by Con Lehane
“I already told you—” I said.
John looked at her as hard as she looked at him. He didn’t owe her or anyone an explanation. After the standoff, he stood and looked down at her. “I’ll let you know as soon as they finish with the autopsy … . You coming?” he asked me.
I looked at Sandra. She nodded her head slowly, her expression tired and sad. I kissed her on the cheek. She put her small, cool hand at the back of my neck while she held her face against mine.
As soon as we were out the door and had reached the end of the walk, John lit into me. “What the hell is with you?”
The rebuke stung, coming at me sharply out of nowhere, like a slap. Thinking he was talking about me taking Sandra to bed, I began to stammer an explanation, beginning with the age-old “It’s not what you think.”
But John shook his head and waved me off. “Jeez, bro,” he said sadly. “You didn’t have to start tellin’ her everything about Greg. What good’s it for her to know all the crap that’s been goin’ on?”
Before I could tell John what I’d really told Sandra, he started the Eldorado and prepared to pull out of his parking spot, and I saw that Sandra had wheeled herself out onto the porch of her house.
I opened the window and hollered to her, asking when I would see her again.
“Call me,” she said.
“I will … When should … ,” I yelled as we were pulling away.
She had a strange expression on her face, watching us pull away. I guess she didn’t hear me.
“Forget all that,” John said. “Right now, we’re about to get pulled over.” The police cruiser was beside us before I could turn to look.
“Mr. McNulty?” the policeman on John’s side asked politely. The other cop stood behind and off to my side of the car, his holster unbuckled and his hand on his gun. I got out of the car.
“We’d like you to follow us to police headquarters, please,” the first cop said.
Trying to keep John from getting hauled in, too, I said, “I’m McNulty. I’ll ride with you.” The cops looked at each other. “Some identification, please,” the cop said to John, who showed him a license. “You don’t want to drive to headquarters?”
“No,” John said. “But I’ll be back in a half hour with a lawyer for Mr. McNulty.”
The cop waved a hand good-naturedly. “Nothing like that. Just a couple of questions. He won’t need a lawyer.”
John didn’t share the cop’s good humor. In fact, when John’s narrowed eyes and piercing stare settled on the cop’s face, the man snapped to attention like an enlisted man being called to task for taking liberties with the captain. John turned to me. “Wait till I get there before you talk to them.”
I nodded and walked to the police car. The cop stopped me. “It’s just a formality. But I have to frisk you before you get in the car.”
At least this time I was clean. Nonetheless, this was my third involuntary ride to the cop shop in the last ten days; I was obviously doing something wrong. As I ducked into the backseat of the cruiser, I caught a glimpse of John staring at me.
At the police station, I was led into a room with fluorescent lights, a linoleum tile floor, blank green walls, and a blond wooden table. We didn’t stop at the desk, nor did anything suggest they wanted to book me. The young cops, their thick chests and lumpy arm muscles bulging through their blue short-sleeved shirts, were relaxed and polite. Carney, the white-haired, red-faced captain I’d already met too many times, came into the room a few seconds after I sat down on one of the straight-backed wooden chairs. He was stuffed into a puke green summer suit, whose pants fit too tightly against his thighs and stopped just below his ankles. He sat down across from me.
With his eyes locked on mine, he said in a more pronounced New York City accent than I’d heard him use before, “You’re beginning to be a suspicious character.”
“I haven’t done anything,” I said pleasantly. But I was nervous. I’d been grilled before by cops and had always done poorly under interrogation. For some reason, cops immediately suspect I’m guilty, even when I’m not. What’s worse, I usually begin to doubt my innocence also. This guy was no slouch, even if this was a hick town; already, I was beginning to suspect myself.
“So why don’t you just tell me.” The captain settled back in his chair, trying to cross his legs but getting hung up because of the tight fit of his pants. This irritated him, and I could see in his face that he would take this irritation out on me.
