What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  “This is why, Kevin,” I said, with little hope he’d believe me. “Because if you killed them, then you’d be like them.”

  “That’s bullshit, Dad … . That’s just being weak.”

  “I love you, buddy,” I said then. “Good-bye.”

  The conversation with my son helped neither my mood nor my view of what the world had to offer, although when I talked with him, no matter how combative or sullen his mood, it helped me get my bearings. I remembered I had a purpose in life, that there was reason to battle the chaos and the meaninglessness, and that despite the emptiness of the uncaring universe, I knew, like the guy in the rowboat in the middle of the ocean, I wanted to embrace life. But not at the moment. I shut off my phone and read until I fell asleep.

  When I woke up next time, it actually was morning, and I didn’t know what day it was. Realizing that with all that was going on I should probably be paying more attention to the world around me, I called for messages. There were three calls from Sandra, beginning early that morning.

  “I was really worried. I thought something happened to you,” she said when I called her back. She sounded breathless and unsettled.

  “Why did you think that? Is something wrong there?”

  She hesitated. “No …” But it was the kind of no that took a long time to say and ended up meaning yes.

  “What happened?”

  “Someone broke into my house.” She paused. Her breathing sounded like gasping. Finally, she screeched, “Brian, I’m terrified. Please come here. Please … please come here.”

  Shit, I said to myself. I’d been planning to give Dr. Parker a call to see if we could have an early dinner before I went to work. And I sure as hell didn’t want to trek all the way back to the Jersey shore. “I gotta work tonight,” I said weakly. “Maybe you could come up here?”

  Sandra began weeping quietly. “I know it’s not right to ask you. I only asked because I was really afraid … . Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.”

  “If you’re afraid, go somewhere. Did you call the police?”

  “I didn’t call the police, because nothing was missing. Someone was just here. I have this terrible premonition that someone sat here all night waiting for me to come home. I can’t explain it.”

  “Why weren’t you home?”

  “I was in the hospital to have my catheter changed. They didn’t like some of the tests, so they kept me over. I have a feeling that if I’d been home last night, whoever killed Greg would have killed me.”

  “Stay right there. I’ll call you back.” I hung up and called Charlie’s office. When Sourpuss answered, I altered my voice to sound like one of the pious Brooklyn Irish Catholics I’d known as a kid. “Father McNulty here,” I said. “Dr. Wilson, please.”

  “He’s not here, Father,” she answered very politely, as I knew she would because I remembered the pictures of people with halos I’d seen on her desk. “Are you sure it’s this Dr. Wilson you’re looking for?”

  “Yes, yes, I need to speak to him on a pressing business matter,” I said in the lilting tones of a New Testament shepherd. “Do you know where I might reach him?”

  She stuttered a bit. “I’m sorry, Father. He’s out of town.”

  “Oh, praise the Lord. Is he still in Atlantic City?”

  “Why yes, father.”

  “Then he must have remembered. God bless you,” I said. I hung up and called Sandra back. “I’ll be there this afternoon. Call the police and keep your eyes open.”

  When I left my apartment, morning was in full swing. Pretty young Upper West Side women in their business suits, wearing Nikes and carrying attaché cases, ran neck and neck and elbow-to-elbow with worsted-suited and silk-tied Upper West Side men, all heading for the subway with grit and determination. The neighborhood was an awful lot more respectable than when I first moved there in the 1970s. These days, on a New York City morning, no one sauntered, no one stood aside to let another pass. Those already too late to take the subway leaned out into Broadway, bodies braced, arms jabbing at the air, flagging down a cab.

  I couldn’t handle either the subway or the four or five Yuppies already leaning into Broadway from my corner, so I walked downtown a few blocks on the off chance I might find an empty space on one of the blocks, and on the even more remote chance I might find a cabdriver having coffee in La Rosita.

