“She’d have realized Mahaffey put it there.”
“Uh-huh. And she’d have had twenty-five thousand reasons to thank him for it.”
“Huh?”
“The insurance,” I said.
“But you said they’d have to pay anyway.”
“Double indemnity,” I said. “They’d have had to pay the face amount of the policy, but if it’s an accident they’d have had to pay double. That’s if there was a double-indemnity clause in the policy, and I have no way of knowing whether or not there was. But most policies sold around then, especially relatively small policies, had the clause. The companies liked to write them that way, and the policy holders usually went for them. A fraction more in premiums and twice the payoff? Why not go for it?”
We kicked it around a little. Then she asked about the current case, the one that had started the whole thing. I’d wondered about the gun, I explained, purely out of curiosity. If it was in fact an automatic, and if the clip was in fact in his pocket and not in the gun where you’d expect to find it, surely some cop would have determined as much by now, and it would all come out in the wash.
“That’s some story,” she said. “And it happened when, thirty-five years ago? And you never mentioned it before?”
“I never thought of it,” I said, “not as a story worth telling. Because it’s unresolved. There’s no way to know what really happened.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s still a good story.”
The guy in Inwood, it turned out, had used a .38-caliber revolver, and he’d cleaned it and loaded it earlier that same day. No chance it was an accident.
And if I’d never told the story over the years, that’s not to say it hadn’t come occasionally to mind. Vince Mahaffey and I never really talked about the incident, and I’ve sometimes wished we had. It would have been nice to know what really happened.
Assuming that’s possible, and I’m not sure it is. He had, after all, sent me out of the room before doing whatever it was he did. That suggested he hadn’t wanted me to know, so why should I think he’d be quick to tell me after the fact?
No way of knowing. And, as the years pass, I find I like it better that way. I couldn’t tell you why, but I do.
“At first,” Mick Ballou said, “I thought the same as everyone else in the country. I thought the fucking cable went out.”
We were at Grogan’s, the Hell’s Kitchen saloon he owns and frequents, and he was talking about the final episode of The Sopranos, which ended abruptly with the screen going blank and staying that way for ten or fifteen seconds.
“And then I thought, well, they couldn’t think of an ending. But Kristin recalled the time Tony and Bobby were talking of death, and what it would be like, and that you wouldn’t even know it when it happened to you. So that was the ending, then. Tony dies, and doesn’t even know it.”
It was late on a weekday night, and the closemouthed bartender had already shooed the last of the customers out of the place and put the chairs up on the tables, where they’d be out of the way when someone else mopped the floor in the morning. I’d been out late myself, speaking at an AA meeting in Marine Park, then stopping for coffee on the way home. Elaine met me with a message: Mick had called, and could I meet him around two?
There was a time when most of our evenings started around that time, with him drinking twelve-year-old Jameson while I kept him company with coffee or Coke or water. We’d go until dawn, and then he’d drag me down to St. Bernard’s on West 14th Street for the butchers’ mass. Nowadays our evenings started and ended earlier, and there weren’t enough butchers in the gentrified Meat Market district to fill out a mass, and anyway St. Bernard’s itself had given up the ghost, and was now Our Lady of Guadalupe.
And we were older, Mick and I. We got tired and went home to bed.
And now he’d summoned me to discuss the ending of a television series.
He said, “What do you think happens?”
“You’re not talking about tv.”
He shook his head. “Life. Or the end of it. Is that what it is? A blank screen?”
I talked about near death experiences, all of them remarkably similar, with the consciousness hovering in midair and being invited to go to the light, then making the decision to return to the body. “But there’s not a lot of eyewitness testimony,” I said, “from the ones who go to the light.”
He thought about it, nodded.
“You’re a Catholic,” I said. “Doesn’t the Church tell you what happens?”
“There’s things I take their word for,” he said, “and things I don’t. Kristin thinks you meet your loved ones on the other side. But of course she’d want to think that.”
Kristin Hollander had lost her parents in a brutal home invasion, and had met Mick in its aftermath, when I sent him to her house to keep her safe. They’d grown friendly since.
“She has this set that puts you in mind of a movie screen,” he said. “We watched the show together and sat around for hours talking about it.” He drank whiskey. “There are some I’d not mind seeing again. My brother Dennis, for one. But after a few words about old times, what would we talk about for the rest of eternity?”
I wondered where this was going. He’d called me out in the middle of the night, and I had a feeling he wanted to tell me something, and I was afraid to ask what it was.
And so we drifted into a shared silence, not uncommon during our late evenings together. I was searching for a way to break it, but it was Mick who spoke first.
“There’s a favor I have to ask you,” he said.
“I dreaded hearing it,” I told Elaine. “I just knew he was going to tell me he was dying.”
“But he’s not.”
“He wants me to stand up for him. He’s getting married. To Kristin.”
“I figured that’s why he wanted to meet you. So he could tell you. You didn’t see it coming?”
“I thought they were just friends.”
She gave me a look.
“He’s forty years older than she is,” I said, “and spent those years tearing up the West Side. No, I didn’t see it coming.”
