by Con Lehane
“Should I call the police?” she asked in a resigned and uncertain voice.
Probably I should have told her yes, but I couldn’t bring myself to. For reasons I couldn’t even explain to myself, I didn’t want the cops looking for Kevin. I had a fear of being hunted, probably going back to Pop and the Red Scare of my own childhood, that I had a hard time shaking. Even though the police would be trying to help, I felt like I’d be turning Kevin over to them, instead of taking care of him, which was my job. I told her to wait an hour; I’d call back.
Since Kevin knew everyone I knew in the neighborhood, I figured I’d ask around. The first person I thought of was my cabdriver friend Ntango, but Ntango would have called me. I checked my answering service; the only calls were from my ex-wife. I went in the couple or three bars on Broadway where I knew the bartenders, checked out the arcade near 113th Street, the pizza-by-the-slice and falafel joints near Columbia, and walked around the Columbia campus, even though it was too cold for anyone to be hanging out. I was on my way to check with the counter guys at the Olympia when I thought of Eric the Red. The on-again, off-again chef at Oscar’s, Eric was yet another illegal, in his case from Yugoslavia, a devotee of the late Josip Broz Tito and the late Yugoslavia itself. We’d bonded over the years, drinking slivovitz and bemoaning the slow death of socialism in Eastern Europe. Eric was a loyal if disreputable friend, a joker, a smoker, a midnight toker, if there ever was one, fired from more jobs than me, at odds with society’s mores and manners. Just the kind of guy a runaway kid might go to, with no fear of being turned over to any authority, including a parent.
I hiked up the five flights to Eric’s top-floor apartment, which overlooked Strauss Park, at the intersection where West End Avenue blends into Broadway, following the blaring sound of the Grateful Dead, “Playing in the Band.” Even in my frazzled state of mind and alarming physical condition, it was hard to keep from dancing up the stairs. Impossible, once Eric opened the door and I saw Kevin. My heart leapt, despite the fact he was sitting in Eric’s ornate easy chair, next to a massive marijuana plant.
“Kevin!” I roared over the music, and he jumped a foot.
“Sorry, man,” said Eric. “I wanted to tell you, but he wouldn’t go for it.”
“It’s not up to him,” I began in my stern-parent voice. “You’re the grown-up.” I took in the room, the pot plants, the black light, the psychedelic wall hangings and naked-women posters. “Never mind,” I said.
“No. I told him, man. Running away’s no good.” Eric held his open palms up to me, and I saw in his stance and his expression that he really had agonized over this. “I didn’t want him on the street, man.” Behind those slanted eyes that seldom saw daylight was the anxiety you saw in someone trying to do what was right. “I said okay. I don’t call. I don’t tell. But you stay in here.” Eric held up his hands again. “That was what I could do. I’m glad you came, man.”
“You didn’t call him?” asked Kevin, who had sat glaring at us through the prior exchange.
“He didn’t call,” I said. “Sam the Hammer saw you in the Olympia. But Eric should have called. You can’t run away. You’ll end up in jail. You were a half hour from having the cops after you. And you had no right to put Eric on the spot like this.” I was prepared to go on, but Kevin’s expression warned me to stop. I didn’t want him to bust out of there and be out on the street again. I let out a big, exasperated sigh, of the kind parents of teenagers know well. “You can go home to your mother, stay with me or your grandfather, or get locked up. Take your pick.”
Kevin was astonished. His eyes widened, and he stuttered before he could speak. “You wouldn’t call the cops on me.” He said this with a mixture of disbelief and belief, the latter catching up with the former about halfway through the statement.
“You heard me.” Through a massive effort of will, I kept my voice steady. If he knew how terrified I was that he’d call my bluff … but he didn’t. Age and experience won the day, even as my knees began to give out.
I listened to Kevin’s grievances about his mother—they were mostly of the defiance type—and told him he could stay with me until we worked things out, but there would be rules living with me also. He nodded his head gravely and agreed, but I could see the smile creeping in. I told Kevin to call his mother and left him with Eric while I went back to Oscar’s to pick up where I’d left off with the Boss and Sam the Hammer.
They were pretty much as I’d left them, though Sam had finished his beer and gone back to coffee, and the early edition of the Daily News had arrived in the meanwhile, so he was reading that.
