What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  The man at the table, despite his diffidence, looked me in the eye, taking my measure, and in doing so seemed quite formidable. “Mr … .”

  “Brian. Brian McNulty.”

  “Brian.” He nodded and seemed pleased. When he smiled, the dimples in his cheeks reminded me of Big John. He raised an eyebrow ever so slightly in Ntango’s direction.

  “He’s with me,” I said. “Ntango Tivugla.”

  The man bowed respectfully toward Ntango.

  The gray-haired man, his face etched with the resignation and wisdom you find in men who’ve seen a lot and gained very little in life, spoke slowly. “Ernesto said you would help him. The police think he killed a man.” The gray-haired man stopped smiling. Each word seemed carefully chosen, filtered through his own language, carefully crafted in mine. “I want to make no mistake. Ernesto say you understand some things … political things.”

  “Actually, there’s a lot I don’t understand … and maybe we should keep it that way.” I had an idea that Ernesto and his friends were up to the sort of political shenanigans frowned upon in better Republican circles, so I tried to look blank while everyone in the room waited for my move. They waited a long time. These were patient men. The tension was palpable. Something was expected of me.

  “So?” I said.

  Everyone reacted as if I had made a major pronouncement. The men nodded to one another, then nodded at me approvingly. A wave of relief rolled across the room.

  Ernesto gestured toward the chair next to him, so I sat down. “Everyone is very nervous … . They let me send for you, but they weren’t sure.”

  Somehow, I’d gained their trust, but I didn’t want it. Someone had switched the dice.

  “The problem …” said Ernesto, his dark eyes even darker with seriousness. “For us, deportation means death.” His body rigid with the tension of the fugitive, his haggard face showing the strain of his life, he went on: “Greg is a friend. I don’t want to turn on him, but—” He left the sentence unfinished. What they really needed me for up here was to finish their sentences.

  “After we close,” Ernesto said quietly, “Greg take me outside. He show me the body under the cloths near the boats. I help him carry to the river. We tie the bricks and throw him in.”

  “Did you recognize the guy?”

  “I never see him.”

  “You never saw him when you threw him in the river, or you never saw him before that night?”

  “I see his face,” Ernesto said. “I never see him.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t there earlier, that he didn’t come there regularly?”

  “I never see him.”

  “Did Greg kill him?”

  Ernesto shrugged his shoulders and looked quickly and instinctively at the older man. But the older man’s eyes never moved off of me, nor did his expression change. “He’s dead when I see him,” Ernesto said.

  “The police have evidence—fibers on your bar jacket. That’s why they’re looking for you.”

  Ernesto didn’t flinch. “I didn’t kill him … . This, what I told you, happened.”

  “Did you know anything about drug dealing?”

  He looked into my eyes for a long time, thinking it over. Then he brushed his nose a few times with his hand. “Lots of cocoa. Greg. Everybody—” He gestured again like he was shoveling blow into his nose. “All the time.”

  “How about you?”

  He smiled with a kind of boyish shyness, shaking his head, as if burning out your nasal passages and scrambling your brain was the province of sophisticated Americans alone.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “We want that you know what happened,” the older man said. “Ernesto helped your friend. Nothing else. He wants to see his family.”

  “And he can’t until this is over, right?”

  The expressions on the faces of all the men in the room suggested they were proud of my bravery and devotion to the cause. When I looked in Ntango’s direction, he made clear he was the cabdriver and had no other connection to the project.

  “I understand the problem,” I said to Ernesto. “I just have no idea what I could do to help.”

  Ernesto bent forward, rounded at the shoulders, which accentuated his slight frame. He looked like a boy who was tired and afraid. “I don’t know, comrade. Perhaps you knowing, that will help.”

  When Ntango and I went outside again, we found Alberto leaning casually against the cab. Though his body was relaxed, his eyes were alert. The cab was untouched. Ntango was quiet as usual as we drove away, so I went over the whole story with him again on the way downtown.

