Clearly, Bobby was mixed up in smuggling. What sort of smuggling, I couldn’t say. At least now I understood the reason for those stupid airport runs. They weren’t about hitting old people up for flight insurance policies. They were about giving Bobby cover for what he was really up to, but it was more than that. It had to be. The night 1055 Coney Island Avenue burned down, Bobby had shown up just after me and just before Susan Kasten. He had gone up to the third floor and seen Salaam’s body just like I had. Why? What were the odds that Bobby and Susan Kasten didn’t know each other? What were the odds they would show up at the same building on the same evening? Had Bobby smuggled in the boxes Susan and her two flunkies removed from 1055 Coney Island Avenue? What was in the boxes?
“Yeah?” I said, picking up the phone.
“Aaron Prager, is that you?” It was Murray Fleisher. “I can’t hear so good. Must be a bad connection.”
He was right. It was a bad connection between the nerves running from his ear to his brain.
“Yes, Mr. — Murray, it’s me, your future partner.”
“Wonderful.”
“I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”
“What? Did I call you too soon?” he shouted at me as if I was the one losing his hearing.
“No, Murray,” I upped the volume. “I said I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”
“Right, but I figured I would take the chance you’d be home. I got what you asked for … mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“First, grab a pencil and a piece of paper.”
“Got it.”
“One of the license plates belongs to a Ford registered to a Wallace Casey of 34 Trinity Street, Oceanside, New York, 11572. You know Oceanside?”
“On Long Island. It’s where they got the other Nathan’s Famous.”
“See,” Murray said, “I knew you were the sharp one. That’s it. The address is off Long Beach Road and Atlantic … around there.”
“Thanks, but what about the other plate?”
“What? Now your mother’s late? How is she, by the way?”
“No, Murray, sorry for whispering,” I shouted. “What about the other plate?”
“The other plate. That’s the rub, kid, the other plate. Are you sure you got the numbers right?”
“Positive.”
“Then we got a problem,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“The DMV tells me that plate number is registered to an official city vehicle.”
“New York City?”
“Of course. What else?”
“Did DMV tell you what kind of vehicle it is, at least? I think one of the witnesses who saw it clip my car said it was a white Dodge van.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone, a long silence.
“Murray, you still there?”
“I don’t get it.” He sounded almost hurt.
“Get what?”
“It’s a white Dodge van, all right, but why would an official city vehicle just pull away like that after denting your car?”
“Then it was the Ford that did it,” I said, not wanting Murray to get too curious. I didn’t want to have to lie to him anymore than I already had, and I couldn’t afford him showing up at our door.
“Sharp kid, very sharp. So, when is Murray gonna see you? We can have a little nosh. Have a drink maybe.”
“Soon, Murray. I’ll call. Thanks for the help.”
“Anytime, partner.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
What’s funny about Brooklyn is that it’s not its own place. Brooklyn is actually the westernmost tip of Long Island. Us Brooklynites don’t like acknowledging that fact, and it’s easy for us to pretend because we’ve got Queens as a buffer between us and the Nassau County line. Over the county line, Long Island stretches eastward beyond Nassau to the wild netherworld of Suffolk County. Coney Island isn’t an island, but a peninsula. Just don’t try and sell that notion to a Brooklyn native. If the world’s shape doesn’t suit us, we’ll reshape it as we see fit. Yet in spite of our willful ignorance of geography, there’s not another collection of people anywhere on earth who see the world or their place in it with a more honest eye. Good liars have to know the deeper truth of things. If nothing else, Brooklyn teaches you that, how to see those deeper truths.
I hated Long Island, not because Brooklyn was part of it, not for any good reason, really. I always saw it as a kind of suburban East Berlin, a place where parents coerced their kids to go live in the lap of torturous luxury. You will never again be allowed to wear hand-me-down clothing. You must never play sports on concrete and must suffer with pristine grass fields. You must sleep in your own bedroom. You will never be allowed to share a bathroom again. When you graduate from high school, you will be forced to accept a new automobile. And worst of all, you will be exiled to an actual university. I suppose if I gave it any serious thought, my hate for the Island had more to do with jealousy than anything else. Don’t get me wrong: I love Brooklyn, and I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. But by the time I hit Brooklyn College, the blinders had come off. Even as a kid I knew my dad was never going to make it big. He wasn’t ever going to come home from work one day and say, “C’mon, everyone, we’re moving. I just bought a house in Glen Cove.” We were doomed to rent, doomed never to have anything to call our own. We were never going to have a little plaque outside our door that read THE PRAGERS. Dad was never going to magically make our lives a little bit easier. No one would.
I took a little ride to Oceanside. It was on the south shore of Long Island, a couple of miles east of JFK airport, across the county line. The town wasn’t exactly bustling, but it was loud. Located directly under the glide path for a runway at Kennedy, Oceanside was almost as noisy as Coney Island on a spring Sunday. The difference being that graceful, soaring jets are more majestic than bone-rattling, earthbound subway trains. It wasn’t all that fancy a place, either. Many of the houses I saw were smaller than those in Midwood, Mill Basin, Dyker Heights, or Manhattan Beach. For the most part, the homes were modest, well-kept affairs with tidy front lawns and small backyards. Unlike in the city, though, these houses here weren’t squeezed in and shoehorned together. People could breathe a little in a place like Oceanside.
Wallace Casey’s house was very much in keeping with the other houses I’d seen in Oceanside. His street was a street of such houses. There was nothing showy or chesty about it. Nothing about it cried out for attention. Nothing about it made you want to turn away. I don’t know much about architecture, so I can’t tell you in what style the house was built. It had red painted clapboards with white trim and black asphalt roofing shingles. The aluminum storm door had some scroll work on it with a fancified letter C in a circle at the center. C for Casey, was my guess. The flashiest things about the place were the white-painted flower boxes that accented the street-facing windows. There was a small gravel driveway and an attached one-car garage. There was no car in the driveway. That didn’t mean no one was home. In fact, someone was home. As I watched the house, wondering what to do, I saw the shadowy figure of a woman twice pass by the front window.
I didn’t have much of a plan. I just sort of hoped Wallace Casey wouldn’t be home. After nearly getting run over and run off the road, after getting smacked in the ribs, getting tied up, and nearly getting kidnapped, I wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation. Sure, I’d been tough enough to break a guy’s nose with a single blow, but that was more a matter of surprise and survivaclass="underline" his surprise, my survival. But those clowns with their stupid masks were strictly amateur hour. If Casey was the menacing bastard I thought he was, I didn’t like my chances against him. And even if I was wrong about him and he was a flower child at heart, he was a man who had a fondness for sawed-off shotguns. Either way, I would definitely be the underdog.