fate, had eaten away at my mother-in-law. I looked in the mirror. I looked at my wife. I had seen what the miscarriage had done to us. I didn’t like thinking about what would become of me if anything ever happened to Sarah. In the end, it wasn’t Geary’s threats or the potential size of the retainer that interested me. It was the human cost. It always was.
I pulled off the L.I.E. at Queens Boulevard. Mandrake Towers was a ten-unit apartment-building complex in Rego Park. It was one of countless characterless projects which had sprung up like redbrick weeds during the building boom of the fifties and sixties. I’d lived in places just like it. The facelessness of these buildings did not end at the exterior walls, but rather turned inward, pervading the hallways, elevators, bedrooms, and baths. Each apartment as much a cell as a home. You had your friends in the building, but most of the people on the other side of the wall, the people above your head and beneath your feet, were strangers.
The security office was in the basement of Building 5, between the garbage compactor and the laundry room. It wasn’t exactly the war room in the basement of the White House. The door was ajar and through it came the sweet sound of Marvin Gaye’s voice rudely interrupted by the static-filled squawking of walkie-talkies. I knocked, didn’t wait for an invite, and walked in.
A large, heavyset black man in a khaki uniform that had fit him ten years and thirty pounds ago sat behind a long card table reading the
“What can I do for y’all?” he asked, not looking up from the paper.
“John Heaton around?”
That got his attention. His relaxed demeanor seemed to run out through the bottom of his shoes. He stiffened, put the paper down, shut off the radio.
“Who wanna know and why?”
I showed him my old badge. As it didn’t come stamped with an expiration date, it usually helped cut through the bullshit. Not this time.
“That’s only half the answer, man.”
“It’s about his daughter.”
“They find her?” He perked up.
“Nah, I’ve been hired to have a fresh look into it.”
The room got very chilly. “Hired? You a cop or ain’t you?”
“I’m retired,” I confessed, showing him my investigator’s license. “I’m working this private.”
“He ain’t here,” the guard stonewalled, standing up in sections to unfurl all six feet eight inches of himself. I guess he wanted me to get that he meant business.
“Come on, I’m not here to bust his balls or anything. Look, Officer … Simmons,” I read his name tag, which was now just a little below my eye level. “I know I shouldn’t've flashed the tin, but-”
“He ain’t here ‘cause he don’t work here no more.” He shook his head and pantomimed taking a drink. “They let him go, if you know what I’m sayin'. He was doin’ awright for a while, but jus’ in the last few months, he couldn’t handle it no more. He loved that girl. Moira was a good girl.”
“I’m not here to say different.”
“Then what you here for? Little late in the game, don’t ya think, to start nosin’ around? All you gonna do is hurt the man.”
“You know the man and I don’t. I’ll give you that,” I said. “But don’t you think he’d trade a little more pain for a chance to find his daughter?”
“He ain’t got much left to trade, mister. He and his wife split. She move down to Florida with their boy. I s’pose you could have his soul, but there ain’t much a that left neither.”
I said nothing. There was no answer to that, no way to dress it up and take it to the prom. As a cop, I’d seen people kill themselves in all sorts of ways. Some more violent than others, but the saddest suicides were the long marches of self-destruction.
I held my hand out to Officer Simmons. “Moses Prager,” I said. “Most people call me Moe. I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I’m really not the asshole I appear to be.”
“Preacher,” he offered, his hand fairly swallowing mine. “Most people call me Officer Simmons.” A mischievous smile flashed across his face. “And I am the tough-ass motherfucker I appear to be.”
“Preacher Simmons,” I mumbled to myself, something stirring in my memory. “Preacher ‘the Creature’ Simmons? Boys High, 1964 all-city team, right?”
That knocked about half the smile off his face. He was happy I remembered, but afraid I’d remember more. I did. Preacher “the Creature” Simmons had gone on from Boys High to Georgia Atlantic and gotten mixed up in a point-shaving scandal. Unlike Connie “the Hawk” Hawkins, who had, thanks to the ABA, salvaged at least some part of what might have been one of the brightest futures in basketball history, Preacher had fallen off the radar screen. No wonder. It’s hard to spot a man so far below ground level.
“Preacher ‘the Creature’ been gone since before we landed on the moon, Moe. I been jus’ plain Officer Simmons now for near fifteen years. I owe that to John Heaton. He got me this gig.”
“Judging people’s not my business, Officer Simmons. Finding them is.” I handed him a card. “There’s plenty of numbers there you can reach me at if you can think of anything that might help me. I don’t suppose you’d wanna tell me where I can find John now?”
“Wine stores, huh? You jus’ a jack a all kinda trades.”
“I’ve never been great at anything.”
“I have,” he said, his smile having fully retreated. “It’s overrated.”
Ready to leave it at that, I thanked him and turned to go.
“Glitters,” he called out to me when I was nearly out the door.
“Glitters?”
“It’s a topless joint in Times Square. John workin’ there off the books doin’ this and that. Down there, they don’t judge people neither.”
The things that become of people’s lives. That’s what I was thinking about as I pulled my car out of the lot at Mandrake Towers. In his day, Preacher “the Creature” Simmons was as much a legend as Lew Alcindor. It’s sad when the mighty fall or when injury diminishes greatness, but I felt sick at the sight of Preacher Simmons, forgotten by the world, living out his days in a cinder-block bunker. I wondered what would kill him first, the cigarettes or the what-ifs.
Anyway, I hadn’t the heart to argue with him when he suggested too much time had passed to start looking into Moira’s disappearance. If my investigation into the Catskills fire had taught me anything, it was that the passage of time, even sixteen years, cuts both ways. Sure, cold leads freeze over and witnesses move, forget, die off. But though time tightens some tongues, it greases others. As years pile up, perps can get overconfident, sloppy, and alibis rot away like unbrushed teeth. Guilt can set in and fester. But time’s greatest benefit is distance. Distance allows for perspective. All manner of things become visible that were previously impossible to see. The passage of time had helped me get to the truth of the Fir Grove Hotel fire. Whether it would help lead to Moira Heaton, I could not say, but what it had done to her father was clear enough.
Glitters was what the guys on the job so affectionately referred to as a titty bar. Preacher’s calling it a topless joint had been unfairly generous. It was more a bucket of blood with tits and ass thrown in. When new, the dump was probably just cheap and ugly. Now cheap and ugly was something to aspire to. And the stink of the place! Between the spilled-beer carpeting, cigarette smoke, sweat, and cheap perfumes, it smelled worse than the Port Authority men’s room.
I guess Glitters was no different than a hundred other places in town, maybe no different than a thousand other places in a thousand other towns. We had a bar just like it in my old precinct.
It was too everything: too dark, too smelly, the drinks too watery, the women too old and too much the victims of gravity. Everything about the place gave credence to the line about all that glitters not being gold. At that place in Coney Island, a lot of the girls turned tricks for drug money. But none of its myriad faults put a dent in its popularity with my precinct brethren. Maybe that was because head was on the house for the local constabulary. As our precinct philosopher, Ferguson May, was wont to say: “It sure beats the shit out of free coffee.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a topless place. Probably some cop’s bachelor party. What a silly concept. I think the last time bachelor parties served a useful purpose was during the second Eisenhower
