by Con Lehane
“If he tells us what happened, we’ll know what the connections are, the reason he wanted them dead.” I was scrambling to get the words out because I was afraid Barney might be right and I didn’t want to admit it. What good would it do to tell the cops Eliot confessed to us? We still wouldn’t have any evidence.
“And if we know he’s guilty, what then?” Barney’s gaze was steady, his voice calm, unlike mine.
“Well, we’re not going to shoot him or hurt him.” This time, my determination shored up my voice.
Barney searched my face. His look was hard, but there was sympathy there also, like you might have for a child learning a painful lesson. “I’ll tell him ‘talk or I’ll shoot you,’” Barney said. “If he doesn’t talk and then I don’t shoot, he’ll know he doesn’t have to talk. There’ll be no point in asking him anything else.”
“Yeah, well, if you pull the trigger, there won’t be any point in asking him anything else, either. We didn’t come out here to execute the guy.”
“We’ll have done away with a murderer,” said Barney. “Is there harm in that?”
At this point, Sam, who had listened to our exchange, butted in. Shaking his head, he said, “You Irish got some crazy ways about you, man. Bring this guy all the way out here and then the two of you stand around arguing all night. Both of you crazier than a couple of shithouse rats.”
This got Barney back on track again. “For the love of God, man, we didn’t go through all this for nothing,” he said to me. “Give me another chance with him.” He looked at Sam. “Let me have your gun, Sam.”
Sam hesitated, but I didn’t react fast enough, so Barney took the gun from Sam and leaned it against Eliot’s head. “If you ever want to get back to your thuggish ways, tell me now that you’re the man responsible for the two murders. That’s all. Tell me that and you’re a free man. If you don’t tell me now, I’ll pull the trigger.”
I was too stunned to move. Eliot shivered as the seconds ticked off, and as the seconds ticked off, I shivered, too, but made myself ready to move. I was going to jump Barney and grab the gun before he could shoot—Wild West heroics to save the sleazy bastard even though I believed he killed two people and chopped off Barney’s fingers with a machete. I couldn’t have told myself why I would do this, but I was certain I would.
“Tell me the truth, man. It’s as simple as this. Confess and you walk away. Keep up your lying and you’ll never leave this swamp. I’ve got the gun now, and if you look me in the eye, you’ll know I’m well able to pull the trigger.”
“I did,” Eliot whispered, a choked sound but loud enough for all of us to hear it.
“You killed them yourself?”
Eliot whimpered, unable to speak. He wobbled as his legs began to give out again. Barney pushed the gun harder against his forehead.
“I did.” It was hardly a sound at all.
“And who was it you had chop off me fingers?”
“Not me,” said Eliot, his voice stronger than it had been all night. “MacAlister … hired guys … I never saw them. I swear.”
Barney asked a few more questions. Who else knew? Was Tierney working for MacAlister? Why did he kill them? Eliot mumbled his answers, almost incoherent by this time after his brief flurry of clarity, or else Barney provided an answer for him and he only nodded.
After a few questions, something changed in Barney as if whatever had steeled him up until that point for this gruesome task gave out on him. His expression was difficult to read—weariness, sadness, disappointment, despair. “Aragh, what’s the use?” he said. “He won’t tell us anything more.” He weighed the gun in his hand, his eyes meeting mine.
“We have to let him go,” I said.
Barney’s features softened into the man I’d come to know over our time together, no longer the hardened hangman’s expression of the past couple of hours. “We’ll let him go, so,” he said.
Barney handed the gun back to Sam, walked to the back of Ntango’s cab, and vomited. I felt awkward as Sam and I waited, uncertain what to do next, not exactly ashamed of myself—I didn’t know if Barney would have killed Eliot, but I knew I wanted no part of killing him—but as if I’d bitten off more than I could chew, tried something I wasn’t able for, turned out not to be as tough a guy as I pretended to be. Barney’s prophecy would come true, it looked like now. We had Eliot’s confession but no evidence to take to the police. I thought about dragging him to the nearest precinct or calling Sheehan, but Sam ixnayed the idea, saying the cops would arrest us when we tried to hand him over. Our only choice was to let him go, now that we’d decided not to play by Barney’s IRA rules and take justice into our own hands. By the time Barney pulled himself together and we saw headlights cutting through the dark swamp, all of our nerves were shot, so we panicked and piled back into the cab.
