“Where’s Opie?” I said.
“Huh?”
“Forget it, Pete. Thanks for putting me up. I was pretty zonked.”
“I’d say. I’ve been checking on you every hour,” he said, pointing at the security camera mounted on the ceiling outside the cell, “and you’ve been in one position for most of the night. Come on, I got some coffee for you out here.”
We stepped into the offices. Here, the sun streaming through the windows confirmed that my watch was telling the truth. Vandervoort handed me a cup of coffee and motioned for me to sit down in front of his desk. Although his expression was neutral, I could tell that the news he had for me wasn’t good.
“It’s a dead end, Moe. We got your Yukon on one of the tapes and we got the kid walking into the convenience store at the station, but it’s impossible to read the tags. The driver never got out of the vehicle to buy gas or anything and he drove off right after dropping the kid.”
“Shit!”
“I know it’s not what you wanted to hear, but it totally confirms that this is a setup. You got that much, anyway.”
“Tape show anything about the driver?” I asked.
“Well, the good thing is that this tape was brand new, so it’s much cleaner than the other one I gave you. No murky images on this one.”
“But…”
“But you can’t tell anything about the driver. The windows are slightly tinted and there’s some sun glare.”
“Can I have the tape?”
“I knew you’d ask that.” He shoved a plastic evidence bag across the desk. “Here you go.”
“Any news on the lab?”
He started laughing. “The damned explosion registered on earthquake sensors. That was no small operation there, my friend. Somebody’s not going to be happy about it going boom.”
“I don’t suppose they’re going to file any insurance claims.”
“I suspect not.”
I got up. “Thanks for the tape and for the accommodations, Pete. I better get back down to the city and see if I can figure out how to come at this from another angle.”
“Sorry the SUV thing didn’t work out for you.”
“Me too. Later.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There are times when Brooklyn feels more like home than others. This was one of those times. I considered stopping at the office, but decided against it. I’d stop by later and drop off the new videotape and see if Devo had made anything of the answering machine tape and the original security video. Without tag numbers, it was a waste of time to put people on tracking down the Yukon. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of Yukons registered in New York State. Crank and the SUV had been worth a shot, but the sheriff was right, it was a dead end. Dead ends, unlike closing doors, are not very Zen. When one door closes, it’s said, another opens. When you hit a dead end, you make a U-turn. I needed to clear my head and think. I used to do my best thinking in Coney Island.
I strolled down the boardwalk toward the looming monster that was the Parachute Jump: its orange-painted girders rising like dinosaur bones two hundred and fifty feet off the grounds of Steeplechase Park. What a silly beast it was, after all, serving no purpose but to remind the world of its impotence. It might just as well have been a severed limb. Besides the salt air, the boardwalk smelled of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, Italian sausages frying with sweet peppers and onions: the fat from the sausages hissing and spitting on the grill. It smelled of sun block too. The beaches were crowded, but not so crowded as when I was a kid. The beaches weren’t as much of a magnet for city kids as they once had been.
With Sarah fully grown and nearly all my old precinct brothers moved or dead, I didn’t find much cause to come back here as I used to. I still loved the wretched place. How could I not, but it had never been the same after Larry McDonald’s suicide. This is where I saw him alive that last time in ’89, the ambitious prick. He had been a murderer too, though I didn’t know it then. I guess it broke my heart a little to find that out about Larry. That day back in ’89, Larry and I stood on the boardwalk directly over where his victim had been found. Larry threatened me and my family. He said he was desperate. Maybe he was. Somehow his words and deeds had tainted the place a little. It was the divorce too. Divorce does more than split things apart. It taints things, all things, especially the good ones.
As I walked I thought back to my chat with Mira Mira and how she said the older guy with the eye patch was a cop. Maybe there was an angle in that, but intuition didn’t usually stand up under scrutiny. It had been my experience that people who insisted they knew things for sure didn’t necessarily know shit. I don’t care if every one of the tattoo artist’s relatives was a cop. Just because a man is a chef doesn’t mean his kid can cook.
I thought about how much money was involved in arranging for the audition ads, for paying the kid and fixing him up to look just like Patrick. I thought about what it had cost to fly around the country for the auditions and to have arranged for the roses and the dramatics at Jack’s grave. I estimated it had cost between ten and thirty grand, maybe a little bit more, to stage this little charade. A nice chunk of change, yes, but not big money. Any regular schmo, if he was motivated enough, could come up with that kind of scratch, so the money was another dead end. It all led back to the motivation. In the end, it was the only way I could figure to come at this. There was someone out there who wanted to hurt me and wanted to use my family to do it. For now, I had to go back to stumbling around in the dark, to interviewing everyone I could think of who might have a reason to want to hurt me.
It was no wonder that Devo’d had trouble tracking down Judas Wannsee. First off, the name was an obvious alias, a construct of the most hated Jew in history, Judas Iscariot, and of the Wannsee Conference at which the Nazis worked out the details for the Final Solution. Headquartered in the Catskill Mountains, his cult, the Yellow Stars, rejected the concept of assimilation and believed that the only way to avoid Jewish self-hatred was to announce your Jewishness to the world, to brand yourself a Jew, and to avoid the false comforts of fitting in. Most of the members did this by wearing the eponymous yellow star on their clothing to mark themselves as the Nazis had marked the Jews of Europe. Some went so far as to shave their heads and don the striped pajamas of those herded into concentration camps. In a few extreme cases, they had numbers tattooed on their forearms and ate a meager diet of stale black bread and potato soup.
If Karen Rosen had sought refuge from any other group, cult, or religion, Judas Wannsee and I might never have crossed paths. Karen was one of the three girls from my high school who had allegedly perished in a Catskill Mountain hotel fire in the summer of 1965, so you can imagine my response when her lunatic older brother Arthur came to me in 1981 claiming not only that the fire was no accident, but intimating that one of the dead girls wasn’t dead at all. As it happened, he was right on both counts. Not only had his sister survived the fire, she started it. Exhausted from guilt and years of hiding, she found her way back to the Catskills and joined the Yellow Stars. Why she joined them is hard to say. Maybe she thought she could fashion her own murderous self-loathing into something that could be exorcised by slapping on the yellow Juden star. Maybe it was proximity to the scene of the original crime. By the time I found Karen Rosen at the Yellow Star compound and got to discuss it with her, liver cancer had since rendered her more dead than alive. When we spoke, she wanted from me something not in my heart to deliver: forgiveness.
Years later, I read an interview with Wannsee in a magazine. Although he gave no specifics, he discussed the issue of giving refuge and how the sins of those he had harbored over the years had come to weigh heavily upon him. Yeah, tell me about it. Shortly after the interview appeared, buzz over the group faded. Then the Yellow Stars went the way of their buzz. It was a stretch, I know, but I wondered even then if he blamed me for pulling the first stone from the foundation upon which his little semi-secular temple had rested. Back then, it hadn’t interested me enough to bother tracking him down. It did now.