What Goes Around Comes Around

by Con Lehane

  It dawned on me that once more, after all these years, I was following him. Even though this was my battle, he’d taken over and now led the charge. I didn’t like what we were doing; I wouldn’t have chosen this way. But I was drawn to this as if John were leading me around by a chain. I didn’t have to remind myself that the two guys we were after made their living killing people. They weren’t normal in any sense I understood. Calling them down wasn’t going to be a grade-school fight. Even Sam and Reuben, the only murderers I knew on a first-name basis, when they killed people, had done it almost by accident—in fear or rage. The guys we were after were execution-style killers. When you read about them in the paper, you understand that a cold, calculated, immeasurably cruel act of premeditated, conscienceless killing has taken place. They were like those governors who so cold-bloodedly order the executioner to throw the switch.

  Sitting in the car waiting was gloomy and nerve-racking. Each time the door of Dominic’s Den opened, my heart stopped beating. Each time it turned out not to be them, I felt a surge of relief and a strange sense of disappointment. I don’t know why I doubted the inevitable. Was I thinking they’d never come out? That maybe a higher power would turn them into bar stools?

  Despite my anxiety, I noticed that Seventh Avenue was pleasant as the evening progressed. The streetlights shone dully on the flat brown-faced four- and five-story buildings. Cars passed by in each direction; the street was crowded, jostling, but no traffic jam, no blaring horns. Some cars were double-parked in front of the fruit stand a couple of doors from us, or in front of a Korean grocery store on the far corner. Well-dressed, nicely groomed young men and women, forced across the river by high rents in Manhattan, sauntered toward the Japanese restaurant on one corner or the Mexican restaurant across from it. In the second-floor storefront directly opposite us, I saw a sign that read FORTUNE-TELLER AND ADVISER. Looking through the plate-glass window, I watched a large woman in a flowing red-and-green-flowered gown and black shawls, wearing dangling chains and bracelets, walk in and out from behind a curtain made of shiny beads. I thought I might run in and get a quick glimpse of the future. “You’re not a happy man,” she would say. “But don’t worry about it. Your lifeline stops about thirty seconds after you walk out my door.”

  At one point, a Camaro double-parked in front of Dominic’s, blocking in the Cherokee. I thought this might complicate things. But the night wore on; the Camaro moved, but still no sign. The guys we waited for were in for the long haul.

  Then, the inevitable. The smaller guy came through the door first. I recognized him before I saw his face. His gestures were animated but unsteady. The other guy bumped into the first guy and then bounced off the door; they talked to each other in louder voices than they needed to. When they bumped into each other, they giggled. Two contract murderers giggling like schoolgirls.

  John was out of the car and crossing the street before I’d hoisted myself out of the car and up on my crutch. Because they were drunk, they missed what they should have seen coming. John stuck his gun into the back of the bigger one as the guy stood next to the Cherokee, shuffling through his pockets for his keys. I came up behind the smaller guy on the curb side, dropped my crutch into the gutter, grabbed his arm, and twisted it up behind his back—a hold I’d learned the hard way from a cop. By bending and pushing up my arm behind me, the cop had first bent me over and then lifted me by the force of excruciating pain onto my tiptoes, where I wriggled like Eliot’s bug. This approach worked on the goon, too; he danced on his toes like a ballerina. John let the little guy see the gun, found the bigger guy’s keys for him, opened the door, and we all climbed into the Cherokee—the bad guys in front, the good guys in the backseat.

  “Drive,” John said.

  The driver sat stiffly.

  “Drive this fucking car,” John said menacingly, sticking the gun into the driver’s neck. The driver stiffened some more but didn’t move to start the car. I thought, Man, this is it, murder on Seventh Avenue. John didn’t want to shoot the guy, but what do you do when you’ve got the gun and the other guy balks? Fortunately, my faithful reading of the New York Daily News over more than a quarter of a century came to my rescue: Hit men were often imported from Latin American countries to do a particular job.

  I leaned through the gap between the two front seats, turned the ignition, and started the car. “¡Andele! ¡Andele!” said, waving my hand toward the windshield. The driver dropped the car in gear and off we went. “I don’t think they speak English very well,” I told John.

