Redemption Street (6 page)

He transformed his cold smile into a cruel, joyless laugh. And, raising his glass to me a second time, grudgingly complimented: “A tough Jew, good. Good.”

He was baiting me. I held my tongue.

Bored by my unwillingness to engage him, Francis Sr. worked his way out of the recliner and started toward the kitchen to freshen his whiskey. He stopped, as I knew he would, as he always did when we were alone, to turn back for a parting shot.

“Ghosts,” he said. “Do Jews believe in ghosts?”

Ghosts again, always with the ghosts. I didn’t get what his preoccupation was with ghosts, and he never seemed inclined to enlighten me. Though tonight, given the job I was about to take on, the subject of ghosts seemed oddly appropriate.

Katy was asleep when I got upstairs. I was exhausted, but almost too tired to sleep, so I took my first blind steps into the world Arthur Rosen had left behind. And “blind steps” was just the right term, for I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to find. Karen and Andrea were dead. The inquiries and inquests, no matter how shoddily performed, were sixteen years finished. Chances were the scene of the fire had been bulldozed, filled in, built over, sold and resold. All I had to work with were some disconnected words scrawled on a crazy man’s walls, some old newspapers, and a dead man’s paranoia. I was certain other detectives had worked with less. I just couldn’t think of their names at the moment.

Chapter Five
November 27th

Katy’s resistance to my Catskills adventure was a stroll in the park compared with Aaron’s reaction. Unlike Katy, though, my big brother couldn’t have cared less that I had taken a dead man’s case. It mattered not to him whether my client was President Reagan or the Ghost of Christmas Past. To Aaron, there was no good reason to miss work short of open-heart surgery. And then only with a signed note from the doctor. We went round and round like a two-headed dog chasing its tail.

Dizzy from the chase, I put an end to it. “Look, Aaron, I haven’t taken a vacation day or a personal day since Sarah was born. I got four weeks coming to me, so I’m takin’ one of them. What’s the big deal? It’s not like I’m takin’ Christmas-and-New Year’s week.”

“And for that I’m supposed to be grateful?”

“No, you’re just supposed to understand. It was part of the agreement when we went into this business. I have the right to work cases.”

“I have the right to wear a bra and panties and run through Times Square,” he chided, “but it doesn’t mean I’m going to do it.”

“That’s an image I don’t want to think about.”

We both laughed. Aaron surrendered.

He slapped my face playfully. “Get back soon or I’ll start wearing sensible pumps and a handbag into work. Go already.”

I gave Aaron my buddy Kosta’s phone number and suggested he call him if things in the store got out of hand. Kosta was initially Katy’s friend, but we’d grown pretty close. He managed a few punk and new wave bands. Yet even in punk’s heyday, he was only slightly less successful at rock-and-roll management than the captain of the
Titanic
was at iceberg avoidance. Kosta was heading down the homestretch toward the poverty line.

“Don’t worry.” I cut Aaron off before he could object. “Kosta knows wine.”

“Be safe, little brother,” he said. “Be safe.”

November was through teasing. It had definitely decided to pack up the denim jackets and stick them in the attic next to the plastic garbage bag marked “Indian Summer.” Time had come to haul out the parkas and boots. And if there were any lingering questions about November’s intentions, the mean shade of gray hanging in the air outside my windshield answered most of them. The remaining questions were answered by my throbbing knee. “Snow,” it said in its unique kind of Morse code. “Snow.” Just what I needed for my drive upstate.

Us denizens of the five boroughs referred to the Catskills as “upstate,” but that was just another manifestation of our warped view of the universe. What do you expect? There are still a sizable number of lower-Manhattanites who consider Chelsea a northern suburb, Brooklyn another country, and Yonkers a distant planet. What they thought of the rest of the world, who can say? Potsdam, up on the Canadian border—now, that’s upstate. Buffalo and Rochester to the northwest, they’re upstate. In truth, the Catskills, a low mountain range only an hour or two north of the city, was actually downstate.