Eliot didn’t say anything when I pushed him into the backseat. I asked a couple of questions during the car ride, like what Tierney had to do with MacAlister, but, as Barney had said, Eliot clammed up now that he knew we weren’t going to kill him. He just stared at me with a vacant expression. We drove into Canarsie and dropped him at the L train on Rockaway Boulevard. He didn’t beg for his life as we drove to the train, or thank us once he realized he’d been spared. At the end, he didn’t say anything, nor did we, when we parted company.
In a strange neighborhood that far out in Brooklyn, you might want to be careful where you stopped for a drink, but we all dearly needed one.
“Doesn’t Betsy live near here?” Barney asked.
She did. We’d cut across on Avenue U to Sheepshead Bay after we dropped off Eliot and weren’t far from Gerritsen Beach, so I called her from a pay phone—the fourth one we tried. She told us she’d meet us at an Italian restaurant right there in Sheepshead Bay.
Roberto’s at Avenue R and Nostrand Avenue was the kind of structure that makes Brooklynites proud: a stand-alone, one-story building with bright blue awnings over the windows and walls made from a kind of white stucco and stone that is sold only to build Italian restaurants—or an occasional Moroccan belly dancer joint—and that clues you in from two blocks away that you’re coming up on one.
Inside were murals of dark-haired men paddling gondolas, small Italian villages, and Leaning Towers of Pisa, plush carpets, waiters in dinner jackets, a large menu, and a good wine list. The maître d’ didn’t bat an eye at the arrival of two black guys and two white guys, one an Irishman with a bandaged hand, all of whom ordered double shots of whiskey before they even looked at the menu.
The waiters were gracious and efficient, and there was enough light to read the menu. You can go almost anywhere in New York and find a good restaurant—maybe even Staten Island. The problem with this one would be paying the check, since none of us had been working regularly lately.
When Betsy arrived and half the restaurant staff rushed over to her, I realized we’d made a mistake. She was well known here, most likely as the wife of a dead cop.
“I told them you were friends of my husband,” Betsy said when she sat down. “This probably wasn’t the best place to come.” She redeemed herself by saying she’d pick up the check.
“Is this a cop place?” I asked her.
“Not really. Someone might come for dinner with his family, but not a hangout.”
We ate antipasto followed by pasta and drank the house Chianti. I gave Betsy a sanitized version of our adventure with Eliot.
“I’m surprised he told you anything,” said Betsy. “Why should he?”
Because we were going to dump him into Jamaica Bay if he didn’t, was the answer I might have given. Instead, I said, “Sometimes, people who commit crimes feel a need to admit their guilt, to clear their consciences.”
“Whoever told you that?” Betsy asked incredulously.
It was uncomfortable talking about the murders and Eliot. So we talked about the strike and what we accomplished and didn’t accomplish, and this brought us back to Eliot anyway.
“Wha
t’s the matter with everyone?” asked Betsy after the conversation died for the third or fourth time. “All of you look as if you’ve come from a funeral.”
Toward the end of dinner, she told us she was supposed to go and speak with the detectives at the Sixty-first Precinct the next day. I told her to have Peter Finch go with her.
“Why should she do that?” Barney asked. “Won’t that make everyone think she’s guilty if she goes with a solicitor? Sure, what’s the girl to fear? She’s innocent of everything.”
Sam and I spent the next few minutes persuading Barney that Betsy needed a lawyer. Convinced finally, he switched and began trying to figure out how we were going to hang the crimes on Eliot, now that he’d admitted to them.
Bent over the table in the tradition of gangs of desperadoes throughout the centuries, we listened to Barney’s whispered plan. Betsy would drop some information on the detectives questioning her. Innocently, she would mention that her husband had some connection to MacAlister and Eliot. She’d overheard her husband talking to MacAlister on the phone; she’d seen him and Eliot together. The point was to hint at a link between the three of them, and let the cops take it from there.
