Compromised (9 page)

Ma gasped and covered her open mouth before pulling out a kitchen chair and dropping into it. “Jack Burns?” She rubbed her forehead. “My God.”

“Ring a bell?”

“Oh my Lord, yes. Frank and Jack were childhood friends. Frank felt responsible for what happened to Jack, but . . . I knew that he reopened the case. I was going to tell Stephanie about it when she was in the hospital but somehow I just didn’t get around to it. I always thought it was the reason Frank became a cop.”

“So what can you tell me about it?”

She thought for a moment before ladling pasta into his dish. “You’d better start eating. It’ll get cold before I get through the whole story.”

“Long story, is it?”

“Oh yes. Frank and I had just started to date when it happened, and let me tell you, it rocked the whole neighborhood.”

Gus looked down at the large bowl and smiled as she filled it to the brim with mounds of steaming macaroni. “Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me anyway. Take your time.”

Manhattan 1973

“That’s-that’s-that’s a do-over,” Reggie protested in his accustomed stutter as he watched his bottle cap sail past the number twelve square at the far end of the skully board.
The white chalk skully board had been marked in the street alongside the johnny pump between two parked cars. Reggie would’ve won the game and a quarter from each of his friends had his bottle cap landed on the number twelve square. “Hey. Why-why-why’d you d-do that, Jack-O?”

Jack-O was short for jack off, and Jack Burns was going out of his way to show that he had earned his nickname. He’d pounded the end of his baseball bat on the street just as Reggie was about to take his shot, causing him to miss. “Duh-do-do-do-over,” he said, teasing his friend. “You sound like a baby with a wet diaper.”

“Well, it is a do-do-do-over.” Reggie stood to retrieve his rare Pepsi flat-top bottle cap, a one in a thousand find, one that had miraculously left the bottling plant without getting crimped on top of a soda bottle. He was just reaching for it when Jack crushed it with his bat. “Hey!” Reggie’s eyes flashed hotly as he looked down at his now-mangled treasure. “You’re-you’re a real jerk. That’s the-the only one I’ve got like that.” He pushed Jack with two hands, not hard enough to start a fight, just hard enough to demonstrate that he was angry.

Jack pounded the bat into his open palm. “Try that again, dipshit. I dare you.”

“Cut it out, Jack.” Frank Chalice wasn’t as tall as Jack, but he was older by a year and had been working out with some of the older high school boys over the summer. He already had thick sideburns and a girlfriend of sorts, which clearly established his position as the group’s leader.

“Why do you have to always butt in, Frank?” Jack griped. “Let buh-buh-brainless fight his own battles.”

“Because you’ve got a bat, nimrod. Maybe you ought to put it down, and we’ll see how tough you are without it.”

Bobby Cohen was the fourth member of the pack. He bent with the wind and was loyal to no one. He took sides with whoever could do him the most good at the moment. “He’s right, Jack. Lay off Reggie.”

“Butt out, bootlick,” Jack warned. “You always side with Frank because you want to go over to his place and feel up his sister. Only reason you don’t is because you’re afraid Frank will kick your ass.”

Bobby gave Jack the finger. He tried to show that he had been offended by the accusation, but his expression gave him away. Every one of them knew how he felt about Frank’s sister and regularly caught him ogling her. The neighborhood was tightly knit and held few secrets.

Frank reached into his pocket and handed Reggie a quarter. Bobby followed suit.

“Pay up, Jack,” Frank said.

“Why?”

“Because he would’ve won on that shot,” Frank explained. “He hasn’t missed in his last seven turns.”

Bobby chimed in. “Yeah. He’s like the pinball wizard of skully,” he snickered, likening his friend to Tommy, the idiot savant in The Who song “Christmas.” “You know you weren’t gonna beat him, man.” He mockingly paraphrased the lyrics. “And Reggie doesn’t know what day it is. He doesn’t know who Jesus was or what praying is.”

“Hey! Cut-cut-cut that out,” Reggie complained.

Frank’s eyes grew hot. “That’s enough!” His intimidating countenance silenced Bobby. He huffed angrily before turning back to Jack. “So, what’s it going to be?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “Let him go again. I’m not paying unless he gets it in the box.”

