by Con Lehane
She leaned closer to me, her lips inches away. I reached for her. “Can I kiss you?” I whispered.
“You already did,” she said matter-of-factly. I slunk back against the couch. But her expression didn’t change; she still acted like I belonged to her. “Ralph said you were looking for Greg. Why?”
“It’s a long story. Actually, I found him last night, and he knocked me on my ass.”
She tilted her head, scrutinizing my face to see if I was kidding. Satisfied I wasn’t, she said, “That’s weird. But why would you come here to ask me about Greg?”
I wasn’t quite ready to tell her why, and she was polite enough not to push. I told her I hadn’t found Greg or his family listed in any of the directories and asked if she was sure he’d grown up in Sea Isle City. She was sure. She remembered him in high school, she said, and went to get her high school yearbook. He was there all right, under P, but he was Greg Peters, not Greg Phillips.
“What do you think of that?” said Linda. “I never even knew he changed his name.”
“Not much is as it seems.”
I thumbed through the yearbook, looking for a picture of Walter. There was a Walter Springer, his blond hair slicked back in a pompadour, à la Bobby Rydell. It could be the same Walter, but I couldn’t tell for sure, and Linda didn’t remember him. John wasn’t in the book because he’d graduated a couple of years before them.
Linda looked at Greg’s picture for a long time. “He sure was a strange guy. I’ve known him since we were kids and never really known him at all. John was the only person he cared about—and you.” She turned to look at me. “I don’t think you even knew how much he watched out for you.” Linda laughed. “When you started at the Dockside, you were the worst bartender we ever saw. The waitresses would have hung you if it wasn’t for Greg.”
She was right. If I hadn’t known then, I realized later Greg had my back the whole time. And Linda was right about what a closed book he was, too. Although he lived even more in Big John’s shadow than I had, Greg lived his own life, too, and that part he kept pretty much to himself. He’d become my friend before John had. And he made me a bartender more or less in his likeness. A real journeyman, he was meticulous, as close to perfection as anyone got at a trade. I learned from him to pour with both hands, to keep my head up, to plan so that nothing—not the juices, nor the fruit, nor the beer, nor the ice—ever ran out, no matter how busy it got. After a while, the waitresses even liked it when I worked the stick. But when push came to shove, of all the bartenders, no matter how handsome or charming, as in John’s case, or solicitous, as in my case, it was Greg the waitresses most wanted to work with. They came to the Dockside to make a living; most of them hated the work. Greg didn’t keep them waiting—no backups on the service bar—Greg flew, so they made money the nights he worked.
I could still picture him in his blue bar jacket, clean and pressed as if for parade-ground inspection. Every other day, he walked in carrying a fresh bar jacket in a dry cleaners’ bag. His shoes were always shined, his shirt ironed, every hair in place. He moved into the bar with the bearing and aplomb of the acrobat walking out onto the stage. He believed working the stick at the Dockside was the best job in the world, and he had paid his dues to get there.
The front bar was a bit different. Greg had little charm and not much interest in the patrons. His fastidiousness paid his way. The customers liked to watch him. He won them over by his mastery behind the bar. When he made a drink, his hands moved like a magician’s. His movements were like close-order drill. And even if he never said more than three words to a customer, the guy’s glass was never sitting there empty. The bar surface shined like brass; the glasses sparkled. So any hail-fellow-well-met assumed Greg was a jolly good fellow, even though he wasn’t.
During my first few weeks at the Dockside, he taught me the bar. And after work, on rare occasions, he took me into his life—his own life, not the one he shared with Big John. We went to small neighborhood bars and softball games, a mom-and-pop restaurant in Ocean City, an old-man shot and beer bar in Sea Isle, and a gin joint that a couple of black guys he’d been in the navy with had opened in Wildwood.
Linda broke in on my thoughts. “Does this have anything to do with John?” she asked in the tone that suggested she already knew the answer.
“Why?”
Her eyes, which were always so clear and expressive, narrowed with concern. “Greg never did anything without John being close by.”
“Maybe he did this time,” I said more to myself than to her. “You remember Aaron Adams?”
She nodded.
“He’s been murdered.”
Fear flashed in her eyes. First shock, then fear. She still held on to life strongly enough for willful and sudden death to be terrifying. “And?” she asked, her eyes frozen open.
“It happened where Greg worked.”
“When?”
“The other day.”
“Which other day?”
“Friday night.”
She drew back from me. “Why did you come here? Did John send you?” She grabbed at the front of my shirt. “Why did you come here?” she screeched again. The tone of her voice sent shivers through me. The change that came over her was awful. I was stung by what she said—until I remembered the baby.
“I’m sorry,” I said, standing up. Linda, already standing, moved closer to the hallway that undoubtedly led to the baby’s room, to stand between me and the baby. I tried to calm her. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. I shouldn’t have come here. I wish I hadn’t.”
Her eyes, still clear, were open wide. She cringed, as if she thought I might hurt her. But after a few minutes, when she’d calmed down, she insisted on hearing every detail of what had happened. So I went through the whole litany. Aaron was fished out of the river. John and I talked to Walter. I went to see this guy Dr. Wilson and got shot. I followed him and Walter to Atlantic City. I found Greg, and he knocked me on my ass. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Where’s John?” she asked.
