Redemption Street (7 page)

The logical thing to have done, I didn’t do, not immediately anyway. I didn’t rush up to the information desk to find the location of Councilman Hammerling’s office. I stood there instead, trying to formulate an approach to take with Hammerling. Somehow I didn’t think my presence would be well received if I barged into his office proclaiming I was the part owner of a Manhattan wine shop looking for a long-dead girl because her recently dead brother had said there was something wrong with a sixteen-year-old investigation. I guess I’m just funny that way. Yet, no matter how I tried to spin the words in my head, they always came out sounding rather ridiculous. I decided to take a more subtle approach and not divulge exactly what I was doing there.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the heavy woman at the information table apologized. “Dick—I mean Councilman Hammerling—is out of town for the weekend. I think he’s in Vermont skiing. You up from the city?”

“My Brooklyn accent’s showing, huh? Twenty years of diction lessons all to no avail.”

She stared at me, blankly and unsure. Sarcasm isn’t a universal language. That’s a thing most New Yorkers forget when they venture beyond the city limits. Most Americans don’t spend 80 percent of their waking hours constructing witty comebacks and snide remarks. Not everyone acts as if they’re onstage at the Improv or trying to outwit Groucho Marx or George Bernard Shaw. Most people say what needs to be said and shut up.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “just joking. Will Mr. Hammerling be back on Monday?”

“Sure will, Mr….”

“Prager, Moe Prager.”

“I can leave him a message if—”

“That won’t be necessary,” I assured her. “I’ll just come back Monday morning.”

She smiled sweetly. She had a pretty face that even all her added weight couldn’t disguise. She had sincere brown eyes, high cheekbones, plush lips, and a never-say-die smile.

“Okay, then,” she said, “enjoy your weekend. I hope you had a pleasant Thanksgiving.”

I thanked her, began walking out, and turned back. “Listen, I used to stay in a place up here when I was a kid. I think I might like to spend the night there for old times’ sake. The …” I snapped my fingers for effect. “The … the Fir Grove Hotel. That’s it!”

The smile ran away from her face. I could see she was struggling to find the words to tell me what I already knew.

“Fir Grove burnt down maybe sixteen, seventeen years ago.” She shook her head sadly. “Lotta folks died in the fire, teenagers mostly. Of course, I was just a kid back then, but I remember the fire.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. They didn’t rebuild, huh? Are there any other of the old-style hotels up there, by where the Fir Grove used to be?”

“On the other side of town, yeah, plenty.” She perked up, grabbing at a stack of brochures. “But up where the old Fir Grove was, no, nothing. No one up there now but the hayseeds and the Hasids.”

“Hayseeds and Hasids?” I repeated.

“You know, Hasids: the funny-dressed Jews in black clothes and beards. The women shave their heads and—” She cut herself off. Clamping a hand over her mouth, she clenched her entire body. She blushed red as a cherry cough drop, her eyes darting dizzyingly from side to side. “Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you.” Her voice cracked as she whispered through her meaty fingers. “That was a stupid thing to say. It’s just a local sort of joke—the hayseeds-and-Hasids thing. I forget myself sometimes. Oh God, I’m so embarrassed.”

“Relax. Relax. It’s okay. No offense taken. If I gave myself a nickel every time an embarrassing thing came out of my mouth, I’d’a made myself a rich man by now. Forget it. Look, I’m the one who should be ashamed,” I confessed. “I knew about the fire at the Fir Grove. I’m up here doing research on the demise of the Borscht Belt and I thought you might let something interesting slip.”

That did the trick. Her body unclenched.

“Take me for a drink later and I’ll let something interesting slip.”

I held up my left hand and wriggled my ring finger. “Sorry, terminally married.”

“Hey, Moe, I’ve seen last call too many times to fret details like wedding bands. Besides, maybe I could really help you with the research. Sitting in this chair, I know everything about everything in this town.”

I winked. “Maybe you can help, but first you gotta pass a little test.”

She was intrigued. “What kind of test?”

“Remember when I asked about a hotel to stay in?”

“Yeah,” she purred.

“Which one of the hotels on the other side of town would still have some old-timers on the staff. You know, people who’ve worked up here since you were a—”

“The Swan Song Hotel and Resort,” she stopped me. “Here.” She dealt me a brochure out of the handful she had originally pulled out of the rack.

