by Con Lehane
I got a cup of coffee and joined him. “Suppose you wanted to prove Eliot killed MacAlister and Tierney. What would you do?”
Sam folded up his newspaper and gave me that hard stare of his. “First thing, I’d lock up you and that Irishman to keep you out of the way while I tried to figure it out.”
“You know this detective Sheehan?”
“The cop investigating this?”
“Do you think it would do any good if I told him what we found out, that Eliot confessed to us?”
Sam thought this over. “I don’t know, man. You ain’t much of a diplomat. He already don’t like you, right?”
“We have a grudging respect for each other.”
“That ain’t what I heard.”
I asked Sam what the cops would do if they did believe me and began to investigate Eliot.
“They ask him where he was and check if anyone says he was there. Then they check some other places and see if someone say he was there. Can’t be in both places. Know what I’m sayin’? There’s other things, physical evidence, witnesses, confessions. They’d check the area again. Maybe someone was taking pictures and caught him in the background, maybe a surveillance video picked him up. Mostly, they’d lean on him, like we did, although there’s rules they suppose to play by, and he prob’ly be smart enough to make them do it. So even the cops don’t have much without witnesses or some physical evidence.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“I watch those cop shows on TV.”
I looked surprised.
Sam laughed. “I took the detective test before I quit in Charleston. Studied up real good. Got the highest mark.” He laughed again mirthlessly. “Good thing I knew how to bartend.”
He dropped his coffee cup in a bus basket and went behind the bar. “Nobody we know gives a shit these guys are dead, man. Some folks are better off. What do you care if Eliot walks?”
I told him the police might charge Betsy, and Barney, too, and there were still a couple of goons who knew where I lived. “It would be good if we could find a way to end all this, before I get ended.”
Before going back uptown, I walked around the Savoy’s neighborhood, following up on Sam’s idea that the cops might have overlooked something like a video camera or someone with a hot dog cart who was there the morning MacAlister was killed and saw someone who wasn’t supposed to be there, but I didn’t find anything worth pursuing. When I got back to the hotel, as luck would have it, I ran into Detective Sergeant Pat Sheehan in the lobby. He saw me before I saw him, or I wouldn’t have gone in, but I was in the revolving door and I knew he’d seen me.
“Hey, McNulty. I thought you only came out at night.” He waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he said, “Glad you settled the strike. Hope it worked out for you. I wish we could strike.”
“Me, too. But you should remember it was a police strike in Boston that brought us Calvin Coolidge.”
“You don’t say.”
“You should read about it. Cops haven’t always been on the wrong side.” Sheehan made me nervous. I was afraid he’d found out about our adventure with Eliot. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
“Help me find your Irish friend. Have you seen him?”
I hate to lie. It’s the fault of my upbringing. How do you expect to get anywhere in this world if you don’t tell lies? So I gave it my best shot, sure Sheehan could see right through me. I said I hadn’t.
“What if I told you we’d had a tail on you for the past few days?”
My jaw dropped. The possibility had never come to mind. If the cops had been following me for two days, I’d be headed for jail. Anyone could have followed me. I wasn’t paying attention. “Well,” I said with a nervous chuckle, “you wouldn’t have to ask me where I’d been.”
Sheehan didn’t chuckle. “We didn’t tail you, but someone did follow your girlfriend to Sheepshead Bay last night. She’s smarter than she looks, managed to shake off her shadow. We think she was meeting Saunders.”
“Oh?”
“Where were you last night?”
I was ready for this one. “At my father’s apartment in Brooklyn.”
“You didn’t see Saunders or the Tierney woman yesterday?”
“No.”
“When did you see her last?”
“I don’t remember. Not long ago. We work together. You still think she was involved in her husband’s murder?”
“What do you think?”
“I told you. It was the business agent, Tom Eliot.”
“That’s what she says, too. She told the Six-one detectives her husband had dealings with Eliot. You know anything about that?”