  “Many intrigues,” Ntango said. “But I don’t know why those men wanted to see you tonight.”

  This bothered me, too, I had to admit. They wanted to assure me Ernesto hadn’t killed Aaron. But there was something of the “She doth protest too much,” about the summons. I didn’t think Ernesto did kill Aaron. So why go to all this trouble to throw me off the scent? Why did these guys care what I thought?

  These compañeros wanted me to keep the cops away from Ernesto. Big John wanted me to forget the whole thing. Pop wanted me to regroup the workers of the world under the banner of the bartenders union. And all I wanted to do was turn the clock back a dozen years so I could marry Linda, or, failing that, spend the night with Dr. Parker.

  “So where are we now?” I asked Ntango.

  “‘Ay, there’s the rub,’” said Ntango. I looked him over carefully. This Shakespeare thing of Greg’s was catching on. “Your problem is one of goodness,” said Ntango.

  Ntango the oracle. I never got a chance to ask what he meant. He pulled up to the curb on the service road at the Riverside end of 110th Street. We got careless. Too late, I heard something—doors opening or doors closing. An unnatural sound of movement. Peering out the cab’s back window, I saw the front end of what looked like a small truck that had pulled up close on our bumper. I knew instinctively, in the way a doe hears the click of the hunter’s gun, that they were after us. Maybe it was the stocky, shadowy shapes of the men who had gotten out of the truck. Even before they reached us, I knew they would come for us. Even before I recognized the red Cherokee, I knew. In the glow of the streetlight, I saw cruelty frozen on a man’s face and the glint of a gun barrel as someone opened the door on the sidewalk side of me. At the same moment, someone else leaned in the front window and poked at Ntango with a gun, jumping around outside the cab, speaking rapidly and angrily in Spanish, as if Ntango was arguing or fighting with him, when, in fact, Ntango in his calm, soft voice was telling him, “I don’t have money. I’m a cabdriver … . Look, my friend … . How much money do I have? Take it.”

  I knew Ntango was wrong. They weren’t after money.

  The guy at the rear waved his gun through the open door and reached to pull me out of the cab. As he pulled me toward the door, Ntango caught on. He’d never shifted the cab out of gear while we were stopped, so he floored it. The open back door took out the guy who held the gun on me. I heard a shot. The cab sped out into 110th Street and hooked into the curve that led to Riverside Drive, where it careened into an uptown bus broadside. Just before the cab hit the bus, Ntango slumped against the window.

  chapter fifteen

  The cab’s intercom radio was turned off. So, hanging over the front seat, I tried to get it to work. Finally, I did, and by pushing buttons, hollering, and answering stupid questions, I got across to the dispatcher what had happened and where we were.

  Ntango hadn’t moved. The guy with the gun had been at point-blank range. I sat there in the dim, wobbly light of an ancient Riverside Drive streetlamp, in a cab crumpled against the side a New York City bus, barely aware of the few worried faces looking down at us from the bus. I expected that Ntango was dead and that if I moved him, I would find the white mush of his brains spattered against the window.

  In those terrible moments, I wanted to get away from him; I huddled into the far corner of the backseat. Then all of a sudd
en, I didn’t feel so afraid anymore. I leaned forward, reached over the back of the seat, and held his hand. When I squeezed it, I felt a slight response. I sat like this for the few minutes—I have no idea how many—it took the EMS ambulance to arrive. They came with red lights flashing and siren wailing, then jumped out of the truck with instrument bags and stethoscopes and began working over Ntango. Then they dragged him out of the car, placed him on a stretcher, and stuck an IV line into his arm.

  When the paramedics had prodded and poked Ntango enough and had finally slowed down, I asked one of them, a stocky woman in an olive green medic’s suit, her dark hair tied back from her face, if Ntango was alive. She said it looked like he’d gotten a small-caliber bullet in the back of his head, but he wasn’t dead. I wanted to ride to the hospital in the ambulance with Ntango, but a police cruiser arrived and a truculent young cop, who looked like a fourteen-year-old with a mustache, told me I had to stay and answer some questions.

