Chapter 9
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Willie Brew’s auto shop looked run down and unreliable, if not blatantly dishonest, from the outside. Inside it wasn’t a whole lot better, but Willie, a Pole whose name was unpronounceable and had been shortened to Brew by generations of customers, was just about the best mechanic I knew.
I had never liked this area of Queens, only a short distance north from the roars of the cars on the Long Island Expressway. Ever since I was a boy, I seemed to associate it with used car lots, old warehouses, and cemeteries. Willie’s garage, close by Kissena Park, had been a good source of information over the years, since every deadbeat friend of Willie’s with nothing better to do than listen in on other people’s business tended to congregate there at some time or another, but the whole area still made me uneasy. Even as an adult, I hated the drive from JFK to Manhattan as it skirted these neighborhoods, hated the sight of the rundown houses and liquor stores.
Manhattan, by comparison, was exotic, its skyline capable of seemingly endless change, depending upon one’s approach. My father had moved out to Westchester County as soon as he could afford to, buying a small house near Grant Park. Manhattan was somewhere we went on weekends, my friends and I. Sometimes we would traverse the entire length of the island to stand on the walkway over the Brooklyn Bridge and stare back at the evolving skyline. Beneath us, the boards would vibrate with the passage of the traffic, but to me, it seemed like more than that: it was the vibration and hum of life itself. The cables linking the towers of the bridge would cut and dissect the cityscape before us, as if it had been clipped by a child’s scissors and reassembled against the blue sky.
After my father’s death, my mother had moved us back to Maine, to her hometown of Scarborough, where tree lines replaced cityscapes and only the racing enthusiasts, traveling from Boston and New York to the races at Scarborough Downs, brought with them the sights and smells of the big cities. Maybe that was why I always felt like a visitor when I looked at Manhattan: I always seemed to be seeing the city through new eyes.
Willie’s place was situated in a neighborhood that was fighting gentrification tooth and nail. Willie’s block had been bought by the owner of the Japanese noodle house next door — he had other interests in downtown Flushing’s Little Asia and seemed to want to extend his reach farther south — and Willie was involved in a partially legal battle to ensure that he wasn’t shut down. The Japanese responded by sending fish smells through the vents into Willie’s garage. Willie sometimes got his own back by getting Arno, his chief mechanic, to drink some beers and eat a Chinese meal, then stumble outside, stick his fingers down his throat, and vomit outside the noodle house. “Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese — all that shit looks the same when it comes out,” Willie used to say.
Inside, Arno — small, wiry, and dark — was working on the engine of a beat–up Dodge. The air was thick with the smell of fish and noodles. My ‘69 Mustang was raised up on a platform, unrecognizable bits and pieces of its internal workings strewn around on the floor. It looked no more likely to be on the road again in the near future than James Dean. I’d called earlier to tell Willie I’d be dropping by. The least he could have done was pretend to be doing something with it when I arrived.
The sound of loud swearing came from inside Willie’s office, which was up a set of wooden stairs to the right of the garage floor. The door flew open and Willie rumbled down the steps, grease on his bald head and his blue mechanic’s overalls open to the waist to show a dirty white T–shirt straining over his huge belly. He climbed arduously up a set of boxes placed beneath the vent in a step pattern and put his mouth to the grille.
“You slant–eyed sons of bitches,” he shrieked. “Quit stinkin’ my garage out with fish or I’m gonna get nuclear on your ass.” There was the sound of something shouted in Japanese from the other end of the vent, and then a burst of Oriental laughter. Willie thumped the grille with the heel of his hand and climbed down. He squinted at me in the semi–darkness before recognizing me.
“Bird, how you doin’? You want a coffee?”
“I want a car. My car. The car you’ve had for over a week now.”
Willie looked crestfallen. “You’re angry with me,” he said in mock–soothing tones. “I understand your anger. Anger is good. Your car, on the other hand, is not good. Your car is bad. The engine’s shot to shit. What have you been running it on, nuts and old nails?”
“Willie, I need my car. The taxi drivers are treating me like an old friend. Some of them have even stopped trying to rip me off. I’ve considered hiring a rental car to save myself embarrassment. In fact, the only reason I haven’t hit you for a car is that you said the repairs would take a day or two at most.”
Willie slouched over to the car and nudged a cylindrical piece of metal with the toe of his boot.
“Arno, what’s the deal on Bird’s Mustang?”
“It’s shit,” said Arno. “Tell him we’ll give him five hundred dollars to scrap it.”
“Arno says to give you five hundred to scrap it.”
“I heard him. Tell Arno I’ll burn his house down if he doesn’t fix my car.”
“Day after tomorrow,” came a voice from under the hood. “Sorry for the delay.”
Willie clapped me on the shoulder with a greasy hand.
“Come up for a coffee, listen to the local gossip.” Then, quietly: “Angel wants to see you. I told him you’d be around.”
I nodded and followed him up the stairs. Inside the office, which was surprisingly neat, four men sat around a desk drinking coffee and whiskey from tin mugs. I nodded to Tommy Q, who I’d busted once for handling pirated video–cassettes, and a thickly mustached hot–wire guy known, unsurprisingly, as Groucho. Beside him sat Willie’s other assistant, Jay, who, at sixty–five, was ten years older than Willie but looked at least ten years older than that again. Beside him sat Coffin Ed Harris.
“You know Coffin Ed?” said Willie.
I nodded. “Still boosting dead guys, Ed?”
“Naw, man,” said Coffin Ed. “I gave all that up a long time ago. I got a bad back.”
Coffin Ed Harris had been the kidnapper to beat all kidnappers. Coffin Ed figured that live hostages were too much like real work, since there was no telling what they might do or who might come looking for them. The dead were easier to handle, so Coffin Ed took to robbing mortuaries.