“Did I hear you right, the Swan Song?” I asked, even as I read the name. “That’s an odd name.”

“It is?” she wondered, that blank stare returning.

“Never mind. Listen, I’m sorry, but what’s your name?”

“Molly,” she said, “Molly Treat.”

I winked again. “You certainly are. I’ll hold you to that drink.”

“I’ll be here.”

I didn’t doubt it.

The place was exactly what I expected. Just like all the other buildings in Old Rotterdam, excepting, of course, hideous Town Hall, the buildings that made up the Swan Song Hotel and, Resort were well on their way to disintegration. The chill and mask of snow only seemed to heighten the sense of despair. Huge icicles hung off neglected fascia boards. Soffits were missing everywhere, and windows throughout the campus were covered by plastic sheets and plywood. Although the top layer of snow presented the eye with the illusion that the long, twisty driveway up to the main house was paved smooth as an airport runway, my tires and shock absorbers told a different tale.

The main house, a beast of building, had probably once been a beautiful study in Victorian asymmetry. But, like many of the structures of that era, it had had its turrets and porches, its intricate spindles and fish-scale shingles stripped away and replaced with an incongruent hodgepodge of stucco, aluminum siding, and fake brick. One vestige of the original building remained: a curvy porch extended from one side of the front entrance around the right side of the big house. Even in the dying light I could see it was sagging terribly. The numerous missing spindles from its rails gave it the look of a jack-o’-lantern’s mouth. Before getting out of the car, I popped the dome light on and studied the brochure Molly Treat had given me. Clearly, the pictures for the brochure had been taken a very long time ago. A very long time indeed.

A bent little man patrolled the front desk, his bald head and crooked back barely visible above the mahogany counter. There was a big old-fashioned bell atop the counter, but, like the rest of the room, the bell hadn’t been polished in recent history.

“You Prager?” the gnome asked as I approached. “Molly gave a call from the town, said you might be coming. I’m Sam Gutterman, the proprietor of this lovely establishment. The brochure says Swan Song Hotel and Resort. Considering the age and health of our guests, it’s more like the Swan Song Hospice and Last Resort.”

I was laughing by the time I shook Gutterman’s hand. It felt good to laugh again. His grip was surprisingly firm. In spite of his sparkly blue eyes and white smile, I figured him for his mid-seventies.

“I’m Prager. And you should have been a comedian.”

“Anybody ever tell you you got a flare for the self-evident?” Gutterman wagged his finger at me. “What, you think I owned this palace my whole life? I used to be Sudden Sam Gutterman, Blue Boy of the Borscht Belt. You shouldn’t know from it! I used more four-letter words than Webster’s Unabridged! You know what one wise-guy critic once wrote?”

“What?”

“ ‘Sudden Sam Guttermouth is …’ Wait,” he said, rubbing his chin, “I vanna get this right. ‘Sudden Sam Guttermouth is perhaps the only man alive—if you call what he does living—who could make Belle Barth sound like Oscar Wilde.’ You know Belle Barth?”

“My folks had her records,” I said. “I used to listen to them when I stayed home sick from school. My favorite joke of hers was about the famous Yiddish actor Boris Tomashevsky.”

“If you want bread, go bang a baker,” he recited the punch line without missing a beat.

“That’s the one.”

He glowed. “We’re gonna get along, you and me. You’re a good audience.” Sam turned behind him to the maze of little mailboxes, recited eenie-meenie-minie-moe, and picked a key. “This is where you would expect me to say that I’m giving you our best room. But since we don’t have even a good room, this one will have to do.” He handed me the key.

“Two twenty-one,” I said, reading the number off the tag.

“I could lie to you and say I gave you that room so you wouldn’t have trouble carrying your bag upstairs. You can guess already the elevator hasn’t worked since the last time I got laid. And you wouldn’t want to insult an old man by guessing how long ago that was.”

“I didn’t know they had elevators during the Civil War.”

“Don’t be such a wiseass.” He wagged his finger again. “You’re supposed to be the straight man. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Like I was saying, it’s not about how far you gotta carry your bag. It’s about how far you’d fall when the fucking building collapses.”

I feigned dismay. “Maybe I’d like a room on the upper floors. This way I’d fall on top of the rubble instead of it falling on me.”

“It’s your funeral,
bubeleh
, but the heat don’t work up there.”

