by Con Lehane
The team? My God, the basketball tryout, and I hadn’t even asked him about it. I tried to make up for my mistake with an excess of enthusiasm, but he saw right through me. “I have practice three nights a week now and games or practice almost every night once the season starts in January.”
I understood he was preparing me for his return to Brooklyn. Getting to school in the morning was tough enough. Going back at night for basketball was impossible. I told him this, and that I liked having him with me—and I did—but if he wanted to play basketball he had to go back to his mother’s.
He nodded. “We might need an assistant coach.”
Kevin knew I loved basketball, so he was trying to arrange more time for the father to be with the son—a job I should be doing, and should have been doing all his life. I almost cried. “I’ll talk to your coach and see what I can do.”
We had things pretty much settled when the doorbell rang. I didn’t like the doorbell ringing in the middle of the day. It might be a delivery, but usually the super handled those. Before I pushed the buzzer for the outside door, the apartment doorbell rang. Two burly guys, both young, one white, one black, both wearing suits, stood in the doorway when I opened the door.
“Mr. McNulty?” the white guy asked.
When I didn’t answer, he came into the apartment. He didn’t push through me, but I sensed he would have if I hadn’t stepped back.
Kevin came up behind me. “These are the guys I told you about.”
“Take a hike, kid,” the white guy said to Kevin.
“No,” Kevin said.
I was scared, trembling scared, and jumped at the chance to get Kevin out of there. “Go,” I told him.
“No,” he said again, his voice shaking, fear in his eyes.
The black guy moved toward him, but I grabbed Kevin’s arm first. “He’s going,” I said, my tone more forceful than I thought it could be. The black guy hesitated. “It’s better for you to go,” I said gently to Kevin. “I can take care of this. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
Kevin sized up the two guys. No way were we going to do anything against them if it came to a fight. Then something changed in his face; the tension drained, as if he’d found something he’d lost. The black guy began to move toward him again, so I moved between them.
“He’ll go,” I said.
“I’ll go,” Kevin said this time, to my great relief. In a flash, he squeezed between the two guys and out the door.
“Don’t talk to no one and you can come back in ten minutes,” the black guy said as he was going.
“You know what we want,” the white guy said when he was gone.
“I could probably guess.”
“You know where a certain person is. A gentleman you spoke to thought you might tell us.”
The guy had shoulders as wide across as the M104 bus, but he didn’t come across as a tough guy. He didn’t have to. Clean-shaven, well-groomed, soft-spoken, polite, he was like one of those good-natured giants constantly reassuring folks he isn’t going to squash them—the black guy, too, except he seemed bored and impatient. I didn’t want to think about what he was impatient for. If I remembered my gangster movies correctly, the two gentlemen in my foyer intended to put a hurtin’ on me, as Sam had suggested they might. The alternative was to tell them what they wanted to know.
Here goes nothin’, I thought. I considered blessing myself. “You gotta give me a hint here, guys. I’m not hiding anything. I told the other guy—gentleman, I mean—what I knew. I’ll tell you, too. Just tell me what you’re lookin’ for.”
“Where’s the Irish guy?”
“The Irish guy?”
The black guy took a step toward me. His expression didn’t change, but when he took the step he became menacing.
“Oh, you mean Barney,” I said quickly before he could get to me. “He’s hiding out. No one knows where he is.”
They waited, neither speaking.
“Look, if this is about those unfortunate happenings, Barney didn’t have anything to do with that. This guy Eliot, the business agent for the bartenders, is the guy you want.”
“The guy we want is the Irish guy.”
The black assassin’s expression changed to something like distaste, as if he didn’t much like what was going to happen next. He took another step toward me. Reflexively, I took a step back. He took another step, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the other hand. Just then the door opened. Both of my guests spun to look. It was Kevin.
“Not yet, kid—” the black guy started to say, but stopped when he saw Sam the Hammer behind Kevin.
chapter twenty
Sam came into the foyer with his right hand in his windbreaker pocket. He was chewing a toothpick, and his eyes were calm. “Beat it,” he said.
