by Con Lehane
I signed the release forms and regained my possessions. Sheehan told the booking guy that my lawyer would be in to do the rest. As I’d surmised earlier, this guy didn’t care if it was a jail break.
St. Luke’s was only a dozen or so blocks up Amsterdam from the precinct building. I tried to be cooperative as Sheehan asked his few questions, but I couldn’t tell him about Ernesto because that would get him and his friends in trouble. I couldn’t tell him where Greg was. And I didn’t want to tell him about Dr. Wilson now that I knew he was John’s father. My discretion made our little chat somewhat strained. But I did break down and tell him the whole story about the second coming of the red Cherokee. I left out Dr. Wilson and the address, but the rest of it was what had happened.
“The second time.” Sheehan said. “The same guys?” We were headed up Amsterdam. He drove easily, keeping up with the cabs, timing the lights, switching lanes, using the mirrors as much as the windshield. Concentrating on driving, he spoke without turning toward me.
“You were shot in the leg as a warning the last time, right?” Sheehan glanced quickly at me. “I don’t think they were warning you this time. What do they want you to stop doing?”
“I have no idea. I don’t deal drugs. I don’t owe bookies any money. I can’t stop doing something if I don’t know what it is. I don’t think they meant to shoot me. I think they wanted to take me somewhere.”
“Yeah,” said Sheehan. “To a vacant lot in Canarsie.”
Ntango was in an OR recovery room when we got to the hospital. The chief surgical resident told us he’d been shot in the lower part of the head; the bullet missed the brain and came out behind his ear. There was swelling near his brain, so they surgically released some of the pressure. He was unconscious and the resident didn’t know when he’d wake up or how he would be when he did.
There wasn’t much more to say, and they didn’t like us hanging around, so Sheehan and I went outside.
As soon as the door closed behind us, Sheehan lit a cigarette. “I should take you downtown and put the screws to you,” he said, not unkindly.
We stood on Amsterdam Avenue in front of St. Luke’s Hospital. Across the street was an apartment building that some of the hospital workers lived in. A couple of blocks up the street, Columbia University began. A couple of blocks east, the end of the campus backed up against Morningside Park, and beyond the park stretched the howling Harlem slums.
“Your old buddy Aaron Adams lived a pretty sordid life. Did you know that?”
“Oh?” I said, deciding not to mention my talk with Scott Cooper, Aaron’s former partner. “The Aaron I knew was rich. He went to boarding schools and graduated from Princeton.”
“Sounds like a different guy. This guy Aaron worked at a fancy restaurant as a maître d’, where he made maybe five hundred a week. When he was murdered, he was living in an SRO on Forty-fourth Street, the kind of hotel I don’t like to walk into by myself. He was a pervert, a drunk, and a cokehead, and he’d done time. On the first conviction, he got released to rehab. The second, he did a three-year bid at Greenhaven.” Sheehan looked thoughtful; I’d say wistful, if I’d thought him capable of it. “We used to call them pansies. Fairies. But a life like his would scare me to death.”
We contemplated the morning light coming to Amsterdam Avenue. Then Sheehan put his cop hat back on. “That bar boy is from Colombia, right?” He dragged on a cigarette, leaning his back against the front wall of the hospital.
“Not Colombia.” I didn’t hide the irritation in my voice. “He’s from Chile.”
This gave Sheehan only a second’s pause. “The way it looks, he sold drugs on the side. Aaron was his customer. Something went wrong.”
I stared at Sheehan. I could feel my eyes narrow with suspicion. I hoped Sheehan couldn’t see it. “That’s speculation, though, isn’t it? How does Greg fit in?”
“He doesn’t; he’s an accessory, probably got scared and ran. That’s why I’m not going to hammer you for helping hide him out.” He watched a cab pull away from the curb, then turned to face me. “There’s one piece that doesn’t fit yet. I’m told two guys came to see the bartender that night, an older guy with gray hair and a younger guy. It may be nothing, but we got to check it out. When we find them, we’ll tie things up.” Standing up straight, he took a step away from the building and flicked his cigarette butt, spinning, out into the middle of Amsterdam Avenue. “You don’t have any guesses who the two guys might be, do you?”