I shook Sam’s hand good night and asked if I could have breakfast with him. In spite of his protestations, he accepted my invitation. When I reached for my bag, the former Blue Boy of the Borscht Belt ordered me to stop.

“I gotta ring the bell for the hop,” he explained. “It’s tradition.”

“Let me guess, you haven’t had a bellhop since the last time you got laid.”

“Since the first time I got laid.” Sam laughed. “George Washington was in the next bed.”

The room was actually clean and quite a bit more pleasant than the rest of the Swan Song. The furnishings were old, but neat. They dated back to the late fifties or early sixties, all very retro, very
Jetsons
. There were lots of big square cushions covered in thick orange wool. The lamps sort of looked like B-movie rocket ships. The Bakelite phone on the bedside table was a real relic. You didn’t quite need a crane to lift up the receiver. I buzzed Sam and asked for an outside line.

“Would you believe me if I told you all the outside lines were busy?” he wondered.

“No.”

“Good. I’ll patch you through.”

I dialed the Maloneys’ number. Katy answered. The sound of her voice made my heart sink. I was suddenly very lonely. My cells, I think, were remembering just how empty my life had been before I met her. She asked me how things were going. I told her about Sam. She thought he sounded like fun. Katy held the phone up to Sarah, who talked at me some. Katy said Sarah smiled when she heard my voice. I promised to call the next day, said I loved them both probably one too many times, and hung up.

When I turned the TV on, I decided to downgrade my assessment of the room. There was more snow on the screen than on the collapsing roof.

Chapter Six
November 28th

The phone was ringing louder than I’d heard a phone ring in quite some time. Given what Sam had said about the average age of his clientele, loud was probably good. Still groggy, I reached for the receiver and promptly dropped it on my forehead. Believe me, with how much the thing weighed, dropping it on your head was either going to snap you completely awake or plunge you into a persistent vegetative state. I escaped with only a mild concussion.

It was dark when I trundled down to meet Sam in the kitchen. I wasn’t thrilled about the hour, but I had asked him to breakfast, and it seemed we were going to do it on his terms. I told myself that this was a good thing, that I’d get an early start. What I was getting an early start with had yet to be established. Hammerling wasn’t going to be back till Monday morning. I hoped Sam might have some insight. Maybe he could point a blind detective in the right direction.

I still had trouble thinking of myself as a detective. Not because I’d never officially worked a case since getting my license. It had more to do with my never getting a gold shield while I was on the job. I’d spent my whole ten years in the bag, in uniform. My buddies thought finding Marina Conseco would have earned me my shield. It got me a medal instead. I had almost convinced myself that I didn’t want to make detective because of dumb luck or on the back of a little girl’s suffering. Sometimes I still believe that.

Something smelled delicious but completely out of place in the Swan Song’s allegedly kosher kitchen: frying bacon, God’s quintessential torment. With bacon you were fucked either way. Even if you were an observant Jew and disdained pork products, there was no prohibition against breathing. And one sniff, one breath that contained that sweetly smoky aroma, could torture the most devout rabbi. If, on the other hand, you were, like myself, a bad Jew, or someone unconstrained by five-thousand-year-old dietary laws, you were still screwed. Bacon was cholesterol’s perfect delivery system. Bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches had killed more cops than all the cheap handguns ever made.

“Tsk, tsk, Sam.” I shook my head in mock disapproval. “This is gonna cost you a dozen mitzvahs. If there was a hell …”

“What’d’ya mean, if? This
is
hell! Sit down, Mr. Wise Guy, and eat. The bacon’s from my own private stock. Once the natives stir, we’re all of a sudden kosher again.”

“Can’t they smell it?” I asked.

“Most of my guests are beyond breathing, let alone smelling.” Sam waved, shoving a mouthful of eggs, potato, and bacon into his trap. “And if they do smell it, they forget before they complain.”

I did as the man said and sat across from Sam at a two-top table set up in the back of the kitchen. We could make out the first rays of daylight through a big window that gave new meaning to the term “stained glass.” The windows were so thick with accumulated grease that the world appeared in sepia tones. You could see the hole in the ground that used to be the pool, and many of the other buildings from our vantage point. Sam didn’t waste his time looking. Eventually, I stopped playing the wide-eyed newcomer and got down to eating. The food was good, but the coffee tasted like the brown water at the bottom of what used to be the pool. Sam noticed the look on my face.