He would watch the death notices, pick a decedent who came from a reasonably wealthy family, and then steal the corpse from the mortuary or the funeral home. Until Coffin Ed came along and bucked the system, funeral homes weren’t usually well guarded. Coffin Ed would store the corpses in an industrial freezer he kept in his basement and then ask for a ransom, usually nothing too heavy. Most of the relatives were quite happy to pay in order to get their loved ones back before they started to rot.
He did well until some old Polish aristocrat took offense at his wife’s remains being held for ransom and hired a private army to go looking for Coffin Ed. They found him, although Coffin Ed just about got away through a bolt–hole in his cellar that led to his neighbor’s yard. He got the last laugh, too. The power company had cut off Ed’s electricity three days before because he hadn’t been paying his bills. The old Pole’s wife stank like a dead possum by the time they found her. Since then, things had gone downhill for Coffin Ed, and he now presented a down–at–the–heel figure in the back of Willie Brew’s garage.
There was an uneasy silence for a moment, which was broken by Willie.
“You remember Vinnie No Nose?” said Willie, handing me a steaming cup of black coffee, which was already turning the tin mug red hot but still couldn’t hide the smell of gasoline from its interior. “Wait’ll you hear Tommy Q’s story. You ain’t missed nothing yet.”
Vinnie No Nose was a B&E guy out of Newark who had taken one fall too many and had decided to reform, or at least to reform as far as any guy can who has made a living for forty years by ripping off other people’s apartments. He got his nickname from a long, unsuccessful involvement with amateur boxing. Vinnie, small and a potential victim for any New Jersey lowlife with a penchant for inflicting violence, saw an ability to use his fists as his potential salvation, like lots of other short guys from rough neighborhoods. Sadly, Vinnie’s defense was about as good as the Son of Sam’s, and his nose was eventually reduced to a mush of cartilage with two semiclosed nostrils like raisins in a pudding.
Tommy Q proceeded to tell a story involving Vinnie, a decorating company, and a dead gay client that could have put him in court if he’d told it in a respectable place of employment. “So the fruit ends up dead, in a bathroom, with this chair up his ass, and Vinnie ends up back in jail for peddling the pics and stealing the dead guy’s video,” he concluded, shaking his head at the strange ways of non–heterosexual males. He was still laughing his ass off at the story when the smile died on his face and the laugh turned into a kind of choking sound in his throat. I looked behind me to see Angel in the shadows, curly black hair spilling out from under his blue watch cap and with a sparse growth of beard that would have made a thirteen–year–old laugh. A dark blue longshoreman’s jacket hung open over a black T–shirt, and his blue jeans ended in dirty, well–worn Timber–lands.
Angel was no more than five–six, and to the casual onlooker, it was difficult to see why he should have struck fear into Tommy Q. There were two reasons. The first was that Angel was a far better boxer than Vinnie No Nose and could have pummeled Tommy Q to horse meat if he wanted to, which might well have been the case since Angel was gay and might have found the source of Tommy’s humor less than amusing.
The second and probably more compelling reason for Tommy Q’s fear was that Angel’s boyfriend was a man known only as Louis. Like Angel, Louis had no visible means of support, although it was widely known that Angel, now semiretired at the age of forty, was one of the best thieves in the business, capable of stealing the fluff from the president’s navel if the money was good enough.
Less widely known was the fact that Louis, tall, black, and sophisticated in his dress sense, was a hit man almost without equal, a killer who had been reformed somewhat by his relationship with Angel and who now chose his rare targets with what might be termed a social conscience.
Rumor had it that the killing of a German computer expert named Gunther Bloch in Chicago the previous year had been the work of Louis. Bloch was a serial rapist and torturer who preyed on young, sometimes very young, women in the sex resorts of Southeast Asia, where much of his business was transacted. Money usually covered all ills, money paid to pimps, to parents, to police, to politicians.
Unfortunately for Bloch, someone in the upper reaches of the government in one of his nations of choice couldn’t be bought, especially after Bloch strangled an eleven–year–old girl and dumped her body in a trash bin. Bloch fled the country, money was redirected to a “special project,” and Louis drowned Gunther Bloch in the bathroom of a thousand–dollar–a–night hotel suite in Chicago.
Or, like I said, so rumor had it. Whatever the truth of the matter, Louis was regarded as very bad news and Tommy Q wanted in future to be able to take a bath, however rarely, without fear of drowning.
“Nice story, Tommy,” said Angel.
“It’s just a story, Angel. I didn’t mean nothing by it. No offense meant.”
“None taken,” said Angel. “At least, not by me.”
Behind him there was a movement in the darkness, and Louis appeared. His bald head gleamed in the dim light, his muscular neck emerging from a black silk shirt within an immaculately cut gray suit. He towered over Angel by more than a foot, and as he did so, he eyed Tommy Q intently for a moment.
“Fruit,” he said. “That’s a … quaint term, Mr. Q. To what does it refer, exactly?”
The blood had drained from Tommy Q’s face and it seemed to take him a very long time to find enough saliva to enable him to gulp. When he did eventually manage, it sounded like he was swallowing a golf ball. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, so he closed it again and looked at the floor in the vain hope that it would open up and swallow him.
“It’s okay, Mr. Q, it was a good story,” said Louis in a voice as silky as his shirt. “Just be careful how you tell it.” Then he smiled a bright smile at Tommy Q, the sort of smile a cat might give a mouse to take to the grave with it. A drop of sweat ran down Tommy Q’s nose, hung from the tip for a moment, and then exploded on the floor. By then, Louis had gone.
“Don’t forget my car, Willie,” I said, then followed Angel from the garage.