What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  I said, “Mucho trabajo, pequito dinero,” which was most of the Spanish I knew. He patted me on the shoulder. I pointed to the fruit containers. He galloped off toward the kitchen and had the juices and the fruit refilled in five minutes. We looked into the beer cooler together. I mumbled about a case of this, a half case of that. He waved his hand reassuringly, patted me on the back once more, took off, and came back in minutes with four cases on a hand truck. He emptied the beer coolers, cleaned them out, and put the new beer on the bottom. He got ice without my asking him, wiped down the service bar again, eyed me when a waitress came up for a couple of whiskey sours, and, when I nodded, made them.

  “You know Greg?” I asked when he had finished. We stood together in the service bar, which was a little hut at the rear of the main bar.

  He smiled. “Your friend?”

  I said yes.

  “Greg, he all right,” said Ernesto.

  “He trained me, too.”

  Ernesto nodded enthusiastically and patted me on the shoulder again—a workable form of communication.

  “You know where Greg is?”

  Ernesto stopped nodding, but didn’t say anything.

  “He’s supposed to be here,” I prodded. “He didn’t show up for work.”

  Ernesto shook his head, his eyes opening wide with worry. Probably he didn’t understand what I was saying, but since I looked worried, figured he should, too. I didn’t get a chance to ask him anything else because I caught a glimpse of Sheehan on his way back through the glass doors.

  “Who knows what goes on here?” he asked as he slid onto a bar stool. I looked at the ceiling, then at the river. “I’ll save you the trouble, McNulty. Get me a cup of coffee and ask the big shot if I could have a word with him.”

  There was no sense pretending I didn’t know whom he was talking about, so I went in back and got John. He came out like a farmer who hears a fox in the henhouse, but sat down quietly enough beside Sheehan and ordered another Campari and soda.

  Sheehan very deliberately put a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee. He watched it carefully, as if it might try to get out again, speaking to John without looking at him. “You got any idea where this guy Greg Phillips went?”

  John’s expression was as pious as an altar boy’s. “I have no idea. But I’m sure he had nothing to do with this. The guy was stabbed, right? This is New York. Don’t people get stabbed here all the time?”

  “All the time,” Sheehan said after a sip of coffee. “But people show up for work, too—even here in New York. Did this guy call in?”

  John took his time answering. “He may have. I wasn’t here.”

  “Can you find me someone who was here, and can I get this Phillips guy’s address?”

  “The hostess would know, and she has a list of addresses,” John said wearily. He stood and waited for Sheehan, who finished his coffee at his leisure, then asked for the check. I said it was on the house. When Sheehan left, John came over and made a show of looking under Sheehan’s cup and picking up his napkin and shaking it out in a vain search for a tip.

  It was an old joke, and we laughed. But the laughter sounded hollow, mine and John’s. He was a worried man. I’d seen men worried like him before, men who owed money they couldn’t pay to people they shouldn’t have borrowed from. John left as soon as the door closed behind Sheehan, without another word to me.

  The night wasn’t especially busy, but it would have been tough without Ernesto. The waiters and waitresses were tolerant enough while I kept them waiting for their drinks as I looked for bottles, or fumbled with the price list, or couldn’t find the right glass. They usually waited for a few seconds while I stumbled around; then they asked Ernesto.

  When John returned, not long before closing, he didn’t seem any more inclined to explain himself than he had been before he left. At the end of the evening, when the last of the patrons had moved on and Big John looked as if he was heading out himself, I called him over.

  “I’m ready to exercise my option,” I said as he approached the bar cautiously. “Back to the Sheraton … . We’ll make it a trade. Me and Ernesto to the Sheraton. You get Alphonse, a day bartender, and two waitresses, to be named later.”

  “Whoa,” said Big John. “Wait a minute.” His expression was bleak, his eyes sad. “Not you, too, bro?”

