Death at the Old Hotel

by Con Lehane

  Adrenaline or instinct—the call of the wild, perhaps—took over. I thumped him in the chest with the heel of my hand to get him off Barney and onto me. Not surprisingly, this worked. In the blink of an eye, he’d grabbed me by the collar of my coat with both hands, thumbs at my throat, and had lifted me onto my toes. I saw what was coming, so before he could fling me backward, I grabbed for something of his and came up with a handful of hair. When he shoved, I brought him with me to the sidewalk. His resistance to coming along broke my fall, even though I yanked out a good chunk of the hair I grabbed, but he landed on top of me, and the collision smacked my head into the sidewalk. He managed to get off a punch, too, a good one that smashed into my left cheek and hurt all the more because my head was already pressed against the sidewalk and had nowhere to go to absorb the punch.

  He didn’t get off a second shot because amidst a chorus of shrieks and screams, two shadowy bodies attached themselves to him, one to either arm, and in the melee, he was dragged off of me, while soft-yet-firm Betsy tumbled across him to take his place on top of me. My ears were ringing from the punch to my cheek but not so much that I didn’t take pleasant note of Betsy’s arrival and her squirming around on my midsection to get herself righted again. When she did, she lit into her husband. “Dennis, you asshole. Are you crazy?” She screamed this into his face, all of us watching. The other shadowy shape, I realized, was Mary Donohue, who just then, unfortunately, let go of Dennis’s right arm.

  Dennis looked at Betsy stupidly. “Don’t—” he said. I noticed him become conscious of everyone watching. As soon as he did, he grabbed Betsy’s arm and yanked her toward him.

  “Let go, you son of a bitch,” she said, and tried to yank her arm back. She twisted to get away, and he held her arm until she was bent forward. When he loosened his grip to let her unbend, she swung with her opposite hand and grazed his chin. He let go then and backhanded her across the face, a glancing blow because she saw it coming and rolled with it, but he’d swung hard.

  This was enough for the boys in blue to intervene. Two of them grabbed Dennis and walked him away down to the corner. He was agitated and talking a mile a minute to them, but I was pretty sure he was done with us, for the evening anyway. They wouldn’t arrest him, most likely, but they’d get him out of there, probably to a cops’ bar in Brooklyn, where he’d spend the rest of the night telling his fellow workers about what a bitch his wife was.

  The picket line was a somber place after the commotion. Barney and a bevy of waitresses led by Mary Donohue fluttered around Betsy. Me, who’d had his bell rung pretty loudly, no one paid much attention to, although the kitchen crew eyed me with some interest. This thing with Betsy’s husband, bad enough on its own terms, was the kind of problem Pop always said could scuttle a strike. So when I took a break and went to the Greeks’ for a cup of coffee, I called him.

  “Not good,” he said right off the bat. “Something like this lets people start crying the strike is falling apart and gives them an excuse to give up.”

  “I know it’s not good. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You might have to get rid of Barney.”

  I didn’t like to hear this talk about getting rid of Barney. First off, he was my friend. He was also our leader, and I wasn’t sure that anyone could take over for him.

  “And that young woman. Is she going back into work?”

  “I don’t know, but I doubt it.” Pop was irritating me, bringing up these realities I didn’t want to deal with, so I told him I had to go and hung up.

  Back on the picket line, I fell in behind my fellow workers, all of us walking a kind of desultory march in front of the hotel. After a few moments, Betsy sidled up beside me, hooking her arm into mine.

  “Thanks for what you did, Brian.”

  “Think nothing of it. It was a moment of temporary insanity. Besides, if I remember correctly, you rescued me.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Betsy with her coy smile. “A moment of temporary insanity. You’re still my hero.”

  We circled the far signpost and entered the backstretch. The street was quiet, darkness in full swing. I noticed for the first time colored Christmas lights blinking from a few windows in the apartments on the far side of the street.

  “What am I going to do, Brian?’ She tightened her grip on my arm.

  The kid was in a tough spot. Some things you get yourself into, you don’t get out of again. I didn’t want to tell her this. She probably knew what to expect from her husband better than I did.

