by Con Lehane
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s a bleak fucking life, ain’t it?” Then after another silence, he said, “You better go tell Sandra.”
“Me?”
“It should be one of us … one of his friends.”
“What about you?”
“I gotta finish something here; then I’ll try to make some arrangements. You need to handle this, bro.”
“I can’t believe how awful everything is,” Linda said as we drove away from the bar after a stiff drink. She dropped me off at a liquor store a few blocks from the street Sandra lived on, refusing to come with me because she wanted to get back to her baby and Ralph. I picked up a fifth of Remy Martin and managed to hobble to Sandra’s house, leaning on the crutch, carrying the fifth. The steady breeze off the ocean died down as the sun sunk beneath the bay. It was a pleasant evening, with a hint of chill in the air. I had no idea at all what would comfort Sandra.
She opened the door as soon as I knocked, wheeled herself back from it, and looked at me with accusation in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Greg’s dead.”
“I knew it.” Her expression didn’t change.
I had nothing else to say. I might still be standing in that doorway if she hadn’t recovered her senses and told me to come in.
Moving forward seemed to unlock my brain. “I have some brandy. It would be good for you to drink some.” She nodded, so I went to the kitchen and poured some into teacups. When I returned, she was at the entry to the living room. I put the drinks on the coffee table and, more decisively than I do most things, went over and lifted her out of her wheelchair and carried her, with her arms around my neck, to the couch. I sat down beside her. For a little while, we didn’t talk. After she took a few sips of her brandy, she slipped her hand into mine. We sat there like that. At one point, I asked if I should call someone to stay with her. She said no. So I stayed.
“I do want to know what happened,” Sandra said after another long lapse. “Just not yet.” When she looked at me, her eyes were moist and sad and apologetic. “You don’t have to stay.”
“I want to.”
“I want you to, too.” She squeezed my hand and began to cry.
After maybe an hour, I began to feel light-headed and remembered the last time I’d eaten was a sandwich at the motel the afternoon before. I walked to the market near the liquor store, where I bought a couple of steaks, potato chips, lettuce, and fresh Jersey tomatoes. Back at Sandra’s house, I grilled the steaks in a frying pan, washed the lettuce, sliced the tomatoes, and made up plates for both of us.
“I don’t think I can eat,” Sandra said when I presented her plate.
“You gotta eat,” I said. I had no trouble myself. She took a few bites of the steak, ate the salad, then gave the rest of her steak to me.
“I’m ready now,” she said. Some color was back in her face. Her eyes were clear, her chin up. “You can tell me what happened.”
“He was murdered. They found his body.”
“Where?”
I couldn’t tell her the dump, so I said, “In some marsh grass on the road to Strathmere.”
“How was he killed?”
“I’m not sure. The cops think he was stabbed.”
It took a few minutes for her to take this in. Then she faced me unblinkingly. “Now you can tell me what you wouldn’t before,” she said firmly but not unkindly.
“It wouldn’t have helped if I told you before.”
She nodded.
Maybe I was supposed to protect her from the truth. But I didn’t think it was up to me. I told her everything that had happened, from the phone call Greg made to the Sheraton almost two weeks ago to the present, about Greg’s jobs in New York, Aaron’s murder, the connection to Charlie and Walter, and the deaths of Dave Bradley and Bill Green many years before.
Her expression didn’t change throughout all this, so that by looking at her, I wouldn’t even have known if she’d heard me. I didn’t try to explain anything, just straight out told her. When I finished, we sat together again in another long silence.
“God, to be this close to someone who did all that and not know anything about it.” She shuddered. “To have so many buried secrets. Poor Greg. I guess I never knew him at all.”
I guessed I didn’t, either. Greg was a good pal, if he liked you, loyal and generous. But he was cold, too, not someone you’d grab in a bear hug. He never lit up a place when he arrived like John did. But then, I don’t suppose I brightened up very many places myself.
