Long Time Gone: A Novel - Hardcover

Hamill, Denis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743407091 ISBN 13: 9780743407090

Publisher: Atria, 2002

Synopsis

It was 1969 on Hippie Hill in Brooklyn, and it seemed as if the world were coming to an end. LONG TIMEGONE 1969: Woodstock and the Moratorium, a man on the moon, Broadway Joe Namath, the Mets take the World Series. It was a year that saw goof balls, acid, thorazine, pot, Seconal, amphetamines, meth, and THC. It was the year the sixties ended, and it was the year in which Danny Cassidy saw his life shattered in a purple haze of drugs and violence. Did he kill the father of the girl of his teenage dreams? Or was he framed to cover up a far darker crime? Thirty-two years later, Danny, now a forty-nine-year-old divorced journalist, returns to his old neighborhood for his father's wake and one last attempt to exorcise the demons of that watershed year. One final chance as well to piece together the lost love of his life: Erika Malone, now a successful businesswoman whose father's unsolved murder remains the missing piece of the puzzle of both their lives. Denis Hamill's Fork in the Road was lauded by The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Library Journal, The Irish Voice, and Publishers Weekly, which called it a "lively, sad, humorous tale." Frank McCourt said, "When you read Fork in the Road, make sure your chair is comfortable, because Denis Hamill hooks you and keeps you to the end." Now, in Long Time Gone, Denis Hamill evokes a lost New York and a dashed love affair, both dissolved into the jinglejangle mornings that came following.

About this title

About the Author

Denis Hamill is the author of Fork in the Road, as well as House on Fire, Three Quarters, and Throwing 7's. He has been a columnist for New York magazine, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the Boston Herald American. A resident of New York City, Denis currently writes a column for the New York Daily News.

Reviews

The latest novel by journalist Hamill (Fork in the Road) opens in 1969, when Brooklynite Danny Cassidy becomes a suspect for a murder he can't remember whether he committed or not; furthermore, the victim was his girlfriend's father and a police officer. The case never comes to trial for lack of evidence. Thirty-three years later, Danny now an aging journalist, divorced and a lousy father receives word that his own father has died. Over the course of one long weekend, Danny must return to Brooklyn to bury his father, reunite with his brother and daughter, and, most importantly, figure out who committed the murder. He must also face erstwhile sweetheart Erika Malone, throw some punches and settle some scores. While the murder mystery is captivating, with a serpentine plot that keeps the reader guessing, Hamill's cultural forays into past and present are less successful. The present-day Brooklyn he portrays is populated by affluent yuppies who say things like "Don't mind me, I have work on liquidating a dot-com to do," while the Brooklyn of 1969 is a panorama of generic, cliched burnouts with names like Hippie Helen and Dirty Jim. While not entirely chiseled, Hamill's prose does succeed in fusing the brevity of newspaper writing and the machismo of traditional detective stories, allowing for a staccato-paced plot teeming with sex and violence. Like Danny himself, the novel is mostly shrouded in a haze of nostalgia and profanity that disperses now and then to reveal an entertaining whodunit with some poignant observations about life, love and loss.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Journalist Danny Cassidy, pushing 50, divorced, and estranged from his daughter, returns to Brooklyn after 32 years to bury his father. When he fled the neighborhood in 1969, he was a speed freak and an acid head suspected of killing a bad cop, Vito Malone. To make matters worse, Vito was the father of Danny's girlfriend, Erika. Danny was so messed up on drugs at the time that he still doesn't know whether he committed the crime. What he does know is that two cops are on his tail, still trying to pin the homicide on him. If he expects to stay free and grab the chance to reconcile with both his daughter and Erika, now a wealthy entrepreneur, he's going to have to find out who killed Vito and why. Hamill (Fork in the Road) spins an engrossing tale with a host of sharply delineated characters and complications galore. Readers will enjoy the rich evocation of late-1960s Brooklyn as an extended dysfunctional family. Highly recommended for most public libraries.
Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Thursday, August 30, 2001

After four loud rings he lifted the receiver, mumbled hello, and then Danny heard a gruff voice say, "Your father's dead."

Eleven months before, on his forty-ninth birthday, Danny Cassidy had decided that before he turned fifty he would stop running. He had lived like a fugitive for thirty-two years. Haunted, rather than hunted, he always expected a knock on the door in the middle of the night -- followed by handcuffs, trial, jail.

Maybe even the death penalty for killing a cop.

With the sixth decade of his life looming, Danny Cassidy was no longer going to skulk through life looking over his shoulder, afraid of the ghosts of 1969. He was determined to confront the nightmare of that year head-on before he turned the proverbial big five-oh.

But even with that commitment made, Danny had procrastinated most of his forty-ninth year. He got up each morning in his onebedroom apartment in West Hollywood, determined that this would be the day he would take the old knapsack out of the big trunk in the back of the closet and confront the year that had ended in horror -- a year from which he had been on the lam ever since.

But as Labor Day approached, he still hadn't opened the trunk, still hadn't worked up the balls to take out the knapsack, which he'd carted across the country and through the decades, and once and for all piece together the broken shards of his life.

