I popped open the dashboard compartment and took out the automatic. It was a good gun, but I missed ... .45. I opened my belt a notch and bedded it down against my stomach and felt like I was on patrol again.
I told him thanks and he asked me where I wanted to go. He didn’t seem at all surprised when I told him to go by our old street again. “Most of it’s gone, pal.”
“So I’ll see the rest. Any vandalism so far?”
“Just some kids breaking windows. Hell, they’re going to be smashed up anyway. A couple of vagrants flopped in one house. They have about two weeks occupancy before the wrecking crews get to that building.”
“Why so slow?”
“Politics, Jack. Contractors fighting the city, some former occupants still putting up roadblocks, trying to get more money from the local government.”
“Think they will?”
“They’re still trying,” he said. “You know that place where Bucky Mohler lived?”
“Sure.”
“Know who built it?”
Davy loved stupid little surprises. “Tell me,” I said.
He turned his head. “Big Zappo Padrone, that’s who.”
Talk about ancient history. “The booze king of Manhattan?”
“The same. Ran a dozen whorehouses, and twenty-three speakeasies in operation, and even before the big crime families got started was the bank for the hoods. Big hoods, that is. Early mob stuff.”
“Where do you get all this information, pardner?”
“I read a lot.”
“Cops read?”
“Sure. When they’re not shooting bad guys.”
We turned in the old street at the open end. The station house was gone except for the old brick foundation. Looking toward the other end was like staring in an old fighter’s mouth full of broken teeth and a few good ones. Charlie Wing’s place was gone, but old Bessie O’Brian’s house was still up, and down a ways the restored tenement Bucky Mohler had lived in was intact. Not even the panes were broken in the windows.
“Who’s keeping it up, Davy?”
“One of those old city laws. The place was deeded to some big charitable organization. Padrone had a thing about helping down-and-outers.”
“Anybody in there now?”
“Hell, even the bums won’t go near the place. It’s supposed to have some sort of a curse on it.”
“Great,” I said. “I heard fancy apartments were going in.”
“Yeah. And guess who’s behind it?”
Another stupid little surprise, I supposed. “Tell me.”
“A Saudi investment group.”
“Only seems fair.”
“Yeah?”
“They took down two buildings, didn’t they? Ought to put up a few.”
Davy just looked at me.
Right behind us a city Yellow Cab pulled up in front of old Bessie O’Brian’s building and a middle-aged woman and old Bessie got out. Davy and I both yelled a big hello and Bessie waved back with a happy yell. “Damn me if it ain’t old Shooter! What you doing here, Captain Jack?”
“Saying so long to a friendly old street, Bessie.”
“Not so friendly any more.”
I walked over, said hello to her daughter from Elizabeth and asked Bessie how she liked the New Jersey countryside.
“Country,” she practically screeched. “It’s as bad as the Bronx! It’s crowded, that’s what. No different from the city here.”
“You like it?” I asked.
She gave a sly look toward her daughter and whispered, “It’s free. My kid’s a good cook, too.”
I glanced up at the old building she had inhabited for a couple eternities. “What are you back for, Bessie?”
She frowned and tapped her mouth with a wrinkled forefinger. “Left my damn lower teeth behind a slot in the wall back of my bed. Can’t eat right without ‘em. Not going to let any more dentists play with my mouth anymore, either. Damn teeth.”
“Come on, Bessie, you look great.”
“Don’t lie to me, sonny. I’m an old hag, I am. You know, I even knew Big Zappo Padrone, you know that?”
I said, “Nope.”
“That’s his house over there. I was just a kid then.”
I nodded.
“Saw that little punk, what’s his name... Bucky Mohler over there not long ago. He didn’t go in. He was just looking, then he walked away.”
“Bessie,” I said to her, “Bucky Mohler’s been dead a long time. He was killed up in the Bronx years ago.”
“The hell he was,” old Bessie insisted. “I ain’t got teeth, but I sure got eyes, and that was Bucky over there. He was older, but his damn swagger was still there. You remember the way he walked?”
“I remember it all right. Cocky little punk. He didn’t do it when I arrested him.”
“So arrest him again. He’s around somewhere.”
“He got buried in a city plot, what was left of him,” I told her.
“Baloney,” she told me.
“Okay, then. What was he looking at?”
She gave a big shrug, hunching her shoulders. “Beats me. He always was a nosey pig.”
“Bessie, Bucky Mohler is dead and buried.”
“He’s up to something,” she said as if she didn’t hear me. “Go look. Maybe you’ll see what he was after.”
It was the only way I was going to get away from the old biddy, so I gave her a wave and walked down the street and across the pavement to the front of Bucky Mohler’s old house. I looked back and Bessie wasn’t even watching me.
As the guy used to say on radio,
There was a sign on the porch to the demolition crews. The place was not to be disturbed until further orders. Clear enough. They had stayed away. But somebody had been looking. The imprint of shoes on the dusty sidewalk onto the ravaged ground led from one side, stayed close to the house, went completely around it, then turned back almost in the same tracks and stopped by the side door. There was little shuffling around in the dirt. Whoever made those tracks knew exactly what he was doing.
When I checked the dirt residue around the door, scraping it out with a pocketknife, one thing seemed to make sense. That door had been opened recently. There were no indications of forced entry, so someone had a key. It was good lock with a reliable name, a new model, probably installed by the last inhabitants and they wouldn’t be hard to check on.
Something was screwy and I didn’t like screwy things. Bessie’s life was the Street. She knew everything that was going on. If she said she saw Bucky, I’d damn well better check it out.
The city kept pretty good records and it didn’t take long for the attendant to locate the book that recorded the death of Bucky Mohler and she gave me the number of his burial plot and its location. But Bucky, or whoever was buried in that plot, would be nothing identifiable by now.
Somehow I couldn’t quite discount old Bessie’s certainty about seeing Bucky. He’d aged, she’d said, but had still been recognizable — to her, anyway. And if it was Bucky, what was he doing down here on that dead street? A guy like that wouldn’t show any nostalgia for a place like this. At least he’d never expect anyone to identify him. The block was almost gone now, the buildings demolished, the few left about to come down. He must have figured