  For a moment, he looked as if he might explode, but quickly that sheepish, boyish look he got when the absurdity of life caught up with him took over. We’d also, I realized, forgotten to frisk them. When I told this to John, he rolled his eyes and nodded. “Tell them to drive out to Rockaway,” he said.

  “I don’t speak enough Spanish.”

  “Try,” John insisted.

  “¡Andele! To Rockaway,” I commanded. The driver sank down into his seat. His partner stared sullenly out through the windshield. We were headed out Seventh Avenue, which was more or less the right direction, so I let it go for the moment.

  “Why do we want to go to Rockaway?” I asked.

  John rubbed his chin. “I don’t know. I want to ask them some questions.” After a few more moments, he began to eye the front seat suspiciously; his face took on that wrinkled look of someone who smells a rat. “Maybe these guys are lying.”

  I wasn’t impressed. “Maybe they are. What are we going to do, torture them?”

  John winked at me, gesturing with his gun. I didn’t know what the hell he was doing. “Here,” he said in a whisper, but loudly enough to be easily overheard from the front seat. “Take this other gun, wrap it in this jacket, and put a hole right behind that little fucker’s ear.” His voice sounded so cruel, I believed he wanted me to do it. But he winked again, so I caught on.

  Neither of the guys in front flinched, so John sat back against the seat. But he didn’t relax his gun hand. “This is ridiculous,” he said.

  “Why don’t we drive them out to Charlie’s office? Somebody might do some explaining.” I sounded like George Raft.

  John took off his glasses, cocking his head in my direction, like a dog not able to identify the sound he’s hearing. “What would who explain?” He sounded so uncertain that my theory began to leak.

  “About these guys?” I tried to sound like it hadn’t really been my idea after all.

  “What about these guys?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why we’d ask them. So they’d tell us.”

  John’s eyes opened wider. He put his glasses back on. “You think these guys work for Charlie?”

  I lost my nerve and hesitated, trying to regain some standing in the conversation. For one thing, I wasn’t ready to accuse Charlie yet. For another, it was John’s fault we were in this car with these gunmen who didn’t speak English. Why shouldn’t he be embarrassed? “They might know something … .” I tried to add a hint of truculence to my tone, but it came out closer to a whine.

  “You think my father sicced these jerks on you?” John’s gaze was hard enough for me to avert my eyes. He was also not paying attention to the guys in the front seat.

  I pointed at them. “Those guys may still have guns.”

  Now he panicked. He waved the gun at the front seat, and I thought he was going to pull the trigger.

  “I don’t know,” I shouted. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. You tell me who they’re working for?”

  By a visible act of will, John regained his old form, pulling himself up straight, narrowing his eyes with concentration. Each movement and gesture suggested authority. “Tell him to turn around,” John ordered. “We’ll find out who they’re working for.”

  I looked at him blankly while I tried to think of how you might say turn around. I’d already used up the store of Spanish I’d learned watching Speedy Gonzales cartoons.

  By grunting, shouting, pointing, and thump
ing the driver on the shoulder, I got him to alter direction. We went back down dark, quiet Sixth Avenue and turned left onto Union Street, following it across the Gowanus Canal from Park Slope into Carroll Gardens—Red Hook—and the Amalgamated Industrial workers union hall.

  I don’t know how John knew someone would be there. But sure enough, a light was on. When I pushed the bell, a bulky, broad-shouldered young man, resembling a junkyard dog in demeanor and attitude, came to the door. He received John’s message wordlessly, walked away, then came back a few minutes later and opened the door. John walked our pals in. The junkyard dog frisked them, removing a good-size handgun from the smaller guy and a small gun like John’s from the bigger guy, then watched over them while John spoke on the phone for a few minutes. After the phone call, John and I sat in straight-backed chairs in the shape-up room, waiting out the night.