All of us watched Sam’s pocket until the white-guy thug reached for his own.
“Go ahead,” said Sam. “We’ll all die this afternoon right here in this hallway.”
The standoff lasted about ten seconds while I stood frozen to the spot, too shocked to feel. Then my two visitors left, without a word but not without a couple of backward glances. Sam left right behind them, without a word to me, either, and with no backward glance. Kevin and I collapsed in the living room in stunned silence.
“Are you going to call the cops?” Kevin asked finally.
“And tell them what?” I said, shaking now, as my systems began to work again.
“I don’t know. I thought cops protected you from people like that.”
“I wish they did. But what did those guys do, really? They asked questions. They didn’t hurt me or threaten me, at least not directly. Even if the cops did arrest them, there’d be others to take their places.”
“You should get a gun.”
“What would I do with it? Shoot them and then have them shoot me and we all end up dead on the hallway floor, like Sam said?” Dumping this despairing view on Kevin was a lousy idea, I decided, so I stood up and tousled his hair. “Time for you to go to Brooklyn. This will blow over. I’ve got friends. Something will turn up.”
He looked as unconvinced as I felt, but I took him to Pop’s apartment, after calling Pop in New Jersey to tell him it was an emergency and he had to come home. He said he would.
“Go talk to your friend Barney,” said Pop a few hours later when we were seated at his dining room table. “Maybe he can prove he didn’t kill anyone and make peace with those gangsters before they kill you. Make your case to Pete Kelly, too. He should have some influence with those people after all the years he’s spent in their hip pocket.”
“He already set up that meeting. It didn’t do any good.”
“Tell them what they want to know. Warn Barney, then tell them.” Pop seemed genuinely worried.
“They’ll take it out on me if I warn him.”
Pop pursed his lips and looked me over. “You’re in a tough spot.”
“I knew that.”
I went from Pop’s apartment to work that evening, cringing every time the outside door opened and someone came in. Mary Donohue was working a Christmas party with Sam, and Betsy was working the lounge. Both women looked haggard, on edge, and irritated. I was out of sorts myself, expecting two goons to come through the door any minute to pound me into submission like one of Francois’s veal cutlets.
We made it through the busy night, with the loud and obstreperous residue from a couple of office Christmas parties at one end of the bar, and also a bunch of regulars back now that the strike was over, full of advice as to what we should have done instead of what we did do, two of them convinced Barney killed MacAlister, the other two looking sideways at Sam each time he came into the bar from the party he was working. The conversation stopped a couple of times I went near them, too, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of them were betting on me for the kill. It wasn’t a great night. Every time I tried to talk to Betsy, she dashed off to one of her tables whether they wanted something or not. Mary and Sam came into the bar when t
hey needed something and dashed out again. So I didn’t have anyone to talk to, not that I felt like talking anyway.
Around midnight, everything changed. I heard the door and, fearing the worst, turned to look. Ntango and Sam the Hammer were shaking the cold off themselves in the doorway. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if it had been Santa Claus. It was the first time, I was sure, Sam the Hammer had been below 72nd Street, not counting trips to Belmont and Aqueduct, since the 1970s. I set them up with drinks—Sam the Hammer a light beer, Ntango a rum and grapefruit juice—and ran a tab for them.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked Ntango, though I knew already why they’d come.
He gestured with his head toward Uptown Sam. “Kevin went back to Brooklyn, so he decided to watch over you.”
Once more, I thought about friends. What a strange manner of being we folks are. Sam the Hammer, a convicted killer, an outlaw since childhood, a scourge on respectable society, no family, no visible means of support, no friends, really, except folks he knows from the street, yet he goes to the mat for me, a bartender who slipped him a beer now and again and took the trouble to pay attention when he told me things he considered important. Ntango, another one, a cabdriver from the wretched of the earth, an exile from northeast Africa, stoned more often than he wasn’t, who befriended me, saved my life, risked his own to protect my son. What kind of friendship is this that’s based on sucking down a couple of cold ones as you watch the Knicks on a barroom TV, sharing a joint in an alley behind a gin mill, or telling tales over drinks late at night after the bar has closed, friendship that happens because folks who don’t have much in the way of homes are thrown together in some New York City version of a clean, well-lighted place?
