invited Jim and Rose and the kids.”
“First I move into a yuppie apartment and now I’m gonna shop like a yuppie. This is culture shock and I’m too old for it. Correction: we’re too old for it. Plus it’s bad for my image. Next thing you’ll be movin’ me out to Connecticut.”
“If it makes you feel better, you can wear a ski mask. Besides, you don’t have to shop. You have to drive and wait in the car. C’mon, I want to hear about the Alamare case, anyway. We’ll talk while we go.”
If there was any way that Betty could have done it by herself, Moodrow would have begged off, but there are no legal parking spaces in midtown Manhattan and the prospect of taking five subways through Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn, even without the grocery bags, was too gruesome to be contemplated. Moodrow knew he was drafted and his complaints no more than ritual.
It was nine o’clock in the morning when they left Betty’s Park Slope apartment in Brooklyn. They headed toward the Manhattan Bridge, and the traffic along Flatbush Avenue was fierce. In most cities, the rush hour ends at nine, when the workday begins; in New York there are days when it doesn’t end until the workers go home. Under normal circumstances, Moodrow would sooner have rescued a cat from a tenement fire than spend his morning in Manhattan traffic, but as soon as he began to talk about Connie Alamare and her daughter, Flo, he forgot the traffic altogether, steering his newly purchased ’82 Mercury Marquis with the automatic professionalism of a veteran cop.
“The thing cops hate most is when witnesses start bullshitting them,” he began airily. “It happens all the time and mostly there’s no reason for it. Alamare’s daughter has holes up and down both arms. Clean punctures from clean needles which most likely makes her a rich junkie. That’s not so uncommon as you’d think, but the funny thing is her mother didn’t mention it. If you listen to her, you’d think the daughter was an angel.”
“Did she know?”
“She knew. She paid a lawyer two hundred dollars an hour to make sure she’d know. When the doctors saw Flo Alamare’s arms, the first thing they did was test her for drugs and she showed positive for heroin.”
“Did she overdose? Is that what happened?”
“I spoke to the doctor in charge of the ward where they first brought her. Doctor Johnson in Bronx Municipal which is a hellhole. He insists that she only had traces of heroin in her system. Not near enough for an OD. Then they brought in a cardiologist to do some tests. His name is…”
Without taking his eyes from the road, Moodrow took a worn notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to turn the pages with his thumb. “Merstein. Samuel Merstein. He’s the one who thinks she had a stroke.”
“How does he know?”
Moodrow’s thumb curled the pages for another moment. “They took a test—a PET test. It’s an unbelievable thing really. They put radioactive glucose into your veins, then watch your brain cells with a Geiger counter. The idea is to find which part of your brain doesn’t use the sugar. That’s the dead part. Which is what happens when you have a stroke—some part of your brain dies. Anyway, the parts of Flo Alamare’s brain that control movement and thinking don’t work. Dr. Merstein wouldn’t say that she’s brain dead, but he thinks she’s so close to it that it doesn’t matter. Flo Alamare’s never gonna tell us what happened to her.”
“Couldn’t the same condition result from an overdose of heroin? I’ve seen a lot of that with Legal Aid. If you stop breathing and the brain doesn’t get oxygen, you can definitely have brain damage.”
Moodrow, trying to avoid the traffic on the Bowery, took the east-bound Canal Street exit and began to work his way through Chinatown. “They only found traces of heroin in her body.”
“You did say that she’d been using for a long time?”
“She had a lot of holes in her
“First I move into a yuppie apartment and now I’m gonna shop like a yuppie. This is culture shock and I’m too old for it. Correction: we’re too old for it. Plus it’s bad for my image. Next thing you’ll be movin’ me out to Connecticut.”
“If it makes you feel better, you can wear a ski mask. Besides, you don’t have to shop. You have to drive and wait in the car. C’mon, I want to hear about the Alamare case, anyway. We’ll talk while we go.”
If there was any way that Betty could have done it by herself, Moodrow would have begged off, but there are no legal parking spaces in midtown Manhattan and the prospect of taking five subways through Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn, even without the grocery bags, was too gruesome to be contemplated. Moodrow knew he was drafted and his complaints no more than ritual.
It was nine o’clock in the morning when they left Betty’s Park Slope apartment in Brooklyn. They headed toward the Manhattan Bridge, and the traffic along Flatbush Avenue was fierce. In most cities, the rush hour ends at nine, when the workday begins; in New York there are days when it doesn’t end until the workers go home. Under normal circumstances, Moodrow would sooner have rescued a cat from a tenement fire than spend his morning in Manhattan traffic, but as soon as he began to talk about Connie Alamare and her daughter, Flo, he forgot the traffic altogether, steering his newly purchased ’82 Mercury Marquis with the automatic professionalism of a veteran cop.
“The thing cops hate most is when witnesses start bullshitting them,” he began airily. “It happens all the time and mostly there’s no reason for it. Alamare’s daughter has holes up and down both arms. Clean punctures from clean needles which most likely makes her a rich junkie. That’s not so uncommon as you’d think, but the funny thing is her mother didn’t mention it. If you listen to her, you’d think the daughter was an angel.”
“Did she know?”
“She knew. She paid a lawyer two hundred dollars an hour to make sure she’d know. When the doctors saw Flo Alamare’s arms, the first thing they did was test her for drugs and she showed positive for heroin.”
“Did she overdose? Is that what happened?”
“I spoke to the doctor in charge of the ward where they first brought her. Doctor Johnson in Bronx Municipal which is a hellhole. He insists that she only had traces of heroin in her system. Not near enough for an OD. Then they brought in a cardiologist to do some tests. His name is…”
Without taking his eyes from the road, Moodrow took a worn notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to turn the pages with his thumb. “Merstein. Samuel Merstein. He’s the one who thinks she had a stroke.”
“How does he know?”
Moodrow’s thumb curled the pages for another moment. “They took a test—a PET test. It’s an unbelievable thing really. They put radioactive glucose into your veins, then watch your brain cells with a Geiger counter. The idea is to find which part of your brain doesn’t use the sugar. That’s the dead part. Which is what happens when you have a stroke—some part of your brain dies. Anyway, the parts of Flo Alamare’s brain that control movement and thinking don’t work. Dr. Merstein wouldn’t say that she’s brain dead, but he thinks she’s so close to it that it doesn’t matter. Flo Alamare’s never gonna tell us what happened to her.”
“Couldn’t the same condition result from an overdose of heroin? I’ve seen a lot of that with Legal Aid. If you stop breathing and the brain doesn’t get oxygen, you can definitely have brain damage.”
Moodrow, trying to avoid the traffic on the Bowery, took the east-bound Canal Street exit and began to work his way through Chinatown. “They only found traces of heroin in her body.”
“You did say that she’d been using for a long time?”
“She had a lot of holes in her