3) A known fact about Lew was his penchant for gambling. If not for Millie’s job as a buyer for Bamberger’s department store in downtown Newark, the family would have gone broke many years earlier, since most of what Lew earned at 3 Brothers Home World tended to wind up in his bookie’s pocket. Now, as his drinking burgeoned out of control, so too did his taste for long-odds hunches, the dream of the spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime killing, the kind of legendary bet gamblers would go on talking about for decades, and the more erratic his guesswork became, the more his losses grew. By August 1954, he was thirty-six thousand dollars in the hole, and Ira Bernstein, the man who had been handling his bets for the past dozen years, was running out of patience. Lew needed cash, no less than ten or twelve thousand, a hefty lump to prove his good intentions, or else the boys with the baseball bats and the brass knuckles would be coming around to pay him a visit, and because he couldn’t ask Stanley for the money, knowing his kid brother had been serious when he’d sworn never to bail him out again, he stole it from Stanley instead — by putting a stop order on a check to 3 Brothers’ G.E. supplier and transferring the amount of the check over to himself. He knew he would be found out eventually, but it would take some time for the discrepancy to come to light, since the flow of cash for goods between the store and its suppliers ran on a system of mutual trust and the bookkeeping lagged months behind the actual exchanges, and those months would give him the time he needed to put things right again. In late September, Ferguson’s uncle saw his chance. It would mean putting a stop order on another check, but if all went well, the embezzled nine thousand dollars would be turned into a haul worth ten times that amount, which would be more than enough to make good on the two stopped checks, pay off Bernstein in full, and walk away with a nifty bundle for himself. The World Series was about to begin, with the Indians heavily favored over the Giants, so much a sure thing that betting on Cleveland was hardly worth the effort, but then Lew thought: If the Indians were that powerful a club, what was to stop them from winning four in a row? The odds on such a bet were far more enticing. Ten to one for a sweep, whereas putting his money on Cleveland one game at a time would yield only pennies. So Lew found himself another bookmaker, that is, someone whose name wasn’t Bernstein, and put the nine thousand two hundred dollars he had stolen from his brother on the Indians, betting they would run the table without a single loss to the Giants. No one knew where Ferguson’s uncle watched the first game, but as Stanley and Arnold and the rest of the staff at 3 Brothers Home World gathered around the television sets in the store to follow the action with fifty or sixty walk-in customers, who weren’t real customers but Giants’ fans with no televisions of their own, Lew slipped out to watch the game by himself, perhaps in a local bar or some other place, an unknown spot where no one saw him live through the horror of watching Mays run down Wertz’s fly ball in the top of the eighth inning, and then, even more terrible, the soul-crushing devastation that followed some minutes later when he saw Rhodes turn on Lemon’s pitch and send the ball into the right-field stands. One swing of a man’s bat, and another man’s life was in ruins.
4) In mid-October, the G.E. supplier informed Stanley that they had no record of payment for a truckload of freezers, air conditioners, fans, and refrigerators that had been delivered in early August. Mystified, Stanley went to the 3 Brothers bookkeeper, Adelle Rosen, a plump widow of fifty-six who kept a yellow pencil in her hair and believed in the virtues of precise penmanship and rigidly aligned columns, and once Stanley explained the problem to her, Mrs. Rosen pulled out the company checkbook from her desk drawer and found the stub for August tenth, which verified that payment had been made in full for the amount they owed, $14,237.16. Stanley shrugged. The check must have been lost in the mail, he said, and then he asked Mrs. Rosen to put a stop order on the August check and issue a new one to the G.E. supplier. The next day, a deeply puzzled Mrs. Rosen reported to Stanley that a stop order had already been put on that check as far back as August eleventh. What could that possibly mean? For the briefest of brief instants, Stanley wondered if Mrs. Rosen hadn’t betrayed him, if his heretofore steadfast employee, who was widely known to have been secretly in love with him for the past eleven years, wasn’t guilty of cooking the books, but then he looked into Mrs. Rosen’s troubled, adoring eyes and dismissed the thought as nonsense. He called Arnold into the back office and asked him what he knew about the missing fourteen thousand dollars, but Arnold, who looked