by Con Lehane
John and I had been down this road back in the old days. We’d passed a lot of nights talking about our reprobate dads. As a kid, I reluctantly stood by my father—just as John had stood by his—even when I suspected he really might be a traitor. I worried about him; that’s why I did it. He was my dad, and when I was eight or nine years old, I thought it was my job to watch out for him.
“Most people wouldn’t understand,” Charlie said. “My son won awards. He was elected things and appointed to places. He made a speech when he graduated from high school. I got proclamations from the mayor from him doing things to help old people. They could say what they wanted about his father being a jailbird, but John was up there with the doctors’ kids and the bankers’ kids. And he stuck up for his old man. When he was getting one of those awards or whatever, he’d always want me to come with him. In that speech when he graduated, he said his dad had taught him what he knew.”
“So you taught him how to become an outlaw?”
“Hey,” Charlie said, sitting up and pointing his finger in my face. “He never looked down on how I made a living. When he got out of high school, he worked with me. That’s how he got started. I taught him a lot.”
“Did you teach him to use a knife?”
Charlie looked stunned. I’d gotten him right up under the ribs, and he was reeling. For a long time, he didn’t say anything. Then he spoke in a whisper that resembled a growl. “I did my time. You may be too fucking smart for your own good. People kill for money everywhere; they always have. Grow up.” Charlie glowered at his rocks glass, brooding, knowing he’d let his guard down, that he must be slipping—knowing, too, that in his line of work if you start slipping, you’re done for.
“I got one more problem, Charlie, and then I’ll leave you alone. What was someone looking for in Sandra’s house?”
“What?” Charlie shook his head to clear it. “Whose house?”
“Sandra. The woman Greg was living with.”
Charlie’s face gave too much away after the scotch; he showed too much interest.
“What was someone looking for in Sandra’s house?” I asked again.
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And Aaron’s apartment. Who broke in after Aaron was killed. You? Walter?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Was it Walter? What was he looking for?”
“Ask Walter.”
“Why Sandra’s house?”
Charlie stared at me with a drunk’s stupid expression. He waved his hand in my direction. “You’re nuts. No one’s breakin’ into places.” He sat up straight on his bar stool, trying to regain the stature he dimly realized was gone for good. But it didn’t work, so I left Charlie with his scotch and found Ntango and Sandra in the car on the street.
“I got one more stop. And I’ll be awhile.” I said, then gave Ntango directions to Linda’s house.
Sandra questioned me with her eyes but didn’t ask me anything. Neither did Ntango. I wouldn’t have known what to tell them anyway.
“Tell me again what you saw the night Greg disappeared,” I asked Sandra. My voice sounded harsh and demanding.
I startled her, so she stammered. “I saw a car going up the street. I heard something. Then I heard the car. Maybe I didn’t see a car. I don’t remember. Maybe I just heard it.”
“You told me and John you saw it.”
“Maybe I did.” Her eyes were pleading. I could see Ntango’s shoulders tensing. I didn’t like the sound of my voice, either. I didn’t like what I was doing. But I didn’t stop.
“Maybe you don’t want to remember. You don’t want to think about it. You want someone else to do all the work.”
Sandra turned on me. There were tears in her eyes. “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you talking like this?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know where the rage was coming from. “You gotta get out of here,” I said. There was no caring in my tone at all, as if it were her fault she had to get out of there, that she’d caused all the trouble. In a strange way, I realized, this was true. Like Charlie’d said. Just as it had been Greg’s fault and Aaron’s, and before them Bill Green’s and David Bradley’s, that they got themselves killed. They made their choices, took their chances.
“Why should I?” Sandra asked petulantly.
“If you stay here, you might get murdered.”
She looked stricken.
“Come with us back to New York. If I’m wrong, you’ll spend a couple of days in the city. That’s not so bad.”
She chewed on her lower lip. “Why should I believe you?”
For the next few seconds, we shot pain and anger back and forth at each other. Finally, something happened: The anger cooled, replaced by an unspoken sympathy for each other that words couldn’t pull off right then. “Okay,” she said.
Ntango dropped me off at Linda’s and headed back to Sandra’s so she could pack. Linda called to me from the backyard when I rang the bell. When I caught up with her, she was sitting in what was left of the sun, holding the baby, smiling at me, then nudging the baby with her nose, bopping the kid’s forehead with her own, poking her gently in her little dimples to make her smile. “Look who’s here, Jenny. It’s Brian. Say hi to Brian.” I waved to the kid, who looked at me suspiciously.
The baby’s skin was darker than Linda’s. Her eyes were dark, too. But they shone and sparkled like Linda’s when she smiled. Linda wore a brightly flowered two-piece bathing suit and was as unconsciously lovely as she always was. I didn’t know how she wouldn’t notice my eyes devouring her or feel the wanton lasciviousness in my heart. But she was as cheerfully glad to see me as ever, hugging me, her flesh, hot from the sun, burning in my hands as I held her against me after she’d placed the baby gently in the wading pool.
“You feel wonderful,” I said.
