What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  Smiling sheepishly, he pointed to the union pin on my shirt collar. “I was union,” he said.

  I began to catch on, remembering Pinochet and the torture ship in Santiago harbor.

  “You were in jail in Chile?”

  With a grim smile, he touched the shaver, then his face, his fingers, and his testicles.

  I put my hand on Ernesto’s shoulder. I wanted to tell him he could trust Big John, but, though I knew I could, I didn’t know if he could. This wasn’t his business; why should he help? The expression in his eyes told me he’d had enough of being brave the last time around, in Chile; now he wanted to be home with his wife and kids.

  I put the razor back in the leather bag, and Ernesto put the bag into Greg’s locker and closed it. He opened his own locker then, pulling out a large interoffice mail envelope, tied closed but not sealed and addressed to no one. He handed it to me. In the envelope, I found an American Express card—even Greg had managed to hold on to his—a driver’s license, a Social Security card, a Macy’s card, and a check-cashing card from Sloan’s, probably all of Greg’s identification.

  Greg’s address was on his license, Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn. I wrote it down and gave the envelope back to Ernesto, telling him to put it in Greg’s locker. Obviously, the police hadn’t gotten to the locker yet. They would need to establish he’d flown the coop before they could get a search warrant and, lacking Ernesto’s finesse, pry it open with a crowbar. It would be better for them to find Greg’s papers in his own locker, rather than in Ernesto’s.

  I told Ernesto he could punch in and start his shift early, since we were already there, then asked again if he knew where Greg had gone, figuring if he knew this much, he probably knew more. John had suggested I threaten to fire him to get him to talk, but I figured I was above such things. Instead, I stood for a while in front of the lockers, scratching my head and looking perplexed. Ernesto stuck with me while I scratched my head, wrinkled my brow, and pursed my lips. He seemed to be rooting for me, but gave no indication that he would be of any help.

  I began speaking as if to myself. “If I could figure out what Greg was doing that night …” Out of the corner of my eye, I sneaked a look at Ernesto. He smiled politely. “The tough thing is,” I said to myself, “Greg may not know how to get in touch with me or John. If he knew we were looking for him …” I finally faced Ernesto, who began changing for work. “Look,” I said. “You ask Greg. If you asked him, he’d tell you to tell me what was going on, so I could help him. Call Greg and ask him.”

  Ernesto continued dressing and just shook his head. The gentle expression evaporated. The hard look he’d taken on with Big John the night before came back. “I go to work now.” He started to walk away.

  When I called him back, he looked over his shoulder but kept going. My temper got the best of me. “Hey,” I shouted. “Ernesto. You work for me. Don’t fucking walk away like that.”

  This time, he didn’t even look back. Two or three busboys, who’d come in to change for their shift, were watching. I could have sworn they were snickering. The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got at Ernesto. When the Sunday-night bartender arrived around five o’clock, I went back and found Ernesto in the pantry area between the kitchen and the bar, where the waiters and busboys were getting supplies to set up for Sunday supper. I asked Ernesto again if he knew where Greg was. Half a dozen of Ernesto’s fellow workers caught the drift of what was going on and had an ear cocked in our direction. Behind me, I heard the buzz of conversation—what’s the word for asshole in Spanish? Ernesto, like a good basketball ref, walked away, trying to save me from myself. But I was too far gone; I needed to save face.

  “Okay, Ernesto,” I said. “Back in the locker room. I’m not finished.”

  He’d begun cutting up fruit and was slicing oranges, continuing to ignore me.

  “All right, pal. That’s it,” I said. “You’re fired!”

  Ernesto glanced up from his cutting, his expression a mix of controlled rage, piercing hatred, pity, and disgust, as if he’d hoped for better from me. He finished the orange he was cutting, put down the knife, and headed for the locker room.

  In the first flush of power, I felt the thrill of vindication. But after an hour or so, I began to feel like I’d murdered a baby. Corrupted by power on my second day. I couldn’t believe what I’d done—taking away someone’s job, sending the guy home to tell his wife and kids he didn’t have grocery money, couldn’t pay the rent. It was like stabbing him.