I slouched down in my chair as I thought befit a suspected felon. “Ask whatever you want,” I said. “I don’t have anything to hide.” But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I remembered John had told me to wait for the lawyer before I said anything.
Taking me at my word, the cop asked, “Why were you at the dump?”
“I’m not going to answer any questions without a lawyer,” I said.
He winced, then glared at me. “Asshole,” he said under his breath as he got up and left the room.
I stared at the blank walls for almost an hour before John and the chief of police showed up. The chief pumped my hand like I was a long-lost relative and called the captain aside.
“Let’s go,” John said while the chief and the captain talked.
“That’s it?”
When I started for the door, Captain Carney began to protest, but the chief waved him off. “It can wait,” the chief said. “You’ve got enough to keep you busy.”
The captain looked disgusted. “Don’t leave town,” he said to me.
“I beg your pardon,” John said to the captain.
“I want to be able to reach him,” the captain replied.
“You can reach him through me.”
We all looked at the chief, who nodded, and the captain stomped away.
As we walked through the glass doors toward the street, I held myself back from making a break for it. John’s pace was sprightly enough, but every nerve in my body urged me to run.
We didn’t talk again until we hit the Garden State Parkway. When we hit the first tollbooth, John turned to me, as if he’d been pondering something. “How’d you know they’d find his body in that dump?”
“A friend of my father’s called me when she heard it on the police scanner.” I steeled myself. “She also gave me some old newspaper articles. David Bradley was buried in that dump; so was Bill Green.”
John nodded. “I thought of that, too, as soon as you called. Bill Green buried David’s body there fifteen years ago; then someone dug a hole for him, too. Now Greg. Strange stuff.”
Taking a deep breath, I dove in. “Maybe it was Greg who dug the hole for David Bradley.”
John’s mouth went square and he hunched his shoulders a couple of times, like he did when he was getting mad and didn’t want to say so. “You used to be much better at minding your business and keeping your mouth shut. Lots of things are possible, bro. But only one thing happens.”
We glided through the empty marshland in John’s sleek and quiet Eldorado, while seagulls, terns, egrets, and all their waterfowl cousins screeched and howled from the depths of the swamps. Why did they holler and screech like that? I wondered. For food? Attention? Was it some kind of primordial angst? I thought about bellowing out the window myself.
“Lemme put it this way,” John said, leaning his large form back against the leather bucket seat, draping his wrist over the steering wheel. “Something happened a long time ago. Maybe I don’t know any better than you do what it was. Maybe I, for one, do mind my own business.” He glanced over at me, his eyes bright behind his glasses. “But for the sake of argument, let’s say whatever you think happened then did happen, right?”
I nodded.
“So why would someone kill Greg now?”
I took a deep breath. I had no idea what anything had to do with anything. John was right. If Greg’s murder was payback for Bill Green’s, why would whoever killed him wait fifteen years to do it? And why kill Aaron? Greg’s and Aaron’s dea
ths were much more likely connected to what they’d been doing recently than what they’d done in 1975. Hard to explain the bodies buried in the same dump, but stranger things had happened. Yet, it was possible that someone who knew the history I’d discovered wanted to open old wounds. I just didn’t know why he’d wait until so much time had passed.
I rode the rest of the way deep in thought, but John didn’t seem to mind; he drove along, taking in the midday air. I liked that he kept the air conditioning on and the windows open. This was Big John’s attitude toward the prescribed way of doing things.
After a long time, I said, “You know, this is weird. And I might be dead wrong. But when I was in the bar yesterday, waiting for you, I saw someone who looked just like that guy Alberto, Ernesto’s partner.” I told John then about seeing Ernesto and Alberto at Charlie’s office.
John turned abruptly. “Whoa. Go over that again.”
When I did, John didn’t say anything for a couple of miles; then, as we were getting off the Garden State onto the Atlantic City Expressway, he said, “This is a whole new kettle of fish. Why didn’t you tell me about those guys before?” The unspoken accusation hung in the air. Had I cost Greg his life, after already getting Ntango shot, by keeping information from John to protect my father’s international working-class comrades?
