by Con Lehane
“You made angry some guys you shouldn’t make angry. Bad enough the hotel guy gets whacked. You gotta be nuts someone kills the cop.”
This time, I forced a word in, to the effect that he needn’t worry; I didn’t kill anyone.
“What you gotta worry about is you don’t get whacked,” said Kelly.
We drove around a couple of blocks and returned to the front of the hotel, whence we’d begun.
“What can I do?” I asked Kelly when the car stopped.
Kelly shrugged his shoulders and turned his right hand palm up. “I’m tellin’ you how it is.”
The visit with Kelly left me more than a bit rattled. I thought things were bad when the cops suspected Betsy was the killer. That paled by comparison to how things were now. The folks Kelly was talking about were the guys who sent Jimmy Hoffa through the cement mixer. Their idea of civic duty in this situation was to track down the cop killer and drop the miscreant’s body on the precinct doorstep.
“Good heavens! What will you do, Brian?” Mary Donohue said when I got back to the picket line and told her of my predicament. Her brow was furrowed, her blue eyes probing mine. She had those Irish washerwoman traits I remembered from my mother: A gang of neighborhood bullies picking on my mother’s son would be chased down the street by a middle-aged woman wielding a broom, FBI agents chased off the stoop with the same weapon, doors slammed on nosy newsmen and landlords who thought they had a grievance about overdue rent. Mary was like that, too—the ferocious-protector-of-your-own sort of woman who may not be exclusive to the Irish race but is certainly found there.
Now, there was fire in her eyes. “The blackguards. And wouldn’t you think that Kelly or Eliot or the two together are the ones responsible—and them trying now to put the blame on you? And the police, the eejits, why aren’t they out after them, instead of bothering with poor Barney, and Betsy, for the love of God?”
I didn’t have answers to her questions. I thought Kelly might be being straight with me, trying to warn me. That snake Eliot was a different story. I’d bet even money it was Eliot who told Kelly and the gangsters Kelly dealt with that either Barney or I was involved in the murders. He was probably the source Sheehan meant when he said someone was talking to the cops about Betsy. As to how we would turn the cops around to get them off of us and pointed at Eliot, I had no idea.
When I told Mary this, she thought it over for a couple of laps around the picket line. “Brian,” she said then, “this is the thing. Pat knows well how the detectives operate. Come up now for dinner and we’ll have a talk with him. Maybe he can get us off on the right foot.”
chapter fourteen
We rode the D train to the last stop on the line at 205th Street in the North Bronx and walked the few crowded blocks to her house under strings of colored Christmas lights that gave the street even more of a festive air. The term “hustle and bustle” was invented to describe the main commercial street in a New York City neighborhood at dusk in the winter when folks hurry home from work, some stopping at grocery stands, butcher shops, and delis, others for a quick pick-me-up in the local tavern, of which there were more than a few along Bainbridge Avenue. With everyone bundled up into coats and scarves, you couldn’t tell off the bat it was an Irish neighborhood, not unless you listened in the doorway of one of the bars to the jukebox playing Irish music, or asked directions, or happened to strike up a conversation with the dark-haired, blue-eyed young man behind the counter in the corner grocery, where you could buy a six-pack of beer—or Guinness, if you so desired, as I did.
Mary lived in a two-family house on 203rd Street, a block off Bainbridge Avenue. She’d lived there in this little Ireland since the late 1960s, through two or three waves of Irish immigrants, the last one bringing a wave of refugees from the Troubles in the north, among them Barney Saunders, lately of the venerable Savoy Hotel—and presently, surprise to me, sitting on the couch in Mary Donohue’s living room, sharing a couple of pints with Pat Donohue, Mary’s husband, still wearing some portion of his NYPD blues.
With his dimples and impish smile, his easy laugh and dancing blue eyes, topped off with his contagious friendliness, Barney, as usual, was having a helluva time, finishing up a tale of his youth having to do with the neighbor’s pig and him cutting through a peat bog, but none the worse for wear, as my mother might have said, for being on the run.