I sat next to the Boss and got right to the point. “You heard anything about me?”
“Should I?” answered the Boss. He always looked sleepy-eyed, but despite appearances was always alert, like one of those lizards that lies there with its eyes closed, then suddenly snaps at you and rips your gullet out, or whatever lizards rip out. I don’t think you last very long in the Boss’s business if you aren’t alert. He didn’t blab, either, only talked about things that were entirely irrelevant to his own life, like the Crown Heights riot and that Orthodox Jewish guy getting killed, which is what he was talking to the bartender about when I sat down.
Taking a deep breath, I got his attention when the bartender headed off for another customer and delicately described my situation. The Boss listened with no apparent interest, and if Sam the Hammer heard, he didn’t let on. Having described my dilemma, I waited for comment.
“Not so good, McNulty,” said the Boss.
“You got any advice?” I said with even more delicacy.
“You always been a gentleman. I know Peter Kelly. A gentleman.”
“He’s not who I’m worried about. Who are the guys he’s talking about?”
“How would I know?” The Boss stiffened up. We weren’t exactly friends—in fact, we’d had a run-in not long ago that proved embarrassing for the Boss and almost fatal for me—and the guy is nothing if not shrewd. If there was no percentage in his helping me, why would he bother?
Still I was pigheaded enough to keep at him. “Look. I need some help.” The tone of my voice changed, so it sounded even to me like a demand.
The Boss made a movement, maybe adjusting himself on his bar stool or running his hand through his hair. The movement was slight but carried weight, like a barely perceptible wince you might see from a boxer who’d been hurt by a punch. Before the Boss could say anything, if he was going to, Sam stood up.
“Let’s take a walk, McNulty. I got to see a guy at Murphy’s.”
I took the hint and followed Sam out the door into the chilly Broadway night. It was still early enough for stragglers to be hurrying along with shopping bags or briefcases. There were a lot more briefcases and dark wool overcoats in the neighborhood than when I’d first moved there years before, prosperity peeking over the horizon for a neighborhood that had been down on its luck for a decade or two. Folks like me were hanging in by the grace of rent stabilization.
Sam the Hammer had been in the neighborhood longer than I had, since the last time he’d gotten out of the slammer. A three-time loser, he was out of the rackets now for good, like the journeyman infielder who’s lost more than just a step and finally hangs up his spikes. Sam never worked a day in his life at a straight job and still didn’t. He kept body and soul together doing odd jobs and hustling barely legal stuff, so he held on to his phone-booth-sized studio apartment and had a few bucks for the two-dollar window at Yonkers a couple of times a week.
“The Boss told you what to do, McNulty. Kelly. Don’t push him,” Sam said as we walked along Broadway toward Murphy’s.
“It’s more complicated than that, Sam,” I tried to explain. “I need to know how things work. Who’s in charge. I need to get out from under this. I’m not asking—”
Walking with my head down, watching my feet, gathering my thoughts, I hadn’t looked at Sam. When I did look up, he was gone. He’d peeled off from me and was under the
colored lights, in amongst Christmas trees and wreaths and hearty winter flowers, chatting with the Korean proprietor of the 110th Street fruit stand, paying no attention to me.
chapter fifteen
The other Sam, Downtown Sam Jones, met me at the Greek coffee shop across from the hotel the next morning, still out of sorts about going to see Eliot.
“We got this meeting tonight. What you think about that?” said Sam, as he wolfed down his sausage and eggs. “You botherin’ about this other guy when you should be botherin’ about the meetin’.”
“The meeting’s not until tonight. Maybe we can invite Eliot.”
Sam eyed me over a forkful of eggs. “That’s dumber than your last idea.”
“How’s it going to hurt if we talk to him? Maybe we find out something. Maybe we don’t. What do we got to lose?”
Sam eyed me again—the evil eye this time. “You think you can play it like that? You don’t push. Nice an’ natural, let it come to you? You go in for this, man, you gotta go all the way—whatever you got to do, you got to do it. You hear?”
