Soul Patch

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Mundane.

Given that in the last few days Larry Mac had either been killed or killed himself, that someone had tried to kill me, that I’d kissed Carmella Melendez, and that I’d witnessed a woman’s head being blown off and was reading about it at the breakfast table, you’d think mundane would be the last word to come to mind. But I had a family and a business and a house and taxes to pay. I had pancakes to serve to a little girl and I had to catch the mailman.

“Yo, Joey!”

But when Joey the mailman turned around, he wasn’t Joey. Years ago, there was a local New York kids’ show called The Merry Mailman. Well, not only was this guy not Joey, but he was as merry as a mortuary.

“Sorry,” I said, handing him some letters to be mailed.

“Gee, thanks, just what I need.”

I let that go.

“Did your neighbors move?” he asked.

“The Bermans? Yeah, they moved down to Boca about two weeks ago. Why?”

“Look at this crap!” Mr. Mortuary said, shoving a fistful of envelopes at me. “I have to carry all this shit around with me all day because some idiot screwed up their change of address card.”

I was seriously considering telling this numbnuts to go fuck himself, but thought better of it. You never want to piss a waiter off before he brings you your meal and you never want to screw with the mailman after you’ve just handed him the envelope containing your mortgage payment.

“Have a nice day. .” Asshole!

When I got back inside, Sarah was talking to someone on the phone. “Un huh. . Yeah, I’m in fifth grade. . Sometimes I help my mom out downstairs with her design work and my daddy takes me to the stores with him. .”

“Who is it, kiddo?”

“Excuse me a second,” she said into the phone. “A lady named Margaret,” she said to me.

“Okay, kiddo, I’ll take it from here.” Sarah handed me the phone.

“Hi, Marge.”

“Frank tells me you came by yesterday to talk to me about Larry.” Her voice was grave. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s not like that, Marge. I just wanted to talk, to try and jar your memory a little about Larry.”

“My memories of Larry don’t need any jarring, Moe.” She began softly sobbing.

Frank Spinelli was no fool. He understood his new wife very well. Margaret’s love for Larry was, indeed, a once-in-her-life thing. Although crushed by the divorce, Marge had probably kept the faint hope of some sort of reconciliation alive. She had married Frank Spinelli as revenge. It was foolish, of course. You can’t poke someone in the eye when they’re not looking at you. My guess was that when Larry had called Margaret a few weeks back to arrange for dinner, she had gone to the Blind Steer fully prepared to do whatever she had to, to recover at least some small part of what she had lost, her own dignity be damned. I can’t imagine how much it hurt when Larry failed to show.

“I’m sorry, Marge.”

“Don’t be. I just. . I just really miss him.”

“I know. He could be a real jerk, but. .”

“Christ, help me, I know.”

“I like Frank a lot,” I said, trying to change the subject, but her sobbing only got worse.

“It’s so unfair to him, to Frank.”

“I don’t think he’d see it that way. He loves you and he understands more than you think, Marge.”

At that very moment, Katy walked through the basement door, waving her portable office phone at me. Her face was as grave as Margaret’s voice had been.

“Excuse me for a second, Marge.” I covered the mouthpiece. “What’s up, Katy? What’s wrong?”

“There’s a Detective Melendez on the phone for you.”

“Tell her to hold on for one second while I get off this call, okay?” She shook her head yes and walked out of earshot. “Marge, listen, I’ve gotta go. Can we meet later, maybe some place you and Larry used to go when you first started seeing each other?”

“Cara Mia,” she said, without hesitation and without tears. “Do you know it?”

“In Bay Ridge?”

“That’s it.”

“Eight okay with you?”

“Eight.”

Katy must’ve heard me hang up, because she reappeared, portable in hand. I mouthed, “Thanks,” and took her phone. My day was about to take a sharp turn away from the mundane.

“Yes, Detective Melendez, what can I do for you?”

“They got your tag number,” she said.

“Who got my tag number?”

“We did, the cops.”

“From last night?”

“That’s right. Somebody gave up your plate number.”

“Fuck!”

“It gets worse, Moe. Detectives Bento and Klein are coming to talk to you.”

“When?”

“Like now, so start thinking of something to say.”

“Listen, write this number down.” I gave her Preacher Simmons’ phone number. “Call it and tell the man at the other end what you just told me. He’ll know what to do.”

“Give you an alibi, you mean.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

There was a loud silence on the other end of the phone. I thought she began to say something, but maybe not. I probably imagined it. She was already compromised and she knew it. Calling Preacher for me wasn’t going to make it any worse.

