by Con Lehane
“Listen,” he said when Ellis Larkin went back to his piano, “I got a plan to take care of you and Greg both. I got to get him out of that club for a while.”
“Maybe we can collect unemployment together after you fire us.”
“My big chance to fuck over my friends,” John announced to the empty tables between us and Ellis Larkin’s piano. John had this way of talking in asides, as if an invisible someone out there would understand him. A wry look, a thrown-off line, most of the time the joke on him, he wanted the world to know he was wise to himself.
“This is what we’ll do,” Big John said. “You’re going to take over his job as bar manager at the Ocean Club. It takes you out of the union for the time being, and I’ll take Greg out of the club for a while to work for me.”
I came abruptly to my senses. “Not me. I don’t want to be a boss.”
“That’s why it works,” John said eagerly. “You can hold down the job for Greg. Other people, they’d want to keep the job. You don’t mind it’s temporary.” He paused, checking on how his pitch was doing, judging if he needed to ratchet up the presentation or might be able to coast home.
“They wouldn’t make me bar manager.”
“It ain’t up to them. I hire the bar managers.”
“They wouldn’t let you hire me.”
That glimmer was back in his eye. “They already have. I told them everyone’s for sale—even you.”
Despite the vision I conjured up of Brian McNulty, bar manager, cavalierly whipping past the tuxedos clamoring at the bar to graciously step behind to give the overwhelmed barman a hand, I saw the pitfalls to this plan. I banged my fist on the bar. “No union, man. They can fire me whenever they want.”
John didn’t bat an eye. “You’d be working for me.”
“They could fire you, too.”
This stopped Big John for a moment. But he bounced right back. “I can get you a job if they fire you. You’ll be an experienced bar manager.”
“I couldn’t handle the responsibility.”
Big John looked at his drink. He then took a pad and a gold fountain pen from his inside pocket and began writing. When he was finished, he ripped off the page and handed it to me:
Mr. Brian McNulty will assume the duties of bar manager of the ocean Club effective immediately. He has the guaranteed option of returning to his position at the bar of the Midtown Sheraton at any time.
I handed it back. “Put in that I keep my seniority rights.” We sat in silence for a minute or two. Then I ordered another drink and told John I’d sign on for the job at the Ocean Club.
In spite of my certain knowledge that it was all bullshit, I began putting on airs as soon as I realized I might now be a bar manager. Feeling a bit paternal toward the man making our drinks, who’d taken a moment too long to notice our glasses were empty, I thought, Perhaps I should remind him, in a kind but firm manner, to keep his head up. Fortunately, I realized Big John hadn’t said anything, and I decided to take my lead from him.
After a few more minutes of conversation, John made ready to leave.
“Drive me uptown,” I suggested. “I’ll buy you a drink at my neighborhood bar.”
My neighborhood bar was Oscar’s. I worked there after the Sheraton fired me and, despite some painful memories, usually stopped in for a nightcap on the way home. It was the kind of joint John would like, but he said he had to get back to the Sheraton. “Besides,” he told me, “you gotta meet me at eleven at the Ocean Club.” He looked me over with some misgiving. “You better wear a suit.”
“I don’t have one.”
Big John rolled his eyes. He prided himself on his designer suits, silk shirts, and Italian shoes. For that moment, I wondered what it was that we had in common. He was cynical, more honest than most people. He was daring also, never an ass-kisser. Despite his faintly disguised contempt for them, the businessmen at the bars always loved him, and so did the dishwashers, even the hotel managers. When I thought for a moment, I realized the real reason I liked John so much—maybe the reason everyone liked him—was that, despite his cynicism, his bombastic personality, and his unbridled ambition, he was kind. This was why he risked his own job now, first to save me, then to send me out to try to save Greg.
When he mentioned the suit, I noticed that my clothes—a white shirt and black pants from the Sheraton, with my black bow tie hanging from my shirt collar by its clip—seemed a bit shabby, although I hadn’t really noticed until I was promoted.
