by Con Lehane
“You should get a license and hang up a shingle.” Carl said, ordering another round of drinks with a flourish of his hand.
“I don’t want a license or a shingle. I don’t even want to be a bar manager.”
Soon, we were joined by Sam the Hammer and Reuben Foster, both regulars at Oscar’s and, interestingly enough, former murderers in their own rights. Reuben was a big barrel-chested guy, who played lineman in the early fifties for his alma mater, Amherst College. A descendant of northwestern Massachusetts free blacks, a writer, and an intellectual, he had squandered his youth in the Village and the Upper West Side with the Beats. He was remarkably well read, could quote Milton from memory—and, in the late 1950s, served a prison term for murdering his first wife.
Sam the Hammer was a neighborhood fixture, one felony short of a habitual criminal sentence, whose name derived from his first felony sentence, manslaughter. Sam wore his hair slicked back, the same way he’d worn it when he began running numbers as a teenager; the hair was gray now, as was his walrus mustache and his thick eyebrows. What I liked about Sam was that he noticed everything and kept his own counsel. Under Carl’s tutelage, he’d been preparing for a while now to write a book about characters he’d known.
Oscar, at the far end of the bar, grumbled into the ear of the bartender, John, a tall, thin, soft-spoken lush, who replaced me behind the stick. Given that Oscar hated each and every one of the group gathered around me and since he was now drunk but still lacked the courage to try it himself, he was telling John to throw us all out. John listened attentively to Oscar, then came back to see if we needed another drink.
As the night crawled toward the small hours, with one thing leading to another—mostly the present drink leading to the next one—the case of the murders of Greg Peters and Aaron Adams caught the fancy of the assembled group. A number of suggestions were made, none of them deserving of being taken seriously, yet in the dim alcoholic fog near closing time, Reuben’s plan—to find one of the suspects, grab him by the neck, and shake the truth out of him—began to pick up a following. A persistent but resigned and jaded voice deep in my unconscious whispered that this was a bad idea. But even though I had to squint one eye closed to focus on our merry band gathering in the doorway, I paid no heed.
Ntango hadn’t yet gotten his cab back and was in no condition to be driving—with his brain bullet-damaged on the one hand and drink-addled on the other—anyway, so Reuben was dispatched to extricate his ancient Pontiac from the parking garage on 109th Street while the rest of the posse waited in front of Oscar’s in the echoing quiet of Broadway at 3:00 A.M. When Rueben pulled up to the curb—over the curb, actually—Ntango and I joined him in the front seat: Sam, Eric, and Carl piled in back. Off we went, gladiators for justice, all of us well beyond the first bloom of youthful fitness, not a push-up among us, except for the occasional barroom dare, in twenty years—fat asses and bulging bellies, sagging into the seats of the old Pontiac, which groaned down on its springs like an old dray horse.
“Go up Amsterdam,” Sam said authoritatively.
“No, across One Hundred and tenth,” said Carl.
I suggested up Broadway to 125th Street.
“Assholes,” said Reuben as he thumped down off of the sidewalk and into Broadway. A screech of brakes, a bleating horn, and a yellow cab fishtailed past us in the outer lane, the only thing visible of the driver his outstretched hand with index finger pointing up.
“Asshole,” said Reuben.
“Reuben,” said Ntango quietly, “go across Ninety-sixth Street and through the park; it’s safer.”
“Except for the squirrels,” Carl said.
Less than twenty minutes after leaving Oscar’s, we turned into East 183rd Street, and I was again squinting out the window, searching the boarded-up and empty-windowed buildings for that faded 92. The street was deserted; the buildings looked abandoned. A pack of dogs, dark and hulking shapes, slunk along the street.
We stopped in front of 92 when I finally spotted it the second time we went past. No light shone from behind the corrugated door this time. I didn’t know if it was appropriate for a goon squad to knock, but the point was moot, because while I stood in front of the door pondering this, Alberto pushed his way out through the sheet of metal to loom before us. Reuben and Eric, who had gotten out with me, swayed shoulder-to-shoulder beside me. As Alberto seemed really alarmed by our arrival, my doubts as to the wisdom of this encounter increased rapidly. But before any of us could say anything, smiling and sleepy-eyed Ernesto pushed his way through the doorway.
