by Con Lehane
“You remember when you and Greg took me back to Brooklyn to see Kevin?” I asked John.
He looked at me steadily and his eyes glistened. He shook his shoulders and waved me away.
Thinking about the Dockside and the time I spent at the shore brought back one other memory that flitted through my mind a couple of times. I’d been embarrassed to bring it up, but now I’d had enough to drink for sentimentality to overtake my better judgment. “Do you ever see Linda Moroni?” I asked, embarrassed down to my toes as I said it.
John started for a second, as if I’d snapped him out of a reverie; then he chuckled. “Funny you should ask. I forgot all about that … you and Linda. You were as cute as a couple of pups together.” He looked me over warmly, as if he shared my regret. But I lost my courage and didn’t ask the follow-up—shades of Gordon Lightfoot—“Did she mention my name just in passing?”
John dropped back into his reverie, and I began one of my own. Back during the Dockside days, John, Greg, and their cronies had any number of small-time hustles going on. John’s father was a crook of some sort, and, I guess, the source of the penny-ante rackets. So because of this, John was top dog. But John had bigger ambitions than being a small-time hood. He was doing his best to make it in the corporate world. I knew about John’s old man because John and I used to talk about our respective outlaw fathers—mine, the Communist; his, the grifter—when we drank together at the bar after closing. During our talks on those nights years before, I grew to understand John loved his father, despite the man’s larcenous ways. Knowing about John and his feelings for his dad, even though I never met the man, helped me understand the contradictory and unfathomable relationship I had with my own father. It was funny, too, that John came to admire Pop. Despite his corporate ambitions, John saw himself as a workingman. He hated the corporate mucky-mucks, even though he was bound and determined to become one—so he liked that Pop spent his life taking them on. And when he and Pop met on his trips to the city after I moved back, they really hit it off.
For anyone working the stick, it wasn’t hard to become corrupt. If you spent your life in gin mills, it was pretty easy to fall in with bad company: bookies, call girls, slot machines in the back room, coke, bennies, and amyl nitrite in the restrooms. If, like John, you knew all the numbers runners, bookies, and small-time hustlers as family friends from childhood, corruption was even more of an occupational hazard.
When I first knew John, he and Greg were tangled up in some kind of marijuana-transporting operation. Since I’d known any number of folks over the years who dealt pot, this wasn’t any big deal for me. I smoked the stuff. Why should I care how it got to me? John told me about the marijuana transporting because he needed me to switch shifts with him now and again. He tightened me up with free weed, and I covered for him and kept my mouth shut. This was the extent of my criminal enterprises.
Added to this, in the circles we traveled, John’s father’s reputation provided an aura of romance—I was hanging out with Big John, the son of Charlie Wolinski, who had something to do with the mob from Philadelphia, who was seen in the company of Big-Nosed Sam or Little Mikie. When we’d come across one of the reputed gangsters showing off in a barroom, he’d nod to Big John, shoot his cuffs a couple of times, and buy us a drink. It was cool being the kind of bartender Louie Suspenders shook hands with before he ordered a drink. These small-time grifters were impressed when John became a hotel manager. He always treated them with the kind of phony respect they expected, so they didn’t mind that he wanted legitimacy instead of the rackets.
Now John waved his arm around to take in the entire Ocean Club. “You know, Greg coulda been manager here.” He stopped and, leaning on both elbows, kind of sagged over the bar, staring at the bottles on the back shelf. After a minute or two, he got up and went to make himself a drink. Behind the stick, he handled himself with his old sureness and confidence. He didn’t pick through a bunch of bottles before he found the one he wanted. Remembering where the Glenfiddich was from watching me, he reached up to the back shelf, slammed his hand against the neck of the bottle for a solid grasp, picked it up, and poured in the same motion, pouring water from the small pitcher on the bar with his other hand at the same time, working on the rail, not spilling a drop.
He put the bottle back and took a long drink. Then, as he was drinking, the small video camera above the bar caught his eye. He looked at it for a long time before he picked up a bar towel and draped it over the whole camera, covering the lens. “I hate those fucking things,” he said.
Watching him, I got an idea. “John. Maybe we can go over that film and find out who was at the bar last night. Maybe Aaron came to the bar. Maybe someone was with him. Maybe that’s who killed him.”
John looked at me with a patient, bored expression. “Those cameras don’t watch the customers, bro. They watch the bartenders and the cash register.”
He was right. They used them at just about every bar I ever worked at, even years before, back at the Dockside. Nearly every piece of equipment, from automatic pourers to computerized cash registers, was developed to protect the hotel corporations from their bartenders.
John stayed behind the bar, feeling his way around. “You know, bro, sometimes I wish I was still workin’ the stick. I miss it, you know. Being one of the guys. Like they say, it’s lonely at the top.” He said this without irony. Despite his charm and sophistication—and his meteoric rise in the corporate world—Big John was a simple man. Part of his fascination with me when we first met was that I’d been to college. He had that respect for a college education held only by people who’d never gotten one.
