Hot-Wired in Brooklyn Page 11

  “Ka-boom!” exclaimed Lucille, by way of a greeting, and everybody laughed.

  Everybody but me.

  CHAPTER

  25

  At eight-thirty, after a few hours’ sleep and a shower, I returned to Caroline Hutchinson’s building, hoping she didn’t work the day shift. My unanswered knocks told me that she probably did. I didn’t know which hospital she worked at, and I didn’t have time to go looking. Charlotte would know, but I couldn’t expect any help from her.

  Especially her. So I left.

  But I didn’t go far. The address Arnold had given for Teddy was just one floor down, apartment 2B. I heard small noises inside when I knocked, but no one came to the door. I knocked again, and a woman’s voice responded, faintly, and thick with fear. “Please go away. He’s not home.”

  “I’m a friend of Arnold’s, I’m looking for Teddy,” I shouted through the wood, but no voice answered. I was about to try again when I heard footsteps in the stairwell. Caroline Hutchinson stepped onto the landing, saw me, and froze in place.

  “Graveyard shift,” I heard myself say.

  Her coat was open, revealing a white nurse’s uniform and more of her natural assets. She still looked haggard, burdened.

  “Teddy’s mother won’t answer the door,” I explained. “Maybe you… can help.”

  Her eyes were still fixed on me when she knocked. I didn’t understand the look. “It’s Caroline, Mrs. Mitchell,” she said to the woman inside. “Please open the door.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I need to talk to you, Eddie,” she said softly, just as the door opened.

  A pale, middle-aged woman in an apron peered out. Her back was bowed, her shoulders slumped, as if she were used to carrying an anvil around. Her eyes conveyed the same deep, desolate sadness as Caroline’s.

  “This is the man I told you about,” she reassured the woman. “It’s all right. He can help you.”

  The woman backed slowly away from the door. The room was small and poorly-lighted, like Caroline’s, and it matched the mood.

  She led us to the kitchen. I sat in one of the straight-backed chairs at the table, hoping the woman would sit also. She did, but she gave no sign of comfort in being off her feet. Caroline stood behind her, offering a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The woman smiled warily, kneading her kitchen apron as I spoke.

  “Mrs. Mitchell, do you know where Teddy is?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you so frightened?”

  She twitched in the chair but didn’t answer. Her eyes sought out Caroline.

  “Two men came here.” Caroline explained finally. “They demanded to know where Teddy was. They threatened her, first with rape, then with death, if she didn’t tell them.”

  “What did these men look like?” I asked the woman.

  “Gangsters,” she said in a small, bitter voice.

  “Were they large, wearing heavy coats and hats pulled low?”

  “Gangsters. Animals. Touched me, one of them… touched me.” She closed her eyes, trying to blot out the memory.

  “Mrs. Mitchell?”

  I glanced at Caroline, who shook her head.

  “I don’t know what your son looks like, Mrs. Mitchell. Do you have any pictures of him?”

  Caroline nodded in the direction of the living room, where a small cluster of photographs in frames adorned an end table.

  “May I borrow the most recent picture of Teddy, Mrs. Mitchell? I promise to return it.”

  She nodded, her eyes still closed. The photograph was of a lean, square-shouldered, dark-haired youth with strong features, what the neighbors would call a fine-looking boy. He would mature into handsome manhood if he lived long enough.

  Caroline took my arm and we withdrew. The woman followed, closing the door behind us without a good-bye. I heard the click of the latch, and Caroline and I were alone in the hall.

  “Come upstairs, please,” she said.

  She didn’t offer me tea. She went instead to her bedroom, and I waited in the living room while she changed out of her whites. She left the bedroom door partly open, not as an invitation to enter, but so I could hear her clearly. She needed to tell me about Teddy.

  “He was hiding out somewhere when the men came and threatened his mother. She was terrified. Poor woman, she has no idea what’s happening. Not that I do, either.”

  “I think it involves Alberto Scarpetti.”

  “The gangster?”

  “Yes. And maybe our late, great D.A., also.”