He, too, had already heard of the found lost baby, and spent the first few minutes shaking my hand and pounding me on the back as if I’d gone off into the jungle and wrestled the tyke away from a herd of lions.
“The kid just landed there on my doorstep,” I told him. “I have no idea where she came from.”
Everyone stood back and marveled over this again, and since I didn’t want to get into another round of guardian angels, saints, and miracles, I tried to change the subject by reacquainting myself with Pat, whom Mary insisted I’d met years before, but which meeting neither Pat nor I remembered.
Pat Donohue, as gregarious as Barney, had an easy laugh and good nature riding on his sleeve, with none of the hard edge you expect to find in even the friendliest of city cops. Tall and thin, with a kind of graciousness and gentleness you’d associate with a priest or a minister, he was as generous and welcoming as a lord of old.
“Welcome, Brian McNulty,” he said, shaking my hand and clapping me on the back again. “A good Irish name and a fine cut of a man. You’ll have a drink,” he said in something between a statement and a question. “A shot of Powers to get the chill out?”
I demurred, mumbling something between denial and acceptance, a stance I’d learned from Barney, who thought it impolite to come right out and accept something being offered to him. When I first met Barney and would offer now and again to buy him a drink, I’d say, “Can I buy you a drink, Barney?” and he’d say, apologetically, “I don’t mind.” A response only the Irish would understand.
So I mumbled and demurred, which was enough to send Pat off to the corner cabinet for the bottle of Powers and three shot glasses, Mary not being included in the manly ritual, though Pat did ask if she’d like a highball, which she declined.
“Sláinte!” said Pat, and we tossed down the shots. By then Mary had come from the kitchen with a glass for me and bottles of Guinness for all of us. Pat took a swig of his and, looking at it, said, “It’s not the same as what you’d get in Ireland, you know. Guinness was always said to travel poorly.” I wondered if that was true of the Irish themselves, who seemed always to be in exile.
Mary and Pat’s younger son, a student at Fordham, living at home for a semester, he said, joined us for dinner, ham and cabbage and boiled potatoes, that we ate while we continued to drink Guinness. The boy was quiet but cheerful and handsome, with Barney’s black hair and blue eyes, looking enough like Barney, in fact, that I might have suspected some hanky-panky if Mary and Barney had been closer in age and Barney not a wild young man in Ireland until just a couple of years ago.
After dinner, the boy slipped away as quietly as he’d arrived, and Mary and Pat began cleaning up, leaving Barney and me alone for a few minutes. Taking the opportunity, I told him about the detectives questioning Betsy and later Sheehan asking me about him. It didn’t seem to be much of a surprise.
“Ah, Brian, t’was only a matter of time till they came round to me.” He tried to sound philosophical, but I could see the suffering in his eyes. “If it wasn’t for my bloody immigration mess, I’d set the coppers right in no time. The bastards thinking Betsy could have anything to do with murdering her husband, they have to be eejits.” The sadness was in full force now, where when I arrived he was his bubbly and cheerful self. It made me wonder if some profound hurt might not always be lurking beneath the cheerful surface.
Pat and Mary joined us in the living room, and we grown-ups got down to the grisly business of talking about murders and those who commit them. As we talked, it became clear that my dinner companions believed Eliot either killed MacAlister or had him killed.
They didn’t have any reason to know this to be true but had many reasons why he might have done it. After all, it was well known, said Pat, what happened after there was a falling-out between thieves.
That these arguments didn’t take us anywhere Pat Donohue recognized himself when I suggested he make the case about Eliot to Sheehan and maybe succeed where I had not.
He shook his head. “Aragh, you’re right, Brian. It’d do no good to tell the detectives anything, with us not having the evidence to back it up. What do they care about the thinking of the likes of us? No. By rights, we’d have to show them something to make them stop and think.”