“Poor Greg,” I said after a long period of silence. “How’s he get himself into these messes?” Greg was the most fickle of souls. As far as work was concerned, he was fastidious, neat, punctual, meticulous. But in his own life, he was out of step with everything. If everyone dressed casually in jeans, Greg would wear a suit. If it was a wedding and everyone wore suits, Greg would show up in overalls. Despite his fastidiousness, he was always forgetting and always late. Most of the time, he got there—wherever it might be—when everyone was leaving. He wore an alarm wristwatch, which added to his image of robotlike efficiency; but it served mostly to remind him of events he forgot to show up for and places he should have been. He never got along with bosses, either, even though he tried. Aaron would tell him not to open the second bar station. Greg would give him thumbs-up and go on about his business. An hour later, Aaron would come back and both stations would be open. Aaron would holler. Greg would listen humbly. Sometimes he would say sadly to himself, “‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes …’” and Aaron would stomp out of the room.
Yet Greg was a stand-up guy. I’d never forget the afternoon he and John took me back to Brooklyn. John negotiated with my ex-wife while Greg and I walked around and around the block—it must have been a dozen times—until I saw John standing on the steps of my old house. He was holding Kevin and waving for us to come over. I got ahold of the kid and never let go. I’ve seen Kevin every week since then. It’s not good enough, but Kevin is a forgiving kid; he takes what he can get.
I took a long drink of beer. “Poor Greg,” I said again.
“Poor Greg, yeah,” said John. “Poor everybody.” When he wrinkled his brow, his glasses slid lower on his nose, so he pushed them back up, then looked searchingly at me. He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket, thumbed through it, and spread the bills out on the bar. They were twenties and fifties and hundreds, a half dozen or more of each. “You know, bro, I look at these, and I know I could be stone-broke again tomorrow. I’ve spent fifteen years getting this far. You know what I had to do to make it—everyone thinking I’m a gangster because of my old man. Now I’ve been straight for a long time. But the company gets wind of this, nothing I did will make any difference. The fuckers’ll rifle me in a minute.”
John sat hunched over the bar and sort of rolled his shoulders to turn his head in m
y direction, his expression that of an honest man willing to take his medicine. It was far into the night, the sky bending toward morning. It seemed like we’d ended a million nights like this. “I gotta find Greg … .” John said to himself.
I suddenly felt tired, and when I get tired like that, I get cold, so I began to shiver slightly. “Do you think Greg is going to get killed?”
The question caught John by surprise, even though it shouldn’t have. His expression at that moment was unguarded: He looked scared.
chapter four
I woke up the next morning with a sinking feeling, remembering I’d told John I’d help him find Greg. Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut and let him handle things? No sir, not me, not Helpful McNulty himself. Even when John tried to talk me out of it, I insisted. Now I was supposed to see Ernesto this morning—actually early afternoon—and worm out of him whatever it was John was sure he hadn’t told us the night before.
When I checked with my service, I discovered John had already called with Ernesto’s address. There was one break: He lived on 104th Street on the West Side, not far from me. Pop had called also, so I called him first. It was his fault I got myself involved in things like this, anyway. Battering me day and night all through my youth with his stories of man’s inhumanity to man, the struggles of the wretched of the earth, the dignity of labor, and the insidiousness of inherited wealth, he’d stamped indelibly on my brain that the concerns of my fellowman were mine, as well.
Pop had called because he wanted to go to a ball game with Kevin and me when the Yankees got back into town later in the week. This, in turn, reminded me of John’s boy, Robert, who was two years older than Kevin. Years ago, after I’d left Atlantic City and moved back to New York, John used to look me up when he came to the city with Robert, and we’d go to Yankee games together, he and I and the boys. At Yankee Stadium, it isn’t hard to pass for a real dad. Neither of us were real dads, but at the stadium during those night games when the Yanks battled the Red Sox for the pennant, we pretended we were. The last time I’d seen John before all this had been on Kevin’s seventh birthday, at the stadium.
I told Pop I’d seen John, there’d been a murder at the Ocean Club, Greg was missing, and I was helping John look for him. He was disturbed by the murder but pleased John was in town and suggested I invite him to go to the game with us.
“Maybe,” I said. “But we might be too busy looking for Greg.”
“He has to eat and drink and sleep,” said the old man heartily. “Look for him there.”
“Where?”
“Where he’d eat or sleep.”
“I don’t know where he’d eat or sleep.”
“You can ask. Nose around a bit.” Pop was a big fan of the chase. He was also determined that I would accomplish things in life. I was a great bewilderment to him, right up there with the working class. He couldn’t understand why neither of us would do what he thought we were capable of.
“Who was the man who got himself murdered … and why would he do that?”
“His name is Aaron Adams. But I don’t think he got himself killed on purpose.”
“This I can tell you,” Pop said after a pause. “The better you know the victim—the more you know about how he lived his life, why he ended up at the place he died at the time he died there—the sooner you will know who killed him.”
“I don’t know if I want to find out who killed him. Suppose it was Greg?”
“Suppose it wasn’t?”
“Actually, I’m worried about that, too. Someone might be after Greg.”
“Who saw Greg last?”
“The bar boy, probably. John wants me to talk to him this morning. But he didn’t tell us anything last night, so I don’t know what good seeing him today will do.”
