Death at the Old Hotel

by Con Lehane

  I soaked in her presence next to me. I was worn out, barely awake; my mind wandered. She was so pretty. The softness of her body, the clearness of her skin, the silkiness of her hair, the slight puffiness of her lips, it wasn’t fair for her to be so desirable and so close—and I was sure, so oblivious to her effect on me. When she turned to face me, my eyes met hers, and I wasn’t sure what I found there—sympathy, tenderness. There was an echoing silence around us, and she looked into my eyes for a long time. I don’t know what she found there either, but I was sure they were pretty much glazed over by that time.

  When I awoke for the second morning in a row on my own couch, the strike, the picket line, murdered bosses and murdered husbands, kittens in windows and babies on doorsteps, my son, my ex-wife, all of it came rushing back at me. I rolled off the couch and went to the shower.

  Later, when I got back with coffee and bagels from the corner, Betsy had changed, fed, nursed, and given Katie a bath in my kitchen sink. The baby was now dressed and sitting in the stroller.

  “Brian, something terrible happened!” Betsy said, as soon as I came through the door. “The kitten jumped out the window. He was out and gone before I could stop him. I’m so sorry. Katie and I were just going to look for him.”

  “Don’t bother. You wouldn’t find him. You can take the cat out of the alley,” I told her, “but you can’t take the alley out of the cat. He’ll be back.”

  Over bagels and coffee, while the tyke gnawed on a bagel half and smeared cream cheese across her face, Betsy told me again about finding her dead husband and not finding Katie. “I didn’t feel. I just acted. Called the police. Called my mother. Called Dennis’s mother. Looked in every room. Ran next door. Ran down the street, ringing doorbells and knocking on doors. All I thought about was Katie. Before long, the entire neighborhood was out on the street. I had started in to do everything all over again, was heading down the street, when my mother found me. She gave me two Valium. I went into a trance and stayed in the trance until you called. I didn’t think about Dennis being dead at all. I thought about Katie being gone. It was like a gigantic hole opened up where I once had a heart.” Betsy finished her bagel and we drank coffee, both tied up in our own thoughts.

  “You must think I’m awful not to be sad that Dennis was killed,” Betsy said, “but I’m not. I’m sorry for him that he’s dead, but I’m not for me. Whoever killed him gave me back my life. I was trapped. Dennis told me he’d kill me before he’d let me go, and I believed him. I think I always believed he’d either kill someone or be killed anyway. He had this reckless streak. When we were kids, he was never afraid of anyone or anything. That wildness and craziness attracted me then. After we were married, I knew I’d been wrong. He was cruel. Not just mean, he was sick. At a bar once, when I was waiting for him, a guy bought me a drink and was kind of coming on to me. Nothing serious. Polite. Kind of charming. When he got there, Dennis shooed him away, but the guy wouldn’t take the shooing. Dennis embarrassed him, so he had to save face. You know how that thing is with Brooklyn guys.” Betsy paused. She hadn’t been looking at me as she told me this but did now. “Dennis beat him bloody. Way beyond the fights you see sometimes in a bar. And he liked that it made me sick and repulsed because he knew that meant I was really afraid of him.”

  “Do you know who wanted to kill him?”

  “Besides me? Probably a lot of people. People he arrested. Street hustlers he harassed. Dennis liked throwing his weight around. That’s why he liked being a cop. He was already investigated by internal affairs for hurting people he’d arrested, and he’d only been in the department not even two years. People tried to warn him. Mary Donohue’s husband Pat did—he’s been in twenty years and never hurt anyone. We had dinner with them a couple of times, then never again. Mary made excuses, but I knew it was because her husband didn’t like being around Dennis.”

  We talked for a while longer trying to figure out how Katie ended up in my doorway but couldn’t come up with anything. Betsy wondered if it might have been Katie’s guardian angel. For all I could figure out, it might have been.

