by Con Lehane
“This person Charlie sounds interesting,” Sue said. “Do you know where he is now?”
“I remember vaguely that a few years ago John had said his father was semiretired and lived out in Arizona.”
“What did he retire from?” Ntango asked.
“From being a gangster, I guess.” Then I remembered that in addition to his nefarious activities, John’s father had a respectable job. But if I’d ever known what it was, I didn’t remember.
We talked for a while longer but didn’t come up with any new ideas to explain where John was, what Dr. Wilson and Walter were doing in Atlantic City, why Greg had two names, why he’d pushed me down in the casino, or how I might go about finding answers to any of those questions. So after sea bass and white wine, Ntango and I left to relax at the casinos before heading back to New York.
While Ntango sought his fortune from the craps table, I lurched off in search of my own treasure. It took twenty minutes of thumping between the casino tables, but I found her. Her face tight with concentration, she was raking in the house’s winnings. When I approached the table, she looked up and her sparkling smile broke through the weariness in her face. She was glad to see me after all.
“I have a break in fifteen minutes,” she said. During those seconds that she looked into my eyes, I felt perfectly happy. For that moment, being with her was the only thing in the world I wanted.
With a few minutes to kill, hoping the gods of probability would take pity on a cripple, I laid my crutches down and took a seat at the blackjack table next to hers. Fifteen minutes later, Linda, shaking her head sympathetically, stood beside me for the last hand and watched the dealer drop a four of hearts on top of his king-six to beat my nineteen and scoop up the last of my fifty bucks in chips.
“What are you going to do now?” Linda asked.
“I’m going to give up rambling, gambling, and staying out late at night. Let’s go for a walk.” I took her by the craps table to meet Ntango, but since he held the dice and had just made his point, we didn’t want to get in the way, so we left.
“I’ll go with you if you promise not to talk about this afternoon,” Linda said.
This time, I promised.
As we walked away from the table, Linda slipped her arm through mine and pulled herself tightly against me. “I’m glad we get another chance to say good-bye. Seeing you just appear in that crowd around the table made me so happy, I almost cried.” Her face, pressed against my arm, was as softly colored as a child’s.
For some stupid reason, I felt tears well up behind my own eyes as I looked at her. “The ones who should be crying are those poor suckers you keep fleecing at the table,” I said.
She hugged my arm, causing my crutch to wobble.
“Can we go outside?”
Her forehead wrinkled with worry for a second; then her face brightened. “I’m not supposed to, but I don’t care. I used to go out all the time to smoke a joint before I got pregnant.”
“I actually happen to have a joint.” I patted my chest pocket as we walked through the doorway and out onto Pacific Avenue.
“We can smoke it on the boardwalk.” Linda let go of my arm and walked slowly beside me. “Just like old times,” she said wistfully.
We sat on an old wooden-slatted bench set on stone haunches that had withstood a century of Atlantic storms, while somewhere in front of us the surf rolled, the hushed roar drifting in on the darkness. I lit the joint and passed it to Linda. When I first knew her, she was the world’s sweetest flower child. We got to know each other by sneaking out the kitchen door and smoking joints in the alley behind the Dockside kitchen. The first time we ever kissed was in that alley, next to a Dumpster.
Now, on the bench on the boardwalk, under the stars and a moon that was three-quarters full, my face brushed by the damp wind from the ocean, I put my arm around Linda, and she rested her head on my shoulder. There really wasn’t anything to say. When I bent over and kissed her, her mouth moved gently against mine for a few seconds, but except for that, she remained perfectly still.
“Whew,” she said when she pulled away from me, a dazed look in her eyes.
“Maybe if we close our eyes, we’ll drift back in time.”
“That would be wonderful.” She turned toward me. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, and it excited me. In the darkness, her features were less distinct, so her expression didn’t give any extra meaning to her words, yet I felt her eagerness. But in a second, she changed. “We can’t do the things we used to do, Brian.” She stared at me, and I felt the chill of her anger.