  “Poor Betsy,” I said in spite of myself.

  She loosened her grip on my arm, so I put the arm around her shoulder, and she leaned in against me. “Not poor Betsy. If it wasn’t for Kate, I’d kill the son of a bitch.”

  “Nice talk. This is New York. We don’t allow killing here.”

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “Seriously. It’s against the law.”

  “You’d never know it. Anyway, I’m going to pick up Kate from the babysitter and stay at Mary’s tonight.” She said this last thing like a question, as if she weren’t quite sure of it.

  For good reason. “Isn’t that where Barney’s been staying since Mary figured out he wasn’t able to feed himself with his bum mitt?”

  “He’s not staying there now. He moved to a monastery or something.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a place the priests have up in the Bronx where men can stay for a short time—a retreat house.”

  “Even so. Mary’s is where your husband would expect you to go if he thinks Barney is there.” I could see that I’d embarrassed her, but I envisioned a middle-of-the-night confrontation with women screaming, children crying, and Mary’s husband Pat going for his service revolver when Daddy Dennis broke down the door coming to get his wife and kid. A lot was at risk here, so a bit of embarrassment for causing all this difficulty might not be such a bad thing for Betsy. She had a lot of things to work out, with the kid and all, and Barney shouldn’t have a role to play yet.

  She walked silently for a while, her head down. After a few minutes, she said so softly I barely heard her, “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  After an even longer time, I said, “You can stay with me until we figure something out.” Stray cat. Lady with a baby. What the hell?

  Some hours later, Betsy rang my bell, accompanied by a harried cabdriver carrying a half ton of baby equipment. When the cabdriver left, Betsy looked at me, then looked around nervously.

  Kevin had arrived in the meantime, so I told her this, assuming it created a higher level of propriety.

  It seemed to work. Her face lost its strain, and she worked her way though the foyer. “Oh, Brian,” she said as soon as she entered the living room. “You have a kitten.” The baby noticed this, too, and screeched. The cat, having grown less timid, was now sleeping on the couch instead of under it. He still hadn’t shown any signs of moving on.

  “What’s his name?” Betsy asked, heading over to pet the creature.

  “Otto.”

  “That’s a strange name for a cat.”

  “It’s a strange cat,” I said, as the animal hissed and dove out from under her hand.

  Betsy seemed quite efficiently motherly as she tended to the tyke, who took in the surroundings without much comment. Betsy seemed different with the kid, sure of herself, almost showing off, but in an endearing way. She wore black jeans and a black sweater. Her blond hair was tied back, and her lips glistened. Despite her troubles, her blue eyes sparkled with life. There was no awkwardness between us. The tyke went to sleep pretty quickly, and Betsy’s eyes began to droop as soon as the baby’s closed.

  They slept in my bed. Kevin and I slept on the fold-out couch. Early in the morning, the blaring phone woke me up.

  chapter nine

  “We got trouble!” It was Sam. Before I could ask him what it was this time, he told me. “Someone offed MacAlister.”

  I knew the term, though I hadn’t he
ard it for a while. I knew what Sam was telling me. Maybe this idea of offing coming at me from out of the past threw me. I knew what he said. I just didn’t want to believe it.

  “What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me, man. You know goddamn well what I mean.”

  “How do you know?”

  Sam hesitated. “I heard it from the cops as soon as I got here this morning. They had the hotel entrance taped off.”

  “MacAlister was killed in the hotel?”

  “I guess. You better get your ass down here. Barney says he ain’t comin’.”

  “Who did it? Why won’t Barney come down?”

  “Did what?”

  “Killed MacAlister.”

  Sam hesitated. “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know. How would I know?”

  “You better know somethin’, man, and we all best be able to account for ourselves pretty quick.”

  “Why?”

  Sam let out a deep breath. “McNulty, you know who got killed? You know what we been doin’ lately? Who they gonna think killed him? Where were you last night?”

  “Home. I was here with—” I stopped and looked at my bedroom door. This was great. I’m going to tell Betsy’s crazy husband she spent last night at my apartment?

  “Well.”

  “I was home.”