“I don’t even know what he felt about me.” Sandra’s tone was quizzical, rather than sad. “For the first time, I’m wondering now what my life with Greg was all about … . Isn’t that strange? Greg was with me for ten years, and I never wondered why he stayed with me.”
I watched her carefully because her calmness seemed unreal to me, like the flat, dead air in front of a storm. Her voice tightened as she spoke, and rose in pitch. I expected the look in her eyes to go wild any second and for her to begin shaking and writhing in hysteria. I took a strong slug of cognac to brace myself. But she stayed calm.
“I’m actually glad he had another life, though I’m sorry it led him to this. His life with me was so impersonal. In a strange way, I feel closer to you than I ever felt to Greg.” Her expression was fixed and staring. “I can’t stand the idea of his being lifeless and stuffed in the ground.”
Something, I guess, did snap, or perhaps just loosened—maybe the cognac took hold—because her words began pouring out. She talked about her whole life from the time of the accident till now. Greg had begun coming to see her right after the accident. So he must have been involved with her even back when we worked together at the Dockside.
“Didn’t you know he was a bartender then?” I asked her.
“I was so self-absorbed for so long after that accident, I didn’t notice or care what anybody did. Greg came to the hospital. I knew him a little bit from school, but he wasn’t one of my friends, just a quiet kid, a little bit odd, not much interested in school. At first, after the accident, a lot of kids came to see me. They had car washes and dances to raise money for me. Gradually that all stopped. But Greg kept coming. He became indispensable. I was hateful, vicious, mean to everyone, especially my family, who I hated even before the accident. Greg put up with me. He took the place of my brother, who joined the navy, and my mother, who couldn’t cope with a teenage daughter, much less a crippled teenager. Greg was there, always there, whenever I needed him. He helped me find this place, helped me move in, and then he moved in, too—at least for some of the time.”
“But why the secrecy? Why did he never tell any of us about you—not even John?”
Sandra didn’t know the answer to this. But as I asked her, I suspected I did. Big John took up too much room in Greg’s life. John needed people around him and he was great to be around—generous, loyal, funny, considerate. Wherever he was going, he’d take you with him. John didn’t like to go anywhere or do anything alone; he needed his bros. You were amply rewarded for being with him. He attracted women; he had friends or made friends everywhere, so you were always welcome and always the center of a good time. But there was a price to pay. Whatever you did, you did on John’s terms. John didn’t share top billing. So, the way I figured it, Greg needed to get out from under. But he couldn’t completely break like I had. He needed John as much as John needed him. When I looked back now to our time together in Atlantic City, I remembered Greg’s attempts at finding his own life—the gin joints he took me to, some folks he introduced me to who didn’t know John. He often said, “There’s someone you gotta meet—someone you’d really like.” And I wondered now if one of those persons might have been Sandra but the right time never came for me to meet her.
“So that’s what it’s been?” I asked. “You didn’t wonder where he went or what he did when he was away from here? You didn’t mind him being away?”
I was drawn to look into her eyes that we
re brown and soft, but also turbulent and exciting. “It wasn’t the sort of relationship you might think,” she said. “I don’t know how to say this. I’m sure it’s as awful as it sounds. I didn’t love Greg. He took care of me, and I needed him very much, and I was very grateful to him. But I never got close to him at all. It was like I was a wealthy woman and he was my servant.” Her eyelashes veiled her eyes, and her cheeks flushed. “We never made love,” she said quietly. “Sex never came up—I guess he didn’t think of me that way, or he just thought I couldn’t do it or wouldn’t care, and for a long time I didn’t care or wouldn’t do it, and that’s how our relationship evolved. I loved him, but like a brother, I guess—and I think I was like a child to him, someone to take care of.”
When she told me all this, a peculiar and inappropriate question presented itself to me, which I realized had been lurking in my addled brain all along. I wondered if she could make love—and if she could, how. Maybe the brandy. Maybe my warped need to desecrate propriety. More likely, though, it was those beautiful brown eyes, the warmth and the kindness in them. I wanted to make love with Sandra. I wanted to go to bed and hold her. I had since the first time I looked in her eyes. But now? How could I possibly think about this now?
