His smile broadened. “Jeez, you know, for the life of me, I don’t remember that,” he lied. “Maybe you’re confusing me with somebody else. I hear you and my wife are good pals, huh? Students for a Fair Draft, right? You have that petition on you? I’d like to sign it.”
“Jeez,” I parroted him. “You know, for the life of me, I don’t remember that.”
“Okay, Prager, now that you got that outta your system, you wanna let me know why you needed to see me so bad?”
“First things first, Detective. I don’t suppose this will matter to you or that you’ll do anything about it, but that guy, Detective Nance, who was in here before you …”
“What about him?”
“Well, in the five minutes we were together, he slapped me, kicked me, pushed me onto my back, choked me, threw a lit cigarette in my face, used a religious slur, and threatened me. Other than that, it was love at first sight. Don’t you guys ever stop to wonder why my generation hates you so much?”
“He’s an asshole. Aren’t any of your friends assholes, Prager?”
“Yeah, sure, but they aren’t bullies.”
He shook his head. “No, that’s right. Your friends just try to blow up entire city blocks and kill as many cops as they can.”
“As a general rule, I don’t believe in killing people. And just so you know, Susan Kasten and that bunch aren’t my friends.”
“You sure about that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Detective?”
“Isn’t Bobby Friedman your best friend?”
“Bobby works for you and don’t even try to deny it. I saw you pick up or drop off the package in his trunk at the airport the other day. Explosives, right? I followed you and the van to the Onion Street Pub, and then out to that garage in College Point. If I hadn’t run out of gas, I probably would have found you out that day.”
He applauded. “Keep going.”
“Bobby was your way into the group. I don’t know how you coerced him to turn on his friends, but you did. You supply the explosives to him. He supplies them to the Committee, and he supplies you with information. I knew that airport run thing he was doing was bullshit. I just couldn’t figure out the angle, but I never could keep up with Bobby that way. It was all pretty neat until Jimmy found out about it and ratted Bobby out. So don’t talk to me about my friends being involved.”
“Some are closer than friends, like Mindy Weinstock, for instance.”
“Mindy? Mindy’s in the hospital. She just came out of a coma, for chrissakes! I just saw her tonight. She can barely speak. And it was one of Susan Kasten’s flunkies, this guy named Abdul Salaam, who put her in the coma in the first place. How can she have anything to do with this?”
“Come on, Moe. I can call you Moe, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re a smart guy, a very smart guy. Look how far you got on your own.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“What’s funny, Moe?” he asked. “Most people I know don’t think I’m very funny.”
“Susan Kasten said almost exactly the same thing about how far I got.”
“She was right. Without hardly any resources, you nearly got to the bottom of this thing.”
“All I did was stumble around.”
“Well, you stumbled around pretty fuckin’ good, better than my whole task force and half the federal agencies in this country. Maybe we should try stumbling around a little more often.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But don’t change the subject. Mindy had nothing to do with this.”
“She had everything to do with this.”
“Bullshit!”
“You think so? I don’t. I think your girlfriend’s in this up to her eyeballs.”
“Prove it.”
“I won’t have to. You can do it for me.”
“What are you talking about?”
He said, “Come with me.”
“Where’re we going?”
“To open up your eyes that last little bit.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Casey refused to tell me where we were going even after we got into his chestnut Galaxie. In a weird way it felt nice to be inside his car instead of following around behind it. As we drove, he asked me to tell him about what had happened at Hyman Bergman’s house earlier.
“You know what quid pro quo means, Detective?”
“You scratch my ass, I’ll scratch yours.”
“I’ve never heard it put that way before, but yeah, like that.”
“So who’s scratching whose ass first?”
“I’ll tell you everything about what happened at Bergman’s house and what led up to it, if we can talk about Samantha Hope and Marty Lavitz.”
“We’ll see,” was what he said as he turned left onto Coney Island Avenue from Avenue Z.
“Not good enough.”
“For now, it’s all that’s on the table, Moe. Show me you’re as smart as I think you are. Take it.”
I took it. I didn’t see the point in holding back. Chances were they weren’t really going to let Nance beat it out of me, as much as he would have liked to, but I figured the cops had their ways. For all I knew, they would throw my ass in jail and charge me with murder. I could be stubborn, but not to the point of stupidity. I told him everything … well, almost everything. I worked backwards from Bergman’s house to the night I bailed Bobby out of the Brooklyn Tombs.
“That was smart thinking, telling them that Jimmy was the rat,” he said, turning off Coney Island Avenue onto Avenue I. “It probably saved your lives.”
“It was the only thing I could think to do. I knew they were gonna kill Bobby, and they were probably gonna kill me.”
“They would’ve had no choice.”
Even after I had a pretty good idea of where we were going, I didn’t comprehend why we were going there. We parked outside Burgundy House in the exact same spot Bobby’s car had been parked on the day of the big snowstorm. And for reasons I couldn’t fathom, I just broke down. I was crying like a little kid, sobbing so fiercely I could swear the car shook. It didn’t make any sense. Only a half hour before, I couldn’t feel anything about having watched two men shot to death practically within arm’s length of me. And now, suddenly, I was overcome at the sight of a darkened driveway at the entrance to a dirty little basement apartment. I might not have understood what was happening to me, but Detective Casey seemed to. He gave me as much time as I needed.
When I settled down, he asked, “Who said that thing about never being able to go home again?”
“Thomas Wolfe, I think. It’s the title of a book. You Can’t Go Home Again.”
“He’s right. You can’t.”
I didn’t get it, not then. “So we’re in front of Burgundy House, so what?”
“You tell me. What happened here?”
“Like I said, I met Mindy here after I bailed Bobby out of the Brooklyn Tombs.”
“And you said she was acting strange, right?”
“Strange isn’t the word for it, man. She was drinking bourbon and smoking. There was a sense of desperation about everything she did that night.”
“You think you know why?” he asked.
“I do. She must’ve just come from a meeting of the Committee where she found out that Bobby had betrayed them to you. They no doubt blamed him for what had happened to Samantha and Marty. Look, Detective Casey, didn’t I just go over this with you a few minutes ago?”
“I’m just a big dumb cop who doesn’t even know who Thomas Wolfe is. Humor me, okay?”
“At the same meeting of the Committee, Mindy also must’ve found out they meant to kill Bobby for his betrayal. She loves Bobby. They go way back. Bobby introduced her to me. That’s why she was so flipped out that night, and why she warned me to stay away from him. She was trying to protect me.”
“Okay. What else?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. Somehow the Committee found out that Mindy meant to warn Bobby, and they sent this Abdul Salaam guy after her.”