by Con Lehane
We were watching a Yankee game on television, John and I drinking a couple of beers, when Walter showed up at the door an hour later. Standing in the foyer, he looked my apartment over like he was casing it. I didn’t like anything about him. Not his cheerfulness, which was nervous and put-on; not his manner of dress, tight pants of a color between gray and white and of a material that seemed to be available only to gangsters and Greek greasy-spoon waiters on their nights off. He wore the same shiny open-collar, dress shirt and gold necklace, too, and had hairy chest that I believe is purchased with the shirt. He smelled of the same cologne I remembered from the unpleasant bar next to Greg’s apartment in Brooklyn. Small-time punk was written all over him. If you hadn’t turned and run already, his smile lit up like a warning sign: FORTY MILES OF BAD ROAD AHEAD.
“What’s goin’ on?” he asked John, ignoring me, even though I’d opened the door and now stood beside him. He shuffled around, his eyes settling on mine for a second, then on John’s, then on my bookcase. He looked twice at the bookcase.
Big John spoke to me over Walter’s head. “Walter thinks everyone’s a punk like him.” He grabbed Walter’s arm in a gesture that seemed friendly, but he clenched the muscle with his fingers. “Brian and I go back a long way,” he said quietly into Walter’s ear, then let go. Walter backed off, his expression sullen.
“Do you want a beer, Walter?” I asked.
“I don’t know, man. What else you got?”
“A beer,” I said. “That’s it.” We looked each other over for a few seconds; then I started back toward the living room.
“Sure, man,” said Walter urgently, hastily reaching an arm out toward me. “I’ll take a beer.” He was obviously someone who’d missed a lot of chances by holding out for more.
Seated across from us, next to the TV, he drank his beer and waited for John to tell him what to do. One of those people who think kids are like pet turtles, he ignored Kevin. But then, when I looked at Kevin, I remembered that even this jerk must have been a kid once—even he must have been lovable once—so I felt sorry for him.
“Walter,” I said, standing beside Kevin’s chair, “This is my son, Kevin. Kevin, Walter.” When Kevin stood up and walked over to shake hands with him, Walter got flustered. He half-stood, then sat back down. He held out his hand awkwardly, then pumped Kevin’s hand like he was running for mayor in Altoona.
Under John’s questioning, we discovered Walter didn’t know where Greg had gone, nor did he know what Greg had been doing lately. Big John, a look of mild disgust on his face, turned from Walter to watch the ball game. The Yankees were changing pitchers, with two runs in, two men on, no outs in the top of the seventh. I myself had turned from the game with a look of disgust.
Even though John wasn’t paying any attention to him, Walter began to fidget. “Greg and I aren’t that tight, man,” he said nervously.
John looked up from the TV. “What have you been up to yourself, Walter?” he asked innocently.
“A little of this and a little of that,” Walter said evasively.
It took a bit of hammering from John, but pretty soon Walter began to open up. A little of this was bartending in Bensonhurst one night a week, in addition to his regular gig for John at the service bar at the Downtown Club. A little of that turned out to be buying kilos of cocaine from a supplier in Bensonhurst, breaking it down, and wholesaling it with Greg to a string of bartenders in some of the better Manhattan clubs.
On the TV, a number of players from the Oakland A’s were scooting around the bases, as the Yankees booted the baseball around the stadium; this summer wasn’t going any better than the previous one. Good thing we had the Mets.
“How long’s this been going on?” John sounded like someone had pulled a fast one on him. “What did Aaron Adams have to do with it?”
Walter said he’d never heard of Aaron.
Big John rolled his eyes and slumped back into his chair. He’d put on a few pounds over the years, so he had to struggle a bit to get back up after he had slumped back. Walter sat on the edge of his seat, alert, his ears pricked, ready to duck or run.
John tried for a tone of fatherly concern. “You guys weren’t trying to get over on anybody were you?”
Walter’s eyes darted around the room; he looked like a man about to break under questioning and squeal on his partner.
