What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  “Did he have anything to do with Aaron getting killed?”

  “He didn’t kill Aaron,” John said softly.

  I waited a few minutes; then I went on. “If it’s all the same to you, I think now is the time to clear up a couple of other things.”

  John curled his lip and tightened his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. The irritation level was already pretty high in the car. “Go ahead,” he said without enthusiasm.

  “Let’s talk about cocaine dealing, strong-arm tactics, lying, cheating, stealing, and murdering. Does that cover everyone’s hobbies?”

  “Some of us play golf, too,” John said. He leaned back against the seat, driving with his wrist draped over the top of the steering wheel. We were doing about ten miles an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Gowanus Expressway heading into the Battery Tunnel, so it didn’t make much difference what he did with the steering wheel.

  “You know who brings cocaine into the country?” Big John asked. “The government,” he answered with a satisfied smirk. “The CIA brings it in from Colombia. You think those drug cartels are outlaws? Those days are over. Now they’re all businessmen.”

  “Talking about businessmen,” I said. “You’re secretary told me Aaron Adams came in to see you last week right before he was killed.”

  John looked toward me; then his eyes darted away. He relaxed, sinking lower into his leather seat. He looked like he was ready to give up, staring at the taillights of the Love Taxi in front of us.

  Finally, he came to a decision. “You remember Arizona?”

  I remembered.

  “After a while, I needed Aaron to cover for me at the Dockside, so I cut him in.”

  I’d known John and Greg were flying to Arizona and driving back rented cars stuffed with bales of marijuana. But we thought, So what? We were all outlaws anyway—the counterculture; everyone smoked the stuff. But I couldn’t picture Aaron covering for a dope dealer. A Nixon Republican, he was the soul of the establishment. When push came to shove during the union campaign, he relished the oncoming strike, strode through the picket line like a peacock when it came, and cried for the National Guard when I took down his new sports car. He came speeding up to the picket line with his black paint—spattered red Triumph, craning his head out the side window on the driver’s side because he couldn’t see through the smashed windshield. He came for me, and my knees shook, but John grabbed him around the neck.

  “He did it,” Aaron shouted, the finger of accusation pointed so truly at its mark. “You’ll pay for this.” Tears glistened on his cheeks.

  “You don’t know who did it, Aaron,” John said calmly. “Tell the company to pay for the damage.”

  I would have been surprised back then to know Aaron covered for John. But then John had always assured me that everyone was corruptible.

  “These days I’m making good money,” John said now. “But for years after I came out from the bar, I didn’t make two-thirds of what you guys were making behind the stick. Those corporate whores, they thought I was just another shithead hotel-management graduate.” Big John looked over his shoulder as if “they” might be still be coming after him. The bitterness in his voice was as resonant as my father’s was when he used to rail against the bosses. “I used their mails, their couriers, their banks and their credit, and their corporate cars. Half their management people worked for me on the side. When they were paying me twenty-two thousand and laughing, I picked up another thirty on my own. By the time they moved me up to thirty-eight, I moved myself up to eighty.” John’s expression was aggrieved, like someone to whom an injustice had been done. “I haven’t done any of that for a long time. I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t need to anymore. But back then I had everyone in on the deal, Greg, my old man—and, for a time, Aaron. Later, I worked out gigs for Greg and my old man. For my old man, retirement in Arizona. For Greg, the Ocean Club, where he could pull down nearly a grand a week. By then, Aaron was long gone, strung out on coke and booze. He didn’t want my help.”

  Once more, like so many times in the past, John was trying to justify himself to me. He wanted me to say what he’d done was okay, though I couldn’t understand why he cared what I thought. On a good week, I made maybe six hundred bucks. On a bad week, I made three hundred, and half of it on any week went for child support.

  “I told Charlie I’d front him the nut to set up something easy—like a liquor store—far away from Philly and the shore, somewhere he wouldn’t get into trouble anymore. That was five years ago. I told myself, That’s the one good thing you done. Whatever else, you took care of your old man. And I took care of Greg, too. I was gonna work him up into management.

