Dead Street

Somehow I couldn’t quite discount old Bessie’s certainty about seeing Bucky. He’d aged, she’d said, but had still been recognizable — to her, anyway. And if it was Bucky, what was he doing down here on that dead street? A guy like that wouldn’t show any nostalgia for a place like this. At least he’d never expect anyone to identify him. The block was almost gone now, the buildings demolished, the few left about to come down. He must have figured there’d be nobody left who could tag him.

Cell phones are great for an area like this. The compartmentalized city of New York had a place for everything and everything was in its place. There was a cubicle where a cop kept track of every known street gang in the city, had IDs on their members, knew their codes and recognition signs and every record of arrests and convictions any of those punks had.

I called the department number and a voice said, “Officer Muncie here. How can I help you?”

“Captain Jack Stang, retired, from the old—”

“Hey, Captain! Good to speak to you. We were talking about you the other day. Somebody saw you down at your old precinct...”

“It’s torn down now.”

“The new place is pretty nice, I hear.”

“Maybe, but not my bailiwick. I got to learn to be a civilian again, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What can I do for you?”

“There was an old Bronx gang, the Blue Uptowners. What happened to them?”

“Hell, Jack, they’re still active. A few of the originals are still around, but they’re out of the loop. The new kids aren’t too bad. Very little trouble.”

“Who can I see about something that happened twenty-some years ago?”

“Just a second.” I heard him pull some folders out and rustle the papers in them. He wasn’t a computer guy either. When he was satisfied, he said, “There’s one guy, Paddy The Bull, they called him. His real name was Patrick Mahoney...”

“I recall him,” I said.

“He’s square now. Has a painting business. Want his address and phone number?”

I said yes, wrote them down in my note pad and thanked Officer Muncie for his time.

Patrick Mahoney was a far cry from Paddy The Bull. He was respectable now, a burly, bald, hard-working guy who had his own business, owned a pickup truck and had a wife and two kids and a big smile when he saw me.

“Damn,” he said with a laugh, outside the house in Queens he and a crew were painting, “did I do something wrong?”

“Nope,” I said. “You did something right. You grew up.”

“It’s been a long time, Captain Jack. I coulda been wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, not these painter’s whites, wasn’t for you. Now, I know that you’re retired and that this isn’t a social call, so what’s happening?”

“Remember Bucky Mohler?”

He made a face and spit out a dirty word. “He was a lowlife scumbag. Bad news. I tried to tell Wally Chips who ran our club to stay away from him but he wouldn’t listen to me. Or a couple of the other guys, either.”

“So?”

He paused. His eyes locked onto me, hard. “Look, Captain. You did me a favor once.”

“Yeah?”

“You probably don’t even remember. You coulda hauled my ass in and I’da done a stretch, a real one — I was over eighteen. You gave me a one-time pass.”

I had no memory of it, but if he thought he owed me, fine. “Know something, Paddy?”

He swallowed, then jumped in. “We had a bad apple in our bunch. A squealer. Turned the cops on to us four different times. The guys wanted to bump him, but that would only pull more law down on us, so the rough guys in the club figured out a cute dodge. Bucky, he wanted out from his family and he suddenly had a load of dough to lay out, so if the Uptowners could fake a kill on him and get somebody else in his place, and like really mutilate him up bad, Bucky would put his ID on the body and two birds would be killed with one beer bottle.”

“How did Bucky know about your squealer?”

“Man, word gets around, you should remember that.”

I bobbed my head in agreement. “What happened?”

“This a clean game you’re playing, Captain?”

I squinted at him.

“That was a long way back,” he said. “But there’s no time limit on murder, is there?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t in on this play. I came in right after the hit and got details from another member. I don’t remember who, either.” Something tightened his face. “Captain, there’s such a thing as accomplice after the fact, and—”

“Consider this a civilian inquiry.”

“You swear it?”

“I swear it.”

“Okay,” he said and took a deep breath. “I don’t know who drove the car, but the deal was when Bucky came up the street the Uptowners would send a member out to identify him and bring him back to us. Our guy would walk on Bucky’s left so when the car made the move, Bucky would jump clear and the squealer would get mashed. Well, it worked. The driver went over the body four times and when he finished you couldn’t even tell it was human. Bucky took the guy’s ID, put his own in its place dropped his jacket or something down and took off.”

“No accident investigation?”

“Come on, Captain. Who cared a hoot about a street gang in those days? Just one more punk out of the way. Remember?”