“You have to have three or four suits,” John said.
“Forget it. I don’t want the job.”
“Just wear a shirt and tie tomorrow.” He looked at my worn and shiny black chino slacks. “You have any other pants?”
“Another pair like these.” John looked disappointed, so I said, “There’s a Gap near my street. I can get a new pair tomorrow if you want.”
Big John shook his head sadly and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Pulling a wad of bills from his pocket, he peeled off three one-hundred-dollar bills. “Get a fucking suit tomorrow.”
I couldn’t imagine paying that much money for a suit. You can buy one off the rack at Fowad on Broadway for $39.95. Fortunately, on the way uptown I remembered that my friend Carl, a doorman on West End Avenue for the midnight to eight shift, had an in to a suit. He had borrowed suits for us from a guy in his building for a funeral a while back.
I stopped off at his building on the way home. Carl, who wrote poetry during the long night’s watch, was reading Baudelaire in his little shack off the lobby. He looked me over when I told him my news.
“‘The working class can kiss my ass; I’ve got the foreman’s job at last,’ eh?” he said.
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
Carl said he’d borrow the suit before he left work in the morning and leave it with Harry, the day guy, so I could pick it up any time after 8:00.
At 11:00, sitting on the kitchen loading dock at the rear of the Ocean Club, drinking from a container of coffee I’d picked up on the way over, trying not to spill any on the borrowed suit, I watched a red tugboat push an oil barge down the East River. It had been a good hike from the Lexington Avenue subway stop, but I liked the walk because it was through a new neighborhood. Something interesting always turns up in a new neighborhood in New York—in this one, I found a store that sold Lionel trains and nothing else. In the window, the old orange engine pulled a coal car and some boxcars through hills and tunnels, past wooden railroad stations with ornate roofs overhanging the platform.
When I’d waited about twenty minutes, enjoying the sun and the peaceful lapping of the river and the gentle rolling of the barge or raft or whatever it was that the Ocean Club sat atop of, I realized once again I had a real talent for doing nothing. I was lulled into contentment by the gentle swaying and the warmth of the sun and the cool of the breeze. Despite the suit, I felt comfortable on the loading dock, smoking cigarettes with the Guatemalan and Ecuadorian kitchen workers in their American Linen Service whites, with their gentle manners and shy smiles, all of them illegals.
Across the valet parking lot on the uptown side of the restaurant, a couple of white gleaming yachts bumped against the floating piers. Two of the kitchen guys who’d walked over to look at the boats began shouting, pointing into the water. The others, beside me on the dock, lost their sweet smiles. A couple ran over to take a look; the others took off. They went swiftly, right past the restaurant, and disappeared under the raised concrete roadway of the FDR Drive. By the time I sauntered over to take a look in the river, the others had gotten the message and hit the road themselves. I wondered if maybe the INS was coming in by submarine.
Instead, at the base of the hull of the whitest and gleamingest of the yachts, directly beneath the name—Snug Harbor—floated a body dressed in a tuxedo.
chapter two
By the time Big John drove up half an hour later in his dark blue Eldorado, the parking lot was crammed with police cruisers, fi
re trucks, and ambulances, while a police boat and a fire department boat bobbed around in the water next to the bulkhead. A dozen or more cops milled about the cars and trucks and boats. They took pictures, drew chalk lines, erected barricades, measured distances, and sectioned off portions of the area with long strips of yellow tape. Two divers, one from the police department and one from the fire department, both dressed like Martians, bobbed around in the water. Just as John arrived, the amphibious cops, using various riggings from the police motor launch, hoisted the body out of the water and onto the boat.
“What’s going on?” Big John asked when he came back from next to the building where he’d parked his car.
“They found a body in the river.”
Before I could say anything else, he strode over to the edge of the river, beckoning the police lieutenant over to him, as if he, Big John, had been sent by the commissioner to take charge.
“Can you quiet all this down? You’re ruining our lunch business.”
“You don’t want any lunch business,” I told John before the sputtering cop could speak.