  “I heard about it on my way home. It’s terrible.”

  “That it is.”

  “And all because they stole his car?”

  “All because.”

  “So Teddy’s in real danger?”

  “Yes. Has he been back since the two men threatened his mother?”

  “The next day. When his mother told him, he stayed only long enough to call Chick. But I guess Chick wasn’t home. Teddy hasn’t been back since.”

  “What about Charlotte. Seen her?”

  “No. Not since the day you were here. That was…”

  “Saturday. And this is Tuesday. She hasn’t been back at all?”

  “No. I’ve been very worried about her.”

  “I wouldn’t be if I were you.”

  “She’s my sister. She’s my responsibility, especially now that Jimmy’s gone.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said and let it drop. I read a magazine until she was finished dressing.

  She emerged in a bright blue cotton skirt and lighter blue turtleneck. Her hair was combed out and fell softly down to her shoulders. She wore lipstick. It was more than a change of clothes and some spiffing; it was a transformation. I found myself staring like a hopeful suitor.

  “Have you had breakfast?” she asked.

  “About six hours ago.”

  “Brunch, then?”

  “No. Haven’t had that yet.”

  “May I make some for you?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  “I’m still trying to apologize.”

  “For?”

  “Accusing you of being a man.”

  “Guilty as charged,” I said with a forced smile.

  “Well?”

  “No, thanks. I mean about fixing breakfast—brunch—here.”

  “Maybe you’d prefer to take me somewhere… to a restaurant, I mean.”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t have to, of course,” she added, offering an encouraging smile. Her look was pleasantly indiscreet, almost sexy.

  I was about to smile back when the front door swung open hard and bounded off the rubber stop. Charlotte, dressed in the same jeans and sweater she’d worn the day before, caught it on the rebound. She staggered a few steps forward before she saw Caroline. She was drunk, and she looked and smelled like she’d thrown up on herself. Her eyes moved randomly.

  “Hel-lo, big sis,” she said with a giggle. “How’s tricks?” Then she said, “Oops!” Her eyes drifted lazily down the front of her pants as a small puddle collected at her feet. That made her giggle more, until she saw me. Her snarling lips started to mutter an obscenity when the rest of her liquor came up and she bolted for the bathroom. Caroline started after her, then stopped. Her eyes found mine and turned melancholy again. They asked me a question.

  “Leave her,” I answered. “Let her choke on herself for a while.”

  “I can’t,” she said, her eyes turning to water.

  “She’s your misfortune, Caroline. She’s not about to be mine. Can you understand that?”

  “I can’t leave her.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I can’t. I’m so sorry, Eddie.”

  “Me, too.”

  She followed after Charlotte, and I left without closing the door.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Chick Gunderson was next on my list. According to Arnold, he lived with his parents and one younger sister in a tenement on Pitkin Avenue i
n East New York. They were on the first floor. Apartment 1C. I smelled fresh paint as I knocked, and an instant later the super appeared from across the hall. He could’ve passed for Shork’s brother with his pencil mustache and slimy looks. He’d added the smoldering stump of a cheap cigar to the image.

  “They moved out,” he said.

  “The Gundersons?”

  “That’s the ones what lived there, that’s the ones what moved out. Can’t ya smell the paint?”

  “Where’d they move to?”

  “Wisht I knew. They snuck out in the middle of the night, like crim’nals, owin’ me rent.” He flicked some cigar ash onto the floor and postured like a tough guy. “I ever see ’em again, or that fucker Chick, I’ll kick some ass.”

  “What about Chick?”

  “He’s the reason they left all of a sudden, the little prick. Got in some big trouble, had t’ hide out. Still hidin’. That’s what the kid sister tol’ me, anyway.”

  “Somebody come looking for him?”

  “That’s one question too many, pal,” he said, squinting through a puff of foul-smelling smoke. “Who are you?”

  “Friend of the family.”

  He grinned. “Cop, huh?”

  “Friend of the family, like I said. So, did somebody come looking for him?”

  “Yeah. Two hardasses. Whoever they were, they scared the livin’ shit outa them folks.”

