Innocent monster

THIRTY-ONE

Paul Stern showed up at eight sharp with a bottle of scotch, but it wasn’t any kind of scotch I’d ever seen.

“You’ve heard of single malt scotch, right, Moe?”

“Don’t be a wiseass, kid. I’m sure your PI told you how I earn a living.”

“Sorry. Yeah, she told me you own wine stores.”

“Well, we’ve been known to sell a bottle or three of Glenfiddich, Laphroaig, and Macallan.”

“This is single barrel scotch. A friend of mine belongs to a club that buys single barrels of fine unblended scotch and the club members get equal shares. Sometimes they have the barrel shipped over here and they have a party. Sometimes, like with this one, they have it bottled.”

“Just when you thought the idle rich had run out of ideas on how to waste money…”

“You resent money?”

“No. Just what people do with it,” I said, getting two rocks glasses from the shelf. “It’s just that when you grow up without money, you have a different kind of respect for it. That’s all. Your dad-shit! I mean Rico. He understood. He grew up like me.”

“It’s okay. You can call him my dad. I know who you mean and it will stop you from correcting yourself every thirty seconds.”

“Fair enough.”

“My friend gave the scotch to me as a gift a few years ago and I’ve never found the right occasion to drink it. I brought it down to New York with me because I hoped you’d talk to me about my biological father.”

“Call him Rico or we’ll be tripping over each other all night,” I said, pouring a finger’s worth of the honey-colored scotch in each glass. “So you think this is the right occasion, huh? You know some of the stuff I’m gonna tell you about your dad isn’t apt to make you very proud to be carrying around his DNA.”

“That’s okay, Moe. I’m a lawyer and did a little research on my own before I hired… before I had someone else look into things. I know all the stuff about his trial and prison time. I know he sold information and protection to drug dealers, so I get that he was no saint.”

“Another lawyer, just what the world needed.” I winked at him. “Listen, kid, if that was the worst of it… Maybe we better drink some of this.”

We raised glasses, neither of us making a toast, and sipped. I could taste the difference immediately. It was like the purity of a single sustained note coming out of John Coltrane’s sax. Of course, even a single note is a thousand different things. Maybe it was the same note a million other sax players might have hit, but it was just slightly different when he played it. But that was the thing about the scotch, as unique as it was, it was still scotch and inevitably disappointing. Single sustained notes played even by a genius aren’t that much different. It was like the first time I smoked a real Cuban cigar. It was great and sorely disappointing all at the same time.

“Good stuff, Paul. Thanks.”

“Tastes like scotch,” he said.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“I want you to tell me the truth about Rico, and not like you told me the truth about the scotch.”

“Okay, sure.” I recapped the scotch and broke out some red wine.

It was ten o’clock by the time we noticed we hadn’t eaten. And by then I’d gotten past the hard stories about how Rico sold me out, how he was on a drug dealer’s pad even when we were first on the job, and how he let me walk into an ambush once at an old Mafia Don’s house in Mill Basin. I knew the PI had told him some of these stories, but he wanted to hear them from my mouth. I guess I understood that. We had since moved on to the funny stories, like the one about how Rico walked off post on the Fourth of July to sleep with a nurse in the back of a city ambulance and how the sergeant caught him with his pants around his ankles.

“Your dad and women… man, he was like a magnet. Women loved him and he looked so cool in his uniform. I remember those weekends up in the Catskills. Rico and I used to go sometimes. It was wall- to-wall drinking and fucking around.”

“I’m living proof of that,” he said.

“I didn’t mean to be insensitive, sorry. What about your birth mother?”

“Her name was Alice Weathers. She died about five years ago, but I talked to her sister. She said Alice fell in love with Rico that weekend, that he was the most gentle lover she ever had, but knew he barely even remembered her when he woke the next morning. When she had me, she wrote that the father was unknown on the birth certificate.”

“Then how-”

“Her sister. She told her sister Rico’s name.”

“Amazing. So, you wanna go eat, kid?”

“Sure.”

Just as we opened the lobby door, Sarah came strolling into the building carrying a tiny, fake Christmas tree in one hand and a bag full of gift-wrapped boxes in the other.

“Hey, Dad.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I thought you’d be out at the movies. I wanted to surprise you.”

“You did. I thought you were working.”

“I got off at eight. I think we have something to celebrate this year and figured now that Mom’s not around, we could have a tree.”

“How’s the beagle?”

“She gives a whole new meaning to sick as a dog, but she’ll live.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Paul Stern, I’d like you to meet my daughter Sarah.”

He made to shake her hand and gave up. “Why don’t you come to dinner with us?” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Don’t be silly, kiddo. C’mon with us. I’ve been talking about my past all night and I think I might want to let Paul do some talking for a change.”

“I’ve got the keys, just let me drop this stuff off upstairs. You guys wait for me.”

Paul Stern grabbed the bag. “Let me help.”

I waited downstairs in contemplation of the smile on my daughter’s face and letting go of the emptiness that had haunted me for the last seven years.