  I worked the bar through the late afternoon, then watched the night bartender, Herb, for a while. He didn’t need me, so I wandered between the bar and the small bar manager’s office behind the liquor room until well into the evening. When I got tired of kicking myself, I called Ernesto’s to tell him he could have his job back. He wasn’t there, so I tried to explain to his wife, who didn’t speak English, first that I had fired Ernesto, then that I was hiring him back. I don’t know what the hell I ended up telling her.

  After that, I sat and thought for a while, finally deciding to try to do something useful. I called John’s office. No one answered but the machine said John would retrieve his messages frequently, so I told him I was going to Greg’s apartment—one place he might eat or sleep—and asked John to meet me there.

  I walked all the way across Thirty-fourth Street to Seventh Avenue and took the number 2 train to the Grand Army Plaza stop in Brooklyn. Years before, when a couple of lesbian real estate operatives first staked out the area, I’d gone out with a woman who lived on Eighth Avenue. For a while, it looked like they might be able to create a kind of Amazonia in that section of Brooklyn, but, like all good neighborhoods, it went to hell when the Yuppies found it and came rushing in to pay exorbitant prices to gentrify the place.

  Along Prospect Park West, I joined up with a small troupe of young men and women in designer sweatsuits, hurrying home from their health clubs to their brownstones. The brownstones had been sandblasted and reworked into one- and two-bedroom apartments that were sold as co-ops by real estate agents named Fern. Seventh Avenue had been cleaned of drug dealers and junkies, just as if the town had hired a new sheriff.

  On a corner in front of candy store and on the stairs of the stoop next to it, teenagers lounged, smoking cigarettes, reminding me of the Brooklyn of my youth. A pretty dark-haired girl wearing black chino pants looked at me as I passed. She hadn’t filled out enough yet to fill her chinos completely, but she dragged on her cigarette and looked me in the eye with a kind of haughty flirtatiousness. I was surprised teenagers still smoked. Kids like me didn’t know cigarettes would kill us back in the days we used to sit on the stoops smoking and trying to look tough; we thought the worst smoking could do was stunt our growth. I was disappointed these kids were like me, that there didn’t seem to have been any progress. Something like panic came over me. I stopped in my tracks and hoped and hoped for my son, Kevin, that his life wouldn’t be fucked up, that he’d be okay.

  Greg’s apartment was in a four-story building on Seventh Avenue—a street of storefronts in three- or four-story brownstone buildings with apartments above the stores. His was above a health-food store and had on one side what looked like a typical pretty good-food, refurbished restaurant, and on the other side was an old-fashioned neighborhood bar that seemed to have weathered the Yuppie invasion as it had various other neighborhood shifts over the years. I didn’t have grand expectations in going to Greg’s apartment; it seemed unlikely he or anyone else would be there. But I rang the bell and waited.

  When no one answered, I went into an upscale place on the right to have a beer to help me think. The bar was too loud, with too much blond wood, too many hanging plants, and too many young men with overdeveloped pectorals, wearing sport shirts and cologne. I left and went to the bar on the other side. This one was quieter, clean, and unadorned, with a dull wooden floor, a dark mahogany bar, wooden backed-bar stools, with a faded mirror and ornate dark wood behind the bottles on the b
ack bar. A few elderly women, probably retired and lonely, sipped sherry or manhattans at the bar, their large handbags propped beside them. They looked like they were used to the place. A couple of older men stared vacantly at the Met game on the TV above the bar. At one end, a handful of younger men watched the game with more interest; none of them wore cologne. I ordered a draft beer from the bartender, who pulled himself away from the game to pour it. He didn’t wear cologne, either. I asked him the score. But he didn’t know and had to ask the guys watching. They had to discuss it themselves before someone made an educated guess that it was three to one, Mets in the fifth. Gooden was pitching, so three runs should be enough, I figured.

  I drank my first beer before asking the bartender if he knew Greg. I spoke softly so no one else would hear, but he took a look around the bar, wrinkled up his mouth, and made it clear that he didn’t like my having asked.

