“Oh, Christ, Moe, what am I gonna do?” She pulled herself close again and rested her head on my chest.
“Do you want the baby?”
“Me? I’m a thirty-five-year-old unmarried woman. What am I gonna do with a baby?”
“That’s not an answer. Do you want it?”
“Yes and no.”
“Now that’s an answer,” I said, once again stroking her hair. “How far along are you?”
“Not so far.”
“Whatever you choose, you know, it’s good with me.”
“I know.”
I reached under her chin and tilted her head so that she was looking up directly into my eyes. “Just one thing, Carm, don’t think that because you’re not far along that you have a lot of time. The longer you wait, the harder it will get. Whatever decision you make will be a permanent one and you’ll have to live with it forever.”
She smiled sadly. “Maybe not forever, but just as long as I live.”
“Yeah, I guess everybody’s forever is a little bit different.”
Now she pushed herself away, wiping off what was left of the tears with the backs of her hands. “Come on, we got work to do. Go put that bottle away and then get your ass back in here.”
By the time I returned to her office, she had completely regained her composure. I hadn’t invested in this partnership because of her looks. Of the two of us, she was the professional detective. I’d only ever been in uniform. When Carmella needed to, she could be all business. You couldn’t’ve worked homicide the way she had without the ability to check your emotions. There were times when her knack for emotional distance verged on antiseptic and, given what was going on with my family at the moment, that was probably a good thing. I was too close to it, way too close.
She slid a thick file across her desk. “That’s what you asked for. You’ve got current addresses-home and business-phone numbers, e-mail addresses… everything. There’s only one guy, this… Judas Wannsee, that we’re having a little trouble locating.”
In 1981, Judas Wannsee was the leader of the Yellow Stars, a Jewish anti-assimilationist cult headquartered in the Catskill Mountains. His group had provided cover for the woman who had started the fire that killed my high school crush. The group had attracted some national media attention in the early part of the decade, but by 19 9 0 had fallen into the creases of history the way pocket change disappears into the furniture.
“Okay, have Devo keep looking.”
“So, where do we start?”
“ We don’t. I’m flying solo. There are some people I need to talk to by myself.”
“Okay, but-”
“You still have that package in the office?”
Carmella knew what I was asking for and pulled a large plastic bag out of her drawer.
“Good. Patrick and his boyfriend Jack had that tattooed on their forearms.”
“So you told me, but that had to have been at least-”
“-twenty-three years ago. I know, but I want you to send some people out to tattoo parlors to see if anyone’s had a tat like this done within the last few months.”
“Moe, these days aren’t exactly like when my dad was young and the only people who got tattoos were sailors and bikers. There are probably more than a hundred tattoo and piercing joints in Manhattan alone. Maybe double that. Never mind the boroughs.”
I suppose I hadn’t given it a lot of thought. “You really think there’s that many?”
“Shit, everybody’s got ink these days.”
“I don’t.”
“I do.”
“You do! What of? Where?”
“You should’ve asked me that about twenty minutes ago. There’s a good chance you would have seen for yourself. But we’ll talk about that some other time. I bet you Sarah got one.”
“I don’t think so.”
Carmella just shook her head and smiled at me. “Okay, so we’re going tattoo hunting. Anything else?”
“Casting calls,” I said.
“Casting calls! Tattoos and casting calls, what’s this about exactly?”
“At the airport…” I hesitated.
“At the airport what?”
“Remember when Raheem pointed and said that the guy that paid him to deliver the-”
“-package looked like the guy in the painting. I remember. He fed me that same line of crap when we had our little debriefing. The kid was trying to get over is all. He was full of shit.”
“No, he wasn’t, Carm.”
“What?”
“I saw him.”
“You saw who?”
“Patrick.”
“You outta your fucking mind?”
“I think maybe I am, but I know what I saw and I saw him.”
“So maybe he really isn’t dead,” she said.
“No, he’s dead.”
“Wait a-”
“I didn’t see an older, not a forty-year-old Patrick. I saw Patrick from when he was in college. And there’s only two explanations for that. He was a ghost or a-”
“-look-a-like,” she finished my sentence.
“If he wasn’t a ghost, then somebody was shopping around for a replica and the best way to find one in this city is to hold auditions for a very special part.”
“Okay, Moe, I can see how this would work, but I don’t understand the why. Who could hate you guys this much?”
“When we find out who,” I said, “the why will be self-evident.”
“ If we do.”
“When we do. When!”
We discussed a few more details and I got ready to head back home. Carmella was still in her office. I stuck my head through the door.
“You gonna be all right?”
She didn’t answer immediately. “Me? I guess I will be, but this isn’t only about me anymore, is it?”
“I guess not.”
“About before…I…I-”
“I won’t pretend I’ll be able to forget it, but don’t worry about it.”
“Safe home,” she said, turning her chair back toward the window.
Safe home yourself, I thought, although I knew she’d be spending the night here. Would anyone walk past our offices and wonder about the light leaking through the bottom of the door?
When I got back to Sheepshead Bay, Sarah had gone. Her note said she had decided to spend a few days with her mom. It was the right choice for all of us, especially for Katy, Folded into the note were my Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association card and Carmella’s Detective’s Endowment Association card. The postscript read, “You were right, Dad. I was being a hypocrite. Thanks for the card and thank Carmella for hers, but I won’t be needing them anymore.”
Sarah really was the best of both Katy and me.
CHAPTER NINE
Although Aaron lived there and our biggest moneymaker was on Long Island, the place still gave me the chills. When I was growing up and kids from the neighborhood would vanish over summer vacation, there would be whispers about their families having fled to far off places with idyllic names like Valley Stream, Stony Brook, and Amityville or to places with unpronounceable names like Ronkonkoma, Massapequa, and Patchogue. It was all Siberia to me. I lived in secret dread that one of my dad’s business ventures would finally succeed and that he’d move Mom, Aaron, Miriam, and me to one of those awful places where people lived in big houses on quiet streets. My fears might have been allayed had I bothered looking at a map to see that Brooklyn and Queens were actually part of Long Island. I needn’t have worried in any case. My dad’s bad fortune would tie me to Brooklyn forever.
Elmont was a faceless town that was close enough to the city line to blow kisses at New York across the Queens border. It was the home of Belmont Park racetrack where the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, was held every June. If not for the track, Elmont would be notable for being on the glide path to Kennedy Airport and for its cemeteries. My parents were buried in Elmont. In the end, I guess, they had moved to Long Island, but, as yet, without Aaron, Miriam, and me. I had come to see a man in Elmont about an empty grave.
I have heard it said that concentration camp survivors sometimes pass on their torments to their children, that the victims become the victimizers. I don’t know if it’s true or not. People say a lot of things. What I do know is that Mr. Roth had been my friend, a second father to me, and a surrogate grandfather to Sarah. He was affectionate, warm, funny, and philosophical in spite of what he had endured, maybe because of it. Yet he, by his own admission, had been an unfaithful husband and a negligent father. I knew about some of his failings, but had come by the knowledge indirectly.