Deacon King Kong(95)
Still, there were questions. Was this a drug war? Or just payback to even things out with the old man and that was the end of it? He was just not sure.
He’d taken Dub to the sisters and then sought a follow-up with the two shooting victims out at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park. For some reason, his request had been delayed several days. By then, the fourth person present at the shooting was assumed to be dead in the harbor, the body yet to appear. The girl hit man, if that’s what she was, had long fled.
This borough and this goddamned department, he thought bitterly, are changing too fast for me. They’re both worse than they ever were.
The new normal in the old Brooklyn, he decided, was heroin. There was so much money in it. It was unstoppable. How long would it take before the drugs plaguing the Negro in the Cause Houses would spread past the district to the rest of Brooklyn? Today it was the Negroes in the Cause and a few Italians from the surrounding blocks. Tomorrow, he thought . . .
He was irritated and felt the need to move. He opened the cruiser’s door and got out, leaving the engine running. He leaned one arm on the roof of the car and the other on the top of the open car door. From that position, he could see the boxcar in front of him, its dock, and Five Ends Baptist Church just a block away, easily seen above the high weeds of the bare lot next door. It had never occurred to him that the boxcar and the church, both located at the barren edges of the Cause Houses, were within sight of each other. One could go directly from one building to the next, they were so near each other. Yet they were from two worlds. The boxcar of the proud Elefante family—old Guido, who staggered around with a gimpy arm and leg after his stroke, suffered while doing twelve years in Sing Sing for keeping his mouth shut, along with his slick, closed-mouthed kid, Tommy, and the strange wife who wandered the lots looking for junk plants. And then the proud Negroes in their dilapidated old church with the gorgeous woman leader who loved dirt. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Sister Gee. Veronica Gee. Even the name sounded wonderful. Veronica. Sister Veronica. Like the Veronica in the Bible who offered Jesus her veil to wipe his face with as he bore the cross to Calvary. Glorious. She could wipe his face with her cloth anytime. He sighed. He imagined she was at work right now, her dark, regal face bent in concentration, dusting the halls of the handsome brownstone across the street from Rattigan’s, or maybe cleaning some snot-nosed kid’s toilet or dusting off a chandelier and thinking about all the things that dirt represented. “You and I got the same job,” she’d said to him. “We clean dirt.”
I need cleaning myself, he thought. If I let her clean me the rest of my life, maybe I’d have a chance at happiness. But why would she bother?
He slammed the door of the cruiser and headed toward the boxcar just as Tommy Elefante emerged, hands in his pockets. He knew Elefante had spotted him on his first pass.
“What brings you to my dock, Potts?” Elefante said.
“Loneliness.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Stop complaining, Tommy. At least you’re rich.”
Elefante laughed. “That brings a lump to my throat, Potts.”
Now it was Potts’s turn to laugh.
There were three makeshift stairs to the doorway where Elefante stood, a normal-sized door cut into the frame of the railroad car. Elefante took a seat on the top step, above him. Potts noted that Elefante had carefully closed the door behind him. Clearly, Potts thought, he wasn’t invited inside.
Elefante seemed to read that thought. “I got a Ferrari inside,” he said, nodding at the door behind him. “I only let my closest friends see it.”
“How’d you get it in there?”
“Prayer. And insurance. The only two things a good Catholic ever needs.”
Potts smiled. He’d always liked Tommy Elefante. Tommy was like the father—but with words. Silent as old Guido was, there was a grim goodness to the old man, an honesty and sense of humor that Potts, despite himself, always appreciated. Both men—the cop at the bottom, the mobster at the top—looked out toward the harbor, watching the gulls skimming the water and gliding toward the Statue of Liberty shining in the dusky distance.
“I haven’t parked my duff on this step in twenty years,” Potts said.
“I didn’t know you ever did.”
“I talked to your father a lot in the old days.”
“Got any more lies?”
“I broke his six-words-a-day limit a couple of times. I ever tell you the story about how I met him?”
“If there’s a story,” Elefante said, “it’s one-sided.”
“I’d walked a beat for six years, and finally they gave me my first squad car,” Potts chuckled. “It must have been, oh, 1948. There was a tip that old Guido Elefante, our local smuggler, just got out of jail, had a shipment of illegal cigarettes coming through his boxcar. On a certain night, at a certain time. You know the drill: Buy the cigarettes cheap in North Carolina. Pull the tags. Add new ones. Sell ’em at fifty percent profit.”
“Is that how they did it?”
Potts ignored the remark and continued. “They sent a squad down to bust the operation wide open. They were tired of him, I guess. Or maybe he hadn’t greased somebody. Whatever the case, we had three squad cars and a sergeant. It must have been three or four in the morning. We swooped in here all piss and vinegar, lights flashing, making noise, the works. I was young and bothered in those days. Gung ho. Still feeling my oats from the war. Finally had my own squad car. A cherry top, they called it. I was just so hot.