The question came too quickly. I didn’t have time to think. “I wish I did,” I told him honestly. “Have you questioned Eliot? Where does he say he was when those guys were killed?”
Sheehan took a step back and appraised me carefully. “What do we have here? You really must be thinking about police work as a new career.”
I debated telling Sheehan about the goons, which would explain my interest, but I didn’t see what he could do about it, and I didn’t want cops hanging around my apartment. Instead, I said, “I want you guys to leave Betsy alone. She didn’t do anything.”
“No protecting the guilty this time around?”
“This may surprise you, Sergeant. I don’t like trouble, mine or anyone else’s. You made a mistake with Betsy. She has a baby to take care of. Just because her husband was an asshole and she knew it doesn’t mean she killed him. Why do you want to pin this on her or someone from the hotel when you got guys out there like Eliot whose lives are based on killing people or scaring them into believing they’ll be killed? When someone gets killed, you should look at those assholes who do it for a living and not pick on working people.”
Sheehan nodded. “We’re working stiffs like you, McNulty. Wearing badges doesn’t make us different.”
“Something does,” I said when I should have kept my mouth shut. “You guys are more like Eliot than you are like us.”
What I said registered on Sheehan’s face in a way I’d never have expected. For a split second, he looked surprised and hurt, like someone might whose offer of help had been rudely rejected, but he hardened up right away. “Yeah, we take care of all the shit this city has, so good citizens like you don’t have to. Maybe some of it rubs off.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything personal,” I said. He didn’t care.
I was embarrassed and wanted to get out of there, so I asked if he wanted anything else.
“No. I wasn’t looking for you anyway. I came for the French chef.”
“Is he still a suspect?”
Sheehan almost smiled, but it came out as something closer to a sneer. “Nope. Everything he told us checked out. He’s in the clear. The problem we have is with the bartenders and the waitresses getting their stories mixed up.”
“You don’t have a problem with Eliot or Pete Kelly?”
Sheehan’s eyebrows went up. “The union boss. That’s a new one. Maybe we should check the mayor out, too.”
It was a mistake bringing up Kelly, and when I tried to fix it I made things worse. “Tierney was working for MacAlister. Eliot took them both out before they got him.”
Sheehan reached into his inside pocket for his notebook. He licked the tip of the pen and pretended to begin writing. “Could you give me some times and dates here? Places they were seen together? Names of witnesses? The nature of their business together? A few details to tie up some loose ends?”
“I don’t know the details. Maybe you could find out.”
Sheehan threw his arms open in front of him. “I get it. You come up with the theories and I do the legwork. Sorry, McNulty, I already got one of those in my life, the captain. What I want from you is a straight answer someday.”
I called Ntango’s dispatcher to ask for him to come by to drive me to the North Bronx. I didn’t know if he’d have anything to do with
me after the Jamaica Bay fiasco. He was my conscience about many things, and lately I needed one as much as Pinocchio. Yet show up he did, and he had his OFF DUTY light on.
“Hey, no. That’s okay,” I said after I climbed aboard. “I’ll pay you this time.”
“I’m taking the day off, my friend. I enjoy your company—on me.”
On the way up, we talked about the night before. Ntango had been in the cab for the argument I’d had with Barney but had caught the drift of it anyway.
“What went on out there in the swamp troubled the Irishman as much as it did you,” Ntango said. “He’s a man of compassion. I knew men like him in Eritrea. Men like my father and his friends. Loving men caught up in violence, whose hearts and minds are in conflict.”
The surprise in the North Bronx was that Barney was no longer employed at the butcher shop and no one in the shop had any idea why he left or where we could find him, no idea they would pass along to me, anyway. No one answered the door at the Donohues’ when I knocked, either. I knew Mary wasn’t on the schedule, so I figured to wait to see if she might have gone to the store or a neighbor’s. Instead, after a few minutes, Barney came out through the door I’d knocked on. He looked around himself carefully—like Otto the cat did each time he went out the window—stepped quickly off the stoop, and headed down the street. When I rolled down the cab window and called his name, he sprang about half a foot off the ground and turned to face me—again reminding me of Otto when he was startled. I half expected him to hiss.