  Just after dawn, Frank Carlucci and his entourage—two assistants the size of defensive tackles and a small dour-looking man in rumpled clothes walking unhappily between them—burst through the door. Dressed impeccably in a gray Italian-cut suit and a blue shirt with a pastel pink silk tie and matching handkerchief, Carlucci was brisk and businesslike, not to say angry. It was 5:30 A.M.

  “These guys belong to you, Peter?” Carlucci asked the rumpled man as soon as they entered the room. The light of recognition had gone on in the eyes of both the characters he was talking about when Peter came through the door, so the question wasn’t misplaced.

  Peter looked sick. He fawned after Carlucci, ignoring the rest of us, including the thugs on either side of him. “Frankie,” he said in a cajoling voice. “I told them to lay off.” He gestured toward the two hit men, who by this time of the morning, their drunks wearing off, their lives on the line, looked ready to raise the white flag. “I sent them the fucking message: ‘Don’t hurt him.’ Maybe they didn’t understand the language.” The sincerity in his tone, the sadness in his eyes, it was pure obsequiousness. But Frank ate it up. Then Peter looked at me. Red-faced, his eyes bulging and misty with tears of frustration and anger, he looked like he’d finally found the one to blame for everything. “You tell this fucking guy, too,” he cried out. “Tell him to cut the shit. You want him to be running the fucking union?”

  By this time, I’d recognized him. Here was Peter Kelly, president of Local 1101 of the United Bartenders of America: my first line of defense against exploitation and abuse by the bosses. Poor Pop would break down in tears.

  “Don’t worry about him. Worry about you. We had an agreement. You fuck up again,” Frank said, “I’ll whack you and them.”

  “It was a mistake, Frankie,” Peter said, holding up his hands once more to placate his pal. “I never cross anyone, Frankie. You know that.” He gestured toward his hired hands. “They fuck up again, I’ll whack them myself.”

  Frankie dismissed the whole group with a wave of his hand. The goons followed Peter out the door like truants following dad out of the principal’s office. When they left, Carlucci looked at John, and for a split second, I caught a whiff of something like friendship. “It happens that way sometimes,” he said to John.

  That was the apology. For me, the marked man, nothing. I was still trying to digest the idea that my own union had been trying to kill me. If not for John, they might have, and in spite of John’s efforts, they’d almost killed Ntango.

  One of Carlucci’s henchmen drove us back to John’s car, and John drove me back to the Upper West Side in the early light before the morning traffic. The trip was quick: Flatbush Avenue to the Brooklyn Bridge, then up the remnants of the West Side Highway. Going along the river, past the abandoned slips down near the Village, where gay lovers strolled on the wooden piers in the pale morning light, up through the Thirties and Forties, where hookers in tight, garishly colored shorts and white boots waited for the truck drivers, and finally, bouncing over potholes that would put a tank-testing ground to shame, climbed onto what was left of the elevated part of the old highway at 57th Street.

  All the way uptown, I looked out the open window and listened to WQXR on John’s car radio, inhaling the rush of wind, which smelled faintly of salt and the sea, laying my head back against the seat and feeling the rush of air against my hair. Before dropping me off, John broke into my dream, telling me I had to get back to work; he couldn’t keep me on salary anymore. He started to tell me to leave the union alone, then thought better of it and changed direction in midsentence. “—so if you want to beat these guys, it’s got to be everybody. One guy is too easy to get rid of.”

  I nodded. It was the same advice Pop had given me.

  John sighed. “What a fucking day! Maybe things can get back to normal now.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “What about Greg? Who killed Greg? Those guys?” I asked him.

  John shook his head.

  When we pulled up across the street from my building, he shoved the shifting lever into park and leaned against the door. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes; then he closed his eyes and just sat there.

  “Why were you at Walter’s?” I asked. John’s eyes sprang open. Once again, I’d asked for more information than he was willing to give me. For years, I’d never asked anything more than he was willing to tell me. Despite his grand public manner, John was a private man; he kept his own counsel, made his own way. We were as good friends as we were because I’d respected that. When I covered for him at the Dockside years before, I never asked where he’d been or what he’d been doing. I had my own secrets. I respected his. He understood this, so we became friends. Even more than this, John ran every show he was in. You accepted him as boss, or you found your own show. Now, in ways that Greg never had been able to, I’d found my own show. This was treacherous territory. So I tread carefully, speaking softly, talking with my eyes, backing away from what John might feel was a challenge. “We still don’t know what happened with Greg and Aaron.”

