Death at the Old Hotel

by Con Lehane

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  chapter twenty-five

  Author’s Note

  Also by

  McNulty’s Old Favorites

  Copyright Page

  To Jim van Etten

  chapter one

  “The fooker is spying on us,” Barney said.

  We were working the stick at the old Savoy Hotel, and the action at the bar was slowing after a busier than usual Thursday night dinner rush. The hotel was almost full, the occupancy rate bolstered by out-of-town Christmas shoppers and the dining room by a couple of holiday parties from neighboring offices. The Savoy Hotel, which is gone now, in those days was located on the far west side of Manhattan, west of Eighth Avenue on 48th Street, and the fooker Barney referred to was the hotel’s manager, James MacAlister. The Savoy had seen better days, even then in the early ’90s—as had many of us who worked there—but the rooms were clean, the restaurant prices reasonable, and the food better than you’d expect two blocks north of Restaurant Row, thanks to the French chef, Francois DeLouge, who’d bounced around the hotels of New York almost as long as I had.

  The establishment boasted a staff of journeymen hoteliers, many of whom had been there since the hotel’s heyday. Barney Saunders, my partner behind the bar, a wild young Irishman and a good bartender to boot, had been at the Savoy a year or so before I arrived and had already built a pretty good bar business. There was a growing coterie of regulars, and with some business from the dining room, that’s really all a bartender needs to make a living. For the nights later in the week, we had Tiny Waters at the piano. All in all it was as good as many bartending gigs in the city and better than some. The problem was that the pay scale was lower and the benefits fewer than at the other union hotels in the city.

  How Barney and I found ourselves in this hotel on the western fringes of Manhattan, too near the coast of New Jersey for comfort, is one of those long stories better told on a rainy night when you’re still at the bar because you can’t get a cab and don’t have anywhere much to go if you could get one. Barney was exiled from the mainstream when he fell out of favor with the bartenders union honchos. He brought me on board at the Savoy when I ran afoul of the new management at the Sheraton. The union was processing a grievance for me but, since I was a malcontent like Barney, wasn’t in any hurry to settle anything.

  On this night, Barney was trying to talk me into a plan he’d hatched to get rid of MacAlister, whom he suspected of being in cahoots with a crooked business agent from the union. As much a natural-born leader as Napoleon—or in his case, Brian Boru—Barney had taken up the rank-and-file rebellion at the Savoy where he’d left off at his former job, and had dragged me into the battle to reform the union.

  My devotion to the cause of the workers of the world—and bartenders in particular—was my birthright, my having been born under the sign of the hammer and sickle, so to speak; that is, my parents were Communists. Barney’s background was a bit murkier, having to do with, he told me, being born and reared in County Cavan, a stone’s throw—or brick, bottle, or stick of gelignite—from the border of the six counties occupied by the British in the north of Ireland.

  “Dere’s a deal,” Barney had told me soon after I arrived, when he explained about the lousy pay and his plans to change things, “a sweetheart of an arrangement if ever there was one, between Eliot and MacAlister.” Eliot was the union business agent, who was bad enough, but MacAlister really got Barney’s Irish up.

  “A whoore of man,” said Barney. “A Scotsman that hates the Irish. The man is dangerous, Brian.”

  MacAlister was a tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, arrogant boss-type. Since I’d been there, he and Barney had had a series of runins, the latest over Barney’s free-pouring. The night he called him on it, Barney’s reaction was sudden and violent, surprising me. We’d been through the free-pour versus use-a-shot-glass wars a dozen times. None of us cared that much. But Barney the cheerful, friend of every man, got his back up with the first words out of MacAlister’s mouth. I didn’t get it until Barney explained at closing time. “A Scotsman lording over an Irishman, Brian. It’s in his voice, his eyes. He’ll get me if I don’t get him first.”

  A couple of beers later, I learned that this antagonism between the Irish and a segment of the Scots had its origins in the seventeenth century—when the British sent Scots to colonize the north of Ireland. Both the Scots and the Irish had long memories, it seemed, and battles had been raging ever since. Whatever its cause, the change in Barney was remarkable—the hatred resonating in his voice, the no-quarter-given, no-quarter-asked glare cast in the direction of the departing MacAlister. It was like seeing your old pooch who wagged his tail and licked the hand of whomever he came across suddenly go for the throat of the mailman.

  Most of the time, Barney was full of good cheer. When he worked the stick, the long faces of the workaday weary regulars broke into smiles even before they got their first cocktail. With his mop of dark hair and his blue, smiling Irish eyes, he was as handsome as a prince. The waitresses flirted with him unmercifully, but he was as shy around women as an altar boy in a cathouse, so all he’d do was blush and mumble. One of those rare human beings who kept his own troubles to himself but was always willing to heave a shoulder under yours, Barney would do you a favor, as if he were required by law to do it. He had a quick wit and a quicker tongue, the words tumbling over one another, cascading from his mouth, in a verbal blur, so he’d have mumbled three or four things, and if you weren’t quick, or if your mother hadn’t been from Cavan, like mine, you’d have missed it. The good nature vanished, though, when he talked about MacAlister.

