by Con Lehane
“There’re enough dead people already,” I said. “Don’t say that. Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Not like me.”
“Sure they do. Look at the mistake I made coming here to see you.”
She smiled, a thin smile, a tiny light in her eyes. “Oh, Brian, so much has happened, so much I wish was different. But it would have had to happen years ago, and it didn’t.” The smile went away; her eyes glistened with sadness. The chasm between us opened wider with each passing second. We smiled at each other, embarrassed; we’d run out of things to say.
Linda came over and took my hand in hers. “What are you going to do now?”
“I need to make a couple of calls, then hook up with John. Can I use your phone?”
The first call I made produced all the news I needed. It was to Sue Gleason. She told me the police were at that moment digging up what they expected to be a body in an abandoned landfill in Strathmere.
“Where’s Strathmere?”
“Near Sea Isle. It’s the upper part of the same island. An old man walking his dog this morning found what they think is a grave. It wasn’t there two days ago.” Her voice dropped into a meaningful yet jaded reporter’s tone. “That’s not the only reason I suspect it might be your friend. These news clips here that I’ve been saving for you … Maybe you ought to come take a look at them. Can you get over here now?”
“Yeah, I’ll be right there.” My heart had gone cold in my chest. I’m sure what little color there’d been in my face had drained completely out of it.
“What is it?” Linda asked, clutching at me.
“They may have found Greg’s body. I’ve got to call John. I need a ride to the journal office.”
“Don’t call John.” Linda began scurrying around and ran to get her daughter. “I’ll take you. Ralph will be home any minute. Here, hold Jenny.” She lifted and pushed the baby toward me, then dashed off down the hallway.
So I held Jennifer, who was as light as a pillow. She squirmed this way and that to get a better view, looking me in the eye, reaching out to grab a tiny fistful of my hair, hanging on to it like a bulldog. When her father came through the door a few minutes later, he didn’t take any more notice of me than if I were the plant stand; totally enchanted, he reached for the baby. But once he had her in his arms, he turned on me, hate burning in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in a tone usually used to say, “Get the fuck out of here or I’ll kill you.”
“It’s a long story,” I said, hoping Linda would get back, so I wouldn’t have to tell it.
She did. But Ralph wasn’t pleased to see her, either.
“I’m going to Strathmere with Brian,” she said, either not noticing or ignoring his fury on purpose.
“No, you’re not,” said Ralph, surprising us both. “All that’s over. I told you to stay away from them.”
Something in his voice—probably murderous rage—scared the baby, so she began screaming. Linda reached for her, and after a bit of a tussle, during which the baby’s screams reached an earsplitting crescendo, Ralph reluctantly let her go to her mother.
As soon as he let go, he turned on me. “Are you leaving?” he asked. But once more it wasn’t a question.
I held up my hands in a placating gesture. More was going on here than met the eye. For reasons of his own, Ralph had decided to make a stand; this was the defining moment for him and his family: wife and baby were at stake. I tried to tell him without actually saying so that this wasn’t a romantic tryst—though, if the truth were known, through no fault of my own. “Take it easy, Ralph,” I said in the tone I used to calm belligerent drunks, though Ralph was sober as a judge—just momentarily insane. “There’s a good chance that Greg’s dead, that he’s been killed; that’s why Linda’s taking me to where the cops are digging up a body.”
“Good,” said Ralph with an uncharacteristic snort. “I hope they find Wolinski buried beside him.”
“Don’t be an asshole, Ralph,” Linda said, her voice not at all soothing.
“You’re not going.” Ralph’s hands were balled into fists, probably more from frustration than menace. But when he made a move toward her, I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him and calm him. Instead, my gesture popped his cork. He swung one of the balled-up fists in a roundhouse that glanced off the side of my head, just above my left ear.
More to keep from putting too much weight on my damaged leg than anything else, I grabbed for him. In this case, the easiest handle was his almost shoulder-length hair, so I grabbed it, but I lost my balance anyway. Rather than put my full weight on the game leg to catch myself, I hung on to his mane and took him to the ground with me.
Linda screamed, and this time the baby really kicked out the jambs, raising a wail that pierced the heavens. Ralph too was screaming bloody murder because I’d yanked out a fistful of his hair, and I screamed right back at him. “Get off my leg, you asshole!”
Since I managed to get back on top and had a good hold on another clump of his hair, and since Ralph seemed genuinely concerned about the baby, whose screams were now alternating with hiccups, he quieted, so I let him up. He and Linda stared at each other for a long minute as the baby quieted to sniffles and hiccups, and after a few moments of heavy breathing by all concerned Linda handed Jenny to him.
“I’m taking Brian to Strathmere,” she said.
Ralph tried to glare at her, but since he wan’t much of a fighter to begin with, his one punch and its aftermath had pretty much knocked the fight out of him.
As Linda and I drove away from her house, there was a strained silence. She seemed shaken to the verge of tears by what had happened, while I still had a good deal of adrenaline pumping through me, and neither of us knew quite what to say. I felt like Ralph had caught us in the sack, and he, it seemed, had the same impression.
“Ralph didn’t seem in a very good mood,” I said finally. “Is he always that grouchy when he gets home from work?”
