Brooklyn Noir by Tim McLoughlin Page A

graying mustache twitching in the breeze. “It’s been so long, so long ago and far away.” For a second there I think Scoop is gonna break into a song. Scoop useta be like that, a walkin’, talkin’ Broadway musical with subtitles. I understand why Sylv scratched me for him. All that freebee entertainment. Scoop plunks in the chair across the desk from me. “Can you get me outa here? I done nothing wrong. We’re playing deuces wild and I’m drawing to an ace and two twos when they cave in—Sherlock and Front Page, two of the greatest beat reporters who never won a Polk Award.”
    “Hey, you win a Polk Award?” I’m checking out Scoop’s memory.
    “Nominated twice,” Scoop says with a long sigh. “I had Al Landa and David Medina pitching for me, but couldn’t get past that flack Hershey they brought in from
Newsday.”
    The marbles are there, so I ask him for the story. “No song and dance, Scoop,” I say. “We only got so long. Sanchez is doing us a favor. Just a run through, not twice around.”
    Scoop confirms pretty much what Sylvia has told me—the history of the poker game, the poisoned mustard, the clues on his cuff, pants, fly. I’m taking notes, scratching times, names, the menu. Seems the scene of the crime is a small office off the main drag of Senior’s, the deli Sylvia has opened less than a month ago.
    “I never wanted her to do it,” Scoop says. “What we need a business for at our age? We should be rolling in the clover or at least the sands of Miami Beach. But you know Sylvia, once she got it in her head to make pastrami on rye with a slice of cheesecake for McDonald’s prices, there was no stopping her. She’s talking franchises coast to coast, going public on the big board, and we’re lucky if we can pay the bills even with my kid—” Scoop breaks off, shrugs, collects himself. “I mean our nephew I.F. Izzy. Ain’t he an egg cream with a dash of cinnamon if you ever seen one?”
    Egg creams with cinnamon? That’s a new one on me, but I let it pass. I’m hearing “my kid” before “our nephew.” I say, “Tell me something, Scoop. This nephew of yourn, he’s your sister’s kid? Molly who I remember lived in Sea Gate before she run off with a retired cutter from the garment district and moved to South Fallsburg?”
    “Naw. Naw,” Scoop says. “The cutter—may his creases rest in peace—is long since gone. Molly married again, an artist. She’s got a place in Brooklyn Heights, right there looking over the southern tip of Manhattan.”
    I know Scoop has no other sisters or brothers and this “nephew” definitely does not run in Sylvia’s family. I put it to him: “This kid, I.F. Izzy. He is or is
no
Molly’s son?”
    Scoop shrugs, comes as close as I’ve ever seen him to blushing, starts fumbling for a butt. I’d stake him to a White Owl, but it is definitely not a good idea to light up a fat stogie in a precinct house when you’re being held for murder.
    “He’s no nephew,” Scoop says like he’s breaking the Lindbergh case. “The kid is my son. Not by Sylvia. Sylvia and I couldn’t have kids—not in the cards for us.”
    I’m sitting cool as a cucumber, no
how do you do, it’s all news to me
It’s a confession, right out of Bernard Macfadden’s
True Story, Truer Romance, Truest Experience.
A marriage gone lightly sour, a career diving for cover, not much happening except for poker with the boys and a chippy who likes to sing duets. Scoop tells me he picked up I.F.’s mother in a journalism class he was teaching part-time at L.I.U. twenty years ago.
    “A good kid. I really liked her, had a lot of respect for that babe. Would have broken up with Sylvia for her, but she—Martha Gellhorn Washington—would you believe it, named for one of the great foreign correspondents of her time, who also never won a Polk Award. Anyway, Martha said it was just a fling. I was too old for her, not really her type. But she wanted to have the kid. When Martha’s