When I hung up and turned around, Katy was standing right behind me. Her expression hadn’t brightened any. No one, not even the

“How did you know Detective Melendez was a her?”

“I met her before. She’s the one who drove me to where they found Larry’s body.” She was the beautiful, dark-skinned detective who was hanging around the cemetery. She was the one who pushed me out of the way of an oncoming car. She was the one who I-

I resisted the urge to say more. The guilty talk too much and in the back of my mind I heard the old steps creaking with the weight of my guilt. Katy opened her mouth to say something, when the doorbell rang. Whatever was in her eyes had gone, at least for the moment.

“Those are the cops for me,” I said. “I’m going to go with them.”

“The cops! What happened?”

“They think I saw something.”

“What?”

I ignored that. “Where’s Sarah?”

“She went down to my studio,” Katy said. “Why?”

“I don’t want her to hear us.”

“Well, what do they think you saw?”

“This!” I held up the Daily News and showed her the story about Kalisha’s execution.

“Oh, my God! You saw it, didn’t you?” There was no fooling Katy. She could see it in my face. That ability of hers gave me pause.

“I’ll explain later. I’ve gotta go.”

She didn’t argue. The doorbell rang again and this time there was knocking as well. I opened up the door and stepped out, rather than letting the detectives in. Sarah was downstairs, but I didn’t want to risk her hearing anything at all. Kids always know more than their parents think they do, but I didn’t feel obliged to help the process along.

For the first time in or out of uniform, I was on the wrong side of the desk inside a police interview room. I can’t say how exactly, but it seemed fitting that it should happen at my old precinct house. I doubted familiarity was apt to make interrogation a more enjoyable experience. On my way back to the interview rooms, with Klein and

I did stop to stare at the spot on the squad room floor where one misstep and a careless piece of litter had combined to forever alter the course of my life. There was no plaque, no ersatz memorial to the death of my undistinguished police career. Shit, they’d probably redone the floor two or three times since I’d slipped and twisted my knee in a way that neither God nor Darwin had ever intended. But I was lucky, I think, to be able to trace the course of my adult life back to one single thing. When most people look in their rearview mirrors, all they see are faint ghosts: tiny, intermittent steps that don’t seem to add up to where they are. How the fuck did I get here? is a question most people take to their graves for consideration. Not me. I’d have secrets to keep me warm through eternal night.

“What the fuck you lookin’ at?” Bento wanted to know.

“Can’t you see him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Elvis’ ghost.”

“Get the fuck in the room, Prager.”

They’d spruced up the Six-O’s interview rooms since last I stepped inside one over twelve years ago. It’s not like they’d painted the walls a snappy orange or added potted plants, but it was brighter somehow.

Wasn’t it Pascal who said that if you had to wager on whether or not God existed, the safe bet was existence? Although I don’t think he had my situation in mind when he wrote it, I went with Pascal’s advice. I didn’t know if I was in the interview room in which Carmella Melendez had planted the wire, but I acted as if I were. Even if I were so inclined to trust Klein and Bento with the truth-which I wasn’t-I couldn’t be sure of who else might be listening. My answers would be as much for those invisible ears as for the two detectives.

Detective Klein was maybe thirty-five, a lean and quiet type with steel gray hair and eyes to match. He was the kind to hang back and watch. Bento, an impatient, barrel-chested Sicilian, was about my age. He held his hands curled as if holding an invisible salami hero and cold Heineken. He liked his food. I wasn’t stupid enough to think one detective more dangerous than the other.

In the car on the way over, Bento had done most of the talking, mostly about the Mets. They should have won three championships by now. Gooden’s a piece-of-shit drug addict. They never should have traded Kevin Mitchell. It was all crap meant either to make me feel at ease or to disorient me. It did neither. Now inside the box, Bento changed his tune. He was probably a fucking Yankee fan anyway.

“Do you know why we want to speak to you?”

“What happened, you’re not interested in talking Mets’ baseball anymore?”

“That’s not what Detective Bento asked you, Prager.” Klein jumped in. “So let me ask it again. Do you know why we want to talk to you?”

“No.”

“Lying’s no way to begin a friendship,” he said.

“I got all the friends I can use, Detective Klein.”

“Then why just march into our fucking car when we showed up at your door?” Bento asked, already looking pissed enough to rip my head off.

“Because I used to be a cop and when two detectives from my old precinct show up at my door and ask to speak with me, I go with them.”

Klein opened a folder and laid out various photos of Kalisha’s body on the table in front of me. Although I had watched the murder take place and had stood closer to her lifeless torso than I was now to either Klein or Bento, the pictures were worse. Recorded after death had fully taken hold, when the blood had settled and the open wounds had begun to attract the local insect population, the photos caught the ugliness and horror of murder in a way the filtered human eye could not: a tangle of blood-soaked hair caught on a wire fence, a piece of skull lying on the sidewalk next to a crushed soda can, a lone fly crawling into a vacant eye socket, a blood-splattered leather jacket.