I’d regret this in the morning, I knew as soon as I began, but with a willing audience and a boost from the Guinness, I expounded on the principles of criminal investigation. That this was an area of my expertise should have come as a surprise to everyone, including myself, but Pat, an authentic NYPD cop with more than twenty years on the force, cheered me on. So Pat and I traded opinions, taking turns explaining, for the most part to one another, how the keen-eyed man of the world—someone like the cop on the beat, or a man who works behind the bar and has a knack for listening and watching what goes on about him—knows how things work and can find out things the run-of-the-mill detective doesn’t find out.
The plan we worked out—before Pat staggered off to his bed, Barney hauled himself to the spare room, and I crumbled onto the couch—was that Pat would use his network of PD contacts to get a line on what the detectives had in the way of evidence and suspects, while I would pay visits to Eliot and Kelly to see if I could trip them up and find out some things they didn’t want me to know. Barney would continue to lie low. Mary and Betsy, as much as she could, would help Sam out at the picket line. We hoped to have some better information by the time of the union meeting the following night.
I woke up the next morning with a throbbing head and digestive difficulties that would cause a nun to blaspheme. Pat had left for work, and I pitied the lawbreakers who ran afoul of him before his hangover wore off. Mary made breakfast while Barney and I sat across from one another holding our heads in our hands. Every minute or two, I’d remember something from the evening before that I wished I hadn’t said. At the top of the list was this idea of going to see Kelly and Eliot. After breakfast, I felt a bit better. Barney wasn’t so sure.
“I think I left me liver in the toilet,” he said.
On the way downtown, I thought about Sam and the bribe from Eliot that I hadn’t told anyone about and decided if I was going to talk to Eliot, Sam should come with me. Now that the night had met the morning sun, I’d regained my critical faculties, so I didn’t figure it was a sure bet Sam would buy into the plan we’d come up with last night. I was no longer sure about it myself.
Sure enough, the first thing he said, wearing that irritated, skeptical expression he’d patented, was, “You’re nuts, McNulty. You and that crazy Irishman are gonna get us all killed.”
I’d caught up with him on the picket line, where he was attempting to keep things moving while trying to placate three kids, the oldest of whom might have been six or seven but carried himself like a thirty-something, the youngest was two or three but the squirming sort of kid who doesn’t much go for being held. With his hands full, literally, Sam wasn’t interested in small talk—or large talk, either.
I also broke down and told him about my faux pas of telling Sheehan I was with Betsy after he told the cops I was with him and Barney in Harlem. My being with Betsy caused Sam to raise an eyebrow and then to look me up and down a couple of times. A slight smile on his lips and in his eyes spoke volumes.
We went round and round until I convinced him we could see Eliot on the pretense that we were ready to end the strike and pick up our pay. He wouldn’t fall for that from me, but he might from both of us because he wasn’t sure what to make of Sam—as I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Sam. For instance, I hadn’t known about all the kids.
“My second wife,” he said. When I looked at the baby, he caught my drift. “We tried a reconciliation. You know, man, one of those getting-back-together things.”
“I thought you had teenage kids.” A boy I thought was his son had played basketball against Kevin the year before.
“That’s my first wife. We have two kids.”
“Five kids?”
“Six,” Sam said sheepishly, then, to the question marks in my eyes, “The woman I’m with now.”
I guess I looked astonished.
“Why do I work three jobs?” he said gruffly. “And I can’t afford to be on this goddamn strike much longer.”
I thought about the bribe from Eliot and tried again to tell myself I understood why Sam would keep the money. He didn’t owe the union or anyone else in the majority camp a hell of a lot of loyalty. I told myself these things, but it didn’t change what I felt: that because I liked Sam and thought him a stand-up guy, he should live up to my expectations.
Finally, he said he’d go with me to see Eliot but not until the next day, when he wouldn’t have his kids to look after. He took off with the kids, and I took over the picket line for an uneventful day. Late in the afternoon, Mary showed up, and a little behind her, Betsy. Mary had spent the afternoon on the phone shoring up our fellow workers, and most of them were hanging in, though the rumblings of discontent were getting louder. They’d wait for the meeting before they did anything. This might have been more reassuring if I had any idea what we would do at the meeting.
