What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  At this moment, with the white remains of the beer head drying against the side of the pilsner glass, I felt a sense of déjà vu. In a bar like this, not long before, I’d sat like this, not knowing what to do. That night, I went to pee, found the gin mill’s back door open, walked out into the alley below Greg’s apartment, thought of a plan, climbed a tree—and the rest was history. Once more, I had to pee. And, even though this joint didn’t have a back door and no one lived upstairs, the plan was already hatched before I pulled down my zipper.

  Fate dictated no one would answer the door at Charlie’s office. Fate determined I would notice a side window off Charlie’s porch was open a half inch on the bottom. Fate, not thought, led me into the forsythia bush alongside the porch. Fate, again, as I gave a shove and the window went up.

  Crouched in the bushes—my eyes flashing, I’m sure, with the cunning of the fox outside the open chicken coop—I saw trees, empty porches, blank walls, and not a living soul. Using my one crutch as a pole, I vaulted for the open window and made it about halfway through before losing momentum and beaching myself on the windowsill. Half in and half out, I wiggled and squirmed, kicked and grunted, grasped and pulled, until I hoisted myself through and poured myself onto the floor. A bit more experienced at this sort of thing now, I looked out the window carefully to make sure no one had seen my entrance. Satisfied no one had seen because the window faced the blank wall of the house next to it and the bushes blocked it from the street, I pulled down the shades and turned on the light. Quickly, I went about my work, searching through Charlie’s desks, cabinets, and files. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was sure I’d know it when I found it.

  What I did find, after shuffling through papers, insurance forms, charts, and photocopied articles, was a metal box, not unlike a safe-deposit box, on a shelf in a metal cabinet. I figured it might contain eyeglass lenses or frames, or it might contain sophisticated laser machine parts. Then again, it might contain whatever it was I was searching for. The only way to know was to break it open—but if I did, Charlie would know someone had broken in. I could take the box with me, but he’d still know, and on top of that, I’d have to carry the goddamn box with me. With my luck, there’d be twenty pounds of uncut cocaine in the box. Then someone would kill me for sure. So I grabbed a screwdriver-type instrument from another cabinet and pried the box open.

  It was filled with small booklets with dark blue heavy-stock covers. When I opened one, I discovered it was a passport. In small boxes underneath the passports were blanks for driver’s licenses from California, New York, Florida and packets of Social Security cards. This was enough for me. I was a nervous wreck anyway in the deathly quiet, antiseptic room. The shadow of the examining chair, with all its arms and levers, started my imagination working, so I expected it might start up and come after me any minute, grabbing me with its levers and strapping me into the chair, holding me there until sourpuss the receptionist showed up in the morning to turn me over to the cops.

  I went back out the window, leaving it open wider than I’d found it, hoping Charlie might figure some neighborhood kids had broken in. I took a car-service cab back to Pop’s apartment in Flatbush, where I recounted my adventures.

  “I admire your flair for the dramatic,” Pop said when I told him what had happened.

  Flair maybe. But for once I was glad to have worked without an audience. With a burglary charge already hanging over my head, another arrest would send me up the river. Even though I knew I’d acted with the best of intentions—and that I wasn’t a second-story man in the real sense of the word—any judge I tried to explain this to would have as much compassion as one of Kafka’s judges.

  “The passports mean you were right about Ernesto having a different reason for hooking up with Charlie,” I told him.

  Pop nodded. “So whom do you point the finger at now?”

  “Walter,” I said without hesitation.

  Before leaving, I called Sheehan to see if he might have had a change of heart and gotten the information I’d asked him for.

  “I’ll tell you what I know when you tell me how you knew where Greg Peters’s body was buried,” Sheehan said by way of hello. “Who tipped you off?”

  “A reporter I know down there. They listen to the police scanner.”

  “Bullshit,” said Sheehan. “How’d you know it would be Peters?” When I didn’t answer, Sheehan said, “Sorry I can’t help you. Police information is confidential.”

  “Wait.” I thought this over quickly. I needed to trade, and since I’d already let most of the cats out of the bag anyway, I told him about the newspaper articles.

  What I got for my trouble was a long silence.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Fair’s fair. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” This last was an oft-used phrase of my mother’s, one that never in my wildest dreams did I expect I would use myself.

  “What they told me,” Sheehan said, the flatness of his tone worthy of a twenty-year veteran of New York’s finest, “was that they made no connection between this case and the earlier case or between the two earlier cases. In one of the earlier cases, the cause of death was a drug overdose. The other is an open murder case.”

  “They don’t think it’s strange that all the bodies were buried in the same garbage dump?”

  “You see a connection, McNulty. No one else does. Two guys were stabbed to death fifteen years apart. They’re buried in the same place. Could it have been the same murderer? Yes. Could it have been a different murderer? Yes. Then you have an overdose. You’re telling me that was a murder also. All I want to know, McNulty, is how do you know? What’s the motive? Who’s the perpetrator?”