Still, even now, when it came right down to it, I didn’t like John suspecting Ernesto and Alberto, despite the fact that I’d brought the subject up. Alberto wasn’t the only one with explaining to do, I told John. “What does Charlie being here tell us? And Walter? What does that tell us? Don’t we have some questions to ask them, too?”
“Take it easy, bro.”
I was still fuming about Charlie and Walter when something else hit me. A connection—far—fetched maybe, but it clanged like a brass bell right at that moment.
“Did Walter know Bill Green or Dave Bradley?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose he did. Suppose he and Bill Green were tight. Suppose for years he was trying to find out who killed his friend, but he couldn’t be sure because everything had been covered up so well. Suppose he started hanging out with Greg, or even Aaron, trying to find out. And he hooks up with Charlie. Maybe that’s the way things point. Then, one night, someone’s drunk and talks too much. He finds out Greg killed Green. So he kills Greg.”
Something clicked in John. He went on full alert.
“Maybe Aaron was who told Walter that Greg killed Green,” I said. “Then Aaron figured out what Walter was up to. He was going to tell Greg, so Walter killed Aaron.”
John shook his head. “I don’t buy it.” He watched the road in front of him and spoke slowly. “Number one, you’d have to believe that Greg killed Green and that Aaron knew. And why wouldn’t Greg tell us about Walter after Aaron was killed if that’s what happened?”
He was right. Greg even went out to do business with Walter after Aaron was killed. “Maybe he didn’t know,” I said. “He didn’t know Walter killed Aaron.”
“Like I said, bro. I don’t buy it. Greg didn’t kill nobody. But Walter’s another story. Walter’s someone to think about.”
John dropped me at the bus depot. He still had work to do in Atlantic City and I wanted to get home. Before I got out of the car, I noticed him studying me, and his scrutiny made me squirm. “Don’t do anything without checking with me first,” he said finally. “Too much is going on for you to stick your head up. I don’t want anything else to happen, especially to you.” His eyes went soft. He put his hand on my shoulder, hauled me in with his arm, and gave me a shake with that big one-armed bear hug of his. “The manager from the Ocean Club called me yesterday. He wanted to fire you for not showing up,” he said gruffly as he shoved me toward the passenger door. “I gotta cover for everybody. Someday I’m gonna start hiring reliable help.”
I hobbled into the depressing Formica-paneled waiting room and called Linda.
She answered on the first ring, panic in her voice. “The police want to talk to me.”
“Don’t tell them about the clippings, and call John. He’ll know what to do.”
“What about you?” she asked in a weak voice.
“I’m going back to New York.”
“I’ll miss you,” said Linda sweetly.
chapter twenty-two
When I got back to the city in the middle of the afternoon, I started to head up to the hospital to see Ntango, but then I got off at 104th Street instead to buy a couple of joints at the dope store on Amsterdam Avenue. I went home, put on the Grateful Dead, and sat down in my blue stuffed chair. After an hour or so, I stopped thinking about Greg and started to feel like myself again. I decided to have dinner before I went to the hospital, so I walked down to the Cathedral Market for a steak and a six-pack of Beck’s. On the way back, I ran into Ntango, who was coming out of the Drop Off Your Laundry Laundromat. He had a small bandage on his head, walked slowly, talked more slowly even than he had before. But he assured me he was fine. Dr. Parker had gotten him released from the hospital the night before and had bought him dinner, he told me.
We got another steak and went back to my apartment. After we ate, I told him about Greg’s murder. Afterward, we smoked dope, listening to the sound track from The Harder They Come over and over again. Sometime after midnight, we decided to go to Oscar’s for a drink. Why we thought we needed to go out this late, who we expected to see, why we didn’t just pack it in and go to sleep after a pleasant-enough evening—those are the kind of unanswerable questions that have defined my existence. Thinking there must be more to life, then speculating that the extra bit life had to offer would be found at Oscar’s in the small hours of the morning is the kind of misguided answer I unfailingly came up with. I’d once worked at Oscar’s, after getting fired from the Sheraton the first time and before the union, despite its best efforts to the contrary, got me my job back. So I knew most of the regulars, and the owner, Oscar.
