What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  She handed me the papers, some of which were handwritten police reports and were virtually impossible to read. “There are a few things not in the file—off—the—record things I can tell you but that we don’t have in writing.” She told me Greg and John had been questioned about both David Bradley’s death and Bill Green’s. But the police didn’t seem to have any evidence against them, and both had strong alibis: proof they’d been at work. The police hadn’t questioned Charlie about either death. Another interesting piece of news was that David Bradley had been arrested a couple of weeks before he died in a car carrying four hundred pounds of marijuana. Because of the arrest, he was cooperating with police at the time of his death.

  “A snitch?”

  Sue nodded. “Does this help?”

  “I don’t know. It’s more things to try to fit together. Reminds me of when I used to try to fix my bike when I was a kid. I’d have it all fixed and put back together; then I’d notice a part on the ground that I’d forgotten to put back in.” I stared at the photocopied reports Sue had hustled out of the police station. After a long time of my looking at it, a name at the bottom started to come up off the page at me.

  “What’s that name?” I asked Sue.

  “Sam Roberts. He used to be a narcotics detective here in Atlantic City. Even though the bodies were found in Sea Isle, the Atlantic City police had an interest because David Bradley was their informer. Roberts moved over to Sea Isle in the late 1970s, and a couple of years ago, he became chief. Does that tell you anything?”

  “Yeah. Now I’ve got two parts lying on the ground.”

  Once more, I rode the New Jersey Transit bus from Atlantic City to New York City, sleeping fitfully and having dreams that frightened me and that I forgot as soon as I woke up. Greg was in one dream. We were all back at the Dockside and Walter and I were the bartenders. I kept telling Walter I needed to find Greg. When I woke up, I remembered the last conversation I’d had with John, sitting in the car in front of my building. He said that something was wrong about Walter. I should have thought about that more, but it slipped by me.

  When I got home near 11:00 P.M., I called John’s home number. He answered on the first ring. “Jesus, bro,” he said in his most mournful voice. “I told you to go to work tonight.”

  I was contrite. “Sorry, John.” I wanted to remind him that he’d gotten me into this mess in the first place, but I decided to wait and let him talk himself into straightening things out, like he usually did.

  “It’s okay,” John said. “You’re on the clock. But you’d better get over there. I can’t keep saving your ass forever.”

  “I went to Atlantic City and I forgot.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “Sandra called me. She was scared.”

  “Scared? What was she scared of?”

  I told him what had happened with Sandra, and that I’d talked to Charlie.

  “Why Charlie? What are you trying to do, Brain? And where’s Sandra now?”

  “It’s a long story. Come over to the Sheraton and have a drink. I’ll tell you about it.”

  “I’m working on a problem,” John said. “I don’t think I’ll get there tonight.”

  “Walter?”

  “My problem, bro. Go to work. Call me later.”

  I put in the last three hours of my shift and gave all of the tips I picked up to the bar back who’d covered for me. It felt great to be behind the stick again, even if I was a bit gimpy. Around 1:00 A.M., there was a bit of rush, so I got the rhythm back, soda bottle in one hand, liquor bottle in the other, shaking the whiskey sour behind my ear, pouring in front of a woman in an evening dress, her breasts pushing over the top of her gown, pouring the drink, with a half inch of froth, perfectly filling the glass, not a drop to spare, her eyes rising from the glass to meet mine, my eyes rising from the glass and then passing over her breasts to meet hers. It was fun, and, for the first time in weeks, I was in control of something.

  John never came in, and when I called, his machine was on. I went home around three and slept like the dead. In the morning, I called Carl’s house. He hadn’t gone to bed yet, so he was pleasant enough. Sandra was gleeful; Carl was taking her out for a job interview. “New York is wonderful,” she said.

  “Fun City,” I told her. “Keep your head up and don’t talk to strangers.”

