Brooklyn Noir Read online

Senior’s? She’s got to be pulling of my legs. But not Sylvia. A kid with an old baseball cap on backwards is standing by her side, the spitting image of Seamus “Scoop” O’Neil, my former pal, who run off to City Hall with Sylvia back when we were an item.

  “So what’s up? Why me? Why today after—has it been thirty, forty years?”

  Sylvia doesn’t miss a beat. “I need you, Pistol Pete,” she says. “The cops have got Scoop in for murder. Murder. They say he done in Front Page Shamburger and Sherlock Iconoflip.” Then, “Don’t you ask a lady to sit down? What’s happened to your manners? And this gentleman, about whom you don’t seem to have the presence to ask, is our nephew I.F., named, of course, after the famous Izzy Stone, who you know was Scoop’s hero all these many years.”

  So, I pull up two old bridges that I haven’t unfolded in—gotta stop counting the years. Sylvia keeps yammering, reminding me I’m the only private eye she’s ever really known, recalling the days when I was feeding Scoop leads, checking out scumbags for him, so he could blow the lid off the hustlers at Borough Hall—who made the deals with sewer, highway, and bridge contractors. I unwrap a White Owl, pull out the old Zippo, and am ready to light up.

  “You are not going to smoke,” Sylvia tells me. “I don’t believe it. You still haven’t caught on.”

  That’s Sylvia. Hasn’t skipped a beat, still telling me what to do. I bury the Zippo and start chewing the stogie.

  “It happened at their weekly poker game,” Sylvia says.

  “What useta be their gang of six, what with the smoking and the drinking, what it done to their lungs and livers and kidneys, not to say their marriages and longevity. Well, now it’s down to the three of them. Was three until Front Page and Sherlock—may their souls rest in a City Room—got knocked off.”

  Sylvia is not keen on interruptions, but I cut in. “Gotta play it straight with you for old time’s sake, Sylv,” I say. “Haven’t hustled a case in must be five years. Been sittin’ up here in the office on a long-term lease just passin’ the time. Doin’ a little this and that.”

  She knows I never been hitched, and I can tell by the way she kinda half smiles at me she suspects I’m still carrying the torch for her.

  “Sanchez over at the precinct says it was poison—arsenic mixed with mustard—that done them in,” Sylvia goes on. “The cops found splotches of mustard on Scoop’s cuff, his shirt, the zipper of his fly. Would you believe it?”

  I’m studying the kid’s cap. The mellow blue has me wondering if it’s an old Brooklyn Dodger lid. “Hey, kid, you ever hear of Carl Furillo, Sandy Amoros? Duke Snider? I know you heard of Jackie Robinson. Everybody heard of Jackie Robinson.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Sylvia says in a huff. “I’m talking about my husband, held for murder. I’m giving you the facts, nothing but the facts, and you come up with a walk down Memory Lane. Who you think you are—Joe Franklin?”

  But the kid is hooked. “Carl Anthony Furillo hit .296 for the 1955 World Champions. Edwin Donald ‘Duke’ Snider hit four home runs, batted in seven, BA .320 in the Series. ‘Sandy’ Edmund Isasi Amoros led the team with .333 …”

  “Enough,” Sylvia says, like she’s letting the dentist know one more drill and she’s outa there. “We didn’t come here to talk baseball.”

  But the kid has cleared the fences. When Scoop and I seen the last of each other, we had this pact, at least I thought we had a deal, only talk, talk only, about Dodgers, once O’Malley had packed up the gang including the great Sandy Koufax himself and hauled kit and caboodle off to L.A. I’m touched that the kid—did Sylvia say he was her nephew?—has got it all down pat. The memories, my memories of our church that was Ebbets Field.

  “Everything isn’t picture perfect between Scoop and me,” Sylvia goes on. “I’m not gonna tell you it is. Like Senior’s. Me opening the restaurant, a deli. I’m ordering my pastramis from Langers. You never taste a smokier, saltier, peppery flavor in your life. ‘Yer ordering pastramis from L.A.,’ Scoop says. ‘I won’t hear of it. First they steal our Dodgers. Now you’re goin’ head to head with Junior’s with an L.A. pastrami.’ That’s what he says. No head for business.”

  “Say, kid,” I say. “They call you I.F.? What you know about Izzy Stone?”