“Nerves wound a little tight, eh, pal?” I said.
Relief spread across Barney’s ruddy face, forming itself into wrinkles, smiles, and twinkles. “Bejaysus, you’re a hard man, Brian McNulty. You scared the wits out of me.”
“If you’re in hiding, you’re doing a lousy job.”
“Aye, ’tis true. A poor job indeed.”
It turned out Barney had left his job at the butcher shop when two men in suits showed up looking for him. He didn’t know if they were the police or goons, but he didn’t take any chances.
“’Twas you lads knocking on the door then earlier,” said Barney. “I’d stopped by for a shave and a shower.” Looking around him again, Barney said, “I’d feel a bit safer in a different neighborhood.”
Ntango drove us across Gun Hill Road to Kingsbridge, where we found a diner on Broadway under the el across from Van Cortlandt Park. The diner, a true outer-borough greasy spoon, had 150 items on the menu, and all the waitresses were over sixty, limping, hoarse-voiced, and able to carry eleven plates at a time. I ate breakfast again, as did Ntango and Barney.
We speculated on who might have been looking for Barney in the butcher shop, then talked, in hushed voices, about our adventure with Eliot.
“It’s as simple as that,” said Barney. “We let up on him too soon.”
On our fourth or fifth coffees, Barney said we should go back to the hotel and to Betsy’s house to search for anything the cops might have missed. I didn’t think too highly of the idea, since the cops were professionals and knew where to look for evidence and what evidence looked like when they found it. None of us knew our asses from our elbows about where to look or what to look for.
Surprisingly, Ntango agreed with Barney. “It happens that the police overlook things. They comb an area, find nothing, then a week later or a month or a year later a person stumbles across the missing gun. Snow might have melted, a tree fallen, part of a building was knocked down. It’s worth looking.”
The police hadn’t found the gun. So where was it? Thrown in a garbage can, into the river, down a sewer?
“The police would search the sewers and garbage cans in the area,” Ntango said.
“What did Eliot tell you about the gun?” I asked Barney. “Did you ask him?”
Barney shrugged. “He said he threw it away, but he didn’t know where. Sure, by then he didn’t know what he was saying, he had so many lies mixed up with his truths.” He was quiet a moment. “Now, when I think back on it, I believe he was lying. It was nothing resembling a straight answer he gave me, saying one thing and then another. Now, suppose the eejit didn’t throw the gun away.” His expression was mischievous, almost diabolical. “There’s no help for it, lads, we’ll have to find out.”
This was why that night, a day short of the night before Christmas, two men, one with a bandaged hand, approached the garment-district building that housed the office of the United Barmen and Hotel Workers Local 909, while a third accomplice parked a few doors past the building and kept the motor of a Yellow horse-hire cab running. Barney had borrowed a mailman’s uniform from an IRA crony in the Bronx, including the bag, in which he carried gloves for both of us, an assortment of pry bars, screwdrivers, hammers, chisels, a glass-cutting contraption, and God knows what else.
We’d argued a bit, but Barney convinced me that Eliot might very well be dumb enough to have held on to the murder weapon. If I hadn’t learned much in my years behind the bar, I did learn that folks are forever doing unbelievably dumb things. Pop told me once that if you took the stupid mistakes of criminals out of the equation, the cops would never arrest anyone.
So there we were, standing in front of the building, trying to look inconspicuous, until we got our chance. Barney waited until he saw someone approaching the door from inside, pretended to ring a bell, and grabbed the door when the other person came out. He waited a few minutes, then opened the door for his partner in crime—me.
