by Con Lehane
“Why would he do that? Why would Greg not tell anyone about Sandra? Why go to all this trouble?”
John lifted his arm and gestured to the sea and sky around us, as if to let me in on the universe’s unanswered questions, too. “Only Greg can answer that, bro. But the life we know about’s the one we got worries about.” John watched the ocean for a long time again, then spoke without turning toward me. “Look, bro, you know where I come from.”
I nodded because he seemed to want me to, even though I didn’t know if he could see me.
“A long time ago, I buried the past. I got everybody else out, too, including Greg. Now he has to be a wise guy. He has to have a hustle. And it ain’t just him.” John sounded unsure of himself, like this big powerful machine that was skipping and missing and barely running on one cylinder.
“Is that why Aaron was killed?”
John picked up handfuls of sand, sifting them through his fingers and staring out over the ocean. When he spoke again, it was quietly and sincerely. “Look, bro, I’m gonna ask that you forget about all this. Forget about Aaron being killed. I know it ain’t right. It shouldn’t have happened. But no one can do anything about it now.” I started to say something, but he held up his hand to stop me. “I know you don’t want to stop. But there are things going on I can’t tell you about. I have to fix them myself. If I don’t, you’ll find out everything soon enough anyway.”
“Does this have anything to do with David Bradley and Bill Green?”
John’s reaction was extraordinary. He froze in midbreath and stared at me. Then he shook his head. “Who told you that?”
“It just came up.”
“How could it come up?” Then he caught the scent. “Linda,” he said.
“Not Linda … . I was here then, too, remember?”
“Jesus Christ,” said John. “Every fucking chicken I’ve ever known is coming home to roost.” He lifted his gaze to the sky, like he was going to bellow. Instead, he said, “Sometimes not knowing is better than knowing, bro. Let me take care of it.”
“What about whoever shot me?”
“I’ll find that out, too. I promise.”
“What about Greg?”
“I’m finished with him. He’s not going back to the corporation no matter how this shakes out. He can start another fucking new life.”
This reminded me of Ernesto, so I asked John what would happen to him.
“Who?”
“Ernesto. The bar back. I fired him, and I want to bring him back.”
“Stay away from him. He ain’t goin’ back, either.”
I started to ask why. But I remembered what Sheehan had said about the fibers on his bar jacket. “Ernesto called me.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. He left a message, but he didn’t say.”
John shook his head.
“Does he have anything to do with this?”
John raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t go meeting him in any dark alleys.”
After wrestling his way out of the sand and onto his feet, John held out his hand and pulled me up. He looked disdainfully at my gimpy leg. “You can’t work the stick like that. Hang around the Ocean Club another week or so and keep an eye on things for me. You’re management now, so I can keep you on the clock until you’re able to work again.”
Together, we trudged away from the dark water, the paler sky, and the rhythmic beating of the surf against the shore.
chapter thirteen
After a long drive in silence back to Atlantic City, John dropped me off at the rooming house—tourist lodge, if you listened to the landlady—telling me he’d see me back in the city in a day or two.
Though I was tired enough not to care about anything, I did notice that Ntango wasn’t in the room. It surprised me. Something wasn’t right about his not being there, but it didn’t scare me. I figured he’d stopped off at the casinos when he went to get his cab and maybe he was on a roll. I dropped on the bed in my clothes and slept for an hour or so. When I woke up, Ntango was the first thing I thought about. I looked toward his bed. He wasn’t there. I jumped up, found one crutch, got to the pay phone in the hallway, and called John. I woke him up.
“What the fuck could have happened?” he shouted, but his voice was thick with sleep and duller than it might have been.
“I don’t know.” My panic rose. I hadn’t eaten in a long time, so I was jittery.
“I’ll be over in a half hour.” His voice wasn’t as muddy.
“Hurry up.”
