Onion Street

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Coney Island Hospital was a white brick box at the corner of Ocean Parkway and Shore Parkway. It was known in the neighborhood as the butcher shop. It was a city-run hospital and the kind of place where big doses of apathy were handed out like after-dinner mints. Incompetence too. The emergency room was renowned for casts that were put on too tight, and bones that had to be rebroken and reset because … well, because they just didn’t get it right the first time. I knew guys with broken arms and legs that had driven themselves to other hospitals to avoid the place. But Coney Island Hospital was less than ten minutes away from Hyman Bergman’s house, and with Bobby in such bad shape I didn’t think I could risk being choosy.

About five minutes after they wheeled Bobby into the emergency room, I was herded into a dark room by two uniformed cops. When I asked what was going on, they told me, “Get the fuck in, sit the fuck down, and shut the fuck up.” Charm school graduates, both.

The room was a windowless box with a rolling desk chair that didn’t roll, a metal desk, and metal shelves bending under the weight of cardboard boxes dating back to a time before the Dodgers moved away from Brooklyn. I waited in there for a half hour or so, trying to come to grips with what had happened to me over the last few hours. I had just watched two men shot to death in front of me. And I don’t mean killed at a distance. One of them, Jimmy, had his brain blown out the back of his head. Neither the Choirboy nor Jimmy had been more than ten feet from me when they died. I kept waiting to feel something other than numb, but I just didn’t. I was cold inside, so cold that I shivered.

There was a knock on the door and it pushed open. In walked a man who didn’t exactly bring an end to my shivers. No more than five foot six, he was a nasty-looking little fireplug of a man with a gray and brown brush cut. He wore his face red and angry, and a lit cigarette dangled from his snarly lips. He carried a ridiculous gray fedora in his hand, and he was twenty years too old and thirty pounds too heavy for his John’s Bargain Store suit. That, and his black shoes squeaked when he walked. Hanging out of the hanky pocket of his suit jacket was a gold and blue enamel detective shield.

“I’m Nance, Detective Nance,” he said, leaning his face right up close to mine. His breath smelled of onions, cigarettes, and whiskey. Yummy. He squeezed my cheeks together till they hurt. “We’re gonna be pals, you and me.”

I said nothing. He didn’t like that. Apparently his other pals were more talkative.

He slapped the side of my head and then grabbed my collar. Why did everybody do that to me? My collar had been grabbed more in the last week than in my whole life. “Listen to me, you little shit. You’re gonna tell me what happened in that basement tonight and how you came to be there. You don’t, I’m gonna slap the cuffs on ya, beat the piss outta ya, and then you’re gonna take a ride to the Tombs to spend the night.”

I said nothing. What I was in the middle of an hour ago, that was worth being frightened over. This guy bullying me … not so much.

He slapped me in the side of the head again, this time a lot harder. “You deaf, asshole?”

“What?”

“Very funny, ya hippie draft-dodgin’ piece a crap. Tell me what happened tonight.”

This time I had something to say, but I knew he was going to like it even less than my silence. “I’ll tell someone, but not you. Get Wallace Casey in here and I’ll talk to him, only him.”

He was back to tugging at my collar. “You obnoxious little cocksucker. Who the fuck do you think you are, ordering me around like I’m your boy?”

“Wallace Casey,” I repeated.

He changed tactics. Instead of tightening his grip on my collar, he pushed me and the chair over backwards. “Start talking.”

I obliged him. “Wallace Casey.”

Nance kicked me in the ribs. It hadn’t escaped my attention that Nance never once asked me who the hell Wallace Casey was. I was pretty sure he knew exactly who Wallace Casey was. I assumed Casey was either standing on the other side of the door or was on his way over. Because there was little doubt that the second an incident involving Bobby Friedman had occurred, Casey would be notified. I knew the truth and the truth was this: the deceased Jimmy might have been a lot of things, a belligerent asshole for sure, but he wasn’t the informant. No, Bobby Friedman was. I might have been a little bit in shock, but I wasn’t stupid. A lot of things made sense to me now that didn’t quite fit before. The only two people who could tell me if I was right or wrong were Bobby and Casey, and Bobby was in no shape to tell me anything.