  “Now you see, right? Greg and my old man, they start out on their own. Who needs Big John?, they think We’ll do it ourselves, right? Now look at this fucking mess I got to straighten out.”

  The story was good, but not good enough to throw me completely off track. “So why did Aaron come to your office?”

  “He wanted a job, a management job. He was on the skids.” John gestured with his open hands, letting go of the steering wheel. “He was hinting about dealing for me. But I didn’t catch on. He must’ve known what Greg was up to. This time, I was the simpleton. I told him I’d get him something in a hotel if he was willing to leave town. He told me to fuck off. He’s hinting at somethin’. But I don’t know what it is. Maybe he was threatening me. But I didn’t pay any attention. What’d I care? He’s almost a stumblebum. That was the last I heard from him. When this thing came down, I kept it quiet that he’d been to the office. It was just a lousy coincidence. And I couldn’t afford for it to get out.”

  “So then he went to see Greg?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Another thought occurred to me, and I blurted it out. “Where’d you go after you left me the night Aaron was killed?”

  John rolled his eyes to the roof of the car again. “You see what I mean? Even you! You’re ready to send me over when you hear Aaron came to my office. Imagine what the cops or the company would do. I shoulda thrown him out the fuckin’ window then and none of this would have happened.” John got a faraway look in his eye and cocked his head in my direction. He looked almost sheepish. “That night Aaron was killed, bro, after I left you, I was with someone I shouldn’t have been with. And I really would hate like hell to have to say who it was.” His eyes met mine.

  “‘She walks these hills in a long black veil’ sort of thing?”

  John nodded. “More than you know, more than you know.” He banged both hands against the steering wheel. “You see what happens? Greg never told me. I didn’t even know my own father was in New York. What does that tell you?” John glared at me. “These high rollers—my old man and Greg—they shouldn’t be going to the bathroom without supervision.”

  “Where does Walter come in?”

  “A year or so ago, he’s just there one night with Greg. Greg said I knew him from the shore. I didn’t remember. I still don’t. But I said okay.”

  “Just shows up one night? You don’t know where he came from?”

  “No.” John’s eyes turned smoky, like they did when he was troubled. “You know, there’s another thing. I was busy. Not paying attention. I didn’t think about it.” His voice trailed off. “I wasn’t conning anyone anymore. So like a dope, I think no one’s gonna be conning me.”

  When we got back to midtown, John asked me to go up to his office with him.

  “Ah, success!” I said, pole-vaulting across the plush carpet on my crutches. Starting to think I felt at home in John’s sumptuous office, I sat down on the couch. John picked up the phone and ordered some coffee, which was delivered in a silver pot by Jane, the blond receptionist. I felt embarrassed as she poured the coffee at the ornate round table in front of the couch. I thought she should get some coffee, too, as long as it was being poured. But she smiled just as brightly as she had when I met her, so maybe she didn’t mind pouring coffee. Big John seemed not to noti
ce her. You probably get used to this, too—pretty young women pouring you coffee—just like you get used to ragged and hungry homeless people sleeping in your doorway.

  The coffee was actually good. “Maybe she could leave the pot,” I suggested.

  “She’ll bring it back.” John chuckled for a minute when he realized I was embarrassed. He bent forward to lean on his desk and shook himself gleefully. “If I push that buzzer, she’ll come right back in. If I dial a couple of numbers and holler into the phone, four or five regional managers’ll come running, knocking each other down in the doorway to get in first.”

  He looked up at the ceiling and held out his arms like Moses presenting the Ten Commandments. “None of them could hold a candle to you or me or Greg behind the stick. They were assholes when I worked for them, assholes when I worked with them, and they’re assholes now that they work for me.

  “And you know, Brian”—John got up from his desk and walked over to sit beside me on the couch—“what you said was true. I never forgot it for a minute. The people out on the floors who make the hotels work, the maids who run up to the nineteenth floor to make up a room for someone getting in early, the waitresses and bartenders the customers come to see—like you and me at the Dockside. Well, I can tell you for sure this fucking corporation don’t give a rat’s ass about any of them.”