no less shocked and confused than Mrs. Rosen had looked when confronted by this same mystery, said he couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going on, and Stanley believed him. Then he called in Lew. The oldest member of the clan denied everything at first, but Stanley didn’t like the way his brother kept looking past him at the wall behind his shoulder while they were talking, so he pressed on, grilling Lew about the stop order on the August check, insisting that he was the only one who could have done it, the only possible candidate, since Mrs. Rosen was in the clear, as were Arnold and himself, and therefore it had to be Lew, and then Stanley began to bore in on the question of Lew’s recent gambling activities, the exact amounts he had wagered, the total extent of his losses, what baseball games, what football games, what boxing matches, and the harder Stanley pushed, the more Lew’s body appeared to weaken, as if the two of them were slugging it out in a ring and each word was another punch, another blow to the gut, to the head, and bit by bit Lew began to stagger, as if his knees were about to buckle, and suddenly he was sitting in a chair with his face in his hands, sobbing out a chopped-up, barely audible confession. Stanley was appalled by what he heard, for in point of fact Lew wasn’t the least bit sorry about what he had done, and if he was sorry about anything it was only that his plan hadn’t worked, his beautiful, flawless plan, but the Indians had let him down and lost the first game of Series, and fuck Willie Mays, he said, fuck Dusty Rhodes, and Stanley finally understood that his brother was beyond hope, that for a full-grown man to point his finger at a couple of ballplayers and think they were the cause of his troubles meant his mind was no more developed than a child’s, an idiot child at that, someone as impoverished and handicapped as Lew’s own son, the dead and buried Private Andrew Ferguson. Stanley was tempted to tell his brother to leave the store and never come back, but he couldn’t do that, it would have been too sudden, too harsh, and as he pondered what to say next, knowing he couldn’t say anything until his anger had subsided somewhat, at least down to a level that wouldn’t make him regret his words, Lew began to talk again, and what he was telling Stanley was that they were all up to their necks in it and that the store was finished. Ferguson’s father had no idea what Lew was talking about, so he held his tongue a bit longer, beginning to feel that perhaps his brother had actually lost his mind, and then Lew was talking about Bernstein and how much money he owed him, more than twenty-five thousand now, but that was only the tip of the iceberg, for Bernstein had begun charging interest, and every day the amount was going up, up, up, and in the past two weeks there had been half a dozen phone calls, a voice on the other end of the line threatening him to pay what he owed or else suffer the consequences, which variously meant that a team of men would jump him in the dark and break every bone in his body, or else blind him with acid, or else cut up Millie’s face, or else kidnap Alice, or else kill both Millie and Alice, and he was scared, Lew told his brother, so scared that he couldn’t sleep anymore, and how was he going to raise the cash when his house was carrying two mortgages and he had already borrowed twenty-three thousand dollars from the store? Now Stanley’s knees were beginning to buckle as well, he felt disoriented and dizzy, no longer quite himself, no longer fully encased in his own skin, and so he sat down in a chair on the other side of the desk from Lew, wondering how fourteen thousand dollars had suddenly turned into twenty-three thousand dollars, and as the two brothers looked at each other across the surface of the gray metal desk, Lew told Stanley that Bernstein had come up with a proposal, and as far as he was concerned it was the only way out of it, the only possible solution, and whether Stanley liked it or not, it had to be done. What are you talking about? Stanley said, speaking for the first time in the past seven minutes. They’re going to burn down the store for us, Lew said, and once we collect on the insurance, everyone takes a cut. Stanley said nothing. He said nothing because he had to say nothing, because the only thought in his head at that moment was how much he wanted to kill his brother, and if he ever dared to speak those words out loud, to tell Lew how much he wanted to put his hands around his throat and strangle him to death, his mother would curse him from her grave and go on torturing him for the rest of his life. At long last Stanley rose from the chair and began walking toward the door, and once he had opened the door, he paused on the threshold and said: I don’t believe you. Then he left the room, and with his back to his brother he heard Lew say: Believe me, Stanley. It has to be done.