Soul Patch

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cops in cars can’t follow suspects worth a shit. Even if they were to possess the requisite skills, the damned unmarked cars would give them away. Unmarked cars are about as inconspicuous as the Good-year blimp. So it didn’t take more than a glance in my rearview mirror to spot the unadorned blue Chevy as it pulled away from the curb. The whole way to Sarah’s school, the car trailed half a block behind, the driver trying to keep other traffic between us.

I kissed Sarah, watched her walk into the schoolyard and up the front steps. When she had disappeared behind the heavy metal doors, I rolled slowly into traffic, making certain to get caught at the first red light. My tail was four cars back in the right hand lane, the same lane as me. I scanned the cross street for oncoming cars and, seeing it was clear, put my foot to the floor. With tires smoking, I swerved across the left lane, through the red light, and onto the cross street.

With my foot still hard on the pedal, I drove a further three blocks before making a sharp left down a dead end street that ran perpendicular to the Belt Parkway. About a hundred feet from the dead end, I backed up an empty driveway until the houses on either side obscured my car from view. I waited. Either they would give up before cruising this street or, as I hoped, they would roll down the street, distracted, annoyed, simply going through the motions rather than searching for me under every stone.

Neither hearing it nor seeing it, I sort of sensed their car coming. Then I caught a glimpse of its nose as it rolled down the block. Went right past me. As it passed, I pulled out of the driveway, slammed on the brakes and put it in park. In a moot display, the cop at the wheel of the Chevy threw it in reverse. Too little too late. My car was widthwise

When the window disappeared halfway into the door, I recognized the driver. I had seen her face on the backs of my eyelids and suspended in the dark air above my bed only a few hours ago. But before I could react, Detective Melendez threw her door open, smacking it hard into my bad knee. Reflexively, I backed up and bent down to rub it. Big mistake. Melendez and her partner were out of the car and on me like wolves on a crippled lamb.

“All right, dickweed, you know the drill,” said Bronx Irish as he threw me into the side of their car.

Still favoring my bad leg, I hit the car awkwardly, the right side of my rib cage taking the full force of impact. Hurt like a son of a bitch and it didn’t do much for my respiration.

“Assume the position,” she barked.

Still trying to catch my breath, I was slow to follow her instructions. Big mistake number two. My arms were being yanked up and thrust forward, palms slapped down on the hood of the Chevy. Bronx Irish kicked my legs apart and back. He frisked me, removing my wallet and.38.

“So, Mr. Prager,” Detective Melendez said, “you always speed like that in a school zone?” It was a question for which she wanted no answer. “That was quite a display of stupidity you put on back there.”

“I noticed I was being followed. How was I supposed to know you were cops?”

“Don’t be such an asshole, Prager,” said Bronx Irish. “What should I do with him, Carmella?”

“Cuff him and throw him in the back.”

“Hey, I-”

“Shut the fuck up!” she cut me off. “Keys in the car?”

“What?”

“Are your fucking keys in the car, Prager?”

“Yes, Detective.”

“John, you take care of him. I’ll park his car right.”

Bronx Irish cuffed me and slid me into the rear of the unmarked Chevy. He got into the passenger seat. As we waited for Melendez to reposition my car, I tried striking up a conversation.

“What part of the Bronx you from, Detective?”

“Pelham.”

“Am I allowed to ask your last name?”

“Murphy.”

“John Murphy, now there’s a rare name on the NYPD.”

I could see him smile.

“What were you guys tailing me for?” I wondered.

“You’ll see,” he said. “We didn’t wanna discuss it in front a your little girl. We were waiting for you to come out, and then you come out with your kid. So we figured-”

Just then, Detective Melendez opened the driver’s side door. She put the Chevy in reverse and tore down the street, tossing my car keys out the window as she went. I hoped I got back to my car before dark. Finding those keys wasn’t going to be easy. She hit the siren, pulled into traffic, and up onto the Belt Parkway heading east. When she shut the siren off, I tried to get back to my chat with her partner.

“So, Murphy, when you saw me come out of my house with Sarah, you-”

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Melendez stared at me in the rearview. “We ask the questions.”

I ignored that. “You’re a real hothead, huh?”

“Shut up and enjoy the drive.”

“You’re kinda young to be a detective, aren’t you?” I pressed on. “Christ, when I was on the job-”

“Don’t gimme any of that old timers’ bullshit. It’s all you old guys do, talk about how it was back in the day. What you got to worry about is that I am a detective, not how I got to be one.”