  He sat down at the bar. I poured him some Glenfiddich and opened a beer for myself. Before he began speaking, I knew he’d convince me to stay. Even though I hadn’t seen him in a good few years before last night, if I’d been in trouble—no matter how bad—Big John was one of the few people in the world I’d have gone to. We were bros. The kind who take the rap for each other if it comes to that. Years before, not long after I began working with him at the Dockside in Atlantic City, John didn’t show up for his shift one night. The manager—it had actually been Aaron Adams—was going to report him to the hotel’s general manager, who would have fired him. I was coming off the day shift and talked Aaron into letting me punch in on John’s card. I worked his shift until he rushed in around 11:30, looking like he’d missed his own funeral. He sneaked up behind the service bar and called me aside. When I told him I was covering for him, he was genuinely shocked at what I’d done. There were tears in his eyes when he clasped my hand and said he’d never forget it. And like an elephant, he never did.

  Even though I’d aged quite a bit, it seemed I was still a sucker for Solidarity Forever. “Okay,” I said. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know, bro.” I could see in his eyes that his mind was racing over everything that had happened. “None of this makes sense.”

  “What was Aaron doing here? What about Greg?”

  He took a large drink of his scotch and looked me in the eye, as bewildered as I had ever seen him. “Greg is gone,” he said in a wavering tone that conjured up the supernatural.

  “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know he’s gone?”

  I felt a strong sense of the empty bar. The dull orange lantern lights on the walls reflected off the hardwood floor; two or three candles burned themselves out in their red globe bowls on the dark wooden tables. The lights were dim, but my eyes had adjusted to the peaceful half-light. I liked even this hoity-toity lounge late at night, now that everyone was gone and it belonged to me. Ernesto slipped around behind me, finishing up the restocking and the cleaning. Big John looked him over suspiciously.

  “He’s a good guy,” I said. “Greg broke him in.”

  John followed Ernesto with his eyes.

  “He doesn’t speak much English,” I said.

  John paid no attention. “Hey, come here,” John hollered. I didn’t like his tone of voice; it was imperious and disrespectful. Ernesto’s back stiffened; he held himself rigid for a moment before he turned.

  I tried to smile reassuringly, but Ernesto ignored me.

  “You work with Greg a long time?” John asked in that superior tone that bosses use.

  Ernesto nodded.

  “He used to drink all the time. Why didn’t you tell anyone?” John sounded like a hanging judge.

  Ernesto looked at him stonily.

  John took people on like that. He came out punching at the bell. I didn’t like it, but it was his way. I got used to it, so I guessed everybody had to. “I could fire you,” he announced to Ernesto. “This is the new bar manager.” He pointed at me. “He could fire you, too. Now, I want to know what happened here. Where’s Greg?”

  Ernesto’s expression darkened.

  “Give him a drink,” John said.

  “Your friend?” Ernesto asked me, looking at John. His eyes were dark and smoldering; the gentleness was gone. He clenched his fists, stiffened his back, adjusted his stance, and waited.

  “Greg’s friend, too,” I said, moving to get between him and John. “He’s our boss.”

  Ernesto looked at John, a smile crossing his face. He pointed. “The boss? Him?”

  I laug
hed out loud, while Big John sort of shook himself and rolled his eyes, getting himself back together after he’d been knocked off his perch. He’d sized Ernesto up—and maybe decided he was okay. John wouldn’t have taken my word for it, though, or Greg’s, either. He made his own decisions about people, and his standards were tougher than mine.

  Big John explained life behind the bar to Ernesto, the way he’d once explained things to me. First, he told Ernesto, I was the boss; I would take care of Ernesto. Ernesto was not to trust anyone besides Big John and me. Next week, I’d put him on the schedule to work the service bar one night. He’d also work as a bar boy on the two nights I worked up front. Everything would work out well for Ernesto, because he was now one of us.

  “Okay, bro?” said John clasping his hand thumb-to-thumb, the way Black Power folks used to back in the sixties.

  Ernesto listened and nodded without much enthusiasm. He drank a beer, then went back to work.

