When I looked over into the back seat and saw a writing pad from Aaron’s company, I got an idea, an idea I hoped wouldn’t get me in any more trouble or put me in any more danger than I was already in. I grabbed the pad, found a pencil in the glove box, and hopped out of the car. I crossed to the Casey house side of the street and approached it as if I had just come from their neighbor’s house. I rang the doorbell and waited.
“Who is it?” a woman asked, pulling the door back slightly, as far as the door chain would allow. This may have been the suburbs, but many, if not most, of the people who lived here came from the city. Old habits and caution die hard. “Can I help you?”
“Hi, I’m Joseph Jones from the Students for a Fair Draft. We’re an organization that — ”
She stopped me. “You mean the draft like for Vietnam?”
“Exactly. I’m in your town today to collect signatures for — ”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We’re for the war.”
It didn’t escape my notice that she said we, and not I. “That’s fine. Although I am against the war myself, our organization is neither pro nor con. What we are about is making sure that the draft is fair and that everyone has an equal chance of getting drafted. We don’t want the kids of rich and powerful people to be able to dodge the draft while poor kids go off to get killed far away from home.” I was encouraged. These were the first sentences she’d let me finish. “I was wondering if I could ask you to sign our petition, which we will present to Congress — ”
She stopped me again. “I’m sorry. I don’t think my husband would like me doing that. He’s a policeman and — ”
It was my turn to stop her. “Your husband’s a cop?”
“So what if he is?” She got understandably defensive.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I think a cop, a guy who puts on a uniform and risks his life every day, would really be for our cause.”
“Maybe, but I’m sorry. If you want, you can come back in a few minutes and talk to him. He’ll be home soon.” She closed the door.
I stood there for a few long seconds, stunned, unmoving, completely confused. Then, like a zombie, I crossed the street and got back into the car. If there hadn’t been a very real possibility that Casey would be rolling down the block at any second, I might have sat there for hours going over in my head the implications of what his wife had just told me. Instead I twisted the ignition key, put the car in gear, and drove. A few car lengths away from the corner, I caught sight of Wallace Casey’s chestnut Ford Galaxie in my rearview mirror. The nagging question repeated itself: What was a cop doing mixed up with the likes of Bobby Friedman? More importantly, why was Bobby Friedman mixed up with a cop? It wasn’t so much the questions that bothered me. It was that I couldn’t think of many good answers. No, I couldn’t think of any.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I had a sick, uneasy feeling in my gut during the entire ride over from Oceanside. It wasn’t that I was scared. I was scared. Given my recent history, it made perfect sense to be scared. But it wasn’t fear that was making me queasy. My unease was about something more insidious. It was as if I’d been walking around the last week or so with glasses with the wrong prescription and somebody had switched them back when I wasn’t looking. Suddenly, all the stuff that had appeared to be so out of focus was now clearer, if not quite crystal clear. I could see a way to connect some of the puzzle pieces that had seemed so utterly random and disconnected: Mindy’s warning to stay away from Bobby, the attempt to run Bobby down, Bobby showing up at the apartments above the fix-it shop, the cop on the Belt Parkway letting Bobby go. Even so, many of the events of the last several days still didn’t make much sense. There were plenty of puzzle pieces that continued to feel as if they were from a completely different puzzle.
At least I knew the cop was at home. As things were, walking into a neighborhood dive as an outsider was going to be uncomfortable enough. I never would have risked a visit if there was a chance Wallace Casey would be around. And when I stepped into the Onion Street Pub, I realized the only truly unusual thing about the joint was its name. If not for the few horse-racing-related props — an obvious concession to Aqueduct Racetrack’s proximity — the place might have been any bar on any street in any neighborhood in any borough in New York City. There were a few framed black-and-white photos of jockeys on horses in the winner’s circle at the nearby track, blankets of flowers tossed over the horses’ shoulders. Did the horses ever give a rat’s ass about the garlands and the glory? I doubted it. There was a saddle hung on the wall. A whip and riding boots too. There was a dusty, faded display of a jockey’s silks, goggles, and helmet, but the place didn’t smell like a barn. There was no stink of wet hay or horse shit. There were flies, though. I never understood how in February in New York, every other fly in the city has moved on to that great moldering garbage heap in the sky, yet you walk into any dive bar and voila, flies.
Although only two of the three patrons at the bar had lit cigarettes dangling from their slack lips, there was a mighty cloud of smoke hanging in the air like a drawn gauze curtain. Maybe the flies had taken up the habit too. Why not? If the February chill couldn’t kill them, smoking wouldn’t. The two guys at the bar — one about my dad’s age, the other looking old enough to be my grandfather’s father — peered up from their copies of the Daily Racing Form just long enough to take another drag on their smokes. Their gray stubbled faces, already sour with lifetimes of defeat, barely registered my presence. The woman at the bar, her blonde updo unmoving as she turned her head, gave me a long, hungry look worthy of Cassius. Apparently, I was her type. I think maybe anybody with male plumbing might have been her type. Almost anybody. Not the two losers at the bar, certainly.
The bartender was a different matter altogether. He’d put his eyes on me the second I opened the door and hadn’t taken them off me yet. He was an ex-Marine type, the kind with a hard blue stare, gray brush cut, and tattooed biceps. He had some mileage on him, most of it the ugly kind. Too young for WWII and too old for Nam, Korea was probably his war. He looked like he was still fighting it.
I sat down next to Blondie and her updo. She was about thirty going on forty, and had a once-pretty face that had seen way too many last calls for alcohol. Not only did she have trouble pushing away from the bar, she also seemed to have the same issue with the dinner table. She had a good thirty pounds on me. Well, maybe not so good. She smiled at me and I smiled back.
“Buy me a drink?” Blondie asked with a bit of desperation behind the come-on.
I looked at her glass. “Sure. What’s that, Scotch?”
“It is, on the rocks.”
I got the barman’s attention, pointed at Blondie’s glass and said, “One more of these and a Rheingold for me.” I threw a five-dollar bill on the bar.
The barman looked about as pleased as a fifteen-year-old kid late to his own circumcision. Maybe Blondie was his girl, but I didn’t think so. He just didn’t like strangers in his place. It upset the balance of the universe, the natural order of things. I decided to prove him right.
“You got a jukebox in this establishment?”
“Yeah, but you won’t like it,” he said, slamming our drinks on the bar.
“Why’s that?”
“No crappy psychedelic hippie shit on it. None of that Motown nigger shit, neither.”
I ignored him. Guys like him, they lived to get you going. They were so miserable and rotten inside, they needed to spew their bile on the rest of the world. I wasn’t in the mood, not yet, anyway.