Fresh Kills Page 21

  “Yeah, Artie,” said Mike. “Sure. Billy seems like a good kid, except when he was here earlier, he wanted to take a picture of me and when he realized he had left his phone upstairs, he got kind of, I don’t know, worried. I guess maybe he figured he’d get punished for losing something like that. But sure, I’ll go up later.”

  “Thanks.”

  I was halfway out of the door when Mike called me back.

  “What’s that?”

  “How’s Maxine?”

  Over my shoulder, I said, “She’ll be back Sunday. Day after tomorrow.”

  “Hey.”

  Outside the forensics unit downtown where I knew they’d taken the dolls, I bumped into Clara Fuentes, the detective I’d seen on the beach at Coney Island when the plane crashed. With one hand, she was holding a newspaper over her head against the drizzle, the other hand she held over her belly, though you couldn’t tell she was pregnant yet. You saw that a lot with pregnant women, the way they held their hands – protect the baby, let the world know.

  “Hey, Artie, isn’t it?” she said for the second time. “What’s up? You look upset.”

  Turned out that she had stopped in to gossip with a girlfriend in the department. I told her what I needed and she led me back into the building where she left me in a hallway.

  A few minutes later Clara returned, and told me that the type of doll in the Chinatown fridge was made in China and was sold at the toy store uptown where the party for Luda had been. Problem was a lot of other upmarket stores sold them. I asked her about prints.

  “Wait for me,” she said. She went back in to her friend. I sat on a bench in the hallway. I waited. The tension built up so bad, I felt crazy waiting. Finally Clara reappeared.

  “Artie? Hello?”

  I jumped up. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

  “You ever heard of a guy name of Stanley Shank? Used to be a cop?” said Clara. “Sergeant out in Brooklyn.”

  “I heard of him.”

  “So all city employees get fingerprinted, right, cops, teachers, all of us, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Well, for some crazy reason, they turned up prints on one of the dolls from this Shank guy who’s been retired for years. They make them in China, like I said, and people really dig them because they feel like real babies. Seems like people are paying way over the regular price ’cause every little girl has to have one. People are too fucking weird. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Nobody else? No other prints?”

  Clara shook her head. “You were looking for somebody in particular?”

  “I don’t know. Listen, you did plenty.” I noticed for the first time that, under her red jacket, Clara was in uniform.

  “I pulled a shift on the subways, can you believe it, I get to search backpacks and shopping bags and pray to God no one files some kind of suit against me for being a racist bitch for profiling because I tell some hippity-hop Hispanic kid with pants down around his crotch to open his backpack instead of getting an old white lady to show me what’s in her Coach bag,” she said. “Jesus H Christ, because of London they want a cop in every fucking station. I make detective, they put me back in uniform and I get to hang in the subway with some rookie cop who doesn’t know shit from shinola as my old man used to say. Anyway, you keep my number, in case?” Clara pulled a card from her pocket, brushed back her thick brown ponytail.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  She hesitated.

  “You don’t look so good,” said Clara. “Did I tell you that I’m, like, pregnant. I probably did. I tell everyone.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “I mean it.”

  “Go,” she said. “Go on. Nice seeing you, Art. Call if you want.”

  On my way to Brooklyn again – I felt I’d been shuttling back and forth between the boroughs endlessly, like a subway train gone off the rails – I stopped myself from doubling back home to check on Billy. It would cost me what was left of his trust. I had asked him to keep an eye on things. I kept going, calling Max while I drove to Brooklyn.

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Artie?”

  “Hi, Max.”

  “Hi, Max, that’s it?” She was irritated, and probably hurt, and I felt bad and didn’t know what to say.

  “Is it still nice out there? Is the weather good?” I said and heard the inane words echo off the distance between us.

  “Very nice,” said Maxine.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Sunday, like we planned, but I’m going to try to get an earlier flight,” Maxine said. “Jet Blue lets you change, and the girls are anxious to get home. So am I. I miss you, Artie,” she said, very straight, very plain. “I miss you.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I miss you. What time does the plane get in?”