Pop is a retired journalist, a charter member of the Newspaper Guild, and a lifelong Communist, prematurely retired from the working press by the blacklist back in the fifties. After that, he worked for unions until he retired, voluntarily this time. He’d been a top-notch investigative reporter before anyone heard the term, and, at one time, did internal investigations for one of the needle trades’ unions, searching out arrangements between corrupt business agents and crooked bosses. The experience had jaded him: He didn’t necessarily believe people were who they said they were, that things were as they seemed, or that you took anything on faith.
“Who is this bar boy?”
“His name is Ernesto. He’s from Chile.”
“That’s all? I suppose it’s beneath the dignity of a bartender to chat with his subordinates,” said Pop, bitter sarcasm as much a part of him as his piercing look.
“I’ve only been there one day,” I grumbled.
“And this job title, bar boy, I suppose he’s eleven or twelve, not grown up yet?”
“He’s grown-up,” I said. “A man.”
“So the degrading job title is so you don’t feel bad paying him your cheap tips?”
“John moved him up to the service bar one night,” I said defensively. I didn’t have the heart to tell Pop that John had made me a boss.
On 104th Street, tiny brown-skinned boys and girls played in and among abandoned cars, worn-out mattresses, broken-down armchairs, and burned-out couches along the sidewalk and gutters. Men worked on cars propped up on metal milk crates along the curb; women in housedresses sat on the stoops. It was midday warm, almost summer hot. The upper-middle-class white people live west of Broadway in the massive gilded-ghetto apartment buildings on and off West End Avenue. The low-wage working folks—once Irish and German, now Dominican, Ecuadorian, and Chilean—live in five-story walk-ups on the east side of Broadway, the neighborhood stretching north through the Manhattan Valley and east toward Central Park, where at some nebulous point it becomes Harlem. The people living in these walk-ups spend a good part of their lives outside because the apartments are cramped and stifling. Despite the detritus, these folks aren’t any messier than the folks over on West End. They just don’t have as many people picking up after them.
Given the activity, and the music from the parked cars and apartment windows, the street had a neighborhood feel to it. But the neighborly ambience broke down at each end of the block, where the dope dealers and their outriders, half a dozen nervous, watchful, slippery, streetwise kids, old beyond their years and destined for short and painful lives, patrolled Amsterdam and Columbus avenues. Their presence seemed to make everyone unhappier.
The woman I asked directions from had been laughing and chatting with her neighbor, watching her child from the stoop, when I stopped in front of her. She gave no indication of understanding English at all until I said I worked with Ernesto, and then, satisfied that I wasn’t a Yuppie in search of dope or a collection man from Household Finance, she said, “Fifth floor rear.” I should have known it would be the fifth floor.
Ernesto’s wife, small and dark, with beautiful black eyes, opened the door while I stood in front of it, puffing from the climb. Three dark-eyed children of varying sizes, none of whom reached her waist, gathered around her skirts. She looked scared.
“I’m a friend of Ernesto,” I said hopefully, though I didn’t suppose I was really a friend or that he wanted me nosing around his home the day after I met him.
“Buenos dias,” Ernesto said from a doorway behind his wife. He smiled a cautious but friendly smile and didn’t seem surprised. I liked the way his face creased and his eyes sparkled, and I liked the way a couple of the kids went to him to hang on to his leg while they watched me.
“You’re up early for a bartender,” I said.
“You, too.” He pointed at the kids. “When they awake, no one sleeps in the neighborhood.” He laughed.
Acutely aware of the impoliteness of my visit, I mumbled an apology.
“I expect you,” Ernesto said.
I waited.
“Greg ask me not to say, so I no say.”
“Don’t say what?”
“Greg no say his friends. He just as
k me no say.” He held his hands out in front of him in a pleading gesture.
I held up my own hands in front of me like the proverbial Jewish tailor to suggest I shared his concern. I didn’t know if he should trust me, either. “Maybe I can help him.”
“I don’t know,” said Ernesto. He sized me up and thought it over. As he did this, I realized Pop had been right, as usual. Without actually thinking about it, I’d already judged Ernesto by his station in life, assuming that if I had the better job, I must be the superior person. But it became clear to me now as Ernesto weighed his options that he hadn’t made the same judgment. After a few minutes, he reached for his jacket. “Let’s see,” said Ernesto. We took the train downtown then walked across to the club without speaking much.
In Greg’s locker, which Ernesto opened quite deftly by listening to the rattle and fall of the tumblers on the combination lock, we found a freshly pressed bar jacket, a freshly dry-cleaned tie, two laundered and starched shirts on hangers, and a clean pair of black slacks with a sharp crease. Greg never recovered from navy boot camp; he was always ready for inspection. We also found a small leather toiletry bag with Old Spice aftershave, Right Guard deodorant, Tic Tacs, and a portable electric razor. When I switched the razor on, for no reason other than to see if it would buzz, I guess, Ernesto jumped a foot away from me. He laughed then, like it had been a joke, but the fear in his eyes bordered on terror.
I stared at him, holding the buzzing razor, until I realized what I was doing and shut it off.