Grief Street

straight-out questions? You always go at things sideways, you always make people spill things they don’t realize they’re spilling. It’s what makes you a great detective.” Slattery put back the rest of his Pepsi. He thought about mixing another drink but instead poured straight from his flask, draining it. I thought about whisky going down my own insides, and that fine old softness and warmth I miss so much. I fought off a shudder. Slattery said, “Back when you and I were still out there drinking together, we used to talk about detectives all the time. And—oh boy, the great stories you’d tell me when you’d had some jars! So what’s wrong with you now, Hock? Why would you want to keep stories all to yourself?”
    Slats was right. Asking blunt questions was out of character, and counterproductive. I might have worried about
    that—haste makes waste, especially in hot pursuit—except for the fact that it suddenly hit me that Slattery had confirmed at least one of his sources, without realizing it.
    “Back when was back when,” I said. “You keep on drinking, Slats. Me, I have to move on. Where I’m going, there’s a wild story. When I’m ready with it, I’ll call you up and tell you where you can read it.”

Eighteen

    Once upon a time in the borough of Queens, there was a green and quiet island at the edge of Bowery Bay in the East River. The island was home to a Dutch farming family by the name of Ryhen, which over a few hundred years somehow came to be called Rikers. The Rikers clan grew rich raising potatoes and tomatoes and sunflowers in the sandy earth of their sunny island.
    Then along about the time that Annie Meath named my neighborhood during a summer’s night riot, the Rikers family sold their farm to the city of New York for a hundred and eighty thousand bucks, which in those days was a fortune. The city, having no use for vegetables or big yellow flowers, converted the farm to a dump site for three things: subway excavations, garbage, criminals.
    RikersIsland quickly grew from eighty-seven natural acres to four hundred mostly man-made junk acres. The city’s criminals were dealt with in a campus of ten different jails. This included the notorious House of Detention for Men, which is classically famous for its role in the movie The Public Enemy, the one starring Jimmy Cagney and the grapefruit, which I have enjoyed a number of times at the Royal Bijou cinema.
    When the war was over in 1945, the city was able to attend to a problem that understandably worried law-abiding citizens of the Queens mainland: namely, a rat population on Rikers Island that greatly outnumbered the eight million human beings of New York City. These were not ordinary rats, they were a breed that became known as “Rikers Island rats.” There were regular panics in the streets when members of the breed were spotted swimming through the greasy waters of the East River en route to Queens proper. Many of these swimmers, buoyant and quite strong from life in the city’s enormous open-air garbage dump, were the size of cocker spaniels. The city responded with two actions: closure of the garbage dump, and installation of steel nets ringing the island waters. When the hungry rats fled they were successfully snared in the nets, where they either drowned or starved to death.
    There are still rats on Rikers Island, and because of their genetic lines they are significantly larger than rats living elsewhere in New York. People have mostly forgotten about the underwater nets, and the City Corrections Department likes to keep it that way, which is why the occasional inmate who attempts a water escape is never heard from again.
    Each year, a hundred forty thousand men and women (mostly men) pass through Rikers Island, giving it the distinction of being the world’s largest penal institution—by far. At any one time, Rikers houses twenty thousand of America’s despised class; ninety percent of the inmates are black or Latino and lack a high school diploma, one of four is mentally ill, the HIV-positive ratio is well on its way toward fifty percent of the prisoner population.
    Everybody works a job on Rikers, the eight thousand COs and the inmates alike. Some details are better than others. Corrections officers do not like pulling bing duty, for instance, because it gives them tremendous headaches by the end of the tour, from inmate howling alone.
    Prisoners particularly enjoy farm work, farms having been reestablished on