  Somewhere between waking and finishing breakfast, the jam broke; the pieces tumbled into place. Someone once told me that everyone can be bought. This theory didn’t speak very highly of humankind, but it did help the picture emerge. Half a dozen pieces of information that until that moment had made no sense at all now fit so snugly, I couldn’t pry them loose.

  I called Sue Gleason and asked her to find the security director from the old Dockside and ask him a couple of questions for me. I started to call Sandra to ask her the one question I had for her, but I hung up on the first ring. I wanted to check on a couple of other things first. I wanted to check on them because I hoped I was wrong. I did my laundry in the machines in the basement of my building, washed some food-encrusted dishes in my sink, and took a shower. I kept remembering my life in Atlantic City, trying to recapture something from that time. The longer I thought about it and the more I remembered, the further away it slipped, until it seemed like I didn’t really know anyone who’d been there—not even myself.

  Late in the afternoon, I called John again.

  “Let’s have dinner,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “You could come up here.” There was a little hesitation, almost shyness, in the invitation.

  “Sure. You want me to bring anything?”

  “Bring something Polish.”

  I took a cab down to First Avenue near Ninth Street and picked up a couple of kielbasa dinners and some pierogi from a Polish lunch-counter restaurant. John’s apartment was smaller than his office, as he’d said, a one-bedroom walk-up on the second floor of a nondescript town house on Eleventh Street in the West Village.

  John had St. Pauli Girls in his refrigerator, so we drank beer and ate kielbasa and pierogi at his table.

  “Tell me about your trip to the shore,” he said.

  “Linda said you were lovers.”

  John looked embarrassed. He stared at his plate and chewed distastefully. “That was a long time ago, bro.” He looked at me sheepishly.

  “That’s not what she said.”

  John nodded as he chewed. “Linda’s okay,” he said noncombatively. “She just don’t know to shut up.” He ate for a few minutes, then asked without looking up, “What about Sandra?”

  I told him about the break-in at Sandra’s. He ate his dinner impassively.

  “Where is she now?”

  Right at that moment, I got this horrible flashback to Greg’s body half-buried in the soft spongy dirt of the garbage dump. When I came to my senses, John was watching me carefully. I froze. I couldn’t bring myself to talk. He asked if I was sick. Then he said, “Where’d you say Sandra was now?”

  I didn’t tell him. He waited, then smiled a kind of rueful smile, like the joke was on him, and asked about work.

  “It was great. I can’t wait to go back.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yeah. You wanna come by?”

  “Maybe.” But I still got that problem to deal with.”

  “What’s that?”

  Usually, I wouldn’t ask a question like that, and if I did, it would have no effect on John, but this time he told me. “You’re right about Walter,” he said.

  When I left John’s apartment, I walked around the Village, examining my theory, which wouldn’t go away. I walked down Christopher Street, crossed Sixth Avenue, and walked across Eighth Street to MacDougal. I’d been coming to the Village since I was twelve, looking for excitement. MacDougal intersected with Bleecker, and at that corner were Le Figaro and the Crossroads, and along Bleecker were the cafes where I had first heard Joan Baez, Bob Dylan,
and the whole generation of 1960s folksingers. The streets had changed and not changed, maybe the way I had changed and not changed; some part of us both defined forever in those early days. I stopped into Kenny’s Castaways well before the music began. I drank two beers and realized I wasn’t going to work that night, nor would I call John to cover for me.

  I made a stop at a Crazy Eddie’s on Sixth Avenue to have them demonstrate a telephone answering machine for me. Then I called Carl. Because he was a union delegate, he knew just about every doorman in New York. I asked if he could make some arrangements for me and he said he would. An hour later, I was riding the freight elevator to the forty-first floor of the Omnibus Building. The United Maintenance Workers business agent for midtown was at the controls. Short and dumpy and smoking a cigar, he looked like he’d been raised in a kennel and brought out into the world to be a steward in a building-maintenance workers’ union. It turned out he’d graduated from the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations and spoke like an English professor.