  “He published an independent newsletter, received a Special George Polk Journalism Award in 1970, the same award the Brooklyn Eagle won for Community Service in 1948 and 1949. Stone thanked the Brooklyn Center of L.I.U. for what he called a great honor.”

  The kid gets no further than that when Sylv is back again.

  “What is this? First down Memory Lane, now it’s Old Home Week. The Brooklyn Eagle is dead and so are Front Page and Sherlock. Scoop is facing the hot seat and you’re cutting up about Brooklyn bygones. You taking the case or I gotta fly a shammes in from L.A.?”

  “Sanchez, you say?” I say. “Pablo Sanchez. He still around? Must be a sergeant since I seen him last. I’ll give him a call.” Sylvia is pumping her heels, the kid is flipping his lid, brim forward now. I can see the fading white monogrammed B. The number comes to me easy, 84th Precinct, 718-875-6811. I’m still chomping the stogie when I’m on the line with Pablo. “Socorro! Socorro!” I say by way of openers. “I gotta talk to you, amigo. I hear you got Scoop O’Neil in for asesinato. His wife Sylvia put me on the case. I gotta talk to him. No puedo esperar.”

  “Come on over,” Pablo says, “Esperaré aquí.”

  “I’m on,” I tell Sylvia and the kid. “You might as well come along for the ride.”

  “Sure I know my way around Brooklyn,” the kid tells me as we’re ambling toward Gold Street. “I got a map.” Then he says, “You ever hear of Only the Dead Know Brooklyn?”

  “Not now,” says Sylvia, wobbling on her high heels. “I’m in the dumps without more bad news.”

  I say, “Yeah. A story by Thomas Wolfe, the elder. I never knew kids your age even knew who he was.”

  “Izzy knows all about books and batting averages,” Sylvia squawks. “But ask him to slice a corned beef and it comes out like he’s working the Blarney Stone.”

  When we reach the old brown brick precinct house where they’re holding Scoop, Pablo greets Sylv, “Mucho gusto en conocerla, señorita.” Then, he makes it clear, only one visitor at a time in the detective’s office. He’s arranged for me to have a confab with Scoop.

  I’m sittin’ on one of those hard-back chairs that must’ve been designed by a chiropractor to increase business when Scoop comes in looking like it’s ten seconds after Bobby Thomson’s home run that done us in in ’51.

  “Pete. Pistol Pete,” he says, shaking his head from side to side, the flaps of his graying mustache twitching in the breeze. “It’s been so long, so long ago and far away.” For a second there I think Scoop is gonna break into a song. Scoop useta be like that, a walkin’, talkin’ Broadway musical with subtitles. I understand why Sylv scratched me for him. All that freebee entertainment. Scoop plunks in the chair across the desk from me. “Can you get me outa here? I done nothing wrong. We’re playing deuces wild and I’m drawing to an ace and two twos when they cave in—Sherlock and Front Page, two of the greatest beat reporters who never won a Polk Award.”

  “Hey, you win a Polk Award?” I’m checking out Scoop’s memory.

  “Nominated twice,” Scoop says with a long sigh. “I had Al Landa and David Medina pitching for me, but couldn’t get past that flack Hershey they brought in from Newsday.”

  The marbles are there, so I ask him for the story. “No song and dance, Scoop,” I say. “We only got so long. Sanchez is doing us a favor. Just a run through, not twice around.”

  Scoop confirms pretty much what Sylvia has told me—the history of the poker game, the poisoned mustard, the clues on his cuff, pants, fly. I’m taking notes, scratching times, names, the menu. Seems the scene of the crime is a small office off the main drag of Senior’s, the deli Sylvia has opened less than a month ago.

  “I never wanted her to do it,” Sc
oop says. “What we need a business for at our age? We should be rolling in the clover or at least the sands of Miami Beach. But you know Sylvia, once she got it in her head to make pastrami on rye with a slice of cheesecake for McDonald’s prices, there was no stopping her. She’s talking franchises coast to coast, going public on the big board, and we’re lucky if we can pay the bills even with my kid—” Scoop breaks off, shrugs, collects himself. “I mean our nephew I.F. Izzy. Ain’t he an egg cream with a dash of cinnamon if you ever seen one?”

  Egg creams with cinnamon? That’s a new one on me, but I let it pass. I’m hearing “my kid” before “our nephew.” I say, “Tell me something, Scoop. This nephew of yourn, he’s your sister’s kid? Molly who I remember lived in Sea Gate before she run off with a retired cutter from the garment district and moved to South Fallsburg?”

