Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

Author:Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock [McLoughlin, Tim & Adcock, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2008-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE BODY IN THE DOORWAY

BY PATRICIA MULCAHY

Fort Greene

I never saw the body. I found out that Vladimir the antiques dealer, a.k.a. Bobby from Russia, had been shot in the head at point-blank range in the doorway of his shop at Vanderbilt and DeKalb because the drums were talking. This is how it went in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the mid-1990s.

Friends called friends to alert them to the fact that there’d been another mugging in Fort Greene Park, or gunshots heard from an unknown source on Adelphi at 3 a.m. A mention of Fort Greene on the news usually meant that another four-year-old had been shot tragically in drug-related violence in the Walt Whitman Houses. Myrtle Avenue was referred to as “Murder Avenue” by all and sundry. The local citizenry protected each other with all-points alerts about crime in an area labeled up-and-coming, yet still on its way to that elusive goal, whatever it meant to anyone who wasn’t a real estate broker.

Burnt out on tourists, nonstop street spectacle, and rising prices in Greenwich Village, I’d moved to Brooklyn in 1990, thrilled by the beautiful architecture, the wide, treelined streets, and the warm and generous spirit of the people who lived here. Hell, I got a free dessert the week I moved in. Christine, a Caribbean woman who ran a bakery at the corner of Carlton and DeKalb, told me, “Watch out going by the park after dark,” as she welcomed me with a delicious rum pudding. No one had given me free anything in the twelve years I’d lived in Manhattan. This was Fort Greene in a nutshell: Welcome, and watch your back.

Taxi drivers told me I was crazy to live in a neighborhood like this. Unspoken was the fact that I was white and the area was predominantly African American. Perhaps I was naïve, but I didn’t worry. In the nine years I’d lived on Jones Street between West 4th and Bleecker, I’d been mugged in broad daylight in the lobby, burglarized by a guy who called on the phone a week later to let me know he could come back anytime he wanted, and terrorized by a drug-and-booze-addled jazz musician neighbor whose friends I passed shooting up in the hallway on my way to work. How much worse could it be in Brooklyn?

It was tough in New York then, and things could happen anywhere: This was the common wisdom passed from one nervous neighbor to another. Watching your back was a way of living, the price of being in the big city, with all it had to offer. The worst thing that happened to me in Fort Greene was being labeled “white meat” by a bunch of teenaged boys eager to look tough for their cohorts. But if I stayed out late I hoped and prayed I would find a parking spot close to my apartment. Muggers exercised equal opportunity in their choice of targets.

In truth, I learned that for all its tough-talk swagger and reputation, Brooklyn had a big, warm heart.

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