Onion Street

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

My brother was at the desk doing his weekly sales reports when I walked into our bedroom. I didn’t even try to sneak the shearling jacket past him. I think I would have preferred him killing me and just getting it over with, but he must’ve seen the look on my face.

“What’s wrong with you, little brother? You’re white as a ghost.”

Ghost! If you only knew. “I’m sorry about borrowing the jacket, but — ”

“I didn’t ask you about the jacket. I asked you what was wrong. Is it Mindy?”

I choked on a laugh. “She’s the least of it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If I even tried to explain it, it would blow your mind,” I said, brushing off the jacket and placing it back on its hanger. I pulled the plastic bag down over the jacket and hung it back in its place.

“Try me.”

“Oh, and I borrowed your Chuck Taylors too.” I lifted up my left foot to show him.

He jumped out of his seat and grabbed me by the shoulders. “What’s wrong, Moe? You’re not making any sense.”

“I’ve gotten myself into something that I can’t get out of.”

“Drugs?”

“Nothing like that, I swear. I’m not even sure what it is, or how I got into it.”

“What?” he asked, relaxing his grip on my shoulders. “Does it have to do with the cop that was here today?”

“He’s a detective.”

“I don’t care if he’s Attila the Hun, for chrissakes. Does it have anything to do with him?”

“No, I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure,” I said, my mind racing, the rest of me numb with fear.

Aaron let go of me completely and pulled a suitcase out from under his bed. “Does it have anything to do with this? I found it in the trunk of my car last night.”

At first it didn’t register. Then I remembered. It was Samantha’s suitcase, the one that I’d pulled out of her landlady’s attic. I’d put it in the Tempest’s trunk the night Susan Kasten and her Halloween-masked friends had snatched me off the street. In the whirl of events that followed, I’d completely forgotten about it.

“I don’t know, Aaron. Maybe.”

“What the fuck do you know?”

“I know that almost everything I thought I knew, about everyone I thought I knew it about, was wrong.”

“Well, that clears it all up,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm.

I grabbed the suitcase and hoisted it onto my bed. “Let’s open this up. Maybe you better get a butter knife in case it’s locked.”

Butter knives are the Brooklyn Jewish take on Swiss Army knives. Between the five of us in my family, we’d used butter knives to do everything short of open heart surgery. It showed. All of our butter knives had blunted or twisted tips from being used as letter openers, screwdrivers, lock picks, or pry bars. Hell, sometimes we even used them to spread butter. Aaron, always the practical one of us, suggested I try the locks before he went to the kitchen. Smart man. Click. Click. Both latches snapped open when I pushed the two rectangular tabs to the side with my thumbs. My heart thumping with anticipation, I raised the case’s lid.

My heart sank in disappointment when I saw that the case contained nothing more than a cheerleader’s skirt and sweater from Koblenz High, a graduation tassel, programs from school plays, a yearbook, and some other odds and ends. But I wasn’t going to give up just yet. I removed it all from the case. Nothing. That is, nothing that did more than make me wonder about Samantha as a younger girl.

“Shit!”

“Not so fast, little brother,” Aaron said, pushing me aside. “007 would be disappointed in you.” He ran the flats of his hands along the faded, satiny interior lining of the suitcase. Then he pulled back the pocket of the same material on the underside of the case’s lid. He stopped, his eyes lighting up. He grabbed my hand and placed it inside the pocket. “Feel that?” he asked.

“Yeah, there’s something between the lining and the lid.”

Aaron curled his right hand around the loosest part of the lining and gave it a sharp yank. The material, old and faded, tore away from the glue without much of a fight. There, taped to the underside of the lid, were two large brown envelopes. I carefully peeled away the tape and held the envelopes in my hands. I was surprised at just how heavy they were.

“Do you think the envelopes are Samantha’s?” Aaron asked.

“Probably. Look at the rest of the bag. It’s all beat up. The lining is saggy and faded, but the tape is fresh and unyellowed, not brittle like old tape would be.”

“One way to find out for sure.”