“You never noticed the way she looks at him? Or the way he looks at her?”
“I knew they enjoyed each other’s company,” I said, “but—”
“Oy,” she said. “Some detective.”
We had dinner at Paris Green, a few blocks south of our apartment on Ninth Avenue. I ordered the sweetbreads, and wondered not for the first time why they were called that, being neither sweet nor bread. Elaine pointed out that Google could clear that up for us in no more than thirty seconds. More like two hours, I told her, by the time I’d run out of other fascinating things to click on.
The fish of the day was Alaskan halibut, and that’s what she chose. After many years as a vegetarian, she’d been persuaded by a nutritionist to regard fish as a vegetable. At first she worried it would be the culinary equivalent of a gateway drug, and in no time at all she’d be cracking beef bones and sucking out the marrow. So far she hadn’t progressed past fish a couple of times a week.
It was around eight when Gary showed us to our table, and maybe an hour later when we said no to dessert and yes to espresso. It’s rare for her to have coffee, especially late in the day, and my surprise must have shown in my face. “It could be a long night,” she said. “I figure I’d better be awake for it.”
“I can see how much you’re looking forward to it.”
“About as much as you are. It’s got to be like a wake without a corpse. Except last night would have been the wake, so what’s this? The burial?”
“I guess.”
“I always thought the Irish wake made a lot of sense. Pour down the booze until you can think of something good to say about the deceased. My people cover the mirrors, sit around on hard wooden benches, and stuff themselves with food. I wonder what it was like last night.”
“I’m sure he’ll tell us.”
W
e finished our coffee, and I signaled our waitress for the check. Gary brought it himself. How many years had we known him? How many years had we been coming here a couple of times a month?
It seemed to me that neither he nor the restaurant had changed. He always looked as though something reminded him of a joke, and the light in his blue eyes hadn’t dimmed any. But his beard, still hanging from his long jaw like an oriole’s nest, showed some gray now, and his age showed at the corners of his eyes. And it was a night to notice such things.
“I didn’t see you last night,” he said. “Of course I didn’t go over until we closed up shop here. You’d probably headed for home by then.”
“That would be—”
“The big fella’s place. You’re friends, aren’t you? Or have I got it wrong, as I so often do?”
“We’re close friends,” I said. “I didn’t realize you knew him that well.”
“I don’t, not really. But he’s part of the neighborhood, isn’t he? I doubt I’ve been in Grogan’s a dozen times in as many years, but I made sure I got there last night.”
“Paying your respects,” Elaine suggested.
“And watching my neighbors take advantage of the open bar. A sight guaranteed to raise or lower your opinion of the human race, depending where it was to begin with. And, you know, being present for the end of an era, and isn’t that the most overused phrase at our command? Every time a sitcom’s canceled, someone proclaims it the end of an era.”
“And once in a while it is,” she said.
“You’re thinking of Seinfeld.”
“Well, yeah.”
“An exception,” he said, “that proves the rule. As is the shuttering of Grogan’s Open House. A fixture in the local landscape, and soon enough the building will be gone and no one will remember what used to be there. Our town, forever reinventing itself. I heard they made the owner such a good offer that he was willing to risk Mr. B’s wrath for selling the building out from under him. And I also heard that Mick owned the building, no matter whose name might be on the deed.”
“You hear lots of things,” I said.
“You do,” he agreed. “I’m pleased to report that the era of hearing things is still going strong.”
For longer than I’ve known him, my friend Mick Ballou has been the proprietor of Grogan’s Open House, a Hell’s Kitchen saloon at the southeast corner of Tenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. The place began as a hangout for the neighborhood hoodlums, or at least that segment thereof who pledged some sort of undefined allegiance to the man himself. In recent years it has attained a certain degree of raffish respectability, even as the neighborhood has gentrified around it. The new people who’ve moved into refurbished tenements or new high–rise condos like to stop in for a draft Guinness and point out what may or may not be bullet holes in the walls.
Mick has always tended to hire Irish lads as bartenders, most of them fresh transplants from Belfast or Derry or Strabane, but a Northern Ireland accent never kept a new man from learning how to make a Wild Mustang or a Novarian Sunset. The new crowd liked bellying up to the bar next to old neighborhood regulars, and a man who’d worked half a century as a subway motorman would be transformed in the telling into a desperate character with blood on his hands. The old fellows didn’t mind; they were just trying to make a glass of beer last until the next pension check arrived.
“Don’t come on the Friday,” Mick had told me. “’Twill be our last night, with the whole of the West Side sure to come out for it. An open bar until the taps run dry, and there’ll even be a bit of food.”
“And everybody’s welcome but me?”
“You would be welcome enough,” he said, “but you would hate it, as I expect to hate it myself. I won’t have Kristin there, and wouldn’t be there my own self had I any choice in the matter. Come on the Saturday, and bring herself.”
“Friday’s your last night,” I said.
“It is. And the following night there’ll be none but the four of us. And haven’t our best nights always been after closing time?”
