Death at the Old Hotel

by Con Lehane

  “Sorry,” she said in a lilting tone that made clear she wasn’t sorry at all. “He’s made his bed; he can lie in it. I’m leaving tomorrow on vacation for a week. You can see how it really is to raise a child.”

  Any more conversation with her would have driven me over the edge, so I hung up and called Pop. He wasn’t any help either because he was speaking at some left-wing conference in Atlantic City and would be gone for two days. Kevin would have to stay put until he got back. While I was on the phone with Pop, I told him what had been going on, hoping he might change his mind and stay home. Little chance of that; he hadn’t stayed home from the political wars when his own son needed him.

  “You’ve been busy,” said Pop.

  “Yeah, and I’m gonna be busier unless you can tell me how to get the heat off me and onto where it belongs.”

  Pop considered this. “Someone knows the truth.” He’d long ago cornered the market on truisms.

  “Right. And how do I get them to tell me?”

  “You’d be surprised what you can find out by asking.”

  “Right. I just say, ‘Excuse me, did you murder the hotel manager?’”

  Pop didn’t chuckle, nor was he offended. “You ask the staples: Where were you? When? Did you go here? Were you with him or her?—those sorts of questions. Sometimes things don’t add up; you recognize efforts at evasion. Someone wasn’t where he said he was. Someone gets mad and punches you. You’ve been through this before. You should have taken notes.”

  His sarcasm had fermented over decades of quixotic battles against bosses in various guises. Still and all, he was the most perceptive person I knew, so I asked, “Who do you think killed the hotel manager and the cop?”

  He took a few seconds to think over his answer. “I’d say that for some person, the consequences of those two men staying alive were so severe that any consequences that might flow from murdering them paled in comparison. Desperation.” He paused. “Of course, that’s not the only possibility, but it’s the one I’d go with.”

  “Why that one? What are the others?”

  “There are many—financial gain, jealousy, hatred, revenge, thrill-seeking, political, probably more. You want to consider these, you need to delve into each man’s life. Who knows what you’ll find? If you try out my theory, you might eliminate those on strike as possible killers. Or not. But isn’t that what you want?”

  Getting off the phone after one of these question-and-answer sessions with Pop, I always felt like I’d been to visit an oracle. I didn’t know what I wanted. Why did I care who killed MacAlister and Tierney? It wasn’t as if I was going to miss them. For one thing, some gangster thought I killed them and was pissed. For another, the cops suspected Betsy and Barney. In both cases, I believed Tom Eliot was feeding information to the gangsters and the cops to get suspicion off of him and onto us. Why he would do that was one question, and how we could turn things around was another question. Thinking along the lines Pop suggested, what would make Eliot—or possibly someone else—desperate enough to kill two men?

  It was late, after midnight, but still early for the gathering of the winos at Oscar’s. I got Kevin squared away with the TV and the fold-out couch, after giving up my effort to get him to read a book before he went to sleep, and headed down the block to arrange backup for keeping an eye on him. Given the thugs who came to my door—even though they were after me and not him—I didn’t want him alone in my apartment.

  As I crossed 107th Street, I spied my pal Carl, a doorman on West End Avenue, leaving the all-night deli with his buttered hard roll and Coke and heading for work. I gave him a quick rundown and asked if he’d spend some time in my apartment in the evenings when I couldn’t be there. I didn’t go into detail because Carl, who was having some success getting his poems published in small magazines of late, was a Nero Wolfe fan and got excited about mysteries just as the portly detective might. If I told him there was a murder involved, he’d ask me questions all night.

  At Oscar’s, I found Sam the Hammer with the Daily News again. I was hoping for the Boss, but you never knew when he was going to be there since he had so many other joints he stopped into on his appointed rounds—half the bars on Broadway, Amsterdam, and Columbus above 79th Street. I went into a little more detail with Sam the Hammer than I did with Carl since Sam knew the terrain better than most people.