  We sat for a few minutes once John finished speaking. I remembered how we used to spend time like this just talking—about everything—hour after hour, drunk or sober, hanging out on the slow afternoons while the bar back ran the bar, sitting in the dark drinking beer after closing time, driving around to half a dozen joints on our nights off. We had in those years a closeness I didn’t have with anyone anymore, and I missed it.

  “So,” I said, leaning back into the soft couch, trying to balance my coffee cup on its saucer, then leaning forward to put it on the coffee table. When I sat back again, I sank down and couldn’t reach the cup.

  “So what?” asked John, who seemed quite comfortable on the couch, sitting back, resting his arm on the side of the couch.

  “What’s next?” I was getting irritated. I leaned forward for the cup again and felt like I was bobbing for apples.

  “Take a week off, until you can use the leg again. By then, things’ll be back to normal.”

  “I don’t want a fucking week off,” I shouted angrily, jumping up and causing a shooting pain in my sore leg. I had enough of the couch and the coffee table and the cup and saucer. “How the fuck do you drink coffee all bent up, with your nose touching your knees, for Christ’s sake?”

  John’s smile was slight, just a whisper, but enough to make me smile, too. “I’m gonna have a lunch counter put in for when my friends drop by,” he said.

  “I need to call my service.” I hobbled over to the phone on his desk. I’d left my number at the hospital in case anything happened with Ntango. But the hospital hadn’t called. There was a message from Greg, though. No number. The message was that he needed to talk to me, so he’d call back. And he said to be sure not to tell anyone he’d called.

  “Well?” John asked when I hung up.

  I was a little flustered not telling him about Greg. But Greg said not to tell anyone, so I didn’t. “Nothing. No news about Ntango. I’m gonna go to the hospital now.”

  John stopped me at the door, his expression somber. “You gotta watch your back, Brian.”

  “Thanks. I’ll call you.” I stopped in the doorway. “One more thing. What’s going to happen with Greg?”

  “You know, I’ve been bailing Greg out of things since he was twelve years old. Thirty years we’ve been partners—Butch and Sundance.” John sounded like a mother who was at her wits’ end because of a mischievous child. This was John’s real nobility: Despite the compromises he’d made along the way, he remembered where he came from and he cared about his friends. The sentiment was genuine, too, and it went both ways. Any of us who were John’s bros believed we would take a rap for him—if not any of the rest of us, certainly Greg—because he would do it for us. Big John’s eyelashes drifted over his eyes; he nodded his head slowly. “Maybe Greg’s taking off like that was the right thing to do.” He took off his glasses; his expression changed, and he switched tracks. “You know Greg well enough. Maybe he’s covering for that bar back.”

  This slowed me down a bit. John was right that Greg would disappear rather than rat on someone. But John had turned the tables on me. Ernesto and his campañeros in that burned-out hulk of a building, because they were part of my father’s worldwide movement for the final triumph of the little guy, demanded loyalty, too. John’s principles of loyalty, as rock-solid as they were, were personal; mine, as flabby as a damp handshake, were global—my legacy as a red-diaper baby. I didn’t believe John. Ernesto was too easy a mark.

  Still more or less able to read my mind, John came over and stood beside me. “Look, bro, I ain’t saying Ernesto did it. I ain’t saying let the guy take the fall, even if he did do it. We can take care of him, get him out of the country, back to his own country. Let him stay a few months or a year and the whole thing will blow over.”

  “He can’t go home; they’d execute him.”

  “Oh?” said Big John, raising an eyebrow. He seemed impressed. “What for?”

  “He’s a revolutionary.”

  “Jesus,” said Big John.

  “I’ve got worse news. Sheehan told me that the night Aaron was killed two men came to see him—an older guy and a younger guy.”

  John exploded. “My old man?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what he told me.”