I could follow John’s line of thinking. If Greg and Walter—and maybe Aaron—had tried a swindle on their supplier, this could explain Aaron bobbing to the surface of the East River. It was also reason for Greg to hide, and for Walter to be nervous—and me, too, after that phone call.
When I went to the kitchen for another beer, John followed me. Quietly, he told me he wanted me to take Kevin, get a cab, wait outside my apartment, and follow Walter when he came out.
“Just find out where he goes from here, just the address. Don’t get out of the cab for nothin’.”
“Will Kevin be all right?”
“Nothin’ will happen if you do what I said.”
“What about that phone call?”
“I don’t know about the call, bro. But Walter’s gonna have so much on his mind when he leaves here, he ain’t gonna notice you followin’ him.”
“What if he takes the subway?”
He thought it over. “Let him go. This is just a dumb hunch anyway.” He pulled a fifty-dollar bill and a couple of twenties off his roll and handed them to me.
I looked at the bills. “Do you think he’s going to Chicago?”
John walked me back to the foyer and asked out loud if Kevin and I would go out for a cup of coffee so he could speak with Walter in private. When I got out on the street, I had a better idea. Kevin and I walked down to Oscar’s. Sure enough, my pal Ntango was sipping a rum and Coke, his cab parked with its hood and trunk open in the bus stop outside. Ntango drove us back to my street. He waited on the corner with his lights out while Kevin and I hid in a doorway. When Walter came out of the apartment, Ntango switched on his lights, pulled up, and Walter climbed in.
When I told John about the change in plans, he chuckled. “I guess there’s no chance he’ll lose him in traffic.” Then he got serious. “Who the hell is this cabdriver, anyway? Are you sure we can trust him?”
Ntanago is Eritrean and has the distinctive light brown skin color and semi-European features of his countrymen. He was part of a small colony of exiles living on the Upper West Side. I’d gotten to know a good many of them when I tended bar in the neighborhood, and I’d become friends with Ntango. We’d been in enough scrapes together for me to know the kind of man he was. Once, he’d risked his life when Kevin was in danger. He was one of those people who—because of their upbringing, I guess—put a premium on being part of humanity. They think their friends are more important than the glitter and gleam of the easy life and that an injury to one is an injury to all. In the “me first” culture of contemporary New York City, they stick out like sore thumbs.
Because Ntango was soft-spoken, African, and drove a cab, for most people he was one more invisible man. But Ntango was wise and tough. He’d lived through seven different kinds of hell and could eat punks like Walter for breakfast. “This cabdriver fought a couple of wars, climbed through mountain ranges, fought off plagues, and probably swam half the ocean to get here, so he could drive a fucking cab,” I told John. “You can trust him. Relax and watch the ball game.”
The score was nine to three as the Yankees went through the motions in the bottom of the ninth. The game ended with the Yankees heading dejectedly for the tunnel to the clubhouse and the A’s matter-of-factly shaking hands with one another as if they were used to it. The Yankees hardly ever got to shake hands anymore. I remembered my dad and the ball game he wanted to go to, so I asked John if he wanted to go—assuming we got through with all this by then. He said he would, and I went to the refrigerator for a couple more beers. After Kevin went to bed, John rolled a joint. He lit it and we passed it back and forth a few times, sipping
the beers.
An hour later, Ntango rang the bell. He drank a beer and we smoked another joint. He gave John the address of a Dr. Charles Wilson, an optometrist in Bay Ridge.
It was interesting watching John and Ntango size each other up. They were outdoing each other with graciousness. John wanted to know about Eritrea, but that wasn’t something Ntango talked about, so John tried to interest him in the hotel business. Ntango had been a busboy, but he hadn’t liked it. When John got out of Ntango that he had been a mechanical engineer in Eritrea, I could see the respect beginning to take hold. By the end of the joint, Ntango was a bro. John asked some questions about what Walter acted like in the cab. And he kept coming back to Dr. Wilson being an optometrist.
“That’s strange,” John said when Ntango told him for the third time. He was stoned and talking to himself.
