“Try again,” he said.
“That’s the best I got.”
“I doubt that, but skip it for now. What happened the next day, the day after Mindy warned you?”
“It was the day of the snowstorm. I cut class and came here to straighten up, but Bobby’s car was already here. He was stepping into the street when I saw this car coming at him out of the snow.”
“The Caddy stolen from Hyman Bergman’s neighbor?”
“Yeah. I ran across the street and shoved Bobby out of the way. The car clipped my foot and spun my shoulder into the bumper of Bobby’s 88.”
“Then you heard the car crash around the corner, and you and Bobby went to check it out,” he said, putting the Ford in gear and slowly driving around the corner. “Show me where you found the car smashed into the tree.”
“Here! Right here.”
He stopped the car. Even in the dark, we could make out the scar in the bark the Caddy had left in its wake. “Oak tree wins that battle every time. Musta been an ugly scene, huh?”
“Real ugly,” I said. “The car was totally fucked up. The windshield was smashed. The driver and his passenger had split, but I knew they were hurt pretty bad. There was blood all over the Caddy’s interior and in the snow. I guess we could have tried catching up to them, but my shoulder was killing me and Bobby convinced me to go back to the house and get some ice on it. Besides, the snow was falling like crazy.”
Casey put the Ford in gear again. “So the driver and passenger left the scene of the accident? Why do you think they did that?”
“You’re joking, right?” I asked. “They didn’t want to get caught in a stolen car. Why else would they run?”
“You tell me.”
We were moving again, down Avenue I, right onto Ocean Avenue. He drove at a snail’s pace. There wasn’t much traffic at that time of the morning, so no one protested. As we drove, I got that sick feeling in my gut again. It was a feeling I’d become intimately familiar with in recent days, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I should have been feeling it at just that moment.
“You don’t look so good,” Casey said to me as we turned off Ocean Avenue onto Glenwood Road. “What’s wrong?”
I didn’t answer because a niggling thought forced its way into my consciousness, because I suddenly saw how the dots connected in a way to make me look like a lovestruck idiot. Detective Casey saw the realization in my eyes just as we pulled up to the corners of Glenwood Road and East 17th Street.
I pointed down East 17th. “They found Mindy over there.”
“They did.”
“Okay, Detective, I get it now. Let’s go,” I said, never having felt quite so low or so stupid as I did just then. “You made your point.”
“I need you to say it, Moe.”
“What, that I got it all wrong? That I refused to see the most obvious answer?”
He shook his head. “You know what I need to hear.”
“Fuck you!”
“That wasn’t it,” he said, and we were off again. “Not even close.”
Less than two minutes later we were parked in front of the burned-out rubble that had once been Hyman Bergman’s fix-it shop.
“The old man’s dead. That last shot you heard when you were carrying Bobby out of the basement was Bergman blowing his own head off.”
“So where’s Susan?” I asked.
“First things first, Moe. You wanna know about Kasten, you wanna talk about Samantha Hope and Martin Lavitz, fine. It’s all on the table now, but I need to hear it and fuck you better not be the words that come outta your mouth. We understand each other?”
I didn’t give him what he wanted. “But why? You already know the truth. What’s the value in hearing me say it?”
“We’ll discuss that later.”
The pigheaded part of me wanted to tell him to shove it up his ass, but I needed him to talk about Sam and Marty. I gave him what he wanted.
“Mindy and Abdul Salaam were the people in the Caddy that tried to kill Bobby, and it was probably Mindy at the wheel. That’s why she warned me to stay away from Bobby, and that’s why she missed when I shoved Bobby out of the way. Salaam was there as insurance, to make sure she carried out her assignment. It makes a sick kinda sense, really, having Mindy be the one to kill Bobby. It was a way to test her loyalties. After she missed us, when they tried to speed away in the snow, Mindy lost control of the car and smacked into the tree. Mindy wasn’t beaten into a coma. Nobody beat anybody. Both Mindy and Salaam were hurt bad in the accident, but they couldn’t afford to let us find them. They took off on foot, Salaam probably dragging or carrying Mindy. My guess is that they were coming here,” I said, nodding at the rubble.
“Salaam was trying to get them to the upstairs apartment to wait out the storm or to get help from Bergman. But Salaam couldn’t make it, not with his injuries and not carrying Mindy. He dropped her on the street to lighten his load. Salaam finally made it here, but the shop was closed because of the weather. He got upstairs, crawled into bed, and probably died of his injuries. That’s how I found him. That’s how Bobby found him. That’s how he was when Susan Kasten lit the place on fire. You happy now, Detective Casey? Pretty ironic how I got involved in all this shit so I could find out who put my girlfriend in a coma. Well, okay, I found out. Joke’s on me, I guess. Go ahead, laugh. It’s okay. I deserve it.”
“I’m not happy and I’m not laughing, Moe. I needed you to say it because, let’s face it, if I told you that story, you probably woulda thought I was full a shit. That I was another lying cop trying to set you up.”
“You’re right. I wouldn’t’ve believed you.”
“Now here’s the thing,” he said. “If I wanted to, I could get your girlfriend sent away for the next hundred years. By the time she got out, she’d be dead or she’d wanna be. You know and I know she was deep in this whole bomb plot thing and I could get her on attempted murder too — ”
“But — ”
“But I’m not looking to hurt her, and I need a favor from you.”
I was more than a little skeptical. “A favor from me?”
“Yeah. Stories are gonna come out in the papers and on the news tomorrow that won’t exactly fit the facts of what happened. Your name and Bobby’s will be completely kept out of it, but I need you to keep your mouth shut. I need you to promise me that.”
“This is the part on TV where you say, or else.”
“There’s no or else. This isn’t TV and we’re not all like that asshole, Nance. I think you’re a man of your word, Moe, and I’m asking for your word.”
“Where’s Susan Kasten?”
“Wish I knew. A year’s worth of work setting this up, and now she’s gone,” he said. “She was the candy inside the piñata, the big prize. We’ll never find her now. She’ll disappear into the underground and wind up in Cuba or Syria. We figured if we caught her red-handed, looking at life in prison, she’d cut a deal. She’d’ve given us a way into all the other groups that think bombs are a good way to make a point.”
“You mean like LBJ, McNamara, and Westmoreland?”
He wasn’t having any. “It’s different.”
“It’s killing.”
“People like Susan Kasten kill innocent people.”
“You watch the news lately, Detective? You think all the people under those bombs are guilty? A lot of them are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides, Susan Kasten would’ve chewed her own fucking arm off before making a deal with you. She’s a true believer.”
“And you’re not? A true believer, I mean?”
I laughed. “Me? Are you crazy? I’m not into isms. Since my bar mitzvah I don’t even do much with Judaism. Sometimes I think that’s why Bobby and Mindy like me, because all I believe in is a better world.” I turned in my seat to face him. “When I was in that basement, old man Bergman said the bomb that killed Samantha and Marty wasn’t his work.”
“Don’t look at me, Moe.”
“Why not?”
“Because that bomb in December nearly blew our operation. It made the Committee suspicious. It’s what made Kasten start looking for a rat inside her group. Then there’s a very practical reason why it couldn’t have been me.”