  Even though I was shaken by the murders and bewildered by the return of the missing baby, the strike continued to weigh heavily on my mind. Sam and Francois and Mary Donohue were holding things together, but I needed to be more help, especially since Barney was likely to be out of the picture for the foreseeable future. I was preparing to make my way down to the picket line when a new problem arrived. Betsy called her mother and found out her front yard was crawling with reporters and photographers and that the police investigating Dennis’s murder wanted to know where Betsy was. Fortunately, Betsy’s mother didn’t know where I lived, or for sure she’d have blown the whistle, but she did tell them I was one of the bartenders on strike at the Savoy.

  When she hung up, Betsy said she wasn’t going back there, but I could see the handwriting on the wall. “It seems to me you better get back to Gerritsen Beach and play the role of the grieving cop’s widow, like it or not,” I said.

  Betsy’s face crumbled; her lip quivered. Chalk another one up for Diplomat McNulty. “What I mean is, all hell’s going to break loose until the cops find whoever killed your husband. Won’t matter if he was the worst prick who ever walked, or if every cop in New York hated him. He’s a dead cop now.”

  There were tears in Betsy’s eyes. “Now you think I’m awful—”

  “No. I don’t. That’s not what I mean—”

  “Yes, it is what you mean.” Betsy’s voice rose menacingly.

  “No, it isn’t. Calm down, God damn it. You wanna be on the front page of the Daily News tomorrow, ‘Murdered Cop’s Widow in Love Tryst’?”

  Betsy hung her head. “No,” she said quietly. She looked at me beseechingly, and I felt heartless, as if I were sending a mutt to the dog pound.

  Okay McNulty, I told myself. Time to step up. Take some responsibility here. Be a man. You don’t have to push Betsy out the door to take her lumps. You could go with her. Stand up for her. In truth, there was something appealing about the little scene of domesticity I found myself in after so many years, something appealing about Betsy—and the tyke, too. Why couldn’t I be a family man? Me and Betsy and little Katie … and Kevin … and the cat … What the hell was I getting myself into?

  “Are you all right?” Betsy had leaned closer to try to get a better look at me, her brow wrinkled with concern. “Your face just went all pale.”

  chapter twelve

  When I left for the picket line, Betsy headed to Gerritsen Beach to face the music—a symphony played by her mother and her dead husband’s relatives gathered at her mother’s house, plus a dozen or so cops’ wives from the neighborhood, along with a handful of off-duty cops, some of whom were already probably mean-drunk and ugly. She didn’t ask me to go with her, but I suspected she wanted me to. Maybe a better man than I might have gone. But even if I was inclined, I didn’t see how showing up with the bartender she spent the night with would help anything.

  The picket line at noon, when it should have been bustling with a dozen Sunday brunch waiters and waitresses in addition to the kitchen staff and the housekeepers, looked like one of those small Mexican towns you see in western movies when the hero comes riding in at siesta time. Sam and Francois pulled themselves away from the remnants of the crew staking out the front of the hotel and came toward me with disgusted looks on their faces.

  “The polices!!” bellowed Francois. “They scare the shit out of everyone.” He waved his arms excitedly. “Off in all directions, like chickens!”

  Sam was scowling. “I didn’t know you’d put in for vacation time, McNulty. You and Barney. Did you find him?” His stance was challenging, as if to say the next move was mine; he’d handle what I came up with.

  What I came up with was an abject apology. I knew how slowly the hours passed on the picket line. I told them about Barney’s immigration difficulty and him making himself scarce until things blew over and about Betsy’s murdered husba
nd. The story was in the paper, and the cops had already been there, so they knew about the murder, but not about the lost kid being found.

  “A babee on your doorstep, Brian? Magnificent!” Francois said, and kissed me on both cheeks—just like in the movies. “Your heart is pure!” Sam and I both must have looked surprised by this because Francois took umbrage. “C’est vrai! It’s true! Such things happen only to the pure of heart.” He jutted out his jaw and waited for an argument.

  “What I want to know is who put the kid there?”

  “Angels, maybe,” said Sam, glancing at Francois.

  I looked at Sam to make sure he was joking. I wondered if he’d talked to Betsy.

  “Who the fuck you think put the kid there, McNulty?” asked Sam, presumably not buying the pure-of-heart explanation—or the angels.

  Was I supposed to know? Had I missed something? Perplexed, I turned to Sam.

  He shook his head.