I didn’t say anything.
She wrestled with herself for a moment, then came closer to me again, nestling her head against my chest. For what seemed a long time, we watched the sea beyond the darkness. When we walked back to the casino, taking the long way, I felt an odd mixture of contentment and longing—and there still wasn’t anything to say.
About twenty feet from the front door of the Claridge, Linda stiffened beside me. Instinctively, I looked up. There, bursting through the doorway at his usual stampedelike pace and barreling down Atlantic Avenue toward Resorts International, was Big John. I hollered his name but caught the sound in my throat, so it came out a hoarse whisper that only Linda heard.
Stunned for the moment, I watched John. “I’m going to follow him,” I told Linda as we pressed against each other and the wall of the building.
“Why?”
I couldn’t explain. It seemed like what I should do. “Don’t worry. I’m just curious. I’ll call you later. Would you get Ntango at the craps table and ask him to catch up with me?” With that, I hoisted myself up, despite the increasing pain in my armpits, and went hippity-hoppity down the avenue.
Ntango caught up with me near the Resorts’ entrance on the street side. I kept John in sight while Ntango negotiated with one of the local cabbies at the hack stand in front of the hotel. Sure enough, John handed the valet a ticket. Ntango waved me over. I ducked into the cab, but Ntango went to stand at the corner of the hotel—too near Big John for my money; I couldn’t guess what he was doing. When the attendant pulled John’s big Eldorado out of the lot and stopped about fifty feet in front of us, Ntango sidled up behind it, almost brushing against the back of the car. He crossed the street and then crossed back again behind the cab and climbed in beside the driver.
“Hey,” said the cabdriver. “Good idea.” The cabbie was big and round and very dark. He looked like he’d been poured into his seat at the beginning of his shift and wouldn’t get out again until someone pulled the stopper at quitting time. He had a green-black-and-red flag on the dashboard and a decal on the back of the front seat that said JESUS LOVES YOU.
Ntango and the driver exchanged smiles, and when John’s car pulled away, I saw that a portion of the taillight had been blacked out. Ntango had covered it with tape he’d borrowed from the driver.
“Taillights look a lot alike,” Ntango said.
I took note of the irony of using Big John’s money to pay for following him. Despite what I’d said—or not said—to Linda, I did have a pretty good idea why I was doing it. I didn’t trust Big John now. That was one reason. But there were other things, too: outrage that he’d left me to get shot; curiosity, after all these years, about what he did do when I wasn’t supposed to know about it. I felt like I was claiming my right to something. I’d paid my dues with a bullet in my leg.
He tooled the Eldorado around a couple of corners, then out Ventnor toward 694, heading toward the Atlantic City Expressway and then either Philadelphia or the Garden State Parkway. I had a sinking feeling that things were going wrong. Here I was in an Atlantic City cab with the meter running, possibly heading for New York, while the New York cab I’d hired was sitting in an Atlantic City parking garage. Lew Archer never ran into this kind of trouble. Fortunately, Big John’s car passed the ramp for the Garden State Parkway north and began winking with its bandaged eye, indicating he would go south on the Garden State.
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The cabdriver was good at his job. He exchanged pleasantries, talked about the light traffic, and in general tried to act like this cab ride was no different from any other. A couple of times, he mentioned the speed—John was doing over seventy—and he hinted he might be wondering why we were following this guy, but he didn’t come right out and ask. About twenty minutes down the parkway, just after the second tollbooth, John’s signal blinked again—this time the good eye—and he turned off the parkway at Exit 17. The sign said SEA ISLE CITY, the town he, Greg, and Linda hailed from. We were going back to the roots all right.
Turning right at the end of the exit, we followed him across the coastal wetlands, the reeds and the water flat and dark outside the window, the black asphalt road stretching across this anomaly, neither land nor sea, for a mile or two, then over a bridge onto the island. A multistory white stucco condominium loomed in front of us, aspiring toward Palm Beach or Fort Lauderdale; a nightclub beside it glowed in garish panels of red and green lights. The street into town was wide and quiet until it crossed the main drag and then dead-ended at the ocean.