  “Five,” she said. “I’ll confirm it. I’ll leave you a message if you’re not home, or do you want me to leave the message at your loft?”

  “Just call me on my cell. I’ll keep it on. I’ll pick you all up,” I said, and she said OK, and hung up. Didn’t ask where I was or what I was doing.

  The rain was slashing down; it was hard to see out of the front window of my car. I had been a jerk, talking to Tina Farone without knowing what her loyalties really were; worse, I’d asked her to find Debbie Shank.

  I called Tolya Sverdloff, left a message, called him in East Hampton and left another message. I was reluctant because I didn’t want Tolya near Stan Shank. Helping me out a couple of years earlier, Tolya had ended up next door to dead at stinking Coney Island Hospital thanks to Shank. I just wanted him to know where I was.

  If Shank beat me up, or worse – and better me than Billy – I’d make sure I left a trail a mile wide so people would come after him. I called Hank Provone. I left a message on Lily’s phone.

  Tolya called me back, said he had picked up my message, and offered to come in from Long Island.

  “I can get a helicopter,” said Tolya when I told him where I was going.

  “Not now,” I said.

  “I’m always here, Valentina too.”

  “I know.”

  “Artyom, you know I swear, you know this is like brothers, this is my soul, your soul, you know I will do anything for you or your family, this isn’t kidding. Do you understand me? This is not American-style friendship where everybody is analyzing everybody and counting up credits,” said Tolya, who thought American life was superficial and existed only in the moment and that people had disposable emotions. He was wrong, but I thanked him, and he said it again solemnly in Russian.

  I thought about calling Maxine, but figured it was better that she didn’t know where I was going. She knew as well as I did, because we always talked about cases, how much Stan Shank liked using knives.

  24

  Gerritsen Beach was a small community, on the coast of Brooklyn beyond Brighton Beach, and it was mostly white, Italian, Irish, small houses, plenty of American flags, a lot of them soaked and dripping with rain. You felt people in Gerritsen Beach didn’t like outsiders. There was no subway stop, only a single bus line. Under a greasy sky, it seemed inward-turning, apart from the rest of the city, almost sullen in its isolation.

  I found Shank’s house, and the woman who answered the door looked blank when I told her my name. She was Russian. The one time I’d been at Shank’s house, I hadn’t seen her, or couldn’t remember her. She didn’t react to me, but maybe she was covering it up.

  Her hair tied up in a scarf, holding a dishtowel, Mrs Shank – she said she was Mrs Shank – told me Stan wasn’t in. But she held open the door and I went in. Mrs Shank was friendly enough, which made me wary. She asked me to wait while she went in the kitchen and found the name of the bar where Stan was catching a game with some of his pals. She closed the door to the kitchen behind her, and I could hear the faint sound of her talking into the phone, very low, very intense.

  In the living room where I wai
ted was an expensive flat screen fifty-four-inch TV that hung on the wall, and silky covers on the furniture that stood on a deep pile emerald green nylon carpet. Over the mantelpiece was a fancy photographic portrait of Heshey Shank.

  A row of candles under the portrait made it look like a shrine. Close up, I could see poor Heshey Shank’s thick face and the uncomprehending eyes; he had been slightly retarded. A guy in a pizza place, looking for the term mongoloid, had come out with mongoose instead and poor Heshey got stuck with it.

  A large crucifix made of gold metal was propped up next to the picture of Heshey. An ornate little vase, painted gold, held a few silk roses. There was a framed card from a funeral mass next to the flowers.

  Stan Shank had told me once he only took in his younger half brother, Heshey, because he, Stan, was a good Christian, nothing else; now Heshey was a household saint and there were photographs of him everywhere. In Shank’s eyes, Billy Farone was the Antichrist who had killed Heshey.

  “Why don’t you drop over and say hello to Stan, talk to him yourself,” said Mrs Shank coming out of the kitchen, a fixed smile on her face, leaving the door propped open so a warm blast of meat and onions came from the kitchen. “I was just getting supper ready,” she added, but I knew she had been talking to Stan. She handed me a scrap of paper. “Here is address. Tell him be home for supper, OK?” she said as if we were involved together in making ordinary domestic arrangements.