“Okay, bro,” he said quietly. “I’m on my way.” I felt like his thick arm had just gone around my shoulder to steady me. Forty minutes of pacing later, John showed up with coffee and bagels, which we ate in the car on the way back to Sea Isle City. He had a hunch. For my part, I tried not to have a hunch. My mind raced from one unsavory possibility to another, each of them centering on the SUV I’d seen and dismissed the night before. As we came down off the bridge leading into town, I saw Bub’s cab parked among the cruisers in the parking lot next to the police station. I froze.
“I knew it,” John said.
“What?”
“They arrested them.”
“Oh?” This was a startling turn of events, and I didn’t know what we were going to do about it. But it seemed like John did. He parked in the police parking lot and marched right through the front door of the cop shop, with me bouncing along in his wake.
“Who’s in charge here?” Big John demanded, bellying up to the desk like it was the bar at the Bucket of Blood. I knew we were in trouble: Big John had caught the scent of injustice.
“Who the hell are you?” the middle-aged, sour-faced desk sergeant asked right back.
John looked him up and down a couple of times. “I’m John Wolinski. This is Brian McNulty. You have two friends of ours in your lockup, and you’d better have a goddamn good reason for them being there.”
“Sit down,” the sergeant said. “I’ll get to you.”
John took off his glasses, then put them back on and leaned toward the sergeant as if he might grab him by the lapels and lift him out of his chair. “I’ll ask you one more time who’s in charge; then I’ll call the chief.”
The sergeant, in a grand gesture of defiance, placed the phone on the desk and slid it toward John. Staring at the sergeant with that imperious expression of his that wrote buffoon on the forehead of the victim, John pulled a small address book out of his pocket, looked in it, then dialed a number.
“Bob? John Wolinski here … . Good. I’m fine. Fine. How are you?” He laughed. “Great … . Actually, you can do something for me. I’m talking to a dunce here at your front desk.”
The dunce stared openmouthed at Big John as he told the chief about Bub and Ntango. When he finished the tale, John handed the sergeant the phone. The cop listened, looked at John, at me, at John again, his brow wrinkled, his expression pained, as if he couldn’t quite grasp what he was being told.
“We picked up these two guys,” he said into the phone. “ … Suspicion.” He screwed up his face. “Just suspicion.” He snarled at the receiver. “The cab had a headlight out.” The snarl edged his voice when he spoke again. “They were suspicious.” Then, softly, as if imparting a secret he added, “One of them’s a foreigner.” He listened, brow wrinkled. “I don’t know from where; he wouldn’t tell us. And he didn’t have any papers.” He glared at John, and his mouth got square.
When he hung up, he didn’t look at John anymore. “Okay,” he said, shuffling through some papers. “Just hang on. We’re gonna release ’em.” He picked up the phone again and mumbled into it, then looked behind him toward the squad room. As luck would have it, some of the crew who’d worked the graveyard shift the night before had stayed for some overtime on the day shift. Two young cops, who turned out to be Schmidt and Lunsford, the arresting officers, stuck their noses around the corner as Ntango and Bub came from the lockup to the desk.
“What gives?” asked Schmi
dt. He had close-cropped blond hair and a fresh-looking round face; he looked innocent, a big, chunky farm boy, like a guard or tackle on a high school football team. He seemed genuinely interested but not particularly concerned. And he didn’t have the nasty arrogant edge I’d come to expect in cops.
The sound of bristling and stiffening and the clatter of rattling belts, cuffs, keys, and flashlights coming from the squad room melded into a creaking silence. Four or five of Sea Isle City’s finest gathered around. From behind them came a red-faced, white-haired man in a gray Anderson-Little sports jacket that didn’t match his brown dress slacks. New York City Irish Cop Retired was printed on his forehead. He had quick blue eyes and, without much change of expression, made clear it would take a lot to impress him.
Bub and Ntango came to the side of the desk, picking up the envelopes with their belongings. I thought about tugging on the hem of John’s jacket.
“These guys get locked up for driving down the street?” asked John. “And you wonder why blacks holler about police abuse?”
“That’s not true,” said Schmidt. He sounded like he believed it.