  “I’ll do it later,” I said, edging toward the back door of the ambulance. “I want to go with my friend.”

  The mustachioed 14-year-old unbuckled the flap on his holster. His partner, a Hispanic guy, who also had a mustache but looked his age, came alongside me and touched my arm. He spoke softly. “We’ll take you to the hospital after we ask a couple of questions,” he said, and then patted my shoulder. I realized I was shaking, and since I really didn’t know what to do, I grasped for the cop’s kindness.

  “Thanks. Do you think Ntango will be okay?”

  He nodded toward the EMS truck. “These guys are the best.” His hand gripping my arm, he walked me to the police car, helped me into the backseat, and, with the door open, stood looking down at me. I didn’t know whether he thought I might keel over or I might run off. But he kept a pretty good watch over me. After he asked my name and address and Ntango’s name and address, the other cop called the information in on their radio. I described what had happened, trying to gloss over exactly where we’d been and exactly what we’d been doing.

  “What were you doing tonight, Mr. McNulty?” the formerly truculent but now politely stern younger cop asked me again. He sat in the front seat and awkwardly twisted his body, encumbered by leather belts, handcuffs, a flashlight, a holster, and the other accoutrements of policehood, to face me.

  “I told you. We went for a ride.”

  “No one goes for a ride to the South Bronx.”

  He had me there. In my initial state of shock, I’d told him where we’d been; now, if I’d had a third leg and was able to stand adequately on the other two, I would have kicked myself in the ass for doing it. I couldn’t think of any plausible reason for us to be in the South Bronx, either, except to buy drugs—or else the real one, which I didn’t want to tell him about. I was mulling over a possible explanation when I heard my name come back over the cop radio, mixed up with a bunch of numbers and letters. The sound of my own name crackling through the radio startled me and seemed to have a similar effect on my companions, who stiffened noticeably and became warier than they’d been.

  “Are you sure you didn’t recognize the assailants?” the good cop asked.

  “I told you no,” I said wearily.

  From a misguided sense of loyalty, I didn’t want to tell the cops about Ernesto and his pals in the Bronx until I knew if they had done this. From an equally misguided sense of loyalty to John and his father, I didn’t want to tell the cops about the Cherokee and the first shooting until I knew for sure who was telling the truth. This combination left me tongue-tied when it came to explanations. It turned out not to make any difference, because just then the mild-mannered cop with the Spanish accent told me that I had a right to remain silent, that anything I said could be used against me, and that I was entitled to a lawyer.

  “What the hell is this?” I screamed at him. “I’m the fucking victim. You said you’d take me to the hospital to see Ntango.”

  He still looked sympathetic. “Sorry, pal, this comes first.”

  “There’s a charge pending for Brian McNulty, Six twelve West One Hundred and tenth Street. That’s you, right?” This was from the cop in the passenger seat, who had regained his former truculence now that I’d been identified as a criminal.

  “A charge?” Then I remembered my escapade at Greg’s apartment. “That’s a mistake. I was released. You can ask them.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re gonna unrelease you.” He turned to open his door. “Get out of the car. I’m gonna frisk you.”

  As I opened the door, I doubled myself over to drop the joint I had in my pocket into the gutter. But the cop was quick; he bent and picked it up. “Now what’s this?” He came up in my face and held the joint in front of my eyes.

  “It looks like a joint.”

  “Is it yours?” The expression on his face was triumphant.

  “Nope. You can have it.”

  He bumped his chest against mine, knocking me backward a step and forcing me to catch my footing with my sore leg. Particles of spit spewed from his mouth when he yelled at me. “I saw you drop it.”

  “Not me.”

  He spun me around and pushed me against the car. Without my crutches, I had to use my bad leg again to steady myself, and it hurt, so I yelped and cursed. As soon as my back was turned, he slapped me hard enough on the back of the head that my forehead bounced against the doorframe of the car. “Nothing there,” he said, laughing, then spread me against the car and patted me down the rest of the way. His partner looked embarrassed.

