What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  “If you want to stick to your story, there’s nothing I can do,” said Sheehan. A flash of anger, a wisp of sympathy, and then his eyes closed slightly. When he opened them, the sympathy was gone; he was a battle-scarred, jaded cop looking down at another dead body in an alley. “Suit yourself, but let me tell you something, just between you and me. A bar jacket hanging in this guy Greg Phillips’s locker had fibers on it that came from a tuxedo, the same kind of cloth the deceased wore. They were on your bar boy’s jacket also.

  “Ernesto?” I lost what little composure I had left.

  Sheehan’s expression changed ever so slightly to something between a smile and a smirk. “That’s him. He’s gone to join your pal in cloud-coo-coo land.”

  “He’s missing?”

  Sheehan nodded. “Duty requires me to explain that harboring either one of them is a criminal offense. One more bit of information: The deceased was a pansy. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “A what?”

  Sheehan looked irritated. “A queer.”

  I stared at him incredulously.

  “A homo.”

  “Jesus, Sergeant. I thought the New York Police Department had grown up.”

  Sheehan frowned like a schoolmaster from a Dickens novel. “Don’t tell me you’re a fucking bleeding heart, on top of everything else?”

  I maintained my stern expression.

  Sheehan grunted a couple of times. “Whatever you call him, I imagine you still don’t remember him?”

  I told him I didn’t.

  Sheehan’s face broke into, what was for him, a broad smile. “Funny … You used to work for him.”

  “Is that right?” I feigned shock. “I’ve always said I worked for more managers than I can remember.” Still, Sheehan’s detective work impressed me. He’d traced Aaron back a dozen or so years to the Dockside and gone over the employment records.

  “I understand you had some trouble with him there.” Sheehan had taken out his car keys and was rattling them in his hand as he stood in the foyer. “Something about a union.”

  “Bosses don’t like unions. Probably not even yours. Am I a suspect now?”

  “There’s this coincidence. You. Greg Phillips. The big shot … Wolinski. The deceased. All of you together years ago in Atlantic City. All of you together when this guy gets fished out of the river.” He turned those blue searchlights on me for a final time as he stood holding the doorknob. “By the way, you know where I can find the big shot?”

  “I honestly couldn’t tell you,” I said brightly.

  He nodded, pursing his lips, as if he expected as much; then he left.

  When Ntango showed up, I debated a couple of minutes and then asked him to stop on 104th between Amsterdam and Columbus. He perked up because he thought I was after a packet of blow. Instead, I hobbled up five flights of stairs on my crutches to Ernesto’s apartment.

  His wife’s deep, dark, tear-filled eyes told a story words couldn’t keep up with. The kids watched from behind her skirts, or from their playground on the cracked linoleum of the warped kitchen floor. All those dark eyes beseeched me to do something. A walk-up, the smell of chicken and rice; worn, dark, and littered hallways, garbage-strewn streets; the neighborhood whacked out on cheap wine, heroin, and cocaine. All this she could take. But not the cops after her husband—not again.

  I gave her my address and phone number. She looked at it blankly. “For Ernesto.” Her eyes met mine once more, questioning.

  “What can I do?” I shouted at her, waving my hands. “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where the fuck anybody is!”

  She shook her head. “Ernesto.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  She looked bewildered and scared of me. I patted her on the shoulder. I tried a reassuring smile and felt my face redden. I patted her shoulder again. Three kids. I didn’t know if she had any money or any food even. I didn’t know what she should do next. I didn’t tell her to have three goddamn kids. I didn’t tell her to come to America. Why the fuck was it my fault? She watched, her head tilted slightly, her eyes still questioning.

  I gave up and handed her a bunch of crumpled twenties from the stake John had given me. It didn’t look like I’d be buying a suit anyway. She looked at them and at me. “Food,” I said, “the kids. I’ll get it back from Ernesto.”

