Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

Senior’s? She’s got to be pulling of my legs. But not Sylvia. A kid with an old baseball cap on backwards is standing by her side, the spitting image of Seamus “Scoop” O’Neil, my former pal, who run off to City Hall with Sylvia back when we were an item.

“So what’s up? Why me? Why today after — has it been thirty, forty years?”

Sylvia doesn’t miss a beat. “I need you, Pistol Pete,” she says. “The cops have got Scoop in for murder. Murder. They say he done in Front Page Shamburger and Sherlock Iconoflip.” Then, “Don’t you ask a lady to sit down? What’s happened to your manners? And this gentleman, about whom you don’t seem to have the presence to ask, is our nephew I.F., named, of course, after the famous Izzy Stone, who you know was Scoop’s hero all these many years.”

So, I pull up two old bridges that I haven’t unfolded in — gotta stop counting the years. Sylvia keeps yammering, reminding me I’m the only private eye she’s ever really known, recalling the days when I was feeding Scoop leads, checking out scumbags for him, so he could blow the lid off the hustlers at Borough Hall — who made the deals with sewer, highway, and bridge contractors. I unwrap a White Owl, pull out the old Zippo, and am ready to light up.

“You are not going to smoke,” Sylvia tells me. “I don’t believe it. You still haven’t caught on.”

That’s Sylvia. Hasn’t skipped a beat, still telling me what to do. I bury the Zippo and start chewing the stogie.

“It happened at their weekly poker game,” Sylvia says.

“What useta be their gang of six, what with the smoking and the drinking, what it done to their lungs and livers and kidneys, not to say their marriages and longevity. Well, now it’s down to the three of them. Was three until Front Page and Sherlock — may their souls rest in a City Room — got knocked off.”

Sylvia is not keen on interruptions, but I cut in. “Gotta play it straight with you for old time’s sake, Sylv,” I say. “Haven’t hustled a case in must be five years. Been sittin’ up here in the office on a long-term lease just passin’ the time. Doin’ a little this and that.”

She knows I never been hitched, and I can tell by the way she kinda half smiles at me she suspects I’m still carrying the torch for her.

“Sanchez over at the precinct says it was poison — arsenic mixed with mustard — that done them in,” Sylvia goes on. “The cops found splotches of mustard on Scoop’s cuff, his shirt, the zipper of his fly. Would you believe it?”

I’m studying the kid’s cap. The mellow blue has me wondering if it’s an old Brooklyn Dodger lid. “Hey, kid, you ever hear of Carl Furillo, Sandy Amoros? Duke Snider? I know you heard of Jackie Robinson. Everybody heard of Jackie Robinson.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Sylvia says in a huff. “I’m talking about my husband, held for murder. I’m giving you the facts, nothing but the facts, and you come up with a walk down Memory Lane. Who you think you are — Joe Franklin?”

But the kid is hooked. “Carl Anthony Furillo hit .296 for the 1955 World Champions. Edwin Donald ‘Duke’ Snider hit four home runs, batted in seven, BA .320 in the Series. ‘Sandy’ Edmund Isasi Amoros led the team with .333…”

“Enough,” Sylvia says, like she’s letting the dentist know one more drill and she’s outa there. “We didn’t come here to talk baseball.”

But the kid has cleared the fences. When Scoop and I seen the last of each other, we had this pact, at least I thought we had a deal, only talk, talk only, about Dodgers, once O’Malley had packed up the gang including the great Sandy Koufax himself and hauled kit and caboodle off to L.A. I’m touched that the kid — did Sylvia say he was her nephew? — has got it all down pat. The memories, my memories of our church that was Ebbets Field.

“Everything isn’t picture perfect between Scoop and me,” Sylvia goes on. “I’m not gonna tell you it is. Like Senior’s. Me opening the restaurant, a deli. I’m ordering my pastramis from Langers. You never taste a smokier, saltier, peppery flavor in your life. ‘Yer ordering pastramis from L.A.,’ Scoop says. ‘I won’t hear of it. First they steal our Dodgers. Now you’re goin’ head to head with Junior’s with an L.A. pastrami.’ That’s what he says. No head for business.”

“Say, kid,” I say. “They call you I.F.? What you know about Izzy Stone?”

“He published an independent newsletter, received a Special George Polk Journalism Award in 1970, the same award the Brooklyn Eagle won for Community Service in 1948 and 1949. Stone thanked the Brooklyn Center of L.I.U. for what he called a great honor.”

The kid gets no further than that when Sylv is back again.

“What is this? First down Memory Lane, now it’s Old Home Week. The Brooklyn Eagle is dead and so are Front Page and Sherlock. Scoop is facing the hot seat and you’re cutting up about Brooklyn bygones. You taking the case or I gotta fly a shammes in from L.A.?”

“Sanchez, you say?” I say. “Pablo Sanchez. He still around? Must be a sergeant since I seen him last. I’ll give him a call.” Sylvia is pumping her heels, the kid is flipping his lid, brim forward now. I can see the fading white monogrammed B . The number comes to me easy, 84th Precinct, 718-875-6811. I’m still chomping the stogie when I’m on the line with Pablo. “Socorro! Socorro!” I say by way of openers. “I gotta talk to you, amigo . I hear you got Scoop O’Neil in for asesinato . His wife Sylvia put me on the case. I gotta talk to him. No puedo esperar.”

“Come on over,” Pablo says, “Esperaré aquí.”

“I’m on,” I tell Sylvia and the kid. “You might as well come along for the ride.”

“Sure I know my way around Brooklyn,” the kid tells me as we’re ambling toward Gold Street. “I got a map.” Then he says, “You ever hear of Only the Dead Know Brooklyn?”

“Not now,” says Sylvia, wobbling on her high heels. “I’m in the dumps without more bad news.”

I say, “Yeah. A story by Thomas Wolfe, the elder. I never knew kids your age even knew who he was.”

“Izzy knows all about books and batting averages,” Sylvia squawks. “But ask him to slice a corned beef and it comes out like he’s working the Blarney Stone.”

When we reach the old brown brick precinct house where they’re holding Scoop, Pablo greets Sylv, “Mucho gusto en conocerla, señorita.” Then, he makes it clear, only one visitor at a time in the detective’s office. He’s arranged for me to have a confab with Scoop.

I’m sittin’ on one of those hard-back chairs that must’ve been designed by a chiropractor to increase business when Scoop comes in looking like it’s ten seconds after Bobby Thomson’s home run that done us in in ’51.

“Pete. Pistol Pete,” he says, shaking his head from side to side, the flaps of his graying mustache twitching in the breeze. “It’s been so long, so long ago and far away.” For a second there I think Scoop is gonna break into a song. Scoop useta be like that, a walkin’, talkin’ Broadway musical with subtitles. I understand why Sylv scratched me for him. All that freebee entertainment. Scoop plunks in the chair across the desk from me. “Can you get me outa here? I done nothing wrong. We’re playing deuces wild and I’m drawing to an ace and two twos when they cave in — Sherlock and Front Page, two of the greatest beat reporters who never won a Polk Award.”

“Hey, you win a Polk Award?” I’m checking out Scoop’s memory.

“Nominated twice,” Scoop says with a long sigh. “I had Al Landa and David Medina pitching for me, but couldn’t get past that flack Hershey they brought in from Newsday.”