Manhattan 62 by Reggie Nadelson Read Free Book Online

soundtrack. Then, a couple years ago, white people began leaving. White Flight, they called it.
    My cousins eye those Levittown houses on Long Island. You can do OK as a schoolteacher, a cop, a firefighter, and now you could live with your own, my cousin said. It’s all they want: the house, the car, the green lawn, the TV and washing machine, the wife who stays home and takes care of things, the kids who keep their mouths shut and desire only what their parents have. No coloreds, either.
    My pop, old and bitter now, is always yapping. “If I could, I’d go out there, get away from them coons,” he’d tell me. He has a nasty gift for language—still does—that he puts to work dumping shit on other people: Chink, Kike, Nigger. My whole life is running away from him.
    But after ten minutes, I’m still clawing at the warehouse door. It doesn’t give, I get out my gun and smash a window. I have a hunch about this, I crawl through into a warehouse space that stinks of dead chickens. Somewhere I hear rats. All I have is my lighter, and I flick it on again and again.
    In the far corner is a rusty electric heater, one bar with a faint glow.
    Someone’s been here recently. Near the heater is a nest of old newspapers in English, in Spanish, the New York Post, La Prensa, and I scrabble through them like a crazy man, looking at dates. The dates are recent, the papers are from late June, early July, right up to July 2nd. July 2, 1962 says the date on the newspaper. Two days ago. It’s the 4th now, the night I find her, find these newspapers. In the pile of papers is a leaflet in Spanish, something about Fidel Castro. A strange, sweet smell comes off it. The girl must have worn flowery cologne, something pretty, lilies of the valley. I light up another smoke. She was here before she died, hiding here, a bed of old newspaper, scared to death.
    Did something drive her back out onto the High Line? Did somebody find her huddled, torture her, hang her from the viaduct?
    That night, I work the case until dawn, and my mouth tastes like a sewer from all the smokes; I keep on working it day after day, but there’s nothing. I start drinking too much.
    The case, it runs right through July, my name shows up in a couple of the articles. In the Mirror, they even shove my picture in with the story, and some headline about a brave detective, garbage like that. The Post picks it up. People around NYU start asking me about it, ghoulish questions about the girl, her death. Why is anyone interested in so much horror; it’s not long after I meet Max Ostalsky in the park.
    *
    Leaving the High Line now on this miserable October morning, I remembered how Max Ostalsky had asked me about the dead girl. Polite, but insistent.
    What did some Russki care about a Manhattan homicide? I had wondered more than once.
    Now I knew. He had wanted information on how the cops worked a homicide. Wanted it because he was planning to kill the man on Pier 46. I felt sure about it, but I needed evidence, and I was burning up with fever, sick as a dog, exhausted.
    Tommy was asleep on my couch, and I left him there. He could miss school for a day. I washed down three aspirin with a belt of Three Roses—drank it from the bottle I kept in the kitchen— tore off my clothes, fell into bed.
    The phone rang. It was my lieutenant. I said I was sick. He said, OK, take some time. Take two weeks. Don’t come in, he said. Didn’t ask about the case. Don’t ask nothing, Pat, he said. Finally, I fell asleep. Dreamed I was running uptown, had to get to the piers, to the High Line, had to save somebody, except the face on the detective who was running wasn’t mine. It was Max Ostalsky’s.

CHAPTER THREE
    October 17, ’62
    T HE DREAM WOKE ME . I couldn’t get back to sleep. I drank some more whisky and took more aspirin
and I still couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, trying to recall how I fell into the friendship