Soul Patch Read online

  Larry McDonald, my old pal from the Six-O Precinct and current NYPD chief of detectives, was already out front smoking a cigarette. So much for that fresh air! Something was up. Normally unflappable, Larry was sucking so hard on his cigarette I was afraid he’d inhale his index finger. He had smoked on and off for years, but it was never an addiction with him. Larry Mac’s only vice was ambition and, with a little assist from me, he’d nearly satisfied his craving. He was within sniffing distance of being the next commissioner.

  “Nice shindig,” he said.

  “Shindig! Christ, Larry, where’d you come up with that one? Did you already use hootenanny today?”

  If he was laughing, it was definitely on the inside.

  “Will you look at this fucking parking lot, Moe?” He flicked the filter away in disgust. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was the used car lot of a Porsche dealership. More Jags, Beemers, and 911s here than in all a Brooklyn. You and me, we come a long way from Coney Island, huh?”

  “Not so long. I still live in Sheepshead Bay, remember?”

  “That’s not what I—” He stopped himself, lit another cigarette. Sucked on it like Superman.

  “You trying to smoke that thing or swallow it, bro?”

  That bounced off him too. “Yeah,” he repeated, “we come a long way.”

  Larry was definitely off his game. He was a lot of things—preening and vain for sure, pragmatic to the point of cutthroat—but reflective and philosophical weren’t generally part of his repertoire. I took a good look at him. He seemed much older somehow. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  Wasn’t in his posture. Wasn’t how he fit in his clothes nor how they fit him. Tall, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, Larry wore his clothes the way a smooth plaster wall wears wet paint. Today was no exception. His gray, light wool pinstripe hung on him perfectly. Even when we were in uniform, his blues looked tailor-made. And he was handsome as ever, maybe more so. He was the type of guy God had in mind when he created gray hair. No, the age was in his eyes, in his voice. Larry reached into his jacket pocket.

  “You believe in ghosts, Moe?”

  Shit! There it was, that fucking question. A sucker punch. Usually it was my father-in-law who asked it. He had asked it of me a hundred times over the last dozen years, and with each asking came a sick feeling in my belly. Most times Francis didn’t even need to mouth the words. It would come in the guise of a glance or, like today, a smile. He never explained the question, never once discussed it. Didn’t expect or want an answer. It was a pin pricked into the skin of a balloon, but not quite deep enough to pop it.

  “Ghosts?” I repeated. “Depends. There’s shit that can haunt a man worse than the walking dead. But do I believe in spirits and shit? Nah, I don’t believe in things that go boo or bump in the night.”

  “You sound pretty confident.”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Larry said, his eyes looking through me and into the past. He smiled. Pulled a cassette tape out of his pocket. Put it in my palm and gently folded my fingers around it. “Don’t be so sure.”

  “What’s this?”

  “It goes bump in the night.”

  “Very funny, McDonald.”

  “You see me laughing?”

  I didn’t.

  He held his right hand out to me. I put the tape in my pocket.

  “Again, congratulations on the new store, Moe. Pass it on to your brother and kiss Katy for me. Listen to the tape and call me.”

  “Cryptic isn’t usually your style.”

  “This isn’t ‘usually.’ ”

  I thought about saying something to that. Thankfully, he’d gone before I could formulate a question. When I turned back around, Francis Maloney was smiling at me through the plate glass window of the store.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I COUNTED SLEEPLESS nights instead of sheep, staring up at the ceiling I knew was there but couldn’t see. Katy was next to me, but a million miles away. We had hit the inevitable impasse, that stage in marriage when each day is like a long drive through Nebraska. In the absence of passion, I wondered, what distinguished love from habit? The answer escaped me there in the dark.