“You look awful.” She leaned back to take a better look.
Leaving me to watch the baby, she went inside to get me a beer. As soon as she left, I got scared the tyke would drown, so I hovered over the pool and kept my eyes glued on the child, who slapped at the water, making big splashes, giggling and screeching. She was adorable, with her sparkling eyes, her two tiny white teeth, and her dimples.
Linda handed me the beer, then sat down in her sling-back beach chair. She watched the baby and made cooing sounds in tune with her daughter’s sounds as she splashed about. Linda looked content, sitting in the yard of her own house in the sun, watching her baby, waiting for her husband to come home, waiting to go to work herself. It was a reasonable-enough life. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing in the middle of it. She seemed as if she traveled in the right orbit, like a star. I’d rejected a similar life myself many years before when I first had my own child, because I thought then that life owed me better. By the time I realized life didn’t owe me anything and had probably already given me more than I deserved, I was already pretty far down that lost highway.
The wonder and innocence in Linda’s eyes matched that of her little girl’s. She was either totally guileless or the world’s best liar. And she certainly wasn’t in any hurry to find out what I wanted.
“I hate to bring this up again,” I said.
Those beautiful eyes searched mine. “I knew you would. I knew it wouldn’t be over.”
“How did you know all that?”
“I just knew,” Linda said quietly.
I wasn’t finding Linda as cute as I usually did. I was tired of her playing coy. “Sometimes you know too much,” I said. “Sometimes you know things you wish you didn’t know. How are things working out with Ralph?”
“Better” was all she said; then her face took on this expression Kevin used to get when he was small and I’d wrongfully accused him of something. Not accustomed to unfairness, he was more than hurt by the accusation; such injustice was something he, until that moment, had thought was impossible. Linda looked like that. But since she was over thirty, I f
igured she should know better—and expect less from her friends, particularly me, than she seemed to. But I still felt like a rat.
I’d come there to check up on Charlie. Instead, I asked her about something else that had nothing to do with Charlie and was probably none of my business. “A few years ago, Greg was arrested for punching Ralph. Why?”
The expression on her face was so incredulous and so damning that I felt like I’d finally done the thing for which there was no forgiveness. “You come so close,” she said, “and then you always do something to screw it up.” She glared at me for a second and then closed her eyes. When she opened them, they reddened, as if she would cry. “I’m going to tell you,” she said. She reached behind her for a white beach robe that had been draped over the back of the chair and put it on. That beach robe was a barrier. Like Eve putting on clothes when the sense of shame was born. Evil had entered the garden; innocence was lost. “I’m going to tell you,” she said again. “Maybe I was wrong and should have told you before. But even if I am wrong, so are you, because you should never have had to test me. I loved you and was your friend. That was as important as anything in the world to me. Like my baby.” Her eyes pinned me against the sky.
“You don’t understand—”
“Yes I do. You’re going to think I’m terrible. But so do I, so it doesn’t make any difference anymore … . All those years ago, John and I were lovers. You never knew that. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you. I didn’t because I was ashamed.”
Sitting down awkwardly in the grass in my stiff and heavy dungarees, the sun beating down, I listened like the child I all along had thought Linda was.
“Since the time I was seventeen, John summoned me whenever he wanted me.”
We stared at each other over this piece of information for a long time.
“Ralph knew about you and John? Is that what the fight was about?”
“Not exactly. Ralph never liked John. Maybe he knew about John and me, or maybe he suspected something, but we never talked about it. That night, we were at some party in a bar. Ralph was drinking. He doesn’t ever drink, so he’s a real asshole when he does. John was toying with him for a while, sort of helping him to become more and more of an asshole and making fun of him. I got John to stop. But Ralph kept it up. John wasn’t even paying attention to him by then. He was talking to someone else. Ralph went after him, so Greg dragged Ralph outside just to get him out of trouble. I guess he pissed Greg off, too. Greg punched him. A cop happened to be passing by and arrested Greg. That’s the story. Something stupid. Something embarrassing. Something private and none of your business.”
I felt a place inside me start to crumble, another section of my self-respect probably. I was embarrassed for Linda, and even more for myself, because I began to understand something. “You were seeing John even then?”
Linda’s eyes went wild, her look mocking and angry, filled with triumph and despair. “John and I were together before I met you, when you and I were together, and after you left.”
“When did you stop seeing him?” I asked, despite the cold, sick feeling in my chest.
She didn’t answer. The look in her eyes, so angry and triumphant, began to weaken, until she looked down and wouldn’t look up again. And then I knew the answer. I remembered what I’d always known about John. He made every man who knew him jealous because we all knew he could take any woman he wanted anytime. John—ever noble and chivalrous—would never tell. So I remembered now asking him where he was the night Aaron was killed. I remembered the song I’d kidded him about. The missing line: “ … I was locked in the arms of my best friend’s wife.” I knew the last time Linda had been with John.