  “If for some reason you’re found in here, it would not be good form to mention how you got in,” he said without removing the cigar.

  “I won’t,” I said solemnly.

  “I know Carl well.” He gave this statement added significance by glaring at me.

  “So do I.” I glared myself.

  He stopped the elevator and shook my hand before he opened the door. “Come down in the main elevator. There’s a button alongside the door to call it.”

  I crossed the darkened anteroom and tried the door to John’s office, which was open. I fumbled with the desk drawer in the dim light from the large windows, but in the dark, I couldn’t make sense of the answering machine, so I turned on the desk light and put on my new specs. I could find the play button, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the machine to reverse, and I was afraid I was going to erase whatever was on it. My nerves were rattling and I wanted to get out of there. I would have taken the machine and screwed, but I’d promised the union guy I wouldn’t take anything from the office. After going to the reception area every time I heard a creak or a groan, I realized that even if I heard a noise and it turned out to be something, I wouldn’t know what to do. Hide behind the couch? Jump out the forty-first-floor window? So I said, Fuck it, and concentrated on fiddling with the machine. Finally, I got it to work. I rewound it to the beginning and let it play.

  The sound from the anteroom when it came was not a creak or a groan anyway. It was more like a bam and a swish. By the time I looked up, Big John was halfway across the room. His expression was more disappointed than angry. He certainly didn’t look surprised. I would just as soon have melted into a puddle on the thick pile rug. The first thing I thought was that he would fire me because I wasn’t at work.

  I stood and walked to the visitor side of the desk; he walked right past me and sat behind it. We both listened to the tape recorder playing Greg’s message from my answering service, telling me to come to the shore but not to tell anyone. After we listened, John sat back in his chair, looking like a boxer taking a flurry of punches, waiting for his shot.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “do you have the videotape in that drawer?”

  He opened the bottom drawer and held up a black videotape case.

  John hadn’t been at work on June 17, 1975, just like I hadn’t been on time for work at the Sheraton last night, but we both had been on the clock all the same. The problem for John was that the security tape for that June night, which he now held in his hand and which Aaron had held on to all those years, showed he wasn’t there.

  “I should have left you out of it, bro. I didn’t think it would come down this way.” John tried for that reassuring expression I’d seen so often, when to look at him was to believe firmly that he’d find a way out of whatever jam we were in. Not this time. John couldn’t come up with the expression. And I couldn’t come up with the belief. He sagged in his chair like an old man. “You make a mistake and you spend your whole life covering it up. For what? For this?” He gestured theatrically about him. “I told you it was lonely at the top. All alone with your bodies.”

  “David,” I said.

  “David was wired. The stupid bastard got caught and they turned him. He was going to give me up to save his ass.”

  “That guy who’s the chief of police now told you about David.”

  “That’s right. The AC cops had David. But I had Sam Roberts—a narcotics cop on the take.”

  “So you killed David. Then you killed Bill Green.”

  “I had to get somethin’ from Green to give David the hot shot, so Green knew I killed David. He thought David had a lot of money, so he tried to shake me down.”

  “Aaron fixed your time card the night you killed David and then came back years later with the security tape to get paid off. Why did Aaron wait all this time?”

  John shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe he didn’t want to do it—or have nerve enough—until he was desperate. Maybe he waited until I was in a position where I could really do something for him. He wanted to manage a hotel. He thought I could get it for him.”

  “But why Greg? Why would you kill Greg?” It took a few seconds for me to catch the import of what I’d said.

  John’s expression was pained, his eyes misty. “For all those years, Greg thought Bill Green killed David. Then dumb fucking Aaron—when he was trying to shake me down, thought he’d get to me through Greg, so he told Greg I’d killed David. He didn’t know Greg loved David like a brother. Greg would’ve killed Green if I hadn’t, and he might’ve killed me then, if he’d known the truth.