At closing time, we had a confab at the end of the bar—Betsy, Mary, Downtown Sam, Francois, and our new consultants Ntango and Uptown Sam the Hammer. The new manager stuck his head in but decided against intervention, which I took as a good sign. For the hotel, it had been a good night—a good week since the strike ended—so he didn’t begrudge us a couple of pops at the end of the shift.
What began things was my pouring what would have been the first mouthful of my beer out onto the floor in memory of Barney, hiding out upriver in the Bronx. We talked about him then, mostly despairing talk about whether things would ever calm down enough for him to come back.
After a bit, and her second Irish whiskey punch, Mary Donohue had enough of our whining. “For the love of God, can’t any of you men stand up against the pair of crooks that caused us this trouble in the first place? Isn’t it Tom Eliot and Peter Kelly who’ll be the ruination of us all, if we don’t put a stop to them? Are ye no men at all, that you can’t put them in their place?”
“And what place is that, Mary?” I asked quietly.
“Behind bars.” She didn’t miss a beat.
I remembered then that I’d forgotten to show pictures of Kelly and Eliot to Jeanne, the French desk clerk. Downtown Sam had back copies of the union newspaper in his locker, which he retrieved. Sure enough, there was Kelly on nearly every page, and in the third issue I looked at I found a picture of Eliot and some other business agents at the union’s scholarship banquet. I’d have to wait until tomorrow to show the pictures to Jeanne. I didn’t even know what good it would do if she did recognize them.
“Okay, so we know all this. I’ve already told the cops that Eliot is behind the killings, and I told it to the guys who want to pound me. None of them believe me.”
“Give them proof,” said Betsy.
“That’s a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?” I glowered at Betsy. “I don’t have any proof—just Barney’s half-assed idea about what he thinks happened.”
“Sweat it out of him,” said Francois.
“Up in the office on the Quai des Orfèvres, I guess?” Francois seemed to have me confused with his countryman le commissaire Maigret of the French Police Judiciaire.
Francois was saddling up his Francophile high horse again. “The Police Judiciaire know how to bring about a confession.”
Around two, we went our separate ways, with Ntango driving me uptown and Sam the Hammer riding shotgun. Nothing happened on the way home, and Sam spent the night on my couch. It was reassuring to have him there, but I didn’t want to adopt him permanently. Before we’d left the hotel, Betsy told me she was off the next day and wanted to stop by so I could see Katie. I said fine.
Saturday morning, I spruced myself up, bought Sam breakfast at Tom’s, and went downtown to the hotel to show the pictures of Kelly and Eliot to Jeanne. At first, she didn’t remember our conversation the day before, or me at all. I thought I’d have to go get Francois to reestablish my legitimacy, but she came around after a few minutes. When I showed her the pictures, she didn’t recognize Kelly but was sure Eliot had been to see MacAlister—more than once.
I found Downtown Sam in the bar and told him about it.
“It don’t mean shit,” Sam explained.
“Oh?”
“Of course Eliot goes to see MacAlister; he’s the union business agent. We want to know when the motherfucker went to see him.” Sam paused. “You got those pictures?” I gave them to him. “I know Jason, one of the security guards. Maybe he can ask around if somebody seen Eliot when MacAlister was killed.”
I went back home to wait for Betsy and Kate. When they arrived, I held Katie for a bit and bounced her on my knee. She giggled a lot and seemed to enjoy being with me. I doubted that she saw me as her rescuer, but she seemed comfortable with me, and I had fun playing with her. It had been a long time since I’d spent time with a tyke. After a bit, Betsy nursed her and put her in her stroller for a nap.
When she finished, she came over and sat beside me on the couch. “I feel like I should do something, but I don’t know what,” she said. “All this suspicion is making me a nervous wreck. I feel like someone’s watching me all the time.”