Murphy’s head was turned sideways, away from her. I could see he was rolling his eyes. Wanted to ask him how he’d ended up with the young hotshot, but I didn’t figure she’d much enjoy that line of questioning.

“Back in the day or today, people don’t usually make detective at your age.”

She bit the bait hard. “If I was a man, you wouldn’t even be asking me this shit about my age. It’s not about my age! I got to put up with

Murphy, making sure his head blocked her view, pointed his right hand at me and motioned like a quacking duck. He’d heard this speech before. I egged her on.

“So it’s not about your being Hispanic either, then? Not even a little bit?”

Taking her eyes off the road, she turned to give me the cold stare. Murphy crossed himself. I’d done it now.

“Listen, viejo, I was waiting for that. See, you assholes are all the same. In your eyes, my gold shield is about my pussy or Puerto Rico, not about if I’m a good cop.”

“Did I say that?”

“You didn’t have to. I was always a big reader, but I read best between the lines, grandpa. Besides, you ever make detective?”

“Nope.”

“So, you’re just a resentful old fuck, huh?”

“I had my shot,” I said.

“What happened?”

“In ’72, I rescued this missing little girl from the roof of an old factory building. Everyone had given her up for dead. It was a big story. These days, they’d throw me a ticker tape parade. Back then-”

“This is it!” Murphy barked.

Melendez hit the siren and lights and yanked the wheel hard right, cutting the Chevy across two lanes of traffic. Several cars smoked their tires as they braked and swerved trying to avoid smacking into the flank of the unmarked cruiser. We pulled up around the Pennsylvania Avenue exit of the Belt Parkway.

The Fountain Avenue dump had been a working landfill for about the first twenty years of my life. I don’t know how long before that. When we were kids, Aaron and I used to call it Stinky Mountain. You didn’t have to see it to know it was coming up. Depending on wind direction, you could tell you were in the vicinity from several miles away. And even when the wind blew the stench of rotting garbage and methane in the other direction, you could always spot the swirling clouds of thousands of gulls and other birds that feasted at the banquet of our moldering debris. Freaked me out more than a little, those

Then, a decade or so back, the city just shut it down. I think someone got the brilliant idea that maybe it wasn’t such a good thing to have a huge dump in the wetlands around Jamaica Bay. Across the way from the dump, some developers had built a maze of apartment buildings, called Starrett City. Like everything else in Brooklyn and the city itself, Starrett City blended in with the surrounding landscape like a pile of pus in a vanilla milk shake. Even I had to remind myself that in New York, it’s always about the money and never the beauty. Beauty was a commodity affordable only to people who foisted eyesores like Starrett City upon the rest of us.

But just because the dump had been closed, its mounds of fetid garbage tarped over, its methane vented and burned, its clouds of birds relocated to Staten Island, it didn’t mean people had forgotten what it once had been. As Rico’s task force had proved many years ago, there were plenty of bodies beneath the tarpaulins. Now, apparently, there was one outside its gates. As soon as I saw the other “official” vehicles lining the road, I knew this wasn’t going to be pretty. This wasn’t a drug bust or a speeding ticket or a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association barbecue. There were no flames or aircraft debris strewn about. No plane had gone down on its approach to Kennedy. This scene had homicide written all over it. Disquiet wrapped me in its arms and squeezed tight.

As we rolled along, Melendez navigating us through the throng of uniforms and suits, I got that sick feeling in my belly. I know that’s something people just say, but I meant it. This wasn’t any old crime scene either. There was a lot of brass in attendance, a lot of suits, a lot of worried white faces. We veered off the road and into a patch of tall blond reeds and cattails. A blue and white NYPD chopper flew tight circles overhead, the downwash from its rotors toying with the reeds like a fickle plain’s wind blowing Kansas wheat to and fro. We came to a full stop. Detective Melendez threw the Chevy in park.

“Okay, get him out,” she groused at her partner. Murphy’s clenched jaw indicated just how much he loved being ordered around.

I slid over to the rear passenger door and Murphy helped me out, making sure I didn’t crack my head on the car frame. He looped his

Almost to the yellow perimeter, Melendez ducking under the tape in front of us, I turned away from the line of princes and to my left. There, in the midst of the reeds, hundreds of feet away from the closest paved road, was an incongruous blue Chevy, not dissimilar to the one I’d just gotten out of. A swarm of men and women moved around it like worker bees attending to the queen. When one of the worker bees moved away from the driver’s side window, I noticed a figure slumped against the wheel. I couldn’t make out his face, but I knew in my heart it was Larry McDonald.

