CHAPTER 23

COLD AND GRAY

“SO, YOU STOLE A bike,” Maggie said like a mother scolding her errant son.

“I returned it,” I said, fighting the desire to whine.

“That’s something, I suppose,” she said. “But what if down there the bike had been stolen? What then?”

“That would have been a problem. But it wasn’t stolen, was it? No harm done. End of story.”

I stretched out on the couch. Maggie issued a grunt of disapproval so great my bookcases trembled.

“How did your meeting with the new rebbe go?”

“More than I expected.”

“Meaning?”

“Ratsy Yitzi remains Ratsy Yitzi, ugly and irritating. But now he’s got enormous power, and a very tall tale that he’s whipped up with some very shrewd assistance.”

“Oh?”

I told Maggie about the Monday night dream and the Tuesday afternoon reveal, how a packed house sat in a darkened room rolling steel balls in their hands and devouring what poured out of Yitzi.

“It’s quite extraordinary, actually, in a Benito Mussolini sort of way, if El Duce lived in the New Age.”

“Fine. But what did you learn about Shmulie?”

I did not respond.

“You wasted your time.”

“Not exactly. I did get a healthy dose of Schmeltzer philosophy.”

“You wasted your time.”

“I did get a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich,” I said. “With mayonnaise.”

“But as for locating Shmulie?”

“There was no concrete information, that’s certain. But an odd thing happened just as I was stomping the hell out of the place.”

“Oh?” Maggie said. “I am a fan of oddities, usually.”

I told her about stumbling into 42, about the monitor focused on a blue door.

I looked around the living room and took note of Ezekiel’s absence.

“What’s happened with the good prophet?” I asked.

“He popped up not long after you left, sang about selling postcards of the hanging in the shower, drank some coffee, refused some oat bran, and staggered on out.”

“Did he say anything?” I asked.

“Something about searching some more for dry bones, which I assume was a reference to the thirty-seventh chapter of his book. Not that I know where one can find a valley of dry bones in this part of the City, or the chariot he keeps saying he’s going to ascend in.”

“With Zeke you never know.”

“True.”

I looked at the screen. The great German actress appeared in an image from that wonderful movie, Witness for the Prosecution, a tired-looking, German WWII survivor brought to England by Tyrone Power. A fabulous conniver in this film, she gets her comeuppance in the end. “So, what do we do now?” she asked.

“It’s chilly and gray outside.”

“It’s February in New York City, Nick. It’s always gray and chilly.”

I rose from the couch and stretched. “I think I’ll settle down with some tea and read the collected works of Yitzi Menkies.”

“Your plan has merit, Nick. Stay indoors, and off other people’s bicycles, and out of old Volkswagens.” Another pause. “But what will you do for exercise?”

“I could borrow the bike next door again.”

“I’ll assume that’s a joke.”

“You don’t find me funny?”

“No, Nick, not funny today.”

I touched my toes in a demonstration of my physical health. “Not bad for an aging cocker.”

“You know how beneficial exercise can be, Nicholas. I don’t want your body returning to its previous unfit condition. Shall I be in touch with a repair shop and make an appointment for you?”

I once had both a wife and a mother. My wife left me, and my mother passed on at a ripe enough age. I now had a domineering computer.

“I’ll take care of it when I’m ready. Now will you please heat up some water for me? I need to get to work. And I’d like a cup of tea.”

Tea sat beside me as I settled into my favorite reading chair and opened Menkies’s book to the table of contents. Prologue, Introduction, Chapter 1: The Old Kobliner Philosophy, Chapter 2: The New Land, Chapter 3: The Land of No-Mind, Chapter 4: The New Thought Idea, and so forth through twelve chapters. Three hundred and seventy-five pages of what promised to be third-rate Jewish mysticism conveyed by a fourth-rate writer.

But the prose wasn’t too bad. Perhaps Menkies had developed some intellectual muscle. Or he had a good ghostwriter. In either case, the read wasn’t the masochistic exercise I’d feared.