  As luck would have it, Ntango was having coffee at La Rosita—with Dr. Parker. They sat together at a small table, engrossed in each other, and then shame-faced when they saw me. Until I saw their embarrassment, I thought they’d just run into each other. With my usual aplomb in delicate situations, I stared at them. They stared at me. Finally, Dr. Parker stood. She said she had to leave and asked me to walk her to her car. On the way, she told me she’d gone to see Ntango, as I had asked her to. She got him released from the hospital; they had dinner together that evening, then again last night, and one thing led to another. She looked at me with those beautiful eyes and smiled that secret smile, too happy to be ashamed.

  Since, during one of the times she and Ntango were having dinner, I was in the sack with Sandra, I couldn’t conjure up much moral outrage. Ntango really was a wonderful man in all respects—in all respects I knew about anyway—and Dr. Parker’s blushing suggested she was quite pleased with any additional respects she’d discovered.

  I asked her if Ntango had his cab back yet. She said no. Feeling some dowry might be in order, I asked if I could borrow Ntango and her car to go to the Jersey Shore. I didn’t know if the Hippocratic oath extended to loaning your car, but it was a matter of life and death. Despite her profession, Dr. Parker had those salt-of-the-earth instincts. She went back in to La Rosita, talked to Ntango, and gave him the keys. In her self-possessed way, she came back, hugged me, then actually sauntered over to the curb. An uptown cab did a quick U-turn around the center island and picked her up as soon as she raised her hand.

  Ntango was eating eggs and reading the News when I came back in and ordered my own huevos rancheros. He was polite and embarrassed but, like Dr. Parker, unapologetic. I didn’t talk about her. There wasn’t anything to say. I liked her. At moments, I’d dreamed we’d spend our lives together. But once more, I’d bet on the wrong horse.

  I told Ntango who the guys were who’d shot him and said that they were really after me. There was nothing personal, just a couple of guys trying to make a buck. They wouldn’t shoot him again, nor would they shoot me, presumably, for the foreseeable future. Ntango showed no particular anger that the villains wouldn’t be brought to justice. Like most of us, he’d come to accept daily injustice. I brooded about it, though. Most corruption, I could take. But the older I got, unconsciously and absolutely involuntarily, the more I began to pick up Pop’s traits. Reverence for the union was one of them. They could step on Superman’s cape, spit in the wind, pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, but this desecration of the last best hope of the working people, this would be avenged someday.

  Ntango looked at me in that sympathetic, bored way of his as I told him this. After all, someone had stolen his country and murdered his father; what was a corrupt union or two to him? But he did care that Sandra might be in danger. Murderers sometimes travel in packs, he said, so he’d drive me back to the shore.

  By the time we reached south Jersey and the ocean breezes, the afternoon was sunny and clear. The parkway ran straight through a field of marsh grass that looked and felt like a prairie—everything low to the ground, nothing protruding, the marsh grass shifting in the breeze like Nebraska wheat, flowing toward the horizon, where the sea and the sky came together. The air was warm, but the breeze was strong off the ocean. I liked the coastal wetlands flashing by the car window. I liked the emptiness and peacefulness, and that the wetlands belonged to no one. I didn’t get scared until we turned off the parkway and headed east through the marsh grass to the bridge that led into Sea Isle City. By the time we’d crossed into town, slowed in front of the police station, and turned right to hea
d out on Central Avenue toward Sandra’s house, a sickening fear came over me, like the night John and I started out in search of Greg.

  Sandra’s street was quiet, the air dead. Her house was dark, as dark as it could be in the sparkling sunlight. The outside was bright enough, but nothing came from the inside; the house was lifeless. I had the eerie feeling you get sometimes that no one is home, even before you can reasonably know this to be true. I went up the walk and then up the ramp to the porch. I knocked and waited and then knocked again. No answer. I hollered to Ntango that I was going to wait, so he could go get lunch or coffee if he wanted, but he joined me on the porch instead. We sat on ancient dark green Adirondack chairs that were much more comfortable than they looked, with their hard wooden angles and straight backs. Sitting on the porch might have been quite pleasant, even in the heat, if I hadn’t secretly dreaded that Sandra might be dead in her darkened house. “If I had any balls, I’d go look,” I told Ntango.

  He agreed.

