Death at the Old Hotel

by Con Lehane

  So I told him that.

  “Is this connected to the strike?” Kevin asked while we waited for Ntango. “And who’s she anyway?” He nodded toward the bedroom, where Betsy was getting herself ready.

  The codeine had kicked in, so the pain had dulled and seemed to be coming from far away. I was beginning to feel at peace. “Betsy’s one of the strikers, and she’s having trouble with her husband. That’s who came to pick up the kid.”

  “Why did he smack you down?”

  “I guess I was in his way.” I asked Kevin to keep Betsy company until she was ready to return to her better half and then come down to the picket line. He said he was supposed to play basketball with some of his friends in Brooklyn around noon and could he meet me at Pop’s later. I hesitated.

  In mock exasperation, he rolled his eyes. “Jocks and nerds, Dad. They’re straight.”

  “Maybe you’d want to consider becoming a nerd.”

  “Yeh, Dad. Right.” said Kevin.

  When I got to the picket line, I found yellow police tape cordoning off the hotel entrance and the picketers fenced in with wooden police barricades on the opposite side of the street. Since they were in front of a Greek coffee shop and not the hotel, they’d given up picketing in favor of gawking at the police activity. Mary Donohue arrived just before I did. She and Francois were trying to buck up the troops, but she was out of sorts and jittery herself, so she was having the opposite effect, undoing whatever enthusiasm Francois conjured up, raising the tension level of the group so high I expected everyone to turn and run.

  As I gawked at the hotel from in front of the Greeks’ like everyone else, I noticed that the holiday season had arrived during the night. Decorating had probably been delayed by the strike, but the old Savoy was decked out in its Christmas finery this morning—wreaths and candy canes, ornaments on the potted yew trees in front of the doors, a tasteful string of white lights around the lobby windows. They must have done the decorating after we closed the picket line down for the night. I wondered if MacAlister had been there supervising the operation, thinking he’d gotten over on the union one more time. I suppose if you get to do one last thing in your life, putting up Christmas decorations isn’t such a bad choice.

  Having reflected enough for one morning on life’s ironies, I went over to the front of the hotel to see if I could find out any more about what was going on and got a cop’s baton in the chest for my trouble.

  “What’s happening, officer?” I asked politely, nonetheless.

  “Police business.”

  “No shit. What police business?”

  “Move along, wiseguy. You can read about it in the newspaper.”

  “You’ve been a big help,” I said, “but you guys are denying us our legal right to picket. I think you need to get your sergeant.”

  “I told you to fuck off. This is police business. We got our rights to conduct police business.”

  The cop wasn’t a kid. A bit bulky, with gray hair showing under the edges of his cap and a belly bulging over his belt, probably fifteen or twenty years in, still standing on his flat feet keeping the crowd back, this wasn’t a guy who’d do any strategic thinking about the situation. So I went back behind the wooden barricades to conspire with Francois and Mary Donohue. They rounded up our fellow workers. This time when I went back, I did so after kicking down the barricades and with thirty workers, led by Mary and Francois, marching menacingly behind me. This time we got the sergeant.

  As Sergeant O’Day and I walked down the block together in quiet conversation, while the workers and the uniforms faced off, he, a narrowback mick like myself, said there’d been a murder in the hotel. He couldn’t tell me any details, he said, because they were investigating. But if I’d keep the picketers calm for a couple of hours, he’d make sure no one registered in the hotel during that time. “Better than a picket line, if you ask me,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose you could give me any information … off the record, maybe?”

  He shook his head. “They don’t tell me anything either. The detectives think their shit don’t stink.” He appraised me, his blue eyes intense. Sympathy in his expression, I would have said if I didn’t know better.

  “Well, I mean,” I tried apologetically, “we’re not suspects or anything, are we?”

  He shrugged a shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “You’ll lay off for a couple of hours, right?”

  Back again behind the wooden barricades, I told the crew we were shutting down the day shift. They were gone before the last word left my mouth.