“The new Schmeltzer philosophy,” he wrote on page 220, “entails a surrender of magnificent proportions. We are always the tabula rasa, receiving the Word from the Rebbe, peace be unto him. The teachings given you make your spirit soar, achieve true Being, and holy Obedience. All is love. The NTI brings the end of melancholy, rancor, pain, inner imbalance. All is well.”

As I digested this ostensible wisdom, Maggie interrupted.

“Nick,” she said.

I was startled. “Yes.”

“You have a call coming in on your old-fashioned telephone.” I kept my old landline around primarily for reasons of nostalgia. I had used it to call my parents, but they’d been gone now for some years. I hadn’t received a call on that line for a very long time.

“Can you tell who’s calling?”

“This older technology prevents me from identifying the caller. Do you want me to disconnect?”

“No. No. I’ll take it. Send it to my mobile.” I went to my desk where my mobile sat on a pad charging. I picked it up.

“Nicky? It’s me, Abe.” His voice was buoyant.

“Hello, Abe. How are you?”

“Wonderful, just wonderful,” he answered.

“Good. Why wonderful?”

“I just got off the phone with Shmulie,” he said, nearly giddy.

“You’re sure it was him?”

“I don’t know my own son’s voice?”

“What did he say?”

“We only talked for a moment. He apologized for not calling for so long. He couldn’t help it, he said.”

Why would Shmulie reach out to his father now?

“Did he tell you where he was calling from?”

“I asked him. He’s far from New York and safe, that I shouldn’t worry. That’s all. But it was enough.”

There was a loud noise on the other end. Abe shouted, and then he dropped the phone. I heard a muffled scream, then silence followed by a click, as someone returned the premodern phone to its cradle. I stood still, tense, indecisive.

“Call the police, Maggie.”

***

After around twenty-five minutes of hard peddling through Prospect Park, as always empty of people, onto Ocean Parkway and into Midwood, I arrived. Pumping through the cold, a drizzle of sweat ran down my back. I hadn’t been to Abe’s house in decades, though it stood just a few miles from my apartment. The last time I found myself in Midwood was after my mother died. I had come to clean out and sell the old house. That was, wow, fifteen years ago.

The police had arrived at Abe’s ahead of me. Three cop cars sat out front as a small crowd gathered. Uniformed police stood guarding the crime scene as the sun set, enhancing February’s chill.

Abe’s house appeared neglected, a small, two-story place, shingles missing from the roof, one of the shutters swinging precariously by a nail from a second-story window. The five concrete steps leading to the front door were cracked. The railing for the stairs had dropped away. That Abe hadn’t long ago fallen down those stairs and broken something was a wonder. The front door had been smashed in, a strip of yellow already set up to denote a crime scene.

As I moved toward the house a burly officer stepped in front of me. “Can’t go in, sir,” he said firmly.

I stood there trying to come up with a story that would get me in. To some I might be Nick Bones, but to this cop, I was a zhlub off the street, trying to mess with his business.

“I knew this guy,” I said.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “I can’t let you in. Please let us get on with our work.” A police sergeant came over to check out what was going on.

What the hell, I thought. It worked once; why not twice? I pulled up my university ID on my phone and put it in their faces.

“Recognize me?” I asked.

The sergeant gave me the same look I received from Brick, who was, perhaps, beneath this very spot.

“Jesus. You’re the guy found that guy’s bones. I heard of you,” the first cop said.

“Let him through,” the sergeant said.

As I pulled up the yellow band and began to enter, the second cop asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I was on the phone with the victim when he got killed. Maybe a half hour ago.”

“You hear anything that might help us?”

I wondered how much to say. “Can I see Abe Shimmer, please?”

“What’s left of him,” the sergeant said.

We moved into the house. He led me from the living room filled with old furniture and framed photographs into the kitchen. Abe lay on the kitchen floor, blood soaking his body and caking his hair. He’d fallen right beside the table where Shmulie and I had studied Talmud and ate the sugar cookies. He was wearing a gray cardigan sweater and slippers, eyes open wide, looking nowhere. This dead old man had scaled his way out of the Holocaust to America and built a life in Midwood only to end his time alone on his kitchen floor.