  In front of the door, I almost tripped over a toy stroller still wrapped in plastic.

  “We get it for our little granddaughter, Debbie’s girl,” Mrs Shank said.

  I didn’t stop. Clutching the address of the bar, I bolted for my car, skidded on the broken step of the house, fell on my knees like I was a hundred years old, yelled with pain, stumbled to my feet and got into the car.

  Debbie’s youngest? Debbie Shank? Tina Farone told me Debbie never saw the parents, that she had gone away to Italy to get her kids away from her own father.

  Stanley Shank was drinking coffee out of a thick cup at a table with two other men at a cafe over near Sheepshead Bay, a few blocks from Johnny Farone’s restaurant. Also at the table with Shank was Samson Britz, a can of Diet Coke in front of him.

  As soon as they saw Shank look up at me, the two men went to another table and I couldn’t tell if Shank had indicated that they should move. He didn’t look surprised to see me. I knew his wife had called to say I was on my way.

  A small-time hood, Shank wrapped himself up in moral righteousness from his religion and his fury about the way things were, foreigners moving in, blacks moving up, Shank himself going nowhere. He had a beef against the whole world.

  No one invited me to sit, but I sat down on one of the empty chairs at Shank’s table and tried to keep myself from hitting him.

  “You want to apologize for sending your goons to beat the shit out of me over on Staten Island?” I said to Shank. “Or not. Maybe you don’t want to offer an apology.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “I accept,” I said now that I’d set the tone.

  It was the only way to deal with Shank. He was very fat. Making inroads on a meatball sandwich, with a side of spaghetti, he looked like he enjoyed hurting people even more than eating meatballs and red sauce.

  The Samovar Cafe still looked like the Italian joint it once was, and there were plenty of red-sauce dishes on the menu along with chicken Kiev and borscht. A large samovar made out of painted tin metal stood on a table and a couple of old pictures of Russian athletes – including Oksana Baiul, the year she won the Olympics in figure skating – were on the wall behind the bar along with an oil painting of birch trees with snow on them.

  It was the kind of place locals met to complain about the world and drink and play cards. You took one look at the Russian decor; you saw half a century of Italian just under the surface like an archaeological dig.

  My shirt was wet from the rain – I got caught between my car and the door of the cafe – and the air conditioner dried it so it stuck to me. Shank was fat and Sammy Britz was small, and they were both a lot older than me, but I was glad I’d brought a weapon anyway.

  “Accept what?” Shank said.

  “Like I said, your apology for having my kidneys punched.”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Listen, why don’t you two just calm down, and we can talk it over,” Britz said in an unctuous tone.

  “Shut up,” Shank said.

  “I agree,” I said.

  Shank gave me half a smile.

  “Your wife was very helpful,” I said, just to get his goat. “I’m glad you’re married to a good Russian woman, Stan. Very nice.”

  He ignored this and said, “It wasn’t any goon of mine that beat you up, whatever the fuck you think I don’t got no interest in beating you up, you hear me? What do you want?”

  I held back on the dolls. I was saving it up, the fact that Shank’s prints had been on the dolls in the Chinatown warehouse.

  “I want you to leave me the fuck alone,” I said. “Get off my back, Shank. Stop following me. Stop calling.”

  “You want me to forget what happened to my brother, Heshey? Well, fuck you.”

  “Half brother.”

  “My own blood,” Shank said. “I had him confirmed, too. He was a good Catholic.”

  “It was your car following me around Tuesday. Ugly maroon job.”

  He lifted his enormous shoulders. “Whatever,” he said.

  I was going to ask Shank how he knew Billy was back in New York as early as Tuesday, the day he started following us. I was going to ask, when he said, “I have to take a leak” and left the table.

  “Take it easy with Shank,” Britz said to me, looking at his empty Coke can. “You listening?”