They say energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and I guess I’ll have to take their word for it. But when a man with that much ambition dies, there has to be fallout somewhere-an earthquake, a tsunami, an erupting volcano, something. Or did Larry have ambition in place of a soul? Did it pass into the body of the first cop on the scene or the person who found him? Did it inhabit the first ant that crawled by or the first gull to swoop over? If so, the other gulls had better watch out.

“What are you smiling at?” Murphy wanted to know.

“Seagulls.”

“Whatever.”

He guided me under the tape. It took a few seconds for the assembled minions to notice me, my police escort, and my NYPD issue jewelry. When they did, Fishbein scowled.

“Detective, what is Mr. Prager doing in cuffs?” he asked Murphy in a less than cordial tone. “You were ordered to bring him to the scene, not arrest him.”

Melendez started to answer. “I told him to cuff-”

“Get them off. Now!” Fishbein ordered.

“Hey, Hy,” D.A. Starr said, “this is my borough. Don’t be ordering my cops around.”

“They’re my cops!” corrected Police Commissioner Cleary. Ah, the world of New York politics and fiefdoms. “Well, Melendez, why the cuffs?”

“I-he-When we went to get him, he, uh-he,” she stuttered, flushing slightly.

“Spit it out, Detective. Sometime this week.”

“He ran a red light.”

Fishbein, Starr, Cleary, and Brown sneered disapprovingly, shaking their noggins like four bobblehead dolls on the back deck of the same car.

“If you’re so desperate for traffic enforcement, Melendez, we can put you on Highway Patrol,” Cleary said. “You’d cut a fine figure in those tall black boots and riding pants.”

By the look on the men’s faces, the image of Melendez so dressed had universal appeal. Christ, it appealed to me. But I saw that some of what Melendez had said to me on the ride over was true. She might carry the shield, but she was always one misstep away from being dismissed as portable pussy and nothing more.

“I did worse than blow through a red, Commissioner Cleary. I cut across a crosswalk and sped in a school zone. I saw I was being followed and overdid it, I guess.”

But instead of being pleased or impressed by my jumping to her defense, Detective Melendez shot me a look that would scare the numbers off a clock. I don’t need rescuing. She was tough to figure, and now wasn’t the time to try.

“Cut him loose,” said Cleary.

Murphy let me go. I wanted so hard not to rub my wrists, to show everybody, especially Melendez, how tough and cool I was. I immediately rubbed my wrists.

“You know who that is in that car over there?” Fishbein asked, ignoring the icy stare of his Brooklyn counterpart.

“I can guess.”

“Guess.”

“Larry McDonald.”

“Give Mr. Prager a cigar!” Fishbein joked. “Commissioner, you smoke cigars, don’t you?”

“How’d you know?” D.A. Starr got a question in before Fishbein could breathe.

“I didn’t know. It was a guess.”

“Why guess Chief of Detectives McDonald?”

“If it was a 1930 DeSoto or something instead of an ’89 Chevy, I would have guessed Judge Crater.”

“That’s not an answer,” Starr growled. Fishbein didn’t do a good job of hiding his delight at the displeasure of his Brooklyn counterpart.

“Because I knew Larry was missing.”

“You did, huh?” said Cleary.

Decision time. I had to choose my words very carefully. There’s lying, and then there’s the truth. Lies are lies, but you can filet the truth all sorts of ways depending on the dish you’re cooking. For much of my life, I’d been a bad liar and an unskilled butcher of the truth. Patrick Michael Maloney’s disappearance had changed all that. I’d since learned s-e-c-r-e-t-s was just an alternative spelling of l-i-e-s. And, God help me, I could parse the truth like a Catholic school nun with a run-on sentence.

“I did. I knew he was missing.”

“How’d you know?” Cleary kept on. “The chief was taking vacation time, so there’d be no reason to believe he was missing.”

Time to start parsing. “His ex-wife called me up.”

“And. .” Starr said.

“And she told me she was worried about Larry. That he had called her recently to apologize about their divorce. They had made a date to talk it over, but Larry never showed up.”

“It’s a big leap from standing up your ex to going missing, Prager,” Fishbein piled on.

“I guess,” I agreed. “But he never got back in touch with her. That wasn’t Larry’s style. He could be a selfish, ambitious prick, but never an impolite one. Not to Margaret, not after what he’d done to her.”

They nodded again in unison.

“Is that all, Mr. Prager?”

“Is that all what?” I turned the question back on Fishbein.

“Let’s not be coy. Was there anything besides his ex-wife’s call that might have led you to believe something was up with Chief of Detectives McDonald? It’s no secret that you and Larry were close friends.”