Linda looked over at me and with some effort managed a tiny smile. “Poor Ralph” was all she said.
I decided to leave it at that. I’d blundered around in their life too much as it was. They deserved to be left alone to work out whatever it was between them—among them, I guess, would be more accurate, since the tyke seemed to have something to say about things, too.
Linda seemed to want to move on to other things also, because after a few blocks she said, “You know, even though I said all those things about Charlie, he wasn’t so nice, really, and most of all, he wasn’t so nice to John. Charlie always talked big about how John was going to be a success. But he never did anything to help him. He was sort of a phony.
“He never said he wanted John to be like him—and John didn’t want to be like him—but I think Charlie really did. John wanted more than anything to be respected for doing good, like a judge or something, and he could have gone to college. He could have gotten a scholarship to go to NYU. But he needed his father to come up with part of the money, and Charlie didn’t do it.
“All of us wanted John to go. We told him, ‘Screw Charlie.’ But you never could tell John anything about his father. John decided college was a stupid idea and he didn’t need it.” Linda turned to me, bewildered and angry. “Why would he worship Charlie? The only things Charlie did for anyone, John included, were things that didn’t cost him anything. Even for his own son, he’d only do the things that didn’t cost him anything. Why would he worship Charlie?”
The late-afternoon breeze off the ocean blew in through the car window. We drove past hotels that rose garishly into the blue-gray wash of sky above the ocean. The shore was a pleasant place as afternoon became evening. I knew about fathers and sons. I had one of each. “Charlie’s the only father he had,” I told her.
Linda waited in the car when we got to the newspaper office. Sue Gleason had gone to cover a story, but she’d left the news clips in a manila envelope with my name on it. When I got back to Linda’s car, I open
ed the envelope and took out the photocopies of the articles. The first one was dated June 18, 1975. It told of a man’s body being discovered buried in a garbage dump in a town called Strathmere. The next article, from the following day’s paper, said the body found in the Strathmere dump had been identified as that of David Bradley of Atlantic City, who appeared to have died of a heroin overdose, and that the police were investigating.
Another article, dated July 30 of the same year, reported that the body of a man, identified as William Green, had been discovered in the Strathmere dump. He’d died from a stab wound to the chest. A note from Sue Gleason said that there was only one dump in Strathmere—the one where the police were digging up a body right now. Sue’s note also said that the police listed the Green case as open and unsolved, and while the newspaper articles didn’t make any connection between the two deaths, she’d been told the police had found the first body on a tip and the second body when one of the investigators went back to the dump looking for evidence.
“Why did you get these?” Linda demanded when she had read the articles.
“Do you remember?”
Linda stared in front of her while I pulled from my memory’s foggy ruins a dim vision of my younger—and considerably slimmer—self, wearing a bartender’s white jacket, standing at the bar in the semidarkness of after hours with pert, lovely young Linda. She wore her waitress’s short-shorts, sailor suit that accentuated the contours of her adorable ass, and was talking to me in that absolutely sincere way she had that made the rest of the world disappear while I listened to her. Her hand was on top of mine and her bare leg pressed against me. We were waiting for Greg and John, who were holding a private conversation in the liquor room.
They were taking care of whatever serious and important business they were often about and that I paid little attention to, especially when the alternative was rubbing my hand along the soft nether down of Linda’s thigh. I was particularly impatient this time because it was the night after Linda and I had slept together for the first time, and I really really wanted to do it again. That night, we’d heard about Bill Green’s body being found. Greg had come in earlier and waited while John finished cashing out. He stood at the end of the service bar with us for what seemed like an hour, looking stricken, until John whisked him off into the liquor room.
Now, years later, Linda and I sat trancelike in her little car. “The night they found Bill Green’s body … do you remember?” I asked again. “Did you think Greg killed him?”
Linda clutched the steering wheel and nodded very slowly. Then she let go of the wheel, adjusted herself in the seat to face me, and kind of cocked her head to the side. “I thought you knew, but I guess you were still too new. We made up a story to cover everyone—for the time when Bill Green was killed.”
“Who made up the story?”
“John.”
“Who else was in on it?”
“I don’t remember … . Everyone, I guess, or everyone who needed to be—waitresses, bar boys, busboys.”
“Charlie?”
“She nodded.
“And Aaron wasn’t?”
She hesitated, her expression beseeching. “Maybe he was … . I don’t know. Maybe they needed him because he was the boss and all. Everyone was just helping John and Greg.” She reached toward me, her eyes filled with that sincerity again. “We didn’t know what they did. We were just helping them, like they would have helped us.” She laid her hand gently on my arm; her eyes locked onto mine. “John and Greg weren’t murderers, Brian. They wouldn’t hurt anyone if they could help it. You would have helped them, too.” She took my hand; her eyes glistened. “Besides, I wasn’t interested in what they were doing. I was paying attention to you. I thought I’d met the man I was going to love for the rest of my life.” She smiled, and her smile was sadder than her tears had been.
“Will you take me to Strathmere?”
“Why? Can’t you forget about all this? It’s going to get worse and worse.”
I didn’t answer.