“He doesn’t have to talk, mind you,” said Barney. “If the police begin an investigation of Tom Eliot, the Lord knows what they may find.”
“Should I tell the lawyer?” Betsy asked.
This was a bit of a sticky wicket, as they say. You’re not supposed to lie to your lawyer, but she couldn’t tell him what she was doing. The problem was that if she didn’t tell him in advance, he’d hear about this new wrinkle at the same time the cops did, and he wasn’t going to like that.
“I think you better not tell Peter,” I said. “Lawyers aren’t supposed to let their clients lie. It violates the Hippocratic Oath, or something.”
On the way back, I asked Ntango to drop me off at Pop’s apartment. We dropped Sam, who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, at the Nostrand Avenue subway stop. Then Barney and Ntango dropped me at Cortelyou Road and headed to the Bronx.
I don’t usually keep things from Pop, but I didn’t want to tell him about Eliot and the Jamaica Bay standoff. I’ve done a lot of things in my life I’m not proud of—some I’m downright ashamed of—nothing like this, though, where I felt a kind of revulsion at myself. I’d stopped to talk to Pop because, while I was pretty sure now that Eliot was the killer we were looking for, some things about how he acted and how he’d said things seemed like they could have been made up, and this caused me to wonder if he might have been, despite his abject fear, protecting someone.
“How powerful is Peter Kelly?” I asked, after he’d gotten us a couple of Pilsner Urquells and I’d told him I now thought Eliot was the killer. He asked why I thought this, but I didn’t tell him.
“Kelly rose to the top because he’s smart. He’s an opportunist, and he’s tough. He worked with the left; he worked with the politicians; he worked with the gangsters when he needed to. He built a powerful union, and he’s got a lot to lose if things go wrong.”
“Is he a gangster?”
“I’d say no.”
“Do they control him?”
“Not in their pocket. He uses them. They use him.”
“Is he afraid of them?”
“If he isn’t, he should be. With crooks like your business agent, he lets them be. In exchange, when he needs them—to fight off a rank-and-file challenge like yours, let’s say—they support him.”
The question I was getting at was whether the mobsters would kill someone if Kelly asked them to. When I finally got around to asking it, Pop said, “I don’t know that it works quite like that. It would depend who it was, what was in it for them, things like that.”
“Did Kelly ever kill anyone?”
“Some would say yes. I doubt it myself. This thing you’re getting at with the hotel manager and the cop doesn’t look like anything Kelly would do.”
“You think it was Eliot on his own?”
Pop shrugged his shoulders. “You seem to think so. But I don’t know why.”
chapter twenty-three
Kevin arrived shortly after this. He’d been at Sunday night basketball practice. I was glad to see him, as always, and hoped he’d be glad to see me, but he didn’t seem to care that I was there. Then again, I hadn’t gone out of my way to be with him much lately. With a pang of regret, I remembered it was only a couple of days until Christmas and we hadn’t done anything together. When he was young, I’d taken him Christmas shopping, to the Bronx Zoo to see the lights, after Thanksgiving to the Pete Seeger holiday concert at Carnegie Hall. Christmas had always been a special time for us, and it seemed to be slipping away, as he seemed to be slipping away.
“Pretty late practice,” I said.
He mumbled something and headed toward the bedroom, but I intercepted him. I’d noticed the telltale redness and a kind of wildness to the expression in his eyes. I looked at him carefully and let him go, not wanting to confront him when he was stoned.
“I thought you were going to ask about being an assistant coach,” he said as he walked away.
I’d forgotten that, too. Anything I said now would be too lame, as he would say, to bother with.
“How’s he been?” I asked Pop.
“He watches the TV, does some homework, spends a lot of time on basketball, doesn’t communicate.”
“He’s been smoking pot.”
Pop nodded. “I thought as much. I’ve told him he’s not allowed to. I don’t know what else to do. I didn’t have much success stopping you, either.”
