without having to see who was watching, but I was not so much a fool as to imagine Harder would be magically transformed. Hate isn’t immutable, but it isn’t clay either.

Aaron was just glad to have me back at work in time for the holiday rush. Katy would be less easily satisfied. It was a delicate balance for the both of us. There were things she knew she shouldn’t ask, and there were things I’d promised not to tell. I saved her the trouble of asking and gave an even vaguer version of events than I’d given to Dick Hammerling. Katy would put the pieces together for herself. She didn’t say a word about it again until the drive up to her parents’ house on Christmas Eve. Sarah was asleep in the backseat.

“You did it, Moses, didn’t you?” she said, great pride in her voice. “You put the dead to rest.”

“I guess.”

With that, Katy took a small gift-wrapped box out of her coat pocket. “Pull over and open it. It’s a special gift that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

I pulled over, unwrapped, and opened the box. Inside was a gold-and-blue enamel shield, a detective’s shield. It bore my old badge number.

Katy leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You’ve earned it, whether or not the world knows it.”

She was right. I had earned it.

After dinner, after Katy and Sarah had gone up to bed, I was sitting on the couch admiring the shield my wife had awarded me. I guess there were tears in my eyes. I was being watched. Francis Maloney Sr″ whiskey in hand, stood snickering at me. He didn’t say anything. He never had to say anything. I put the shield back in my pocket.

I threw him off balance. “How are you feeling?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m fine.”

“I guess I’m responsible for that,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“I took your advice, Francis. I watched what I wished for. Good night.”

On New Year’s Day, I called Israel Roth. He was glad to hear from me, but there was a tension in his voice.

“Did you like the scotch?” he wondered.

“You know, Mr, Roth, I wanted to apologize about that. I lost the bottle.”

“You did! So you didn’t read the note?”

“Note, what note? Oh, before I forget, Sam Gutterman’s missing. Did you know?”

The relief in his voice was palpable. “Missing! No, I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, they found his cabin burned to the ground, and his car turned up in the Bronx on Christmas Day. You said something about a note?”

“It was nothing. Forget it. Happy New Year to you and your family, Mr. Moe.”

“The same to you and yours, Mr. Roth.”

Did he know I was lying about the note? Maybe. That wasn’t the point. Either way, I’d made an old man happy, and that was worth it. Like I told Karen Rosen, I wasn’t in the forgiveness business. The funny thing about forgiveness is that it comes from the inside out, not the other way around. All I did was to let Mr. Roth forgive himself. I hoped someday I’d be able to forgive myself for the growing list of my lies of omission.

Everything we do changes us. Some things more than others. My time in Old Rotterdam had gotten me thinking. Old Rotterdam was as much about me as it was about Karen, Andrea, and Sam. I had seen bits of myself reflected in the faces of Hasidic men, in the words of Judas Wannsee, in the shame of Israel Roth, and, yes, even in Anton Harder’s hate. Old Rotterdam had made it impossible for me to ignore my Judaism. No longer would I be able to trot it out like a tuxedo when, like with Sam Gutterman, I needed to speak a little Yiddish or cozy up to a customer. I wouldn’t be able to put it back in its suit bag when I hung out with my old cop buddies. I was what I was. Now I was going to have to deal with it.

Katy, Sarah, and I started attending Saturday services at a local Reform temple. Katy was thrilled to go. Paradoxically, it seems, converted Jews are less conflicted. For years she had gone to Mass every Sunday, and though she had parted ways with the church even before we met, I think Katy missed the sense of ritual and tradition. I met with the rabbi once a week, on Tuesday nights.

“Who better than a man named Moses should be welcomed back?” he asked at our first meeting.

I reminded him: “Moses never made it to the Promised Land.”

“Such is the nature of Jewishness. But will it be you or God that blocks the way?”

It took me a few years to figure out what to do with Andrea’s journal. Karen Rosen was right: the journal was an albatross, but not in the way I expected. Like her life, Andrea’s journal wasn’t any one thing. It was her poems, her thoughts, her observations. It was growing pains painted in words. In some ways I had hoped to find something deep and ugly about her, something to make her death seem less horrific and tragic. No, she had her faults and foibles, her petty jealousies and grudges, but Andrea was very much the girl I had dreamed she was.

I had gone to see R. B. Carter to tell him that his sister was neither a blackmailer nor a murderer and that she had in fact been dead these many years. Like Hammerling and Harder before him, he just seemed relieved. I could not bring myself to give him the ugly details. But R. B. Carter was no innocent, for, in a subversively fitting way, he had been involved in the matter for quite some time.

If it hadn’t been a particularly lazy Sunday, if Katy and Sarah hadn’t been up visiting the Maloneys, I might have missed it. It was an article in the Sunday
New York Times
detailing the efforts by Albany lobbyists to push a legalized-gambling bill through the state legislature.

CATSKILLS REGION GAMBLING BILL VOTED DOWN

was the headline. Major real-estate concerns, it seemed, had been buying up vast amounts of property for years in anticipation of the bill’s passage. The largest of those concerns was a company owned by R. B. Carter. The reporters also cited several less-than-savory tactics the companies had employed to depress the already depressed real-estate prices in the region. Guess who owned the old Fir Grove property? That’s right, R. B. Carter. Carter had leased the land to the likes of Anton Harder in an attempt to drive down the prices of the surrounding real estate. There was enough irony in that to make me puke.

Andrea’s journal wasn’t always an albatross. Funny things happened in her life. She had a dog named Sweetie that used to pee on her mother’s spider plant. She loved her big brother. She was jealous of the beautiful girls in school and thought Mr. Cantor, her social-studies teacher, was the handsomest man on the planet. She loved the Mets even though they were terrible. She thought George Harrison was the cute Beatle, but was hypnotized by John Lennon.