John looked at me.
“All the kitchen slaves took it on the lam.”
He walked away from the lieutenant as resolutely as he had walked over to him.
In the locker room, I took off my borrowed suit and hung it next to Big John’s six-hundred-dollar job. We donned American Linen Service whites and went to work, John on the line, while I made sandwiches: chicken salad with pineapple, tuna and avocado, turkey clubs. Fortunately, the sous-chef, who actually knew how to cook and handled omelettes and such things, was French and had a green card, so he hadn’t joined the exodus.
The next hurdle rose up before us at 5:30, when the dinner crowd rushed in, and Greg didn’t show up for his shift. John sent me back behind the bar. The bar was new to me, but it didn’t take long to find my way around. Greg had set it up, and it wasn’t much different from the way I’d set up the bar at the Sheraton; after all, I’d learned it from him. Big John looked on approvingly as I worked my way through the first wave: martinis, Gibsons, perfect manhattans, wine spritzers, Rob Roys, a rare old-fashioned, stingers, whiskey sours, daiquiris. The crowd was older, senior partners and such, out with their wives on Saturday night. These guys had cut their teeth during the cocktail hour heyday in the fifties and could appreciate a well-made drink. The first sips were followed by satisfied looks that were like firm handshakes. As soon as I had things under control, Big John took off. To look for Greg, I guessed.
During the lull between cocktails and after-dinner drinks, I suffered a momentary lapse of concentration and stared out the window at the river while I fantasized about what the bar manager might be entitled to in the way of dinner and other amenities. When I looked up, Detective Sgt. Pat Sheehan stood leaning against the bar, watching me. At that moment, my heart sank with the dread one feels at the first undeniable harbinger of terrible news. The last time I’d seen Sheehan, he’d kept tripping over me while he was conducting a murder investigation in my neighborhood that I tried real hard, but unsuccessfully, not to get involved in.
“Hello McNulty,” said Sheehan. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Nice to see you, too.” I said, the note of suspicion in my voice as clear to him as it was to me. I approached him gingerly because I knew he was about to tell me something awful, though I had no idea what it might be. Sheehan wasn’t the most gregarious of souls; he had no facility for small talk. Yet he stood now in the exclusive Ocean Club in his crumpled suit with the same aplomb as in every other place I’d ever seen him. He didn’t need the authority of his badge because he’d developed an authority of a person that one finds rarely, but that I was experiencing for the second time that afternoon.
“It looks like you’ve happened into an investigation of mine for the second time,” he said in a friendly voice. He stood in front of the bar, making no move to sit down or to go away.
“Not on purpose, you can believe me. What are you doing here? I thought you worked on the Upper West Side.”
“I’m on loan to the Manhattan Detective Bureau for a couple of months. Now I might ask the same question of you. What brings you to these parts?”
“Well, you might say I’m on loan myself.”
Sheehan’s manner was such that when he made an effort to be friendly, it seemed so forced that I used to think he was insincere. Eventually, I learned that he was sincere—he just wasn’t very good at being friendly.
We looked at each other long enough for me to become uncomfortable. “What is it this time?” I asked when the silence finally got to me.
“We found a body in the river, right outside your door.”
“Maybe he fell.”
“He fell with a knife wound in his chest and a concrete block tied to his leg.”
“Oh.”
“He got tangled in the lines of that yacht there, or we wouldn’t have found him for years.”
“I doubt it means anything one way or another to him,” I said. “Maybe he came from the yacht.”
“Maybe,” said Sheehan. “We don’t have an ID yet. Anyone missing from here?”
“This is my first day,” I said, but I immediately thought of Greg. I couldn’t imagine someone stabbing him and dumping him in the river—and I didn’t want to tell Sheehan, because I didn’t want to jinx Greg.
“Who’s the manager?”
“I don’t know,” I said, then added rather stupidly, “I’m the bar manager.”
“You don’t know who the manager is?” Sheehan repeated. I guessed he was giving me a chance to come up with a more plausible answer. But I actually didn’t know who the manager was.