  Sam showed up as everyone was leaving, so we went into the Greeks’ for coffee. I wanted Mary to come, too, but she’d left with the rest of the crowd.

  “Where were you?” I asked him.

  “I had some things to take care of. What’s it to you? No one else wants to be around here when there’s any trouble. Did you find the Irishman?”

  When I told him I didn’t, he made clear by his expression that he held me responsible for Barney’s no-show.

  Things didn’t improve much from there. I tried to talk him out of using the card-game story he’d come up with, but he didn’t bite.

  “Your story’s no good,” Sam said. “If you had a better story, I could see it.”

  “But it’s the truth. I was home.”

  “Alone?”

  I clammed up.

  “Don’t fuck me on this, McNulty. Keep the story. If something better turns up when we find Barney, we’ll change it.”

  Sam said he was going home but would come back and cover the night shift until Mary or Betsy got there, if I’d try to track down Barney. When he left, I had another cup of coffee and thought things over. Mostly, I thought about what I should have done instead of what I had done. For one thing, I could see the whole strike escapade going ass backwards down the dumbwaiter shaft: everyone freaked out by MacAlister’s murder; the wicked witch dead; Barney on the lam; Betsy duking it out with her husband; everybody with too many troubles of their own to be trying to run a strike … and comin’ on Christmas. I wished I had a river …

  One recurring thought had to do with a parlay between Barney’s fingers being chopped off and MacAlister dead. Tit for tat? An eye for an eye? Maybe Barney was better left to his own devices, strike or no strike. This left me, Sam, and Mary Donohue to carry on the class war, everyone else too busy with their private wars.

  Enough thinking. We’d posted a list of the strikers’ phone numbers on the wall next to the pay phone in the Greeks’, so I tried to phone Mary and got no answer. I stared at Betsy’s phone number for a solid minute, then decided not to call her. I did call Kevin and told him I’d meet him later at his grandfather’s house for dinner.

  “I think the cat’s gone,” he said.

  chapter ten

  Before heading back uptown, I checked out the hotel to make sure Sergeant O’Day was a man of his word. He was, so I began my trek toward the subway on Seventh Avenue. I’d gotten about half a block when I noticed a black Lincoln Town Car keeping pace with me along the curb. At the very moment panic gripped my heart, the Town Car’s window rolled down and a hoarse whisper said, “Brian, over here. ’Tis me, Barney.”

  I took a quick look around, then climbed in the car.

  “Jaysus,” said Barney. “It’s a lovely bollocks we’ve made of things.”

  “Where’ve you been, for Christ’s sake?”

  “My friend and neighbor, Jim Ryan,” said Barney, introducing me to the driver, a pleasant enough chap with a workingman’s thick paw to shake hands with and a brogue as thick as the fingers.

  “Barney,” he said, “I’ll need to drop you off. I’m to pick up a bride in Bay Ridge at five. By rights, I should be already on my way.”

  “Jaysus,” said Barney, squirming in his seat to look out the back window, as if the posse were closing in.

  The logical thing was to ask Barney if he’d killed MacAlister, but when I looked at his hand, I realized he probably couldn’t have.
Then I thought of Jim Ryan’s hands and decided to mind my own business.

  “The strike almost went down the drain this morning,” I said with a clear note of rebuke in my voice. “If it wasn’t for Francois and Mary, the street would have been deserted by noon.”

  Barney shook his head, pursed his lips, and turned to me with enough sadness pouring from his blue eyes to almost bring tears to my own. “I couldn’t take the chance, Brian. Begod, it tore the heart out of me leaving ye on yer own, but bejaysus, I couldn’t take the chance.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Sam made up a cock-and-bull story to cover all three of us for last night.”

  Barney’s expression was wistful. “It’s not a story for last night I don’t have. It’s a story from the past that I do have.” He clapped me on my shoulder. “Ah, the things that were done in the days we were young.” The anguish rose again in those sincere and sad blue eyes.