“What?”
“What what?” John came around slowly to focus on me.
“What’s strange?”
After an exchange of bewildered looks, John returned to his meditation.
When John stretched out on the couch, I got him a blanket and a pillow, then went to the bedroom where Kevin slept. I sat in an easy chair, watching my son for a long time. Then fear began to creep in. It came at me softly from all sides and hovered over me like a fog until I fell asleep in the chair.
In the morning, John drove us out to Brooklyn to take Kevin to Pop’s. After that, he was going to pay a visit to the optometrist’s office.
“Don’t you think you ought to find out more about what’s going on before you go barging in on this guy?” I asked as we climbed back into John’s Eldorado in front of my father’s apartment.
John had his hand on the ignition switch but didn’t turn it. Instead, he sat back with one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the ignition key. After a couple of minutes, he whacked the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “You’re right … . What the hell am I doing?” John glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “I gotta find out something. Let’s take a ride. You know where Union Street is? There’s a union hall there.”
The hall was across the Gowanus Canal from Park Slope, in a section of Brooklyn once called Red Hook, lately deemed part of Carroll Gardens by the real estate gougers. Italian longshoremen once lived there, and their union hall remained, though their neighborhood was filling up with Yuppies, their jobs had been taken by containers, and their union hall had been sold to the Amalgamated Industrial Union, an entity I’d never heard of.
A gray-haired woman sat at a desk in the carpeted outer office. Her expression was on the sour side as she watched me come through the door, but it blossomed into smiles and wrinkles when she spotted John behind me. Beaming and giggling, she popped up from behind her desk and galloped to the doorway to throw her arms around his expansive middle. John handled the adulation with good cheer, slightly embarrassed, dimpled, and smiling.
“Why don’t you ever come to see us anymore?” she asked him. “You forget your friends.” Her eyes were dark and you could see the pretty girl she’d once been. Her name was Joyce. She acted coquettish, holding John’s hand, smiling at him, possessively folding his hand under her arm as she led him to her desk.
“Frank,” she said into the intercom on her desk. “A prodigal son has come home.”
A few seconds later, Frank appeared in a doorway behind the desk. Probably in his sixties, he had a suntanned face, a healthy shock of gray hair, an expensively cut brown suit with a pale blue silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. In general, he looked well taken care of—prosperous. But his hands were thick and his fingers short and stubby; his head was large, like a bull’s; his neck was thick; and his back so broad that it stretched the fibers of the suit jacket. Above his eye was a scar and in his eyes a light of intelligence. But even when his eyes smiled, which they did when they rested on John, they were like granite. He cuffed John around the shoulder and shook him. John both gave way and resisted, so they tussled, at great risk to the furniture. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in between them.
“This is my friend, Brian,” John said after the wrestling.
Frank stepped back from the tussle and looked me over skeptically. “He’s the one you told me about?” His hard stare sought me out. “The guy who thinks he should be running the bartenders union?”
John stopped smiling; he looked hurt. After meeting Frank’s eyes for a moment, he shook his head. When he spoke, his tone was aggrieved. “Brian’s a good guy, Frank. That’s what I told you. Those guys are wrong.”
“It’s okay,” said Frank, waving a hand in my direction. “I’m glad to do a favor.” He continued to look me over. “Kevin McNulty’s son?”
I nodded.
“That figures. Is your old man behind this?”
My back went up. “Behind what?”
“Taking over the bartenders’ union.” Frank looked at me long and hard, then went on before I could say anything. “Your old man and I had some run-ins. But he wasn’t anything like they said he was—those pissheads. The Commies were a pain in the ass, but they were tough, not like the whiners that came after them. I never had anything personal against your old man. When no one else would touch him, I offered him a job.” Frank didn’t move any closer to me, nor did he grow any bigger. But I had the impression that both things had happened. “He said he wouldn’t work for me,” For a second, Frank’s expression was pleading. “He didn’t need to say that. But I let it go. He thinks he’s too good for me. So where’s he end up? Slopping through Pennsylvania for a hundred a week. And where’s he now? You come to me to get the pressure off. You don’t go to him.”