  Over coffee at the Greeks’, we decided whatever was going to happen with the strike, stay and fight or throw in the towel, we should all do it together. I said that was fine but before we did anything we needed to talk to Mary Donohue, since she was the issue in the strike. When I said this, Francois hemmed and hawed. Even Sam did a little dance with his eyes to keep from looking at me.

  Finally, Sam said, “Mary Donohue may have made her own peace.” Then he glanced at Francois.

  Distress clouded Francois’s expressive dark eyes. He hemmed and hawed again, then, his eyes filled with sympathy and his tone consoling, said, “Jeanne, the French girl who is the night front desk manager? You know her?”

  I nodded.

  “She saw Mary put in a secret visit to MacAlister.”

  My eyes sprang open. “When?”

  Francois shook his head. “Thursday. Perhaps Friday, when Jeanne told me. A day or two before the unfortunate event of MacAlister’s death. In the excitement, I didn’t get a chance to tell you. Today, I wonder where Mary Donohue has been, and Sam announce Mary Donohue said to him she had enough. She would get a different job. No longer persevere. And I say, ‘Oh my God, of course,’ and I tell him what Jeanne has said to me.”

  Even though Francois spoke apologetically, I still got mad. “Are you sure, Francois? That doesn’t sound like Mary. How do you know MacAlister hadn’t put Jeanne up to telling you this? She’s management.”

  Francois puffed out his chest, raised his eyebrows, and looked down his nose at me—the de Gaulle influence, no doubt. “A French woman,” he said, his accent more exaggerated than normal, “she would not lie to me!”

  I hoped she had, because if Mary called it quits, we would have two hundred workers on the street holding the bag. Half of us would go back to work, our tails between our legs; the rest of us would be fired. I couldn’t believe she’d do it. “Mary was here on the picket line yesterday at lunch. She organized the demonstration when we went at the cops.”

  Sam harrumphed a couple of times. “He told you what she said, McNulty. You got too much faith in human nature, man. Been listening too long to that solidarity-forever bullshit.”

  I winced. Betrayal came in many forms and from all directions, I knew from experience. Before the cock could crow three times, just about anyone might flip on you. Even so, you couldn’t believe rumors you heard on a picket line. Pop warned me about splits when the workers hit the bricks—day shift against night shift, dining room against housekeeping, other Slavs against Poles. African American and French against the Irish? Who knows? I had to admit the Irish weren’t holding up their end of the fight, what with Barney hiding out in the hills of the Bronx, Betsy taking on the Daily News photographers in Brooklyn, me deserting my post last night, and Mary seeming to have thrown in the towel. I wanted to hear it from Mary herself before I’d believe it, though.

  We set the meeting for Wednesday night at the Lord Byron Hotel on 27th Street, something of a sister ship to our own lovely Savoy. This gave us a little time to get our ducks lined up. Francois went to activate the phone tree, Sam went home to sleep, and I joined what there was of a picket line. The half-dozen Guatemalan and Salvadoran dishwashers and kitchen slaves smiled wearily, giving the impression they were glad to see me, when I knew in their hearts they hated my guts, since I was one of the gringos that got them into this mess. It was chilly—not freezing as it had been early in the strike, but cold enough, and colder still when the sun dipped behind the buildings. I shivered into my pea coat and the kitchen guys shivered into their windbreakers, none of us outdoor guys to begin with, and them especially sensitive to the cold, coming from warm-weather countries and spending sixty hours a week in overheated kitchens. We walked for a while, me by myself, them in groups of two or three, talking quietly in Spanish—probably about getting me alone in an alley. I suggested we take breaks in groups of two or three to go to the Greeks’ for coffee and to warm up. When my turn came, no one came with me, except that one of the two uniformed cops watching the picket line peeled himself away from the other one and stopped me at the door of the restaurant.

  “You McNulty?” he asked.

  My heart stopped. Here it comes, I thought. “Let’s say for the sake of argument I am.”

  He stiffened, the expression in his eyes hardening. He looked like he wanted to kick my ass but instead reached inside his jacket and came up with a business card that he handed to me. “One of the detectives wanted me to give this to you.”