  “They were lookin’ for you, right?” Sam said, without any visible sign that he was concerned. “I’d make it hard for them to find me.” He went back to reading his paper without telling me whether he’d look in on Kevin or not. Next was Eric the Red, whose enthusiasm for the task was exceeded only by his unfailing unreliability.

  I had a couple of pops and began to notice that wisps of the waitress’s long black hair had slipped out of the bun she’d tied it into and flickered around her dark eyes quite becomingly. She smiled in a cute, shy way when she found me watching her. I’d seen her a couple of times before, but this night she became pretty right before my eyes. A tiny ember of hope flickered in the burned-out wreck of my heart, but it had been a long day, Kevin was alone in my apartment, and the odds of romance were long, so I packed it in.

  The worst thing about Kevin living with me was getting up to see him off for school. He had to leave the house by six in the morning, a time I was more used to getting home at than getting up at. When the alarm went off, I staggered around, poured him a bowl of cereal, gave him lunch money, and sent him on his way. I fought off the temptation to go back to sleep and instead put in a call to my pal Ntango, who lately had been working a seven-to-seven shift and should be getting off about then. I wanted to go to the Bronx to talk to Barney. I hadn’t talked to him since the strike ended, for one thing, and Peter had asked me to find out what went on between Betsy and Barney and why she hadn’t told Peter about it.

  The night I saw him at the Donohues’, Barney told me he was working at an Irish butcher shop, whatever the hell that was. We were swilling down Guinness, and in truth I wasn’t paying attention. I did remember where Mary and Pat lived—or thought I did—so I figured one of them could point me toward him. If I was lucky, Pat might be home and I could find out more about the Friendly Sons of Ireland and what it meant that Dennis Tierney was snooping around trying to find out about Barney.

  I asked Ntango’s dispatcher to have him meet me at La Rosita, the neighborhood Cuban restaurant, hoping that, for the price of gas, lunch, a couple of beers, and a joint or two, he’d check out the Irish Bronx with me. I bought some coffee for the French-Canadian Christmas tree guys on the corner and chatted with them while I waited. They came down right after Thanksgiving with a truckload of trees and lived in their van in shifts until Christmas, selling them. Since they were there all the time, I asked if they’d keep an eye on my apartment and call the cops if they saw any linebackers wearing suits approach it. They were nice guys but didn’t speak a lot of English, so I don’t know if they got the message or not.

  Ntango got to La Rosita around eight, having got the message when he was picking up a fare at LaGuardia that was coming to the Upper West Side anyway.

  “Why not?” he said when I asked him about the Bronx trip. “We haven’t had an adventure in a long time, Mr. Brian.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  I told him about the demise of the strike. We also talked about the murders.

  “I read about them in the paper,” he said. “The story mentioned the police questioning the wife. I never thought of that nice blond waitress at the hotel. They didn’t connect the policeman being killed with the strike, though I read in a different story about the hotel manager’s death—an unusual combination of events. You lead an exciting life.”

  This struck a nerve. I’d been thinking about why I found myself in the middle of evil doings again. “You can’t spend your life in bars without a lot of trouble finding you,” I told Ntango. “Especially if you have a disposition like mine that leads you to go where you shouldn’t go and get involved wi
th folks you shouldn’t because you think they’re more interesting than everyday folks. I see a person that’s practically bent double with the troubles they’ve brought on themselves or had foisted onto them, and I know damn well I should turn and run. Give them cab fare to the next borough and go home and sit by the fireside bright. But no, I get curious. I have to find out what’s going on with them, then I need to find out one more thing. I find out that one thing and I get curiouser and curiouser until I’m ass-deep in trouble myself.”

  “It’s good to know your own nature,” said Ntango.