  Once, many years back, when I was working the case that ultimately led to Larry Mac’s first big promotion, I thought Katy meant to leave me. Only time in my life I felt faint. Had to prop myself up against the furniture. God, I can feel the power of that moment surging through me even now. A few months before, Katy had miscarried. The convulsion of grief and guilt that followed in its wake had overwhelmed us. After the initial tears and blame, Katy fell into a kind of stupor. I thought she was coming out of it, but she was so unpredictable in those long weeks.

  The miscarriage and the months that followed caused the first subtle cracks in our marriage. They were hairline fractures, small, barely detectable. I suppose they’ve added up with time. But that day, the day I thought I would faint, my panic wasn’t about the miscarriage. No, the panic belonged to me. I owned it. I thought Katy had stumbled upon the secret, the one her father and I kept wedged between us like a bottle of liquid nitroglycerin.

  Back in December of 1977, Patrick Maloney, Katy’s younger brother, had gone into Manhattan and vanished. I had just been retired from the job due to a freak knee injury. Hobbling around on a cane and looking for a way to raise some money for our first wine shop, I was hired by the Maloneys to help find their missing boy. According to the media, Patrick was never found and everyone but the Maloney family had long since moved on. The truth was both more and less than that.

  I had, in fact, found Patrick, a college sophomore who had collected a trunkful of his own dark secrets. By that time I’d already begun to fall in love with Katy. But when I found her brother, he begged me for a few more days. He wanted to come back to his family on his own terms. I agreed. Biggest mistake in my life. I should have dragged him out of his hiding spot by the ears and plopped him on his parents’ sofa.

  Of course, Patrick was full of shit. He hit the road running and never looked back. Can’t say that I blamed him. My problem was that my father-in-law knew I’d found his son. We both had our reasons for not telling Katy. Now our reasons were moot. The time for confession had come and gone. Compounded with each passing day, this was a sin Katy would never forgive.

  For years I had been able to keep the panic and guilt at bay. My sleepless nights were few. Only time it used to get to me was when I’d work the odd case, or see Francis and he’d ask me that fucking question about ghosts. Then I’d relive it all over again, the past churning inside me. These days, sleeplessness was the norm and I’m not sure if guilt or panic has a thing to do with it. I suppose I still loved Katy and that she loved me, but the love just wasn’t the glue it had once been. Sarah, our little girl, she was the glue now. These nights, when I stare up at a ceiling I cannot see, I wonder if I would still feel faint if Katy threatened to leave or if I would simply feel relief.

  Tired of the frustration, I got up and fished Larry McDonald’s cassette out of my jacket pocket. Still smelled his smoke on my suit. Went downstairs. Poured myself a few fingers of Dewars. Sitting on the floor, hunched against the wing of the sofa closest to the stereo, I sipped scotch and rolled the cassette in my hand. It was a prayer of sorts, a prayer without words—a prayer that the cassette meant trouble, that the trouble meant Larry Mac needed my help. It was a cruel prayer. It’s cruel to pray for troubles, but I was lost. Worse, I was bored.

  Some cops are action junkies. They crave stimulation. If it doesn’t come to them, they go looking for it. If they can’t find it, they create it. That wasn’t me, not who I used to be—not while I was on the job, anyway. Now I wasn’t so sure. The wine business had never been my dream. That was Aaron’s gig, not mine. I’d just hitched my ass to it and gone along for the ride. I don’t think I ever thought it through, really. But that’s what happens when you’re lost. You make stupid decisions. The wine business had taught me at least one important lesson, though—dust collects on many things other than just old bottles of red wine. Dust corrodes a man’s soul.

  I slipped my big old Koss headphones over my ears, clicked off the SPEAKER A button, and pressed PLAY on the tape deck. There were three voices, two men and a woman. All sounded far away, but I could make out what was being said clearly enough. The recording had the sound of a tape that was made surreptitiously, because no one was speaking into the mic. It became immediately apparent I was listening to an interrogation or, as cops euphemistically like to call it, an interview. The suspect’s name was Melvin. Melvin didn’t like being called Melvin. Even my moms don’t call me Melvin no more. It’s Malik!

