I took long strides to the door, opened it. As planned, an EMS technician wheeled into the room the Dobrover rebbe himself, frail and wraithlike, a man of fifty-three years with an early heart condition, attended by his young son in the Litvak frock.
The Dobrover appeared before us all as the Job-like figure that sooner or later every mortal becomes, but in his case the suffering had come at the hand of man rather than God, and that made all the difference.
The room remained silent for long minutes. An excommunicated man shows himself in the courtroom for only one purpose: to have the excommunication nullified, to be reborn to the community. This court had difficult days, weeks, probably, of work ahead.
I’d done my part for Dobrov. Now it remained to be seen what Dobrov would do for me. In the meantime, no one took notice when I snapped my briefcase closed loudly, adjusted the brim of my hat, and left. I had become a dead man, unseen and unheard.
©2004 Pearl Abraham
No time for senior’s
by Sidney Offit
Downtown Brooklyn
I’m talking murder. Murder!” she says.
It’s past noon. I’m sitting in my office near DeKalb and Flatbush, knocking off a corned-beef-lean bathed in cole slaw on seeded rye from Junior’s. And there stands Sylvia Berkowitz O’Neil, not looking her age, in high heels, short skirt, and enough makeup to drown Esther Williams and Mark Spitz on a bad day.
Before I can crack wise, Sylvia takes her first shot. “Yer eating at Junior’s? I’m working day and night, night and day, with an economy deli for the neighborhood, and you’re supporting the competition? And don’t tell me you never heard of Senior’s!”
Senior’s? She’s got to be pulling of my legs. But not Sylvia. A kid with an old baseball cap on backwards is standing by her side, the spitting image of Seamus “Scoop” O’Neil, my former pal, who run off to City Hall with Sylvia back when we were an item.
“So what’s up? Why me? Why today after — has it been thirty, forty years?”
Sylvia doesn’t miss a beat. “I need you, Pistol Pete,” she says. “The cops have got Scoop in for murder. Murder. They say he done in Front Page Shamburger and Sherlock Iconoflip.” Then, “Don’t you ask a lady to sit down? What’s happened to your manners? And this gentleman, about whom you don’t seem to have the presence to ask, is our nephew I.F., named, of course, after the famous Izzy Stone, who you know was Scoop’s hero all these many years.”
So, I pull up two old bridges that I haven’t unfolded in — gotta stop counting the years. Sylvia keeps yammering, reminding me I’m the only private eye she’s ever really known, recalling the days when I was feeding Scoop leads, checking out scumbags for him, so he could blow the lid off the hustlers at Borough Hall — who made the deals with sewer, highway, and bridge contractors. I unwrap a White Owl, pull out the old Zippo, and am ready to light up.
“You are not going to smoke,” Sylvia tells me. “I don’t believe it. You still haven’t caught on.”
That’s Sylvia. Hasn’t skipped a beat, still telling me what to do. I bury the Zippo and start chewing the stogie.
“It happened at their weekly poker game,” Sylvia says.
“What useta be their gang of six, what with the smoking and the drinking, what it done to their lungs and livers and kidneys, not to say their marriages and longevity. Well, now it’s down to the three of them. Was three until Front Page and Sherlock — may their souls rest in a City Room — got knocked off.”
Sylvia is not keen on interruptions, but I cut in. “Gotta play it straight with you for old time’s sake, Sylv,” I say. “Haven’t hustled a case in must be five years. Been sittin’ up here in the office on a long-term lease just passin’ the time. Doin’ a little this and that.”
She knows I never been hitched, and I can tell by the way she kinda half smiles at me she suspects I’m still carrying the torch for her.
“Sanchez over at the precinct says it was poison — arsenic mixed with mustard — that done them in,” Sylvia goes on. “The cops found splotches of mustard on Scoop’s cuff, his shirt, the zipper of his fly. Would you believe it?”
I’m studying the kid’s cap. The mellow blue has me wondering if it’s an old Brooklyn Dodger lid. “Hey, kid, you ever hear of Carl Furillo, Sandy Amoros? Duke Snider? I know you heard of Jackie Robinson. Everybody heard of Jackie Robinson.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Sylvia says in a huff. “I’m talking about my husband, held for murder. I’m giving you the facts, nothing but the facts, and you come up with a walk down Memory Lane. Who you think you are — Joe Franklin?”
But the kid is hooked. “Carl Anthony Furillo hit .296 for the 1955 World Champions. Edwin Donald ‘Duke’ Snider hit four home runs, batted in seven, BA .320 in the Series. ‘Sandy’ Edmund Isasi Amoros led the team with .333…”
“Enough,” Sylvia says, like she’s letting the dentist know one more drill and she’s outa there. “We didn’t come here to talk baseball.”
But the kid has cleared the fences. When Scoop and I seen the last of each other, we had this pact, at least I thought we had a deal, only talk, talk only, about Dodgers, once O’Malley had packed up the gang including the great Sandy Koufax himself and hauled kit and caboodle off to L.A. I’m touched that the kid — did Sylvia say he was her nephew? — has got it all down pat. The memories, my memories of our church that was Ebbets Field.
“Everything isn’t picture perfect between Scoop and me,” Sylvia goes on. “I’m not gonna tell you it is. Like Senior’s. Me opening the restaurant, a deli. I’m ordering my pastramis from Langers. You never taste a smokier, saltier, peppery flavor in your life. ‘Yer ordering pastramis from L.A.,’ Scoop says. ‘I won’t hear of it. First they steal our Dodgers. Now you’re goin’ head to head with Junior’s with an L.A. pastrami.’ That’s what he says. No head for business.”
“Say, kid,” I say. “They call you I.F.? What you know about Izzy Stone?”
“He published an independent newsletter, received a Special George Polk Journalism Award in 1970, the same award the Brooklyn Eagle won for Community Service in 1948 and 1949. Stone thanked the Brooklyn Center of L.I.U. for what he called a great honor.”
The kid gets no further than that when Sylv is back again.
“What is this? First down Memory Lane, now it’s Old Home Week. The Brooklyn Eagle is dead and so are Front Page and Sherlock. Scoop is facing the hot seat and you’re cutting up about Brooklyn bygones. You taking the case or I gotta fly a shammes in from L.A.?”
“Sanchez, you say?” I say. “Pablo Sanchez. He still around? Must be a sergeant since I seen him last. I’ll give him a call.” Sylvia is pumping her heels, the kid is flipping his lid, brim forward now. I can see the fading white monogrammed B. The number comes to me easy, 84th Precinct, 718-875-6811. I’m still chomping the stogie when I’m on the line with Pablo. “Socorro! Socorro!” I say by way of openers. “I gotta talk to you, amigo. I hear you got Scoop O’Neil in for asesinato. His wife Sylvia put me on the case. I gotta talk to him. No puedo esperar.”
“Come on over,” Pablo says, “Esperaré aquí.”
“I’m on,” I tell Sylvia and the kid. “You might as well come along for the ride.”
“Sure I know my way around Brooklyn,” the kid tells me as we’re ambling toward Gold Street. “I got a map.” Then he says, “You ever hear of Only the Dead Know Brooklyn?”