I opened the first one by bending the clasp’s spread metal wings together, lifting the flap, and dumping the contents onto my bed. Three white, letter-sized envelopes fell onto the bedspread. One was marked “Last Will and Testament.” Another was marked “For Dad.” And one “For Mom.”
“Is that Samantha’s handwriting?” Aaron wanted to know.
“I think so. Wait a second.” I scrounged around the bottom of my closet looking for a particular shoebox. After a minute of frantic searching, I found the one I wanted. Pulling off the lid, I reached into the box and came up with a handful of holiday cards, birthday cards, and postcards. I searched through them until I came upon what I was looking for. “Here it is,” I said, holding up a postcard with a photo of the Steeplechase on the front. On the back was a note from Sam.
Dear Moe —
Please forgive me. I don’t know what got into me the other night. You are a good and loyal friend, which is more than I can say for myself. Getting to know you has been one of my favorite things about moving here. Please don’t let a few minutes of stupidity on my part ruin that.
Love,
Sam
I held the postcard up to the writing on one of the envelopes. “It’s her handwriting, but I’m not going to open these up, Aaron. It’s not right.”
“I agree. There’s nothing in them for us.”
I opened the second brown envelope, turned it upside down, and let gravity do the rest. There was another white, letter-sized envelope within. It was marked “To Whom It May Concern,” but it was the remainder of the contents that made me go cold inside. Next to the white envelope on the bed lay a NYPD badge and a thick packet of black-and-white photographs. The photographs were of Bobby and Tony P, of Bobby’s car — trunk open — at the airport parking lot, of a light-colored van parked behind it. There was a series of photos of a man loading something from the van into the trunk, but the man in the photos wasn’t Detective Casey and the things being loaded into the trunk weren’t wooden crates of dummy explosives.
“Holy shit!” I thought I heard myself say.
Aaron grabbed the photos out of my hand. “What is it? What are those things in his hands?” he asked, pointing at the plastic- and tape-covered bricks being loaded into Bobby’s trunk.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Aaron didn’t like it when I got sarcastic. He especially didn’t like it when it made him feel dumb or out of touch. “No, I’m not kidding, jerk. Remember whose clothes you’ve been wearing today and whose car you’ve been driving lately.”
“Sorry, you’re right, big brother. Those bricks are bricks of heroin or cocaine. I’m not sure which.”
“Get the fuck outta here! Bobby wouldn’t do that.”
“You’re wrong. You wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that, but I’m not sure there’s anything Bobby wouldn’t do if a lot of money was part of the equation.”
Aaron wasn’t believing it. “Big money or not, Bobby’s a shrewd guy. He wouldn’t risk going away to prison for — ” I was already laughing before he could finish. “What’s so funny?” he wanted to know.
“I swear I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “In fact, even though it looks and sounds like laughter, I’m really crying.”
“You’re talking crazy, Moe.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Aren’t you going to open the white envelope? It’s addressed to Whom It May Concern, not to her mom or dad.”
“Not now,” I said. “Not here.”
“When?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied. I knew exactly where and when I was going to open it.
“What about the photographs? Are you — ”
“I’ll handle it.”
“Okay,” he said, but his expression was full of worry. Rightfully so.
My brother knew my heart better than I thought he did. What was even more amazing was that in spite of knowing that I was basically an aimless fuck-up, he trusted me. That I hadn’t expected, because I wasn’t sure that I’d ever done anything to earn his trust. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to trust somebody. I was about to test that theory out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Bobby was sleeping when I walked into his room at Coney Island Hospital, but it wasn’t the sleep of angels. His face, his long brown hair were bathed in sweat. His fingers twitched. His head jerked violently from side to side. His lips curled and moved. His arms struck out wildly at an invisible enemy. Maybe it was a nightmare. Or maybe he was being crushed beneath the weight of his deals with various devils. I didn’t much care either way, as long as he suffered. I stood there watching him for what might have been an hour, trying to feel something other than anger. I think I could have stood there for days and not felt anything else. Eventually Bobby’s night terrors calmed, and he fell into a more restful sleep. I sat down, reading while I waited. He stirred again at around eleven, this time opening his eyes. I got up. I wanted to be standing over him when he woke.
“Hey, Moe.” He yawned, stretching his muscles, not without pain. “What time is it? How did you get in here with — ”
I might have told him what time it was. I might have told him that I had called Detective Casey to make sure I could get past the relief cop at the door without any hassles. I did neither. What I did instead was to toss something onto Bobby’s chest.
He grabbed at it. “What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a dead cop’s badge.”
“What the — ”
“Shut up, Bobby. For once, just shut the fuck up. I’m already sorry for saving your life. Don’t make it worse.”
“About that,” he said, “about saving my — ”
“Twice, Bobby. I saved your worthless life twice. So please shut up. Shut up!”
He put his hands up in surrender. “Okay.”
“We’ll talk about the badge later. First, I wanna talk about this.” I handed him a photo of the big guy loading up his trunk with drugs. “Are the bricks heroin or cocaine?”
“Where did you get this?”
I ignored him. “Heroin or cocaine?”
He bowed his head. “Heroin.”
“What a perfect setup, huh, Bobby? By volunteering to be Detective Casey’s rat inside Susan Kasten’s bomb plot, you got a pass from the cops that would let you drive all the heroin you could carry through the streets of New York without risking a day in prison. If you got stopped, like we did that day you got a flat tire coming back from the airport, you just told the cop to call the number Casey gave you and the cops would send you on your way. Those weren’t dummy explosives in your trunk that day. It was heroin, right?”
“Right.”
“You musta gotten a fucking hard-on when Casey explained to you about the number to call if you ever got jammed up. Me, I wouldn’t’ve been able to see a way to turn that into profits, but that’s always been the difference between us, Bobby. You could always see all the possibilities in any deal, whether it was trading baseball cards or smuggling heroin.”
“Everybody’s good at something, Moe.”
“Well, I guess that makes it all okay. Hitler was good at killing Jews, and you’re good at making money. So, whose idea was it to use your cover to smuggle drugs, yours or Tony P’s?”
He looked like he was going to deny Tony Pizza’s involvement, but didn’t bother. “From when I worked for him a few summers back, I knew Tony was involved in all sorts of smuggling: jewelry, car parts, electronics, fireworks. You know about the fireworks. Everybody in Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island knows about the fireworks, even the cops at the 60th and 61st precincts buy their fireworks from him. At worst I thought Tony would ask me to move some hot jewelry or bottle rockets.”
“Bottle rockets. If this wasn’t so fucked up, I might even laugh at that. But I guess when you went to him and told him about your sweet setup, he had bigger plans than bottle rockets.”