  No one was after anyone, as far as I knew, I told Barney. The cops would be questioning us soon, though, and unless I came up with an alternative pretty quickly, I’d have to use Sam’s stupid story, if only because he would, so I’d have to cover for him.

  One of these days, I promised myself, I’d find a group of normal friends who didn’t need alibis and hideouts. We’d go bowling, watch football games. I’d hang out with guys who thought cops were the good guys, the mayor an honest civil servant, and the president the leader of the free world. What the hell was I doing involved with another murder? There’s something wrong with your life if every time you turn around someone you know is either getting murdered or being accused of murder. I should sign on for a self-help class. I needed a new line of work. I should have stayed in college and become a pharmacist. Instead, I thought I was an actor. That’s what got me into this crazy nightlife world in the first place. If I’d gotten one good part, I wouldn’t be worrying about who murdered whom. I wouldn’t be covering for my friends or hiding them out when the law was looking for them. Why wasn’t I respectable?

  When I returned from my reverie, I realized Barney was watching me intently. He didn’t say anything, just nodded as if I’d been speaking to him. The Irish understand dreamers.

  Since Jim Ryan was headed out to Brooklyn, I told Barney we could go to Pop’s apartment and talk things over. He wouldn’t mind an extra guest for supper and, having been “on the run” himself during the McCarthy era, might have some compassion for Barney’s troubles, whatever they were.

  True to form, Pop greeted us cordially. He’d cooked lamb stew, so there’d be enough for everyone, and he liked company—and adventure. Kevin was there, watching rap music videos on TV, and mumbled something incomprehensible when I asked if there was anything on the news about MacAlister’s killing.

  Barney told us the bare-bones version of why he had stayed away from the picket line: He needed to avoid contact with the police since everything wasn’t quite on the up-and-up with his immigration papers.

  After dinner, Pop got around to the reason he’d wanted me to come out that night in the first place. After assigning a grumbling Kevin to clearing the table and getting the dishes into the dishwasher, he went to his desk and brought back some papers he’d found in MacAlister’s rubbish. He told Barney he’d had some experience breaking up deals between bosses and crooked business agents in one of the garment unions, so he could smell a crooked deal from a block away.

  “The payoffs are usually in cash,” he told Barney. “But the cash has to come from somewhere, and that’s where you can pick up the trail. Maybe not enough proof for court, but enough for you to know. I’ll show you what I mean in a minute.

  “The hotel collects the dues and a health and welfare fund contribution and is supposed to send the money on to the union. The hotel deducts dues from your check, say ten bucks a paycheck—two hundred workers, that’s two thousand bucks. Just for instance, say MacAlister sends the union a thousand bucks and a list of a hundred workers. So far so good for him, except the dues don’t come in cash. The money’s in the hotel’s account. How’s he get it out? He writes a check. To Eliot? That wouldn’t work. To himself? Nope. How about to Acme Produce? Who’s that? It’s MacAlister. In this case, it’s MacDonald Produce.” Here, Pop laid out canceled checks on the table, showing the signatures on the front of the check, MacAlister, and on the back of the check, MacDonald, looking quite similar.

  “Now, I’ve looked high and low for MacDonald Produce, and there is no such place. But there is a street address.” This time, Pop laid out two envelopes, one addressed to MacDonald and one to MacAlister. The address on both: 153 W. 38th Street. “Wanna guess?” asked Pop.

  “Eliot’s office,” said Barney.

  “Right you are,” said Pop. “So there’s that. But the real money is in the health and welfare contributions. That could be fifty bucks a week per worker. What happens is you have immigrant workers, many of them illegal. A maid’s kid gets sick and needs an operation. She goes to the union welfare office and is told she’s not a union member and doesn’t have any health benefits. What’s she going to do? She screams. She cries. She pulls her hair out. Who’s she going to complain to? So she sends the kid to Kings County or one of the other city hospitals and hopes for the best.”