His face went to granite, impenetrable. Why was everyone I ran across hard as nails? Whatever happened to those dear hearts and gentle people? Inside, that’s what most of us were—even the hard ones. The city knocked it out of us. Pop would say it was greed. You had to like the Commies for that. No more dog-eat-dog once the capitalists were out of the way. No more “I’m gonna get what’s mine, come what may.” Nothing but dear hearts and gentle people, when the international working class becomes the human race. Even so, the heart grows hard on the way there. Poor Pop. Anyway, I needed to toughen up. I should go home and kick that cat, who’d come back through the window that morning.
While Sam finished eating, I wondered about him, where he’d come from, what he did before he began working the stick, where that toughness came from. In New York, you’re always coming across someone running a corner grocery store at night or driving a cab and you find out he was a captain in the secret police in Iran or a surgeon in Libya before leaving hurriedly in front of the executioner, taking whatever work he could get when he arrived in the New World. Sam struck me that way, someone who left in a hurry, a guy with a story to tell, if he was of a mind to tell it.
He put in a call, and Eliot agreed to meet us in his little-used maildrop in the garment district where we’d met the last time around. I didn’t like going to the office. At least it was during the day when there was activity on the street, not late at night down near an abandoned pier where these kinds of meetings usually take place.
Eliot was sitting at the same desk in the outer office, with the door to the inner office again closed, still looking out of place, as we walked across the dusty wooden floor to sit in the two wooden office armchairs across from him.
“What’s happenin’, Mr. Eliot?” Sam asked cheerfully. “Sure has been a helluva week.”
Eliot’s expression was sorrowful and expectant. He spread his soft hands on the desk in front of him, as if he waited for whatever it was we brought him. Overdressed in a loud green wool sport coat and a shirt with green geometric patterns offset by a white tie, he looked like he’d been dressed by Damon Runyon.
“Youse guys were supposed to fix things. What the hell happened?”
“Well, Mr. Eliot, that’s what we came here to ask you,” said Sam. “I said to McNulty, we better check with Mr. Eliot because maybe all bets are off now. Maybe someone took care of things for us.”
Eliot blinked a couple of times while he caught up with Sam. I was having a time keeping up myself.
“Youse guys know what happened, you better tell me. Whoever whacked those guys don’t know the problems he got.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You know who whacked the hotel guy?”
“We were hoping you knew,” I said.
He twisted his mouth into something resembling a snarl, then took a quick glance over his shoulder, causing me to wonder if someone might be in the inner office listening. “Whadda you talkin’ about? You nuts? Whaddo I know about someone whackin’ the guy?”
Sam’s eyes were glued to Eliot’s face, not missing a twitch or a grimace. I followed his gaze and saw the telltale tics and fluttering eyelids. Sam struck quickly. “MacAlister was screwing us, screwing you. So you took care of things. That’s okay, man. Helps us out, too. We ain’t askin’ what went down. We just wanna make sure everything’s the same with us.”
Eliot looked over his shoulder, then back at Sam, his eyelids blinking rapidly. Sam is wiry and muscular, wound tight as a guitar string. Eliot is flabby, mushy, the consistency of marshmallow, and he was squirming. Because he was uncomfortable under Sam’s scrutiny, he turned toward me when he spoke next and lowered his voice.
“Youse guys are on your own. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with either of the deceaseds, as you goddamn well know. Someone of youse knows somethin’, and if you ain’t gonna tell me, that’ll be your hard luck. The fuckin’ strike is outta my hands. This fuckin’ guy MacAlister was skimmin’, as you goddamn well know. So I got a problem and you got a problem, ’cause the corporation’s comin’ in to settle the thing with Kelly and nobody gives a shit what any of us thinks.” His eyes did a quick flick behind him again. “I’m tellin’ you how it is.”
Not knowing how it was but knowing we wouldn’t get anything else from Eliot, we saw no reason to prolong our stay.
“There was someone behind that door, wasn’t there?” I said nervously, as soon as we’d left the office.
Sam rolled his eyes. “I can do a lot of things, McNulty, but seeing through wood and frosted glass ain’t one of them.”
“’Right. But if I told you I just heard that door creaking open, I bet you’d run.”
Sam’s eyes went wide; he dropped into a crouch, snapped a snub-nosed pistol out of his belt, and spun to face to the door we’d just left. It was closed.