“With the messed-up bottle cap you smashed?”

“It doesn’t look so bad. He can still use it.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Give him a quarter so we can all go home.”

Jack lived in a basement apartment a block from the Hudson, three blocks west of where the other boys lived, on a street overrun with junkies, pimps, and hookers. He always carried his bat with him for protection. “Come on, Frank. Walk me home.”

“Now who sounds like a baby?” Bobby said, then leaned over and hawked his spit into the middle of the street.

“Are you gonna pay up?” Frank asked.

“No.”

“No? Well, then, I guess you’ll have to walk home by yourself.”

“I can’t pay him,” Jack said. He reached into the pockets of his jeans and turned them inside out. “I don’t have any money on me.”

Bobby wrinkled his nose. “You were playing for money with empty pockets?” He spit on the sidewalk again. “That’s a dick move.”

“I’m good for it,” Jack insisted.

“Take a walk,” Bobby said with distaste. “It’s not the first time you’ve tried to welsh on a bet.”

“No, really. I’m good for it.”

Reggie and Bobby ignored him and started for home.

Frank watched the other two walk away. “You gonna be all right?” he asked. He could see that Jack was reluctant to walk home alone and clearly understood the reason why. Only a few days had passed since the boys had come to pick him up after dinner to find him cornered in his apartment house lobby by Ray MacAteer, a nasty drunk he’d had run-ins with before. MacAteer was almost thirty but picked on Jack because he was almost a man in size. It didn’t matter to him that Jack was all skin and bones. It was only because MacAteer was outnumbered that evening that Jack escaped without a beating.

Now he pounded the bat into his palm again. “Yeah.” He pumped himself up to demonstrate his street-worthiness. “No worries.”

“You’re sure?”

“You think I’m like that wimp Reggie? I’m not afraid. I can stick up for myself.”

Frank checked his watch. He felt guilty about letting his friend walk home alone but had plans to meet his girlfriend, Lisa, and didn’t want to be late. “All right then. See ya.”

“You going over to Lisa’s house?”

Frank nodded.

“You think she’s gonna let you get some?”

He rolled his eyes. “You really are a jerk,” he said, then turned and walked off.

The four boys hung out every day during the summer except for Sundays, which was family day, so Frank knew he wouldn’t see Jack the next day, but when Jack didn’t meet up with them to play stickball on Monday, he and the rest of the boys began to worry.

“Hey, did you-you hear? The-the cops found Juh-Juh-Jack-O?”
Reggie said, his face animated as he turned away from the old tub-style grocery store soda cooler. He’d been digging in the cap slot in search of a new flat-top bottle cap to replace the one that Jack had crushed days earlier.

“No shit! Is he all right?” Frank asked with concern. He folded his grocery list and slipped it into his back pocket.

Reggie’s fingers were sticky with dried soda as he pulled them from the cap slot. “Uh-uh. Don’t think so. I heard he’s in the hospital.”

Frank squeezed his eyes shut. The guilt of not walking Jack home had been eating at him all week long, keeping him awake at night. He could still picture the look on his friend’s face the last time he’d seen him, the uneasy expression suggesting that he was afraid to walk home alone even though he said he wasn’t. The story had surfaced on Monday afternoon—Jack never made it home on Saturday night. “Shit. Do you know what happened to him?”

Reggie shook his head. “No, b-but my father’s mad as h-hell because we didn’t wuh-wuh-walk him home. I t-told him about Jack being a jerk and all, b-but he didn’t care. He says we’re-we’re re-responsible for what happened. Told me I’m g-g-grounded—j-just chores and m-my speech lessons.”

“Your father’s right. We should’ve walked him home. Remember last week? He almost got his ass kicked by MacAteer. He lives on a shitty block. Besides, we always walk him home.”

“O-o-only at night.”

“We screwed up,” Frank lamented.

Smitty, the grocery store owner, followed his mother out from behind the counter. He was wearing his standard uniform, a white tee that smelled as if it had never been washed and a white apron over stained black pants. His mother, who the regulars referred to as Mrs. Smitty, wore her gray hair in a bun and had long chin whiskers.