This wasn’t an I-told-you-so statement. Pop has too much compassion for that. He thought he’d failed bringing me up, that I’d never fulfilled the potential he’d seen in me as a child nor found the happiness he’d hoped I’d find. Seeing his failure passed on through me to his grandson only brought him pain.
“He’s a good boy,” I said. “We’ll get beyond this.”
Pop’s expression was unyielding. “Not without a great deal of work on your part.”
I tossed and turned on the couch for a long time before I slept that night, watching the streetlight patterns on the living room ceiling, as I did when I was Kevin’s age, lying on the couch waiting for dinner or for Pop to come home. I wanted so much for Kevin. Since he was a baby, I’d thought him the most perfect person in the world. His sullenness, his aloofness, the contempt he showed me, all of it was probably no more than being a teenager, but I’d never expected it from him. I’d expected him to be perfect, I realized. The same expectation Pop had had for me—that I’d spent my life trying to live up to without ever making it.
Lying awake that night, I came to understand that I needed to get my son back. To do this, I had to get my life back to normal. I thought about Betsy and Katie also. Betsy needed her life back, too. She needed to be with her kid. I thought more about Betsy and the little one, imagining the possibility of this and that, but I let it go pretty quick.
In the morning, despite an almost sleepless night, I got up with Kevin as he prepared for school. He was sleep-logged and sullen, refusing to eat breakfast and answering my offers to pour him cereal or cook him an egg by shouting “Go away” or “Leave me alone.” As he headed out the door, I told him I knew he’d been smoking pot the night before. He denied it. I also told him I’d be at his next practice to talk to his coach about helping out.
“We’ve already got an assistant coach,” he said from the elevator.
“That’s okay. I’ll be second assistant. I wouldn’t be much help anyway.”
Kevin rolled his eyes as the elevator door closed. But was that the beginning of a slight smile?
Instead of going back to bed, I went home and got there just in time for an angry phone call from Betsy’s lawyer. Peter Finch was so mad, he was sputtering.
“I thought you lawyers had secretaries to make your phone calls for you,” I said, hoping a bit of humor might calm him down.
“Cut the shit, McNulty,” he
said, then continued to browbeat me. Betsy, it seemed, had let the cat out of the bag.
“It’s pretty clear to me that Eliot is the killer,” I said when the sputtering died down.
“It’s nice that it’s clear to you, but that doesn’t help your friend Betsy. Nor does that cock-and-bull story you guys came up with about this guy Eliot and her husband. The cops saw through it before the words were out of her mouth. I don’t know when they’re going to charge her, but my guess is they’re going to. Now, there are two things wrong. First, she’s a suspect who’s hiding something about another suspect—that Irish guy. Maybe it has nothing to do with the murders, but I need to know what it is. I don’t want any more surprises. Now, on top of that, she pretty obviously made up a story attempting to implicate someone else.”
“But Eliot is the killer.”
“You suspect Eliot.” Peter clearly enunciated the word “suspect.” “Unless you have proof, it doesn’t mean anything. Why are you so sure it was him?”
I certainly didn’t want to tell Peter about our adventure at Jamaica Bay, and I didn’t know which pieces of Betsy’s story about her husband and Eliot he believed or didn’t believe, so I was stumped for an answer. “I just know,” I said lamely. “You’ll see.”
“Good. I’ll see. Until then, you better find out for me what Betsy is hiding.”
I already knew what she was hiding, or thought I did, but I didn’t want to tell Peter. There was also the possibility she was hiding something else I didn’t know about.
In the middle of the afternoon, I went to the Savoy. It was as if I needed to be at my job in order to find the normalcy in my life. Lots of places I worked, the bartenders or waitresses, after complaining all week about the job, would invariably show up at some point on their nights off. I was guilty, too. Hotels, bars, and restaurants easily become a center for your life, especially when nothing much else is going on in it. On this afternoon, the joint was dead, and I found Downtown Sam sitting at the bar, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper. He looked up once and went back to reading the paper.