Grief Street

being a detective.
When people forget and cannot remember, they lose themselves und they are alone. That is a crime.
Some people can’t help forgetting. Some choose to forget, some simply let it happen. Certain others make us want to forget. If we are not careful of them, they can steal our memories.
When people forget, lives are ravaged. What happens when a whole society forgets?

Four

    " Y ou don’t look like no Jew-boy I ever seen.’’
    “No, I suppose not.”
    Becker was the name of the tiresome muster sergeant I had to be in the same room with. His first name I do not know, or care to know. Becker is the kind of cop with shiny pants from a career of mostly sitting at a desk. He wears flag patches sewn to the sleeves of his size xxl uniform shirt, with U.S.A. embroidered in redundant gold under the stars and stripes. Cops like him all over the country sprouted these little flags back when Nixon was warming up to his final disgrace. If Becker was to have a stroke anytime during his tour, odds were that he would freeze up just the way he was now: jelly doughnut in one hand, clipboard in the other.
    “So if you ain’t Hebe,” Becker wondered, pouring on the charm, “what’s it to you?”
    “It happened in my neighborhood, that’s what. While I was sleeping.” I was looking over the detail sheet from the abbreviated special incidents report Becker had read off to everybody during the morning roll call. It was bad enough I had heard it cold—the news about my friend’s murder— from a slob like Becker. It was worse now, reading it black on white, every word whapping me in the chest. Sweat ran down my back and trickled into my shorts. I put a hand over my heart, thinking somehow that would stop the banging. “Five blocks from where I live...”
    Victim DO A at Roosevelt Hospital... Facial region butchered beyond recognition... Print positive ID pending... Tentative ID as...
    Whap? My friend’s name again.
    I am no stranger to dead names, mainly due to the hazards of my occupation. In my time I have seen hundreds of dead bodies, read hundreds more toe tags and newspaper obituaries and funeral programs—and homicide write-ups, like the one now rattling in my hands. But seeing the words paznik, rabbi Marvin in the familiar typeface of the Royal standard manual from the station house papering room that I myself have used to write a mile of anonymous dead names—this was personal, a violation. And a hollowing sadness, the kind that overwhelms me when I visit my mother’s grave, when I brush my fingers across the letters of her name chiseled in a marble headstone. Sadder yet, I realized—too late to tell him—how much affection I had for my friend, a neighborhood good guy.
    “Oh, that’s right, you live in the city, in Hell’s Kitchen yet—that slum.” Becker was missing the point all over the place. Also he was chewing on a doughnut. Sugar crumbs bounced on soggy lips as he talked. “For crying out loud, Hockaday, you never heard of the Island?”
    Becker lives in the Long Island cop ghetto of Massapequa. Other than driving back and forth between the suburban tract house where he sleeps and the precinct station house where he sits, he does not get around much. Consequently, he has no clue about the Evian gulpers crowding my neighborhood; how they would take one look at his face blotchy from crullers and his shiny pants and make him for something that goes to bed at night inside a cardboard box propped up in a doorway.
    Any other day, I might have given Becker my low opinion °f Massapequa and the Island in general. I would have asked, How’d you like an army of Island-hating cops like rue—worse than me, cops with dark complexions—commuting out to Massapequa every day with guns and bad attitudes? But today it would give me no such pleasure to make Becker’s neck bulge.
    Besides which, I had no time. I needed clearance from my inspector—not an easy man to reach on the phone—and then I wanted to hurry over to Temple Ezrath Israel before a killer’s trail went cool. A shadow? So I let it go with Becker by telling him, “Do all the decent folks a big favor, Sergeant. Shut your hole.”
    Becker bellied up to me, so close I could smell cinnamon on his breath. “You should watch your mouth, Hockaday. Maybe your back, too. You don’t want it that somebody decorates you with a couple more nice wreaths. Follow?”
    I turned, and slowly walked away from Becker. Also I followed him, so to