“I wish I knew.”
I started to tell Linda I couldn’t have endangered her or the baby by coming there, but then I stopped before I began. I didn’t know why Aaron had been murdered or why I’d been shot. I didn’t know why Greg had run off or why Walter and Dr. Wilson had driven to Atlantic City to meet up with Greg. I didn’t know where John was. I didn’t know if someone was stalking me. I should have been more careful. I didn’t want to see the fear in Linda’s face or the fierceness she summoned to challenge the fear. I wanted to remember how pretty and how happy she looked when I first arrived. Now her eyes reddened and filled with tears.
“Oh, Brian,” she cried, then ran across the room into my arms, burying her face against my chest, knocking me against the back of the beige chair. “I’m afraid, horribly, horribly afraid.”
“Why?” I hung on to her shoulders because she was the only thing holding me up. “What are you afraid of?”
She lifted her head from my chest. “Don’t you remember?” Her face was blotched and red, her eyes wild.
My own horrors started climbing up out of the murkiness. “What?” I hollered back at her.
“You really didn’t know what John and Greg and Charlie were doing when you were here, did you?”
“What do you mean? Doing what? You mean, Charlie John’s father?”
“Yes, you didn’t know Charlie?”
I shook my head. “I knew about him, but I never met him. You tell me. What was going on?”
Linda’s eyes were red and wild-looking. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her to stop them from shaking. “Much, much more than I would care to remember. Do you know why you got your job at the Dockside?”
Linda and I faced each other, both of us grim-faced and rigid with tension. “Because that guy David Bradley died.” My voice shook.
“David Bradley was murdered. The overdose was on
purpose.”
My blood turned cold. “How do you know? That was a rumor. All we knew was that he overdosed.”
“And Bill Green.”
I felt the cold wind at my back. Bill Green was the guy who’d given David the dope he overdosed on. They found his body a couple of weeks later in a shallow grave, a knife wound in his chest. “I know what you’re thinking. But you don’t know what happened, any more than I do. And what does any of that have to do with what’s going on now?”
There wasn’t any reason to believe Aaron being killed had any connection to deaths so many years before in Atlantic City. Yet what was scariest about what Linda had said was how the tumblers clicked together. Something out of the past was coming after all of us.
I sat Linda back down. “Let’s go over this again.”
“No!” Her expression had hardened. No longer was she my sweet little Linda. “Just leave me alone.”
“Did you know Walter?”
She shook her head. “I told you no.”
“Look, I know John’s father was some sort of second-rate racketeer. What else do you know about him?”
I put my hand on hers. She took a deep breath and almost smiled. We both began to calm down. She held my hand and squeezed. “All those guys—Bill Green, David, John, Greg, who knows who else—they ran errands for Charlie. Numbers, sports betting, bootleg cigarettes, stolen liquor, pot. You know, all that stuff.” Linda began to sound more like a battered B-girl, and less like the angelic mother.
“I think I was born yesterday.”
Her eyes locked on mine for a long time until the defiance softened into a smile. “Brian, Brian … you worshiped those guys. I used to wish you’d be like that with me.”
“So my friends were gangsters, and I was too stupid to know it?”
“They were kids, Brian. They weren’t gangsters. We grew up in the shore towns, where you couldn’t even find a place to buy groceries in the winter, not to mention have fun anywhere. That was the romantic life. You knew it, too. You liked it. I saw it in you. You weren’t like John and Greg and the other bartenders, but you wanted to be. You wanted to be a high roller. We all did, even before any of us ever saw one. Now I see a thousand of them every day and the glamour has sure worn off.
“If you’d known Charlie, you’d have loved him. He was generous and funny and even more charming than John. Those guys went to him. He didn’t have to come after them.”
I felt foolish. Everyone, even Linda, had known what was going on and I hadn’t. Now I was mad at all of them. “Who killed David, if he didn’t die accidentally? And who killed Bill Green?”
Linda weighed her answer before she spoke. “This is what I know. Bill Green killed David by giving him a hot shot because David had twenty-five thousand dollars on him. The money belonged to someone else, and that someone else killed Green to get the money back.”
“Did the money belong to Charlie?”
“I don’t know. It was all rumors. I don’t know if any of this is true.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes.
“What did Aaron have to do with any of that?”
“Nothing, as far as I know.”
Linda sighed and laid her head back against the top of the couch. “Why did you ever decide to come and see me now?” she asked quietly. “What on earth made you think I knew anything about Aaron being killed?”
“Nothing. Linda, believe me. In my wildest dreams I didn’t think you had anything to do with this. I just thought of you. I wanted to see you again. I thought maybe you’d know where Greg was. It gave me an excuse to see you. That was the only reason.”
