Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Then one afternoon she got a babysitter for Nicole, right here in the loft on Greene Street, and filled half a jelly jar with Del Monte fruit cocktail, put about forty pills in her pocket and a driver’s license, and went off to join the skanks in Tompkins Square Park. The cops found her body hours later. Bent over on a bench with broken slats. No note. No farewell. Then cremation. Another sorry fucking tale that started in the 1960s and ended in the 1970s.

In the Paris bistro, Briscoe signaled to the waiter to bring fresh coffee.

— Where was I? Nicole said.

— After that night, you were at my mother’s house in Sunset Park. In Brooklyn.

— And where were you?

— When your mother died? Covering the Democratic convention in Miami. I flew home as soon as the call reached me at the hotel.

— That’s why we moved here to Paris?

— A few years later. Yes. After my mother died. Remember? She was helping take care of you.

Her jaw slack, Nicole stared out at the street in St.-Germain-des-Prés.

— It’s so sad.

— It is, he said.

She turned and buried her head in his shoulder.

— Oh, Daddy.

— It’s okay, baby, he whispered, while a few people stared at them. We get over almost everything.

We still do, he thinks. And gets up.

12:40 p.m. Ali Watson. Castle Bar, Livonia Avenue, Brooklyn.

He watches the street from a high plastic stool at the front end of the long bar, sipping a beer. Everyone is black. The bartender is large, young, mustached, his skin the color of coffee with lots of milk. His skull is shaved, and he talks with a small group at the far end of the bar. He is polite with Ali, but he knows a cop when he sees one. Ali slides off the stool and stands. The bartender walks toward him. The guys at the other end are silent.

— Take care, Ali says, and moves two singles toward the bartender. The tip.

— Yeah, the bartender says, and watches Ali leave.

Ali steps into the cold air, and turns right toward the far corner. Across the street when he was a boy there was a gymnasium on the second floor. All the Jewish gangsters went there to watch their properties in action. The last years of Jewish fighters. A guy named Bummy Davis was one of the fighters and he got killed going after some dumbbell who stuck up a bar. All of the players were gone by the time Ali was born, so Ali didn’t know the location of the bar. But everybody knew the story. He talked with his partner about it once, but Malachy Devlin had never heard of Bummy Davis. Then, one morning at the JTTF, he arrived in a state of excitement.

— Ali, that Bummy Davis you told me about? Last night, there was a show about him on ESPN. Couldn’t believe it.

— I wish I’d seen it, Ali said.

— I tried to call you, but—

The gym was a Baptist church when Ali was a teenager, and now it was a mosque. A very special mosque. Services were held in the wide-open space of the vanished second-floor gym. Young men moving on polished wooden floors, slamming heavy bags, turning speed bags into blurs, others boxing in a ring: the stuff of neighborhood legends, now replaced by prayer mats and submission to Allah. Mary Lou wondered why free men would bow to someone who wasn’t there and he could never explain to her why even he had once done the same. It was like trying to explain the myth of Midnight Rose’s, the candy store where the killers from Murder, Inc. met each night, down under the El at Saratoga and Livonia. The hit men loved egg creams and sharp clothes and killing people for a living. Laughing all the way. Or so the tale went.

When he took Mary Lou around Brownsville he told her about the place, and she asked, “What’s an egg cream?” Like someone from Minnesota. He had to explain that it was a soft drink, but didn’t have eggs in it, and she didn’t get it until finally he took her to the Gem Spa on Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan and she sipped her first egg cream, thick with milk and chocolate syrup and seltzer water, and said, “I don’t care what they call it. It’s great.”

Nobody has entered or left the mosque now in an hour. Drifters move along the avenue, passing the front door, lost in a fog of heroin or meth. For sure, not one of them longs for egg creams or for Allah.

Ali crosses the street quickly and walks to the door of the mosque. Blinds drawn within windows and the door. He rings a buzzer hard. Then again. Then knocks. It doesn’t matter who is watching him now. They know he’s a cop. Nobody comes to the door.

He walks to the corner and makes a right, heading for the lots behind the row of buildings. There are two rusting shells of automobiles in the space behind the mosque. And tire tracks in the mud, backing up, turning. He moves to the side, to avoid leaving his own footprints in the mud, and goes to the back door. Locked. He tries knocking again, sensing that nobody will answer. Thinking: Two mosques in one morning, without leaving Brooklyn. I should score some points with Allah. Inshallah.

He uses a Visa card to spring the lock, thinking: Too easy, then takes out his pistol, listens, and steps inside. The door has a wide, thick metal bar across it, but it’s not wedged into its slot. Someone has left and couldn’t close it from outside.

The lights are out, but he can see the large shapes in the leaking grayness of the rooms. He listens. There are the usual creaks from old buildings but no human sounds. No footsteps. No breathing. And yet he feels that someone is here. He moves forward on tiptoe. Pauses. Listens. Moves again, heading to where he knows the stairway is, and the living quarters where the imam named Aref seethes with daily bitterness. Ali has visited him over the years, as part of the job. To let him know he was being watched. Felt the anger that was never spoken. Put him on the master list. He might actually be here. Hidden in a bathroom. Lying flat in the large room upstairs. Holding a pistol. Ready to repel infidels. Or more likely: he drove away in the automobile that left tracks in the mud. Or—

He peers into the living quarters and flicks on a tiny flashlight. Bedclothes unrumpled on the narrow cot. Nothing in the sink of the small kitchen. No water on the floor of the stall shower. Some newspapers in English and Arabic. No signs of a woman or children, no clothes, schoolbooks, or toys. Aref chose to live in purgatory.

Ali goes up the stairs. A few steps creak. Nothing creaks back. He steps into Allah’s gymnasium.

There’s a body on the floor against the far wall. Lying on its back. There are two toppled lockers to the right of the body, their doors open. Ali lets his pistol hang loose at his side and takes out his cell phone. He moves closer to the body while dialing Malachy Devlin. He looks down at the body. It’s Aref, all right. His face has been battered, but it’s him. Blood spreads beneath his head like spilled paint.

— Hey, partner, Malachy says. What’s up?

— I’m in Aref’s friendly neighborhood mosque. He’s here on the floor, dead.

— Jesus.

— Call everybody, starting with the precinct. I’ll let them in.

— Right.

— And in my files, there’s a folder on my son, Malik. With photos. We have to put out a bulletin. Wanted for questioning. The whole Northeast. Use his photograph. Have an artist make a version without his beard or mustache. I think Malik might be driving the imam’s car. And shit, maybe I’m nuts. It could be some other guy. But look in Aref’s file. Get the make and license plate. Pass that on to everyone, starting with NYPD. Bridges. Tunnels. Arrest whoever the fuck is driving.

He glances at the toppled lockers.

— Ali, is this—

— I don’t know anything for sure. It could be about my wife. And the Harding woman. Or just about this asshole Aref. But it could get even worse than a double homicide. We need the bomb-squad guys here. Technical guys. The whole enchilada.