Before she’d told me all this, I’d recognized I was attracted to her. The feeling since the first time I’d seen her had been so strong as to be illicit—enough to make an alley cat feel guilty. My friend dead, and me coveting his wife, or the person I thought was his wife. She had this openness to life, like Linda, where she accepted her feelings, let them live even if they were sensual, sexual—maybe illicit—not afraid of her emotions. I liked Sandra. I liked how I felt sitting next to her. I wanted to touch her. What I felt about her and maybe from her was emotional and physical.
When I looked at her again, tears trickled down her cheeks and her eyes were liquid. “I would have,” she said. “But he didn’t want to. He was so cold that way, like a stone statue.”
I took her in my arms and held her, my face against her tear-stained face, until I felt her rising in me. Then I kissed her on the lips, and her lips pulled against mine and her hands caressed the back of my neck as gently as feathers.
“You’re a strange man, Mr. McNulty,” she whispered. “Please don’t let go of me until I tell you it’s okay.”
We clung to each other for hours on her couch while the flat color of the evening light changed to darkness.
“I want to lie down in my bed with you,” Sandra whispered.
I had felt a plastic bag like an IV bag against her body while we sat together on the couch. She told me it was for urine. When she got off the couch, she wheeled herself to the bathroom. When she joined me in the bedroom, she’d taken off her pants, and when she raised herself out of the wheelchair and onto the bed, she put the bag, which was empty, on the floor under the bed. She did it discreetly, like a woman might put in a diaphragm, not exactly hiding her action, but doing it in such a way that even if it didn’t escape notice, it might at least escape comment. There was still a tube coming from under her underpants. I watched the whole process more intently than might be proper, so she laughed at me.
“Does it come out?” I asked.
“No, the tubes stay in.”
She loosened her hair from the clips that had held it back, so that the hair, long and thick and sparkling and brown, flowed luxuriously over the pillow as she lay back. Smiling like a Madonna, gentle and sad, she said, “I want you to lie with me and hug me. I don’t know if I want to make love with you.”
“Do the tubes bother people?” I asked.
“Do they bother you?”
“No,” I said warily.
We held each other again in her bed, naked now. She patted one of her legs, which was thin and withered, and said, “This one never came back.”
I touched her and felt where the tube entered her and just below it the opening to her vagina, which was moist as I touched it. Master of the bon mot, I asked if she felt anything.
“Mmm,” she said, putting her hand on top of mine where it rested against her. “You must think I’m awful to do this now.”
“No.” I started to say I understood, then realized that I really didn’t.
Sandra squeezed my hand. “I’m really afraid … . I need to be close to you tonight. It’s been so very long since I’ve been close to anyone.” She cried again, so I held her. She cried for a long time, and emotions being the confused things that they are, the sorrow became something else. We kissed for a long time, each kiss as gentle as the first one. And then she took my cock in her hand and held it. “Please come inside me,” she said. “Come very gently inside me, please.” So I did, sliding gently into her wetness, and though she lay still, her hips unmoving, inside her was alive and wet and burning hot. I moved gently inside her for a long time until she came, and when she did, I came, too. She moaned and writhed, the upper part of her body moving, and when she came again, she screamed in anguish or ecstasy—I wasn’t sure which. But gasping and moaning she came in waves, and when she had finished, she cried and cried, as if she would never stop.
I held her head against my chest until she fell asleep, and then I did also, sleeping restlessly until I heard banging in the distance and realized it was finally morning and someone was at the door. I sprang from the bed, ready to go out the window, pants in hand. But Sandra calmed me. “Who could it be?” she asked. “Who could it be who would care?”