We walked down Ninth and over Fiftieth, where the last of the Street Fair vendors were dismantling their booths. “Like nomads in Central Asia,” Elaine said. “Packing their yurts and heading for richer grazing.”
“A few years back their flocks would have gone hungry here,” I said, “or been prey for the local wolves. Now they sell T–shirts and Gap knockoffs and Vietnamese sandwiches, and the block association spends the fees installing security cameras and planting more ginkgo trees.”
“And look at the ornamental light posts,” she said. “Like the ones we saw in Paris.”
Grogan’s came into view as we neared Tenth Avenue. The tavern occupied the ground floor, with three levels of rental units above it. All the apartment windows facing the street had big white X’s on them, indicating that the building was scheduled for demolition. No light showed behind the X’s, and Grogan’s looked to be dark as well. I wondered if perhaps Mick had changed his mind and gone home, and then I saw one light glowing dimly through the front door’s little window.
We hesitated at the curb, although there were no cars coming, and Elaine responded to my unvoiced thought. “We have to,” she said.
Kristin unlocked the door for us. A light glowed softly in a leaded glass shade hanging over a table way in the back. There were four chairs grouped around the table, the only chairs in the room that hadn’t been put up on top of other tables. Mick wasn’t at the table, and I didn’t see him anywhere else, either.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “So’s himself.” She rolled her eyes. “‘So’s himself.’ Listen to me, will you? He’s in the office, he’ll be out in a minute. And now that you’re here—”
She arranged a cardboard CLOSED sign so that it covered the window. “Double duty,” she said. “Tells them we’re closed and keeps them from seeing there’s a light on.”
“All the world sees you as a Jewish–American Princess,” said the former Elaine Mardell. “Yet it’s clear you were born to be an Irish saloonkeeper.”
“A wee village pub in Donegal,” Kristin said. “On the wind–swept shores of Lough Swilly. That’s our favorite fantasy. The funny thing is I think I could actually enjoy it well enough. And so could he, for three weeks tops. Then he’d want to put a match to the adorable thatched roof and come home.”
She led us to the table. Her drink was iced tea, and we said that sounded good to us, too. Mick’s bottle of twelve–year–old Jameson was on the table, along with a glass and a little water pitcher. The Jameson bottle is clear glass, so I could note the color of its contents. I still like the color of good whiskey. Or of bad whiskey, for that matter, because the color doesn’t say anything about the quality. All it tells you is that you’ve got a thirst for it.
Before Kristin was back with our iced tea, Mick had emerged from the office in back, a paper bag in hand. “I had the devil’s own time finding a bag to put this in,” he said, “as if it would have been a hardship to tuck it under your arm and carry it unwrapped through the streets. We’ve no place for it in the house, and himself made the mistake of admiring it.”
I knew what it was before Elaine got it out of the bag, a 9x12 framed Irish landscape.
“It’s Conor Pass in the Dingle peninsula,” Kristin said. “It really looks like that, too. I think it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”
“It’s a hand–colored steel engraving,” Elaine said. “There was no color printing at the time, so there were people who added color one at a time by hand. There’s a lost art for you, but then so’s steel engraving.”
“The few arts not yet lost,” Mick said, “have their heads on the chopping block, waiting for technology to lop them off.” His hand moved first to the bottle, then to the water pitcher, then back to the bottle; he picked it up and poured a small measure of good Cork whiskey into his glass.
“Quite the affair last night,” he said.
“I was going to ask
.”
“Oh, it was a right hooley. They paid their twenty dollars at the door and for that they got to drink until the well ran dry. ’Twas for the help, you know. I had four men working, and they got to divide just over eight thousand dollars.”
“Not bad for a night’s work.”
“Well, it was a long night, and that crowd kept them hopping. But they had their tips on top of that, and the tips are decent when the drinks are free.” He’d had his glass in his hand, and now he took the smallest sip from it. “I stood at the door taking the money, and being asked the same fucking questions all night long. ‘Wasn’t it terrible that the greedy landlord sold the building out from under me?’”
Kristin laid a hand on his arm. “When all along,” she said, “the man himself was the greedy landlord.”
“I was the best landlord that ever lived,” he said. “Three floors above me packed full with rent–controlled tenants, and the heat bill for the building was higher than its rent roll, and I never even bothered putting in for what rent increases the law allowed me.”
“A saint,” Elaine said.
“I was that. If the Creator were half the landlord I was, Adam and Eve would never have left Eden. My lot would be late with the rent, they might not pay for months on end, and I gave them no trouble. If there’s one thing that’ll save me a bit of time in Purgatory, it’s how I treated my tenants. And then, as a final sweetener, I gave each of them fifty thousand dollars to move.”
I said that was generous.
“I could well afford it. Don’t ask what Rosenstein got them to pay for the building.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll tell you anyway. Twenty–one million dollars.”
“A nice round sum.”
“The sum,” he said, “was to be twenty million, which is rounder if not so nice, and then Rosenstein went back to them and said his client was fond of the old English system, and preferred guineas to pounds. Are you familiar with guineas?”