The flaps on the envelopes were held closed by the little spread wings of metal clasps. I knew Aaron was right, that opening the envelopes would tell us about who had concealed them, but I hesitated. I wondered if I shouldn’t just put them back inside the suitcase and ship it to Sam’s parents.

Aaron shouted, “Open them!”

I suppose if Sam had died under normal circumstances and if my world hadn’t been turned upside down just lately, I’d have kept them closed and mailed them to her parents. But Sam hadn’t died a normal death, and with me on Jimmy Ding Dong’s to-do list, I had to see what was inside the envelopes.

I opened the first one by bending the clasp’s spread metal wings together, lifting the flap, and dumping the contents onto my bed. Three white, letter-sized envelopes fell onto the bedspread. One was marked “Last Will and Testament.” Another was marked “For Dad.” And one “For Mom.”

“Is that Samantha’s handwriting?” Aaron wanted to know.

“I think so. Wait a second.” I scrounged around the bottom of my closet looking for a particular shoebox. After a minute of frantic searching, I found the one I wanted. Pulling off the lid, I reached into the box and came up with a handful of holiday cards, birthday cards, and postcards. I searched through them until I came upon what I was looking for. “Here it is,” I said, holding up a postcard with a photo of the Steeplechase on the front. On the back was a note from Sam.

Dear Moe —

Please forgive me. I don’t know what got into me the other night. You are a good and loyal friend, which is more than I can say for myself. Getting to know you has been one of my favorite things about moving here. Please don’t let a few minutes of stupidity on my part ruin that.

Love,

Sam

I held the postcard up to the writing on one of the envelopes. “It’s her handwriting, but I’m not going to open these up, Aaron. It’s not right.”

“I agree. There’s nothing in them for us.”

I opened the second brown envelope, turned it upside down, and let gravity do the rest. There was another white, letter-sized envelope within. It was marked “To Whom It May Concern,” but it was the remainder of the contents that made me go cold inside. Next to the white envelope on the bed lay a NYPD badge and a thick packet of black-and-white photographs. The photographs were of Bobby and Tony P, of Bobby’s car — trunk open — at the airport parking lot, of a light-colored van parked behind it. There was a series of photos of a man loading something from the van into the trunk, but the man in the photos wasn’t Detective Casey and the things being loaded into the trunk weren’t wooden crates of dummy explosives.

“Holy shit!” I thought I heard myself say.

Aaron grabbed the photos out of my hand. “What is it? What are those things in his hands?” he asked, pointing at the plastic- and tape-covered bricks being loaded into Bobby’s trunk.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Aaron didn’t like it when I got sarcastic. He especially didn’t like it when it made him feel dumb or out of touch. “No, I’m not kidding, jerk. Remember whose clothes you’ve been wearing today and whose car you’ve been driving lately.”

“Sorry, you’re right, big brother. Those bricks are bricks of heroin or cocaine. I’m not sure which.”

“Get the fuck outta here! Bobby wouldn’t do that.”

“You’re wrong. You wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that, but I’m not sure there’s anything Bobby wouldn’t do if a lot of money was part of the equation.”

Aaron wasn’t believing it. “Big money or not, Bobby’s a shrewd guy. He wouldn’t risk going away to prison for — ” I was already laughing before he could finish. “What’s so funny?” he wanted to know.

“I swear I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “In fact, even though it looks and sounds like laughter, I’m really crying.”

“You’re talking crazy, Moe.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Aren’t you going to open the white envelope? It’s addressed to Whom It May Concern, not to her mom or dad.”

“Not now,” I said. “Not here.”

“When?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. I knew exactly where and when I was going to open it.

“What about the photographs? Are you — ”

“I’ll handle it.”

“Okay,” he said, but his expression was full of worry. Rightfully so.

My brother knew my heart better than I thought he did. What was even more amazing was that in spite of knowing that I was basically an aimless fuck-up, he trusted me. That I hadn’t expected, because I wasn’t sure that I’d ever done anything to earn his trust. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to trust somebody. I was about to test that theory out.