They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

Coney Island Burning

Larry Feld was unhappy. That was par for the course. His parents had set a good example. Today he was unhappy about answering phone calls at sunrise. He was unhappy I had waited so long to get back to him after his fax. But what made him most unhappy-and this, of course, went unsaid-was the prospect that I no longer needed him or his dirty little stories.

I was usually amenable to playing the game his way: answering his questions, letting him gloat when I got things wrong. I wasn’t in the mood today. I didn’t know that I’d ever be in the mood again. I was scared for Zak. I was scared for myself, too scared to play straight man to Larry Feld’s wounded ego or to stroke the lost little boy that would live inside him forever. I had done enough of that when we were kids. And when he began interrogating me about his fax, I told him to forget it. He was either going to tell me about Boatswain-Hernandez or he wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to play.

“No, Dylan, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Larry!”

“Sorry,” he said without feeling. “But let me ask you something. Do you remember what your brother did straight out of law school?”

“He was an assistant district attorney in the Bronx. So what?”

Feld didn’t answer that. He just said, “Go read your first book and put two and two together. Even you can get to four.”

“I’m not in the mood for this, Larry.”

“The next time you ask a question, make sure you’re ready to hear the answer.”

He hung up before I could say another word. I tried in vain to muster some enthusiasm for going to Cyclone Ridge with MacClough. Giving up, I rang John’s room and begged out. He said he understood and that I would probably have just gotten in his way. He was right. In the shape I was in, I was of no use to anyone, particularly myself. I closed my eyes and, more out of the need for escape than exhaustion, I fell deeply into dreamless sleep.

I got up around noon and noticed the message light on my phone was flashing red. I buzzed the desk. Kira had stopped by to say she would see me tonight around 8:00. I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel right. She had always played the guessing game with me; would she show up or wouldn’t she? Why, I wondered, the change in tactics. Maybe she wanted to show me how much I was missed. Maybe she got paid extra for that.

Without trying to lose my entourage, I took a walk about campus and asked around for Guppy. Like Valencia Jones, everyone seemed to know about Guppy’s reputation. No one seemed to know him or how to get in touch with him. Guppy was the kind of guy who gets in touch with you. One kid told me that he had heard that Guppy lived in the tunnels beneath campus. I asked the kid if he had taken his meds today.

Having struck out on my hunt for the great Guppy, I went over to the Riversborough public library and sat down with a copy of my first book, Coney Island Burning. Ich! It was really hard reading my own work, especially the early stuff. So I read the liner notes and hoped I would get whatever it was Larry Feld had hinted at. They went like this:

While looking into the suspicious death of an old basketball buddy, insurance investigator Wyatt Rosen finds himself trapped in a racial firestorm. With New York City’s African-American community ready to explode, Rosen, along with his best friend-ex-NYPD detective Timmy O’Shea-race against the clock to prove his old friend’s murder was a crime of passion, not police brutality.

In their quest, Rosen and O’Shea are forced to enlist an unlikely cast of characters including a radical black preacher, a Hasidic rabbi and a reformed underworld hitman. Rosen and O’Shea spend as much of their time juggling the diverse agendas and personalities of their team as they do fighting against the political and social forces aligned against them.

Rosen and O’Shea lock horns with Janson Whitehurst, an ambitious assistant district attorney who will stop at nothing to further his career, and his band of loyal toadies. There is nonstop action as O’Shea goes undercover to weed out the bad cop whose greed and carelessness opened this Pandora’s box of ill-gotten gains, backroom deals and murder.

Along the way, Rosen runs into his first love and desperately seeks to rekindle the romance he had turned his back on years ago. Come for the ride as O’Shea confronts the man he is convinced is responsible for the death of his former partner, Jack Spinner, but who may also hold the fate of the city in his grasp.

At its core, Coney Island Burning is a hard-boiled novel with a 90s edge. .

I didn’t get it, not right away. I braced myself and began turning past the title page, past the copyright, past the dedication and acknowledgments to the first chapter. Then, I’m not certain I know what made me do it, but I turned back to the dedication and acknowledgments. And there were their names, separated by only a few lines:

“For my brothers, Jeffrey and Josh, who showed me that heroes can have clay feet and still stand tall.

I would like to thank my friend and technical advisor, John MacClough, for his inspiration and support.”

I tried remembering the date of the Boatswain kidnap ping. March of ’72, I seemed to recall. That would put my assistant district attorney brother and uniformed police officer John MacClough in the Bronx at the same time. They had never actually denied knowing each other. I had always just assumed they did not and they let me assume. I wanted to believe I was simply jumping to conclusions, that they had never met before I introduced them, but I knew it wasn’t so. Larry Feld was a lot of things, but inaccurate wasn’t one of them. There had to be a connection.