  A strategic mistake, telling the detectives that. The woman detective—young, with the lilt of someone raised speaking English in school and Spanish at home—jumped all over him. She started and ended each question with Melvin, picking fiercely at his scabs. She was the bad cop and was either a great actress or born to the part. The male detective—older, white, Bronx Irish—was the sympathetic voice. Listen, Malik, I’m with you, man, but it’s her case.

  You could tell he was the more experienced detective, not because of his age, but because he spoke less. A good interviewer knows that silence can be your best weapon. The Latina’s youth was showing. She was a little too eager, too much of a shark, that one. She smelled blood in the water, Melvin’s blood. She’d learn.

  Funny thing is, I was a cop for ten years, but I wasn’t allowed in the box except for maybe once or twice, and then only to try and intimidate the suspect. Detectives guarded their turf jealously: uniforms need not apply. For detectives, the interview room was like the ark that held the Torah scrolls; only the rabbis got a free pass. The rest of us had to be invited to stand before the ark or sta
re from the pews in awe and wonder. It took me a minute to divine that Melvin, a.k.a. Malik, had been snagged with half a key of coke taped to the underside of the dash of his 1979 Buick Electra 225. Things quickly settled into a boring point-counterpoint:

  I’m keepin’ my mouf shut till y’all get me my lawyer.

  You do that, Melvin. You keep quiet while I extol the virtues of the Rockefeller Drug Laws to you. Okay, Melvin?

  The partner bitched about her using words like extol.

  What’s the problem? You afraid Melvin won’t understand?

  Fuck Melvin. I’m worried I won’t understand!

  I didn’t get what this chatty interrogation about a drug bust had to do with Larry, nor why it would worry him so, but it was great for insomnia. I found myself drifting off into that netherworld between consciousness and numb sleep. I was almost fully out when the female detective began a rant about just how much of his worthless life Melvin would be spending in Attica thanks to the former governor of the Empire State.

  Shit! Get me my moufpiece and you best bring a D.A. too.

  Why’s that, Melvin?

  ’Cause I got something to deal.

  Something like what, Malik?

  You ever heard a D Rex Mayweather?

  There was an uncomfortable silence. I could hear the hum of the ventilation system, shoes brushing along the linoleum floor of the interrogation room, bodies shifting in their chairs. I thought I might have heard whispering, but it was hard to know if I was just imagining it. The silence broke, and the older detective did the honors.

  Why should we give a shit about some dead, drug-dealing nigger, Malik?

  Man, y’all gimme that buddy-buddy Malik shit and then you gotta get all up in my face like that. S’not right, man. Y’all get my moufpiece and a D.A. We let them decide if they should give a shit about what this nigger got to say.

  That was it. End of tape. But not, I figured, the end of the story. It was too late to call Larry. It was too late to go back to bed. Maybe it was too late for a lot of things.

  Excerpted from the Daily News, June 5, 1972:

  BOARDWALK BODY IDENTIFIED

  Terry O’Loughlin, Staff Writer

  The partially decomposed body discovered last week in a shallow grave beneath the Coney Island boardwalk has been positively identified as that of reputed drug kingpin Dexter Mayweather. Mayweather, better known by his street name, D Rex, was alleged to have run the largest drug trafficking network in the five boroughs.

  Mayweather had been arrested on a host of charges over the last ten years, ranging from simple possession to assault and attempted murder. Yet at the time of his death, he had never been convicted of any crime. Detectives at the nearby 60th Precinct refused comment on either Mayweather’s homicide or on his previous run-ins with the NYPD.

  However, an unnamed source in the federal prosecutor’s office was more forthcoming. He spoke of Mayweather with a grudging respect. “D Rex was the real goods. He was shrewd, slippery as an eel, and ruthless,” the source said. “He was anything but run-of-the-mill and he had been the undisputed ruler of Coney Island. But no lion stays king forever.”