“Brian,” he said. “You’re drunk.”
I was hard-pressed to deny it.
More of the cadre of revolutionaries emerged from their hovel at this point, all of them angry and serious—at least two of them carrying guns. The older man I’d liked the last time I was there pushed a snub-nosed pistol into my ribs, snarled into my ear, and shoved me toward the tin door. The rest of my elite corps, sullen and scared, were hauled into the building by the scruff of their necks.
I sat at the table while Ernesto argued energetically in Spanish with his comrades for ten minutes. Every now and then, the group would look in my direction, first with anger, then contempt, and finally a bewildered sort of pity. Carl, Sam, and Reuben sagged into an old couch that leaned against a wall, all three of them sinking so far into it and with such misplaced centers of gravity that it would take five minutes of intense struggle for any of them to get out of the couch again if called to battle.
When things calmed sufficiently, the leader, Raol, came and stood over me. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “What do you want?”
Given the superfluousness of preliminaries, I got right to the point. “My friend Greg was murdered,” I said in a shaking voice. The adrenaline that had been holding me up deserted me. I felt the room waver. I pointed to Alberto, who was back on duty at the door. “The day Greg was killed, I saw Alberto in Sea Isle City.” I fixed my bleary eyes on Raol. He didn’t flinch. “I want to know what he was doing there.”
“He wasn’t there,” Raol said quietly.
I don’t know what I expected. All along, I’d held onto a faint hope that it hadn’t really been Alberto in Sea Isle. But I wasn’t reassured. I had no reason to believe Raol. So why ask questions if you aren’t going to believe the answer? It wasn’t that I expected the truth. Everyone shapes the truth to fit his needs. Still, asking questions sometimes produces something—if not answers, maybe mistakes, contradictions. So I said, “Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Three nights ago. Dr. Wilson’s optometry office. Anyone know anything?” Everyone stared blankly at me. I settled on Ernesto. “How’s your eyesight?”
His expression was sad. I checked out Alberto. His dark eyes were as blank as a wall. I tried Raol. His expression was stern. Somewhere a clock ticked. Somewhere the sun shone and children laughed. But not here in Mudville.
“I’m sorry for you, my friend,” said Raol. “We did not kill the man. Alberto was not in this seaside city. More than that, no.” He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “I can see it is hard for you to believe us. But it is as we told you. Ernesto help your friend. No more.”
“Who killed Greg?”
“Not us. I’m sorry you don’t believe.”
Carl cleared his throat a couple of times, so I looked over at him. He wrinkled his brow and narrowed his eyes. “How would this guy you saw in the bar down at the shore have found Greg?”
“He followed me.”
Carl tried again. “If he followed you, how could he find Greg before you did?”
The pale light of morning slipped through the gaps in the tin doors and the cracks in the boarded-up windows; a wonderful smell of frying onions, garlic, peppers, and spices drifted out from the kitchen. Raol held up both his hands in a saintlike gesture, as if to bless us all, and insisted we stay for breakfast. I wanted to believe these men. They were my father’s comrades, the folks from the Internationale. But a man can’t spend most of hi
s life in New York City without cultivating doubts about the motives of his fellowmen. Doubting did not stay me from enthusiastically tearing into my breakfast, but it did keep me from scratching comrade Alberto off my list. He might have tracked Greg down in Sea Isle some other way. I still didn’t know why he and Ernesto were at Charlie’s office in Brooklyn. And I didn’t know if any of the campañeros drove a red Jeep Cherokee.
chapter twenty-three
When I woke up in the afternoon with a pounding headache, I called Detective Sergeant Sheehan at the Manhattan Detective Bureau and asked him to meet me at La Rosita, a Cuban-Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood. I read the Daily News and drank espresso while I waited.
He arrived discreetly enough but still had a chilling effect on the establishment. For one thing, he was too big and fair-skinned for the place; for another, with that sandy hair and ruddy, weathered face, he looked like a cop. Seats began emptying pretty quickly. Visibly uncomfortable himself for a change, he ordered his espresso to go. We sat on a bench on the island in the middle of Broadway.
“How’s your friend?” he asked first.