During the thirties, forties, and fifties, the Catskills had flourished as a summer-vacation spot for New York City’s lower-and middle-class populations. With its rich green valleys, numerous lakes, waterfalls, and scenic vistas, the Catskills offered a nearby escape from the sweltering city streets. The Catskills also offered something else: a place for individual ethnic groups to get relief from the pressures of the melting pot and associate in peace with their own. The Irish and Italians had their own enclaves in the mountains, but the Catskills would always be most closely associated with the Jews.

The Borscht Belt was a series of hotels that had sprung up in the Catskills over the years to service a vibrant Jewish clientele. The Concord, Grossinger’s, Kutshers, Brown’s were the big-name places that every Jewish kid knew. Unlimited quantities of bland kosher food, shuffleboard, goofy rituals like cross-dressing mock weddings, endless sessions of Simon Says, amateur talent shows, dance contests, and a house band with a trumpet player that shtupped every lonely skirt in residence—these were just some of the goodies you got for your money. But above all else, what defined the Catskills were the comedians who played the hotel ballrooms: Myron Cohen, Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, Henny Youngman, Don Rickles, Stiller and Meara, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, David Brenner. All had cut their teeth doing the rounds.

Now don’t get me wrong, the Catskills, like any other resort area had a pecking order. Not every hotel was so grand and gaudy. There were second-and third-rung hotels with second-and third-rung comedians. The food was a little blander, the portions smaller, the trumpet player a little less frisky. Never mind the bottom feeders like the motels, boarding houses, and bungalow colonies.

As a kid, I’d spent a few weeks during a few summers in the Catskills. Only once had we ever stayed at a top-notch hotel. I think I was seven or eight. Miriam, my baby sister, was just that, a baby sister. My dad, a supervisor for a big supermarket chain, had won a week at the Concord as a bonus for surpassing his quarterly projections. It was all right, I guess. There were other kids my age to play with, a pool, and lots of crappy food. Aaron, Miriam, and I were too young to see the shows, but my mom finished third in a beautiful-legs contest, and my parents won a cha-cha dance-off. I inherited that dance trophy. Katy put it up in the living room when we bought our house. What I remember most about that week in the mountains was that my parents were happy. It was perhaps the only full week in my life when my parents seemed weightless.

We returned sporadically to the scene of the crime, but it was never the same. And with each return, the quality of the accommodations dropped a rung. My dad changed jobs; once, twice. Then he bought his own store. There was less money. There wasn’t enough money. There was none. Then we stopped coming. Happiness was no longer part of the equation, and weightlessness was beyond my parents’ escape velocity. Eventually, they were ground into dust by the tonnage of their own failures and other unseen forces of the universe.

But it was more than just my parents’ balance sheet that had changed. The Catskills themselves had started to slide into the pit. Two things doomed the Borscht Belt: fast, reliable air travel and dependable, affordable air-conditioning. Who wanted to play seven days of shuffleboard when you could fly to Vegas for a week for the same money? Who needed to pack a hot car full of kids and in-laws to feel cool mountain air when cool air was available at the flip of a switch? And the dynamics had changed. Baby boomers were less ethnic, less traditional, more restless. By the mid-seventies, some of the big hotels had gone the way of Yiddish theater. Some hung on, but the clientele was much older, the lavish shows with first-rate talent were no more.

Sometimes I think it was my fate to catch things gone to seed. Coney Island, the world’s playground during my parents’ generation, was a wretched ghost town by the time my friends and I were old enough to go there on our own. The Dodgers moved to L.A. the year my dad promised to take me to a World Series game. Brooklyn itself had taken a sour turn during my watch. By 1957, the Dodgers weren’t the only ones fleeing the County of Kings. Why should the Catskills have been any different?

But in the mid-sixties, though the seeds of its ruin had been sewn, the Catskills was still the place a lot of city kids went to gain some work experience while getting away. Even Aaron had done it for a summer—working as a waiter at a second-rate Borscht Belt hotel. That’s what Karen and Andrea were doing that fateful summer, working at the eminently forgettable Fir Grove Hotel in the little burg of Old Rotterdam, New York.

