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 skinny thing with a swan’s neck, a strong flirtatious face, and a jet-black hairdo. She’s hovering near sixty, but if you mention that to her, you might get a black eye from her tough little fist. Stuff a force of nature into a size-four dress and there you have her. Shirley grew up in Hell’s Kitchen-as did I-and remains there still with only her memories of the place as it once was, before developers and gentrification-level rents steamrolled not only the color out of the area but the very name itself. It’s now tagged Clinton, which is a designation that’ll put you to sleep before you’ve even finished saying it. Shirley is a bona fide ghost of the old neighborhood. Far fewer haunts, but those that remain she clings to with her notorious tenacity.
We got off at Fortieth Street in Sunnyside and walked the several blocks to Calvary Cemetery. Shirley crossed herself before entering, shooting me a look.
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 anniversary of my uncle Patrick’s remains being identified, and the date agreed upon for the official registration of his death-there should have been footprints in the fresh snow. But there were none.
“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 planning to see it through. Her relationship with the bottle was moving along nicely by that point as well. After I was born, the cop made a point of keeping tabs on me and my mother when he could, dropping in on us now and again. Sometimes I was invited to leave the apartment for an hour while the two hashed things out. To some extent, despite his spotty presence in my life, my old man managed to mold me, if not directly as often as I’d have preferred then at least by dint of his considerable persona and the name he made for himself as he rose steadily up the ranks of the police department. I steered in the direction of the NYPD myself for a while-managed one year at John Jay-though I fell with a pronounced bounce from that particular path. Eventually, my father was named police commissioner for the city of New York. Commissioner Harlan Scott. But one summer afternoon four years into his post, he stepped down without notice or explanation and, five days after that, disappeared forever from the face of the earth. One would have had to be watching closely-which I was-to see that my mother’s relationship with the bottle moved to a deeper level after the old man’s disappearance. Even fifteen years later-eight years after Harlan Scott was officially declared dead-she never tires of reminding me how the important men in her life have a habit of disappearing.
The freaky thing about the daisies on my uncle’s grave was this: Harlan Scott had made it a point every year on the anniversary of Patrick Malone’s declared death to join my mother at her brother’s gravesite and leave off a clutch of daisies. In the fifteen years since his disappearance, every year without fail, the daisies had continued to appear. I knew it wasn’t my father. The lead weight in my stomach told me that he was every bit as dead as the uncle I’d never met. But my mother has another way of viewing matters. It’s not stretching the truth to say that she looks forward to the annual anguish of discovering the mysterious daisies on her brother’s tombstone. Even though she married (and, later, divorced), no other man on earth was going to take my father’s place in her emotions. The inexplicable daisies gave my mother the kind of false hope that fuels constant low-level heartache, a pain with which the small tough woman was, unfortunately, all too comfortable.
After several silent minutes, we left the gravesite. As she always did, my mother paused just outside the cemetery. She slowly scanned the buildings running both ways in front of us. One year she’d brought binoculars. But generally, the tactic was to remain visible for a minute or two, in case someone was watching. The windows of the buildings stared back blankly. Hundreds of opaque empty eyes.
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.