away the sting of our dad’s small-time thinking and big-time failures. He had a wife he probably loved more now than the day they married, great kids, a big house on Long Island, and good health. Aaron didn’t think so, but I envied him. It was a blessing to be born knowing what you want and how to get it. With few exceptions, my wants shifted with my cases.
“Hey, big brother.”
“Christ, will you help me with this thing,” he barked.
“Here, shithead.” I banged the side of my fist into the till and it slid open. “You should come to this store more often. The drawer’s been sticking like that for years.”
“You should come to any store more often.”
“Touche.”
“So what’s this mishegas with your wife?”
“Ex-wife, as everyone keeps reminding me.”
“All right, your ex-wife.”
“What mishegas? What’s wrong with thinking your dead brother dug his way out of his grave, smashed his dad’s headstone to bits, and is making phone calls?”
“ Oy gevalt! ”
“Yeah, big brother, oy gevalt indeed.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“I was just about to call Ghostbusters.”
“Very funny, Moses.”
“I’m doing the only thing I can do. I’m gonna look into it. First, I have to pick your niece up at the airport.”
He grinned. My brother and Sarah had a special affinity for one another. “When does she get in?”
“I’m leaving for LaGuardia in about an hour.”
“Does she know what’s going on?”
“Some of it. Look, Aaron, I just want you to know, I’m going to take as long as it takes to find out what’s going on.”
“We’ve prospered for two decades without your full attention. We should be able to survive another few weeks.”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you, he says to me,” he stage-whispered to an invisible audience. “Let’s face it, the best thing you ever did for us was getting us started. That shit with Katy’s dad, look, you never wanted to tell me much about it, okay. It was your business, but enough already.”
I wanted to explode. He was right, but he was wrong too. I put in my time. I got us some of our biggest accounts, hired our best people. Even Aaron would have to admit that much. Klaus and Kosta were integral parts of our success and had been with us from year one. Both now owned small percentages of the business. Kosta was our head buyer and Klaus, besides running the day-to-day operations of the New Jersey store was, along with our lawyers and accountants, looking into the possibility of our franchising.
“Without me, there’d be no business,” I said.
“Yeah, I heard that refrain before. It used to mean something, too, when you said it last century. That was then. Four stores and twenty years later, it’s enough already.”
“Did Abraham Lincoln write that for you?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Go play cops and robbers with your Spanish hottie.” Aaron was very much of my parent’s generation. I’m surprised he didn’t call our African-American employees colored. He wasn’t a bigot. Far from it. He was just old. He was born old.
“Puerto Rican.”
“What?”
“Carmella is Puerto Rican and she’s not my hottie. Where do you come up with these terms anyway, Reader’s Digest?”
“What’s wrong with Reader’s Digest?”
No matter what our arguments started over, they always ended in the same place.
“You want coffee?” I asked.
“Sounds good.”
“The usual?”
“Always. Hey, little brother…”
“Yeah.”
“I love ya.”
“I know. Me too.”
The Northwest Terminal was bustling. The area airports were always busy, but there was just something about LaGuardia that brought out the closet claustrophobic in even the most hardened New Yorker. I found myself wishing I’d made the travel arrangements instead of leaving them up to Sarah. All this foot traffic was going to make things that much more difficult. No doubt a late afternoon or evening flight would have been a better option, but there was no use giving myself shpilkes over it now. For the moment, I only wanted to think about the best thing in my life, Sarah.
I loved the kid so much it hurt. Maybe it was her only-child status or that we were baseball buddies, but I had never gotten used to her being away from home. The sting was particularly sharp today with LaGuardia being just a stone’s throw away from Shea Stadium. Sarah had a double-major as a kid, learning about baseball and aircraft as we sat and watched the big jets roar over Shea on their final approaches to the airport. I remembered the first game I took her to, a weekday matinee against the Padres. She lasted only a couple of innings in the baking sun and passed out on my shoulder. When she woke up, she said she was firsty. I remembered that day for other reasons too.
It was the summer of 1983 and I had been hired to look into the disappearance of a political intern named Moira Heaton. Moira was a plain looking girl, a cop’s daughter, who had gone missing from State Senator Steven Brightman’s neighborhood office on Thanksgiving Eve 1981. For two years Brightman had proclaimed his innocence. He’d done everything he could, cooperated completely with the police, posted a big reward, jumped through fiery hoops, but it was all to no avail. He had been tried and convicted in the press and in the court of public opinion. Trouble was, Brightman was the fair-haired boy, the next Jack Kennedy and he was too ambitious to just live out his days as a has-been that never was.
That’s where I came in. Thomas Geary, one of Brightman’s wealthy backers and the father of one of our former wine store employees, got the idea that I could magically clear the state senator’s name. My reputation was for luck, not skill. As my early clients had too often said, “We tried good, now we’re going to give luck a chance.” I guess, if I want to be honest, they were right. I was lucky. My luck extended as far back as 1972. On Easter Sunday of that year, a little girl named Marina Conseco was kidnapped off a Coney Island street. And once seventy-two hours passed, the search for Marina silently morphed into a search for her remains. I found Marina severely injured but alive at the bottom of an old wooden water tank. She had been molested, then tossed in the tank and left to die. To this day, I’m not sure what made me look up and notice the tanks and think to search them. I was lucky then. I was lucky with Brightman too.
We were on the 7 train heading back home from Shea. Sarah was sleeping with her head of damp red curls resting on my leg. I was hot and tired too, but my eyes kept drifting to the front page of the Post that the man across the car from me was reading. On it was a picture of evil personified, a serial rapist the papers had dubbed Ivan the Terrible. He had scraggly hair, a cruel condescending smile, and black eyes. They were the blackest eyes I’d ever seen: opaque as the ocean on a moonless night. With a little bit of digging, I found a connection between Moira and Ivan. He eventually confessed to her murder. I was a little too lucky with that one. It all came just a bit too easily. In spite of it, I found the real facts behind the fabricated truths that had been sprinkled on the ground before me like so many bread crumbs.
I could never go to a game or drive past Shea Stadium without thinking of Sarah’s first Mets game. Every year