The problem would come if there was an alarm to go off when we cut a hole through the frosted glass of the outside door of Eliot’s office. Because Barney couldn’t use his hands so well, cutting through the glass was my job. The contraption Barney handed me had a suction cup, which, following his directions, I stuck to the window. Then I set a marking on something resembling a ruler and turned a cutting wheel that, after what seemed like a couple of hundred turns, cut a six-inch circle that I was able to punch out of the window while holding on to the suction cup. I took out the circle of glass, reached through the hole, felt around for the lock, and unlocked the door. My heart was pounding like rain beating on a tin roof. I figured someone could hear it from across the street. I knew you could get caught doing a B&E because I had been, and I was up shit’s creek if I got caught again. Barney, who would probably face a firing squad for impersonating a mailman, obviously had experience in this line of work and was more confident than I was and more determined to carry it out. Pop always said I was too easily led.
Once we were inside the outer office, the thumping of my heart slowed, but I was still excited. I wouldn’t say it was fun, but the rush was there. Barney handed me a pair of fake leather gloves and a flashlight from his mailbag. I was impressed. I wouldn’t have thought of all these things—but then I’m not a burglar, am I?
The door to the inner office loomed in front of us. I couldn’t wait to see what was in there. Twice I’d been to this office. Both times, Eliot met us in the outer office. Now was my chance to enter the forbidden chamber. I knew how Eve felt when she finally got a shot at that apple. I was about to attach Barney’s glass-cutting contraption when I thought to try the doorknob. It turned and the door opened. The place was backlit from windows in the far wall, so I could make out what was in the room. That is, I could have made out what was in the room if there had been anything in it. It was stark empty: four walls, including the one with a couple of windows, a ceiling, and a floor. After gaping for a minute or so, I returned to the job at hand. Barney had already whipped through the place.
It wasn’t as if there were a lot of hiding places in the office. Barney rifled through the desk, and I checked out an empty file cabinet and a closet with an overcoat, a suit jacket, and some boxes in it. I was beginning to think we’d screwed up again, and that the next thing would be Barney telling me we had to find Eliot’s house and search there.
Instead, he said, “We’d not want to be here any longer than we have to, Brian. I’m afraid we’ve wasted our time.” He straightene
d his back from where he had stooped to look under the desk and gave the room a once-over. “Did you look over there?” He nodded toward a large rubbery-looking plant in a flowerpot. I went over. It was a three-foot-tall plastic plant in a large black flowerpot. The top of the pot, where the soil would be in a real plant, had a loose, brown plastic covering that was a poor imitation of dirt. When I moved the covering, I felt something hard, so I lifted the covering, and beneath it was a gun—a black revolver with a brown grip and about a four-inch-long barrel.
“Don’t touch it,” Barney shouted, as he ran toward me.
I cringed. “What kind of gun is it?”
Barney shrugged his shoulders. “It looks enough like a .38 for me to believe it is.”
I bent down to look more closely. There were file markings on the barrel and on the grip. “It’s a gun all right,” I said when I stood up. “Now what?”
“Tip the plant on its side, as if it has been knocked over,” said Barney, “and leave the gun fall out on the floor beside it.”
I did this, and Barney headed for the door. Before we got into Ntango’s cab, Barney had me call 911 from a corner pay phone to say a burglary was in progress at Eliot’s office. We waited until a couple of Manhattan South squad cars headed into 31st Street from both directions, no sirens or flashing lights, hoping to grab the crooks in the act.
We hotfooted it back uptown and went to Oscar’s for a drink. I wasn’t quite sure what we’d accomplished, so Barney explained it to me. The police investigating the robbery would find the gun.
“And then?”
Barney looked perplexed.
Now Ntango began to explain. “When the cops find a gun like that with the serial numbers filed off—that’s what you said, right?”
“Something was filed off. I don’t know what it was because it wasn’t there anymore.”
“Nonetheless, the cops look to see if the gun was used in any unsolved murders.”