  She stood in the doorway, holding the twenties in her hand, watching me bump and stumble down the stairs. When I opened the door of the building, I didn’t see Ntango’s cab, so I panicked, practically pitching myself off my crutches down the stone steps of the stoop. Ntango and his cab had disappeared, too! But then I saw the cab pulled in at a fire hydrant down the block, where he was buying a dime bag of pot through the window. We drove downtown through the gathering evening traffic. Ntango toked up a joint; we passed it back and forth while I told him what had been going on. He nodded sagely but didn’t give me any encouragement.

  John wasn’t at the Ocean Club; neither was Ernesto. No one knew whether John would be in later. No one knew whether I was supposed to work that night. No one cared that I’d come in. No one would care when I left. I said a couple of encouraging words to the bartender, called Ntango’s dispatcher, then left.

  Twenty minutes later, sitting in the backseat of Ntango’s cab, feeling drained and depressed, staring at the Sherwin Williams paint sign on the Queens side of the river, I got this feeling I sometimes get that I don’t want to go home, even though I know I should. The feeling, compelling as it is, doesn’t always tell me where I might go instead of home. So, this time, on a hunch, I asked Ntango if he’d take a ride to Brooklyn. I directed him to Bay Ridge and Dr. Wilson’s office. I thought I might look around the place I was shot. Who knew what I might find?

  Instead, when we got there, I had another hunch. We parked across the street and waited; I had no idea what for. I gave Ntango a couple of Big John’s twenties, about what he’d make for the fare to Bay Ridge and some waiting time. We didn’t talk, just waited and watched the house. I expected I might get an idea of the comings and goings around Dr. Wilson’s office, or perhaps see someone—maybe Greg, maybe Big John, or the guys from the red Cherokee—who might help me make some sense of what had been happening.

  My instinct served me well. After an hour—or maybe longer—of watching the sun leaving Brooklyn and the darkness creeping in, I saw one of Ntango’s sister ships glide to a stop in front of Wilson’s office, and Walter the Sleaze climbed out. Hunched up into a light windbreaker and carrying a little ditty bag, like a sailor home from the sea, he took a look around, saw our cab—stuck in among the rest of the cars on the block like the purloined letter—paid it no mind, and headed toward Wilson’s house. My heart beat faster; I felt a kind of rush, like I do on the rare occasion when my horse starts to pull away in the stretch. We waited another half hour, until the lights went out in the office and two shrouded figures carrying overnight bags slunk out the side door and got into Wilson’s Mercedes. I’d expected Walter would be alone and was prepared to pounce on him. But Wilson tagging along changed my plans.

  Ntango followed Wilson’s Mercedes out Fourth Avenue to Fort Hamilton Parkway, up and over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, onto the Staten Island Expressway, out through the foul-smelling garbage mountains of Staten Island, over the Outerbridge Crossing, and then south on the Garden State Parkway. By then, I had a pretty good idea I was headed toward my old stompin’ grounds. I gave Ntango a C-note from John’s dwindling stash, took a joint from him, toked it up, and sat back to follow where life led.

  chapter nine

  A couple of hours later, we turned off the Garden State Parkway onto the Atlantic City Expressway. Stoned, I’d daydreamed on the way down about my life in Atlantic City years before. Ntango stayed a couple of lengths off the pace, keeping the Mercedes in sight, even though it moved at a pretty good clip. After a few miles, the expressway turned into a city street that ran straight to the casino hotels backed against the ocean. Ntango followed the Mercedes
past acres of blacktop, employee parking lots with herds of blue-and-purple and black-and-green tour buses with names like Bally’s, Harrah’s, and Trump in gaudy lettering on the side. We headed for the gleaming glass and bright lights, the slums sliding past us on one side, the bus depot on our left.

  Riding into Atlantic City after so many years, I felt like I was coming in for a landing at a spaceport. Glass and steel skyscrapers, thirty stories high, shimmered in front of me, oblongs and squares, pillars and obelisks, glittering monuments to greed. The stately brick and white-trimmed Claridge was the only building among dozens pressed against the sea that had been there in my time. The Dockside had been razed to make room for the Sands. Yet, barely a block off the main thoroughfare, the dilapidated, lopsided wooden-frame houses of the porters, maids, and kitchen workers hadn’t changed by so much as a bucket of paint.

