Death at the Old Hotel

by Con Lehane

  “Why were they mad because you didn’t shoot the guy?”

  Sam took his time answering, though I suspected he’d known the answer for a long time. “It got so bad I left. I didn’t want to be a cop no more. The reason? I know the reason. They told me right from Jump Street—no bones about it. That’s not what a cop does. The motherfucker points a gun at you. You need to shoot that bad boy. You know what I’m sayin’? I made ’em look bad. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to shoot the guy next time somethin’ like that come up. You hear what I’m sayin’? I fucked things up for them, man. That’s what.”

  We were done with drinking then and never did get back to who might have been behind the door at Eliot’s office. I could guess: the thugs who took off Barney’s fingers; whoever it was that Eliot reported to; maybe Kelly. The point was I didn’t know, and it was fine with me that whoever it was, if it was anybody, stayed behind the door.

  Drinking beer for lunch was never a good idea, because it beer-logged my brain and made me sleepy. Sam had things to take care of, so we agreed to meet at the Greeks’ at six o’clock with the rest of our crew to plan the union meeting that night. I went to the picket line for an hour to walk off my beer haze. I knew what I had to do next, but I wasn’t in any hurry.

  chapter sixteen

  For a couple of reasons, I needed to see Kelly. One, I wanted to know what Eliot meant about settling with the corporation. Second, I’d been dispatched by our brain trust in the Bronx to find out if Kelly knew anything about the killings he’d neglected to pass along to me. Finally, I needed to find out who it was who thought I’d killed someone. It was in my interest to get to the bottom of things—things other than the East River.

  At least this time, I figured, he’d take my phone call, which he did, although it took some doing to convince the receptionist he would.

  “I need to talk to you anyway,” he said. “Be here in a half hour.” That was it. As Snoopy said, “The anticipation far exceeded the actual event.”

  Kelly’s office was in the same building as the banquet hiring hall, off Seventh Avenue in the Forties, about a ten-minute walk.

  Though I’d been a member for years, I’d never set foot in the hallowed halls of the United Barmen and Hotel Workers of North America office before. The lobby looked like that of any other office building, with marble walls, a bank of elevators, and a security guard sitting at a desk that looked something like a judge’s bench. Kelly’s office was on the top floor. There were rugs on the hallway floor and big glass doors opening into the president’s office, but the whole outfit didn’t look any more posh than your run-of-the-mill doctor’s office. Kelly sat behind a wooden desk. Behind him was a large window, and on either side of the window was a flag, the U.S. flag and the union flag, a symbol of bodiless hands shaking across a map of the United States on a blue background.

  Kelly acknowledged me by a flick of his eyebrows.

  “There’s a problem,” I began diplomatically.

  This brought a wrinkle to his brow and a tightening around his eyes. “The problem you got to worry about is the strike. It’s over. Tell me what you want. I’ll get as much as I can. But when I walk out of those negotiations, you’re done. Got it?”

  “The strike isn’t over until we go back to work.”

  He stared at me. I stared at him. Whatever else I thought about Kelly, I knew he was tough—a bartender in his time, who’d made his way up through the ranks and now controlled a union in a bare-knuckles industry in the highest-stakes city in the world. Who did I think I was talking to?

  Kelly answered for me. “Don’t bust my balls, McNulty. It’s not about you and a business agent who thinks he’s hot shit anymore. Other things have come into play.”

  “How about you get us the same contract the other hotels in the city have and give Mary her job back. We can start from there.”

  Kelly folded his hands and let his face muscles relax. No posturing. “That’s a bigger problem than you know,” he said quietly.

  “Because Eliot and MacAlister were tapping the till?”

  He took this without any sign of irritation, but he didn’t respond.

  “Did you consider that it might have been Eliot who killed MacAlister?”

  This time his expression hardened, a tightening around the eyes. “It don’t make any difference what I think. What I told you is somebody thinks you did.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  Kelly dismissed this. “You or one of your pals. Look, McNulty. You had this scrape with Eliot. Against my better judgment, I let you try to work it out. The whole fucking thing blows up. I’m asked, ‘What went on here? You told us no problems.’ I don’t got time to waste on one big-mouth bartender.”

  I believed Kelly was being straight with me. The workers who voted him into office each time weren’t stupid. Kelly was a player in the city’s power structures, the ones on top and the ones underneath. His track record said he was on the side of the workers—at least, more on our side than the other big shots—but I’d learned from Pop.

  “With all due respect, Pete,” I said. “The world isn’t necessarily shaped in the boardrooms. You still got to get the workers back into the hotel.”

  Kelly’s voice took on a deep, round timbre; rose a few decibels in volume, and came at me like a foghorn. “You wanna take me on, McNulty? Give it a try. When I’m done, those fucking workers will step on your face as they’re walking back in.”

  This wasn’t good. I tried to regroup. “Don’t get me wrong, Pete. You said tell you what we want. This is it: the same contract as the other hotels, the fired waitress goes back …” I took a deep breath. “We get rid of Eliot.”