We talked for a while, and as we talked, Barney’s name came up enough times and with enough tenderness when Betsy talked about him for me to wonder what the real purpose of her coming to see me was.
“Why don’t you go see Barney,” I said a bit peevishly after the question of his welfare came up for the third time.
“Oh, can we?” Betsy brightened considerably, bouncing around on the couch to face me. I expected her to squeal. She didn’t mean to convey how excited she was. Sometimes people don’t know their own hearts.
I was willing to take Betsy to the Bronx to see Barney, but I was spooked by her feeling like someone was watching her. If the cops had a tail on her, we’d lead them to him. Betsy didn’t know if she’d been followed to my apartment or not. How do you make sure you’re not being followed? I figured Sam the Hammer would know. So we bundled up Katie and went to look for him, finding him, after checking a few places, in the Terrace Café on Broadway.
“Gimme the kid and the key to your apartment, go out the back door. Take a cab to 96th Street, the express downtown to 72nd Street, and a local back uptown. Then you can go on your way.” Sam said all this sitting at the bar, reading the Daily News and drinking coffee without taking the toothpick out of his mouth.
Betsy looked at me with an expression of horror.
“He’ll give Katie back,” I told her. I happened to know that Sam had been an emergency babysitter for a couple in my building for years. It wasn’t something he talked about in public, so neither did I. With that and all the times he’d watched Kevin for me, I was sure he’d be fine, and after a minute or two I convinced Betsy.
When we finally got to the Bronx, after our circuitous journey, we found Barney in the butcher shop and went to the same bar and sat in the same booth as the last time I spoke to him. He and Betsy were shyly glad to see each other, each more bashful than the other as they first shook hands and then hugged like eight-year-olds at a dance party.
I wasn’t angry with Barney, but I was tired of beating around the bush. If he wanted me to put my money on his Eliot story, he had to
come clean with his own. For a moment, I considered not telling him about the goons because I knew he wouldn’t want me in trouble on account of him. Then I said fuck it; he could worry just like I did.
“Jaysus, the bastards,” he said when I finished. “You’re a great one for keeping a secret, Brian, but you should have told them where I am. Mind you, I appreciate your watching over me, but you can’t take my troubles as your own.”
“There’s trouble enough for everyone,” I said. “You’ve got the cops to worry about, too. They know Betsy’s husband found out you were illegal and was about to blow the whistle and that you knew about it. What they may not know yet is he told MacAlister, and you knew that, too.”
“No,” said Barney. “I knew no such thing.”
“Betsy told me you knew.”
He turned toward her, his expression anguished, but he softened immediately. “Aragh, so she did.” He patted her hand. “It’s all right, now,” he said. “It’s fine to tell Brian.”
Betsy moved her hand from under his to on top of it. I thought they were going to hold hands, but they didn’t. Instead, Betsy pulled back and clasped her own hands together. “What are we going to do?” she said in a tone as anguished as Barney’s expression had been.
“Maybe you should pick up Katie and the three of you head for the hills,” I suggested. Man, what a reaction, both of them blushing furiously, as mortified as if I’d caught them in bed. “Sorry,” I said.
After a strained silence, I told Barney things looked bleak for him, unless something turned up that would point the finger at Eliot. “Why are you so sure it was Eliot?” I said.
Barney held up his bandages. “Look at me bloody hands.”
“We can’t prove he did that either.”
“Aye, but it’s a court of law where you need proof—the courts where the guilty carry proof of their innocence in their hands. At home, we had our own tribunals.” Barney’s expression hardened; his lively blue eyes stopped dancing. “When we knew who the guilty party was, we didn’t wait for the British court to deny our evidence and set him free. If we didn’t take care of matters on our own, there would be no justice for the Irish.” He paused, and we both saw Betsy’s face frozen into a look of revulsion. His eyes on her, he went on more quietly. “Mind you, we’d take every precaution to not harm an innocent man, to give even the likes of Tom Eliot a chance to answer the claims against him.”