Soul Patch Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AFTERWORD

  GOBBLE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Reed Farrel Coleman, Soul Patch, and the Moe Prager series!

  Soul Patch

  Winner of the Shamus Award!

  Nominated for the Edgar, Barry, Macavity Awards!

  “Reed Farrel Coleman is a terrific writer. . . . a hard-boiled poet . . . If life were fair, Coleman would be as celebrated as [George] Pelecanos and [Michael] Connelly.”

  —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

  “Reed Farrel Coleman is one of the more original voices to emerge from the crime fiction field in the last ten years. For the uninitiated, Walking the Perfect Square is the place to start.”

  —George Pelecanos, best-selling author of The Way Home

  “Among the undying conventions of detective fiction is the one that requires every retired cop to have a case that still haunts him. Reed Farrel Coleman blows the dust off that cliché in Walking the Perfect Square . . . with a mystery that would get under anyone’s skin.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

  “The author makes us care about his characters and what happens to them, conveying a real sense of human absurdity and tragedy . . . a first-rate mystery. Moe is a fine sleuth. Coleman is an excellent writer.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Whenever our customers are looking for a new series to read, they often leave with a copy of Walking the Perfect Square. It has easily been our best-selling backlist title. Thank you, Busted Flush, for bringing this classic ‘Moe’ back into print!”

  —Gary Shulze, Once Upon a Crime (Minneapolis, Minnesota)

  “The biggest mysteries in our genre are why Reed Coleman isn’t already huge, and why Moe Prager isn’t already an icon. Both are to me. Read this book and you’ll find you agree.”

  —Lee Child, best-selling author of Worth Dying For

  “Originally published in 2001 . . . Walking the Perfect Square has been reissued by Busted Flush Press, good news for mystery lovers, since Reed Farrel Coleman is quite a writer, and this is only the first of five books about Moe Prager. The story and the characters will hook you, and Coleman’s lightly warped take on the world will make you laugh, dark as the tale is. As soon as I finished Walking the Perfect Square, I started the next in the series, Redemption Street. The only problem with the following three (The James Deans, Soul Patch, Empty Ever After) will be to decide whether to read them immediately or savor them over a period of time.”

  —Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness

  “Moe’s back—if you haven’t already discovered Reed Farrel Coleman’s wonderful, award-winning ex-cop-turned-P.I., Moe Prager, here’s your chance. He’s for real, and so is Coleman’s handling of cases that stay with you long after the book’s end. Walking the Perfect Square, Redemption Street, and The James Deans belong in every mystery fan’s personal library, because the writing is fine, the realization is believable, and the character is true to himself. This is the man to measure the rest by, a writer with a passionate belief in giving his best, and an eye for what makes the PI novel work at a level few can match.”

  —Charles Todd, best-selling author of An Impartial Witness

  “One of crime fiction’s finest voices, Edgar Award-finalist Reed Coleman combines the hard-fisted detective story with a modern novel’s pounding heart and produces pure gold. Moe Prager belongs with Travis McGee and Lew Archer in the private eye pantheon. Coleman’s series is a buried treasure—dig in and hit the jackpot!”

  —Julia Spencer-Fleming, best-selling author of Once Was a Soldier

  “Moe Prager is the thinking person’s P.I. And what he thinks about—love, loyalty, faith, betrayal—are complex and vital issues, and beautifully handled.”

  —S. J. Rozan, Edgar Award-winning author of On the Line

  “What a pleasure to have the first two Moe Prager novels back in print. In a field crowded with blowhards and phony tough guys, Reed Farrel Coleman’s hero stands out for his plainspoken honesty, his straight-no- chaser humor and his essential humanity. Without a doubt, he has a right to occupy the barstool Matt Scudder left behind years ago. In fact, in his quiet unassuming way, Moe is one of the most engaging private eyes around.”

  —Peter Blauner, Edgar Award-winning author of Casino Moon and Slow Motion Riot

  “Reed Farrel Coleman makes claim to a unique corner of the private detective genre with Redemption Street. With great poignancy and passion he constructs a tale that fittingly underlines how we are all captives of the past.”

  —Michael Connelly, best-selling author of The Reversal

  “Moe Prager is a family man who can find the humanity in almost everyone he meets; he is a far from perfect hero, but an utterly appealing one. Let’s hope that his soft heart and lively mind continue to lure him out of his wine shop for many, many more cases.”

  —Laura Lippman, best-selling author of Life Sentences

  “Reed Farrel Coleman is a hell of a writer. Poetic, stark, moving. And one of the most daring writers around, never afraid to go that extra mile. He freely admits his love of poetry, and it resonates in his novels like the best song you’ll ever hear. Plus, he has a thread of compassion that breaks your heart . . . to smithereens.”

  —Ken Bruen, two-time Edgar Award-nominated author of London Boulevard

  “Coleman is a born writer. His books are among the best the detective genre has to offer at the moment; no, wait. Now that I think about it they’re in the top rank of any kind of fiction currently published. Pick up this book, damn it.”

