Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth Read Free Page B

warehouses that sit like giant blocks piled up at the water’s edge are a scattering of limestone and brick row houses; some wood frame ones too. The views are magnificent: New York Harbor, lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, Lady Liberty, and Governors Island. All this in the panorama of Sunset Park.
    The rising palisades of New Jersey lie on the horizon. And across the neighborhood, from Fourth Avenue down to the waterfront, apartments are perched over storefronts; some of the establishments gated in rusty aluminum, others open with vibrant neon, unchanged for years.
    I always wondered what somebody’s life would be like living above a storefront. A sense of privacy is lost, I imagine. But if you happen to own the business down below, at least you’ve got a really short commute. I read somewhere that John Gotti kept a little old lady in an apartment up over the Ravenite, a Manhattan social club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. That’s where Gotti held his secret meetings, when the old lady was out shopping. But then the little old lady agreed to cooperate with the feds. They went into her place when she wasn’t home, wired a bug into a lamp so they could listen from a remote van, and that’s how the feds taped his conversations; that’s how they got Sammy “the Bull” Gravano to rat out his don.
    In the case of Sweet Cherry, it wasn’t so easy. No federal agent could put a bug in there and hear anything over the mega bump-and-grind decibels pumped out of the sound system.
    Sweet Cherry occupied the ground floor of an unremarkable building at the corner of Second Avenue and 42nd Street. Only in New York City, America’s capital of irony, can there be two streets with the same names mere boroughs apart— the lesser-known address of Sweet Cherry versus the worldrenowned main stem of Times Square.
    The unremarkable building at the Brooklyn corner of 42nd and Second has an apartment upstairs with windows guarded by drawn shades pulled too far to one side, revealing only a slash of darkness beyond.
    From the opposite side of the street, I’m walking by on a dreary February afternoon, assessing the remains of the strip club.
    There’s a big vertical sign, as tall as the building itself, with a curvy black-and-white silhouette of a dancer, set against a field of fuchsia, beneath the words Sweet Cherry in script. Another sign, this one running horizontal along the wall of the building, is smashed and cockeyed, with exposed dead fluorescent tubes. To the left of the tubes is a third sign with red lettering on a white board, also cockeyed and hanging from wires. It reads, BUILDING FOR SALE BY OWNER .
    A delivery guy with a plastic sack of Chinese food dangling from his wrist is banging on the door of the apartment, checking the order stub for the address, looking up at the windows, waiting for some sign of life. Nothing.
    I glance up at the windows again, and I can’t believe anybody’s inside of that apartment, or wanting to be. It’s all the kind of charcoal-gray so thick you can practically feel it. I imagine cuts of light trying to pierce through the cloth shade of a lamp; the shade is streaked in cigarette-yellow. All in all, not my kind of room.
    A man appears at the corner. A big guy, a Latino from the hood. He attempts to help the Chinese delivery guy by yelling up to the window, something indecipherable to me. No matter how much the big guy hollers—nothing. The delivery guy gives up, disgusted at the waste of his time. I cross the street and ask the big guy what’s up in my own weak Spanglish.
    “Good place to let loose, you know, good times,” he answers me in English.
    I ask him his name. Jorge, he says.
    “Some people got hurt here,” I tell Jorge.
    “I don’t know about that stuff. Never happened when I was here.”
    “What about the bad stuff I heard about—murder, dope, sex for sale?”
    “Ah, come on, man. This is a bordello, bad things can happen. You don’t like bad things, you