“You recognize her,” Bento stated more than asked.

“It’s hard to tell.”

“Name’s Kalisha Pardee,” he said.

I never did know her last name. “Who was she?”

“Come on, Prager. We know you knew her,” Klein said.

“Oh, yeah? Maybe you can refresh my memory a little.”

“She was a working girl. Used to have a boyfriend, a small-time dealer named Malik Jabbar, a.k.a. Melvin Broadbent. Ring any bells.”

“Nope.”

“Malik beat his girl into the long hereafter by only a few weeks.” Klein made a gun of his forefinger and thumb, pressing the barrel to my temple. “Took a few to the noggin.”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not helping.”

Bento exploded. “Look, asshole, I don’t care if you was a cop in this house. I don’t care if you built the fuckin’ place. I don’t care if you was a friend of the chief’s. We got a witness places you at the scene.”

“Really? Anyone claiming I did this?” I asked, pointing at the crime scene photos.

“You’re here to answer questions, not ask ’em.”

“Listen, I’m not saying I wasn’t in the neighborhood last night. I was, but I had no connection to this poor woman.”

The light switched on in Klein’s head. “What were you doing there?”

“Basketball.”

“Basketball what?”

“I had dinner with my friend at Nathan’s and then I dropped him off at the courts over by the projects. I couldn’t find a spot by the courts, so I parked on a side street a few blocks away. I walked back to the courts and watched through the fence for a while. When my friend was done, I drove him back to his car and then I went home.”

“This friend of yours got a name?” Klein asked.

“Preacher Simmons.”

Bento’s eyes got big. “Preacher ‘the Creature’ Simmons?”

“Yeah, we’re friends. We play in two-on-two tournaments sometimes. We were scouting this kid to maybe play with us on a three-man team.”

“Kid got a name?”

“Probably, but I don’t know it. They call him Nugget.”

“Big-headed, dark-skinned nigger, about fifteen, with quick hands and a wicked crossover dribble?” Bento asked, “nigger” rolling off his tongue as easily as “Merry Christmas.” “I go down there and watch sometimes. That boy got some game.”

“That’s him.”

Klein looked like he swallowed someone else’s throw-up. “Before you two start humping each other. .”

Bento flushed, chastened by his partner.

“Anybody see you at the courts?” Klein continued.

“I don’t know. Like I said, I watched from outside the fence. Preacher was the one playing in the games. I didn’t make small talk with anyone, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Hey, partner,” Klein turned to Bento, “you seem to know every fucking thing about these courts. What time they close up shop down there?”

“Officially, like ten, but I seen games go on there till midnight sometimes.”

Klein thought about that for a second, opened his note pad and said, “Midnight, huh? Well, the 9-1-1 call came in at 12:52. Our witness says she saw your car pull out around that time.”

“What can I tell you, Detective? Your witness is wrong. Like I said, I was definitely around the neighborhood, but. .”

“That’s your story?” Klein prodded.

“That’s it.”

“All right. Get outta here. Detective Bento’ll give you a ride back to your house.”

“That’s okay. I’ll take the subway. It’s only a few stops.”

“Have it your way.”

I stood to go and made it as far as the door before Klein stopped me.

“You know I don’t believe a word of that bullshit story. It’s gonna fall apart the minute we start checking into it.”

“Look, Detective, I’m an ex-cop, a successful businessman with a family, two cars, and mortgage. Not for nothing, but what the fuck would I want with the hooker-ex-girlfriend of some small-time drug dealer?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, ain’t it?”

Carmella Melendez was waiting for me in the shadow of the el. I wanted to run in the other direction. Between the longing and guilt, I could barely breathe. And the stress she wore on her face made it worse. It angered me. She hadn’t earned the right to be that upset on my behalf. Who was this woman to worry about me? Only Katy had

Melendez said something, but I couldn’t hear her for the screeching and squealing of a train above our heads. Sparks rained down into the false darkness that shrouded us. As a kid I was fascinated by the grinding of steel wheels against steel tracks, at how the grinding produced sparks like shooting stars, shooting stars that burned so brightly and so briefly against the shadows beneath the el that ran along Brighton Beach Avenue. Standing close enough to feel her warm breath on my face, I also felt an overwhelming discomfort. It wasn’t guilt, not this time. There was something in her eyes, the same things I’d seen the other night, something both frightened and frightening. I was so lost in her eyes that I barely noticed the deafening rumble had faded into a distant, almost pleasant clickety-clack.