  “Why do I gotta do all the work? You guys are the ones on the clock. What cop did you talk to down there? That guy Carney seems like he should know better.”

  “I didn’t talk to him. I spoke to the chief.”

  “Doesn’t it sound like bullshit to you no matter who you talked to? The bodies in the same place? The guys knowing one another? There’s no connection?” I said this a little louder than was probably appropriate.

  Sheehan’s voice rose to fill the telephone receiver. “If you know how these deaths are linked, why were you sending me to find out about it from the Sea Isle cops? Don’t talk to me about goosing no fucking gander!” He sputtered for a few seconds but then quieted. “I’m not a fucking messenger.”

  “If Greg killed Bill Green, then it’s possible he was killed in revenge.”

  “By who?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I asked you to find out about that guy Walter.”

  Sheehan didn’t say anything, but I sensed something might be coming, so I kept quiet. “This Walter Springer …” he said.

  “Yeah?” My heart stopped.

  “I couldn’t find anything on him.”

  “What?”

  “There wasn’t anything there.” Sheehan sounded uncomfortable. He was a guy used to saying things directly, not good at pussyfooting around.

  I didn’t believe him, but I knew better than to argue. It was one of those times when the unsaid says a whole lot more than the said.

  Pop watched me hang up the phone. “You’re not planning on a diplomatic career, I hope.”

  I ignored him and called Sue Gleason. Although she’d already come up with more than her share of startling information, this time she might as well have whacked me between the eyes with a two-by-four. I mumbled something, hung up, and stood in front of the phone, staring into the space behind it.

  Pop didn’t interrupt my trance. Some time later, I found myself sitting across from him at the dining room table. “John’s father, Charlie, went to prison for murdering someone in the 1950s,” I told him. “Sue Gleason has the lurid and graphic newspaper story on the murder. But the intriguing thing is how: The guy who was killed was stabbed once, up under the ribs and into the heart, just like Aaron was killed, like Greg was killed, and the way, many years ago, Bill
Green was killed.”

  We sat in silence, which was interrupted only by the creaking of the old wooden dining room chairs. The dark wood of the sideboard behind me, the glass-fronted china cabinet across the room, the ancient round table itself—these and everything else in the room shone with a dull light, like a sanctuary. I began to remember things we’d talked about sitting around this table. Once, when I was seventeen, shortly after my mother died, my father and I talked for hours, and I decided I would go to Columbia University. That night, I was prouder of myself, and more determined to make my father proud of me, than I’d ever been before or would ever be again. The son of a blacklisted outcast had been accepted at one of the country’s most exalted seats of learning. Even though Pop required a blood oath that I wouldn’t forsake the working class when I entered college, I knew it was a moment of great pride for him, this man who had spent a lifetime in quixotic battles without ever giving up his belief that mankind might one day end its inhumanity to man. It was at this same table three years later that I told him I was dropping out of Columbia because I was failing and just couldn’t do it anymore. The room and the table were filled with the memories of my life and my father. My eyes filled with tears. I thought of John and his father and wondered what in the world I would tell John now that I knew.

  “It’s got to be Walter,” I said.

  Pop heard the desperation in my voice, so his own voice was kind, reminding me of how he’d sounded the night my mother died and we sat at this table long, long into the night. Back then, the gentleness didn’t help. I was lost and alone and bitter in a way I thought I’d never recover from. Perhaps I never had. But when I looked back over the years, the gentleness of that talk with my father was one of the beautiful things I remembered in my life. Now, the gentleness came again, because he knew I grieved for John. But Pop’s gentleness didn’t allow for ignoring the truth. His tone was gentle, but the expression in his eyes was unwavering. “You can despise this Walter person, but nothing that you know makes him a killer.”

  “Well, if Charlie did it, Walter was with him. He was with him every single time.” My voice cracked, the tears welling up behind my eyes.

  I stormed out of my father’s house, as I’d done so many times in my life, leaving Pop sad and brooding, behind me. I headed straight down Flatbush, through neighborhoods that would normally scare me to death. This night, with my gimpy gait, one crutch, and unseeing eyes, I must truly have looked like the one carrying the ax. I slowed down as the pain in my leg caught up with me, and the late-summer night and the gentle evening calmed me a bit. A stickball game between the parked cars, down one of the side streets, brought back my childhood with a pang of nostalgia. As a kid, I was warned not to talk to strangers. There were gangs and junkies, but I wasn’t afraid all the time. My head full of summer evenings, stickball games, love affairs on stoops, and the safety of childhood, I was at Grand Army Plaza before I realized where I’d gotten to. I turned at Seventh Avenue and backtracked toward Walter’s apartment. Heedless and incautious, I should have considered that Walter might have a gun. I should have at least noticed that there was a red Cherokee parked half a block from Walter’s apartment.

  chapter twenty-four

  My hand was poised in front of Walter’s bell when for no reason other than instinct I looked back over my shoulder for a second. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a gleaming dark blue Cadillac Eldorado parked at the curb on the far side of the street, and my hand froze. I turned and began to casually haul myself across the street—and almost got creamed by a Daily News truck thundering down Seventh Avenue with the early edition.