There was a grass island in the middle of the street we drove in on and on the far side of the street were some new one-story brick buildings, the spiffiest of them housing the police station. On the other side of the street, a large faded red lobster clung to the side of a shedlike building that sat on pilings out over a canal; beyond that lay rows of frame houses, mostly painted white or wearing those dark brown shingles peculiar to the seaside.
John turned a block before the main drag. From this street, looking beyond the first row of buildings, I could see brown sheds, weathered piers and pilings, and open boats, broad across the beam, seaworthy vessels that looked like they worked for a living. Real life existed beyond the condominiums, hanging on by its fingertips against gaudy prosperity and beach life. We drove along a street of mostly single-story houses with patches of white stone for front lawns. The street was lined with parked cars, many wearing Pennsylvania license plates. John drove slowly, and we dropped back a good distance behind him. The bridge we’d come over, I guessed, entered onto the island in the middle, because after a block or two the street signs were in the Fifties.
It was right about Fifty-eighth Street that headlights flashed behind us, and I heard the roar of gas and air being sucked into a powerful carburetor. For a second, I thought it was the cops. But it turned out to be one of those four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicles that they advertise during Jet games. It looked enough like the red Cherokee from Brooklyn for me to throw myself onto the floor of the cab, but the contraption roared past us and then past John without a fusillade of bullets directed at either of us.
The cabdriver dropped back farther behind John, but since no other cars moved on the street, I felt conspicuous. Beyond the houses outside the car window, the darkness seemed endless. I guessed from the depth of the darkness that the ocean was to our left and the bay to our right, and that the island was no more than a few blocks wide at the point we were passing. I wasn’t exactly lulled to sleep by the ocean breeze. I was tired, I’d left New York what seemed like days ago, I’d traveled many miles in distance and time, I’d had a couple of drinks and smoked a joint, and I wasn’t as alert as a hunter should be.
Somewhere in the Seventies, Big John’s car sped up—shot forward might be more accurate. The cabdriver looked over his shoulder at me. A command decision was required. “After him,” I shouted in a cavalry-charge voice. Who the hell did I think I was?
John’s car disappeared around a corner to the right, far in front of us. But the blacked-out taillight served its purpose, so I felt pretty slick, sitting forward now on the edge of my seat, leaning against the back of the front seat, the better to provide direction. When we spun around the corner into the street John had turned into, we found ourselves bearing down on the bay a block in front of us. A street lay parallel to the bay, and when the cabdriver skidded to a stop at the intersection, we were there at the corner of left and right with the bay in front of us.
“Which way?” asked the cabdriver.
The question became moot, however, because John’s car was parked with its lights out alongside the curb right at the intersection. The cabbie once more looked to me for leadership. But I was stymied. Like the family dog chasing the passing car, I had absolutely no idea what to do now that I’d caught it.
“Uh,” I said, feeling I must say something. This sound, intimating that I might have a plan after all, attracted the attention of Ntango as well as the cabdriver, so they were both looking at me when the cab door on my right side opened and a snub-nosed gun got in, followed by Big John.
He seemed surprised to see me.
“Brian!” he shouted. His face, following the gun into the cab, was cement-hard. As soon as he recognized me and spoke, the cement cracked, making way for his smile and his dimples. “Jesus Christ, bro.”
Taking Ntango and the cabbie into his confidence with a wave of his hand, he said, “Look at this guy,” gesturing toward me with his gun. In almost any situation, Big John was prone to lecture. This one of danger, desperation, and intrigue was no exception. “This guy is a rock,” said Big John, cuffing me around the shoulder with the gunless hand.
Ntango and the driver stared fixedly at him, as if they were already dead, for despite his cheerful expression and manner, Big John continued to hold the gun.