“Close?” I asked. “Was anybody really close to Larry Mac?”

For the first time, I saw something in Detective Melendez’s eyes that looked like admiration. She enjoyed how I kept deflecting their questions with questions of my own.

“Well, then, closer than most,” Fishbein said.

“Okay, yeah, Larry and me, we were closer than Larry and most other people, but he had a lot more layers than an old onion, so I’m not really sure there’s much I can tell you.”

Fishbein screwed up his face as if he were working hard to think of a follow-up, but it was all an act. He was questioning me for appearance’s sake. I guess he was also trying to give me cover. Because, whether I liked it or not, whether I had intended to or not, I was now Fishbein’s boy. By going to him the way I had, he had the inside track. I’d got almost nothing out of the relationship so far except an autopsy report and yellow sheet on Malik, but with me he might knock one out of the park.

“You know, Mr. Prager,” Starr picked up, “you don’t seem awfully broken up about your friend’s suicide.”

“The ground ain’t wet from your tears either, Mr. D.A.,” I said, trying to hide the shock. Suicide! Larry McDonald? “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll grieve on my own terms.”

“Of course,” said Cleary.

“You sure there’s nothing else?” Starr said.

“Nothing else like what? Sometimes Larry played his cards so close to the vest, they were inside his shirt. Maybe there’s something you guys know that you’re not telling me. Is that it?”

Silence. Kind of enjoyed watching four grown men paw at the wet earth with their expensive shoes.

Now there was no mistaking it. There was full-blown admiration in Carmella Melendez’s eyes and fuck me if my heart didn’t race at the sight of it. I had done magic before her. But like all magic, it was an illusion. I had heard the tape. I had spoken to Larry. I knew probably more than any one of them about Larry’s past sins.

“Do you mind if I go over and pay my respects?” I asked.

“It ain’t pretty, son,” Deputy Mayor Brown spoke up.

“Nothing ever is, beneath the surface,” I said.

“Just stay out of the way. It’s still considered a crime scene, remember that,” Cleary warned.

“How about if Detective Melendez comes with me to make sure I keep my nose clean?”

Cleary nodded. Melendez wasn’t stupid. She didn’t jump at the chance. She sneered as if Cleary had told her to carry me over to Larry’s Chevy on her back.

“You were good back there,” she said.

“Thanks. And you were right about what you said in the car on the way over. Maybe we could sort of start over.”

She hesitated. “Where should we start over from, Mr. Prager? From your stunt driving this morning or your unexplained presence at the precinct yesterday? I’m thinking it’s kinda odd that you turned up over there outta the blue and then the chief kills himself, no? The suits and the brass back there might buy your line a shit, but I’m not a big believer in coincidences.”

“That makes two of us.”

“So where does that leave us? You gonna tell me why you were at the Six-O?”

We had reached the car. The driver’s side door was open. Larry’s head rested on the steering wheel; his lifeless eyes looked past me into an unfathomable distance. Even in death, he didn’t look quite peaceful. His ambition had left a residue on his corpse as real as gunpowder. As the chopper moved further away, I caught the stink of his death. In spite of being surrounded by several million tons of decay, the ripeness of it was unmistakable. It was like hearing one particularly sour note from a tone-deaf orchestra.

“How’d he do it?” I asked.

“Look at the tailpipe,” one of the busy bees said. Sure enough, a flexible black hose ran from the mouth of the tailpipe, beneath the car, around the passenger side, up into a slit in the rear window. Neat strips of duct tape covered the opening in the window left to accommodate the exhaust tube. “My guess is he swallowed some sleeping pills, washed ’em down with some bourbon, and went to sleep. There’s a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor.”

“Any note?”

“We haven’t found one yet.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I felt Melendez’s eyes on me, studying me.

“You don’t like it,” she said, “do you?”

“He was my friend. Nobody likes it when a friend kills himself.”

“Don’t be that way. You know what I mean. You have doubts.”

“There’s shit you never want to accept at first. I was never at a shooting scene where the dead guy’s mom thought he was a bad kid. No one wants to believe bad stuff about the people they lo-about their friends. I think they think it reflects badly on them somehow, like it’s their fault when bad things happen, like they failed. You know what I mean?”

I turned to look at her. Her expression went blank, her eyes nearly as distant as Larry’s. “I don’t think anyone knows better than me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Melendez ignored the question. “Come on, we’ll take you back to your car.”

“Gimme a minute.”

“I’ll wait over there.”