“He’s out of the hospital.” I was glad he’d asked. I didn’t say so, but he could tell, because he shifted his eyes from mine and moved his body around a great deal without going anywhere, the way big guys do sometimes when they’re embarrassed. Neither of us especially wanted this to be a personal relationship. If we’d been stuck somewhere without a problem to solve, I don’t know if we would even have been able to carry on a conversation.
“You find out anything about that Cherokee?”
“No.” When I looked disappointed, he said, “Remember I’m homicide. I don’t get involved until they kill you.”
“I’m sure you already know Greg is dead.”
Sheehan, reasserting his know-it-all, surprised-by-nothing, superior expression, leaned back expansively on the bench, crossing one leg over the other. “You were quite a hit with the Sea Isle City police.”
“Do you guys work together?” I asked. “Do you share information and work on things together? Suppose you thought whoever killed Greg also killed Aaron?”
What I got for an answer was this twinkling of mild amusement in his eyes and a twitching around his mouth that might have passed for a smile in some circles. “My, my! Are you teaming up with the forces of law and order?” When I just looked at him, he said, “Suppose you hold up your end by telling me where that drug-dealing, revolutionary wetback friend of yours is?”
“What? … Who’s a drug dealer?”
“All your friends … Maybe you, too, for all I know.” Sheehan’s blue eyes reflected a sort of awed perplexity. “Why’d you call me?”
I didn’t answer. Maybe I didn’t know the answer. Or maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself what I’d made up my mind to do. Finally, I said, “I think the two murders are connected and that they might be linked to something that happened years ago in Atlantic City.”
“What kinds of things?”
I told him about Bill Green and David Bradley. “Greg may have been killed in revenge for Bill Green being murdered by Greg, and Aaron may have just gotten in the way. There’s a guy named Walter Springer. He shared Greg’s apartment in Brooklyn, and he’s from down at the shore, years ago. Could you find out if he ever knew Bill Green?”
Sheehan stood up. I watched the 104 bus pull away from the curb, waiting until the bellowing of the diesel motor faded. Sheehan seemed to be waiting for something, too. “I’m not looking for things to do, McNulty. You want information, tell me where’s that guy Ernesto hiding out?”
I froze. I couldn’t do it, so I lied, knowing Sheehan knew I was lying.
Sheehan let his disapproval hang over me like a dark cloud for a few pregnant seconds, then asked, “You got any proof this Greg guy killed this Bill Green?”
“Proof?”
“Proof. In this state, we need proof to convict someone.”
“You don’t need to convict Greg. He’s dead.”
“Thanks,” Sheehan said sarcastically. “Maybe I can hang a few of my other unsolved murders on him, too, now that he’s dead.”
“It’s okay with me.”
Sheehan’s expression turned to disgust. I thought he was going to kick my crutch out from under me as he turned to walk away.
“Do you really not believe me?” I asked his retreating back.
“I believe in proof,” said Sheehan over his shoulder. “See you around, McNulty.”
After striking out with Sheehan, I went in the early evening to Brooklyn to ask Pop what he thought about Sheehan’s theory that Ernesto and the comrades were dealing dope. I also hoped to catch up with Dr. Parker while I was in the borough of churches. She must have had her beeper turned off, because I couldn’t reach her, so I had to settle for Pop. When he opened the door, he looked at me in this piercing way of his that had seen into my soul since I was a child. I still didn’t know what he looked for, but now, just as when I was a kid, I expected he might find something awful. In his own way, he was probably glad to see me, just as, in his own way, he loved me. He couldn’t help it that his standards were celestial.
“You look wan and tired. Your skin is a white as a nun’s,” he said when he finally did speak.
“You look good yourself, Pop.”
He didn’t miss the sarcasm—I think he invented sarcasm—he ignored it. “I walk an hour a day,” he said proudly.
“I walk, too.”
“You walk from bar to bar … . You should take better care of yourself. I hoped you’d outlive me.” He let go of the door, so I followed him in to the dining room with its ancient round mahogany dining room table. As usual, a book, the page carefully marked with a bookmark, lay on the table next to his glasses. Not the least of my childhood transgressions was infuriating my father by laying books facedown on a table, damaging the spines. This time, he was reading Trotsky’s My Life.