John hunched himself down into his shoulders. He took in Schmidt and all the cops around him. Then his eyes rested on the older man. “Why’d you lock them up?” he asked him.
The older cop took a step closer, spreading his hands toward John. He looked like someone quick on his feet. “You’re wrong about this black thing. I worked with lots of black cops who would’ve locked ’em up, too. What’re they doing in Sea Isle? That’s not a tough question. Instead, they’re wise guys.” The man spoke in a placating, calming manner, but without backing down.
Big John wasn’t going to back down, either. “They don’t have to tell you why they’re here. They have a right to take care of their business, just like Brian and me.” I winced, wishing John hadn’t said that. I didn’t want this hard-eyed guy to start wondering what our business was.
“Look,” the older man said. He didn’t exactly smile, but his voice took on a buddy-buddy edge. “Maybe we made a mistake. We’re trying to protect the good people from the bad guys. Sometimes good people suffer a little inconvenience so we can get to the bad guys. We’re letting them go. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
John gently rocked back and forth as he stood like the colonel before the assembled troops. “It’s more than inconvenience. Some solid citizen says, ‘Hey, there’s a nigger walking down my street; he’s probably robbing something.’ So you go check it out. This poor bastard’s walking home from a twelve-hour day cleaning someone’s cellar for four or five bucks an hour. He’s walking because he can’t afford a car, and there’s no bus out in that wealthy neighborhood. He don’t want to be hassled. He’s had a long day. He’s tired. You come up and say, ‘Hey, you, what’re you doing here?’ Maybe you even say it politely. ‘Excuse me, sir, where you going? Do you have any identification?’ He’s tired of the bullshit. So he says, ‘Go fuck yourself. This ain’t South Africa.’ The guy’s fed up with the landlord, the bill collectors, cleaning people’s cellars, walking home when sixteen-year-old white kids are whizzing by in their sports cars. You stand in front of him. He brushes by you to keep walking. Boom. You grab him. He resists. Now, you say, he’s assaulting an officer. He’s into the slammer. You say he’s a bad guy. But he ain’t. He’s a working stiff.”
Big John walked to the far side of the room and wrapped his thick arm around Bub’s shoulder, while the pleading look in Bub’s eyes suggested he’d just as soon return to the lockup.
Ntango bowed slightly toward the assembled police force and said, “Gentlemen, if I am free to go?” They more or less tumbled over one another assuring him he was, and we moved toward the door.
“I’d still like to know what all of you were doing in Sea Isle” was the white-haired cop’s parting shot.
John and I followed Bub’s cab back to Atlantic City.
“How’d you know they’d be in jail?” I asked John.
“I grew up in these towns … . I know how these people think.”
“How did you get the chief to let them go?”
John turned and winked at me. “We go back a long way. He owed me a favor.”
Now it was time to get out of Atlantic City. I wanted to get back to my own slightly depraved normalcy. I couldn’t keep up with Big John. We gathered at the Claridge and said good-bye to Bub. Ntango said he needed a couple of hours’ sleep before driving back, so I decide to try to see Linda one more time, in the light of day, to say good-bye. When I called her, right after John, Bub, and Ntango went their separate ways, she said she’d meet me in the lobby of the Claridge because she was coming in to pick up her paycheck anyway.
I ate a hamburger in the hotel coffee shop for just under seven dollars and waited. She arrived fresh and pretty in black shorts and a red T-shirt. Bright-eyed, well rested, beaming with good health, she made me feel like a stumblebum. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d sat a couple of stools away, but she sat down right beside me and pecked me on the cheek. “You look like someone fished you out of the gutter,” she announced.
I told her I caught up with John and tracked Greg down, and that everything was okay, so I was going back to New York. She didn’t buy it, pestering me instead about where Greg was, what John was doing, and what the hell was going on. I didn’t tell her. “Yesterday, you didn’t want anything to do with all this,” I said. “You got your wish. It’s all over.”
