Chapter 1

When you sit at home in your skivvies on the top floor of a five story walk-up without an elevator to make going out inviting, you get to ponder your sins in silence wondering where you went wrong.

You might pick up a book or a magazine to read about something exciting and romantic in a place where they might even have some of the new-fangled air conditioning none of these tenement buildings had on their improvement schedule anytime soon. Some of the residents on the lower floors had already purchased a window unit on their own and tried to cool at least one of the rooms in their tiny apartments and put up with the racket it made whenever it went on in the middle of the night.

My books and magazines were all souvenirs from the procession of dames that had played happy home with me over the years and their absence was mute testimony about my lack of romance and my fault of opening my mouth when I should have kept it shut and being far too silent when I should have be giving input to the dame’s conversation just to make her think I was interested in her thoughts even though I really wasn’t.

I had a glass filled with ice cubes and a crappy Kool-Aid mix that puckered my lips so bad that I was tempted to spit it out on the floor in sheer disgust. It was all due to my secretary telling me last month that I was drinking too much booze and if I didn’t stop I was going to wind up in the morgue on a one-way trip when they came to pick me up off the carpet.

Thinking about the morgue, all I could envision was the stiffs on the metal tables waiting for their final humiliating inspection to try and figure out what had caused their departure from this hard, cruel world.

I owed my constant trips down to the morgue to my Uncle, Joe Chambers and his unshaken belief that I could look at a stiff and tell you what caliber handgun had snuffed his rotten life out and with a little detective work tell him who probably did the dirty deed. My Uncle Joe was like the number two cop in all of Brooklyn and he didn’t want to be number one because we all knew the number one guys never lasted too long with politics running the whole thing from the outside. So he stayed clear of politics and smiled at all the Democrats and all the Republicans and told them how grateful he was to have them on his side. It had worked for him for the past two decades and he had no thoughts about changing his affiliation at this late date.

I was just starting to drop off into a mid-day nap when the phone jarred me into attention and I picked up the receiver curious who would be calling me on a Sunday when everybody knew I didn’t do shit on Sundays on principle, not necessarily on religious reasons.

“Who the hell is this? Can’t it wait until Monday morning like normal things for normal folks? Talk to me because I know this ain’t no wrong number.”

The deep voice on the other end made me stub out my Lucky Strike in the ashtray and I shut up as my Uncle lectured me of proper professionalism when using a telephone.

I had to smile because he was right just like he usually was on such matters and I answered his question with a short and sweet response.

“Sure, Uncle Joe, I will meet you at the morgue in about thirty minutes. I just have to get dressed and I will be there by the back door in two shakes of a monkey’s ass.”

Our block had been cordoned off as a playstreet on Sundays and the local kids were playing their made-up games using makeshift gear take the place of real equipment. I recognized some of them from their vociferous shouts that drifted all the way up to my apartment in the early evening hours when there was still enough daylight to get up a game. In the cold weather they played roller skate pretend ice hockey with a couple of loading platform cardboard crates as the goals. In the warm weather, it was always the ever popular stickball with the use of a Spalding rubber ball and the handle of a discarded broom or mop.

I eased my pre-World War Two Buick away from the curb making them change the field a bit to create a new third base instead of my front bumper. It made me feel like a bit of a prick in doing that but it was that or wait for the bus on the corner and renege on my promise to Uncle Joe to be prompt. The morgue was located right off the docks in Chelsea and it deserted just like I expected it to be on a Sunday. Everybody knew Sunday as a day of rest even for the production of stiffs to their final destination after their demise. The suicides had the good grace to wait until Monday to do their thing. The bad guys usually had dinner on Sunday and the good guys went to church like good little boys with their families if they were so lucky.

I looked at the dashboard and saw my gas gauge was on “empty” and I softly recited the names of my favorite Saints under my breath hoping that there was enough juice in the tank to get me to the morgue and back. I wasn’t planning any detours because the few gas stations in the city were usually closed on Sundays because it was a time when most folks still considered Sunday to be a day when good people didn’t work unless they were needed for an emergency like looking over a corpse to let their Uncles know the cause of death.

Sure, we had a coroner and some forensic people that worked for the Police Department but Uncle Joe and I both knew it was not worth the effort to call them in on Sunday because we would get a fair share of nasty comments for the entire next week in the office.