He was up when I got out of the shower and busy worrying a bald spot in the carpet. He wanted to know what that mumbo jumbo was that I had whispered about taking a test. I detailed my conversation with the desk clerk. MacClough didn’t bother calling Kira names. He had been a cop too long to get indignant about prostitution. To him, it was a business not too unlike most others. There were users and people who got used. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart.
“How long before you get the results?”
“You know,” I laughed, “I didn’t ask. Having the test done was stupid, anyway. It’ss take weeks for me to develop HIV antibodies if I’m infected. I guess I just panicked.”
“Yeah, I never thought I’d ever look back at worrying about the clap as the good old days, but Christ almighty, it’s a nightmare out there now.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”
“Thanks, John, but-”
“Hear me out, schmuck. If she’s a high-ticket girl, her employers have a vested interest in keeping her healthy. She’s a valuable commodity. She probably gets tested all the time. Besides, whoever put her close to you wants you outta town as soon as possible and wants you to stay out. Why risk getting you sick and coming back here dredging up all kinds of shit? It’s stupid and from what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think we’re dealing with idiots. Crime works best when nobody notices it. Sound reasonable to you?”
“Sounds like a rationalization,” I winked, “but thanks.”
“Yeah, well, maybe it is.” He hesitated a bit before speaking again. “You know you’ve got to let her keep coming here. If she finds out her cover is blown, we’re fucked. Her employers will close down shop and we won’t find jack shit.”
“I know, John.”
“I’m just worried about you, Klein.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I’ve been pretty worried about you lately. When I came in here, you were having a bad dream. You were twitching like mad and mumbling, ‘I’m sorry.’ What’s wrong? Does this have anything to do with the Boatswain-Hernandez thing?”
“You’re right, I was having a bad dream.” His whole face smiled but for his eyes. “I dreamed I was asking a Jewish girl to marry me and she thought the five carat ring I bought her wasn’t big enough. You bet I was saying I was sorry.”
“Get the fuck out of here, you antiSemite.”
“I’m not antiSemitic,” he protested, “I only hate you. Now get some sleep. The slopes await us.” He closed the door behind him.
I dialed both Larry Feld’s office and home numbers and got two machines. I hung up twice without leaving messages. After the second hang up, I dutifully went through the motions of going to sleep. I spent the rest of the time till sunup playing peekaboo with every bad decision I had ever made.
Coney Island Burning
Larry Feld was unhappy. That was par for the course. His parents had set a good example. Today he was unhappy about answering phone calls at sunrise. He was unhappy I had waited so long to get back to him after his fax. But what made him most unhappy-and this, of course, went unsaid-was the prospect that I no longer needed him or his dirty little stories.
I was usually amenable to playing the game his way: answering his questions, letting him gloat when I got things wrong. I wasn’t in the mood today. I didn’t know that I’d ever be in the mood again. I was scared for Zak. I was scared for myself, too scared to play straight man to Larry Feld’s wounded ego or to stroke the lost little boy that would live inside him forever. I had done enough of that when we were kids. And when he began interrogating me about his fax, I told him to forget it. He was either going to tell me about Boatswain-Hernandez or he wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to play.
“No, Dylan, it doesn’t work that way.”
“Larry!”
“Sorry,” he said without feeling. “But let me ask you something. Do you remember what your brother did straight out of law school?”
“He was an assistant district attorney in the Bronx. So what?”
Feld didn’t answer that. He just said, “Go read your first book and put two and two together. Even you can get to four.”
“I’m not in the mood for this, Larry.”
“The next time you ask a question, make sure you’re ready to hear the answer.”
He hung up before I could say another word. I tried in vain to muster some enthusiasm for going to Cyclone Ridge with MacClough. Giving up, I rang John’s room and begged out. He said he understood and that I would probably have just gotten in his way. He was right. In the shape I was in, I was of no use to anyone, particularly myself. I closed my eyes and, more out of the need for escape than exhaustion, I fell deeply into dreamless sleep.
I got up around noon and noticed the message light on my phone was flashing red. I buzzed the desk. Kira had stopped by to say she would see me tonight around 8:00. I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel right. She had always played the guessing game with me; would she show up or wouldn’t she? Why, I wondered, the change in tactics. Maybe she wanted to show me how much I was missed. Maybe she got paid extra for that.
Without trying to lose my entourage, I took a walk about campus and asked around for Guppy. Like Valencia Jones, everyone seemed to know about Guppy’s reputation. No one seemed to know him or how to get in touch with him. Guppy was the kind of guy who gets in touch with you. One kid told me that he had heard that Guppy lived in the tunnels beneath campus. I asked the kid if he had taken his meds today.
Having struck out on my hunt for the great Guppy, I went over to the Riversborough public library and sat down with a copy of my first book, Coney Island Burning. Ich! It was really hard reading my own work, especially the early stuff. So I read the liner notes and hoped I would get whatever it was Larry Feld had hinted at. They went like this:
While looking into the suspicious death of an old basketball buddy, insurance investigator Wyatt Rosen finds himself trapped in a racial firestorm. With New York City’s African-American community ready to explode, Rosen, along with his best friend-ex-NYPD detective Timmy O’Shea-race against the clock to prove his old friend’s murder was a crime of passion, not police brutality.
In their quest, Rosen and O’Shea are forced to enlist an unlikely cast of characters including a radical black preacher, a Hasidic rabbi and a reformed underworld hitman. Rosen and O’Shea spend as much of their time juggling the diverse agendas and personalities of their team as they do fighting against the political and social forces aligned against them.
Rosen and O’Shea lock horns with Janson Whitehurst, an ambitious assistant district attorney who will stop at nothing to further his career, and his band of loyal toadies. There is nonstop action as O’Shea goes undercover to weed out the bad cop whose greed and carelessness opened this Pandora’s box of ill-gotten gains, backroom deals and murder.
Along the way, Rosen runs into his first love and desperately seeks to rekindle the romance he had turned his back on years ago. Come for the ride as O’Shea confronts the man he is convinced is responsible for the death of his former partner, Jack Spinner, but who may also hold the fate of the city in his grasp.
At its core, Coney Island Burning is a hard-boiled novel with a 90s edge. .
I didn’t get it, not right away. I braced myself and began turning past the title page, past the copyright, past the dedication and acknowledgments to the first chapter. Then, I’m not certain I know what made me do it, but I turned back to the dedication and acknowledgments. And there were their names, separated by only a few lines:
“For my brothers, Jeffrey and Josh, who showed me that heroes can have clay feet and still stand tall.
I would like to thank my friend and technical advisor, John MacClough, for his inspiration and support.”