Sheehan tried a different tack. “Who was on the bar last night? I’d like to find out what went on here.”
“I don’t know.” This time my voice wavered, and I dropped my gaze too quickly from his.
“McNulty,” he said, “you’d lie to me if I asked you what time it was.”
“I don’t know what time it is.”
Big John returned, making his usual bombastic entrance, bursting through the door, charging up to the bar. Sensing Sheehan’s out-of-place presence at once, he turned on him like he’d found a slug in the church collection box. They faced each other like boxers just before the bell.
“John Wolinski, meet Detective Sergeant Sheehan.” I felt like the referee.
Big John shook his hand. “You think you guys could keep people from dumping stiffs into our riverfront? This is a high-class joint.”
It was a joke—one of John’s asides to his invisible audience. If Sheehan got it, he didn’t let on. John made a sweeping gesture toward the bar and me. “A Campari and soda, and give the sergeant a drink.”
“No, thank you,” said Sheehan. “Are you the manager?”
“He’s the regional manager,” I said.
Big John sipped his drink. “Is this one of those ‘Nobody leaves the room’ scenes, or can we go on about our work?” He looked Sheehan over. Sheehan was bigger than John by a couple of inches. They both towered over me, and I’m not tiny.
“You go on about your work, Mr. Wolinski,” Sheehan said. “I’ll do mine.”
“Do you have a warrant or something?”
“No,” Sheehan said. “You don’t want to talk to me, don’t.”
“Nothing personal,” said Big John in a conciliatory tone. “The company likes to believe that everyone who comes in here shits Baby Ruths. You understand?”
Sheehan seemed not to, so I helped him out. “You look like a flatfoot, Sheehan. We don’t want you to scare off our customers. We deal with the executive class here. Brooks Brothers, not Robert Hall.”
Sheehan was neither amused nor insulted.
“By the way,” I said to Big John. “The stiff was wearing a tuxedo. Maybe that will make the corporation feel better.”
“Thank goodness,” said Big John.
When Sheehan left us to speak with Joseph, the manager, John sat at the bar
alone, nursing his drink, and took counsel with himself. I began to restock the bar, but I didn’t know where the juices and the fruits were kept. I didn’t know how to requisition liquor or where to find the beer. So engrossed was John in his thoughts that I felt like I was interrupting an important conversation when I told him I didn’t know where anything was.
“Go tell Joseph I said to find you a bar boy.” Then he thought better of it and went himself, passing Sheehan, who was on his way back.
Sheehan stood in front of the bar again, facing me. When he spoke, he sounded more disappointed than accusing. “The manager said the guy who worked this bar last night didn’t show up today.”
“Did he tell you the entire kitchen crew left this morning?”
“No. He didn’t. Illegals?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Just when I began to think this place would be more cooperative than the last place you worked, I find they have secrets, too.”
“Don’t we all?”
Sheehan took a notebook from his inside coat pocket and shuffled through some pages. “We have an ID on the victim. Does the name Aaron Adams mean anything to you?”
“No.” I held my poker face in place, picturing Aaron, in his grand manner, striding across the floor of the Dockside in Atlantic City, menus under his arm, beckoning to a waitress, snapping his fingers at the busboy, leading a bewildered couple, who had just stopped in for a hamburger, to a secluded table. I tried not to picture what he’d look like after he’d been dragged out of the river.
Sheehan watched me as if he could see my thoughts. “For all of us—but especially for me—I hope this has nothing to do with you, McNulty.”
Sheehan left when the bar boy showed up. The bar boy wasn’t a boy at all, but a man of about my own age. He wore a white dinner jacket just like mine, in the style of a cruise ship’s officers’ corp. He introduced himself as Ernesto and apologized for his poor English. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, slightly built, and wiry. His color was brown with a strong reddish tint, his features angular and sharp. I liked him right away. He had a bright smile and a warm manner, but there was also something hard behind the gentleness in his eyes.