  The Mercedes made a left onto Atlantic Avenue and then a right into the valet parking zone in front of the Claridge. Ntango followed. Before he’d even come to a complete stop, the doorman opened the cab door and was attempting to lug me out. I didn’t want Wilson or Walter to see me, so I came out backward, my head bent. By the time I looked up, the Mercedes’s taillights were rounding the far turn toward the valet lot, and the culprits had ducked into the hotel. So there I was: out of the cab, hoisted onto my crutches, tottering on the sidewalk like Dufus Dumbfuck. Fortunately, Ntango had his wits about him and climbed out of the cab, turning it over to the parking valets. I didn’t want to go into the casino to look for Wilson and Walter, because with the crutches, they’d clock me in a minute, so I asked Ntango to find them and keep an eye on them while I figured out our next move. He’d recognize Walter from the other night, when he drove him to Brooklyn.

  Ntango set off, while I secluded myself—shades of Sidney Greenstreet—behind a potted palm, discreetly reading a copy of the Atlantic City Journal I picked up off the bellman’s desk. I sat there long enough for Ntango to lose track of Walter and Dr. Wilson and the C-note I’d given him. After he gave his report, I hobbled over to the pay phone and tried to call Big John. The tape on his home phone continued to promise to return all calls within an hour. No one had seen or heard from him at the Ocean Club. Next, I called Pop to tell him where I was, in case Kevin was looking for me. I told him that while I was in town, I might check out a couple of Greg’s old haunts.

  While we were speaking, Pop remembered someone he knew in Atlantic City. “Sue Gleason,” he said, “an editor at the Atlantic City Journal. Look her up, and you’ll save yourself a month of trying to find your way around.” Pop’s newspaper cronies were scattered around the country—blacklisted founding members of the Newspaper Guild or writers on the old reader-supported PM, they wrote for years under assumed names, and were these days, many of them, writing for senior citizen newsletters. Other of his comrades were from the younger generation that had tried to revive radical journalism in the sixties and had sought out Pop and his ilk for workshops and seminars. Sue Gleason was of the latter group.

  Pop was on a roll once we got on the topic of digging up information. He told me about city directories, phone books, property lists, driver’s license bureaus and marriage licenses, and on and on. “Sue Gleason can help you with all that,” he said. “And be sure to check the police and court records.”

  This sounded too much like work, so I didn’t pay much attention. I thought I might look for bartenders and waitresses I’d known in the old days, folks Greg would most likely search out if he were back in town. At the top of the list was Linda Moroni—the blond, blue-eyed Italian-American waitress I’d once loved and lost.

  For the time being—recognizing a strategy once I found one—I told Ntango I was going to sit behind the potted palm until something better turned up, so he went back to the craps table to try to recoup his losses. The two hours of sitting that followed provided me an opportunity to watch a few hundred people walk through a doorway. It also gave me time to wonder what the hell I was doing in Atlantic City. I suspected myself of altruism on the one hand, and on the other hand, I wondered if I might be suffering from a form of senility that made the past more palatable than the present. I owed Greg. I didn’t want to forget that. But already I’d gotten myself thrown in jail and shot trying to catch up with my old pal. The trouble here, I thought, might be deeper than a prudent man should delve into, if he has a choice. And I did have a choice.

  At least I thought I did. But at just this moment, Greg appeared in the doorway that led from the casino into the lobby. Like the last time I saw him, in the 55, he didn’t take a step farther in than he had to until he’d cased the place. But he couldn’t see me behind the potted plant and my copy of the Atlantic City Journal. Greg wore the same light jacket he’d had on the last time I saw him, topping it off this time with a beret. Three steps behind him was Dr. Wilson, and alongside Wilson was good old Walter.

  As soon as Greg was fully into the lobby, I hauled myself out of my chair and hobbled toward him. I came from behind, so he didn’t notice me until I spoke. By then, I was right next to him. “Greg,” I said. “It’s me, Brian.”

  He jerked to a stop and turned. His face froze. But in less than a second, he unfroze, put his hands out in front of him, and shoved me in the chest so hard, I pivoted on my crutches and tumbled over like a bowling pin onto the stylish red rug of the Claridge lobby. By the time I righted myself, the trio had hightailed it out of there.