“All right, ya little kike shit,” Nance barked, flicking his lit cigarette into my face. “Stay where ya are and we’ll see what we’ll see.” Then, before leaving, he gave me a goodbye kick for luck.

I really didn’t like that man. I hadn’t had many direct dealings with the cops in my life, but if Nance was representative of the way most cops acted, it was easy to see why not many people my age gave them much respect. I picked myself up and the chair too, stamped out the cigarette, and waited some more.

This time when there was a knock on the door, it was followed by a question. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

Wallace Casey stood front and center. He was even more imposing close up than at a distance, but he wore what I guess passed for a smile on his face. He held a hand the size of a baseball mitt out to me. “I’m Detective Wallace Casey. I hear you been asking for me.”

I shook his hand. “We’ve met before,” I said. “The night 1055 Coney Island Avenue burned down. You were wearing a ski mask at the time and whacking me across the belly with a baseball bat. You called me something like a long-haired hippie freak.”

His smile broadened. “Jeez, you know, for the life of me, I don’t remember that,” he lied. “Maybe you’re confusing me with somebody else. I hear you and my wife are good pals, huh? Students for a Fair Draft, right? You have that petition on you? I’d like to sign it.”

“Jeez,” I parroted him. “You know, for the life of me, I don’t remember that.”

“Okay, Prager, now that you got that outta your system, you wanna let me know why you needed to see me so bad?”

“First things first, Detective. I don’t suppose this will matter to you or that you’ll do anything about it, but that guy, Detective Nance, who was in here before you …”

“What about him?”

“Well, in the five minutes we were together, he slapped me, kicked me, pushed me onto my back, choked me, threw a lit cigarette in my face, used a religious slur, and threatened me. Other than that, it was love at first sight. Don’t you guys ever stop to wonder why my generation hates you so much?”

“He’s an asshole. Aren’t any of your friends assholes, Prager?”

“Yeah, sure, but they aren’t bullies.”

He shook his head. “No, that’s right. Your friends just try to blow up entire city blocks and kill as many cops as they can.”

“As a general rule, I don’t believe in killing people. And just so you know, Susan Kasten and that bunch aren’t my friends.”

“You sure about that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Detective?”

“Isn’t Bobby Friedman your best friend?”

“Bobby works for you and don’t even try to deny it. I saw you pick up or drop off the package in his trunk at the airport the other day. Explosives, right? I followed you and the van to the Onion Street Pub, and then out to that garage in College Point. If I hadn’t run out of gas, I probably would have found you out that day.”

He applauded. “Keep going.”

“Bobby was your way into the group. I don’t know how you coerced him to turn on his friends, but you did. You supply the explosives to him. He supplies them to the Committee, and he supplies you with information. I knew that airport run thing he was doing was bullshit. I just couldn’t figure out the angle, but I never could keep up with Bobby that way. It was all pretty neat until Jimmy found out about it and ratted Bobby out. So don’t talk to me about my friends being involved.”

“Some are closer than friends, like Mindy Weinstock, for instance.”

“Mindy? Mindy’s in the hospital. She just came out of a coma, for chrissakes! I just saw her tonight. She can barely speak. And it was one of Susan Kasten’s flunkies, this guy named Abdul Salaam, who put her in the coma in the first place. How can she have anything to do with this?”

“Come on, Moe. I can call you Moe, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re a smart guy, a very smart guy. Look how far you got on your own.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

“What’s funny, Moe?” he asked. “Most people I know don’t think I’m very funny.”

“Susan Kasten said almost exactly the same thing about how far I got.”

“She was right. Without hardly any resources, you nearly got to the bottom of this thing.”

“All I did was stumble around.”

“Well, you stumbled around pretty fuckin’ good, better than my whole task force and half the federal agencies in this country. Maybe we should try stumbling around a little more often.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But don’t change the subject. Mindy had nothing to do with this.”

“She had everything to do with this.”

“Bullshit!”

“You think so? I don’t. I think your girlfriend’s in this up to her eyeballs.”

“Prove it.”

“I won’t have to. You can do it for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

He said, “Come with me.”

“Where’re we going?”

“To open up your eyes that last little bit.”