Though it wasn’t quite slavery, it wasn’t exactly fair pay for a fair day’s work either. You did receive a nominal weekly paycheck, but anything resembling real money came from tips. Your meals and room and board were free. That the food was leftovers from the paying guests’ meals was a given. Oh, and that free room and board … True, the barracks at Auschwitz were worse. And not all the hotels housed their summer staffs in cramped, overcrowded firetraps like the one in which the girls had perished. No, some were more substandard. I guess if you survived it, like Aaron had, you could look back at the experience with a smile.

I wasn’t smiling when I pulled up to Old Rotterdam Town Hall. My knee had been annoyingly correct about the snow, and the drive up along old Route 17 had been a slip-sliding adventure. Downstate New Yorkers, myself included, are great drivers until you introduce any of the various incarnations of wet weather into the mix.

Old Rotterdam, according to my AAA guide, had been established in 1698 as a fur-trading outpost. Baruch Rotterdam had immigrated first from Poland to Holland and then to the New World. Though his original surname was now an irretrievable artifact of history, it was widely held that he had taken on the name Rotterdam to honor his adopted country.

Town Hall was a hideous, nearly windowless concrete pillbox that looked like the prison from a Bauhaus acid trip. The place was as inviting as a sarcophagus. The thing of it was, it probably cost a fortune, whereas almost every house and business I passed on my way through town seemed weather-beaten and dirty even beneath the lie of whitest snow. I just knew its guts were going to be all hunks of prefab cement and acoustic tile.

What I was still trying to divine, however, as I hobbled in from out of the snow, was what I was doing here. It was silly, really. In New York City, the last place you’d start looking for anything or anyone would be City Hall. You might start at the morgue, the local precinct, the hospital, but never City Hall. Christ, on seven out of ten days, you wouldn’t even find the mayor there. I suppose there was a part of me, in spite of lots of experience to the contrary, that wanted to believe that America outside of the Big Apple was
Leave It to Beaver
land. Though my depressing drive through town had pretty much shot that fantasy all to hell.

In the end, I figured, I was here because it was someplace to start. With Marina Conseco and later with Patrick, there were obvious starting lines. Marina had vanished in Coney Island, Patrick at Pooty’s Bar in TriBeCa. But even if I’d known exactly where to start, I still didn’t know
what
I was starting. At least with Marina and Patrick, it was clear what—or, rather, for whom—I was looking.

“I want to hire you to find my sister,” is what Arthur Rosen had said. Yeah, well, maybe in my next life. Maybe he had meant it figuratively. You know, he wanted me to track down people who had gone to school with her or worked with her that last summer, people who had survived the fire. Could he have wanted me to find her in their memories? I believed that for about ten seconds. It simply didn’t jibe with the strange man’s demeanor. He hadn’t spent a decade and a half hiring lawyers, detectives, butchers, and bakers just to create a happy-family scrapbook.

Obviously Arthur felt something was wrong, but what exactly? What had produced such hopelessness in Arthur Rosen that he had chosen Thanksgiving Eve 1981 to end his life? He had had fifteen, sixteen years of hopeless nights from which to choose. Guilty as I felt for turning him down, not even I believed my rejection was the sole determining factor in his death.

Figuring Arthur Rosen hadn’t kept old copies of the
Catskill Tribune
to line the bottom of a birdcage delusion, I had hoped to find a starting point in the pages of one of the editions I’d “borrowed” from his room the night he’d hanged himself. Nothing doing. As far as I could tell, the only thing that tied the papers together was the masthead. In fact, I was more confused after reading through them than when I’d started. The papers were from different days, different months, different years. No two stories carried over from one paper to another. I could find no common theme. Even the reporters seemed to change from month to month. I guessed that was pretty common with small-town papers.

As it turned out, Town Hall wasn’t such a bad place to begin. Inside the predictably sterile lobby were the usual flags, plaques, and glass cases featuring displays of local elementary-school art. But all was not lost. There was this huge wooden signboard up on one wall listing all the current elected officials of Old Rotterdam and the surrounding county. You had to love politicians and their egos. The smaller the politician, the larger the sign. The damn signboard was bigger than the scoreboard at Shea. I wondered if it lit up when a local high-school kid hit a homer. I’m not complaining, mind you, because up there on the big board was a name I recognized from the wall in Arthur’s room.

Councilman at Large
RICHARD T. HAMMERLING