“No,” said Linda. “It’s come back.” She twirled toward me on her stool. “This time, it’s not going to end so easily.” Her eyes bore into mine, and then they softened with tears. “It isn’t your fault.”
Every time I saw Linda, I brought her to tears. I had no idea what she was crying about and no idea how to comfort her, so I waited while she pulled herself together. I wanted her to tell me what wasn’t going to end so easily this time and what might have seemed to end easily last time. But she didn’t, though she did agree to look at the videotape of Greg and his pals with me. I wanted to try one more time to see if she recognized Walter.
We got ourselves escorted to a security room on the floor below the lobby. Two security guards sat watching dozens of TV monitors that were picking up the action from all over the casino. When the security guard rolled the video from my encounter two nights before, I caught a glimpse of myself from the back hobbling into camera range; then the video picked up Greg and, behind him, Walter and Dr. Wilson. Just as Dr. Wilson hove into view, Linda sprang from her chair toward the screen. “My God,” she blurted out. “That’s Charlie.”
“Who?”
“Charlie,” she said. “John’s father.”
chapter fourteen
On the trip back to New York, I could no longer ignore the burning pain in my leg. It had begun in earnest that morning, and the longer it went on, the surer I was that the leg was gangrenous and would have to be amputated. My future rose before me: Brian McNulty, the one-legged bartender. When I looked under the bandage, that whole part of my leg was bright red and puss was seeping from the wound. I stared at it as if I’d found maggots there.
By the time I got to my apartment building, I knew I needed to do something about my leg, so I asked Ntango. He said I should go to the ER at St. Luke’s, right there on Amsterdam Avenue. But I asked him if he’d take me to Brooklyn. Maybe I could find Dr. Parker, the beautiful surgeon who’d taken the bullet out of my leg in the first place. When I went inside to call to try to have her paged at Kings County, I picked up an official-looking envelope someone had slipped under my door. By some miracle, I reached her and she gave me directions to the clinic she was working in. Ntango drove me to Kings County.
As soon as I caught a glimpse of the surgeon in her clinic, I realized there might be life after Linda after all. If anyone was to chop off my leg at the knee, I wanted it to be Dr. Parker. I wanted to see that reluctant smile one more time before I drifted off to sleep and woke up with a stump. But this meeting with Dr. Parker
in the surgical clinic—a tomblike cavern with ancient marble floors, worn wooden benches, and a smattering of Brooklyn’s walking wounded of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities—began under a dark cloud. No smile from the doctor this time: I’d messed up her handiwork. As soon as she got me into the examining room, she began complaining about bandages needing to be changed, pills taken, wounds washed, and patients listening to their doctors. I nodded in abashed agreement until she washed out the sore—using lye for spite, from the feel of it—and I screamed.
She stopped swabbing to look me in the eye and tell me I was acting like a baby.
“It hurts,” I whined.
When she finished rubbing my leg wound with salt, she wrapped it up in a fresh bandage and handed me a bottle of pills. “You’re infected,” she said in a biblical tone. “These are antibiotics. If you don’t take them on time and for the full course, you’re going to end up in the hospital on an IV.”
“Will I lose my leg?” I was trying to keep a stiff upper lip—I was raised in Brooklyn; I should bite the bullet—but the question slipped out. I was putty in her hands. I liked how strong and efficient she was. I even liked the way she ripped my leg to shreds.
The secret smile slipped out in spite of herself. “Not if you take your medicine like a good boy.”
I watched her in her long white lab jacket and her gabardine slacks, her blue blouse opened a button at the top along her graceful neck. She seemed to be through with me and had turned to her clipboard. But I hung on.
“Uh,” I said. She turned. I barreled forward. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, want to have dinner with me?”
“Tonight?”
I was sure that meant no. “Why not tonight?”
She smiled. “Where?”
I thought this was also part of the argument, so I stared at her blankly.
She asked again. “Where?” With that half smile, she looked bemused and a little puzzled. Her smile was like my father’s.