  “Naw. Naw,” Scoop says. “The cutter—may his creases rest in peace—is long since gone. Molly married again, an artist. She’s got a place in Brooklyn Heights, right there looking over the southern tip of Manhattan.”

  I know Scoop has no other sisters or brothers and this “nephew” definitely does not run in Sylvia’s family. I put it to him: “This kid, I.F. Izzy. He is or is no Molly’s son?”

  Scoop shrugs, comes as close as I’ve ever seen him to blushing, starts fumbling for a butt. I’d stake him to a White Owl, but it is definitely not a good idea to light up a fat stogie in a precinct house when you’re being held for murder.

  “He’s no nephew,” Scoop says like he’s breaking the Lindbergh case. “The kid is my son. Not by Sylvia. Sylvia and I couldn’t have kids—not in the cards for us.”

  I’m sitting cool as a cucumber, no how do you do, it’s all news to me It’s a confession, right out of Bernard Macfadden’s True Story, Truer Romance, Truest Experience. A marriage gone lightly sour, a career diving for cover, not much happening except for poker with the boys and a chippy who likes to sing duets. Scoop tells me he picked up I.F.’s mother in a journalism class he was teaching part-time at L.I.U. twenty years ago.

  “A good kid. I really liked her, had a lot of respect for that babe. Would have broken up with Sylvia for her, but she—Martha Gellhorn Washington—would you believe it, named for one of the great foreign correspondents of her time, who also never won a Polk Award. Anyway, Martha said it was just a fling. I was too old for her, not really her type. But she wanted to have the kid. When Martha’s number was up, got hit by an external fuel tank jettisoned from a F14 Tomcat, something like that, there was our kid hanging in there, out in L.A. He thinks I done her wrong, set his mamalochen up for disaster. He drops the line to Sylvia. The rest of the story you can write for yourself.”

  Pablo is flashing a signal. I lip read: Son las dos en punto. I got to wrap it up now that it’s 2 o’clock.

  I say, “So your kid, I.F., winds up living with you and Sylvia. And the day of the poker game—was I.F. there for the Last Lunch?”

  Scoop raises his hands and slaps them on the desk. “Turns out Sylvia is crazy about the kid. Moves I.F. right in with us, signs him on for Senior’s full time. He’s with her, day and night. Night and day. You are the one. Only you beneath the moon and under the sun. Whether near to me or far …” Scoop cuts out for the solo, but I got no time for musical interludes.

  “Answer the question, Scoop,” I say. “Where was I.F. when the mustard hit the fan?”

  Scoop tells me I.F. was right there. “Matter of fact …” Scoop lowers his voice. I got no idea who he thinks is listening to us, but I register that this is prime cut information. “I’m not sure I.F. picked up those sandwiches from Junior’s for us. Sylvia would hit the ceiling if she knew my guys and me were not even considering Senior’s mini-stuffed. We are strictly Junior’s disciples until—pardon the expression—until the day we die. We always order the same,” Scoop says. “Sherlock and Front Page go halves on a pastrami and corned beef. For me it’s white meat turkey, lettuce and tomato, with Russian on the side. The first week of each month we split a hunk of cheesecake.”

  “And the mustard?”

  “I noticed a little blob on my jacket when James L., the old man who works part-time for Sylv, handed it back to me as I was coming out of the crapper after lunch. I may have took a swipe at it and smeared it on my cuff and fly. Who knows? I was deep into the game. I don’t even remember unwrapping my sandwich. Once we upped the stakes to one and five and I’m down big bucks, what do I know from mustard? I’m thinking about losing C notes and lots of ’em. Last I remember before the guys caved in was pouring the tea for Front Page, the decaf for Sherlock, the straight java for me,” says Scoop, and breaks into song. “I like java. I like tea. I like the java jive. It likes me …”

  He’s into the soft shoe as Pablo Sanchez escorts him back to the holding cell.

  As soon as we check out of the precinct house, Sylvia is all over me. “I knew you could solve it, Pistol Pete. So tell us, who done it?”

  I say, “Slow and easy, sweetheart. Like I told you, I’m a little out of shape, been sitting on the bench too many years.” Then I tell her I got to get a look at the scene of the crime.