She was crying now, pulling her robe around her, crying and watching the baby. “You found out what you had to find out,” she said between sobs. “I was with John in the Sheraton in New York the night Aaron was killed. He said he’d never tell. But once the murder happened, I knew it would come up. Someone would ask where John was that night. I would have to tell them, and it would ruin my life. And it had to be you. Are you satisfied?”
The baby must have gotten cold by then. Or maybe she just caught her mother’s terrible unhappiness. Whatever the reason, she let out a series of bloodcurdling blats that shredded what was left of my nerves. “She needs a nap,” Linda said, cuddling her daughter as she walked away from me. I watched her walk to the kitchen, her blond hair, whitened by the summer sun, against the white robe, the white robe against the backs of her tanned legs. She walked erectly and proudly.
Linda hadn’t told me to stay or go, so I stayed. I’d come there to find out about Charlie and the alibi they’d made for the night Bill Green was killed. Instead, I found out this innocent love I’d remembered all my life had been sordid and corrupt. I stretched out on the lawn and stared at the sky. I felt like I hadn’t lain on my back and looked at the sky like that since I was a kid. Fascinated, I watched the deep blue, the wisps of clouds, a bird scooting once in a while from one end of my vision to the other. For the rest of the time, Linda was gone, which may have been a few minutes or may have been many. I didn’t think about anything except the sky.
When she came back, she’d pulled herself together. Even the color in her face had improved. It had been drawn and pale when she was so angry and scared; now that she’d gotten control again, her complexion was as pink and healthy as her baby’s. She handed me a beer and sat down on the grass beside me. I watched the robe slide away from her pretty legs.
“I’m not sure why I married Ralph. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe it will just make terrible unhappiness for both of us forever. I didn’t love him. But look what love had done to me. There was John, who treated me like a princess with caviar and champagne in luxury hotel suites one day and was gone then for the next six months, leaving me a couple of hundred bucks on the bureau, so I knew I was a whore and not a princess after all. Then there was you. You with your ‘Love is all you need.’ Did you really believe that, Brian? Or was I the only one dumb enough to believe it? … I’m such an idiot. I just loved and loved.” Her expression was pained and cold and she was so alone behind it. “Well, love wasn’t enough, was it, Brian?”
I didn’t want to be with her now. I didn’t want her looking at me anymore.
“I told you I made a mess of everything. But lots of times I’ve thought of you, and thought that you would have been enough for me. I really did love you. And I would have been enough for you, too. You were just too dumb to know it. Now, I see John sometimes—once or twice a year, sometimes not for a couple of years. I spend the night in a luxury suite, drinking hundred-dollar bottles of champagne.” She turned on me. Her eyes drilled into mine. “You know about that kind of stuff, too. You’re corrupt in your own way. Just like John. Just like me.” She waited for this to sink in. “Now I wish I’d never known anything about either you or John.” She began crying. “I just want my baby and my life and Ralph.”
“What do you want Ralph for?” I asked. I said it without thinking. It wasn’t what I meant. Really, what I meant was that I wished life had been different; that’s all. I wished life had turned out happily for everyone.
But Linda didn’t understand, of course. She turned to ice in front of me, then said, “Please leave.”
I said, “Linda, I didn’t—”
She said, “Please get out of my house.”
I wasn’t actually in her house. But I didn’t see how pointing this out would help anything. So I trudged away.
chapter twenty-six
When I left Linda’s, Ntango and Sandra were waiting for me in the car at the corner. I told them I was staying on in Atlantic City for a while longer and sent them back to New York. At first, I thought Sandra should stay at my apartment for a few days. But I realized my apartment wasn’t any safer than her house. My friend Carl had a spare bedroom in his rent-controlled apartment, where I, along with everyone else we knew on the Upper West Side, had crashed during one crisis or another in our liv
es. So I told Ntango to take her there, and said I’d call Carl to tell him Sandra was coming.
When they left, I limped along Atlantic Avenue, back toward the casinos. Not only were things going badly in the present; I’d now also managed to screw up the past. After a couple of blocks, I stopped at a sidewalk pay phone and called Sue Gleason, asking her if she might be able to find any additional information on the deaths of David Bradley and Bill Green and anything at all on Walter and Charlie. She said she’d meet me at the Atlantic City police station in an hour.
I ate a red snapper dinner at Dock’s Oyster House on Atlantic Avenue and then called a cab to take me to the police station. As drawn and tired and tense as I was, despite the meal, I’m sure the cabdriver thought I was going there to turn myself in for murdering my wife.
Sue was sitting on the steps of the police station, reading a book, when I got out of the cab. “You have your father’s instincts for investigative reporting,” she said.
I sat down beside her.
“The connections are astounding.” She rattled some papers in a manila folder. “One of the better ones is that Walter Springer was a patrolman on the Atlantic City police force from 1971 until 1975.”
“A cop? Walter?”
“That’s not all. After 1975, he disappeared. There’s no record of him ever again.”
“Why would that happen?”
“Two possibilities I can think of,” said Sue. “One, he went into a witness protection program of some sort. Or he went undercover for some organization—CIA, FBI, some other police department—so they pulled his file to protect his cover.”