She scrunched up her pretty face to peer intently at me, as if by doing this she could tell if I was telling the truth. When she smiled, I figured she was satisfied. “It’s not your fault,” she said, “that things don’t stay buried in the past.”
chapter eleven
Linda said she’d drive me back to the rooming house on Atlantic Avenue on her way to work. I was hoping she’d come out of her bedroom dressed in a short-skirted cocktail waitress uniform, but, having given up waitressing in favor of dealing blackjack, she was dressed now like a riverboat gambler—black slacks, a white shirt with ruffles, and a string tie. Still, she was as cute as a button. I stared after her longingly, withstanding the compressed lips, wrinkled nose look of disapproval from the matronly babysitter, who had just arrived.
“Second shift is the best for me,” Linda said as she backed her Toyota out of the driveway. “This way, I can be with the baby all day. Ralph can be with her at night, so we only need the babysitter a couple of hours a day.”
On the drive in, I found myself not wanting to let go of Linda again, so I pushed my luck. “Maybe I’ll sit in on your game later,” I said hopefully.
“No … . I don’t want to take your money.” She looked over at me in this imploring way I remembered so well, that had always irritated me because it seemed to be asking me to do something I wasn’t able to do.
“It’s not inevitable, is it?”
“The house is the sure thing,” said Linda.
When I tried to get her to tell me more about the time when David Bradley and Bill Green died, she said it was awful and looked like she would start crying again. “You came at the end. Everything was crazy, everyone running around making up stories. Charlie hadn’t been out of jail long. Everybody was trying to cover for him, so he wouldn’t get sent back.”
“Get sent back for what?”
“I don’t know … . It wasn’t like we thought he’d done anything. Those guys were connected to Charlie, and he was just out of prison and still on parole and couldn’t afford to have the cops suspect him.” She sounded irritated and banged the little car in and out of gear. “I don’t know why you’re dredging all of this up anyway.”
“I didn’t bring it up. You did. How did Aaron fit in?”
“Aaron? … I told you. He didn’t have anything to do with anything. He was the boss. Besides, he was gay. You guys barely talked to him.”
“What about Walter?”
“I told you I didn’t know any Walter.”
It was stuffy in the little car. She pulled over and we sat there in front of the rooming house. I tried once more. “What is it that scared you when I told you Aaron had been killed?”
She looked scared again.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Look, Linda. Do you know some reason Greg would have killed Aaron Adams?”
She looked like a little girl. I couldn’t imagine her not telling the truth. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Well, then, what?” I was exasperated.
She pulled her knees up in front of her so she could turn her whole body to face me. “If I tell you something, will you just forget about everything? Go back to New York and leave me alone?” The look in her eyes was pleading and winsome. If at that moment she’d put her arms around my neck the way she used to, I would’ve promised her anything. But she didn’t put her arms around me, and I didn’t promise.
“Just after David died, Greg told me Bill Green had killed him.” She sat rigidly in her seat, her eyes locked on mine. “When Bill Green died …” Her face was puffy, her eyes red again and glistening with tears. “I can’t say this. I just can’t say it. You know what I’m going to say … . Don’t make me say it.” She began wailing, and when I tried to put my hand on her shoulder to calm her, she whacked it away. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Aaron. It doesn’t have to do with anything. I don’t know where Greg is.”
She shook her head and buried her face in her hands, managing to make clear between sobs and hiccups that she wanted me to go. So I left Linda crying in her car and hobbled up to my room, lay down for a nap, and drifted off to sleep with the thought gnawing at me that Greg might do better for himself not being found.
Sue Gleason had invited Ntango and me for dinner to find out how we’d done on our search. So when Ntango returned from the casinos, with a few extra bucks
in his pocket this time, we went. She lived in an open, airy, nautical-looking two-story modern house facing the ocean. It was on the same side of Atlantic City as Linda’s, but in a more upscale neighborhood. Ntango and I sat on a soft and billowy dark brown couch across from a large bay window, drinking Jamaican rum and grapefruit juice, watching the moon rise over the dark and shifting water.
I told Sue about not finding Greg in the directories, then later finding him under a different name in the high school yearbook. She thought about that for a few minutes. “I’m not sure what it means,” she said finally, sitting back comfortably in the stuffed easy chair that matched the couch. “He might have changed his name simply because he didn’t like the name, or he might have because he wanted to conceal his identity. But it wouldn’t do any good if he had a record and wanted to hide it from the casinos. They use fingerprints.”
“Maybe he has two lives,” Ntango said. We both turned to stare at him. He sipped his drink, smiling with his eyes. “That’s what I’d like to have. When you said two names, I thought that I’d like to be two people. Some days, Ntango driving a cab. Some days, another man, living in the country maybe.”
We let this register, then Sue said, “It’s been done. Housewife in the morning, hooker at night.”
“I doubt that Greg’s a hooker,” I said. They both looked at me. “Or a housewife, either,” I added weakly.
“You’ve created quite a puzzle for yourselves,” Sue said. Somewhere in the course of our conversation, she’d begun writing on a pad. She noticed me watching her. “These are just obligatory letters.”
“Do you ever do one thing at a time?”
While we talked, she continued to write her letters, interrupted by an occasional trip to the kitchen, where she was cooking dinner. I tried putting together the whole story, with an eye toward connecting the past murders to Aaron’s recent murder. But as I unraveled the story, it became clear I hadn’t come up with anything to connect the past and Aaron’s murder, except Greg.