  “Talk to that guy tomorrow,” John said after Ernesto headed toward the liquor room. “He knows more than he’s saying. If he doesn’t talk, fire him.”

  John stared down my disbelief. “You’re the boss; you can fire people—fuck over your friends whenever you want.” I was still staring at him when he said, “Greg didn’t go home last night.”

  “What’s that mean? Do you think something’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Of course something’s wrong!” Big John’s lip curled up at the corner, as it did when he was being cynical. “But maybe not what you think. He took off with his bank and last night’s deposit.”

  chapter three

  The lights from the Queens side of the river glittered and danced on the river’s black water—that I’m told is made up almost entirely of effluent from half a dozen or so sewage treatment plants along the East River’s banks. I finished up behind the bar, poured John another drink, grabbed a beer, and came around to sit down beside him. What I was thinking was that in the old days Greg never did much that John didn’t know about. No one did. John was the boss. So it was hard for me to believe John didn’t know what was going on with Greg now. I decided to be blunt. “Why did Greg call you yesterday?”

  John seemed surprised by the question, as if he’d forgotten about the phone call, and paused for a stiff swallow of scotch before he answered. “I told you about that. He was going to get fired. I didn’t want him to screw things up before I could fix it. I told him to sit tight. He said he would. That was it. I guess he didn’t.”

  We sat in thoughtful silence, mulling things over, until I remembered the bar napkin Greg had given me at the 55. “Why did Greg want me to call him?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “Did you?”

  “I was gonna call him today. I didn’t know he’d disappear.”

  John digested this with a couple of nods of his head and a slug of scotch. “Greg’s been actin’ strange—strange even for him,” he said, as if to himself. “I shoulda known somethin’ was up.” Once more, John shook himself like an old dog. “Maybe you didn’t know. But Greg always had this secret side. You know, he’d disappear—sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes a week. He’s been doing that for years. Maybe he was hitting on someone else’s wife somewhere or went to hang out in whorehouses or lock himself in a motel room to do coke, I don’t know—and I didn’t care. He always covered himself—changed his schedule, called in sick—took care of him and me. Now, I don’t know what happened.”

  “Aaron got murdered. That’s what happened.”

  “What’s that mean?” John snapped. All I could see was the light glinting off his glasses, but I could picture the challenge in his eyes.

  I went straight at him. “Did Greg kill Aaron?”

  John sat bolt upright. “Why would you ask that? What the hell are you thinking?” His tone was prosecutorial.

  But he knew what I was thinking, whether he chose to admit it or not. This wasn’t the first time I’d sat in a darkened bar late at night, trying to understand sinister happenings just outside the door. When I first went to work at the Dockside in Atlantic City, I walked into a tragedy. The job I took over had belonged to David Bradley, a friend of John and Greg, their partner at the bar, who’d died of a heroin overdose.

  The really strange and horrible thing about his death was that he was found buried in a shallow grave. Then, a few weeks after I started work at the Dockside, before I’d really gotten to know John and Greg, there was another sudden death. The police found the body of Bill Green, a ne’er-do-well hanger-on, especially when it came to John and Greg. He’d been stabbed to death. The rumor going around at the time was that Bill Green had been with David when he overdosed and was the one who’d buried him.

  Neither John nor Greg said anything to me about either death. But the other bartenders and the waitresses did. There were rumors. I overheard things. What I remembered now, as John and I sat once more in a dimly lit bar on the cusp of some crazy time warp, was the most startling rumor from those days: that Greg had killed Bill Green. This was what I heard. I never thought it was true. I never knew for sure it was untrue. Nothing like that ever came up again. Until now, almost fifteen years later.

  “You remember what happened to Bill Green?” I said.

  You would have thought I’d pulled a gun on Big John. He looked that shocked. John knew I’d heard the rumors years before. But none of us had ever said it out loud. I’m sure John no more expected me to speak of it now than he expected me to take off and fly around the lounge.