  There was more to the story, too, but I didn’t bend Ntango’s ear with any more of my thinking. What happened when you spent a long time in bars was that you got a heightened sense of what makes people tick, as folks tend to loosen up when they’ve had a few drinks and talk about the things that weigh most heavily on them. Working the stick, you saw the winos at their best and at their worst, and in having bests and worsts winos aren’t so different from other people. You learn there’s a lot of suffering going on that only sometimes slips out. You learn there’s goodness that sometimes makes its way out, too. But there’s another side—the friend-of-mine-that-hits-you-from-behind side. You see the good in people that’s trying to get out, but you’re not surprised when the goodness doesn’t quite make it. Bartenders develop a great sympathy for suffering humanity and faith in our fellow man, but we still want to cut the cards.

  I found the street Pat and Mary lived on more easily than I thought I would. The house was more difficult. There were two or three distinct possibilities.

  “Knock on a door,” Ntango suggested.

  I didn’t have to. A door opened a few houses down from us, and Pat Donohue came through it, dressed in his NYPD windbreaker and wearing a matching baseball cap. I called to him from the cab as he walked past. He went into a crouch almost as deep as Sam had when we were leaving Eliot’s office, turning his head toward the sound of my voice, reaching toward his ankle as he turned. The movement was graceful, not panicked, a just-making-sure movement, so that he was relaxed and smiling when he recognized me a second later.

  “Hello, Brian McNulty, and what brings you to this neck of the woods?”

  “I’m looking for Barney.”

  “So you are,” said Pat.

  He was on his way to the butcher for some sausage and Irish bacon, he told us—this being his day off, he wanted an Irish breakfast—and he’d ask when Barney would be in.

  “Do you know where he’s staying? I’d like to find him this morning if I could.”

  Pat shook his head, his brow wrinkled with worry. “I don’t know. I hope there’s nothing wrong.”

  “You got a couple of minutes? There’s something I’d like to ask you about.”

  He looked about him uncomfortably. “I do,” he said, with what sounded like regret for his delayed breakfast, and opened the cab door and ushered me out.

  He listened with interest as I related what Peter Finch told me about Dennis Tierney trying to get information about Barney from the Friendly Sons of Ireland, while the worry lines in his brow deepened. I realized I was treading on dangerous ground since admitting to the activities Peter attributed to the Friendly Sons would be admitting to a crime, if not treason. He didn’t know me well enough to let me in on political secrets, so I told him I was interested in what Tierney was doing, not the activities of the organization.

  We’d walked as far as Bainbridge Avenue, bustling at that time of the day, with double-parked delivery trucks and deliverymen crossing the sidewalk with hand trucks, and women in kerchiefs and woolen coats pulling along shopping carts.

  “Brian, you know the troubles in Ireland all these many years. I came from near the border, from Cavan. Your man Barney was reared in South Armagh in terrible poverty—”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “He’s from Cavan now; he is. The way he could get out of Ireland on an Irish passport. South Armagh is down to the north. He and his brothers and sisters and cousins lived in fierce poverty there, the poorest of the poor. Not long before I came to America in the 1960s, a cease-fire was declared. The IRA disbanded itself, and the prisoners were released in a general amnesty. That was the first time Barney ever met his da.”

  Pat stopped me by placing his hand gently on my arm and steering me into an old-fashioned butcher shop straight out of my childhood, with sawdust on the floor and giants of men in white aprons with hearty laughs behind the white-enamel-and-glass meat cases. There were three of them, loud and cheerful, with gruff voices and thick arms and thicker brogues, each a decade older or younger than the next. They knew Pat and everyone else who came into the shop.

  Pat ordered his bacon and sausage and turned down a roast that he was told would melt in his mouth. I was the butt of a couple of jokes, with the men behind the counter assuming I was a cop also and Pat in need of protection to get his bacon and sausage home and not be stopping off for an eye-opener at the Old Shillelagh next door.

  Pat asked when Barney might be in, and this started another round of joking about Barney trying to sweep the floor wearing his mitten. “We keep him in the window as an ornament for all the use he is,” one of them said. They didn’t know where he was staying but said he’d be in around three.