“You’re on the job, right, bro?” Big John shook his head some more, continuing to marvel over those qualities of perseverance and determination he seemed to have rediscovered in me. “I shoulda known. If I told you to track Greg down, you’d do it—even if you had to go over me.” Sitting beside me, he leaned against the backseat. “Jesus, bro, you almost did us both in.” He gestured toward the front seat. “Either of you guys got a smoke?” Dragging on the cigarette Ntango gave him, he said, “What a fucking life!” Then he pushed himself forward to put the gun in his belt.
“Can I assume you no longer plan to shoot us?”
John chuckled and gave me an affectionate shove with his forearm as he settled back into the seat. I introduced him to Ntango and the cabdriver who said his name was Bub Williams. John leaned forward again and shook hands with them in that twisted, backhanded, brotherhood way left over from the sixties.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked him.
Big John got his feet tangled up in the crutches and lifted them up. “Whose are these?”
“Mine,” I said. “I got shot.”
Big John raised an eyebrow.
“What the fuck is going on, John?” I tried to sound angry and menacing, but actually I was glad to see him.
chapter twelve
I told John how I got shot. Then I yelled at him. “Why did you leave me there, goddamn it? You told me it was safe.”
John’s eyes softened with sorrow. I didn’t know if he was sorrier for me getting shot or for himself being misunderstood. “I wouldn’t cut out on you, bro … . I didn’t think anything would happen.” His drooping eyes would have made a basset hound seem cheerful. “I got a call Greg was playing blackjack at the Claridge. I left you a message. I called you a couple of times. I didn’t know anything had happened to you. I never expected there’d be trouble.”
“Well, who shot me? You told me that guy Wilson was safe. Who is he?”
John shook his head. “It wouldn’t have been him. I don’t know what happened.” His basset hound expression returned.
But I wasn’t buying it, so I persisted. “Where’ve you been? Where are you going now?”
John answered in the same placating tone. “I kept missing Greg at about a dozen different places all over Atlantic City. That’s why I’m still here. I should be back in New York.”
“Well, I found him.”
As I told John about our encounter, he looked troubled. “You sure he knew it was you?”
I nodded.
“You sure of the other two guys?”
“I’m sure.”
John nodded, calculating, like he might do when figuring out where to place his next bet. Sitting back against the seat, he thought things over. I did some thinking, too, looking out the cab window at the calm black water of the bay and the marsh grass stretching like Oklahoma wheat beyond the water toward the backlit sky and the floating dots of headlights back on the mainland. A thousand gulls shrieked like banshees from their nesting places in the marshes. Life as I knew it was back there across the bay, distanced from me now, hushed by the expanse of water and marsh of the Inland Waterway.
“You followed me from AC,” John said into the silence of the night. “I wouldn’t have known it, except your headlight is out. This one-eyed car with a dome light was on my tail from the time I left the hotel.”
“Shit,” I said.
John kept his own counsel for a few moments. Seeming to decide something, he reached in his pocket for a wad of bills. “How much you want for this trip?” he asked Bub.
Bub looked at me, then at Ntango. “We’re with Brian,” Ntango said quietly.
“He’s coming with me,” John said.
Ntango’s smile was as soft as his voice; nonetheless, it was clear we would all die that night at the edge of the bay before Ntango would leave. It came home to me, as it often did, that real danger lurked never far from single men who live the nightlife we’d chosen: A couple of drinks with the wrong woman, a brushing of shoulders in the doorway of an unfamiliar gin joint, and you’re in the alley fighting for your life.
“It’s okay, Ntango,” I said, leaning toward the front seat, clasping him on the shoulder to calm him. “Despite appearances, John is my friend.”
John squirmed and began a couple of times to say something. He admired Ntango’s loyalty, so he tried to put things right. “You guys did a good job,” he said with the pomposity of a general bestowing a medal. “Things got a little bit confused. But you guys ain’t gonna go wrong sticking by Brian.”
While I hoisted myself out of the cab and onto the crutches, John leaned in the front window and handed Bub a C-note, then elaborately shook hands with both Ntango and Bub again.