Run You Down (22 page)

I’ve been sitting in Saul’s car for almost two hours when my phone rings. It’s a number I don’t recognize.

“This is Rebekah,” I say.

“Rebekah? This is Officer Van Keller.”

“Hi,” I say. “How are you?”

“I’m calling you from my cell. Are you still in town?”

“I’m in New Paltz,” I say.

“Can we meet?”

“Now?”

“If possible. I’ll come to you.”

We agree to meet at a diner just off the New Paltz exit from the Thruway. I order a bowl of potato soup and send Levi a text asking him to call me. If I can get him to comment on Pessie’s apparently secret friendship with her ex, that might be enough for a story. After about an hour, Van Keller appears in the doorway dressed in jeans and a Carhartt jacket. I wave to catch his attention and he slides into my booth.

“Must be important,” I say, trying to keep my smile salutary, not flirtatious. It’s difficult. Poor guy; must be annoying to have every woman he meets turn into a giggling, stuttering teenager in his presence.

“Yeah,” he says, taking off his coat. “We’re off the record, okay?”

“Okay.”

He nods. The waitress appears and he orders a Diet Coke.

“I’m probably going to lose my job for talking to you,” he says. “But I’m not sure what else to do. You’ve already written about the case, so it makes sense that you’d keep digging. I read your other stuff. About that murder in Brooklyn? I guess this is your beat. So. And you have that plate number. I’m sure somebody at the
Trib
can figure out who it belongs to. Maybe you already have. Have you?”

I don’t answer immediately, which he takes to mean yes. He’s nervous, talking fast, tearing at the paper napkin in front of him.

“Right, yeah. So the truck Pessie’s neighbors saw is registered to a man named Conrad Hall. You’re not from around here so you probably haven’t heard of him, but Connie Hall is a bad dude. He’s Aryan Brotherhood. You know them?”

I nod.

“I don’t think he advertises it, but that’s blood in blood out. The Brotherhood controls most of the drugs and the guns coming into the state—outside of New York City. Heroin has become a
big
problem here in the past couple years. Everybody hooked on prescription pills is losing their prescription since they started cracking down on doctors, and heroin is almost as good, and cheaper. Most of the robberies we see are heroin-related. Junkies stealing just enough to get a fix. Breaking into cars and houses. It’s not as bad in Roseville, partly because the Jews aren’t into that shit and they’re more and more of the population. But the rest of Rockland and Orange County. Plus Dutchess and Greene and Ulster and up in Albany. And if they’re not robbing—and they’re white—they can sometimes make a little cash moving product for people like Connie. Which means they want to carry a gun. And if you’ve got a record, you can’t get a gun in New York State. Well, you can’t get it
legally
. But the Brotherhood has people all over, so they bring guns up from the Carolinas, Virginia, even Pennsylvania. And guns just up the ante for everybody. Now we gotta think about getting shot every time we pull over some stoned asshole, you know? I mean, it happens. Last year a probation officer got killed checking on a meth head in Woodbury. He knocks, and the guy’s out of his mind, and armed. Shoots the officer through the door. Cop’s wife had just had a baby. And, like, even the tweaker, he didn’t know what he was doing. Without that gun he’d have gotten violated, sure, but now he’s life without parole for capital murder.”

Van Keller is talking alternately to me and to the napkin he has now torn to confetti. He pauses, looks at the shredded paper, then makes a kind of disgusted exhale out of his nose, and pushes the pile aside.

“I don’t know if you know this already,” I say, “but I’ve talked to two people who told me that Connie Hall’s son, Ryan, is gay, and that he’s in a relationship with a Jew from Roseville named Sam Kagan. Sam Kagan used to be engaged to Pessie.”

Van Keller blinks. “Are you kidding me?”

“No,” I say, and tell him about my visits with Mellie and Kaitlyn. He takes in what I am saying with eyes wide, mouth agape.

“So,” he says, after I finish, “Connie could have gone to Roseville looking for Sam.”

“Right,” I say. “Except Sam hasn’t lived there in years.”

Van falls silent. He wipes his hand across his face, thinking.

“I read an article about Connie Hall being questioned in a double homicide in Troy,” I say. “Did they ever get anybody for that?”

Van smirks and shakes his head. The waitress sets down a glass of Diet Coke and a paper-wrapped straw. “They indicted a kid connected to Connie.”

