by Con Lehane
When things quieted and the spotlight was turned off, John said, “I thought you’d be at the craps table at the Claridge.”
“Soon,” Charlie said cheerfully.
John asked his father quietly if he’d seen Greg.
The older Wolinski’s smile flickered and a tiny cloud passed over his eyes as he told John he hadn’t seen him.
“What about Walter?”
No change in expression this time. The senior Wolinski was steady on his feet.
But John wasn’t easily sidetracked. “Look Charlie, what the fuck are you doing?”
Charlie let out an audible breath. He didn’t know which way to turn; and when he turned toward me, he had the worried look of a boy in trouble.
“Is Walter in town?” John bore down on the older man.
His father didn’t answer.
John waited.
No answer.
“Were you with Greg today?” This time, John didn’t wait for an answer or no answer. “Where’s Walter?”
The older man’s poise continued its disintegration. Sweat beaded on his forehead; he licked his lips as if they were dry, even though he’d been sipping a scotch and water. “Nothing’s wrong with Greg. There’s a deal going down; that’s all.”
John, too, sighed audibly. He raised his arms in exasperation and spoke to the ceiling. “Jesus Christ, you just can’t stay away.”
The senior Wolinski smiled anemically.
“Where’s Greg?”
“A small house on Eightieth Street. He stays there with a woman named Sandra.”
“He’s not there,” I said. “He left there last night with someone.”
Charlie looked at me blankly. Then he looked at John. His brow wrinkled. He seemed to say something to John with his eyes but didn’t speak. Nonetheless, John’s brow wrinkled, and he seemed to be digesting some news.
“As far as I know, that’s where he is,” the older man said to me. “He left us last night to go home.”
“Walter?” I asked.
“Back in New York by now. We finished last night.” By now, Charlie looked almost haggard. Without his smile and the color in his face, the ravages of age showed through, making him look gray and old. When I shook hands with him before I left, he put his arm on my shoulder. “Take care of that big galoot, will you?”
Back on the road again, I asked John, “Did you know we’d find your father there?”
“I thought we might.”
“Do you believe him?”
John shrugged.
We chased back through the sand dunes to a couple of joints in the neighborhood of the Driftwood where we started. In most of the places, John knew the bartender; in some places, he knew no one. But he always introduced himself, shook hands, and had a drink in each joint. I quit trying to keep up with him after the third place.
We drove on through the beach towns, stopping at neighborhood bars, soft-lighted cocktail lounges, cavernous white table-clothed, seaside restaurants, through Stone Harbor, onto Wildwood, and into Cape May. Back to the mainland and north on Route 9, past played-out cornfields, truck gardens, and boarded-up vegetable stands, stopping at each roadside gin mill, each one with a neon-lit Budweiser or Miller sign piercing the darkness half a mile before we reached it.
Even though I knew John would rather stare steely-eyed into the darkness in front of the headlights as we hurtled from bar to bar, I felt better when he talked, so I kept asking him questions. “Why do you think Greg is still here? What do you think happened? How do you know he didn’t go back to New York?”
“Just a hunch” was all John said. “I hoped I’d find him at some of the joints where we used to hang out.”
As the night waned, it became clear that Big John had no more idea where Greg was than I did. But he kept on as if the sheer force of his will would find Greg. The bars were closed by the time we pulled back into Sea Isle. John was a burned-out hulk, groggy, asleep standing up, barely able to drive home from the last joint. I practically had to lug him along the second-floor cement walkway of the Days Inn to my rented room. He poured himself onto one of the beds, where he fell asleep on top of the bedspread in his Pierre Cardin suit. I lay down on top of the other bed in my Gap jeans and was asleep before I had time to think. But my sleep was restless, filled with dreams, whose ominous symbols woke me every few moments, then slipped away before I remembered what had scared me awake.
The ringing of the phone woke me. It was like a dentist drilling into a nerve. Fully alert, I sprang for it, bracing myself for the message.
It was the front desk, telling me it was checkout time.
The phone woke John also. I could tell by the suspicion in his eyes as he looked around the room that he didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there. “What’s happening, bro?” he asked tentatively.
“We got married last night,” I told him.
After checking out of the motel, I left what little there was of my stuff in John’s car, and we walked the couple of blocks to Sandra’s. I was trying out using only one crutch, and it worked pretty well.
Sandra opened her front door before we knocked. John shook her hand. But when I took her hand, she held on and pulled slightly, not forcefully, but gently, as if she wanted me to hug her, so I did, awkwardly, banging my elbow on the wheelchair and craning my neck to get my head next to hers. Her hair was as fine and wispy as a baby’s. Her arm strong against my neck, her cheek soft against mine. I felt a stirring as I held her and my lips brushed the softness of her cheek. A feeling more powerful than I expected crackled between us and I held her longer than was proper.
When I finally let go, Big John asked her what Greg had been doing that night, right before he left, what he’d said to her, who he talked about. I guessed he was trying to find out if she knew Greg was hooked up with his old man. She didn’t know much. Greg had spoken on the phone, but she didn’t know to whom, nor anything he talked about. He was nervous and pacing, she said, but he didn’t tell her what was bothering him. John paced the room himself as she spoke. I sat across from Sandra, wishing this hadn’t happened to her. She had a gentleness and caring about her, like Saint Francis among the beasts. It didn’t seem right she should suffer like this.