  But before I could take action—if, in fact, I was going to take any action—Sandra called me from a grove of bayberry a little way up the street. I sprang out of the Adirondack chair—no mean feat, given the shape of the chair and the shape of me—and half-ran, half-vaulted myself to her. She held my head in an armlock while I hugged her as best I could with the edge of the wheelchair arm sticking in my ribs. She clutched at me, as if what she was describing were happening that minute. Someone had been in the house, she’d swear to it, but she didn’t see anyone or any signs that someone had been there. The police didn’t believe her. They’d asked her questions about Greg and drugs, as if whatever had happened, if indeed something had, was because of drugs.

  “As if that made it okay to break into someone’s house—because someone else was involved in drugs,” she said through her tears.

  On the way down to the shore, I’d figured out what was nagging at me about Sandra’s house being broken into. Aaron’s apartment had been broken into, too, right after he was murdered. On top of this, the cops had accused me of jimmying open the window to Greg’s apartment. Since I hadn’t, it was likely someone had broken in before I got there.

  “Is anything missing?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I could tell. But I think things were moved around. It feels like something’s been disturbed, though I can’t say what’s been moved.”

  Sandra and I took a quick look through the house while Ntango went around the side and back of the house to check the doors and windows. I was particularly interested in Greg’s things, which, true to form, were stacked or placed or arranged in perfect symmetry: his records, his tapes, his paperback works of Shakespeare and a few other books on a bookshelf. Also, on one of the shelves was a row of videotapes—a Shakespeare collection, as I might have guessed. Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, James Earl Jones as Othello. What caught my eye was that the row of tapes was askew, the plays out of order, some leaning on others, disorder very unlike Greg.

  “Could something have been hidden behind the tapes?” I asked Sandra.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know like what,” I said irritably. “Did you ever look behind there?”

  My tone had gotten her dander up, so she was a bit testy herself. “I think I would have seen something if it was there. But the tapes are messed up. They shouldn’t be jumbled up like that.”

  “Are any of them missing?”

  Sandra threw up her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t remember all of them. Why would someone want one of Greg’s tapes?”

  I threw up my own hands, too. “I have no idea.”

  Ntango came back to report no signs of a break-in. But this turned out not to make any difference, because Sandra remembered she hadn’t locked her doors. My trained eye was unable to find any evidence of anything, except the evidence that Sandra was about to become hysterical and shouldn’t be trusted alone. I told her she needed to stay with her family or a friend. She insisted there was no one she could stay with.

  “You can’t stay here. You can go stay with someone, or you can ride around with Ntango and me while I check on some things. But you’ll have to wait in the car.”

  She decided to come along.

  Ntango drove us back to Atlantic City and the Claridge. In the doldrums of midafternoon, it wasn’t hard to find Charlie at a craps table. He wasn’t holding the dice, and he wasn’t sweating. There was a pretty good stack of chips in front of him. As unobtrusively as possible, given that I was the only one in the place with a crutch, I slid in beside him, nudging him so as not to disturb the half a dozen others concentrating on the dice.

  “If you’re not on a roll at the moment, I’d like to talk to you,” I said.

  Charlie’s brown eyes usually had this warm and friendly expression about them—disarming, you might say. Now was no exception. He picked up his chips, put his arm around my shoulder, and led me away from the table to a small bar off the mezzanine above the lobby: half a dozen bar stools, three or four tables against the wall. Even at its busiest, one bartender and a waitress could handle it. Charlie ordered a couple of Beck’s from a bartender who called him Charlie, and we sat down. There was no one else at the bar.

  “This bar used to be a lot bigger,” I told Charlie.

  Charlie waved his arm in the direction of the rest of the hotel. “They want all the space they can get for gambling. They’ll put the bar in a broom closet next.”

  When Charlie paid for the drinks, he handed the bartender a ten. “Swing it,” Charlie said, winking at the barman.

  The guy instinctively looked up, so I noticed a video camera in the ceiling, trained on the cash register, and another over the doorway covering the service bar. He rolled his eyes and went to the register.