  The security guards were solicitous as they picked me up and dusted me off, but there wasn’t much they could do. They did say I could come up and watch the videotapes the next morning if I wanted to try to identify who had pushed me. But I already knew who’d pushed me. After a bevy of solicitous assistant managers had fawned over me long enough to make sure I wasn’t planning to sue, someone went for Ntango, he retrieved the cab, and we headed out. “Which way?” he asked at the end of the driveway.

  “Go to the next block and turn left,” I told him, sounding more decisive than I felt. Turning left was what I remembered; it was the road to Greg’s and John’s house of a dozen years before. Perhaps they’d be waiting on the porch, drinking beer. Maybe, too, Linda would be there in her summer short shorts, with her shirt tied up under her breasts, her eyes brightening the way they used to when she smiled at me.

  The city quieted just beyond the last space-age hotel. Here, the rambling, ornate seaside mansions along the beach roads toward Margate held their ground against the onslaught of the noveau greed. Despite being the summer vacation homes of the rich, they were familiar and welcome, promising elegance and charm, something civilization might need after all, like a Henry James novel. On a side street about three miles from the last casino, I found the house Greg and John once lived in. It was smaller than I remembered, with stone steps and an old-fashioned porch wrapping around three-quarters of the house. Neither Greg nor John sat on the porch, nor was Linda anywhere to be seen. I’d hoped that seeing the house would help me get my bearings. But, aside from a brief rush of nostalgia, my thinking was as muddled as ever.

  On the way out, we’d passed a few rooming houses with vacancy signs. I suggested we go back to try to find a room for the night. These guesthouses were large and wood-framed. With their broad facades, airy wraparound porches, gables, and second-floor porches, they harkened back to an era of family vacations and oceanfront relaxation that was more optimistic than ours. Our era’s frenzied and frenetic pastimes were played out in the garish, bright, and glittering casinos towering over the beach and the boardwalk.

  We got a room from a thin woman who wore glasses and puffed nervously on True Blues while I filled out the registration card. I paid cash in advance. When she first watched me thump up the porch steps, I think she expected I would pay off the cab after Ntango dropped my bags in the room. When she looked at the card and realized he was staying, a pained look came into her eyes that suggested I’d betrayed her; she chomped down hard on her cigarette filter but didn’t say anything. I hoped she’d ask abo
ut my leg, so I could tell her it was a gunshot wound. But she didn’t.

  The room on the second floor was clean and white, with large windows facing the ocean a couple of blocks east. The windows were open, and billowy curtains gathered in the sea breezes. I took a bath in an ancient tub, despite having to hang my wounded leg uncomfortably over the side, and felt a new rush of nostalgia, this one for my childhood.

  “So,” said Ntango when he’d finished his own bath and we’d sat down on the easy chairs that came with the room. “What do we do now that you have found your friend?”

  “He didn’t seem all that glad to see me, did he?” I went over and lay on the bed, my sore leg stretched out in front of me. “What I should do is forget this whole thing.”

  “You say this in a way that suggests you won’t,” said Ntango. “Why would you keep looking?”

  Why indeed? I thought about this for a few minutes before I answered, maybe telling myself as much as answering Ntango. “A couple of reasons, I guess. One, I don’t know what’s going on with Greg. Maybe he’s in trouble. Maybe those guys grabbed him or something and he was protecting me by pushing me down. I want to hear his side of the story and find out why Wilson and Walter came charging down to Atlantic City.

  “I shouldn’t have started this. But now someone shot me. And my old friend John is screwing me around. And someone got killed. And my other friend, Greg, just knocked me on my ass. So now I’m in the middle of this mess. I suppose I think someone should explain something to me. If nothing else, they should tell me why someone killed poor Aaron, and then they should tell me why someone shot me, and what I need to do to keep someone from shooting me again. I can’t believe John or Greg had anything to do with me getting shot, but I suspect the explanations start with Greg. As long as I know he’s here—or was here at least—I’d like to track him down and ask him something before he knocks me down again or does something worse.”