Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

“-package looked like the guy in the painting. I remember. He fed me that same line of crap when we had our little debriefing. The kid was trying to get over is all. He was full of shit.”

“No, he wasn’t, Carm.”

“What?”

“I saw him.”

“You saw who?”

“Patrick.”

“You outta your fucking mind?”

“I think maybe I am, but I know what I saw and I saw him.”

“So maybe he really isn’t dead,” she said.

“No, he’s dead.”

“Wait a-”

“I didn’t see an older, not a forty-year-old Patrick. I saw Patrick from when he was in college. And there’s only two explanations for that. He was a ghost or a-”

“-look-a-like,” she finished my sentence.

“If he wasn’t a ghost, then somebody was shopping around for a replica and the best way to find one in this city is to hold auditions for a very special part.”

“Okay, Moe, I can see how this would work, but I don’t understand the why. Who could hate you guys this much?”

“When we find out who,” I said, “the why will be self-evident.”

“ If we do.”

“When we do. When!”

We discussed a few more details and I got ready to head back home. Carmella was still in her office. I stuck my head through the door.

“You gonna be all right?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “Me? I guess I will be, but this isn’t only about me anymore, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“About before…I…I-”

“I won’t pretend I’ll be able to forget it, but don’t worry about it.”

“Safe home,” she said, turning her chair back toward the window.

Safe home yourself, I thought, although I knew she’d be spending the night here. Would anyone walk past our offices and wonder about the light leaking through the bottom of the door?

When I got back to Sheepshead Bay, Sarah had gone. Her note said she had decided to spend a few days with her mom. It was the right choice for all of us, especially for Katy, Folded into the note were my Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association card and Carmella’s Detective’s Endowment Association card. The postscript read, “You were right, Dad. I was being a hypocrite. Thanks for the card and thank Carmella for hers, but I won’t be needing them anymore.”

Sarah really was the best of both Katy and me.

Although Aaron lived there and our biggest moneymaker was on Long Island, the place still gave me the chills. When I was growing up and kids from the neighborhood would vanish over summer vacation, there would be whispers about their families having fled to far off places with idyllic names like Valley Stream, Stony Brook, and Amityville or to places with unpronounceable names like Ronkonkoma, Massapequa, and Patchogue. It was all Siberia to me. I lived in secret dread that one of my dad’s business ventures would finally succeed and that he’d move Mom, Aaron, Miriam, and me to one of those awful places where people lived in big houses on quiet streets. My fears might have been allayed had I bothered looking at a map to see that Brooklyn and Queens were actually part of Long Island. I needn’t have worried in any case. My dad’s bad fortune would tie me to Brooklyn forever.

Elmont was a faceless town that was close enough to the city line to blow kisses at New York across the Queens border. It was the home of Belmont Park racetrack where the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, was held every June. If not for the track, Elmont would be notable for being on the glide path to Kennedy Airport and for its cemeteries. My parents were buried in Elmont. In the end, I guess, they had moved to Long Island, but, as yet, without Aaron, Miriam, and me. I had come to see a man in Elmont about an empty grave.

I have heard it said that concentration camp survivors sometimes pass on their torments to their children, that the victims become the victimizers. I don’t know if it’s true or not. People say a lot of things. What I do know is that Mr. Roth had been my friend, a second father to me, and a surrogate grandfather to Sarah. He was affectionate, warm, funny, and philosophical in spite of what he had endured, maybe because of it. Yet he, by his own admission, had been an unfaithful husband and a negligent father. I knew about some of his failings, but had come by the knowledge indirectly.

Steven Roth, on the other hand, was so utterly familiar with his dad’s failings that escaping their reach seemed beyond his ability or desire. Steven was a bitter, angry man, so full of rage there wasn’t room in him for anything else but alcohol. That toxic mix of bitterness, rage, and alcohol had caused his father and himself nothing but grief. He had done a long bid in prison for manslaughter-a bar fight, of course-and a second stretch for DWI. He had been in and out of marriage, jail, and rehab so frequently by the time his father passed away, it was difficult to keep count.

We’d met a few times over the years and it was never pleasant. My relationship with his dad was a constant source of irritation, an allergen from which he could not find relief. Once, a few months before he died, Mr. Roth hired me to get his son out of some trouble, big trouble. But when that trouble went away, Steven Roth treated me not with respect or gratitude, but with contempt. It all came to a very ugly head at the memorial service for his dad. Steven was lit like a roman candle and in a particularly foul mood, spouting off about how his dad should have been buried, not cremated and how he should have been the one to see to his dad’s remains. When he shouted at Sarah that he would see to burying her father, I punched his lights out. Aaron tells me, I was still swinging when they pulled me off him. All I remember was that he was smiling at me. Even though I’d broken his nose and split both his lips, he was smiling.

Walking up the few steps to the front door of the neat little saltbox Cape, I had second thoughts about not bringing Carmella along. If things got ugly this time, there might not be anyone around to pull me off. I held my finger a few inches away from the bell and rechecked the address. Well-kept houses on twisty quiet streets were not usually Steven Roth’s style. Not unlike my late friend Rico Tripoli, Steven Roth’s taste ran to the darker edges of town, to places where the blackness of their souls blended in with the scenery. I couldn’t speak to his resources or to his abilities as a schemer, but there was no doubt he hated me enough to hurt my family anyway he could. I pressed the bell and listened to the muted chimes ring inside the house.

When the door pulled back, I stood facing a very attractive woman in her mid-forties. Beyond her broad smile and positively sparkling blue-gray eyes, it was difficult to say what was so attractive about her. Her face, in fact, was rather plain and round and her hair was a mousy brown. She was thin, I guess, but her generic jeans and sweatshirt did nothing to highlight her shape. Yet there was something undeniably appealing about her.

“Good morning,” she said without a hint of guile or wariness.

“Hi, my name’s Moe Prager. I was wondering if Steven-”

“Moe Prager! Moe Prager. Steven will be thrilled you’re here.” She beamed and shouted over her shoulder, “Honey, come here, there’s someone to see you.”

I was sure I wasn’t dreaming it, but not of much else. I was having a full out Twilight Zone moment. Then, when Steven Roth appeared with his right hand extended and a wide peaceful smile on his face, I thought to look for the hidden camera. When he took my hand, shook it, embraced me, I was still in shock.

“Praise Jesus, my prayers have been answered.”

“Praise Jesus,” the woman repeated.

“Moe, this is my wife Evelyn. Evelyn… Moe Prager.”