Linda shrank up into herself, as if she were shivering. “No,” she said. “You won’t forget about it. That was part of what I knew about you.”
chapter twenty
Linda drove quickly out of Atlantic City, then south on the Garden State Parkway. The sun sank toward the horizon on the inland side of us, its rays of purple, orange, and pink splayed out against the horizon. The air was brisk and fresh from the prevailing winds. It was that kind of gorgeous late-summer, early-fall afternoon when every breath you took brought with it vague and unexpected joy. It wasn’t the sort of day to look for a body in the Strathmere garbage dump.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I must be nuts.”
Linda had been stone-faced since we left Atlantic City. Whatever had come over her took away her girlish charm. Sitting rigidly straight, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, she looked possessed. Soon we were driving along the same narrow, sloping blacktop road through the dunes that John had taken the night before when we were looking for Greg. It felt and looked like an old country lane. The houses, which were only on one side of the road because the ocean was so close on the other side, were small lopsided wooden bungalows, this finger of land, a few feet higher than the bay on one side, the ocean held back by dunes on the other side, yet to be discovered by the prosperous and garish.
We turned onto a dirt road that led into the tall marsh grass between two matching weathered shacks. At the end of the road, backed in against the bay, mounds of unidentifiable debris rose like hills, but not as markedly as the stench. It smelled like the Staten Island landfill and looked like it, too, with a hundred seagulls parading on and hovering over the place.
Linda looked like she was waking from a nightmare. “God, this is awful. It’s horrible.” She glared at me accusingly, opened her door, and stepped out. I followed suit, stepping onto the spongy, speckled brown dirt. It looked like all of the eggshells ever eaten in New Jersey had been ground up and spread over the dump. My crutch sank into the ground and got stuck, so I put it back in the car and took my chances limping after Linda.
An ambulance and three or four cop cars, their lights flashing meaninglessly, were parked ahead of us. EMS medics, uniformed cops, and some plainclothes cops were gathered around a pile of twisted and rusted hunks of metal, ancient appliances, large wooden crates, and splintered skids. There were scrape marks on the ground where a stove or an old washing machine had been dragged across it. A section of dirt nearby looked freshly turned over. Two cops were digging and the rest were watching. They all looked up when we drove in. But they were intent on the digging or watching the digging, so no one came immediately to intercept us.
I could see a body that was partially buried, and I tried to pretend it wasn’t Greg. But I recognized the top of his head, even though his face was still covered with dirt. My chest tightened up; I couldn’t catch my breath. Linda screamed and grabbed at my arms as I stumbled toward the body. The nearest cop tried to grab me, but I got by him, despite my stumbling gait. Slicing my hand on the edge of the stove, I used my arms to vault past him, dragging Linda with me. I looked down and saw my own blood on my hand and on Linda’s T-shirt. Her face stained with tears and dirt. She was saying, “Stop,” as she must have been all along without my hearing her. “Stop,” she said again. “What are you doing?”
“Greg’s in there,” I screamed at her. He was dead. I knew that, but I wanted the cops to dig him out because I felt like he was smothering. “He’s my friend,” I tried to explain to the cop who came to grab me.
After some effort, Linda calmed me and the cops down, so they let us stand together near her car, watching the rest of the excavation. The guy in charge was the jaded, retired New York cop John had argued with when we sprung Ntango and Bub. I’m sure he liked bodies buried in his dump even less than he liked people of color driving his streets at night. I expected he might have a question or two for me.
Linda continued to cry,
her head pressed against my chest for a few minutes as we leaned together against the front fender of her car. I kept my arm around her shoulder. My other hand, wrapped in a clean cloth diaper from her car, began throbbing, but the bleeding stopped. I thought about Greg and his two lives. In the end, they didn’t make any more or less sense than what one life added up to. He’d fought the chaos by his order and neatness in physical things—the way he dressed, the way he set up the bar, the methodical way he worked—and by some strong personal belief in right and wrong that made him loyal to his friends and led him, I guessed, to the life he had led with Sandra. But the chaos caught up with him anyway; he’d ended up murdered and buried in a garbage heap.
The police captain, whose name was Carney, was brusquely polite and clearly suspicious. I told him a long story about Sandra calling to ask me to look for Greg, a reporter friend of mine telling me about the police finding a body, and how, fearing the worst, we’d come to find out. I told him who the body was, using the name Peters.
“Do you know who would want to kill him?”
I shook my head.
“What can you tell me about him?”
“Not much,” I said. “I hadn’t seen him in years until a week or so ago.” I gave a true, if somewhat abbreviated, account of what I knew of Greg’s life. As soon as the police began checking on Greg, they would be back anyway, so I didn’t want to waste time now.
The captain surveyed the dump and the bay beyond. The sun was in full decline, moments away from dropping beyond the horizon. “I’m going to need to ask you a few more questions,” the captain said.
I nodded.
“Do you have a local address and phone number?”
I gave him the hotel number John had given me, answered a few more questions, and then Linda drove me to the bar I’d seen Charlie in the night before. I called John to tell him we’d found Greg. His response was a long silence. After a while, he said, “Say good-bye for me when they take him away, bro.”