When we came in, Oscar, who suspected Ntango of being a drug dealer—as he suspected most people of the colored persuasion—climbed off his bar stool near the door and went to the far end of the bar, like a fighter going to a neutral corner. Eric the Red, Oscar’s cook, who’d already closed up the kitchen, left the end of the bar that Oscar went to and came to sit with us. Carl Van Sagan, my friend the doorman, who’d loaned me the suit for my ill-fated bar manager job at the Ocean Club, came in before we had ordered our first drink. It was a little after 1:00 A.M., gathering hour for the winos.
I was glad to see Carl; I hadn’t seen him since I’d returned the suit. He’d been to a couple of other joints before Oscar’s and had that pleasant glow and gregariousness that he got after just a few scotches and before he’d had too many. He wore a white shirt and his doorman green pants, and, though he’d been on a diet for a few months, had not lost much of his heft. He’d gotten new glasses, though; these were horn-rimmed and made him look more distinguished than his granny glasses. I also noticed lines in his face, crow’s-feet, I guess, around the eyes and mouth, and wisps of gray in his hair. Looking at him this night, for some reason, reminded me of how many years I’d known him—longer than I’d known Big John. Carl’s expression was serene; when he looked like this, something in the cast of his eyes reminded me of Snoopy.
The regulars knew Ntango had been shot, but since he was a cabdriver and being shot was part of the territory, they didn’t make too big a deal over it. When it came to light that I’d been with Ntango, Carl asked why they hadn’t shot me.
“Why should they shoot me?”
He stopped drinking in midsip, raised an eyebrow, and said in his mildest tone, “I didn’t mean that they should shoot you.”
Carl was nosy enough to want an explanation. But I let him wait for a while. When I did tell him about the whole baffling mess, I did so with a sense of déjà vu. Telling him about Greg reminded me of an awful time a year or so before when a girl we knew was murdered—and I thought Carl had killed her. Eric listened
in, and the group pondered the mystery—as likely a brain trust as you’d find on any cluster of bar stools in New York.
“Suspect everyone! Accuse no one!” said Carl after a moment. Having drawn himself up to his full height on the bar stool, he bespoke this wisdom in a strong, shivering baritone. “Sergeant Cuff,” he explained.
Eric the Red pondered this before changing the subject Eric had long black hair to the middle of his back, tied in a ponytail, and a long black beard to the middle of his chest that trails off into ragged threads at the end. He was small, but he looked large because of his hair, his prominent hooked nose, his eyebrows like flourishing shrubs, and because of his hands, which were large and thick workingman’s hands. He hailed from Yugoslavia and idolized Tito, who had brought him in from shepherding in the mountains of Serbia and civilized him—or had taken a shot at it at least. “You been working downtown?” he asked. Eric had stalked the streets of New York for six months, an illegal alien, panhandling and living on handouts, looking for work, so he knew what it meant to need a job.
“I was working downtown till all this shit started happening.”
“You got fired again?”
“Not exactly. I’m still sort of on the clock,” I said, knowing Eric wouldn’t understand.
“I don’t get it, man.”
I nodded.
Carl, on the other hand, got too much. “A PI!” The expression in his small thoughtful eyes was gleeful.
Now I didn’t get it.
“A private eye … private investigator.” When he wasn’t writing poetry or reading it, Carl read detective novels in his little doorman’s cubicle, often one a night. His favorite was Nero Wolf.
“I’m not a PI; I’m a bartender. Actually, I’m a bar manager; that’s how I’m still on the clock. I get a salary. But now that’s over. I’m going back behind the stick, where I belong.”