  “I have to find this kid Chick,” I said. “What’s he look like?”

  He sniggered. “You’re a friend of the family and you don’t know?”

  “I’m not that good a friend yet.”

  “You wanna be my friend, pal?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Pay me the ten they owe me on the rent, and I’ll show you.”

  It was rare to meet a squealer who worked so cheap, so I paid and followed him to a jumbled pile of furniture in a corner of the basement. “That’s their stuff,” he said. “Gonna sell it, they don’t come back.” He led me through the clutter to a bushel basket filled with silverware, cups and saucers, and a half dozen framed photographs. A bright, adolescent face grinned at me from one of the pictures. He looked maybe fourteen, stocky, big-shouldered, with good-sized muscles. The super wasn’t about to kick this kid’s ass, then or now. He picked the picture off the pile and handed it to me. “That’s Chick. It’s a old pi’cher, but his face ain’t changed all that much.”

  “Mind if I borrow it for a few days?”

  “Five bucks,” he said. I stared at him, but he didn’t blink.

  I handed it back and started for the stairs. “Three-fifty!” he shouted when I was halfway up. I kept going.

  I stopped at a newsstand on the way home and picked up copies of the Daily News, Daily Mirror, and Brooklyn Eagle. It was almost lunchtime. Last night’s snowfall had melted for the most part, leaving only small mounds of off-white where the sun hadn’t reached. 16th Avenue looked and smelled daisy-fresh.

  I sat at the kitchen table, ate a hot meatball sandwich, and read Carlson’s most recent press. All front-page stuff. He would’ve loved it: CHAMPION OF THE PEOPLE; CRIMEBUSTER EXTRAORDINARY; MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF LAW AND ORDER. If he’d come back from the dead that afternoon, they’d have made him governor by the next morning.

  Then I got to Wiseman’s piece in the Eagle. The headline read: D.A.’s BIG CASE BLOWN SKY-HIGH?He meant Scarpetti and wondered if the D.A.’s explosive exit had somehow changed the rules and the playing field. Which, of course, it had.

  I was past lunch, past Carlson, past the sports page, and deep into the funnies when Gino telephoned.

  “Goddamn it, Eddie! He did it again!”

  “And good afternoon to you, too, paisano.”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yeah. Who did what again?”

  “The prowler. Broke into the church. Same goddamn window. Three nights in a row. That’s three panes o’ glass, Eddie.”

  “I can count.”

  “So where the hell were you?”

  “I was there. Nobody showed.”

  “How long’d you stay—five minutes?”

  “I’m still workin’ on Arnold Pulaski’s case. Remember him?”

  Gino didn’t answer. I figured he was counting to ten in Italian, so I just waited.

  “You goin’ out there again tonight?” he asked finally.

  “Out where?” I asked, just to peeve him.

  “The church, for Chrissake!”

  “That what you want?”

  “Whadda you think?”

  “Okay, then, I’ll go,” and I hung up.

  I had a few other things to do first. If Teddy and Chick were as spooked as I figured, they’d run from everyone they didn’t know and half the ones they did. Aside from Carlson’s red-haired buddy Jorgenson, they were my best link now to the truth.

  I drove first to Brownsville, stopping at every candy store hangout and corner newsstand, anywhere the kids gathered. I passed out my business card and told my problem to any of them who’d listen. Nobody spat in my face or tore up my card, but everywhere I went, from Ralph Avenue to Junius Street, from Liberty Avenue down to Hegeman, they were wary. And scared. Fear was natural in the neighborhood where the Lepke-Gurrah gang, a.k.a. Murder Inc., once ruled; but the scent of it was even stronger among the kids who knew Chick and Teddy. Kids I’d expect to at least act fearless looked cowed and submissive.

  It was no different along Pitkin Avenue in East New York. This was hard turf, too, and the kids were usually brassy and full of themselves, like Arnold. But when I mentioned Chick and his trouble, they went mute. I passed the word, and my card, hoping someone would help.