  John took off his glasses and drew his formidable bulk into an oratorical stance that Demosthenes must have first developed. “Goddamn them!” He punctuated this with sharp forward thrusts of his head like he might be hammering in a stake with it. “Look at the stupid son of a bitch: mixed up with revolutionary bar backs, a third-rate punk for a roommate—and on top of it all, bringing my old man into the deal!”

  John’s expression mellowed into a look of weary resignation and his voice took on the timbre of hard-won wisdom that it often did. “Look, Brian, I don’t know what Ernesto or Greg or my old man or even Walter did or didn’t do. I don’t give a shit, either. I told Greg someday I wouldn’t be able to fix it. If I didn’t have my old man to worry about, I’d let ’em all go to hell.”

  When I left John, I was going to take a nap. Instead, on a whim, I called Dr. Parker at the hospital. She’d given me her beeper number.

  “Hi,” she said brightly. “I hoped you’d call. Have you taken your medicine?”

  “Shit,” I said. “I forgot.”

  “That’s okay; you’ll look cute with one leg. I’m off now. What are you doing?”

  As usual, I wasn’t doing much, so she said she’d drive up to my neighborhood and we could have dinner. An hour later, she showed up.

  “My friends told me that bartenders are corrupt,” she said as we waited for twice-cooked pork and Hunan shrimp at the neighborhood sit-down Chinese restaurant. “They sleep with all their women patrons.” Her sleepy expression—she’d been on call the night before—was content; her dark lashes drifted over her green-gray eyes as she spoke. I wondered if she might be innocent after all. Like that guy with a candle, I was still looking for one honest person.

  “Are you innocent?” I asked.

  “Hardly,” she said. Her eyes opened wide for one moment. “What do you mean?”

  The sordidness of the past few days passed through my mind; everything about it depressed me. I didn’t like what John had become, or Greg. I didn’t know what I had to do with them anymore. I didn’t like my own life, either. I didn’t know if I liked anyone’s life very much. But, most of all, I was worried about Ntango’s life. “Bartenders are corrupt,” I told her. “Your friends were right.” What I really wanted to do was to talk about Ntango. But I didn’t know how. Because she sensed something, she kept quiet and waited, so I finally told her that a friend of
mine had been shot.

  She stared at the ceiling for a long moment. “I thought you were getting ready to tell me you were married.” After I told her all about Ntango, she said she’d go with me when I went to look in on him and would talk to his doctors if I wanted. I said I did.

  When we got to the hospital, Kevin saw me as I was entering Ntango’s room and came running to meet me. “He’s awake,” Kevin said. “He just woke up.” Very proud of himself for bringing this news, he sized up me and Dr. Parker before letting us go past him into the room. “You have to be quiet. And you can’t stay long. Just say hello.”

  Ntango was alert and able to speak, although he slurred his words. “Brian,” he said, that immense kindness sloshing around his soft brown eyes. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “I don’t know why,” I said. Along with the kindness in Ntango’s eyes, there was fear that hadn’t been there before. A bullet in the head wouldn’t overcome his graciousness, but it could shatter his spirit.

  He and Dr. Parker got along fine; I could tell he enjoyed her examining him as much I’d enjoyed her taking a bullet out of my leg. She spoke to the surgical resident on duty, and when we left Ntango’s room, she told me his recovery was going great and he’d be fine.

  “What now?” she asked in the hallway.

  “I could go to Bay Ridge to pick up my new glasses,” I told her, as if that explained my life in a nutshell. “Maybe I’ll ride out to Flatbush with you and we can take Kevin home, too.”

  Kevin wasn’t so anxious to leave, but I told him he’d done a great job, and Dr. Parker asked him questions and discussed Ntango’s condition with him as if he were a consulting physician, so he felt pretty good about things when we dropped him in front of his mother’s house an hour later. Dr. Parker said she’d take me out to Bay Ridge to get my glasses, so, not long afterward, we turned off Fourth Avenue onto Eighty-fourth Street in Bay Ridge just as a blue van pulled up in front of Charlie’s office. Using the same purloined letter strategy Ntango and I had used the last time around, I told Dr. Parker to nestle her Volvo in among the parked cars.