“How did he die?” I asked the sergeant.

“Can’t be sure, but I’ve seen enough to be pretty sure it was a knife.”

“Doesn’t a knife seem an odd way to kill someone these days?”

“People get killed all kinds of ways these days,” the cop said.

I wandered around the room for a moment.

“What did you hear on the phone?”

“Not much. I’ve spent the last few days looking for Shmulie Shimmer, Abe’s son.”

“The drug lord?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Abe asked me to,” I said, pointing vaguely toward the kitchen.

“Why?”

“The old man was sick. Wanted to hear from his son before he died.”

“Not going to happen now.”

“Actually, it did. He called me and told me he’d just heard from his son. I heard a noise I now see was the door being smashed in.”

“Were you and he close?”

“A very long time ago. When he looked me up, that was the first time I’d seen him in years, decades.”

“Why’d he come to you to look for his son?”

“He’d heard of Nick Bones. Thought I might help.”

I caught the cop rolling his eyes. He asked me if I had any idea who’d want to kill him.

“None. Couldn’t it have been a regular burglary?”

“So far there’s no evidence of theft. It looks like someone busted in, stabbed him and ran the hell out the door, in front of the whole neighborhood, for God’s sake.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Not yet, but we’re canvassing,” the cop said. We were back out on the porch. His gaze swept the street. “I can’t see how one or more people could smash in the front door of a house on this block in daylight, kill a guy, skip out, and nobody sees them. But no one’s running over to volunteer information.”

“I grew up in this neighborhood,” I said. “Right down the street from here”—pointing toward my street. “If something like this happened when I was a kid, people would be climbing over each other to get you the bad guys.”

“Times change.”

We walked back into the living room. A photograph of Shmulie and me hung on the wall. I pointed it out.

“Just thought of something,” the sergeant said. “What device did you talk to Abe on?”

“On my old landline, but I route all my calls through my computer.”

“You know, conversations are almost always saved these days, if they’re routed through a computer. Could you send it to me?”

“Of course. Don’t know if it’ll do any good.”

“You’d be surprised how much information we can get from just a little bit of background noise.”

“I’ll check into it right now. Give me a number to have it sent to.” He pulled out a pad of paper and wrote down a number for me.

I called Maggie.

“Hello, Nicholas. Did you make it to Abe’s?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“He’s dead, right?”

“Yes.”

“Terrible,” she said. “That poor, dear man. Sad.”

I waited a moment for her wires, as if she had wires, to cool down. “Do you have a recording of my call with Abe?” I asked.

“Of course, Nick. My memory is filled with recordings of all kinds, some fascinating, most quite boring.”

“Would you mind sending the conversation off to the number I’m about to give you?”

“As you wish, Nick. But there’s an easier and more efficient—”

“Just do it,” I said. I gave her the number.

“If that’s what you want.”

I turned to the sergeant. “You’ll have it in a moment,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll give it to the homicide detectives when they get here. Maybe we can do something with it. I’ll let you know.”

“Abe was alone. His wife died a couple of years ago, and his son lives God knows where,” I said. “What’s going to happen to the body?”

“We’ll take him to the city morgue and our forensics guys will confirm what seems to be the case. Then, ordinarily, we’d turn him over to his next of kin. But you say he doesn’t have any—”

“None that I know of. It was a small family, and they’re both gone.”

“Can you help?”

Who else is there? Crap. Not only was no one going to be paying me the private dick’s twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses for tobacco and booze, I was now going to have to buy my late client a funeral and see him interred six feet under in the middle of frigid February.

Among the many things I did not believe in was karma. But if I did, I’d be engaged in some hard conjecturing as to what loathsome deeds I’d committed in some past forgotten life to deserve the one I was consigned to live now.

It was dark, and the sergeant offered me a ride home. I declined, preferring to bike. I pulled my scarf around my neck and traveled to my side of the park in the cold and dark. Abe was dead; so was my paycheck. Should I leave Shmulie in the past and get on with the present without him? No. I couldn’t. Shmulie had taken too much from me already. That son of a bitch was mine.