The James Deans

Chapter Sixteen

Never the best shot on Earth, I still managed to qualify at the range. Up to that point, I had been reluctant to let Katy start inviting people to the reinstatement/promotion party she, Aaron, and my sister, Miriam, had planned. I’d just finished doing a ride-along with detectives from Midtown South and I was pretty well wired. Oh God, how I remembered that feeling, the bizarre combination of elation and exhaustion. I wanted a drink, but the detectives who’d been saddled with me all shift long had families on Long Island that needed getting home to. I decided to kill two wild turkeys with one call.

Wit was glad to hear from me and even more pleased to share a drink. Although he had not profited directly from the solution of Moira’s murder, his expose on Brightman in this month’s Esquire had thrust him squarely into the limelight, a place he rather much enjoyed. He was now the subject of nearly as many interviews as Steven Brightman.

He offered to have me to the Yale Club again, but I declined. I thought we might do the Yale Club for dinner another time. Katy, I told him, was a bit of an Ivy League wannabe and would just be thrilled to enter the realm of the Elis. He told me to consider it done. I decided Pooty’s, Pete Parson’s soon-to-be former bar, would be a good place to meet. I could get that drink and invite both of them to the party.

Pooty’s was doing brisk business. Pete, wearing a rather sour puss, was working up front with a bartender who made Joey Ramone look tan and healthy. Not only was this guy sickly looking, but he moved at a pace somewhere between super slo-mo and catatonic. He aspired to lethargy. Pete’s face brightened when he noticed his two newest customers.

“You want me to jump back there and give you a hand?”

“Thanks, Moe, but don’t worry about it. Hey, Wit.” Pete reached over and shook our hands. “One Wild Turkey rocks, one Dewar’s rocks coming up.” Pete placed them on the bar and took a moment to share a Bud with us.

“Can that guy move any slower?” I asked.

“Are you kiddin'? This fucking guy’s so slow we have to scrape the moss and barnacles off him after every shift.”

Wit liked that. “Can I steal that line, Pete?”

“You, Mr. Fenn, can take anything you’d like. It’s because of you this joint is so crowded.”

“How’s that?” Wit wondered.

“Your Esquire article,” Pete said. “Look around and behold. This ain’t our regular crowd. When you mentioned me and my kid and this place … And it was perfect timing, too,” he chortled. “My buyout from my partners is based partially on this month’s sales.”

That got my attention. “You mentioned Pooty’s?”

“I’m crushed,” Wit said, putting a hand to his heart. “You haven’t read the piece?”

“Oops! Sorry, Wit. I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. By the way, I wanted to talk to both of you about that. Katy and my brother and sister are throwing a little party for me on September 28 at Sonny’s in Brooklyn.”

Pete squinted suspiciously. “A party?”

“To celebrate your what, exactly?” Wit was curious too.

I pulled out shield number 353. “On the Monday following the party, you two will have to refer to me as Detective Prager.”

“Holy shit! Congratulations, Moe.” Pete reached across the bar and patted my back. “I know it’s what you always wanted. Okay, everybody, listen up!” Pete shouted the barroom to a hush. “Your next round is on the house. We’re celebrating.” He leaned over to Wit and me. “Excuse me, guys. I gotta help Mr. Inertia over here. I’ll join you in a few.”

Wit’s reaction was more reserved, his journalistic skepticism switch locked in the on position. “Yes, Moe, congratulations. This detective thing is sudden, isn’t it?”

I gave him a brief rundown on the offer. “I guess it was Larry Mac’s way of saying thanks. He owes me from way back and he knows how much it means to me.”

“Yes, exactly. He knows how much this means.”

“Look, Wit, I got screwed out of a shield a long time ago. Then I turned it down once. I’m a big believer in the rule of threes. If I turn it down now-”

“I’m sorry, Moe. Please forgive me. It’s just the reporter in me. I see conspiracies hidden in every good intention. An occupational hazard, I suppose.”

“That’s okay, Wit. Cops suffer from a similar syndrome. Just ask Pete.”

Wit didn’t ask Pete. Instead, he led a toast to me with the free round of drinks our host had provided. He was rather eloquent in his praise and hope for my future success, yet his skepticism had put a damper on things. Not that you could tell by how we were acting. By ten that night, Pete had performed “Danny Boy” three times, once as Donald Duck. Wit had done several card tricks and regaled the bar with stories of the rich and the dead. Not so talented as my friends, I simply drank myself silly.

DRY-MOUTHED AND nearly sober, I found myself pacing the kitchen floor at four in the morning. I would have given anything for the house to not be so quiet. When paranoia and suspicion are toying with your head, a quiet house can be your worst enemy. It wasn’t so much what Wit had said that bothered me, it was more the way he’d said it. And his face! It was evident he thought I was somehow being bought off. Now I regretted not having discussed it with him further.

I guess I shouldn’t have cared about what Wit thought. He drank a little too much and was too attracted to the sound of his own voice, but he did have good instincts. You didn’t achieve his level of success without them. I’d gotten pretty far in my life by attaching myself to people with Wit’s feel for things. Whether it was Katy or Aaron or the cops I’d worked with who could sense trouble coming around blind corners, my attraction to these people had put me in good stead. So I was unable to dismiss Wit’s reaction.

As I was about to find out, I was right not to dismiss it. But not even Yancy Whittle Fenn could have conceived how right he had been or why. When, after my third glass of water and second dose of aspirin, I found I still couldn’t sleep, I finally opened the copy of Esquire Wit had sent me weeks ago. Although I was awake and nearly sober, my focus was severely lacking. I found myself drifting off, rereading the same sentences over and over again. Two things kept me at it: a picture of Joe Spivack, and something I had scanned but not processed. Then I relocated the sentence and realized my world was about to change again, forever. Just making sense of the words had changed it.

It was a throwaway sentence, a simple biographical fact that Wit or his editor might just as easily have omitted as included. This was the sentence:

Then, in June of 1957, Steven Brightman’s family moved across the Hudson to New York from the bucolic little town of Hallworth, New Jersey.

Suddenly, every assumption I hid made over the past few months was called into question. Not only were those assumptions suspect, but the facts upon which they were based had, in the course of a few seconds, turned from granite to quicksand.