  Kelly took a deep breath himself. “We can get the waitress back. Her problem was MacAlister. We can do something on the contract. Maybe not scale yet, but I’ll see what I can do.” His gray eyes locked onto mine, and he shook his head. “I can’t do Eliot.”

  Pop had taught me you can’t win in negotiations what the other party isn’t able to give. I thought this over quickly. Did I believe that Kelly couldn’t get rid of Eliot? Yes and no.

  “What if we gave you an excuse?”

  Interest flickered in those hard eyes.

  “If the corporation knows he and MacAlister were stealing, they’d demand you get rid of him, right?”

  Kelly shook his head, a slight movement powered by that thick neck.

  “What if someone dropped a dime? He got arrested.”

  Kelly made a slight gesture with his hand, as if he were, without much enthusiasm, chasing off a fly.

  “What if he was charged in the murders?”

  A spring went off behind his eyelids, but that was it. No comment.

  Kelly told me to call him before the union meeting that night.

  It was after three when I left Kelly, so I went uptown to be home when Kevin got back from school. Part of our agreement was that he take the train out to Brooklyn to school every day and come home right after school unless I told him he could do otherwise. When he showed up around four, I realized I had to either bring him with me to the union meeting or leave him alone in the apartment.

  “I don’t want to go to your lame meeting,” he said when I suggested it. “Why can’t I stay here?”

  I thought of a number of reasons but didn’t have much choice. So after an early dinner of takeout Chinese food, I called around to a couple of bars and tracked down Sam the Hammer, asking him to check a couple of times to make sure Kevin didn’t sneak out. I warned and threatened Kevin, left him to do homework, and headed downtown to meet with the Savoy workers.

  The first gathering was in the Greeks’. Sam, Francois, Mary, and Betsy sat at a table in the back room while I told them about my talk with Kelly. After assessing our chances, we agreed that if Kelly came up with anything half decent we’d have to take it since the strike was falling apart anyway.

  No one was pleased with the outcome, especially with Eliot staying on. Sam and Francois were philosoph
ical; Mary resigned. Betsy, being hounded by the precinct detectives in Brooklyn and given the cold shoulder by the couple of hundred cops, the police wives, and practically everyone else who went to her husband’s wake, was preoccupied. She told me she’d talked to my pal Peter the lawyer, who wanted me to call him. No one mentioned Barney, but he hovered over us, like one of those guardian angels my mother told me about when I was a kid.

  When I called Kelly, he said he’d gotten most of what we’d asked for. I asked for specifics, but he couldn’t be bothered. When I told him I needed the information for the meeting, he decided he could be bothered after all and would come to the meeting and present the settlement himself.

  The meeting was a raucous, happy event. Word began circulating even before it began that there was a settlement in the wind. Folks who dragged themselves around the picket line with downcast eyes and heavy hearts were shouting wisecracks across the hall, slapping backs, and laughing out loud. They were even glad to see me. How the news got out was a mystery. I thought only the five of us knew. The word must have been blowing in the wind.

  When Kelly arrived, he was alone. No thugs. He wore a blue business suit and carried a manila folder. Climbing out of a cab, a short, squat, thick-necked guy, with a broad, open face and an iron gray crew cut, he looked like a construction boss or a former army colonel, someone who earned his way into a suit by the sweat of his brow and the strength of his back. The hotel workers quieted, respectful if not reverential, when he entered the hall. He didn’t stop to talk to me or any of the other strike leaders but went directly to the podium.

  He was good on his feet, like one of the labor orators of old, praising the workers for their militancy, talking about their need for decent pay to take care of their families, and saying how without them and those like them the hotels and restaurants of the city would grind to a halt. He brought them to their feet cheering when he said the hotel had agreed to provide the full union health care plan, mumbled through a plan that would bring Savoy wages to near-parity with the other hotels in the city by the end of the five-year contract—and ended with a word of praise for business agent Tom Eliot, who made sure the unjustly fired waitress would return to work, who stuck with the workers through thick and thin, with never a thought of folding under pressure from management. This didn’t bring anyone to his feet, but the voice vote was overwhelming to approve the contract, which wouldn’t have made a difference anyway since Kelly was doing the counting. He left then, shaking hands and patting backs along the aisle on his way to the door, again with nothing to say to us, the group of also-rans by the door. Slam bam, thank you, ma’am. Just like that it was over. The hotel would begin calling the day shift to come back in the morning.

  When I got home, I remembered Betsy telling me Peter Finch the lawyer wanted to talk to me, so I called him.

  “We have a reliability problem,” he said when I reached him.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Your friend Betsy hasn’t been fully forthcoming.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you know a person named Barney Saunders?”

  Uh-oh, I said to myself.

  “Betsy’s husband was pursuing an investigation of Barney Saunders when he was killed. She met with Saunders the day before her husband was killed, possibly to tell him her husband had found out something damaging about him.”

  “How do you know this?”

  Peter’s tone was cynical. “Not from Betsy.”

  “So how do you know?”

  Peter was evasive. “I can’t tell you. But the detectives investigating Tierney’s murder know. Does the name Patrick Donohue, a cop, mean anything to you?”

