“Katy,” I called down, opening the basement door, “I’m going out for a few hours, okay? Sarah’s next door. I’ll bring back a pizza.”
“No problem. I’m almost done anyway. Where ya going?”
“I’m not sure.”
In some sense, I wasn’t.
I raced the sun along the Belt Parkway. Less than a mile into the trip, I drove past Coney Island, the neighborhood in which I’d spent most of my life and nearly my entire career as a cop. It was a stretch I drove every day whether I was headed to Bordeaux in Brooklyn or City on the Vine. I made the trip so often that I no longer noticed the landmarks. They were no longer even blurs or random shapes or splashes of color. Familiarity breeds a kind of blindness. Today, I took the time to notice. Katy wasn’t the only one coming out of a coma.
Pete Parson was a broken-down old cop like me. These days he was a minority partner in a grimy artists’ hangout in TriBeCa called Pooty’s. Even if I had come by just to play the juke, he would have been happy to see me. It had been a slow Sunday to begin with, as half the population of Manhattan was out on the southeastern tip of Long Island. Anyway, Pete had a low tolerance for the artsy-fartsy posers who populated his bar arguing over Twyla Tharp and Mapplethorpe instead of the Yankees and the Mets.
“How the fuck did I ever wind up in this place, Moe?” he asked, clapping me on the back. “When I was working the job, all I ever dreamed about was owning my own place, some neighborhood joint with pretzels and a pool table and guys reading the Racing Form. Someday I’m gonna move down south and open up a wine shop for you and your brother.”
“Yeah, sure, Pete, Merlot in Macon. If you think you got nothing in common with your clientele now … Besides, you couldn’t tell Ripple from a Cotes du Rhone with a road map.”
“Fuck you. What a ya havin'?”
“Dewar’s rocks.”
“Not that I’m not happy to see ya, but you haven’t been in since-you know. How’s Katy holding up?”
He put my scotch on the bar and opened a bottle of Bud for himself.
“Better. She’s doing better. We all are, I think.”
“Cheers!” He tipped his bottle to me. “So what’s up?”
“Remember I told you about working that case up in the Catskills?”
“That was like two years ago, right? The thing with the fire, all them kids. Yeah. What about it?”
“Nothing about it. It’s just I know you’re good at keeping up with the news, and when I was up in the mountains, there was something I guess I missed.”
“What was that?”
“A girl disappeared.”
“Girls are always disappearing.”
“This one was working as an intern for a state senator.”
“That Brightman thing?”
“That’s the one.”
“Jeez, Moe, she was a cop’s kid. Other than that, I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“Whatever you can tell me is more than I know, so …”
“So what’s this got to do with you, anyways?”
“I don’t know yet, probably nothing,” I said, only half hoping it was true. “Was there any indication of foul play?”
“Nothin’ obvious, no signs of a struggle, no blood or nothin’ in the office, as I recall. One minute she was there and the next minute she wasn’t. Sort of like …” He drifted off. “So, you ever hear anything about him?”
He didn’t have to specify which him. I knew his name like I knew my own, better maybe. Patrick Michael Maloney, Katy’s younger brother, had walked out of this very bar in December 1977 and into oblivion. It was bizarre how months could go by without anyone mentioning Patrick, and then his name would start rolling off people’s tongues like hello. Yesterday it was Geary. Today it was Pete. When Patrick’s name started getting bandied about, it was never a good omen. It usually meant people wanted something, specifically, something from me.
“Not a word, Pete. Every once in a while we get some schmuck looking to make a quick buck off the reward money, but the tips never pan out. Between you and me, I think Patrick ran as far away from here as he could get and he’s never coming back. Given my asshole father-in-law, I can’t say that I blame him.”
“Amen to that.”
Pete had gotten a bellyful of Francis Maloney Sr. after Patrick vanished. My father-in-law, once a big-time fund-raiser for the state Democratic Party, pulled strings in order to get Pooty’s bar license revoked. That was Francis Maloney for you. His son disappeared, so heads would roll. Whether those heads bore any responsibility for his son going missing was almost beside the point.
The Dewar’s was turning to dust in my mouth. Any protracted discussion involving my father-in-law did that to me, but it wasn’t all on Francis. There were things I knew and things I knew he knew about his son’s disappearance that we kept silently between us. These were dangerous things, these secrets, like time bombs sitting in the hall closet. They would remain dormant as long as Katy stayed out of the loop. One word, one leak, one slip, and we’d both lose her forever. Tick … Tick … Tick …
I decided to get back to the subject at hand before I needed a second scotch to wash down the one that had turned to dust.
“You remember any other details of the Heaton girl’s disappearance?”
“Christ, Moe, that was a long time ago. There was some rumblings about hanky-panky between the girl and Brightman. You know, the papers tried playing that up.”
“They would.”
“Hey, it sells papers.”
“Did it have any legs?”
“Nah,” Pete said, grabbing the Dewar’s bottle. “He denied it, put up reward money, cooperated with the cops. Let ‘em search his home, his office, whatever. He was clean.”
“Clean, huh?” I waved a second drink off. “Clean is always a matter of degree.”
“Clean ain’t clear, though. Brightman’s political career took a big hit. They were grooming him for the major leagues, the next fair-haired superstar.”
“Yeah, they all start out as the next Jack Kennedy and end up fixing parking tickets for the local head of the chamber of commerce.”
“Fuckin’ politicians!” Pete shook his head in disgust. “You know, if you really wanna find out about the guy, there is someone who would know better than me.”
“Who’s that?”
Pete suddenly looked as if he’d swallowed a beehive and washed it down with Black Flag. I suppose he hoped I’d figure it out on my own.
“Who, Pete?”
“You know.”
“Who, for chrissakes?”
“We were just talkin’ about him. Katy’s old man.”
I decided I wasn’t that curious, not by a long shot.
Chapter Three
That’s the thing about curiosity-like a craving, it will fade if given enough time. Mine had faded into the routine of work and family.
Wednesdays were my days to open the new shop. Located on Montague Street, Bordeaux in Brooklyn had a bit of a different feel than City on the Vine. Some of that was because Brooklyn, no matter how you dressed her up, would never be Manhattan. She would always be the poor relation in last year’s dress; pretty enough, but a half a step behind. Another contributing factor to the different atmosphere was the actual physical layout of the place. The Brooklyn shop was in the basement and on the first floor of a converted old brownstone with apartments above. And because we were located in a historic district, we were very limited as to the type of signs we were permitted to use.
BORDEAUX IN BROOKLYN
IRVING PRAGER and SONS, INC.
Purveyors of Finest Wines and Spirits
Established 1978
So read the gilt lettering on the front door and the plate-glass window. Of course my father had died years before we opened either store. The corporation name was a tribute to his memory. Aaron and I were determined that Irving Prager’s name should be remembered not for his failures but for his sons’ success.