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I felt blessed for the exclusion.
We picked up an armful of lilies at a shop on Ninth then made our way to the subway and caught the number 7 to Queens. It’s been said that my mother looks like Maria Callas by way of Audrey Hepburn, which might also stand for a description of the quicksilver blend of her personality, though what is generally meant is that she is a ski
We got off at Fortieth Street in Su
The recent snowfall had left the cemetery with a smooth white covering, broken by the thousands of chalky stones poking out of the ground like uneven teeth. We walked several hundred feet along the road before making our way over the snow to the simple stone that read: PATRICK MALONE. Shirley let out a gasp. “There it is.”
“It” was not the stone itself. She was referring to the small bouquet of daisies sitting atop the stone. I started forward, but Shirley put her hand on my chest. “Don’t walk.” She scoured the site. “Damn it all. There should be footprints.”
She was right. Assuming that the flowers had been left off earlier in the day-which was the a
“He’s too clever,” Shirley hissed. “He knew the forecast and he got here early, damn his eyes.” She stepped forward and planted her lilies in the snow. Then she plucked the daisies from the tombstone, crossed herself and buried her face in the flowers.
A year before I was born, an undercover cop in the NYPD’s Organized Crime Task Force working to infiltrate the gangs in Hell’s Kitchen lost one of his informants, nineteen-year-old Patrick Malone. My mother’s twin brother. The undercover cop had worked diligently for months to flip Patrick, recognizing in the young tough a muted streak of humanity and tending it diligently, the way a good gardener tends his plants. What the cop failed to tend with equal care were safeguards to protect Patrick from his ruthless cronies should the facts behind the relationship ever come to light. Which is exactly what happened. The cop was found out, and ten days after Patrick’s disappearance, an extra-strength black trash bag washed up on the sand at Rockaway Beach in Brooklyn. Five days after that, Shirley Malone stood with her head bowed as the scant contents of the bag-no other bags were ever recovered-were lowered into a grave at Calvary Cemetery. My mother allegedly uncorked her first bottle of whiskey that same afternoon and managed to work her way halfway down the label before the cop came by to check on her and put a stop to it. It was a week after the funeral that the cop and Shirley began their affair. It would last all of four months. The cop was married. One child and another on the way. He wouldn’t find out until several months after breaking things off with Shirley that she was pregnant with me and pla
The freaky thing about the daisies on my uncle’s grave was this: Harlan Scott had made it a point every year on the a
After several silent minutes, we left the gravesite. As she always did, my mother paused just outside the cemetery. She slowly sca
Shirley wanted a drink. I’m not my mother’s keeper, so we ducked into a place called the Lounge. Dark. Stale. I could swear the same elbows were on the bar as the year before, and the year before that. We took a table next to a silent pinball machine, and I fetched an old-fashioned for the lady and for myself an Irish coffee, heavy on the Irish.
Several months after Commissioner Harlan Scott disappeared, I’d gotten a referral to Charlie Burke, private investigator out of Queens, and procured his services to snoop around and see what he could find. I’d never trusted the official investigation. It’s easy to make enemies when you’re a cop on the rise, especially once you’ve reached the top. Easy target. Fair game. Charlie managed to shine his light on any number of characters who might have been happy to assist in the obliteration of Harlan Scott, but ultimately nothing rock-solid. Along the way, I picked up my PI license and put myself under Charlie’s tutelage. It was a better fit for me. Attempting to follow in the old man’s footsteps had been downright quaint of me, or just plain stupid. I’m better suited for contract work or just being nosy on my own. Charlie declared that I had the raw material already in place, it was just a matter of fine-tuning, picking up some of the tricks and the bumps and bruises of experience. He also did a smart thing. Or, if not smart, extremely shrewd; the equivalent of attaching an endless belt of ammunition to a weapon. He sat me down one evening at his local, a bar not that far from the Lounge. I remember his every word.