  “You gotta do better than that, McNulty. Better say you were with me. Better if we’re all together last night. The cops won’t believe it. But there’s nothin’ they can do if we keep our story straight. You, me, and Barney playin’ cards all night. Relaxin’, chillin’, gettin’ away from the strike, playin’ cards on 129th Street—Moxie’s—the cops know it. It’s been busted a dozen times. I know everyone there last night. Our story’ll be as solid as a brick shithouse. You and me—you and me and Barney—playing cards all night at Moxie’s. You got it, man? Let the motherfuckers try to break that story—”

  “Hold on, Sam—” I tried, but he’d hung up. Great! I hate phony stories. I’m a lousy liar. I should have told him I was with Betsy, but I wasn’t sure Betsy’s crazed husband would buy into the platonic nature of her overnight visit. I also didn’t know why Sam jumped to the conclusion I needed someone to cover for me. Then, maybe it wasn’t me.

  Betsy, her face wrinkled with sleep and concern, came bounding out of the bedroom as I was hanging up the phone. She was wearing one of my white dress shirts that I guess she’d borrowed for a nightgown. It reached about to her midthigh, but she hadn’t buttoned it all the way down, so when she moved a certain way, it gaped open and her lacy black panties peeped out, the vision of her lace-shrouded crotch taking my breath away for the moment, despite the crisis. When she realized I was transfixed, she looked worried for a second but caught my drift pretty quickly and blushed. She turned and trotted back to the bedroom, the tails of my shirt swishing against her own cute little tail as she left.

  When she returned, fully attired, I regained my composure and told her what happened. She was shocked, and the awfulness of what happened began to sink in for me, too, as I told her about the murder. I didn’t like MacAlister. He was arrogant and used his power as a boss to humiliate workers, the kind of boss workers do rise up against when humiliation becomes too much to bear. Still I didn’t wish him dead, but I guessed Sam was right. When the boss is killed in the middle of a strike, you’ve got yourself a whole picket line full of suspects.

  I hoped that as soon as the cops figured out MacAlister’s connection to Eliot and the gangsters, the emphasis would shift. But I wasn’t going to bet on it. What MacAlister’s murder meant to the strike was an unanswered question, and why Barney didn’t go to the picket line where he was sorely needed was an even bigger one. He didn’t, though, so I figured I’d better get down there if for no other reason than to put the ixnay on Sam’s cock-and-bull story about the three male strike leaders playing cards all night at an after-hours poker palace in Harlem.

  I asked Betsy to stay put in the apartment, taking care of her baby, the cat, and Kevin, who was buried under pillows and blankets on the couch. “Tell Kevin to take the cat for a walk when he gets up,” I told her. “Show him some of the neighborhood alleys. Maybe he’ll see something he likes.” She looked at me strangely, but I left before she could say anything.

  As soon as I went through the outside door and saw the police cruiser, I sensed trouble, but I was wrong about what kind. I looked left and saw a flash of blue. At about the same moment, something pushed me hard in the chest, and right behind that something whacked me in the stomach. I went backwards, pushing the door to my building open with my back and shoulders, into the vestibule. I recognized Dennis’s grim expression a foot or so in front of my face just before the lights went out.

  When I woke up, I remembered being jostled, and I remembered Dennis’s face and the thumps in the front and the back. Pretty soon, I recognized my own apartment and that Kevin was holding an ice pack on my head—one of the ice packs I’d picked up when I coached his rec league basketball team a couple of years before. Sitting across from me, in my easy chair, was Betsy, holding another of my ice packs to her cheek and sobbing.

  “He took Kate,” she belched out between sobs, as soon as she saw I was awake. “He took Katie,” she wailed again. I rolled my head to the side to try to see her better and a pain shot up from the base of my neck through my head to the tip of my nose. I started to say something, but I had no idea what, and it came out as a moan anyway.

  Kevin was staring into my eyes. “Can you see me?” he asked. His expression was serious and, strangely to me, confident. There was a kind of reassurance in his calmness. I started to nod my head and got the shooting pain again. This time, I was able to get out a word, which was “Yes.” He held up two fingers in front of my eyes. “How many fingers?” he asked.