  “We may never find out, bro,” he said softly.

  “Walter and Charlie were at the Ocean Club the night Aaron was killed. They were in Sea Isle when Greg got killed.” I hesitated because I didn’t want to tell John I knew about Charlie’s murder conviction. But he’d have to have pretty bad eyesight not to see the handwriting on the wall. I tried to stick to Walter, but we both knew I was talking about Charlie, too.

  “Walter just shows up one day,” I went on. “He says he’s from down the shore. But no one remembers him.” I caught John’s eye. “Why did Greg and your old man hook up with him?”

  “I do wonder about him,” John said. “Something’s not right about Walter.” He gripped the steering wheel. “That’s why I went to see him tonight.”

  John looked worn-out, circles under his eyes, gently nodding back and forth like he was rocking himself to sleep while he looked at me for a long time. His expression was hard to describe—like a father might look at his son, a tender look, but not soft, one that makes you feel cared for and protected from things you don’t even know about. John smiled slightly. “Maybe you’ve done enough for a while. Is that what you were doing, checking up on Walter?”

  I nodded sheepishly. “Yeah, but then I got a little confused when I saw you were there, so I went for a beer to think things over; then I saw those guys … .” I stopped because John looked confused.

  “How did you know I was there?”

  “Your car. Those license plates.”

  John winced and held up his hands in exasperation. “Of course, the goddamn car.” He nodded a few more times. “The goddamn license plates. I shoulda known.”

  “John,” I said, still working up my courage. “Why did your father go see Greg on the day he was killed?”

  John’s response was softer than I expected. “You tell me,” he said sadly.

  I thought maybe I would. “They were working together. Something went wrong years ago, so a guy got killed. Maybe something went wrong this time, too.” I locked eyes with John and made the leap. “I gotta tell you this, John. You know god
damn well there’s a good chance Charlie or Walter or both of them together killed Aaron and Greg.”

  John stared out the window in front of him and spoke softly. “I don’t know that, bro. And neither do you.” He sounded even wearier. “Do me a favor. Just let me get my old man out of here. You can do anything you want after that. I don’t care anymore.”

  When I got inside my apartment, instead of going to bed, I paced around, nosing into the refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets, looking for something to eat. Too tense to sleep, I found a joint and was about to light it, then decided not to. I was too confused and tense—and afraid, I figured out finally—to smoke a joint. Instead, I picked up William Butler Yeats’s Collected Poems and sat down with it in my overstuffed chair. There was solace from the poets after all.

  chapter twenty-five

  I woke up in the early afternoon, feeling depressed. It was a hot, muggy, gray smog sort of day, and Broadway stank of garbage. I walked to an Arab lunch counter for shish kebab and hummus, drank two beers at the West End, went back home, and called Kevin. I wanted to tell him Big John and I had found the guys who’d shot me and Ntango.

  He perked up much more dramatically than he usually did during my calls. “What’d you do to them?”

  “Nothing really.”

  “What’s gonna happen to them?”

  I told him they’d probably get fired and maybe deported.

  “That’s all?” said Kevin. “If they did that to me, I’d kill them both. You guys are really lame.”

  Pretty lame indeed. Another lesson in life for Kevin, another disappointment. His father would not wreak vengeance; the wrongdoers would not be brought to justice. Once more, the phony grown-ups, his father included, had come up short. I knew the myth Kevin adhered to; it was as old as the ages: Be a man. Settle your scores. Part of me yearned to subscribe to it, too. So why didn’t I go kill them both? There was an answer, not something I could explain to Kevin, maybe not even to myself. But I knew I was right, and part of my job as his dad was to try to tell him that when the cards were laid out on the table, what he’d see is that Rambo is wrong. Too many kids his age died facedown in the gutter after dissing or being dissed and seeking revenge.