  We’re in the neighborhood. A hop, skip, and jump and I’m sitting at a big table loaded with bowls of sauerkraut, pickles, jars of ketchup—mustard! There’s not a customer in the joint. But the walls are plastered with pictures—all shots of the great Dodgers of our past—Hodges, Reese, Stanky, Roy Campanella, and a blowup the size of a billboard on Times Square of Scoop interviewing the immortal Jackie Robinson.

  Sylvia ducks back into the kitchen to get us some eats. Never mind that I just come off half a late lunch. That’s her cover. She wants me to cut it up with I.F., so he can tell me what an Auntie-Mame-stepmother she’s turned out to be.

  Only it doesn’t break according to Sylvia’s script.

  I’m asking the questions and I.F., true to his name, talks straight. He’s known his father was a Brooklyn newspaper hack since he was five years old.

  “My mother told me his name, left me a number to call if anything happened to her when she ran off on foreign assignments. The Balkans, Middle East, Afghanistan, anywhere someone was taking a shot, dropping a bomb, throwing a stone, was Mama’s beat. I lived mostly in L.A. with grandparents and eventually foster homes. No complaints. When I heard my mother died, I checked in with the number she gave me. Sylvia answered the phone. She asked me who I was. I told her. I didn’t know Scoop never told her about me. I guess I blew it. Less than a day later Scoop calls. He’s wiring me money to come to Brooklyn. He and Sylvia have talked it over, he said. They want to meet me, get to know me, make up for all the lost years.”

  The kid is telling me all this without a blink, a snicker, or a tear.

  “So you come to Brooklyn,” I say, going for the extra base. “What happens next?”

  “I did a little preparation, beefing up.” For the first time I.F. half smiles. “When I want to know about a place I read the poets and study the baseball teams. Are you familiar with Marianne Moore’s ‘Keeping Their World Large’?”

  Before I can apologize or fake it, the kid is into a verse: “They fought the enemy,/we fight fat living and self-pity/ Shine, 0 shine/unfalsifying sun on this sick scene.”

  I say, “I’m gonna think about that.”

  The kid is on a run. “Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but lived for a long time on Cumberland Street in Brooklyn.”

  “Hey, that’s real interesting,” I say. “Marianne Moore. Soon as I reread Boys of Summer I’m gonna look into Marianne Moore.” Then, I send my fastball down the middle. “So tell me, you know any reason Scoop would have to do in Front Page and Sherlock?”

  I.F. shrugs, gives his Dodger cap a twist and twirl. “How many reasons you want?” he says. “Would about ten thousand dollars in debt from the poker games be a reason? Or the fact that he discovered soon as Sylvia heard about me she had a romp in the hay with each of them?” As he’s circling the bases, I.
F. goes on with a dose of Walt Whitman. “I do not press my fingers across my mouth,/ I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,/ Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.”

  I’m getting that same uneasy feeling I get when his old man breaks into song. Songs, poetry, batting averages. Maybe I’m on to something. Call it the prayer gene.

  I’m thinking over my next pitch when Sylvia’s voice comes from the kitchen. “You boys ready for a little snack? This corned beef is right out of the brine. You never tasted nothing like it in your life.” I hear the slicer and then Sylvia comes to the door with this kitchen saw. I never seen a chef in high heels and an apron color coordinated with her hair dye.

  “So?” she says, pointing the slicer at me. “I can’t wait any longer, Pistol Pete. Who done it?”

  “Well, Sylv,” I say. “We got five possibilities here.”

  “Solving a murder is that logical, an exercise in Kant’s pure reason?” I.F. pulls the cap around so the Dodger logo is facing me.

  “Starting back to front there is always the possibility of suicide, but a double suicide over a pastrami and corned beef?” I get an immediate waiver on number one. “So we have two, three, and four. Number two is Scoop with the mustard stains, who has motive and clues.”

  “I didn’t hire you for that,” Sylvia reminds me. “Not Scoop. My Scoop may be a good-for-nothing—but he’d never spoil perfectly good corned beef and pastrami sandwiches with poisoned mustard.”

  “Scoop is the patsy,” I go on. “He’s set up. Try it this way—someone with a motive to knock him off frames him for a double murder.”

  Sylvia calls into the kitchen, “James Lamar, we need coffee. Black with those sandwiches.”

  “That could be you, Sylvia,” I say quietly. “You’re number three on our suspect list.”

  “Me?” Sylvia stamps her foot and switches on the slicer.

  Her eyes are shifting fast as Koufax’s curveball. “You got to be out of your mind. I put up with that son of a bitch lying, cheating all these years, and you can’t see I love him?”