My temper flared. But John gave me a hard nudge before I could say anything. “Frank put in the word for you when I asked him to.” John’s expression was as hard as I’d ever seen it. I bit my tongue.
Frank clapped me on the shoulder to show there were no hard feelings. He would treat me nicely, that pat on the back said, since—unlike Pop—I knew my place and accepted favors.
After we stood together for a few minutes in the center of the room while Frank cuffed John a couple of more times, John said he needed to talk. Frank nodded. I expected to be ushered into his office. Instead, Frank led us out a side door onto Union Street. We walked to the corner, where, leaning on a mailbox, Frank listened.
“There’s a guy in Bay Ridge I need to talk to,” John said.
Frank listened.
“His name’s Dr. Charles Wilson.” John indicated by a slight gesture of his head that I should take a walk, so I did. The two men spoke a minute or so more; then we went back inside. We shook hands all around. Joyce hugged John. We left.
When we were in the car, headed back to Manhattan, I asked John how Frank Carlucci would find out about Wilson.
“Frank’ll find out.”
“Why did we talk outside and not in his office?”
John looked at me like I was an idiot, and then turned on the radio.
He dropped me at the Ocean Club, where I stumbled around the bar, the liquor room, and the bar manager’s office again, checking the schedule, pretending I was doing something useful. I tried calling Ernesto, but no one answered the phone. Then after fifteen minutes of trying to get the electronic adding machine on my new desk to work, I gave up. The day shift was going fine, and I had a couple of hours to kill before the night crew came on. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” my mother used to say. Rereading the story of Aaron’s murder in a three-day old Daily News, I realized the address they listed for him was not far from the club. So I decided to take a walk.
Aaron’s name was on a mailbox in a building on East Thirteenth Street, just below Stuyvesant Town. It was alongside the name Scott Cooper. Scott Cooper answered the bell through the squawk box, and it took five minutes to convince him to let me in. When I got upstairs to his apartment, I understood why. The apartment had been broken into and robbed a couple of nights before. That and his former roommate being murdered had understandably un
nerved the guy. He was slight and soft-spoken to begin with, but at this moment, he looked like one of the winos lined up, waiting for the gin mill to open.
“Sorry about Aaron,” I said. “I knew him a long time ago.” I realized this sounded like a euphemism for some kind of fudge packing in the past, so I got a little nervous. But Scott didn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah,” he said when we sat down in his small living room. “Poor Aaron. I wasn’t even surprised. It was as if he was trying to get himself killed.” The man looked sad when he said this, not vindictive, and didn’t seem to think I should be surprised by him saying it. So I tried not to be.
The apartment’s built-in wooden cabinets were splintered in places and the front of a wooden drawer had been ripped off. Scott followed my gaze to the cabinets.
“The police who investigated the robbery told me that burglars read the paper and when someone dies or gets killed, they break into the apartment because they think no one will be there.” He sounded as detached as the cops must have sounded. “The paper listed this as Aaron’s address, even though he’s been gone for months.”
I was hard-pressed to feel too self-righteous about this breaking and entering, since at about the time this apartment was being broken into, I was breaking into an apartment myself over in Brooklyn. The subtlety of difference, I decided, would be entirely too difficult to explain, so I didn’t try.
“Aaron was trying to live like he did when he was twenty-one,” Scott Cooper said. “He couldn’t come to terms with himself, and he couldn’t hold a relationship together.”
What I learned from this forty-five-minute conversation with Scott was enough to depress most people for a month: Aaron died addicted to cocaine and alcohol. At the time of his death, he was living in a not quite seedy hotel on Forty-fourth Street, using drugs and whatever money he could find to pick up runaway boys around Port Authority and the Christopher Street docks. When Scott told me all this, he looked into my eyes. His were timid and trusting—and filling with tears. I liked him. But the Aaron he described was nothing like the person I knew.