“How’s your friend Jack?” she asked. Her speech had a muddled sound because it was painful for her to wear her dentures and she often went toothless. “We heard some hooligans beat him senseless.”

Frank’s face turned ashen. Oh shit! “We don’t know. We just heard about it.”

“Cops found him passed out under the Westside Highway,” she said. “All black and blue. Broken ribs. Filthy dirty. Some of his teeth knocked out too.”

Frank stared at her toothless mouth and allowed a haunting image to creep into his mind. He began to feel light-headed and woozy. He leaned against the cooler to prevent his knees from buckling. “But he’s gonna be okay, isn’t he?”

Smitty shrugged. “I don’t think anyone knows for sure. It’s too soon.”

“How come you two didn’t walk him home?” she asked. “You know that area is bad news. Why, the cops don’t even want to patrol over there. Crack houses and whores—why, it ain’t safe to walk there at night. Goddamn it. I don’t know how his parents think they can bring up a young boy on that block. Why they haven’t moved the hell out of there is beyond me.”

“Maybe they would if they could afford to,” Smitty said derisively.

Frank grimaced and doubled over with a stomach cramp.

“You all right, dear?” Mrs. Smitty asked.

“I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Not in my store,” Smitty warned. He led Frank toward the door. “Puke in the street if you have to.”

Frank had barely cleared the doorway when he threw up.

“I can’t believe the other boys aren’t here,” Marie Chalice snapped as she fished in her purse for a stick of gum.
“No respect. No respect whatsoever.”

“Reggie had his speech lesson, Mom,” Frank said.

“Okay, so Reggie has a valid excuse, but what about Bobby Cohen? What’s his excuse this time? Someone ought to teach that boy the meaning of the word responsibility.”

Frank shrugged and lowered his head. “Don’t know.” He cast his gaze at the highly polished linoleum floor as he listened to the clatter of the hospital staff’s footsteps hurrying back and forth.

“Has anyone else been to see him?”

Frank shrugged again.

She shook her head, almost shuddering. “Disgraceful.”

“When’s he supposed to get out, Mom?”

“They’re not sure, Frank. I spoke to his mother yesterday and she said that he’s still in pretty bad shape. She goes to church to say a novena every morning.”

He looked down the corridor toward Jack’s room. “You think they’ll let us in to see him soon?”

She shook her head once more, slowly this time, conveying an entirely different message as she studied her son’s worried face. She patted his leg. “It’s not your fault, honey. You’re a good boy.”

His throat tightened. “I knew better,” he said. “I knew better than to let him walk home by himself.”

“I know you did, Frank. So why did you let him walk home alone? I know you try to look after all of your friends. It was so unlike you.”

He glanced at his mother with a reluctant expression. “Because.”

“Because why?”

He shrugged yet again. “Because I wanted to go over to Lisa’s place.”

“Ah,” she said with motherly understanding in her voice. “I see.” She stroked his hair. “I know how hard this is for you, but you’re going to have to let it go, Frank. You see . . .” She sighed and remained silent.

“See what, Mom?” he asked but could tell that she had something difficult to say. She had been talking to Jack’s mother on the phone every day but hadn’t revealed much about their conversations.

She finally offered, “Jack’s not going to be the same.”

“What? I don’t understand. Why not?”

“Those men, the ones who beat him up, they . . .” She paused again. A few tears drizzled down her cheek. “They . . .” She sniffled and opened her purse. “Now where are my stupid tissues?”

“They what, Mom? Why are you crying?” He’d suspected she’d been crying after speaking with Jack’s mother the other day, but wasn’t sure. Her eyes had been red after hanging up and she’d had a tissue in her hand.

She finally found a pack of Kleenex and used one to dab at her tears. “This is so difficult. Someone your age shouldn’t even be aware that things like this happen.”

Frank was on the verge of tears himself. “Why won’t you tell me what they did?”

“Because it’s terrible and it’s awful and it shouldn’t happen to anyone, let alone a young boy, but it did.”

“Tell me,” he insisted.

She stared at Frank and sighed. Tears were now streaming down her face. “I’m sorry,” she said as her voice grew hoarse. “I just can’t.”