  “What can I do for you?” Charlie asked me after taking a satisfying sip of his beer.

  “You could stop killing my friends.”

  He took another generous swallow of his beer. His expression didn’t change—the warmth was still there in his eyes—and he didn’t take his eyes from mine until he had put together what he wanted to say. “I don’t know why I have to be the guy to straighten you out. You know John all these years, and still you don’t know anything.” Sitting back in the plush bar stool, he gave every appearance that this was one of the more pleasant afternoons he’d spent in a while.

  “I’m going to name four people,” I said. “All of them had some connection to you. You tell me why and how they died. David Bradley, Bill Green, Aaron Adams, and Greg.”

  Charlie looked at his beer glass for quite a while. I didn’t know if he’d say anything at all. I couldn’t think of any reason he should, but he must have thought of one. “Put it this way. A guy doesn’t get whacked for no reason. You know what I mean?”

  I didn’t, but he didn’t really care.

  “You know the rules. You follow the rules. You do okay. You don’t wanna follow the rules? Maybe that’s okay, too. But you better be damn good. Because you know what happens if you aren’t good enough.”

  Charlie ordered two more beers, not saying anything while we waited for them.

  “Put it this way,” he said after he poured some of his new beer into a clean glass, which he’d asked for. “My son, John … He’s smarter and tougher than all of them. He does what he wants. Everybody respects him. Me? I was pretty good in my time, too. I took my chances and came out on my feet.” He knocked on the dark wooden surface of the bar with his knuckles. “Those other guys, even Greg, who I knew since he was a kid, they weren’t smart. They thought they could do like John or like me. They thought they could get away not following the rules.” Charlie’s eyes narrowed and bored into mine. “They knew goddamn well what happens if you fuck up.”

  Perspiration beaded on Charlie’s forehead. He didn’t look nervous or angry so much as intent, breathing hard through his nostrils. “In this game, if you go off on your own and you win, you make a bundle. You know what I mean? But if you’re not tough enough to win, you ge
t whacked. That’s all there is to it. You don’t wanna take a chance on getting whacked, then do what you’re fucking told.” Charlie’s intensity was amazing. He explained this way of life to me as if his depended on it. “Let me tell you. None of them guys had to get killed. Like in the Old West when you give the guy a chance to go for his gun, it’s a fair fight. Any one of them could have just done what he was told. But each guy took his chances. If they’d won, maybe someone else would be dead. Maybe I whacked them. Maybe someone else did. It’s none of your fucking business. You’re a lunch-box guy. No one’s going to whack you. You got me? Forget about it.” Charlie turned back to his beer and sat hunched over the bar, looking into his glass.

  “That’s it, then? You’re telling me that’s what happened?” I leaned toward Charlie, trying to make him look at me.

  When my eyes finally caught up with his, he said. “I’m not tellin’ you nothin’, except I’ll tell you one more time: Forget about this. I’m gonna forget about it, too. John’s shipping me back to Arizona.” Charlie leaned forward a little unsteadily to clap me on the shoulder, willing to let bygones be bygones.

  “Why should I believe you’re telling the truth?”

  “Son, no one ever tells you the truth about everything. Your father should have taught you that when you were a boy.”

  I bristled. “My father taught me a lot.”

  Charlie laughed comfortably again, nodding his head with approval. “That’s right, stick up for your old man; even an old outlaw like me got a son to stick up for him.” Charlie switched to scotch. I stayed with beer.

  While he sipped his scotch, I thought about how easily he sucked me in with his charm, just like his son did. I really wanted him to tell me about life. I wanted to know what made fathers proud of their sons. But there were other things I needed to find out first. I wasn’t exactly plying Charlie with liquor to get him to open up. But since he was doing a pretty good job on his own, it didn’t take long for him to begin babbling about how unjust the world was to a gangster trying to make a buck, and how hard it was to hold on to your son’s respect when everyone was down on you. “I never pushed John to do anything. But he wasn’t ashamed of me, even though they tried to get him to be.” Charlie developed this sappy smile as he ordered another scotch.