  They took me to the lockup at the Twenty-fourth Precinct, where I sat on a wooden bench in a holding cell populated with drunks and junkies, muggers, rapists, slashers, and shooters. I had tried to explain that an injustice was being done here, but I could tell by the blank expression on the booking cop’s face that injustice meant no more to him than justice did. He didn’t care what I’d done or not done, if I went to jail or if I got away. He was a factory worker with twenty years in at the same machine, attaching the same part, turning the same valve. He wanted his shift to end and to go home to some sanity in his life before he had to come back and go through this again.

  “Look, pal,” I said. “Could I call a lawyer?”

  “Later,” he said without looking up.

  I stood my ground, but I could feel panic grabbing at my voice. “Could you call Sgt. Pat Sheehan at the Detective Bureau? He used to work up here.”

  At this, he looked up, exhibiting the first spark of interest he’d shown all evening. “Sheehan? Do you want to confess to somethin’?”

  I started to say no, then realized this might be my only chance. “Yes, but only to Sheehan.”

  I waited on my wooden bench, contemplating the human misery around me. It was hard to believe, taking in the anguished faces and the twisted bodies of the men and women draped over benches and staring at ceilings and walls, that these were the perpetrators; for all the world, they looked like victims.

  Sometime later, maybe an hour, maybe longer, a slim, gentle-looking cop in a perfectly pressed uniform called my name. When I stood up, he steered me by one crutch to a scarred and battered room off a scarred and battered hallway, where Sheehan sat on the corner of the query room table. His face was red, but he didn’t look angry; it was just his usual impatience, suggesting I was wasting his time. His eyes bore into mine. “I was in the neighborhood, McNulty. You’re lucky.”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant. My friend Ntango, the cabdriver, got shot tonight. I want to get to the hospital.”

  Something flickered in his eyes. “The tall, light-skinned black guy?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s African or something.”

  “Eritrean.”

  “How bad?” There was a small resonant chord of sympathy in his tone.

  “I don’t know.” My voice shook. “He got shot in the head.”

  “Who shot him?” Despite the sympathy, Sheehan’s eyes were still piercing.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were you wit
h him?”

  I nodded.

  “The same guy?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Sheehan, perched on the table, surveyed me from head to toe, as if he were looking for something. He seemed perfectly patient doing this, and patient meeting my eyes. This scrutiny made me nervous, so I looked away. When I looked back, he was still watching me. For these moments, I liked him. I wished we could be friends. But I felt a distance, too. I didn’t know if it came from me or from him, but I suspected from him. We weren’t ever going to be friends. I was his work.

  “Well, now you got a misdemeanor possession to go with breaking and entering rap in Brooklyn.” He watched while I squirmed. Sheehan was the kind of guy where begging wouldn’t do you any good. He knew what I’d asked him. He knew what was right. I’d have to wait for him to decide. So I waited, and I squirmed.

  “Call your lawyer,” he said finally, having made up his mind. “If he’ll do the paperwork, I can take you to check on your friend.”

  I called Peter’s number. He was usually near the phone this time of night, since many of his clients worked nights and often needed legal assistance during the wee hours.

  “That was pretty stupid,” Peter said. “I might have gotten the charges dropped. Now you’ll end up going to trial.”

  “Forget about that for a minute. Ntango’s been shot.”

  “Shot!” said Peter.”

  I told him Sheehan would help get me out if he did whatever lawyers do to get people out of jail.

  “I can ask for bail. If you weren’t already out on recognizance, I could just get you released.”

  “Bail’s okay. Can you put it up, and I’ll pay you back?”

  I told Sheehan Peter was coming down with the bail.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  I felt grateful; I’m sure it showed in my face. But before I could thank him, Sheehan sidled up next to me. “We can talk on the way.”