  Pop’s investigative work—its origins in the hotel’s wastepaper bins—came too late, I was afraid. It would have been great to use the dirt he came up with against MacAlister were he still alive, but I didn’t know how it would help us now. Maybe Kelly would care, but I doubted it. That Eliot was corrupt wasn’t news to me and wouldn’t be to him, either.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Pop, “that MacAlister got in over his head with that crooked business agent and whoever he’s tied to and paid the price for getting greedy.”

  This information tucked away for the time being, we worked out a plan for the present. Pop agreed Barney should lay low until New York’s Finest got their act together and solved the case of the murdered innkeeper, or they would violate him on the immigration problem. Meanwhile, we’d try to keep the strike going without Barney, despite the distraction of a murder.

  Barney said he had a place to stay up in the Bronx and could lose himself among the other illegal Irish, veterans of the Troubles, working on fake papers, living half a dozen to an apartment, fighting again the wars of home in the Irish bars along Bainbridge Avenue.

  I called my cabdriver pal Ntango, himself a political exile, to ask if he’d take Barney up to the North Bronx. It was a long haul, the kind of ride another cabbie might remember if pressed by detectives investigating a murder. I was probably overly cautious, but this would protect Barney. Having Ntango drive him meant I could get a ride home myself and not have to take the subway from deep in the heart of Brooklyn, where subways had a tendency to go astray and not show up at their appointed place at the appointed time late at night.

  Kevin wanted to spend the night with Pop. He had sets of clothes at all three of our apartments, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I told him he could stay if his mother said it was okay, but he couldn’t go out that night after I left. I expected an argument. Instead, he said quietly, almost politely, he wanted to talk with me, indicating the conversation should be private. We went outside and leaned against the low brick wall in front of Pop’s apartment building. It was quiet and dark, chilly but not cold, no traffic on the street, the parked cars settled in for the night against the curb, the ancient streetlights struggling halfheartedly against the dark, the flickering Christmas lights in the windows of the four-family houses down the block.

  With all that was going on, I’d half-forgotten about Christmas. It was still a big deal for Kevin, even though he pretended it wasn’t. Christmas had always meant something to me, too, because it had been important to my mother. She collected Christmas ornaments and decorated the apartment from top to bottom each year with nativity scenes and Santas, shiny bulbs and blinking lights, while Pop stomped around snorting like Scrooge. I tried to keep something of the peace on earth, go
odwill to men stuff alive for Kevin, in memory of my mother, I guess, but I wasn’t having much luck with the jolly season this time around.

  “I’m having a lot of trouble with Mom,” Kevin began. “All she does is criticize me.”

  I nodded but didn’t respond. This was touchy ground. Divorced parents aren’t supposed to criticize one another. We were told to stand shoulder to shoulder, not to let the kid divide us on issues of discipline and not to join in his criticism of the other parent.

  “She criticizes you all the time, too.”

  I tried to smile.

  “Whenever I get in trouble she says it’s your fault because you’re a bad influence.”

  “Maybe she’s right.”

  “She probably is,” Kevin agreed. “What I want is to come live with you for a while.”

  “You what!!??” This came out of nowhere. For fifteen years, he’d been happily growing up in Brooklyn, visiting his dad on weekends and school vacations; his dad always available, visiting the kid whenever he wanted him to, his mom taking all the responsibility. What was wrong with that? “Whoa, Kevin. Let’s take it easy here. Your life’s all wrapped up in Bay Ridge.”

  Kevin didn’t raise his voice, but it resounded with determination. He’d thought this through, I realized. One of his characteristics since he could talk was that when he wanted something badly, he planned his attack. He didn’t lose his cool like he might when I asked him to take out the garbage or clean up his room. Nope. When he really wanted something, there was no weeping and gnashing of teeth. He chomped down and held on like a bulldog.

  “She’s driving me crazy, Dad.” He made sure to look me meaningfully in the eye. “I’m afraid something might happen. She makes me so mad, I’m afraid I might punch her if I don’t get out of there.”