“Are you all right?”

“For now,” I said. “My story won’t hold up for long. You made the call, right?”

“I did. What did you tell them?”

“Basically that I came down to watch some basketball.”

“Did they buy it?”

“Would you?”

“No.”

“Let’s talk, but not here,” I said.

“Where? I only have about an hour and I can’t be seen with you.”

I turned and pointed toward the ocean and began walking away. “Meet me in the aquarium in five minutes.”

Wedged between the boardwalk and Surf Avenue, the West Fifth Street handball courts and the Cyclone, the New York Aquarium was no more than a hundred yards away from where Melendez and I had stood beneath the subway station, and not more than two hundred yards from the front door of the 60th Precinct. In spite of the aquarium’s proximity to the Six-O, it was highly unlikely we’d run into anyone we knew. The only time I’d ever been there in uniform was back in ’74, when Ferguson May and I had to pull some drunk out of the seal enclosure. But as a dad I’d been there many times, taking Sarah at least once or twice a summer.

Strolling around the grounds, just two anonymous adults lost in a sea of school kids and their bored-to-tears teachers, I told Melendez about what Preacher had picked up at the courts and about my meeting with Kalisha Pardee. But as I spoke about what had transpired during the previous evening, I realized there was very little of substance to tell.

That seemed to be par for the course, because when I looked at the big picture, there was no big picture. It was more like a random collection of splotches on an artist’s studio floor. People were being murdered, but I’d be damned if I knew why or how the homicides were related.

I stopped at the tank where the rays and small sharks lived out their time, and leaned over the railing to watch them swim. I turned to look back at Melendez, who had stopped several feet short of the tank.

“Sarah, my little girl, she loves to watch them swim,” I said. “When she was really little, I used to worry that she’d jump in just to swim with them.”

“Don’t worry about me, Moe. I ain’t jumping in. I hate the water.”

“The ocean?”

“Uh huh.”

“Pools?”

“Especially pools.”

“Really, why?”

“I almost drowned once.”

“What happened?”

“I was a little girl and someone saved me, but I don’t like talking about it.”

“Okay, but look into the tank.” Melendez took a few tentative steps forward. I held my arm firmly across her back to anchor her. “Don’t worry, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“I know you won’t, Moe.”

“You see how they swim in circles sometimes and just dart straight ahead other times? No matter how I stare at them, I can’t figure out why they swim the way they do.”

“So?”

“But just because I can’t decipher the pattern doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, that it’s indecipherable.”

“This isn’t about the fish, is it?” she asked.

“Not really. I’m just frustrated, you know? None of the stuff that’s going on hangs together. Larry having you plant the wire. A desperate little schmuck like Malik Jabbar getting arrested with half a key of coke in his car and then claiming to know who killed Dexter Mayweather. How the fuck would he know who killed D Rex? He was like eleven years old when Mayweather was murdered. And even if he did know, why would anybody give a shit? But somebody cared enough to kill Malik. Larry cared enough to come to me with the tape, to threaten me, and then he winds up dead too. Somebody cared enough to try and kill me and blow Kalisha Pardee’s head off. Why, for chrissakes?”

“Maybe we should find out who Malik’s new friends were,” Carmella said, quickly stepping away from the tank. Her face was white with fear, beads of sweat on her upper lip and brow. She wasn’t kidding about not liking water.

“Yeah, I was thinking that. Who was the A.D.A. who showed up that day you and Murphy arrested Malik?”

“I don’t know. Once we went to our C.O., Captain Martello, with Melvin’s story about D Rex and wanting to make a deal, he told us to put the little shitbag back in holding and that he’d handle it from there. That was the last time we saw the asshole. Then he turns up dead.”

“It was your case, right? Didn’t you-”

“-ask Martello what happened? Sure we did, both me and Murphy, but he took the file and told us not to worry about Jabbar anymore.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think it’s time for me to have a chat with your C.O.”

“Moe, watch out for Martello. He’s a rough bastard. Ice cold, inside and out.”

“Don’t worry about it. You work on finding out about the company Malik kept and try and get any files you can on Mayweather. I’ll handle the rest of it.”

“Is that it?” she asked, sharp edges in her voice. “Am I being dismissed?”

“What is it, Carmella?”

She was silent.

“Oh,” I said, “the kiss.”

“The kiss, yes.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Something.”

It’s all I can do not to obsess over it. It’s difficult to control myself when you’re near me. I want to do it again, right here, right now. I. . I disappointed her with silence of my own, and watched her disappear into the crowd.