  I didn’t answer. It had occurred to me, right then as Shank headed for the bathroom and Britz got himself another Diet Coke – God knows why I thought of it then – exactly how Shank knew Billy was in Brooklyn.

  I waited. Shank returned from the bathroom still zipping his pants.

  “So old man Farone, John Sr, your ex-partner, called to tell you his grandkid Billy was coming back to the city? Isn’t that right, Shank?”

  “He don’t talk so good anymore, far as I know. Poor bastard stroked out, in a wheelchair. Fuck knows what he’s saying, just drools into the phone.”

  But old man Farone had called out, “Everything OK out there, Billy boy?” as we left his house in Florida. His voice was thick and the words blurry, but he could talk all right. Shank was bullshitting me. The old man could talk, so long as someone put the call through for him.

  I leaned into Shank’s ugly face and said, very quietly, “Just stop following us.”

  “Or?”

  “Try me,” I said.

  From where I sat in the freezing cafe, I could see a couple of guys hanging around on the street near my car.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere with Shank. I wanted him locked up. I knew it was him who put the dolls in the Chinatown fridge, but it wasn’t enough. Maybe I could shake his smug demeanor, I thought; maybe I could get him for assaulting a cop. I was willing to let him take a slug at me for that.

  I leaned over the table. “You and your pals still like little girls?”

  Shank’s face blew up like he just ate something poisonous.

  “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “I know, and I could let everyone else know, how people said you and old man Farone liked feeling up little girls, how you put your hands under little girls’ dresses, you kept pictures, you protected each other. Maybe you did other stuff with them. You were a rookie when you and old man Farone first became partners. He taught you, right, and you got him whatever he needed,” I said close up to Shank’s face. “You got him whatever he needed. You tell your priest about that? You want me to remind people that it happened to May Luca who was murdered? You heard there’s a little girl got killed recently over in Jersey? You
heard that, Stan?”

  Shank lurched towards me. Britz put up a tiny manicured hand to try to stop him. Nothing could have stopped Shank, who was surprisingly fast on his feet and had me by the throat, his hands like hams.

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” he screamed. “That was Farone, not me, you hear? I never did that stuff.”

  “So how come you never see your kid, Debbie? Your own kid, you never see her, isn’t that because she stays away from you?” I remembered the toy stroller at the Shank house and I took a gamble. “You even keep toys for Debbie’s kid, your own granddaughter, who never comes. Isn’t that right? I bet Debbie wouldn’t let her little girl near you, but you just keep hoping and they never show.”

  He gripped my neck and I gasped for air and thought I was going to pass out, then he let go and pushed me, and I fell backwards into my chair. It tipped over. I was on the floor, my legs in the air, and I felt like a fool because what I wanted was to get out my gun and beat the shit out of him. I got up.

  “You want to know the truth?” Shank said.

  I waited.

  He was purple and I thought he might have a heart attack, but he grabbed Britz’s Diet Coke and slugged it down.

  “The truth is, your fucking nephew killed Heshey, and he deserves whatever. That’s the truth and you don’t tell the truth about it, you and that prick, Sonny Lippert. You just fixed things up with some judge.”

  I wanted to get him good and mad; if he got crazy, he might talk, or attack me; one way or the other, he’d give me something to use against him.

  “What eats you, Shank, is that your own son, who was damaged goods, died, and Billy is alive and well.”

  From his back pocket, Shank took a knife. I saw the blade glint in the dull light.

  “I could kill you, you know,” said Shank. “I could carve you up. I made up my mind I wasn’t going to do him, the kid, your nephew, or whatever he is.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m a Catholic and the priest told me, don’t kill nobody, and killing kids is worst, you go to hell forever and they got devils down there stick you in the eyes and the balls for the rest of your life,” said Shank who clearly believed it and was terrified. “Farone told me from Florida, keep an eye on my grandson, keep an eye on Billy boy, just make sure no one else gets to him, that he’s safe, so that’s what I done, you hear? The old man, he was my partner, and he’s stroked out, and I done what he asked me.” He lunged at me “I didn’t make no promises about you.”