Once more, Sheehan looked like he knew whatever it was I was keeping from him. Once more, with difficulty, I fought back the urge to tell him. I shuffled a little under his scrutiny. “Sorry, I have no idea.”
Sheehan lit another cigarette in the manner of a man little concerned about the outcome of the conversation. “Just be careful. Life ain’t worth nothing to these Latin drug people.”
“Unlike us nativist Americans, eh?”
Sheehan looked hurt. “These guys are vicious.”
“Vicious how?”
“Bringing in dope. Smuggling illegals. Murder. Terrorism.”
“Terrorism?” I raised an eyebrow.
Now Sheehan looked irritated. “If you want to get those guys in the red Cherokee off your back, you take it up with that Ernesto guy.” He smiled. When he did, I realized that unlike most people, who look better when they smile, he looked much better when he didn’t. “That is, of course, if you can find him.”
I turned down a ride, so Sheehan walked down the block to his car, and I propelled myself toward home along 112th Street. All the way there, in the gray dawn light, I kept picturing Ntango’s sleepy-looking half-closed eyes that masked his really alert intelligence, his soft voice and gentle manner, qualities that only the foolish took for weakness. I hadn’t really known how much of a friend he’d become until I felt the empty space now without him.
When I woke up later that morning, I stayed in bed, pretending to myself I was still asleep. Sheehan had things figured out wrong, I decided. But he could probably grab Ernesto and make the charge stick anyway, for all I knew of the processes of justice. And, for all I knew for sure, he might have figured things out right.
I went back to the hospital, my heart filled with dread, to check on Ntango. There was a lot more activity now—the day shift, I guessed—though the chief resident was still there, deep dark circles under his eyes, doing paperwork and conferring with someone new every ten seconds, it seemed. But he did take a moment to look me in the eye with a large degree of sympathy.
“You can sit and wait,” he said. “Or we can call you when something changes.” He looked away and then back again. “He’s getting stronger. I’m feeling more confident than I did last night.”
I thought I should wait with Ntango until he woke up, and I did sit by his bed for quite a while. But the sight of the tubes in his nose and mouth and the IV line in his arm and the sound of the monitors beeping, plus the medicinal antiseptic smell were making me sick. I also wanted to find the pricks who’d shot him, and I wanted to begin looking for them by talking to John and getting the lowdown on the phony optometrist—his dad. I wanted to get the loose ends tied up and then come clean to Sheehan with the whole story, with the possible exception of the freedom fighters in the Bronx, and let the cops figure out what the hell was going on.
I thought about calling my friend Carl, the doorman, to sit with Ntango, but he worked nights and slept during the day. He also got pissed if anyone called while he was sleeping and usually hung up on them. Then I thought of Kevin. He’d been a real trouper when his grandfather—my ex-wife’s father—was dying, visiting him in the hospital almost every day, and he was really fond of Ntango. I called his mother at work and asked her. She didn’t like it much but said she’d leave it up to Kevin. So I called Pop, told him Ntango had been shot, and asked him to get Kevin and see if he’d be willing to keep watch over Ntango at the hospital.
Since Kevin had known Ntango for years and had tooled around the city with h
im in his cab any number of times, and since he knew Ntango loved him like a son, he readily agreed to spend a couple of days with me and take his turn sitting with Ntango.
“The same guys who shot you shot Ntango?” he asked when he arrived an hour or so later, his teenage sullenness bowled over by wide-eyed astonishment. “What are you gonna do now? Are the cops after them?”
“Sort of,” I said evasively. “First, I have to talk to John and straighten a couple of things out. Then we’ll go after them. This isn’t TV, Kevin. Problems don’t get settled so easily. In real life, the good guys don’t always win—the good guys aren’t even always the good guys. The punks who shot us are puppets—working for someone, probably someone who makes a lot of money off them. We need to find out who and what’s behind this before we can stop them.”