He didn’t come out of his crouch laughing. By then, my eyes were wider than his, and I was frozen to the floor, the hair on my head, I’m sure, standing straight up. Sam put the gun away and kept walking down the hallway, down the stairs, and out of the building. I followed. He didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either, since he was rigid with rage, and probably trying to talk himself out of using his snub-nose on me.
We’d walked a lot of blocks at a fairly good clip before he calmed down. When his pace did slow, somewhere on Eighth Avenue in the Forties, he turned into a gin mill, a Blarney Stone look-alike. The bar was about three-quarters full, most of the daytime warriors nursing beers in the noonday gloom. Sam ordered a shot of Hennessy with a beer chaser. I had a draft.
Something went off in Sam’s brain when he pulled the gun. I didn’t think he was going to tell me what it was, but I wanted to stay with him anyway. I ordered a Virginia ham sandwich from the steam table guy and picked up one for Sam as well. The Hennessy would need more than a beer chaser to settle into. Sam took the sandwich without comment.
When he’d finished eating and was drinking a second beer—no nursing at our end of the bar—he appraised me for a long time in the mirror behind the back bar. It had been a while since I’d settled in for an afternoon of drinking—a good long while—but I felt one coming on. Sam was a hard-drinking man; he kept it under control, but they were there—those demons he couldn’t drown. So we drank beer—after Sam’s couple of shots of cognac—and talked, first about the Mets, then the Knicks, about when we worked where and who we worked with and whatever happened to them; that led to music clubs we worked in and who played there, like Howlin’ Wolf or Big Joe Turner, and of course that led to talking about the blues, so it was well into the afternoon, when Sam got to the personal stuff.
“You got some strange ways about you, McNulty,” he said. “You’re like a guy knows somethin’ about the blues.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You had some hard times, man. You seen some things other folks ain’t seen.”
“To live without illusions.”
; “What’s that?”
“Camus. Or, ‘When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door.’ That’s the Grateful Dead.”
“That’s the other thing about you, McNulty. You talk in circles.”
“I’m passing along life’s little jokes.”
Sam was pensive, so I left him alone for a bit with his thoughts while I ordered another round; this one turned out to be on the house, a vanishing New York barroom custom. In days gone by, bar owners figured out a formula. A guy stops in for a drink after work. He’s fine if he has one. Finishes it up and goes home. Same with a second. That’s enough. Fine. He’s done. It’s the third one that gets him. Drink the third one, the beer starts to taste real good, the ball game comes on, he settles in. So the tavern owners figured out, slip the guy the third one on the house, and the sucker’s in for another three or four pops before he realizes he fucked up. No one will admit this—they’ll talk about having satisfied customers and giving something back—but take it from me; this is the deal.
I finally got around to asking Sam what I’d wanted to ask him. Probably without the couple of beers I wouldn’t have. Probably without the pops he’d had he wouldn’t have answered, but he did.
“I was a cop,” Sam said, “in Charleston, South Carolina. You carry a gun; you get used to carrying. Not always. When I expect trouble.”
His story rang true, even more so after he told me how he became a cop and why he wasn’t one anymore. He’d fallen in with a Charleston woman when he was stationed at the naval base there. When he got out of the navy, he stayed on with her. It was the early ’70s, when cities like Charleston were making an effort of sorts to diversify their departments.
“Pretty easy to get hired as a cop if you were military and black,” Sam said. “I didn’t think much about it. It was a job.
“We answered a call. A shooting. A wooden frame house with a wooden porch, not much more than a shack, a shantytown in the inner city. I went first and busted through the door. I busted through with my shoulder and half-rolled, half-dove into the room. I was on the floor, had my gun out, pointed at him. The guy had already shot his wife. She was slumped on the couch, holding her arm, bleeding from the shoulder. He stood in the middle of the room pointing a gun at me. I looked at him. He looked at me. I didn’t shoot. Neither did he. I don’t know why I didn’t shoot. The guy dropped the gun. We arrested him. Then my partner told everyone what happened. You get what I’m sayin’? He told them, and all these guys—the cops—were really pissed I didn’t shoot the guy. Word got around and that was it. I was an outcast, man. The cold shoulder from everyone, even the black cops.”