  —Scott Phillips, award-winning author of The Ice Harvest and Cottonwood

  “Reed Farrel Coleman goes right to the darkest corners of the human heart—to the obsessions, the tragedies, the buried secrets from the past. Through it all he maintains such a pure humanity in Moe Prager—the character is as alive to me as an old friend. I flat out loved the first Prager book, but somehow he’s made this one even better.”

  —Steve Hamilton, Edgar Award-winning author of The Lock Artist

  “Coleman may be one of the mystery genre’s best-kept secrets.”

  —Sun-Sentinel

  “Moe is a character to savor. And Coleman? He’s an author to watch. Make that watch and read. For this is only the beginning, folks, and I’m hitching my wagon to this ride.”

  —Ruth Jordan, Crimespree Magazine

  by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Moe Prager novels

  Walking the Perfect Square (2001)

  Redemption Street (2004)

  The James Deans (2005)

  Winner of the Anthony, Barry, and Shamus Awards

  Nominated for the Edgar, Gumshoe, and Macavity Awards

  Soul Patch (2007)

  Winner of the Shamus Award

  Nominated for the Edgar, Barry, and Macavity Awards

  Empty
Ever After (2008)

  Winner of the Shamus Award

  Innocent Monster (2010)

  Writing with Ken Bruen

  Tower (2009)

  Nominated for the Anthony, Macavity, and Spinetingler Awards

  Writing as Tony Spinosa

  Hose Monkey (2006)

  The Fourth Victim (2008)

  Dylan Klein novels

  Life Goes Sleeping (1991)

  Little Easter (1993)

  They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee (1997)

  Edited by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Hardboiled Brooklyn (2006)

  FOREWORD

  by Craig Johnson

  UNLIKE MOST WRITERS, Reed Farrel Coleman isn’t looking for compliments, and what he has in common with the really good writers is a search for the truth. Truth means a lot to Coleman, like a compass that points to an unerring north. Like some Brooklyn street poet, he weaves honesty in and out of a story like a golden thread—a tarnished golden thread that’s seen better days, but is still gold.

  I heard about Reed from Scott Montgomery, an individual with impeccable taste in the genre. He said I had to read Reed Farrel Coleman. Generally, I don’t trust people with three names, but I’d met Reed and his wife at the Edgar Awards in New York where I complimented his wife on her dress. Coleman said he picked it out. I complimented him on his taste. He said the dress hadn’t looked as good on him. I agreed.

  When I think of Moe Prager, the protagonist of Coleman’s series, I think of Bogart’s line in Casablanca, “He’s just like any other man, only more so.” No hero here, just a guy who does a job, only more so—a guy who knows strong D with good footwork on the b-ball courts and who quotes Blaise Pascal in an unobtrusive way. If I’m going to be stuck in a guy’s first-person head for three hundred pages, he’d better be interesting and he’d better be funny.

  I’ve spent an awful lot of my life in locker rooms, squad rooms, and hunting camps, where a certain type of humor pervades, a dark humor that undercuts the hardness of the life. Reed’s got it down cold, and his pitch-perfect delivery is like the relish on a Coney Island hot dog.

  But I’d read him even if there wasn’t a humorous word in his books—I’d read him because there’s an energy to his characters that’s contagious, a grinding hurt for the individuals that’s honest to humanity. And, like my old buddy Tony Hillerman used to say, he tells a good story.

  Any one of Reed’s novels could’ve been pulled from the pages of the Daily News. But for me, Soul Patch is Reed Farrel Coleman at the top of his game: the political gambits of unbridled ambition, the personal angst of loss for things that might have been—or worse, never were. Moses Prager gets under your skin in Soul Patch, and I mean that in a good way—or maybe we are the ones who get under Moe’s skin, allowing us to see the world through his eyes, and, more importantly, through the pain of his wrecked knee. Prager is a fallen knight who reached for the brass ring in the form of a gold detective’s shield and came down to earth, hard. I carried a gun, lived in Harlem for a few years, and had the City of New York reconstruct my own left knee, and can vouch for the gritty realism of the world Reed Farrel Coleman shows us.

  That’s the thing about Reed’s writing—the human element that complicates everything. He pursues and defines the universal human condition. While displaying myriad characters and their motivations, he finds a way to pull us all together and show us where we’re alike, and sometimes that’s a scary place to be.

  He’s the guy who starts getting distracted when you flatter him. You might notice his fingers paradiddling a complex pattern on the surface of the bar as he looks out the windows at the street. It’s not that he’s ignoring you; it’s just that he’s hearing the music, picking up the rhythms—looking for the truth.

  Reed Farrel Coleman won’t like this intro because it’s too complimentary.

  Tough.

  Craig Allen Johnson

  Ucross, Wyoming

  January 2010

  Craig Johnson is the best-selling author of six Walt Longmire crime novels, including The Dark Horse and Junkyard Dogs.

  This book is dedicated to the Brooklyn that was and never was.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank David Thompson and Busted Flush Press. I’d also like to thank Ellen Schare, Peter Spiegelman, and Megan Abbott for being first readers and first listeners, and for their editorial advice. I’d also like to thank Sara J. Henry for copyediting the new edition.