Back in John’s Eldorado again, we headed for Atlantic City to check a couple of Greg’s old haunts there. John made some calls on the way, to set up a meeting when he got to Atlantic City and another meeting that night back in New York. Finally, he called Walter at the hotel service bar where he worked. I could hear Walter’s voice over the car phone, high-pitched, almost squeaking, as sleazy as ever, insisting he hadn’t seen or heard from Greg. His tone was sly and wary, so you couldn’t believe him if you’d wanted to. Once again, I felt the urge to wring his neck.
“Tell Walter we need to see him tonight,” I told John.
John shook his head and grimaced in my direction. He was asking Walter about people Greg might see in Atlantic City.
“Tell him we’ll be there tonight,” I said.
John calmly questioned Walter while snarling and violently shaking his head at me, using that peculiar body English one uses only when being interrupted while on the phone.
“Tell him, goddamn it. I’ll go myself. I’m going to talk to that son of a bitch.”
“Where you gonna be tonight, Walter?” John asked finally, turning a baleful glance in my direction. “Well, stay there. Stay home till I come by there or call you.” He hung up and turned on me. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Walter’s going to tell me something tonight. There’s a key to all this, and Walter knows what it is.”
John rolled his eyes. “Now you’re a fucking psychic. Jesus, bro.”
chapter nineteen
I had John call Linda for me from the car. My psychic powers suggested we go see her also. John said no, but I insisted, so he said he’d drop me off there if it was okay with Linda. He dialed the area code and numbers, then handed me the phone. Linda’s voice,
bubbly and enchanting when she answered, cooled considerably when I told her I was with John. She became cautious, said she had no time, but finally agreed when I told her I was the only one stopping by.
The sky was clear and blue over the coastal wetlands as I hobbled up Linda’s walk. When she opened the door, she was nervous; the strain showed on her face. “Where’s John?” She looked past me, as if he might be hiding behind the scrub pine in the yard. “He didn’t come with you?” Satisfied that he hadn’t, she calmed down, hugging me then and giving me a peck on the lips. “You, I like to see,” she said cutely. “Come in.” She wore cutoff dungarees and a T-shirt that draped over her breasts and didn’t quite cover her midriff. Barefoot, her legs tanned golden brown, she walked like a princess, with that girlish air of unconscious and natural sexiness she’d had when I first met her. I followed like a pup dog.
When I sat down on the couch and asked how the baby was, she sat down beside me and told me that she’d finally fallen asleep after having been awake since 6:30 that morning. She talked about the baby as if she were the most pressing and important subject in the world—and perhaps she was.
I told her Greg was missing again.
“You came back to Sea Isle because Greg called you and wanted to tell you something? Now he isn’t here? Maybe he went back to New York to tell you, if it was so important.”
“Maybe. I’m not used to dealing with people who lead two lives. I don’t know which person to look for.” I recounted to Linda most of what I’d been doing since I’d seen her last, about Ntango getting shot, finding Charlie again in Sea Isle City, about Dr. Parker and I discovering a link between Charlie and Ernesto.
I thought she’d ask about Greg’s double life or Ntango getting shot. But something else caught her interest. “Who is Dr. Parker?” she asked, her brows furrowed and sparks shooting from her blue eyes “You don’t take long to forget me.”
“I never forget you.”
She smiled and blushed. Then she asked about Ntango. “The poor man. He got shot just because he was with you? Oh, Brian.” Her eyes were wide with sympathy.
Taking advantage of her pity, I leaned toward her and put my hand on her shoulder. “Is there anything you haven’t told me?”
She shook her head and looked away from me.
“What do you think Greg wanted to tell me?”
Linda shook her head once more. “I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
She looked down at her lap. “Brian …” she said in the tone she probably used when the baby spilled her pabulum. “Stop trying to be like Charlie and John and Greg. You aren’t like them. You could be so sweet, if you only tried.”
“I thought I did try.” Realizing I was whining, I went on to other things. “Why didn’t you want to see John?”
“He brings back bad memories.”
“What are the bad memories?”
“I’d rather not say.”
Surprised by her answer, I looked at her carefully, but her expression was frank and open and fresh, as it usually was.
“Tell me more about John and his father.”
“Tell you what? I could write a book. Charlie was the Duke of Sea Isle City—a celebrity, all rumors and reputation. The fastest gun in the west sort of thing. But no one knew what he did. No one ever saw him do any of the things he was rumored to do. For all any of us knew for sure, he was the village eye doctor. Everyone liked him. Even the priests. Charlie’s reputation rubbed off on John, even though he never said anything about it, or tried to bully anyone because of his father. In school, he was the guy everyone thought was so tough that he never had to fight. He would break up the fights. All the guys wanted to hang out with him. All the girls wanted to date him.”
“Did you know Charlie was in the rackets?”
“No one really knew. But everyone knew all the same.” Linda smiled wistfully. “Sea Isle was a small town. The whole shore was a small town. I don’t know how to say this—they were just there.”