  “He’s an old friend of mine,” I said. “We used to tend bar together.” This cheerfully imparted bit of information didn’t improve my standing. The bartender grunted, his expression even nastier than it had been, and went back to the ball game, not even bothering to refill my glass. I hung on; sooner or later, he’d have to come back my way.

  Sure enough, on one of his passes to the service bar, he inadvertently looked at me, so I ordered a refill. Although he gave the impression he’d rather throw it, he set it down gently in front of me. I laid a five down, so he’d have to bring change. “He’s in trouble,” I said. “Maybe I can help him.”

  The bartender bent slightly toward me. “Look, I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he said. “Why should I tell you a fuckin’ thing?”

  Ah, the noble New York City bartender!

  I sipped a couple of beers and watched Gooden bring it in, trying John’s number a few times between innings, at first telling his machine where I was, then leaving nastier messages each time. After an hour or so, as fate would have it, I went to pee before I headed back to Manhattan. When I went to the men’s room, I noticed that the joint had a rear entrance off a hallway next to the kitchen. There was a screen door leading out, which for some reason piqued my interest. Taking a quick look outside, I discovered the yard behind the bar connected to the yard behind Greg’s apartment building. There was also a tree and a fire escape. I thought this over as I peed—although thought is too strong a word to describe the process. I could climb the tree onto the fire escape of the building the bar was in, go up that fire escape, cross the roof, and then go down the fire escape of Greg’s building and take a look in the window of his apartment. Why did I want to do this? I have no idea. Nor did I have any idea then. It seemed the thing to do. Maybe in my cell-diminished brain I thought it was what Lew Archer would have done.

  Up I went, feeling quite athletic for a man in his forties with a beer gut. I hoisted myself between the tree and the wall of the building until I could haul myself up onto the first limb of the tree. From there, I leaned over to the fire escape and got a foot and a hand on the rungs hanging from the first platform. Once aboard, again with some difficulty, I climbed the fire escape stairs. The adrenaline was pumping, my heart was thumping, and I was puffing like the little engine that could. Dodging the windows of the apartments above the bar, both of which were dark, I crossed the roof and came down the ladder on Greg’s building.

  A dim light shone from the window of the top-floor apartment, so I climbed back and hung over the ridge of the roof to take a peek. No one in Brooklyn, it has long been known, has window shades. A man and a woman were in the throes of ecstasy on a bed not more than five feet from my face. The man was on top, looking down at the woman. The woman had her face turned sideways on the bed, so she was facing the window; she was alternately chewing on her lower lip and opening her mouth, gasping, while the man went up and down like a pile driver and the bed rocked back and forth like the old Erie Lackawana. If her eyes had been open, she would have looked directly into mine. I slithered under the window and damn near lost my footing on the ladder between the top floor and the third floor. Fortunately, she didn’t open her eyes.

  The third floor was dark, as was the second—Greg’s apartment. It was impossible to see anything. I looked around from my perch on the fire escape’s landing, wondering for the first time if anyone could see me. There were plenty of windows facing me. But I didn’t see anyone looking. I tried Greg’s window. The latch was broken, so I opened it. Climbing gingerly through the window, I found myself in a bedroom. The bed made, no clutter on the surfaces of the bureau or night table, it was as neat as a hotel room, with not much more personality. Greg’s neatness always made me uncomfortable; now here where his life should be, the neatness concealed too much. I didn’t have a flashlight. But I didn’t see any reason not to turn on the lights, so I did.

  The next two rooms, in what was a good-sized apartment by New York standards, were as neat and nondescript as the bedroom. The rooms connected through internal doors, like a railroad flat, but there was also a hallway from the kitchen to the front door. When I got to the front—what should have been a living room overlooking Seventh Avenue—I found that it had been made into another bedroom. This room had a lived-in look: The bed—a mattress on the floor—was unmade; clothes dripped off the chairs. There were papers and other clutter on the surface of a wobbly bureau, magazines carelessly piled beside the bed. The magazines were Penthouse and Playboy. And a copy of Jane’s Pocket Book of Pistols and Sub-Machine Guns.