  None of this would have been possible without Rosanne, Kaitlin, and Dylan.

  THOU SHALL NOT GET CAUGHT

  —The 11th Commandment

  [soul patch] n. 1. a small strip of facial hair, often triangular in shape, grown between a man’s lower lip and the point of his chin. 2. euphemistic name given by local police (circa 1960-75) to the predominantly African-American section of Coney Island, Brooklyn.

  PROLOGUE

  1972

  NOTHING IS SO sad as an empty amusement park. And no amusement park is so sad as Coney Island. Once the world’s playground, it is no longer the world’s anything: not even important enough to be forgotten. Coney Island is the metal basket at the bottom of Brooklyn’s sink. So it is that when the County of Kings is stood on end, Coney Island will trap all the detritus, human and otherwise, before it pours into the Atlantic.

  Coney Island’s demise would be easy to blame on the urban planners, especially Robert Moses, who thought it best to warehouse the niggers, spics, and white trash far away from the crown jewel of Manhattan in distant outposts like Rockaway and Coney Island. If they could have built their ugly shoe-box housing projects on the moon, they would have. It is no accident that the subway rides from Coney Island and Rockaway to Manhattan are two of the longest in the system. But Coney Island’s decay is as much a product of its birth as anything else.

  Coney Island, the rusted remnants of its antiquated rides rising out of the ocean like the fossils of beached dinosaurs, clings to a comatose existence. Like the senile genius, Coney Island has lived just long enough to mock itself. And nothing epitomizes its ironic folly better than the Parachute Jump. A ploughman’s Eiffel Tower, its skeleton soars two hundred and fifty feet straight up off the grounds of what had once been Steeplechase Park. But the parachutes are long gone and now only the looming superstructure remains, the sea air feasting on its impotent bones.

  It was under the Parachute Jump’s moon shadow that the four men ambled across the boardwalk toward the beach. No one paid them any mind. No reason to. There was a flurry of activity along the boardwalk and in the woeful vestiges of the amusement park during the window between Easter Sunday and Memorial Day. False hope bloomed like weeds as city administration after city administration promised a return to the glory days of Coney Island. But by the advent of summer, hope would be gone, another silent funeral held for a still-born renaissance.

  At the steps that led down to the beach, one of the four men decided he was having second thoughts. Maybe he didn’t want to get sand in his shoes. No one likes sand in his shoes. The man standing to his immediate right waited for the rumble of the Cyclone—several girls screaming at the top of their lungs as the roller coaster cars plunged down its steep first drop—before slamming his leather-covered sap just above the balking man’s left knee. His scream was swallowed up by the roar of the ocean and the second plunge of the Cyclone. He crumpled, but was caught by the other men.

  Once their shoes hit the sand, they receded under cover of the boardwalk itself. Above their heads bicycles clickety-clacked along the splintering wooden planks, old Jewish men played chess, teenage boys proved their worth by hurdling wire garbage baskets. Out on the beach, couples sat in vacant lifeguard chairs. Some contemplated the vastness of the ocean or calculated their insignificance in relation to the stars. Some boys kissed their first girlfriends. Some girls placed their heads into their boyfriends’ laps.

  It was much cooler under the boardwalk, even at night. The sea air was different here so
mehow, smelling of pot smoke and urine. Ambient light leaking through the spaces between the planks imposed a shadowy grid upon the sand. The sand hid broken bottles, pop tops, used condoms, and horseshoe crab shells. Something snapped, and it wasn’t the sound of someone stepping on a shell.

  CHAPTER ONE

  RED, WHITE AND You, that’s what Aaron and I called our third store. It was pretentious, but at the end of the ’80s pretentious was high art, ranking right up there with big hair bands and junk bonds. The ’80s, Christ! The decade when video killed the radio star and AIDS killed everybody else. Pretentious worked well on the North Shore of Long Island, especially in Old Brookville, where even the station cars were chauffeured.

  The attendees at the grand opening party were a volatile emulsion of relatives—even my sister Miriam and her family were in from Albuquerque—broken-down cops, queens, politicians, journalists, kids, clergy, and, oh yeah, the occasional customer. Throw ’em together, shake ’em up with a little alcohol, and they all seemed perfectly blended. Not so. The second the shaking stopped, the elements settled out. More like a time bomb than a party, really. Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . .

  The devil himself, my father-in-law, Francis Maloney Sr., had deigned to grace us with his presence. Several times during the course of the day, particularly during the toasts, I’d spot him raising his glass of Irish in my direction, smiling at me with the accumulated warmth of a tombstone. My tombstone. We’d kept the self-destruct secret between us now for nearly twelve years, neither of us reaching for the red button. There were times I actually forgot about his long-missing son and how I’d come to marry his only daughter, times when I thought he’d just leave it be. Then we’d see each other at some family function and he’d smile that smile to remind me—to remind me that it was just a drawn-out game of chicken we were playing, that someday one of us would flinch, that it would probably be me. I needed to breathe fresh air.