  Although the Medical Examiner’s office has listed the death as a homicide, it has refused to release the actual cause of death. Beyond stating that Mayweather’s body had been in the sandy grave for about two weeks and that it had been positively identified through the use of dental records, the M.E. has declined further comment.

  Dexter Mayweather, the youngest of seven children, began life in a coastal South Carolina town. When his father abandoned the family shortly after his son’s birth, his mother relocated to the Coney Island section of Brooklyn.

  (See Body Identified on page 28)

  CHAPTER THREE

  I WOULD HAVE caught the winning touchdown pass or floated down some lazy country stream or tasted a woman for the first time. When I woke, the world would take me to its breast and I’d be able to hear myself think for the first time in my life. Not only would that voice inside my head know the right questions, but it would supply the answers for my way ahead. Unfortunately, it had been my experience that focusing on ifs and woulds and should haves was a shortcut to hell.

  “Jesus Christ, Moe!”

  I woke up, the touchdown pass glancing off my fingertips.

  “Is this how you want Sarah to find you?”

  I took inventory:

  Shirtless and in my boxers.

  Headphone cord twisted through my arms.

  Tumbler between my legs.

  Bottle of Dewars dripping scotch onto the living room carpet.

  Drool on my shoulder.

  A stiff neck.

  A sore back.

  The stereo on.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “Come on, clean yourself up. Sarah’s gonna be up in a little while and want her Sunday morning pancakes.”

  “Okay, just let me wipe this—”

  “Forget that mess. I’ll take care of it. What were you doing out here anyway?”

  “Time traveling.”

  “Can’t you give me a straight answer anymore?”

  I let it go. Katy and me, we were a million miles apart out of bed as well. Never mind that I wasn’t certain what I had been doing last night. Maybe Larry’s tape had been a way for me to escape from the bedroom, a ready excuse to deaden my senses with a few too many fingers of scotch.

  As to what was actually on the tape . . . Sure, I knew who Dexter Mayweather was. Every cop who worked the Six-O in the late ’60s and early ’70s knew about D Rex, King of the Soul Patch. Shit, they found his body under the boardwalk where I used to walk my beat. But D Rex had been murdered in the spring of 1972, and what possible connection this could have with Larry was escaping me at the moment. Besides, I had other reasons for remembering that spring.

  On Easter Sunday of 1972 a little girl went missing. Seven-year-old Marina Conseco was the youngest of five brothers and a sister. Her dad, a divorced city fireman, had left Marina in the charge of her older siblings while he went to get some hot dogs and fries at Nathan’s. When he returned, he noticed Marina was missing. Three days later, she was still missing. Coney Island was never hell on earth, not even in the bad old days when I worked it, but it wasn’t a good place for little girls lost.

  By the fourth day, we’d made the unspoken transition from searching for her to searching for her remains. No one had to say a word. You could see it on the faces and in the slumped shoulders of the off-duty cops and firemen who had volunteered to look for her. We were running out of places to search. They’d even had the divers in to plumb the muddy waters of Coney Island Creek. They found a capsized submarine, but not Marina’s body. My hand to God, there’s a submarine in Coney Island Creek. You can look it up, as my sister Miriam likes to say.

  Never underestimate exhaustion. As the years pass, I become more and more convinced that my exhaustion saved Marina’s life. Between regular shifts, overtime, and my off-duty volunteering, I had barely slept in ninety-six hours. In spite of my lack of sleep, I was out searching with a couple of firemen. We were driving toward Sea Gate along Mermaid Avenue. I could feel myself drifting off, so I blasted the air conditioner, turned the radio up full bore, began shaking my head violently. The guys in the car with me must have been just as tired, because they didn’t say a word. I began forcing my eyes open, wide open, the way you do when you sense yourself falling asleep at the wheel. I kept looking up. You know when you stare at something long enough, it either becomes invisible or you begin noticing things.