  As I said, the main reason John and I became friends in the old days was that I had been loyal to him, so he would be loyal to me—and an important part of that loyalty was that I didn’t ask questions about things that weren’t my business. This reticence came from some kind of code—taken whole-hog from 1930s James Cagney movies—that I signed on for when I joined up with John and Greg: You take the fall yourself before you rat on a partner. He lies; you swear to it. You mind your own business. As the old bartenders said, “You work the bar deaf; you leave it dumb.”

  I didn’t have to be told how silly all this should sound to a grown man. But back then, I had jumped in with both feet. I believed these guys would follow me into the grave rather than let me go it alone. And I wanted them to believe that of me, too. If there was anything about their business they wanted me to know, they’d tell me. If they didn’t tell me, I didn’t want to know. That was what John required of me and that was what he got.

  John sighed and then drank before turning to size me up, his expression pained with disappointment, as if I’d broken the code and he would now have to drum me out of the brotherhood. “Greg didn’t kill Aaron, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said simply, making clear by his expression and stiff manner that I’d lost some of my standing. “Someone found Aaron and killed him. Greg must’ve thought he was next, so he hit the till and took off. That’s all. Something maybe was goin’ on with him and Aaron. I don’t know.”

  Properly chastened, I returned to sipping my beer and playing second fiddle. Just like in the old days, there was more going on than I knew. Once again, I should listen and do what I was told.

  John sat in stony silence for a moment, but after a while, he seemed to come to terms with things. “You know, the fuckin’ guy gets out of hand; this is what happens. I shoulda saw this comin’.”

  “You should have seen a murder coming?”

  “Not a murder,” John shook his head. He leaned toward me, making clear what he was saying was only between us. That quickly, I’d regained my standing. “Just that when things were finally startin’ to go good for me. I shoulda known something would happen to fuck it up. I shoulda dumped Greg years ago. You know, you got family and friends from when you’re young. You stick up for them. And this is what happens.” John sounded mean—a lot meaner than I knew him to be; maybe as mean as he wanted to be.

  “Like you should dump me now,” I said. “You wanna be boss, you gotta fuck your friends.”

  “Dump
you, too, you son of a bitch—you and your fucking union.” John took off his glasses, and I saw in his eyes that the kindness and the sadness had returned. Funny how the two go together.

  John wasn’t going to dump me, nor would he, when push came to shove, throw Greg to the sharks, either. I didn’t necessarily believe Greg hadn’t killed Aaron. John would say he didn’t, whether he did or not. Even if Greg were up to no good, this wouldn’t ruin his chances with John. John had chalked up a fair amount of no good himself in his time. It was the way John and Greg stuck together—and that they cut me in—that had won me over when I first ran up against them years before.

  I arrived in Atlantic City in 1973, when the city was on the skids, the hustlers doing the Boston Stand Around on the street corners, waiting for legalized gambling to restore the city’s former grandeur and their bankrolls. I was on the skids myself. For years, I’d been driving a cab in the city, trying to get a break in the theater, trying to keep my marriage afloat. My wife never believed I could become an actor, never cared if I did. Finally, she got fed up with auditions, bit parts, and some other things and threw me out. I lost my real job—the one that paid the bills. I felt like I’d sold my baby son down the river. So I took to the suds—and I hadn’t seen my kid in a couple of months. I was in Atlantic City, trying out for a part at a theater there. Some people from the Actors Studio were doing Death of a Salesman, and I got the first break I’d gotten in a long time: I got to play Biff in an Equity show, with some first-rate actors in the other parts.

  The second break was running into Greg Phillips at the audition. He was a primitive actor—a couple of high school plays under his belt—and the competition was all trained actors, so he didn’t have a chance, even though he was the only one who’d memorized a part. He was disappointed at not getting a callback but pleased I had, admiring me far out of proportion to my worth, because I was a professional actor, even if my credits were small, few, and far between. When I got the part, we had a couple of drinks together. I told him if I was going to do the play, I had to get a second job so I could pay my child support. He hooked me up with Big John. They got me the job at the Dockside. Later, they helped me get my son back.