“Yeah,” said Kevin, his awe receding, his eyes closing, the sullenness returning. “When you track them down, maybe you can lecture them to death.”
chapter sixteen
I finally reached John at his office the next morning to tell him Ntango had gotten shot. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, “I don’t understand this, bro. I don’t know why anyone’s after you.”
When he asked where we’d been the night it happened, I told him the truth—that we’d gone to the Bronx to talk to Ernesto.
“What’d you do that for?” It was both a question and an accusation.
“He called me. He’s got problems, too.”
“Problems! You’re goddamn right he’s got problems!” John’s tone was controlled but near the edge of an explosion. “You should’ve stayed away from him, like I told you. Who the hell knows what he’s into?” John’s voice went softer. “I’m sorry about your friend. You better lay low until we figure out who’s after you.”
I wasn’t in the mood for John’s brush-off right then. “Look, John, Ntango got shot because someone was after me. If you won’t tell me everything you know about what’s going on, I’m going to the cops.”
I could sense John stiffen through the phone line. But he pulled himself together. “Listen, bro,” he said soothingly. “I ain’t gonna let anything happen to you.” He paused for a moment. “I got an idea … . Let me put you up at one of the hotels until this blows over.”
I barely heard what he said. I just went on. “What’s your father got to do with this, John?”
There was no sound from the other end of the phone for a long time. “Maybe you better come over to my office,” he said finally.
John’s office was on the forty-first floor of a glittering glass building on Sixth Avenue, a couple of blocks south of the New York Hilton, near Rockefeller Center. The building and its companions, clones of Lever House over on Park Avenue, were built during the late fifties and early sixties, when America’s future looked bright and the bankers and real estate sharks wanted nothing to do with the past. I preferred granite and marble myself.
The lobby of John’s building turned out to be where the marble was after all, variegated off-white polished stone with deep blue lines. The lobby ceiling must have been four stories high. The marble surrounded me like the cliffs of heaven. A gigantic black metal abstract sculpture in the middle of the lobby looked like a pile of arms and legs. Still, if only because of sheer size, it was imposing. If the lobby was intended to humble those who entered the building, it worked on me. I looked over my shoulder a few times to see if the security guards were on their way to give me the heave-ho.
I told the elevator starter I wanted the forty-first floor. He directed me to a bank of elevators whose first stop was the fortieth floor. On the forty-first floor, the elevator doors opened into a carpeted reception area. At the front desk was a young blond woman with a very pretty smile, white teeth left over from an Ipana commercial, a corn-fed complexion, and blue eyes that saw what they wanted to see and nothing else. She looked like she’d come to the job straight from cheerleading school in Iowa. I wondered if she was the one I’d argued with on the phone when I was trying to track John down.
“Mr. Wolinski, please,” I said.
“Whom shall I say is calling?” she responded daintily. She looked with some curiosity but without any obvious sympathy at my crutches.
“His proctologist.”
“Name, please,” she squeaked.
“He’ll know.”
John came out of his office, wiping a grin off his face. As always, he moved decisively, taking large strides, his eyes bright and alert. As usual, he looked healthy and robust, with the energy of three or four people. As usual, I was dragging myself through the morning.
“How’s your friend doing?” John asked.
“He’s the same as he was—in a coma.”
John let that register. “That’s rough, bro. You know if there’s anything I can do—”
I held out my hands in a helpless gesture.
“Does he got a good doctor? A good room? Insurance?”
“Actually, I don’t know if he has any of those things. I don’t think he has insurance.”
“That, I can take care of. Jane will help you fill out an employment application for him and backdate it a couple of months.”
John said he was tied up for a few minutes and would leave me to fill out the forms for Ntango. He saw me watching Jane, the Ipana secretary, as she sat back down and crossed her legs. “Jane”—he raised an eyebrow in my direction—“you give Mr. McNulty here whatever he wants while he’s waiting.” He made a kind of comically obscene gesture to suggest what Jane might do for me. But she didn’t see it, and he didn’t really mean it. When she saw us both looking at her, she blushed, pulled her skirt down, and tucked her knees in under her desk.