  This new wrinkle, which I might have guessed if I’d had half a brain, gave me something to think about. Should I wait there for the roommate to return, scare the shit out of him—and have him blow my brains out with his pistol or submachine gun? Or should I wait downstairs until I saw a light and then ring the bell and come back up? clearly the more prudent choice. Next, I had to decide whether to go back down the fire escape or use the front door and the stairs like a normal person. I chose the latter path and ran into two of the Seventy-eighth Precinct’s finest, standing with guns drawn on either side of Greg’s door when I opened it. A couple more cops with drawn guns were at that moment climbing in the window from the fire escape, so it really didn’t make any difference which route I’d chosen.

  The officers in the hallway were as scared as I was, so they screamed and waved their guns in my face. I threw my hands up, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and flattened myself against the doorjamb. This wasn’t good enough for them, so one of them spun me around and kicked my feet out from under me, while the other slapped me on the side of the head with the hand holding the grip end of his pistol as I slid past. I partially blocked my fall with my hands, but my face, chin-first, still banged against the floor, which I noticed, stupidly, was pretty dusty. One of the cops held his gun on me while the other wrenched my arms behind my back and cuffed my wrists together.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I advised them.

  But as they pulled me to my feet and pushed me toward the stairs, I sensed we all knew who’d made the mistake.

  chapter five

  The boys from the bar next door found the cop cars and flashing lights more interesting than the recap of the ball game, so they came out to take a look, while the cologne-scented sports from the other joint gathered around menacingly, as if they might take the law into their own hands. The cops pushed me into the backseat. One put his hand on top of my head so I didn’t bounce it off the roof on the way in—a nice gesture, usually reserved for criminals they don’t have a grudge against. They sped me around a couple of corners and off to the precinct.

  With some difficulty, I persuaded the desk sergeant to call Sheehan, my old nemesis. I don’t know what help I thought he’d be. I also called Peter Finch, a lawyer I knew from the West Side bars. His dad and Pop fought the labor wars of the 1930s together. Peter was of the breed of brash young leftist lawyers who had resurrected the National Lawyers Guild in the 1960s. Later, he transformed himself into a successful-enough criminal lawyer, whose unsavory clients bankrolled h
is humanistic legal support of the underdog—among whose numbers I counted myself. I left my SOS on his answering machine.

  For quite a while, I sat on a blond wooden bench and waited until my turn for picture and prints. The cop who walked me through the booking process was a pleasant, chatty guy, who found common ground, as if we were fellow workers, just on opposing teams, like Gary Carter chatting with the second baseman of the other team after sliding in for a double—or, as in my case, after being thrown out stealing.

  “You live in Manhattan?” the cop asked when he looked at my card. I sat in a straight-back chair, holding a number under my chin. “You’d come to Brooklyn for a B and E?”

  “I grew up in Brooklyn,” I said, realizing immediately this wasn’t the answer I wanted to give.

  “Me, too,” he said. “Where?”

  “Flatbush.”

  “Bensonhurst. So’d you know this guy?”

  I said, “Yes … sort of.”

  “Have something of yours?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a long story.”

  “Usually is,” the cop said as we moved to the next stage of the booking process. “Just relax your hand and let me roll it across the ink pad.”

  When the bars clanged shut behind me, I sat on a metal cot to contemplate my life to that point. Staring at a stained toilet against the back wall of my cell, I resolved to reform. The night passed slowly. I longed for sleep, listening to the groans and laments hollered out by my fellow felons—all of us, it seemed, innocent victims of ironic twists of cruel fate. I was tempted to tell my own sad story, but the voices gradually faded out, and I did eventually sleep, fitfully, waking now and again with a feeling of dread, then forcing myself back toward sleep.

  The next morning, a burly, grunting oaf of a jailer woke me up, handed me a limp New York Corrections version of an Egg McMuffin and a container of soured milk. Sometime after that, he came back, opened the cell door, and pushed me down a series of iron steps to a side door and a waiting squad car. I bumped along Flatbush Extension on the springs of a lumpy vinyl seat and landed up, after sitting in traffic for a half hour, at the Brooklyn Criminal Court building on Schermerhorn Street. It was an edifice I’d often admired from the outside, and one of some historical significance because of the luminaries who’d been tried there over the years, but not a place I’d ever desired to visit.