The dirty canvas knapsack was what most of the hippies in the late sixties called a head bag, carried on the shoulder and covered in peace signs and smart-ass protest buttons. Danny had carried his head bag through all of 1969 in Brooklyn -- filled with Bambu rolling papers; hash pipes; roach clips; pill boxes; incense; eighttrack tapes of Dylan, Donovan, and the Doors; a copy of Francois Villion's collected poems; and a trade paperback on the life of Hieronymus Bosch, replete with color plates of the Flemish master's nightmarish paintings.

There were also several handwritten letters from Danny's older brother, Brendan, written from Vietnam, and eleven marble-design copybooks, one for each month of 1969 through November, which served as Danny Cassidy's detailed and drug-addled journals of the worst year of his life.

To Danny the head bag was the decade itself, sealed in a trunk like a vampire in his coffin. He was afraid of opening it and releasing the monster that used to be Danny Cassidy.

Now in his forty-ninth year, Danny found that the phone call about his father sent him skipping through time, forever changing his life.

"What did you say?" Danny said, reaching past the digital clock that said it was 4:59 A.M., for the pack of Vantage.

"I said your old man bought the farm," said the now familiar voice of Ankles Tufano. "Sorry, kid."

Danny hadn't seen Ankles in over thirty years but every two or three years, always on November 21, the anniversary of Vito Malone's unsolved murder, Danny would receive a long-distance phone call from him. Just a dirty little middle-of-the-night-piss call to let Danny Cassidy know that there was still an open homicide file on Ankles's desk -- and that Danny's name was still in that file as the prime suspect.

Ankles reminded Danny again that there was no statute of limitations on murder. Every time he called, Ankles said he had every intention of solving this case before he retired. He would ask Danny to come back to Brooklyn to cooperate. Danny would always refuse, and then Ankles would tell him that he always knew where he was, what he was doing, and whom he was doing it with. Just a shout-out to tilt Danny's life off-kilter, to keep him from ever having a good night's sleep.

Danny tried to live a low-key, normal existence, but Ankles popped out of the past every once in a while just to add melodrama and angst and uncertainty to his life. Just enough of an intrusion to keep Danny smoking, eating junk food, suffering from insomnia and an occasional case of hives. It helped wreck his marriage and helped strain his relationship with his only daughter, Darlene. The calls from Ankles were out of a past that kept him distracted enough so that he could never break out of the grind of the daily newspaper life into the broader world of the novel, movies, or theater. He chose to stay under the radar, afraid that any kind of high-profile success or fame would add heat to the old murder case. Years ago he even switched from the hard-news beat of the front of the paper to middle-of-the-book entertainment features, just so he wouldn't have to cover homicides, which always caused him to turn the bloodstained soil of his own past. He even turned down most freelance magazine assignments, except for occasionally agreeing to write a short story for one of the skin mags, and always under an assumed name.

With 1969 always simmering like a low-grade fever in his veins, Danny developed a kind of ADD that kept him from concentrating on anything longer than a newspaper article. Any writing that required sustained concentration shattered into bloody images, fragmented flashbacks, thoughts of a fierce but ruined first love. Sometimes a song triggered one of these unsettling episodes. Or a movie. Or a TV or radio broadcast reference to 1969. Sometimes a newspaper story about an old sixties radical like Brinks robbery suspect Kathy Boudin, or anti-Vietnam war firebomber Howard Mechanic or Symbionese Liberation Army would-be bomber Kathleen Soliah being busted after decades on the run made Danny too nervous to sleep. Even prosecutions he applauded scared him, like the arrest in the murder of the four children in a Mississippi church bombing that was prompted by Spike Lee's documentary Four Little Girls. Or the indictment of the mayor of Yorkville, Pennsylvania, for a race-motivated murder dating back to 1969.

But most times his fears were in direct response to the occasional phone calls from Ankles.

What made the anxiety worse was that after three decades he just couldn't remember whether or not he'd done the murder. He was so stoned on drugs and booze that long-ago night that he'd suffered a total blackout. The night of November 20 was like a page from an FBI file with all the important sections Magic-Markered out.

Danny once even paid for a private lie detector test that came up as inconclusive. Try as he might with the help of shrinks and hypnotists in the years since, Danny could bubble up no memory of that awful night. He read once that a killer lived inside of every man. But am I a murderer, Danny wondered.

Now, as he approached fifty, he decided that even a yes answer would be better than not knowing.

But there was never any solid indictable proof that he was the killer. He might have had motive, means, and opportunity, but there were no witnesses, no smoking gun, and not one shred of forensic evidence -- not enough to arrest or convict Danny at the time, or in the years since. The dead cop had been dirty, so from the beginning NYPD tried to downplay the case, hadn't put on the usual cop-killer full-court press. An embarrassment. But Ankles had never given up. He had never even liked the dead cop in question, but the murder had happened on his watch, on his stomping ground, and ever since it had nagged him like a dent in his otherwise flawless gold shield.

After Danny witnessed Malone's partner, Jack Davis, kill himself in front of his wife and kids, he hit the road, facing possible jail. Danny never returned to Brooklyn. He ran from that night, that year, that Brooklyn neighborhood, and that dead cop. He ran from a fractured family, a shit father, a dead mother, and a first love. And he ran from that murder, across the decades, across a continent.

Now he was being confronted with it again in his bachelor pad on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood.

"Who is this?" Danny asked, pretend

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743407091
• ISBN 13: 9780743407090
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416