Decaffeinated Corpse

My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. If Madame went down memory lane now, I’d lose Ellie for sure!

“Coney Island’s many miles away,” I pointedly interrupted. “It’s on the south end of the borough, on the Atlantic, probably over forty-five minutes away from where we are now.”

“And where are we now exactly?”

“Park Slope.”

Brooklyn was home to at least ninety different neighborhoods and two hundred nationalities, many of whom had created ethnic enclaves (not unlike Manhattan’s Chinatown or the nearly vanished Little Italy). Brooklyn’s more recent immigrants—from the Caribbean, Middle East, and former Soviet Union—had brought cultural color to many of the borough’s streets with native restaurants, festivals, and specialty groceries. In this upscale Brooklyn area, however, the overriding heritage appeared to be that of my own Village neighborhood: Transplanted Yuppie-Hipster (“Yupster” was the current pop-sociological term, Young Urban Professional Hipster). In fact, the area had so many relocated writers, editors, academics, and lawyers, Mike Quinn once joked to me that he’d blinked one day and realized Manhattan’s Upper West Side had teleported half its residents to his borough.

The red light changed to green, and we moved forward. We were now crossing Seventh Avenue, the main shopping area for the North Slope (the northern end of Park Slope), which boasted the sort of bistros, restaurants, and boutiques typically seen in Manhattan’s trendier neighborhoods.

“We’re still close to the city,” I mentioned for Madame, “certainly less than thirty minutes from the Manhattan crossings.”

“Well, you know what they say these days about real estate,” Madame noted, “anything within a half-hour commute to Manhattan, is Manhattan. I have an acquaintance in Brooklyn Heights, near the promenade—she tells me her brownstone’s been valued as high as a Chelsea townhouse.”

Brownstone... my memory kicked in, and I suddenly knew why Union Street sounded so familiar. It was Mike Quinn’s old street address. I’d never visited him in Brooklyn, but one slow afternoon while I was doing schedules in my office, I took a break and regressed into teenage crush mode to find his home by satellite on the Web.

I knew he was melancholy over selling the place, which wasn’t here in Park Slope, but two neighborhoods over in Carroll Gardens. Since his wife wanted the divorce, and they jointly owned the property, he was stuck. Apparently, the building was worth so much now (easily five times the value of their original purchase price fifteen years before), he couldn’t afford to buy her out, but the good news was that he’d be getting a nice chunk of change from his share of the sale.

“Union is definitely a cross street,” I told Madame, thinking back to that Web satellite map I’d consulted. “I’m sure we’re heading West.”

“Toward the East River?”

“Yes.”

The black SUV was still rolling forward, right behind Ellie’s Town Car. And I followed them for a few more minutes. We were now leaving the restored brownstones of Park Slope and entering the far less upscale neighborhood of Gowanus.

Madame pursed her lips as she took in the blighted area of rundown clapboard row houses tucked between dead factories and a network of abandoned shipyard waterways.

“Are those canals?” she said, gawking down one of the channels of water as we crossed the narrow Union Street bridge.

“You’re kidding? You’ve never heard of the Gowanus canal debate?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about that, but I didn’t realize they were actually canals...”

Gowanus, with its maze of narrow waterways, once served as a working extension of the nearby shipyard. When the ports shut down, the heavy industry left, and this neighborhood of factories and warehouses became an urban eyesore. Then artists started moving in, taking over and transforming the large spaces. A former soap factory, for instance, had been converted into a site for a community arts organization.

In more recent years, the area was “upzoned” to allow for the construction of residential buildings. Now two new towers were standing, overlooking the once stinky canals (which had since been cleaned up). A Whole Foods store was about to open, and major developers were buzzing about turning the entire area into a “Little Venice,” complete with the sort of Yupster restaurants and upscale rents we’d just left behind in the North Slope.

The debate right now was with residents who saw themselves being priced out of their homes. It was the same old song that had been sung so many times on Manhattan Island. Low rent immigrant and industrial areas, plagued with cracked sidewalks, graffiti, and crime, became havens for struggling artists who turned them trendy, making them gold mines for developers, who boosted rents, squeezing longtime residents and poor artists out.

“Uh-oh,” I mumbled.

“What?” Madame asked.

“This is the neighborhood where Matt’s renting a warehouse. Do you think Ellie’s on her way there for some reason?”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t know... Matt’s storing Ric’s decaffeinated green beans right now. They’re extremely valuable, and I have to tell you, at the moment, I don’t trust Ellie...”

“They’re not turning or stopping,” Madame noted. “Where is Matt’s warehouse exactly?”

“Just a few blocks away, I’m surprised he never took you to see it.”

“What’s to see? Bags of green coffee in a big building. I’ve seen them all my life, dear. Matt’s handling all that now.”

The buildings around us began to change again, from industrial to residential. The streets became cleaner, the graffiti disappeared, and well maintained brownstones now lined the blocks.

“We’ve entered Carroll Gardens,” I informed Madame.

But my focus was momentarily off the vehicles we were following. Mike Quinn’s brownstone was around here somewhere, and I was searching for a glimpse of it.

During my previous trips to Matt’s warehouse, my ex-husband had been driving, and I wasn’t about to sound like a teenager asking her father to “please drive by Mike’s house. I want to see where he lives...” At the moment, Madame and I were still on Union. We passed the intersection with Hoyt, then Smith (ten blocks down was the famous Smith and Ninth subway station, the highest elevated platform in New York’s entire subway system). Suddenly, a woman in another SUV, a cherry red one, pulled out of her parking space, and jumped right in front of me, cutting me off.

I hit the brakes. “Damn!”

Now there were two SUVs between me and Ellie’s car. Court Street was just ahead, and the line of traffic had stopped for a red light. I found it interesting that the Asian man in the black SUV was still following Ellie.

Coincidence? I wondered. Mike Quinn always said that in his line of work there were no coincidences.

The reminder of Mike and coincidences together had me back checking the street addresses. His old home had to be on this block. I peered down the row of connected brownstones, and noticed a FOR SALE sign in front of one of them. Like the others on this quiet, tree-lined street, the house was set back from the sidewalk, giving it a nice little front yard, delineated by a wrought iron garden gate.

I counted three floors and knew, on sight, that it was a valuable building. An owner could comfortably live on one or two floors and rent out the third. Buildings like this one, in this quiet, lovely neighborhood, a close commute to Manhattan, easily sold for one million dollars or more.

I tried to remember some of the funny things Mike had said about living here... how the area was named after the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence (Charles Carroll), but the area was more famous for a more modern Brooklyn native, Al Capone. The gangster had ended up in Chicago, but he’d begun his criminal career near here and was married at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea church just around the corner.

I wondered in passing if Mike’s wife and two kids had moved out yet, and I automatically scanned the street for any sign of them (Mike had shown me photos). But the narrow block was empty, save for a young woman with short dark hair and trendy glasses, talking on a cell phone as she pushed along a baby carriage. She was clearly one of the newer transplants to what had once been a neighborhood of working class Italian immigrants.