I sat down and Pop went for coffee, fresh this time. When he came back from the kitchen, I picked up the Trotsky book and looked expectantly at him. But no explanation was forthcoming. Since Pop eschewed small talk, I didn’t beat around the bush with him, either. I told him Greg had been killed, about Sandra, although not about sleeping with her, about seeing Alberto and Ernesto at Dr. Wilson’s office and maybe seeing Alberto in Sea Isle and maybe not. I told him Sheehan said Ernesto was a drug dealer and about meeting with the compañeros in the South Bronx the night before, editing out the burlesque.
“I’m trying to convince myself the Chileans didn’t have anything to do with the murders,” I said.
“Good for you. Then perhaps you can get their country back for them.”
“I wish I believed they could.”
Pop heard the despair behind my cynicism but was having none of it. Communists are optimists, my father no exception. “Fortunately, unlike you, your Chilean comrades believe man can determine his fate.” He sat back in his chair like a stern judge. “You’re sure you saw this man both times?”
“I’m sure I saw him at Charlie’s office. I’m not sure it was Alberto in Sea Isle City.”
“Could the Chileans have a different reason for doing business with this Charlie?”
“Maybe they went to get their eyes checked.”
Pop didn’t lose his concentration. “There are reasons why progressives from Latin America might do business with gangsters in America. Two that come to mind are guns and papers.”
I loved the orderliness of my father’s thinking. My own thinking wasn’t like his. Despite being his son, I was inherently chaotic. Those genes came from my mother, the Irish romantic from County Cavan. Pop went for facts. I used leaps of imagination to bridge the gaps between the facts. But this time he leaped further than I could. “What do you do with papers and guns? I don’t see the connection.”
“That’s because your brain is addled from too many nights in barrooms.” He took a deep breath. “Guns, for obvious reasons, to send back to those doing the fight
ing. Papers—passports, green cards, driver’s licenses—identihcation for those on the run to get work. Political refugees who need to lose their identities—Palestinians, Irish, Guatemalans—and Chileans, too, I would bet.”
“Maybe. Do you suppose they’d be riding around in a red Cherokee, taking potshots at me?”
Pop looked me over like he suspected I was coming down with something. “I beg your pardon. You don’t know who shot at you—and what in God’s name is a Cherokee?”
“It’s sort of like a van or a jeep, kind of boxy … .” I felt my voice dropping off. Already, he had that uncomprehending cast to his eyes. “It’s like a station wagon. It’s got big wheels … . Well, not big exactly, I guess, just high off the ground … . It was red … . It had Cherokee written on it.”
Pop picked up his book, deciding, it seemed, I had all the advice I needed. “If you keep at it long enough, life will probably drop something into place.”
“And if life doesn’t drop something into place?”
“If it doesn’t, there won’t be an answer. That happens, too.” He took his glasses off again, but impatience showed in the gesture. He knew I was stalling, and he wanted to get back to his reading. “Let me know what I can do.” He put the glasses back on.
After I left Pop’s apartment, I debated with myself over a couple of beers at Farrell’s bar in Windsor Terrace—an undocumented historical landmark, where, back in the 1920s, elevator operators and window washers met to amalgamate their unions. Why didn’t I just let someone else handle this? That was the question I began the debate with. People get murdered all the time. In New York, during the busy season, two or three unfortunate souls a day—not counting mass murders or vengeful arson. Curiosity wasn’t a reason to risk life and limb in pursuit of whatever truth I might come up with in the end. Yet, sipping my draft beer in the musty late-afternoon sunlight that filtered into the venerable dark mahogany, brass, and mirrored bar, I realized I would follow this out with the same certainty with which I followed my nose—and for the same reasons. Why I would follow this senseless trail to the end had nothing to do with what I thought now, everything to do with what life had already made me into. So I surrendered the debate and thought about Charlie. He had his imprint on every shady deal I’d come across. Here, he was tied up in some nasty business with Greg and Walter. Over there, he had business with Ernesto and Alberto. I’d have bet he was the older man at the Ocean Club the night Aaron was murdered. He was in Sea Isle the night Greg was murdered. I first met the Cherokee folks in his office. On the plus side, he was John’s father and had tightened me up with a set of cheaters. And maybe I liked him, and maybe he liked me. I knew I might have some bad moments. But that wasn’t going to keep me from sending him over if he shot Miles. I mean, stabbed Greg.