  It took a second to click—Mary’s husband. “Yes,” I said warily.

  “There’s an Irish organization loosely connected to the NYPD, one of those groups that does benefits and sends kids to summer camp, marches in parades with bagpipes. It’s a pretty big deal. Some of the brass belong, but it’s run by cops, the rank-and-file guys. This guy Donohue is one of the leaders, a former president, on the board, that sort of thing.”

  “So?”

  “According to cop rumor, the group has a clandestine side that’s connected to the IRA in Ireland.”

  I felt that chill you feel when you’re about to hear something bad, that time before the dreaded news is uttered when your heart starts to beat more rapidly and your body temperature plunges, when you’re both impatient to hear and wishing you never would.

  “Some of the older guys on the force were born in Ireland and have contacts back there. They’re men who’ve never given up the battle; they’re more gung ho for the fight than the people back there fighting it—”

  “Get to the point.”

  “They raise money. There are rumors of gun smuggling. Among the things they’re reputed to do is help acculturate fugitives from the battles there.”

  “Run that by me again.”

  “Irish fugitives wanted by the police in Northern Ireland for bombings or murders or anything else, they escape, make it to the U.S. These Friendly Sons of Ireland guys help them get new identities, find jobs, blend into the Irish population in the city, and disappear.”

  I hung up the phone deep in thought. I knew Barney was here in the states illegally. He’d told me so himself, and so had Betsy when he was in the hospital. I’d thought then Barney must have told her. Now I wasn’t sure how she knew. It was possible her husband was looking into Barney’s background even then, and he told her.

  That Mary and her husband hadn’t told me about Pat helping Barney slip into the country illegally—if he did—or that Barney was an IRA fugitive—if he was—might surprise a less cynical person than myself, just as Betsy not telling me her husband was hounding Barney might disappoint someone whose view of human nature hadn’t been formed during twenty years behind a New York City bar.

  chapter seventeen

  During my call to Peter, Kevin had been watching TV on my antiquated set that sufficed for old movies and the occasional Knicks game. He’d ignored me when I came in and continued to ignore me when I finished the call, but whatever he was watching ended soon after that, so he found me in the kitchen where I was eating potato chips and dip and drinking a beer.

  “That’s not healthy,” he said. “You’re getting fat.”

  This was true.

  “Can I bring my TV from my room at home? It’s a lot better than this one.”

  “We’ll see,” I stalled. I’d talked to his mother briefly that morning, but she was still mad and wanted him to stay with me for a while, presumably so he could see what it was like living with his bum of a father. I had to wait for her to calm down before we could find a way for him to go back home. Even I knew living with me was not the best thing for him. His mother was a pain in the ass, but she was stable. With her, he ate normal meals, lived near his school and his friends. She was home at night, knew the doctors and dentists—and she provided discipline, something I wasn’t very good at.

  Teenagers need rules, I’d been told by the counselors and therapists his mother has foisted on me over the years. I was sure this was true, but rules made me nervous. Not that I didn’t believe in rules. I did—wholeheartedly. You couldn’t play basketball without them. It’s the stupid rules that get to me. You dribble the ball and pick it up, you can’t dribble again. That’s fine with me. You have to wear a tie to the basketball dinner. Why? What happens if you don’t wear a fucking tie? You get an unfair advantage over the other diners?

  The you-gotta-wear-a-tie kind of rule drives me nuts. Somehow I communicated this phobia to Kevin, so he doesn’t like rules, either. He has a larger list of stupid rules than I do, though, and there’s the rub. Like why does he have to be home at eleven? Why can’t he go out on a school night? Why does he have to tell me where he’s going? The easiest way to deal with these questions is to say, “Because I said so.” Or threaten to slug him, but this doesn’t count because I’ve never laid a hand on him—except for knocki
ng one of his baby teeth out playing basketball when he was eight. He said I elbowed him under the boards. But I didn’t.

  The other approach is punishment by deprivation: You can’t watch TV, you’re grounded, and such things. These are the staples of parenting. Except I’m no good at judging guilt and imposing punishment. Chalk it up to reading Camus about assassins in judges’ robes at an impressionable age. So for a host of reasons, it was against my nature to be an enforcer.

  “What do you gotta see? It’s my TV,” he said, interrupting my reverie.

  I took the plunge. “We gotta see if you follow the rules before you get your TV.”

  “That’s stupid. You’re punishing me before I did anything wrong.”

  I hated arguing with this kid. He was relentless, like a bulldog. “We’ll see,” I said finally. “Ask me tomorrow.”

  This satisfied him for the moment. He headed back to the TV. “Oh, by the way, two guys came by to see you.”

  “Two guys?”

  “Yeah. I never saw them before. They looked like goons from a gangster movie.”

  My heart stopped. These weren’t movie goons; they were the real thing. Sent by whoever it was Kelly had warned me about. I had to get Kevin out of there. I pumped him with questions, but all this did was irritate him and make him clam up. He’d been spending too much time with Sam the Hammer. I gave up the questioning and took up brooding. I called my ex-wife and told her I needed to send Kevin home.