I left Mary and Betsy to man the picket line. Betsy’s expression was sad and she was jittery, looking at me beseechingly, as if she had something important to say. She didn’t say it; only our eyes met now and again with helpless expressions. Before I left I grabbed her hand and squeezed it. She seemed to understand, smiling and squeezing back.
“We’ll talk,” Betsy said, as I turned away.
Uptown, since it was cocktail hour—or a-couple-of-beers-after-work time, depending on the crowd you ran with—I stopped in at Oscar’s, my neighborhood bar, where, having fallen on hard times, I’d once worked, and still did now and again when Oscar was short-handed and I was in short pants, which was pretty close to my current financial state. There was a guy I wanted to see—a man called “the Boss,” our neighborhood numbers racketeer, who ran a half-dozen storefronts above 79th Street and below 125th Street that, with trinkets—or, in the case of the 107th Street store, lingerie—in the display window, fronted for numbers parlors, for which he paid tribute to the same powers-that-be that Pete Kelly had said were angry with me. Talking to the Boss was not so easy because even though everyone in the neighborhood knew what he did for a living, no one ever mentioned it to him—a sort of emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing. This meant conversations were usually founded on euphemisms.
He was sitting at the bar with another neighborhood fixture, Sam the Hammer, who’d also spent most of his life on the outskirts of the law. The Boss was drinking Johnny Walker Black. Sam, who only drank alcohol when someone else was buying, drank coffee. Sam was usually no more forthcoming about “how things were” than the Boss. Despite my financial straits, I bought them both a drink, asking Joan, the bartender, to put it on my tab. Joan was new enough on the job to lack the confidence of a true neighborhood bartender, so she went to ask Oscar, who was as usual perched at the end of the bar drinking Budweiser. He whispered to her for quite a while, telling her God knows what, but seemed to okay the transaction.
“Did Oscar tell you I was bad news and to stay away from me?” I asked her.
She looked flustered as she tried to decide whether to tell me the truth, ultimately deciding to ignore my question.
“I saw your kid,” Sam said, gathering in his Miller Lite.
“What?” I snapped to attention. “When? Where?”
“At the Olympia, pretending he wasn’t there.”
Kevin was supposed to be at his mother’s. I didn’t want him hanging out on Broadway when I didn’t know about it. My brain was bursting to
know more, but asking Sam questions was sure to get him to clam up, so I waited a minute to see if he’d say anything else. When he didn’t, I went to the pay phone and called my ex-wife.
Her greeting was nasty and hysterical. “You fucking idiot. Don’t you ever go home? Don’t you ever check your messages? Still a goddamn alley cat. When are you going to grow up?”
“Nice to talk to you, too. Where’s Kevin?”
“What do you care? You’re no kind of father.” She paused, and I recognized for the hundredth time, though it did no good, that the nastiness came because she was scared for Kevin.
“He’s gone,” she said flatly. “He walked out last night, and as far as I’m concerned he can stay gone.”
“Are you crazy? What are you talking about? He can’t be gone.”
“He is gone, and he’d be at your apartment if you were ever home. He’s probably staying with one of his friends. Last night, I thought he was with you, so I wasn’t worried. But since you weren’t there, I don’t know where he went.”
Now it was my fault. Switch the blame to me—and it worked. I wasn’t home. I was swilling down Guinness up in the Bronx when my kid needed me. First things first. I had to find Kevin. I wanted that even more desperately than I wanted to murder my ex-wife. “You have to call everyone he knows,” I said.
“Why can’t you call them?”
“I don’t know who they are. I don’t know their numbers. Please, will you call?”
She snorted. “Don’t think you’re so goddamn smart. It’s not my fault he left. You’re the one who gives him these ideas about being independent, who lets him hang out in bars and argue with his parents. You’ve never stood up to him. Now look what happened.”
Although I was rapidly coming unhinged myself, I tried to understand that she felt as awful as I did, that she loved her son as desperately, worried just as much, felt as helpless as I did.