  I didn’t really think it was John’s car. But I needed to make sure. Since I had no idea what John’s license plate number was, I didn’t know what looking at the car would prove. As it turned out, I didn’t have to know the number. The plates read BIGJON. John was not someone to slink around under the cover of darkness.

  It was while contemplating this turn of events that I caught sight of the red Cherokee I’d walked past back on the other side of the street. It was parked a few doors down from Walter’s apartment. There are many red Cherokees, as there are many blue Eldorados, and no reason to assume this was the one that had been stalking me. But, using my imagination, I came up with a couple of possibilities. One, John had been captured by Walter and the goons. Two, John, Walter, and the goons in the red Cherokee were in cahoots.

  The situation called for action. I pictured myself scaling the side of the building across the street from Walter’s apartment, swinging across Seventh Avenue on a rope, swooping through the front window of the apartment, rescuing John—or capturing him, depending on the circumstances—catching the bad guys dead to rights, rounding them up, and turning the whole passel of thieves over to the coppers. I think I had myself mixed up with Zorro. When, in my mind’s eye, I replaced the lithe figure of Zorro with that of an aging and sagging bartender, the doorbell seemed more practical. But I hesitated doing this, too, because if either of my theories was right, I’d be in more trouble than I could handle.

  Under the circumstances, I decided to have a drink before taking any action. Given my druthers, I’d have gone into the Hourglass and sipped manhattans with the old ladies, but I wanted to keep an eye on both the Cherokee and John’s car, so I went into Dominick’s Den to drink with the hairy chests and inhale the cologne. Sipping a beer, I leaned my body and my one crutch on the dry bar next to the picture window, where I could watch the street. When I went back for my second beer, I noticed two swarthy guys among the many swarthy guys. These two were bent over the bar together in quiet and intent conversation, indifferent to the activity around them. Every other guy floated through the bar, patting a pal on the shoulder, muscling up to one of the girls in tight white jeans. These two guys talked. And the smaller one, dark-haired, hard-eyed, square-jawed, I’d seen before: in Bay Ridge one sunny morning, holding a gun in his hand.

  It is the experience of experiences, let me tell you, to find yourself a few bar stools away from a man who has shot you. I froze to the spot just as I had when I saw that Daily News truck bearing down on me. One more step and wham! Stepping back from the wham this time, too, I set my beer glass down, and, grabbing my crutch, I limped as quickly as I could out of the bar, not looking back, but cringing nonetheless, waiting for a bullet in the back.

  As luck would have it, at the same moment I walked out of the bar, Big John came charging out of Walter’s building. I hesitated a quick second, then called him. He turned sharply, his eyes bright and alert. John moved through his life like a fox in the field, enjoying it to the fullest but constantly on guard.

  “Yo, bro!” he hollered cheerfully when he saw it was me. “What’s going on?”

  “C’mere,” I said in a low voice, trying to hush him, as if the goons in the bar could hear. I pushed him into the Hourglass and, before we had ordered a drink, told him about the guys in the next bar. John took off his glasses and went stone-faced.

  “Two double shots of tequila,” he said when the bartender showed up.

  As we sucked them down, I kept watch out the window.

  “Let’s go,” John said, throwing down the last of his tequila.

  I did the same and followed him toward the door. “Where we going?”

  “To snatch those goons.”

  “Oh?” I hesitated. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” What I meant was, “Please, Mr. Custer, I don’t want to go.” But I stiffened my back and gritted my teeth.

  Reaching into a locked box under the seat of the Eldorado, John took out two little snubbed-nose guns. He stuck one of them into his belt and handed the other one to me.

  “Are you really going to shoot someone with that?”

  John rolled his eyes. “Just scare them. You don’t have to shoot them.”

  “What if they don’t scare?”

  John shook his head. “You shoot them in the leg. You don’t have to kill anybody.”

  “I don�
�t want it,” I said, backing away from him.

  John looked like he wanted to throttle me.

  “I wouldn’t use it.”

  He rolled his eyes, then stared at me for a few seconds; finally, his face took on that wistful, perplexed expression he often got when I tried to explain why I didn’t want to be a boss or why I thought it was terrible for people to be rich. I liked the expression, because it seemed to have in it some weird form of admiration mixed with the incredulity.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’ll whack both of them if I have to.”

  We sat in John’s car and waited. I thought about telling him then what I’d learned about Charlie’s past, but it didn’t seem like the right time. Instead, I pestered him with questions, asking him when he thought the goons would come out, and if he thought they’d see us when they did. When I asked him if he thought they had guns, he gave me a scornful glance, so I shut up. John seemed to take our stakeout in stride, like a veteran soldier going into battle. It didn’t make any difference how far up the corporate ladder he’d climbed. You could take the kid away from the mean streets, but you couldn’t take the streets out of the kid. Big John settled his own scores.