  On the card was written SERGEANT PATRICK SHEEHAN NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT DETECTIVE BUREAU.

  “What did he say?” I asked the cop, I’m sure with a quaking voice.

  “He said you were an asshole,” the cop said, walking away.

  Cops are never much help to workers on strike. It’s not all their fault—the laws are stacked against the strikers—but too often the cops make it personal: A challenge to the law is a challenge to them, mano a mano. If that’s not bad enough, everything gets worse when a cop is killed. On that point, Betsy’s mother was on the money. The cops figure every outlaw is fair game until they get the cop killer. Every bad guy should know this—and if they don’t, they learn it once the manhunt begins. The experienced bad guys lie low. In some cases, they turn the cop killer over to the police. In other cases, they take care of the killer themselves. The cops get a million tips. Every punk who gets collared has a tip on the cop killer. He’s made everyone’s life miserable, so no one gets the mark of the squealer for dropping a dime on this one.

  Now that Betsy’s mother had connected her son-in-law’s murder to the strike, the cops might very well drop a net over the entire picket line and haul us all in to try to pressure someone into talking—and somehow Sheehan, the only homicide detective I’ve ever met, gets involved. He must have a computer that tells him if my name comes up in an investigation, so he can come out and lean on me. There’d probably been a thousand murders in New York since the last time our paths crossed. This wouldn’t stop him from marveling over the coincidence that he’s found me with another body at my feet, so to speak—and this one a cop.

  I grabbed a cup of joe and called my service from the Greeks’ pay phone to get even worse news. Another emergency message from Betsy. Call her at her mother’s.

  “They think I killed Dennis,” Betsy announced breathlessly. “What should I do? They asked where I was and didn’t Dennis and I have a fight and who were the guys on the picket line who assaulted Dennis.” She was practically panting when she finished.

  I went dizzy and had to grab the pay phone to hold myself up—that old getting hit on the back of the head with a two-by-four feeling I know so well. “Oh my fucking word!” I wailed, loud enough to halt the buzz of conversation at the counter behind me. “Everything can’t be this screwed up.”

  “They act like I’m a criminal,” Betsy said self-righteously. “You’d think they’d be sympathetic. What about the blue wall and all that?”

  “It doesn’t extend to wives. Cops don’t like other cops’ wives. A lot of them don’t ev
en like their own wives.”

  Betsy was silent for a few seconds; then she went on. “What should I do, Brian? They wanted to know where I was last night and the night before—” She paused for a deep breath. “And what’s worse … this I can’t believe. I can’t believe anyone could say this … the pricks—”

  “What, Betsy?”

  “The fat blubbery bastard—his breath stinks, on top of everything else—he said Katie being lost was a hoax. He said maybe I forgot to tell him something. Maybe Katie was with one of my friends and I kept it secret because I didn’t want anyone to know where I was the last two nights. He asked my mother who my friends were … anyone I might leave the baby with. What should I do, Brian? I’m scared … I can’t believe this is happening.”

  I was ready to bang my head against the wall. Why hadn’t I seen this coming? Mexico, I thought—or Ireland, if they don’t have an extradition treaty. This was ridiculous. Betsy didn’t kill her husband and hide the baby and have someone leave her on my doorstep … Did she? Where was Barney when all this was happening? Betsy and Barney? Bonnie and Clyde? I had to calm down.

  “Okay, let’s take this one step at a time. You could tell them you were with me, but that’s not going to help much. It’s you and me saying that’s where you were. They might decide we’re both lying. What you should do—”

  “Brian—”

  “What you should do is get a—”

  “Brian!!” Betsy shouted. “I already told them … .” Her voice went soft. “ … I thought it would be enough … In the beginning, I thought they were trying to help … Is that really bad?”

  It took a few seconds to absorb this—like trying to keep down the first couple of bites of breakfast after a bad night. The good thing was, she really was with me. The truth is easier to keep straight than a lie. The bad thing was, contemporary mores would frown on hearing—via the Daily News—about the slain police officer’s widow and the bartender. We might have gotten away with one night chastely spent—but a second night, and the hapless bartender finding the missing kid? I didn’t believe the goddamn story, and it happened to me.