Soul Patch

extra aggravation.”

“Hey, the chief helped make my career. You think he didn’t take shit for putting that shield in my hand? I wasn’t going to show him any disrespect, not today.”

“So what were you doing there? Don’t you have any real cases to make?”

“Murphy’s out today,” she said, as if that explained it.

“And. .”

“And I need you to talk to me or no justice is gonna get done here.”

Man, she was young. Justice is a word that gets beaten out of most cops before they make detective. I searched my memory trying to recall when I’d lost my “justice cherry.” The moment was lost with a million other forgotten milestones.

“Justice! Christ, Carmella. It takes more faith to believe in justice than in God.”

“I believe.”

“Why?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Wanna tell me why this case, if there even is a case, means so much to you?”

She showed me her shield. “This is why.”

Argue that. I couldn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “This is important to me too. What are you doing tonight?”

She blushed slightly, looking suddenly like a shy little girl. “Nothing.”

“Eleven o’clock. You tell me where.”

“Drinks?”

“Drinks would be good.”

“Crispo’s, do you know it?”

“You mean Rip’s in Red Hook?”

Her smile was my answer. I turned to go.

“Moe!”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not invisible to me either.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The red neon sign-RI P ’S-was like a bright smile with missing teeth. Crispo’s or Rip’s, on Visitation Place, was a dive. Name me fifteen bars in Brooklyn that weren’t. But there’s a kind of comfort in a dive, comfort like in a pair of ugly old shoes or a messy room. Rip’s was all of that. Inside was perpetual sepia. Neither the bar nor the plank floor had been refinished since the ’40s. The wobbly barstools were held together with white adhesive tape and glue, which, since the floor pitched and fell from foot to foot, was probably a good thing. Only place in Brooklyn you could get seasick sitting at a bar. Rip’s was the kind of place where old lipstick on your bar glass passed as garnish.

Red Hook, once the toughest neighborhood in the city-and that’s really saying something when you’re talking about New York-was a place in transition. Isolated from the rest of Brooklyn by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, its lack of a subway line, and spotty bus service, Red Hook had once been the thriving center of the borough’s waterfront. These days, the docks were inert and the memories of the tough guys who had once unloaded ships with hooks and ropes had receded into the cracks between the cobblestones that still lined its dead-end streets. As its fortunes fell, low-income housing projects rose up. For the majority of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, Red Hook, with its Civil War Era infrastructure and faceless factory buildings, was left to rot. It was as if the city hoped it would simply detach itself from the western tip of Long Island and sink into the East River.

Just lately, the yuppies-with their nose for cheap real estate, rustic charm, and loft space-had taken notice. It would probably be another ten or fifteen years before the last black, Puerto Rican, and artist was driven out by gentrification, but as sure as the sun would rise

“Over here!” she called above the din of the crowd and Johnny Maestro’s sour ruminations on the prospects of marriage.

That was the thing about the jukebox at Rip’s. With the solitary exception of Sinatra, every selection on the box was written or performed by a Brooklynite. Either that or the song title or the band name featured the word Brooklyn.

“Dewars rocks,” I shouted at the barman after working my way through the tangle of bodies.

Melendez held up her bottle of Heineken to show me she was fine. We clinked bottle to rocks glass.

“This is weird,” she said.

“What’s weird?”

“Us.”

“Us?” I repeated. “What about-”

Everything! “Nothing,” she lied. “Forget it.”

I would have lied, too, had she pursued it. All through dinner with Pete Parson and Katy, this moment was all I could think about. Now that it had come, I felt about fifteen years old. There was no denying she made my heart beat faster, that since she had shoved me out of the path of that car my appreciation for her had taken a decidedly more personal bent than simple recognition of her charms.

“Look at this place,” I said, just to say something. “If the city mixed like the crowd in here, we’d have a lot less trouble.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she agreed, looking out at the jumble of black, brown, and white faces. “Not many places in the city like this.”

“Not many places like Red Hook.”

“None.”

I guzzled my scotch. “C’mon, let’s get outta here for a little while so we can talk.”

“Okay.”

We walked to the corner, turned left on Van Brunt, and strolled toward Conover. In stark contrast to Rip’s, the streets were eerily silent and a thick veil of fog obscured the normally brilliant lights of lower Manhattan. We, too, were silent. Now we stood at the end of Conover Street, where moot trolley tracks curved directly into oblivion.

“My brother Aaron and me, we own wine shops,” I said, smooth talker that I was. “And we just opened up a new place on Long Island. Larry-Chief McDonald-was there for the grand opening party. We were outside talking and he handed me a cassette tape. He told me to take it home and listen.” I pulled that same cassette out of my jacket.

“What is it, a mix tape of ELP, Jethro Tull, and Pink Floyd?”

“A sense of humor, huh? You forgot Yes and the Moody Blues. How do you know from those bands?”

“You think I dance around my house with fruit on my head to Tito Puente and Menudo records? Some kids like dinosaurs. I liked dinosaur rock.”

“No, Carmella, it isn’t a mix tape.” I handed it to her. “It’s a recording of two detectives interviewing a drug suspect.”

“Detectives?”

“You and Murphy, specifically. The suspect was Malik Jabbar or Melvin, as you seemed to like to call him.”

Her face went blank, any hint of playfulness vanished.

“I don’t know how he got it, but there’s definitely a hidden mic somewhere in that interview room. You’ll hear for yourself.”

“Fuck!”

I might just as well have smacked her with a two-by-four. She stared at the cassette like it was radioactive.

“I know, Carmella. It raises a lot of questions.”