  “I’ve had me eye on him,” said Barney, after we’d closed and cleaned and restocked the bar this night. “I’ll find out more about him, to be sure.” On top of his hail-fellow-well-met personality, Barney was a derring-do sort of guy, two characteristics missing from my repertoire. I knew he was up to something, but this was the last I heard about it until the following Sunday night.

  The guy at the bar was small, dark-skinned like a Dominican infielder with a good tan, and wearing a suit that was, if I remember my son Kevin’s infancy accurately, the color baby shit sometimes gets. He ordered a rum and Coke made with Appleton’s—a waste of good liquor, if you ask me; one of those guys who orders a call brand to let me know he can afford it. I poured the Appleton’s because he was sitting at the bar watching me. If he’d been at a table, I’d have poured the rail rum, and with the Coke to mask the flavor, he wouldn’t have noticed if I’d used Sterno.

  His eyelids were like hoods, and when he lifted his head to speak, the hoods came down, so I couldn’t see his eyes. On top of this, he mumbled, and on top of that, he spoke in clumps of words rather than sentences. Given these impediments to clear communication, it took some time for me to make sense of what he was saying.

  “You’re from the union?”

  “Smart guy … My friends …” He waved an arm, gesturing to take i
n the small bar and cocktail area. “You could do good.” He drifted off into his own thoughts, after making his point.

  “Your friends come in here?” I tried. “I wouldn’t know. I’m new.”

  He nodded a few times, then pursed his lips and changed directions, shaking his head sadly from side to side. “The other guy not so smart … You gotta know better.” He raised the hoods for a second, so I got a good look at the yellowish-white-framed black, expressionless eyes. “The other guy. Not here?”

  “Not now.” The other guy was Barney, and he was due to arrive any minute. I could have told the guy this, but I didn’t, since I doubted it would be to Barney’s benefit.

  “He listen to you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  My visitor nodded sadly again. “Busy night.”

  “Not so busy,” I said.

  “Busy tonight,” he assured me.

  Something in the way he said this caught my attention, and those hooded eyes notwithstanding, he didn’t miss my epiphany.

  “Barney?”

  His expression didn’t change.

  “Did something happen to him?”

  This specter, perched like a vulture on the bar stool, drained his drink, shook the glass to rattle the ice cubes, then pushed it toward me. “This a good job?” When I didn’t answer: “Am I right? A good job? No trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just started.”

  The man nodded. “No trouble,” he said. This time it was a command.

  The call from the hospital came at around eleven o’clock.

  chapter two

  Barney was in a semiprivate room at NYU Hospital when I went over early the next morning. He’d been moved there from the Bellevue trauma center once the hospital powers ascertained he had health insurance. Fortunately, he’d held on to the union insurance plan he had when he left the mainstream for the Savoy. Without the insurance he’d have been dumped onto one of the wards at Bellevue to be neglected by the overworked and understaffed nursing crew under the direction of a surgical resident who hadn’t slept in three days.

  Barney’s nose had already been flattened a couple of times in Gaelic football matches back in his native Ireland, long before the Local 909 goons got to him, so when the blackened and discolored eyes came around, his face wouldn’t have changed much. They did break a couple of ribs and rupture his spleen, but he’d bounce back from that, too. What he wouldn’t be able to get along without was the fingers. The sleep-deprived Bellevue trauma team and the hand-surgery fellow had reattached them. Whether they’d hold or not, and consequently whether Barney would ever work the stick again, was, the resident told me, anyone’s guess.

  To see him lying in the bed, his eyes swollen shut, his brain shut down by the free-flowing Demerol drip running through a tube into his arm, and his hand wrapped in a pillow of gauze and rigidly bound to a board, to see such a robust, hearty guy flat on his back with tubes sticking out of him every which way, his face wan and his eyes fogged in, to see him torn up like this would cause anyone to despair.

  When he looked at me, I couldn’t read his eyes. He might have been scared or angry; he might have given up hope altogether, as I would have; I didn’t know. I don’t know what he read in my eyes, either, anger, fear, or pity, except that I stood there not knowing what to say or do.

  If it were the movies, I’d say, “You lie there and relax, pal. I’ll get the bastards who did this.” With that I’d charge out the door, saddle up Old Paint, head out into the hills after the bad guys, catch up to them one at a time, and wreak vengeance, returning in time to see Barney hobble out of bed toward his happy new life, discovering when I arrived that he had an adorable younger sister, who was just so grateful for my having restored her brother’s honor that she … and so on. In real life, here in Fun City in the early 1990s, if I went after the guys who hammered Barney, I’d end up in a bed alongside him with my own bandages, breaks, and bruises, if not sinking into the mud under the East River wearing a pair of cement shoes. If you’ve been a New York City bartender as long as Barney and I have, you know how often the good guys win.