“Did they ever kill anyone?”
“Charlie?” Linda looked startled. “He …” She stumbled over the words and looked at me for help.
I tried to help. “How about Bill Green?”
The color left her face. “Don’t ask me about that.”
“What did Greg have to do with Charlie?”
“Greg worshiped Charlie. He would have done anything for him.”
“Did he?”
Linda caught the double entendre right between the eyes. She let out a small gasp and her hand went to her mouth. I waited while she battled her snakes.
“Brian,” she pleaded. “You’re asking me about people I’ve known all my life. They are what they are. They’ve never hurt me. They always helped me whenever I needed them.”
“Didn’t John get out of the rackets? Didn’t he go into the hotel business so he wouldn’t be like his father?”
“John was an altar boy, an Eagle Scout, an honor student. I’m serious. He really was all those things. He won an award from the American Legion for a patriotic speech he wrote and gave at the high school. He volunteered for the navy and won medals. John did everything he could to be respectable. Except his life was different from that of all the other kids. He knew the gangsters from Philadelphia and Atlantic City. But he’d never tell you about that or even let you ask about it. And he was always one hundred percent loyal to Charlie. No matter what his father did, if Charlie needed him, he went. And Charlie needed him pretty often.”
“How did Walter fit into all of this?”
“I don’t remember that man … Walter. He could have been here. I told you before: I just don’t remember him. I knew that girl Sandra, though—the girl Greg’s been living with—I think. She went to high school with us.” Linda sat on the couch with her legs pulled up underneath her. The upper part of her body was straight and erect, so she seemed taller, and she leaned toward me slightly when she spoke. “I liked her; she was cool. She dressed in black and wore a big silver peace symbol on a chain around her neck. She got hurt in a boating accident. A bunch of drunk high school kids in one of those big powerboats ran over her raft out in the bay.”
Linda said that Sandra told the Coast Guard she was stoned, and the raft didn’t have any lights or markings or whatever it was supposed to have, so she never got much money from the accident, except for her medical expenses.
“Did Sandra and Greg know each other?”
“I don’t think they were friends or went out together. But if I remember right, Greg was one of the kids in the boat.”
“Why in hell would she be living with a person who helped cripple her?” But when I thought about it, I began to see a possibility. Greg, as strange as he was, had a strong sense of duty: he did the right thing, though it would be the right thing by his own lights, not anyone else’s. Like John, he made his own right and wrong. If Greg had been in the boat that hit Sandra, he might have tried to make up for it.
“Was John on that boat?”
Linda shook her head. “John was already out of school by then, running with the wise guys. He didn’t pay any attention to high school kids.”
“Except Greg?”
“Yeh, except for Greg, and whatever prom queen or cheerleader he took for a fling.” Linda looked pretty when she was angry, her eyes glowing with fierceness, her mouth set hard but her lips still soft, so pretty and innocent, like a prom queen herself, but always with this fiery passion just below the surface. There was health and energy and vigor to her, and always the wild passion ever so lightly veiled. I wanted to grab her right then and wrestle all that angry energy into love, like we’d done once upon a time. Her eyes glowing, her lips wet and slightly parted and pouting, I believed she was calling me to her.
“Oh God, Linda—” I said. In spite of myself, I must have moaned, and I might have lunged for her. But she sprang up from the couch and away from me, then stood looking at me strangely and expectantly, a wild look in her eyes.
; Her voice high-pitched, her face flushed, her eyes startled, she cried, “You can’t come back and start this up with me again. You just can’t do it … . I have a baby. I won’t give that up. I can’t … . This is my life now: Ralph and the baby.” Her voice grew stronger, the expression in her eyes harder. “Jenny needs Ralph, too. She loves him more than anything. It would be too horrible.” She got tangled up in her words and went on more slowly. “I won’t let anything—nothing in the world—change it. Go away. Forget John and Greg. Leave me and my baby alone. Go away!”
She put her hands to her face and began crying in earnest, her passion in this as strong as the other passion, so that her face scrunched up, tears rolled down her cheeks, her shoulders shook, and wailing rose from her soul. When I moved toward her, she held her hands out in front of her as if to ward off a vampire. I stopped.
“I’m not asking you to give up anything,” I said weakly.
“You aren’t asking me to give up anything?” Her voice rose with disbelief. “You don’t mean to wreck my life? But you came here. Now you come here again. You’re going to ruin my life.”
“No.”
“Yes you are,” she screamed. She sobbed into her hands, while I stood back and watched her. When she finally stopped crying, her face was a mass of red blotches where it wasn’t pale, and puffy and streaked around her eyes. Her shoulders were stooped, her eyes bloodshot.
My head was whirling because I didn’t know myself what I was doing there. I hadn’t stopped to put together what anything meant. I just wanted to find Greg before it was too late, even though I couldn’t shake the feeling that it already was too late.
“I’ve made so many mistakes,” Linda said sadly. “I’ve done everything wrong. Poor Ralph doesn’t deserve someone like me, a wife who doesn’t even love him the way she should. If it wasn’t for Jennifer, I would wish I was dead.”