  “Eleven,” I said.

  “Don’t joke around, Dad. Lie still. How many fingers?”

  This time there were three.

  The door buzzer rang. Whatever Kevin saw in my eyes caused him to put his hand gently on my forehead. “Relax. I called EMS. It’s the ambulance.”

  Sure enough, it was. They checked me out, shining a flashlight in my eyes, taking my pulse, blood pressure, and temperature. Temperature? They wanted to take me to the hospital, but I wouldn’t go. I had a concussion and it was possible my brain was bleeding, they told me. Even though my head hurt too much for me to move it, I didn’t buy this brain-bleeding idea. I’d watched too many cowboy movies when I was a kid, where the guy in the white hat gets clunked on the head but a few minutes later picks himself up from the ground, finds Stewball waiting patiently at the hitching post, and rides off into the hills after the desperadoes. I wasn’t so hurt that I didn’t remember the strike and know I needed to be there—Pop would never forgive me, throbbing head or not. If I could get rid of these EMS folks and get to my stash of codeine pills, I figured I could hang in. When they finally did leave, I asked Kevin if he would track down Ntango through the car-service dispatcher and get me my codeine pills from the medicine cabinet.

  Betsy had only a busted lip to worry about, that and her hijacked daughter. She’d calmed herself by the time the EMS folks packed up, assuring me—and herself—that Dennis wouldn’t hurt Kate. He was just getting back at her. She didn’t want to call the cops, something I understood, even though I suggested it. Domestic cases aren’t the NYPD’s strong suit, especially so, I’d bet, when it was one of their own who slugged his wife and grabbed his kid because she shacked up for the night with a ne’er-do-well bartender.

  “I’ll find him,” said Betsy. “I’m sure he went home. He thinks he can do whatever he wants.”

  At the moment, it did seem like hubby Dennis held all the good cards. If she was right that he went home, he had the house, and now he had the baby. Betsy was out in the cold. If she went to the cops, even if they believed her, she didn’t have a place to live and at the moment, because of the strike, wasn’t even fully employed. The o
nly thing she had going for her was that he smacked her. But it wasn’t like he’d held a gun to her head or beat her within an inch of her life—and who cared if he beat up the bartender she was with?

  “You need a lawyer,” I told her. “Right away. You’re gonna have a custody fight, you gotta do everything right from the beginning.” I knew from bitter experience.

  Betsy shook her head, her expression one of hopeless understanding that you see in the eyes of a welfare woman sometimes after a session with her caseworker. “Not a custody fight. He wants me back. That’s all. He wants me back on my knees.” Her eyes reddened; her voice, though it was barely above a whisper, filled with anguish and rage. “Did anyone ever own you?”

  I didn’t answer, but she didn’t want one anyway. You want your baby, get down on your knees. Roll over when I tell you. No. No one had ever done that to me, but there was a time I thought I might not see Kevin again. “You gotta go to someone for help,” I said.

  “Who, Brian? Who do I go to for help? Hire one of Eliot’s goons to kill him?”

  “For now, get a lawyer.”

  She shook her head. “For now, Brian, I’ve got to go to him to be with Katie.”

  Kevin came in from the kitchen to tell me Ntango would pick me up in half an hour. I didn’t know what to say to him. You’d think finding your father lying on the marble vestibule floor of his apartment building would freak a kid out. Instead, he gets me into my apartment where he’d just witnessed a kidnapping and there’s a woman there—closer in age to him than to me—bleeding from the lip and hysterical because someone snatched her baby. He takes all this in stride, tends to the wounded, calls the ambulance—but not the cops without asking first—and doesn’t ask questions until things are under control.

  Now, I’m the father here, providing wisdom, sage advice. I’m prepared to read him the riot act because he’s been caught smoking pot—I want to read him the riot act. I don’t want him smoking pot or drinking or doing any of the crazy things kids do. I’m scared for him. But this doesn’t seem like the right time to lecture him. He’s calm. He’s mature. He’s taking care of me. I’m confident in him. I’m proud of him.