Who indeed? At the door, his eyes alert behind his glasses, his quick glance from me to the bedroom door letting me know he knew I’d just gotten out of the sack with Sandra but not whether he cared or not, laden down with bagels and cream cheese, doughnuts, and a restaurant-sized thermos of coffee, properly somber and appropriately attired, stood Big John there in the doorway. “I thought Sandra might need something,” he said.
“What I need is company,” said Sandra, wheeling up behind me. She’d gotten herself into a robe and into the wheelchair and looked less disheveled than I did.
“I can’t stay,” John said, then looked at me and at her again and came in.
chapter twenty-one
As we talked over coffee and bagels, John did most of the remembering, beginning with when he and Greg were kids playing baseball and Greg stood his ground against the first baseman twice his size.
“What about Greg’s family?” Sandra asked.
“There’s only his father, and he’s in a nursing home,” John said.
“What about a funeral?”
“I’m going to arrange for him to be cremated and his ashes thrown in the ocean. That’s what he’d want.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I know.” John’s tone was sharp, as if I doubted him. He didn’t like being challenged, but he caught himself, shrugged his shoulders, and kind of shook himself back into his rightful place as chief mourner.
There was an uncomfortable moment and then Sandra spoke. “Who could have done this?” She shifted her gaze from John to me.
“Why would someone kill Greg?” Now we both looked at John.
John shook his head. “It must be Greg was doing somethin’ none of us knew about … . But we’ll find out who. We’ll take care of it.”
Part of this wasn’t exactly true, as John and I knew some things Greg was doing—and whom he was doing them with. John didn’t know I’d told Sandra about Charlie. Rather than bring it up now, I took my lead from Sandra. If she didn’t bring it up, I wouldn’t.
“We were bros,” John said. “back-to-back. You never believe your bro will die like that.” He watched Sandra, as if he expected her to do or say something, as did I. But she didn’t; she closed her eyes. “What was Greg like these last few days?” John asked when she didn’t say anything. “Was he scared? Did he say what was botherin’ him?”
Sandra opened her eyes. “No. He wasn’t afraid. Looking back, I get the feeling he’d accepted his fate, as if he’d been told by a doctor he hadn’t long to live.
”
“What’d he talk about?” John asked her. There was toughness to his tone that I didn’t like—as if he was accusing Sandra of something.
Sandra caught it, too, and her answer sounded as tough as John’s question. “He said, ‘What goes around comes around.’”
I didn’t like how the conversation was going. Maybe John was mad at Sandra for sleeping with me—saw her as betraying Greg. I could see why he’d think that, but I wanted him to stop pressing her. So I tried to get him started in a different direction. I turned to Sandra. “Do you still not remember the car you saw Greg leaving in? Did you ever see a red Cherokee parked on the street or passing the house?”
She looked confused. “A what?”
“Whatever went around, in Greg’s case, came back in a car,” I told John.
Big John, his brow wrinkled, took the bait.
“A red Cherokee,” I said patiently. “It’s like a cross between a car and a van and maybe a jeep.” Sandra tilted her head, as if she hadn’t quite heard me right. “And it’s red,” I said testily. “Sort of boxy …” I glowered at her as she continued to look at me quizzically. “Like a station wagon … . It fucking says Cherokee on it,” I said, raising my voice.
Sandra listened with some concern, then shook her head. “I don’t remember. I told you that I can’t tell one kind of car from another.”
Before I got myself in any deeper, John raised an eyebrow and gave me a meaningful look to warn me that I was scaring her, so I backed off.
But Sandra wasn’t having any of it. “Who has a red Cherokee?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Forget it.”
“You wouldn’t have brought it up for no reason.”
I looked to John for help. He gave me that “You fucked up again” look, then tried to rescue me. “Brian got jumped last weekend by some goons. He’s wondering if they might have been the ones who killed Greg.”
“Might they have?”
“I don’t know. Neither does Brian.”
Something in Sandra’s bearing changed, a new level of sharpness, as if she suspected she was being had. “I understand that both of you are somehow involved in Greg’s death.” She looked from John to me and back to John.