  On the walk back, Pat continued his story. “The conditions of the Catholics in the North were terrible. The poor were treated like an old dog you’d throw scraps to if you had a mind to or leave to himself if you didn’t, a half-dozen families trying to make a go of it on a wee piece of land that would barely support one family. That’s the world Barney was born into, as well as his sisters and his cousins.”

  He stopped and put his hand gently on my arm again to get my full attention. “The whole family, Barney and his sisters, and his father, and his father before him, was IRA. Sure, isn’t nearly every Catholic family in South Armagh? But if they fought for a dream to free Ireland, they fought for their own survival as well, to put food on the table, a roof over their heads, to get back for their families the land the British stole from them years before. Make no mistake about it, Brian McNulty, it’s a war there in the North, a war to regain land that by all rights belongs to the Irish, that our grandfathers’ grandfathers made into farms and had stolen away from them, and let no man tell you otherwise.”

  We walked the next block in silence, until he began again. “Barney grew up into the IRA. His father was imprisoned again when he was a teenager. His cousins—and his sister, begod—were jailed, whether they did anything at all or not to deserve it. Barney was younger than the crowd that first went to jail. He was just a lad when I left Ireland. I don’t know if he was an IRA man later on, but he got in trouble whether of his own doing or not. He was wanted by the British, but he was fortunate enough to get to Cavan before they got their hands on him, and then to America. By rights, he’s a political refugee who’d be subjected to jail and torture without even a bloody trial if he returned home. The poor man’s been forced into exile. But the American government won’t help him, so, begod, someone has to.”

  Pat was silent then, his expression fierce, as if he expected an argument and was damn well ready for it. He wasn’t going to get one from me. If he and the friendly sons of whoever it was wanted to smuggle in fugitives, it was no business of mine. I already had my hands full with a cat, a teenager, a woman with a baby, and two unsolved murders.

  Now Pat Donohue insisted Ntango and I come in for a real Irish breakfast. The fact that we’d eaten a real Latin breakfast a couple of hours before made no nevermind to Pat. “Aragh, what do the Cubans know about breakfast?” he asked.

  So we gave in and had breakfast: two eggs, bacon, sausage, a little pile of black mush that he called blood pudding, and tea with milk and sugar. Ntango, who has a good appetite, despite being skinny as a rail, gobbled up everything in sight, while I tried to figure out how to get rid of the pile of black mush without actually eating it.

  As we were finishing, I asked Pat what it
meant that Tierney was trying to uncover information about Barney through the police department and what he might find out.

  “He would know of the organization, I’m sure,” Pat said, “and he’s a Tierney, so he wouldn’t find it difficult getting in with some of the boys. And there’s those who after a couple of drinks start to blather. He might well find out we gave Barney a hand getting settled.”

  “Do you think he would expose Barney as an illegal alien?”

  “If he betrayed the man, he’d never live it down. Cops don’t abide informers. Tierney bloody well knew—” Pat caught himself, then started again. “He knew what would happen to my pension if it was known officially that I had a hand in bringing a fugitive into the country. He couldn’t show his face in a precinct house again if he were known to have betrayed me.”

  “Why did he want to know, then?”

  Pat shook his head.

  “What did other cops think about Tierney?”

  “I hardly knew the man, but I’d say he wasn’t well liked, too eager. You wouldn’t want him for a partner.”

  “Did he have enemies?”

  Pat shook his head. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Could his looking into this situation with Barney have been an official investigation?”

  Pat shook his head. “We would have known.”

  When I got home, I called Betsy, who was still at her mother’s. “She’s out,” her mother told me, and hung up.

  When Kevin got home from school, we talked over his day at school for about twenty seconds before he ran out of things to say and told me to stop bugging him. Next, I told him to do his homework, and he said he didn’t have any. After that, I asked him how he liked living with me instead of his mother, and he said it was great. I said it would end pretty quickly if he didn’t find some homework to do. He said he would and to leave him alone. So much for fathering.