  “I didn’t know Aaron had told Greg, so I left Aaron for Greg to dump later, after the bar closed. He acted like nothin’ had happened and took care of the body. But he also must have clipped the tape from Aaron, because I’d told Aaron to bring it that night, but then I couldn’t find it. When Greg took off and I didn’t find the tape at Aaron’s apartment, I began to suspect somethin’. When we found Greg that night at the shore, I pretty much knew. I thought I could straighten him out. But when he left that message for you, I knew he’d tell you about the tape and me killing David.” All of John’s arrogance was gone when he leaned across the desk; he pleaded with me. “I didn’t know what Greg would do next. I couldn’t trust him.”

  With this, John pushed back his sumptuous leather chair, resting both his arms on the arms of the chair, and I realized he had a gun in his lap. He brushed back his hair with his hands and took off his glasses. “Jesus, bro, can you believe someone ends up like this? I never wanted to hurt anyone in my life.”

  Something frightful was happening to him, like Dorian Gray’s face in the portrait. His whole expression seemed to disintegrate, as if he’d had a stroke. I felt sorry for him. Once more, I was edging toward Big John’s side. Just like the old days, I found myself thinking if Big John did it, it must be all right; I must have missed something. Even if there were bodies strewn all over the waterways, it wasn’t what it looked like. But this time, the doubt overwhelmed the belief. Faith can’t be explained when you have it, nor can its lack be explained when you’ve lost it. Brian, the Wayward Disciple. I’d lost my faith.

  “And Sandra?”

  John put the gun on the desk. He looked up and spoke apologetically. “She saw my car driving away with Greg. I knew she recognized my car the day of the funeral. It just didn’t register. But you know my goddamn license plate; she’d remember soon enough.”

  “And Linda?”

  “Linda knew all along how this added up. We grew up together. She’d cover for me. She always has.” He held up his hands.

  “And me?”

  “Now you know.” John’s expression had regained its wisdom, and his movements their decisiveness. My chest froze and my breath stopped.

  There were noises in the hall. John picked up the gun and stood up. The door swung open. It was Walter, leading a phalanx of police wearing bulletproof vests.

  “Hold it. Pol
ice,” Walter said.

  John just stood there. Walter fired.

  I didn’t go to Big John’s funeral. I don’t know if anyone did. I guess Charlie went. Maybe Linda. I called her that night to tell her John was dead.

  “Why did you have to hunt him down?” she screamed, and then she cried.

  I knew part of what Linda had told me about her and John wasn’t true. She hadn’t been in New York with John at the Sheraton the night Aaron was killed. I wanted to ask about the rest—if she really had been seeing him while we were together. I tried. But her grief seemed more important than my memories, so I just said I was sorry and hung up. I told Sheehan that sleezeball Walter shot John in cold blood. Sheehan told me I was nuts to file a charge, because no one would ever find Walter guilty if John had a gun in his hand.

  I’d had a hard time telling Kevin right after it happened. He didn’t get sad so much as really angry at me. The day of the funeral, I’d called him again. I thought he, my dad, and I might go to the funeral together. But my ex-wife didn’t want him to go. She said he was still sad and angry and suffering, so I should leave him alone. We argued for a few minutes. But I lost heart pretty quickly and gave up. I didn’t even call Pop.

  The night of John’s funeral I went to Oscar’s. I sat at the bar reading the Daily News with my new specs on, waiting for someone to make a remark. As the night moved toward morning, the usual crowd drifted in. I was a little put out when Ntango came in with Dr. Parker. Even though I didn’t have much to say and was just as glad they sat at a table, I bought them a drink and let bygones be bygones.

  Then Carl came in pushing Sandra’s wheelchair. As soon as they stopped giggling with each other and looked at me with those guilty and embarrassed expressions, I caught the drift of that one, too. They said hello and slunk off to a table, which was fine with me. They could buy their own fucking drinks.