  I drove back to Bensonhurst in late afternoon, parked across from St. Margaret’s, and made the rounds of the gossip ladies. I didn’t have to ask about the prowler. They’d been talking about him all day, about how attendance at the novena kept dropping from fear of him. No one had seen his face, but several had seen him from behind, in the dark, skulking around in their backyards and garages. Mrs. Panetta had actually encountered him in a dream, threatening her with worse-than-death.

  I didn’t see Angelo doing window repair, and there was nothing new to tell Father Giacomo, so I drove home. I’d do another stakeout at the church that evening, for whatever it was worth. Broken windows and shrinking attendance at a novena weren’t my top priorities.

  I’d been thinking about Joe Shork again, and the pictures he’d sold to Carlson. If he was like any blackmailer I’d ever known, he’d have kept one or two for a rainy day. I was wondering where he might have stashed those extras. Behind a dresser? In some obscene little red scrapbook under the mattress? I decided to have a peek.

  CHAPTER

  27

  The Brooklyn City Directory listed Shork’s address on Snyder Avenue in East Flatbush. It was in the middle of a block of new row houses and had a built-in garage. The neighborhood was quiet, clean, scrupulously middle class, just what you’d expect for a successful, low-profile grifter. He’d probably told his neighbors that he was a buyer for Macy’s or an insurance claims investigator up in Manhattan, and they’d believed him. I wondered how many of them even knew he was dead.

  There was a basement door next to the garage, but I decided to walk right up to the stoop and the front door. Lock-picking isn’t one of my better skills, so I knocked intermittently until I could get both picks in, unlock the door and pretend someone was admitting me.

  I took the slow tour. Shork’s living room decor was extravagant but oddly haphazard: a Mediterranean sofa here, a Victorian armchair there. Scattered about were pieces of Early American, Colonial, and Scandinavian. Most, if not all of it, had fallen off a truck.

  The clothes in his bedroom closet revealed a less opportunistic, less eclectic, style: tailored Brooks Brothers suits, silk shirts and ties by the dozen, gold cufflinks, pairs and pairs of black oxfords, even a tux. All purchased at leisure, probably, and all from the best shops in town.

  I checked the
bathroom next. No Benzedrine, no cocaine. Not even sleeping pills. Joe Shork had lived well preying on other people’s weaknesses, and he’d been smart enough not to indulge carelessly in his own.

  And he’d slept well.

  I wandered back into the living room. Even the magazines were innocuous: Life, Look, Popular Mechanics, Popular Photography. I remembered the girlie magazine he’d been reading in his office at Victory Wrecking. He was sure to have others, but where?

  I tried the kitchen next, and the second bedroom. Still nothing, so I took the stairs to the basement. There was a complete wood shop there, and a small, enclosed darkroom with an inexpensive enlarger, developing tanks and trays, and the usual chemicals. If he’d done some of his dirty work here, it didn’t show.

  That left the garage. The cops had impounded Shork’s car at Victory the night he’d been killed. He wasn’t stupid enough to work out of the trunk, anyway, so whatever he’d stashed had to be here. There were stacks of old newspapers and magazines two and three deep, ready to sell to the junk man by the pound. The New York Herald-Tribune, mostly, and the same magazines as upstairs. I waded through them, one small, dusty pile at a time, moving them away from a crudely-constructed but sturdy cabinet that ran the length of the back wall.

  There were four out-of-plumb compartments in the cabinet. I opened each one as soon as I’d pushed the last stack in front of it aside. The first three were unlocked and filled with what you’d expect in a garage: cleaning solvents, car wax, paint thinner, steel wool, rags, sandpaper. Nothing incriminating.

  A new thought presented itself. What if Shork had only been the agent for someone else, the go-between for the real blackmailer? His boss, Dom Scarpetti, possibly, but more likely big brother Alberto. Those two goons who’d come into Shork’s office, and who’d followed Watusi and me to Sands Street, belonged to Alberto. What had one of them whispered so threateningly into Shork’s ear that afternoon? Instructions on how to deal with the D.A.? A threat of death if anything else went wrong?