I thought back to the time Lennon was in my shop and we joked about Paul. That’s one of my favorite memories. My favorite passage in Andrea’s journal, though, is this:

May 26, 1965

Got my copies of the literary magazine. There was a great poem in it. It wasn’t great like Ginsberg great. It was just that the poet was so in love with the girl he was writing about. I want someone to love me like that someday. Iran into him on the boardwalk … on purpose. His name is Moses. I had him autograph his poem. That was weird, I guess. He’s pretty cute. Looked up his phone number. 332-8594. Maybe I’ll call him when I get back from the Fir Grove
.

I still have the journal. It’s just hard to let some things go.

AFTERWORD
By Reed Farrel Coleman

In many ways,
Redemption Street
was a star-crossed project. As its author, the novel is, for me, an exercise in mixed feelings. While it no doubt represents some of the best of what the series has to offer, its lack of commercial and critical success has been my most bitter pill. I used to joke—maybe half-joke is the more appropriate phrase—that it was the first book in history to go direct from the printer to the remainder bin. For a long time, my friends and colleagues would whisper the words
Redemption Street
like my mom would whisper the word
cancer
and spit. But it is my nature to keep moving forward and my next Moe Prager Mystery,
The James Deans
, won the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony Awards. It was also nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, and Gumshoe Awards.

In the intervening years since the publication of
Redemption Street
, however, I’ve found that the book had many devoted fans, including numerous booksellers and fellow writers. While I have received more comments and fan mail for
Walking the Perfect Square, The James Deans, Soul Patch
and even some of my Dylan Klein novels, the comments and letters for
Redemption Street
are by far the most passionate. I’ve also found a real interest, almost a hunger, in fans of the later Moe books for a re-issue of
Redemption Street
.

I would like to say that when David Thompson and McKenna Jordan of Busted Flush Press and Murder by the Book in Houston first approached me with the idea of issuing a new, quality paperback edition of the novel that I immediately jumped at the idea, but I can’t. For while I was of course curious about their interest and the devotion of
Redemption Street
’
s
fans, I wasn’t anxious to revisit the events surrounding its initial release. That you’ve just read the new paperback edition the three of us discussed a few years back is both a testament to David and McKenna’s persistence and my reexamination of the novel.

Moe may be a big believer in fate, but I’m not. Yet it would be less than truthful of me not to confess that something, resembling my understanding of fate had a hand in the publication of the book you’re holding in your hand. In late 2006 and in early 2007, I was approached to write essays on the persistent nature of the private detective novel and on the growth of the ethnic detective in mystery fiction. While examining my own work and that of my colleagues in order to write these essays, I found that I was drawn not to the obvious choice,
The James Deans
, but to
Redemption Street
.

In rereading
Redemption Street
for the first time in four years, I rediscovered for myself what it was about the novel that made me so enjoy writing it and, perhaps, came to understand the chemistry that makes the novel so engaging to its devotees. First and most evidently,
Redemption Street
is, if I do say so myself, a kickass title. But the appeal of the novel is obviously much much deeper than the title page.

What I noticed as I read was that the Moe I presented in
Redemption Street
was willing to bare different aspects of himself than the Moe of
Walking the Perfect Square
. In
Walking …
the reader is introduced to Moe the person. In
Redemption Street
, the reader is introduced to Moe’s soul, particularly his Jewish soul. For Moe, that internal tug of war between his mixed and contradictory feelings about his own “Jewish-ness” is an essential struggle that continues to playout during the course of the series. And what, if not a protagonist’s struggles, is it that gets a reader to invest his or her real feelings in the life of a fictional character?

That I then externalized that tug of war by placing Auschwitz survivor Israel Roth on one end of the rope and leader of the Yellow Stars, Judas Wannsee, on the other, was not anticipated. Amazingly, neither of these characters was part of a master plan. Neither Mr. Roth nor Wannsee came into my head until I actually wrote the Catskill sections of the book. Mr. Roth, maybe second only to Moe, is the most beloved character in the Prager novels. He is such a powerful presence in my own life that even I think of him as a living breathing human being. I also represented Moe’s struggles by having Moe bounce between characters who represented the Freudian constructs of Moe’s self: Sudden Sam Gutterman (id), Israel Roth (ego), and Judas Wannsee (super ego). I think some, people enjoy the novel because I took on serious topics like cultural assimilation, Jewish self-hatred, and anti-Semitism.

But at its core,
Remeption Street
is the work that lays out the pattern of Moe’s obsession with the past and his dread of its implications for the future.
Walking the Perfect Square
lays out the arc of the series, not its emotional underpinnings. Moe Prager is a sometimes reluctant, sometimes eager slave to the past and nowhere is that clearer than in this novel. Because for Moe, the past is never really past, and it’s always personal. Always. Until I wrote
Empty Ever After
, the fifth installment in the series and in some sense a companion piece to
Redemption Street
, none of Moe’s cases was as personal as the long delayed investigation into the death of his high school crush, Andrea Cotter.

Oddly enough, after going through all this soul searching and analysis, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t in fact matter why people have a soft spot for
Redemption Street
. I am just gratified that they do. For my own self, I’ve come to the realization that writing
Redemption Street
was crucial to the series, that without it,
The James Deans, Soul Patch
, and
Empty Ever After
would not have been what they are. For in
Redemption Street
, Moe Prager reveals the depth of his soul and establishes many of the central characters and themes integral to the series. So while other titles in the series have received critical acclaim, garnered nominations and awards, had greater commercial success, none is more essentially a Moe novel than
Redemption Street
.

Reed Farrel Coleman
October 2007