She tamped flakes of tobacco into the bowl and didn’t look at me.
“Beatrice,” I said. “Mom.”
“It was different then,” she said.
“Getting really fucking tired of hearing that.”
“Well it was,” she said. “You don’t understand ’cause you grew up in a safe place. Back then, the kids that hung out in that park were rotten to the core. A decent person couldn’t even walk through there.”
“Did Matt and Joe arrest Rosato there?”
My mother struck a kitchen match off the railing and bent low. I loomed over her, cupping my hands to provide a windscreen. She coughed and broke the match in two and tossed both pieces toward the can.
“Some things a cop’s wife knows not to ask,” she said. “Whatever your father did, I’m sure he felt he had to.”
It was late afternoon, the sun screened by slate-colored clouds. I walked around Clark Park, trying to imagine a time when it felt ominous to do so. Instead I saw a troop of Catholic students occupying the fields, a pair of middle-aged women kissing on a park bench, a kid on a bike following his father in a circuit of the basketball court, legs pumping with more assurance as the motion became familiar to him. Joe Itami wasn’t among us.
Katz phoned to say he’d looked up Michael Rosato, and found a record of drug offenses and property crimes going back to his twenties, probably further. Nothing in the last few years. Evidently he’d gotten clean.
“More a shit-disturber than a hard-ass,” Katz said. “He would’ve been seventeen, eighteen back in the day. Part of the Clark Park Gang. I asked one of the old-timers about them. She said the park gangs used to be, quote, unquote, pretty rough customers.”
“What I heard too.”
“Rosato’s known associates are mostly dead or moved away. The name that comes up the most is Holditch, Gordon, no middle initial. He did a stint for larceny back in the early eighties, but cleaned up and started a business. ’Member Gord the Stereo Guy, had the store on Alma and 10th?”
“Sure, with the commercials.” A jovial fat man jumping over a whiskey keg to prove his customers had him over a barrel, but only for a limited time.
“Gord’s dead, but his wife still lives at 30th and Main. She says a car went by her house this morning, a couple times, slow. Could’ve been a Nissan. Want to pick me up?”
I said I would.
The Holditch living room was a shrine to the late store as much as its late owner. Framed photos of Gord on opening day, full-page ads, an article in the Georgia Straight, all decorated the walls. On the floor behind a pair of recliners was the store’s neon sign, unplugged, furry with dust, its cord wound loosely around the top of the G.
Nelly Holditch was a large pretty woman in a paisley blouse and dun-colored slacks. Her frizzy brown hair was loosely ponytailed, a few white roots showing. She had coffee ready, and while she poured, she told us about her husband’s nightmares.
“Gord got sober the year we married. Never left the wagon after that. I know he’d had some bad times before me. Once, twice a year, he’d wake up with his side of the sheets soaked through. It’d take him hours to unwind. When I’d ask, he’d say he was thinking of old friends.”
“Michael Rosato?” Katz asked.
“He mentioned a Mikey but I never met him. I guess Mikey’s life hadn’t turned out so well. He couldn’t kick his problems the way Gord did. Poor guy.”
“Something happened to them in Clark Park,” I said.
“Lots. It’s where they used to congregate. They were kids — punks, I guess you’d call them. Lot of broken homes, abuse, parents who drank or did whatever. The park was where they’d get away from all that.”
“The police bothered them?”
“Harassed them,” she said. “Any time there was a fight or a break-in in the neighborhood, it was those evil kids in Clark Park. Some of the cops thought Gord was the ringleader, and really had it out for him.”
“He ever mention a cop named Joe Itami?”
“No. There was one name...” She sighed. Her irises traveled in orbit as she tried to recall.
“Wakeland,” Katz said.
Nelly’s head made deep, emphatic nods. “Him, yeah. I remember ’cause we saw the name on a business ad somewhere, a couple years ago. Security company, I think. Gord tensed right up. That night he had one of his sweat spells.”
I tried not to show any emotion. It was easy. Anger and shame and disbelief all roiled through me at once, canceling each other out. I didn’t know what to feel. Joe Itami’s words came back to me.
“People saw Gord as this happy, funny guy,” Nelly said. “A real character. And for the most part he was. God, no one could make me laugh like him. But something happened back in the day, and once in a blue moon it would creep to the surface. I’d tell him to forget it, it was ages ago. Gord would say, Easy for you, they didn’t put you in the drink.”
“You think his alcoholism resulted from whatever happened with the police?” Katz said.
“I do, yes. He fought it, and beat it, but it was always waiting to pounce.”
We finished our coffee and left, making one last circuit of the Drive. Rush hour slowed our progress. We peered at every building, down every side street, at every face no matter how unlike Joe Itami’s. Katz smoked. The stereo hummed. Chris Cornell, “Preaching the End of the World.”
Finally, Katz said, “It was their job.”
“What was? Beating up teenagers? Or kidnapping — that part of the job?”
“Those gangs weren’t just troubled kids,” Katz said. “They caused riots. Hurt people. Scared an entire neighborhood. The word came down to clean up the parks, whatever it took. Joe and Matt were a part of that. The H-Squad, the Heavy Squad, they called it.”
“Meaning they targeted the kids in Clark Park, Rosato and Holditch specifically.”
“Not like my dad ever talked about it,” Katz said. “I had to ask the old-timers on the job. No one speaks too much about what went on back then, who signed off. Black eye for the top brass and all that. But they went after those gangs hard.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. I wasn’t especially shocked by the revelation. I’d never doubted my father’s capacity for violence. But the lack of specifics was frustrating. “Hard meaning what, exactly?”
“What I heard, they’d pick up a gang member at home, take him for a ride somewhere, and throw a scare into him.”
“Take him fucking where, Katz? Scare him how?”
“I dunno, Dave, just that my dad must be reliving whatever it is they did. It’s burned on his brain. Whatever it was drove one kid to drugs, another to the bottle.”
“The drink,” I said.
“Whatever. My point, we need to figure out—”
“Not whatever,” I said. “Holditch told his wife, Didn’t put you in the drink. Not the bottle, not drinking. You want to scare a kid in East Van, the kind that’s not afraid of anything on the streets, where would you take them?”
Katz coughed, dropping his vaporizer as the answer came to him.
Joe had driven the Nissan across the uneven grass above the New Brighton Park beach, leaving the headlights on as he walked his captive out onto the narrow pier. It was almost dark, and he must have been waiting for nightfall to make his move.
The Cadillac bounced as it followed the tracks Joe had left in the grass. We parked alongside and raced across the sand toward the pier. The planks creaked and shuddered under our feet.