In my head, I ran through the parts of the plot of Coney Island Burning I could remember. Other than the obvious and superficial resemblance between my brother and the A.D.A. in my book, I was at a- That’s when it hit me; MacClough had suggested the character of Janson Whitehurst, the corrupt A.D.A. He wasn’t my invention. I tried recalling the other sections of the book John had suggested. Feverishly, I thumbed through the pages to the section where a dirty cop tortures information out of and then kills a drug dealer:

“. . hit him again and again in the kidneys with a tightly rolled newspaper. Gonzales stubbornly refused to give in, furiously shaking his head no.

“Tough spic, huh? Big cojones. Okay, macho man,” Murphy said, patting his prisoner affectionately on the cheek. “We’ll see about that.”

Murphy reached not for his service revolver, but pulled up his pant leg to reveal a short-barrel.38. Smiling broadly, he unholstered the gun from his ankle, pulled back the hammer and put the barrel to Gonzales’s temple. Murphy loosened the gag in the dealer’s mouth and let it fall to the floor. Gonzales gasped for air.

“Agua,” he coughed, “water.”

“Here’s something to put in your mouth.” Murphy snapped Gonzales’ head back by yanking on his thick, black ponytail and moved the gun barrel from his prisoner’s temple into his mouth. He began to count: “Five. . four. . three. . two. . one.

“Okay, okay,” Gonzales relented, sweat pouring down his face.

Murphy pulled the barrel back slightly so Gonzales could speak more clearly. “Go ahead, spic.”

“The money is in employee locker 12 in Nathans’ back room.”

“You bullshitting me, pendejo?”

“I’m in no position to bullshit you.”

Murphy smiled again. “I guess you’re right.”

As Gonzales began to smile with relief, Murphy shoved the.38 back into the dealer’s mouth and calmly blew his brains out the rear of his skull. Murphy wiped the gun clean, untied the dead man’s hands and wrapped the fingers of Gonzales’ right hand around the handle of the little.38.

Using an untraceable second gun to make an unrighteous kill or just plain murder look like suicide was a time-honored trick. You wouldn’t find the second gun trick in any manual or textbook, but it was one of those things old school cops learned before they ever set foot out of the academy.

Murphy continued the setup, wiping the whole house clean of his prints and making sure he took the rope, the gag and the newspaper with him. He really wasn’t worried about getting prosecuted, not with his connection in the D.A.’s office. In a day or two, Murphy would drop a dime and make like an anonymous tipster. By that time, no one would connect him to Gonzales’ death.”

I was nauseous. MacClough had nearly dictated that part of the book to me. It seemed so real to me then, I hardly played with it. Now I knew there was a good reason for that. I could feel myself getting dizzy.

“You all right, sir?” A librarian shook me by the shoulder. “You don’t look well.”

I didn’t answer. I stood up and stumbled up a half flight of stairs. When I looked back, I noticed the librarian studying my picture on the rear of the dust jacket. I smiled. It was a hollow smile.

After wandering around snowy Riversborough, I found myself drinking coffee in the coffee house I’d gone to with Kira a few days before. It seemed like quite a long time ago to me now. I laughed at myself, but no one was there to hear it. The waiter was in the back and there were no bongos or bad poetry at this hour of the day. I read the graffiti carved into the table for entertainment.

“Excuse me,” a melodic voice interrupted my reading, “but I was wondering if I might have a seat with you? I do not enjoy my afternoon tea alone and you look so much like a friend of mine.”

“I do?” I said, looking up into the dark, sweet face of a man of undetermined years. His hair was shiny and black, as were his eyes. I thought he might be Indian or Pakistani, maybe an Arab. “Sure, have a seat. What’s your friend’s name?”

“Oh,” he smiled and sat, “that is of no matter. He is lost to me and speaking his name will not bring him back.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You too have lost someone?” he wondered.

“I hope not. I’m still looking.”

“That is as it should be. Keep searching. A man searching may find many things, unexpected things.”

“Some unexpected things can kill a man.”

“Maybe so,” my table mate agreed. “But they can enrich him as well.”

“I didn’t catch your name.” I put my hand out. “Dylan Klein.”

He shook my hand, his eyes checking his watch. “Oh dear, look at the time. I must excuse myself.”

“Hey, what about your tea?” I called after him.

“Tea, I never drink the stuff. Keep searching. Maybe you will find my friend as well. Good day to you.” He hurried out the door.

Pretty bizarre, I thought, pretty fucking bizarre, but why should afternoon coffee be any different from the rest of my life? When the waiter came to refill my cup, I described my philosophical friend and asked if he knew the man.

“Sounds like Rajiv Gupta,” the waiter said without hesitation. “He’s a clerk over at the campus bookstore. Nice guy.”

“Guppy!” I said aloud, but to myself. “Everybody’s got clues but no answers.”