Old Flame

by BERKOWITZ, IRA

• ISBN13: 9780307408624
• ISBN10: 0307408620
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2008-12-30
• Publisher: Broadway Books
• More Book Details
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Summary

Dark streets. Darker secrets. Jackson Steeg thought he'd finally put all that behind him. He was wrong. Jackson Steeg isn't an NYPD homicide cop anymore, not since the bullet he took to the lung. But Steeg's retirement is looking anything but relaxing. After months of death threats, his ex-wife's new flame is beaten to death outside a chichi restaurant in the Meatpacking District. When Steeg starts pulling on strings, he discovers that his old pals on the force are strangely reluctant to investigate the murder. Meanwhile, Steeg's Hell's Kitchen roots prove impossible to escape when a ne'er-do-well childhood friend finds himself deep in debt to a vicious mobster. Steeg's brother, Dave, wants to help, but the only language Dave knows is violence, and soon a mob war threatens to erupt. Now Steeg's got two factions of New York's nastiest characters aiming for his head. Worse, every thread keeps leading him exactly where he doesn't want to go: his own family. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author Biography

IRA BERKOWITZ is a native New Yorker and former advertising executive. His first novel, Family Matters, won the Washington Irving Literary Award.

Excerpts

CHAPTER 1 Jeanmarie Doyle, my ex-mother-in-law, loathed me in a biblical way, had poisoned my marriage, and now sat at my kitchen table smiling sweetly, coiled to strike again. In the years since Ginny divorced me, Jeanmarie's black hair had turned white, her body had thickened, and deep lines crosshatched her cheeks. But if you looked closely, the same feral madness still bubbled in her eyes. For the better part of a half hour she sipped coffee from an NYPD mug with a crack in its handle and rattled on about people I didn't remember and deaths I didn't mourn. Even though the snakes in my head screamed that she was about to screw up my life, I didn't interrupt. Jeanmarie got to things in her own time. After the second refill, the well of small talk had run dry, and Jeanmarie got down to business. "Steeg," she said, "I need your help." My mother, Norah, used to say that the fairies give each of us a measure of cheek at birth. And as the years pile up on each other, all we're left with is humility. It was fair to say Jeanmarie's measure had a long way to go before the larder was empty. The sheer chutzpah of the woman was astounding. The snakes had had enough. I got up from the table, walked to the door, and held it open. "Have a nice day, Jeanmarie." "It's not for me I'm asking, it's for Ginny." That got my attention. "Ginny and her husband are getting death threats," she said. "I'm not surprised. It was a match I didn't approve of." She wrinkled her nose and glanced out the window at a pale and listless day. "But she's my child," Jeanmarie continued, "and I only want for her happiness." I had heard Ginny had married a fireman, a Lower East Side guy named Gerhardt. But, as I recall, there wasn't much Jeanmarie, or her husband Ollie, did approve of, so I didn't pursue it. I walked back to the kitchen. "Did she go to the police?" I asked. She looked at me as if I were an idiot child. Jeanmarie Doyle was about three things: family, the Church, and hatred for the British avocation of fucking the Irish over every chance they got. Strongbow, Cromwell, the plantations, the Rising, the Troubles weren't history. They were festering, real-time events that she took with tea at night and with oatmeal in the morning. She even kept a kitchen canister for loose change and the spare dollar, periodically collected by the Hell's Kitchen IRA man. But above all, Jeanmarie hated and distrusted the police, a fact that had never boded well for my relationship with her daughter. When Ginny announced that she planned to marry a cop??me??it caused a shit storm of epic proportions. Cops, especially if they were Irish, were the enemy. Jeanmarie had fought our marriage every step of the way, but Ginny was resolute. So Jeanmarie bit her lip and pasted on a smile, but she never got past it. Yet here she was, in my kitchen. "I didn't raise my child to go to the cops for justice," she said. "I'm a cop and you're here," I said. A little smile, faintly cruel, I thought, played on her lips, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. The nine that tore through my chest courtesy of Frankie One-Eye, a meth-stoked pimp, had been God's punishment for the way I earned my living. A kind of balancing of the scales. "Not anymore," she said. "Fair point." Neither of us spoke for a few minutes as the obvious qu