“Connected?”

“Friend of one of his sons, I think. I’m not sure which one. A small-time dealer, full-time dirtbag named Tim Doyle. But he didn’t make it to trial.”

“Didn’t make it?”

“He died in jail a couple days after they booked him.”

“How?”

“Hung himself was the official word,” says Keller. “But the Brotherhood has a lot of people. And it’s not like they did an autopsy.”

“You think Connie Hall had him killed?”

“I think that being close to Connie Hall can be deadly. And I know that I do not want him and his racist friends in my town. I know the Jews are weird, I get why some people think they aren’t good neighbors. But they deserve to live in peace. That’s my job. That’s my chief’s job.”

“Does he see it that way?”

Van almost smiles. “Good question, Rebekah. Good fucking question. You didn’t hear this from me, but you can look it up easy enough: Connie Hall is Chief Gregory’s stepbrother.”

“How is that possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“How’d he get to be chief if he’s related to a … criminal?”

“Being related to a criminal’s not a crime,” he says. “Ever hear of Whitey Bulger?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Big-time mobster from Boston. They say he killed, like, thirty people over the years. His brother was a state politician. Got reelected I don’t know how many times. People believed he was on the right side of the law.”

“Was he?”

“Who knows,” says Van. “Nobody ever caught him doing anything illegal.”

“But he had to know what his brother was doing.”

“You’d think so,” he says. “Chief’s dad married Connie’s mom back in the seventies. From what I’ve heard, Chief’s dad was a real bastard. Drank too much, beat his mom when he was little, which led to the divorce. Chief had a lot of experience with cops coming to the house and having to pry his dad off his mom. I think he thought of the guys as heroes. So he joined up. Connie went the other way, and since they have different last names and live in different counties not that many people know. But the State Police have never heard of Pessie Goldin, and the thumb drive with my pictures from the scene is gone from our evidence room.”

“Do you think he … did something with it?”

“I don’t pretend to know what he did. But I know he didn’t pass the information along like he said he would. And if he told Connie that someone saw his truck in Roseville, that could be very dangerous for whoever that person is—or whoever Connie thinks that person might be. I’m guessing you probably don’t want to tell me who your source is, but you should make sure they know what’s going on. Connie’s not a reckless man. He’s not going to make noise until he needs to. But now that Pessie’s name is the paper, if he’s connected to her death, he’ll be watching.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

AVIVA

“He’s not here,” said the woman at the jail when I called to be put on the visitors’ list.

“What do you mean he’s not there?”

“I mean he’s not here anymore. He’s been transferred.”

“Transferred where?”

“You have to call the DOC for that. All I can see is that he left here two weeks ago.”

It took three days of phone calls to find out that Sammy was at a state prison almost 150 miles away. Isaac got on the computer and looked up the visiting procedures and we made a plan to drive there the next week. I dreamt of Sammy in a cage of animals. Shirtless, bleeding, swinging at them, exhausted and outmatched, knowing it was only a matter of time until he was torn to pieces. At the prison, a man escorted the visitors in the waiting room through a metal detector and a set of heavy sliding doors. We sat down in a booth and Sammy came out. There was glass between us; we spoke through telephones.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I had to do it, Aviva,” said Sammy. He had a poorly stitched-up cut above his eye and a chipped front tooth. He seemed smaller, somehow, and he couldn’t sit still. He looked around constantly, like he was waiting for someone to jump on him. The man attacked him once, he told us, whispering into the telephone. When he tried again, Sammy was ready with a weapon made from springs in his bed.

“But why did they send
you
away? You were defending yourself!”

“They don’t care,” said Sammy.

“How long will you have to stay here?” I asked.

“They added four years to my sentence,” he said.

“Four years!” I must have screamed because the guard came immediately.

“Calm down, ma’am,” he said, standing above me.

I began to cry. Isaac took the phone and told Sammy we would come back as often as we could. He told him not to forget that we loved him. That Pessie loved him. That we did not blame him, and that we would be here when he came home.