I kept staring at Larry. It wasn’t denial, but I was having trouble with his being dead. When a parent dies, you pretty much know how you’re supposed to feel. Even if the feelings are mixed and confused, you’ve decided; or at least your heart has. With Larry, it was different. I realized that for the twenty-plus years I’d known him, I had never quite decided how to feel about him. I’d always waited for some sign, some gesture on his part that would let me know it was really okay to love him, to hold him close. I took a long last look into his vacant, unfocused eyes, hoping that in death he could give me the thing he seemed incapable of giving in life. Of course, like most wishes, it went unfulfilled. As far as my heart was concerned, I thought, the jury would always be out-the verdict never in.

D.A. Fishbein was the only one of the princes still standing inside the yellow tape when I was done with Larry. Melendez stood a few feet to his left, paying very little attention to either one of us. Fishbein shooed her away.

“Can you excuse us for a second, Detective?”

“I’ll be by the car,” she said.

The Groucho Marx smile vanished from the D.A.’s face when Melendez had strolled far enough away. “Did it end here?”

“What?”

“Don’t play stupid with me, Mr. Prager. You came to me, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Then answer the question. Is the chief’s suicide the end or the beginning?”

“Don’t look now, Mr. D.A., but your hard-on is showing.”

Fishbein actually looked down. “Asshole!”

“The truth is, I don’t know whether this is the end or the beginning. I’m not thinking too clearly right now. That’s my friend lying dead in that car over there, not the ass end of a cow.”

“You can sit shiva later, totaleh. I’ve got no time for your tears right now. I need to know if this case has some legs. Besides, I don’t for a second believe a man like Larry McDonald would have killed himself. You knew him better than anyone.”

“That’s not saying much.”

“Stop fencing with me, Prager. Your Puerto Rican girlfriend’s not around to be impressed.”

Because of his clownish looks and buffoonish overstepping, Robert Hiram Fishbein was an easy man to underestimate. But what he had just said reminded me that he was neither a clown nor a buffoon. He was sharp and cunning and hungry. Very little escaped his notice, not even the subtleties of early attraction.

“No, Larry never struck me as the kinda man to kill himself.”

“That’s better. Then let’s see if we can’t find out what really happened here and if this case’s got any legs.”

“What case is that? I don’t know that there is a case. And,” I felt compelled to remind him, “if there is one, it takes place deep in the heart of Brooklyn.”

“You let me worry about that. In the meantime, you’re working for me.”

“Officially?”

“Unofficially officially.”

“Yeah, what’s that pay?”

“What it’s worth.”

“Now who’s fencing, Mr. D.A.?”

“En garde! ”

“Sorry, my only interest in this was Larry. Whether he committed suicide or not, he’s dead. My interest ends there.”

“How about if I could give you some incentive to come work for me?”

“Incentive. Incentive like what, a gold shield? Money? The shield doesn’t interest me anymore. That ship sailed years ago. Money? Between my pension, my wife’s income, and my business, I already make more money than I need.”

“Money, yes, Mr. Prager, but maybe something else, something you might not have more of than you need.”

“That would be?”

“Information.”

“Information. What kind of information?”

“The kind you want, but don’t have.”

“You’re fencing with me again, Mr. D.A.”

He whispered, making me draw near. “How about your brother-in-law?”

“Patrick!”

“What if I could tell you what’s become of him? Would that be worth-”

“You know where he is?”

“Did I say that, Mr. Prager? I asked would your involvement be worth it if I could tell you what’s become of him. Well, would it?”

Fishbein had pushed the right button. I was dizzy. The thought of Patrick reappearing out of the blue was one of the things that kept me up nights. Yeah, sure, he had been gone for a dozen years now. Did I think he’d ever come back? Probably not, but there was always a chance. And if he did return and he told Katy about what had really gone on, about how I had found him and let him go, about the things I knew about Francis. . That would be it, the end of our marriage, and the end for Katy and her dad. With our marriage at low ebb, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. But what about Sarah? She was eleven years old. She would never understand. Christ, I still didn’t understand why I hadn’t just brought Patrick in when I found him.

“Okay, Fishbein, you’ve got my attention.”

“Good.” He patted my shoulder like we were old buddies. “Go home. Get some rest. Go to the wake. We’ll talk.”

The ride back to my car was decidedly quieter than the ride to the dump and, given that my wrists were uncuffed, decidedly more comfortable. Murphy was less than his chatty self. Detective Melendez seemed completely distracted, lost in a world of her own thoughts, a world with no visas, visitors, or border crossings. I was pretty lost myself.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”