  So what do you do? Who do you tell it to? The detective in the precinct? “Let me get this down,” he says. “Do you know who attacked you?” Well, of course we don’t know who beat Barney up, but we know who’s behind it. “You do, now, do you? And do you have any evidence?” Of course we don’t. “Well, that’s too bad. Maybe there’s an organized crime unit you can talk to. I’ll give you a phone number. A few years down the road they’ll get to you. By then, someone will have painted a couple of houses with the both of you. You want my advice? Do your job and leave them alone. You don’t bother them; they don’t bother you. You want to be a smart guy, you end up like your friend.”

  When I’m really stumped, even at this late stage in my life, I turn to my father. Pop has been in the labor movement in one way or another since his days at Brooklyn College back in the 1930s. He became a Communist in those days and has been one ever since, though a despondent one since Gorbachev pulled the plug on the Soviet Union. In the past, Pop was a journalist and an organizer for the Newspaper Guild. He helped lead newspaper strikes, joined the army to fight fascism, and came back to become a reporter for PM, a left-wing newspaper that had a brief fling in New York at the end of World War II. During the 1950s, he refused to testify about his Communist Party membership. He was willing to testify that he was a Communist but not about who else was or wasn’t, so he got himself blacklisted and later went to jail for contempt of something or other—standing by his principles but scaring the shit out of his son, who was afraid his father really was a Soviet spy and would end up executed like the Rosenbergs, leaving his son to be thrust into a foster home or, worse, adopted by his Aunt Maude, his mother’s sister, the meanest person he’d ever known. Somehow Pop survived all this, as did his son. Because of the blacklist, Pop went from the newspaper world to the labor movement and eventually retired from the furniture workers union, while his son, in whom he had placed much hope, has spent his adult life in vain pursuit of an acting career and other slow-moving dreams.

  After buzzing me in to his Cortelyou Road apartment in Flatbush, Pop returned to his favorite pastime, reading, so I found him sitting at his dining room table with a book open in front of him. The book was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a novel about the beginnings of the modern era in Nigeria that everyone else had read in the ’60s. Pop never went in for trends—he had a habit these days of reading the Times a couple of days after it came out—I noticed he’d dug his four-foot-high bent and faded fake Christmas tree out of mothballs in grudging recognition of the season to be jolly, though he’d yet to hang on it decoration number one.

  “How’s your new job?” Pop asked, and this opened up the floodgates. I told him about what had happened to Barney, about the slimeball who’d been in my bar wising me up, probably at exactly the time his piece-of-shit friends were torturing Barney.

  “The worst thing is I don’t know what to do. I feel like I should wait for that prick to come back into the bar and then smash him over the head with a Galliano bottle.”

  Pop dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “Sure. Then the boss can fire you and hire a more compliant bartender.”

  “I hate to tell you this, Pop, but this time it’s not just the boss; it’s the union, too—and the union’s worse.” I told Pop about my conversation with Barney a couple of nights before he was attacked. “Barney was trying to find out what was going on between MacAlister and the union business agent for the Savoy. He was trying to get hold of MacAlister’s books. They caught him, and smacked him around to tell him to mind his own business.”

  “You think that’s what happened, and maybe so. But you should know how this works yourself. What do you think I was doing all those years?”

  Pop had spent years as an internal investigator for one of the garment unions looking for evidence of deals between crooked business agents and even crookeder
bosses. Now he headed for his hallway coat closet. “Let’s go,” he said, reaching for his coat.

  I was confused, but Pop was used to that; he’d been confusing me all my life. “What you should have told Barney is that it’s a waste of time looking at the boss’s books; you want to look in his wastepaper baskets.”

  What Pop wanted to do was take a look in the trash bins behind the hotel. Here he was in his seventies, and I tagged along as if I were ten years old again. On the way over on the subway, I worried that someone would catch us, like I figured they caught Barney, but it didn’t do any good telling Pop.

  “Most places don’t guard their garbage,” he said.

  We stopped at a small grocery store on Ninth Avenue, where Pop bought a box of plastic garbage bags and two pairs of rubber kitchen gloves. Then we hoofed it over to the street behind the hotel, where Pop guessed, correctly, we’d find an alley leading to the back of the building. The alley and the walls around it were concrete, something like a handball court. There was a loading dock, with the door closed, and a number of different garbage receptacles of various sizes, mostly Dumpsters. Some of them held kitchen garbage, these immediately recognizable by the stench. Others held whatever crap the maids had hauled out of the sleeping rooms that day—used condoms, sanitary napkins, syringes, bloody and snot-filled tissues. None of this fazed Pop. Wearing the rubber gloves, he poked around in this and that bin, until he came upon a small red Dumpster containing mostly paper—typing paper, computer paper, brochures, letters, envelopes. I followed his lead and began stuffing any likely-looking paper into trash bags.

  “We’ll have to take a cab,” he said when we’d stuffed a half dozen bags.

  “You’ll have to take a cab. I’ve gotta go to work,” I told him. After a bit of a tussle getting a cab—the first couple of drivers thought Pop, with his collection of garbage bags and wearing his half-a-century-old overcoat, was a homeless person—I helped him load the stuff in.