Sammy got paroled three years later, just before Thanksgiving. It had been more than two years since I’d seen him. The last time I visited he told me not to come back. He said it was better if he didn’t think about anything outside prison while he was inside. He said it made him weak. I didn’t argue. I did not like seeing him in there. I did not like the way his voice sounded, and the way he couldn’t seem to look me in the eyes anymore. He was getting bigger—from lifting weights, he said—but all those muscles did not make him seem stronger. It took days, sometimes more than a week, to clear my mind of the way he looked in that jumpsuit, his skin gray, his eyes rimmed with red. I had to take more pills and drink more wine to sleep than was good for me. I could not stop imagining all the things that could happen to him—that were happening to him—in there. The crushing loneliness; the fear. The shame of where he was. The secret of who he was.

It was cold on the day we picked him up at the prison, and Sammy slept the whole ride home, huddled in the backseat with an old blanket over him. Isaac drove and I rode in the front, peeking back at him, wondering who we were bringing home, wondering what would happen next.

Sammy’s parole officer explained the conditions of his release: He would be tested for drugs every week. He needed to find a job. And he could not affiliate with criminals.

“What does that mean?” I asked the parole officer.

“What I said. He can go back to prison if I find out he is hanging out with anyone else with a criminal record.”

I looked at Sammy, but he was looking at the ground.

“Did you hear that, Sammy?” I asked.

“I’m not deaf, Aviva,” he said.

“You better check your attitude, son,” said the parole officer. “I have no problem violating you.”

For the first week, we left him alone. He slept all day and lay in front of the television all night. Finally, one night at dinner, we broached the subject of work. Isaac said that he could get Sammy a couple shifts a week at the store where he worked part-time.

“The hippie place,” said Sammy.

“What is this hippie thing?” asked Isaac. “It is a job.”

Sammy rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to sell incense and beads to college students, okay?”

Isaac took a deep breath. “You think it is beneath you?”

“I think it’s fucking lame,” he said.

“Why do you think it is okay to insult Isaac?” I asked.

“I’m not insulting Isaac,” said Sammy. “He can do what he wants. I’m not into hippies, okay?”

Isaac shook his head. “You have to work.”

“I’ll find a job.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll pump gas. Whatever.”

“Well,” said Isaac, getting up with his plate, “you better get started.”

Sammy stayed at the table, pushing his food around.

“I know this is hard, Sammy,” I said. “Don’t let this change who you are. Don’t let this get in your way.”

“You don’t know shit about who I am, Aviva,” he said. “You know that, right? You know you bailed on our family. You know you left me alone with Tatty and Eli and the sicko molester freaks. Why didn’t you take me with you?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t take him for the same reason I didn’t take you. I didn’t think I was good enough. I had nothing when I came back to Borough Park. Who was I to take a baby from his home? I couldn’t even get a job. I was broken to pieces and needed time to create a life for myself. Just like him now.

“Whatever,” he said, when I didn’t answer fast enough. “This is who I am. Sorry if you don’t like it. If you want to be a mother so bad now, go find Rebekah. Maybe she still cares.”

PART 3

CHAPTER TWENTY

REBEKAH

It’s nearly 11:00
P.M.
by the time I check into a ground floor room at the Comfort Lodge between New Paltz and Poughkeepsie. There is a piece of duct tape over a crack in the window and water stains in the toilet, but at seventy-two dollars a night, I’m way under budget. I turn the room’s heat up high and e-mail Larry to relay what I’ve learned from Van Keller, then send Nechemaya a text saying we need to talk. I haven’t heard from Saul or Iris. After about twenty minutes of CNN, I turn off the bedside lamp and, with the hotel’s floral blackout curtains drawn, fall into the big silence of the little room.

The sick feeling begins in my dream. Mellie is in front of the synagogue on Ocean Parkway shouting
Junior! Junior!
But instead of emitting a human noise, she barks. She barks and barks and then she pulls a handgun and points it at me. Van Keller is at my side, his arm around my waist. Mellie pulls the trigger and it makes a barking sound. The bullet hits my stomach and I think, I will never meet my mother. And then I am awake. I keep my eyes closed—sometimes, I’ve found, I can return to my dreams. I always imagine that I can change the outcome, but usually I’m just back in the pain, as ineffectual as before. Mellie shoots me again. I am on the ground but this time Saul is beside me instead of Van Keller.
Take her gun!
I shout. He waves his arms, like he is directing traffic. Someone has painted a swastika on the stone steps. The paint drips white.
Where is she?
I yell. Saul says nothing, but suddenly I can see her. Her back is to me, her long red hair. She is walking away. And I can’t get up.