“Don’t let John pick on you,” I said as he ducked back into his office to finish a phone call.
“Oh, not Mr. Wolinski,” she gushed. “He’s wonderful.”
Trying to look like someone who’d been in an office before, I self-importantly looked through my pockets as though I might find something of value there. What I did find were the Dockside photographs Ntango had gotten from the security chief at the Claridge. On a whim, I showed them to Jane.
“Did you ever see any of these people before?” I dropped the stack of pictures in front of her. She looked at them in wonder. “That’s Mr. Wolinski,” she said. “He looks so young and handsome. And that’s Mr. Phillips,” she said, looking at Greg. “This man was here just a few days ago, but I don’t remember his name.” This time it was Aaron Adams she pointed to. “And this one …” She held it up, looked at me, then at the picture again. “Is this you?”
I smiled a little sheepishly.
“You must be a lot older now,” she said without a trace of irony.
I couldn’t finish the forms because I didn’t know Ntango’s Social Security number. I said I’d get the information and bring it back. Then John summoned me to his pale blue-carpeted office, which had floor-to-ceiling windows and a shiny wooden desk about the size of a tennis court. There were abstract pastel paintings on the pale gold walls, a good-size, comfortable-looking couch beneath them, and what looked like a liquor cabinet against the far wall. The carpet was so thick, I bounced across it. I was afraid to sit on the couch, so I stood by the windows, leaning on my crutches, looking out over the spires and towers of the city through a haze that made everything gray.
Sitting at his desk, reclining in his high-backed leather swivel chair, John waited for me to speak.
“Quite a spread you got here,” I said.
John waved an arm at the expansive office. “I’ve been promoted again. The president called me in. ‘Wolinski,’ he said. Not Mr. Wolinski, not John—just Wolinski.” John leaned forward, warming to his story even though he had an audience of only one. “He puts his arm around my shoulder and leads me into this office. He shows me my nameplate with ‘Vice President’ on it. I tell the guy I have enough titles. This time, I want more money.” John glanced at me over the top of his glasses, making it seem that t
he joke was just between us.
“My apartment isn’t this big,” John said. Like much of what he said, this sounded both funny and regretful. He showed me around the office: bar, refrigerator, stove, private bathroom with a shower, closet with three or four suits and four or five pairs of shoes. The phone rang. He spoke briefly to someone I assumed was the manager of a hotel in Philadelphia. I didn’t really listen, but I heard enough to know it was about food and beverage costs being too high. “If you don’t have a bar manager who can get the right bar cost, I’ll come down and find one,” John said. He flashed me a look of pure disdain for the man he was speaking to, then hung up.
“What was that all about?”
John smiled conspiratorially, then opened his desk drawer and started pushing buttons like a mad scientist. A speaker on his desk played back the conversation, the placating and unctuous voice of the manager, the decisive, ironic voice of Big John. He laughed at my expression as I listened. “Maybe I’m paranoid,” he said. “But I keep a record of my phone conversations.”
“Just like Nixon,” I said.
“That’s funny,” said Big John after a pause. “You’re right. Nixon screwed by a tape recorder.”
I watched John curiously. His expression was strange—ominous—like he was about to tell me something. Instead, he shut off the machine and stared out the floor-to-ceiling window. “You know,” he said after some time had passed, “I come here in the morning and sit at this desk and wonder what the hell it was all for. You give up everything in your life for something and then when you get there, what you were after ain’t there anymore. You know what I mean?” His voice was almost tearful. “You ain’t gonna believe this. But I miss working the stick.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
My irony was wasted; John was back in Atlantic City in 1973. “I loved being a bartender: the front bar on Saturday night, a good crew behind you. We were kings of the mountain. I miss that—you know, it really is lonely at the top.”