The thinner man downed the shot and lit a fresh cigarette. He nodded toward the bartender and asked what the two men in suits were discussing. He didn’t change expression when he was told of the Carter debate. He leaned closer to the bar, his eyes on the young couple at the table in the rear of the pub, and poured himself and his friend another double shot. He told the bartender to bring the two men in suits a drink and to run it on his tab. He also told Jerry to tell them that Republicans were not welcome in Hell’s Kitchen and that either a political conversion or a change in conversation was in order.
The chubby man checked his watch and nudged his friend in the ribs. They were running late for an appointment. A dealer named Raoul Reynoso was holed up at the Holiday Inn three blocks away, expecting to complete a drug deal with them no later than nine P.M. Reynoso was looking to buy two kilos of cocaine and was ready to hand off $25,000 as payment. The two men had other plans. They were going to take his money, put four bullets in his heart, cut off Reynoso’s head, and leave it in an ice bucket next to the television set in his room.
The thin man reached over the bar, grabbed a menu, looked at his friend, and shrugged his shoulders. He hated to kill anybody on an empty stomach. He gave the menu to his friend and asked him to order for them both. He needed to use the bathroom. The chubby man took the menu and smiled. He had known the thin man all his life, they had grown up together, gone to the same schools, served time in the same prisons, slept with the same women, and put bullets in the same bodies. In all those years, the thin man, without fail, always had to use a bathroom before a meal.
The thin man stood up from his stool and finished off his beer. He then turned and walked down the narrow strip of floor separating booths from bar stools, his hands at his sides, his face turned to the street outside. At the end of the bar, across from the rear booth, his eyes moved from the passing traffic and met those of the man eating the meat-loaf special. Both men held the look for a number of seconds, one set of eyes registering recognition, the other filled with annoyance.
“I help you with somethin’, chief?” the man in the booth said, his mouth crammed with mashed potatoes.
“Not right now,” the thin man said, heading to the back. He smiled down at the man in the booth and told him to enjoy the rest of his meal.
He stumbled into the men’s room and ran the cold water in the sink, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked much older than his twenty-seven years, the drugs and drink taking a toll on an Irish face still handsome enough to coax a smile from a reluctant woman. He took off his gloves and checked his hands, calm and steady, the skin raw, the scars across both sets of knuckles white and clear. He put the gloves back on and stepped over to the urinal.
“Reynoso, you’re one lucky fucker,” he thought to himself. “This piss saved your life.”
He walked out of the men’s room and past the man in the back booth. He took his seat next to his friend, put a cigarette in his mouth, and poured himself a refill.
“I ordered brisket on a roll,” his friend said. “With fries. And two baskets of soda bread. I know you like that shit. That okay by you?”
The thin man’s eyes were on the small mirror above the bar, riveted on the man in the uniform finishing his meat-loaf dinner.
“C’mon,” his friend said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Let’s take the booth behind us. We can spread out all we want.”
The thin man turned to face his friend. He asked him to take a look at the last booth in the pub. To take a good look and study the face of the man sitting in it.
His friend turned in his stool and stared at the man in the zippered jacket. His face stayed blank for the few moments it took to link the man to memory, but his eyes betrayed his swirling emotions.
“You sure it’s him?” he asked, his voice harsh, his upper lip twitching. “You sure it’s really him?”
“You know me,” the thin man said. “I never forget a friend.”
They stayed at the bar long enough to release the safeties on the guns hidden beneath their jackets. They stood up together and walked toward the booth at the back of the pub, the thin man leading the way.
“Hello,” the thin man said, pulling up a chair. “It’s been a long time.”
“Who the fuck are you guys?” the man in the booth demanded. He didn’t seem particularly afraid, merely annoyed at the intrusion. “And who the fuck asked you to sit down?”
“I thought you’d be happy to see us,” the chubby man said. “Guess I was wrong.”
“I always thought you would do better,” the thin man said, looking at the patches on the sleeves of the jacket. “All that training, all that time you put in, just to guard somebody else’s money. Seems like a waste.”
“I’m askin’ you for the last time,” the man said, his temper as hot as his coffee. “What the fuck do you want?”
The thin man took off his gloves and put them in the front pocket of his leather jacket. He laid his hand flat on the table, the tips of his fingers nudging the sides of the security guard’s empty beer glass.
“See the scars?” he asked. “Look at them. Take your time. It’ll come to you.”
The guard stared at the thin man’s hands, his upper lip wet with sweat, his body tense, sensing danger, feeling cornered.
Then he knew.
The knowledge fell across his face like a cold cloth. He sat back, his head resting against the top of the leather booth. He tried to speak but couldn’t. His mouth went dry as his hands gripped the edge of the table.
“I can see how you would forget us,” the thin man said softly. “We were just somethin’ for you and your friends to play with.”
“It’s a little harder for us to forget,” the chubby one said. “You gave us so much more to remember.”
“That was a long time ago,” the security guard said, the words coming out in a struggle. “We were just kids.”
“We’re not kids now,” the thin man said.
“Whatta ya want me to say?” the security guard asked, anger returning to his voice. “That I’m sorry? Is that what you want? An apology?”
“No,” the thin man said, moving his hands off the table and onto his lap. “I know you’re not sorry and hearin’ you say it won’t change a fuckin’ thing.”
“Then what?” the security guard asked, leaning over his empty platter. “What do you want?”
“What I’ve always wanted, Nokes,” the thin man said. “To watch you die.”
The thin man, John Reilly, and his chubby friend, Tommy “Butter” Marcano, were on their feet, a gun in each hand. All movement in the pub ceased. The young woman at the back table took her hand off her boyfriend and clasped it over her mouth.
The bartender clicked off the Knicks game.
The two waitresses slipped into the kitchen.
Sean Nokes, thirty-seven, was a security guard with a gambling problem. He was two months behind on his rent and his wife was threatening to leave him and take their daughter home to her mother. He had not fared well since his years at Wilkinson, moving from job to job, small town to small town. He was hoping he had finally turned the corner, working a Manhattan job that paid decent money. He had come to Hell’s Kitchen to pay off a debt and stopped into the pub for dinner before heading home to his wife, hopeful of landing one more chance at a reconciliation. He never planned on a Wilkinson reunion.
“Too bad you ordered the meat loaf,” Tommy said. “The brisket’s real good here. Only you’ll never know it.”
“You were scared little pricks,” Nokes said. “Both of you. All of you. Scared shitless. I tried to make you tough, make you hard. But it was a waste of time.”
“I had you all wrong, then,” Tommy said. “All this time I just figured you liked fuckin’ and beatin’ up little boys.”
“You are gonna burn in hell!” Sean Nokes said. “You hear me! You two motherfuckers! You are gonna burn in hell!”
“After you,” John said.
The first bulle
t came out the back of Nokes’s head, the second went through his right eye, and the third creased his temple. Nokes rested with his head back and his hands spread, mouth twisted into an almost comical grimace. Tommy stepped out of the booth and walked over to Nokes’s side. He put a bullet into each of his legs and one into each hand. John stood his ground and pumped three slugs into Nokes’s chest, waiting for the body jerks to stop each time before pulling the trigger again.
The bartender closed his eyes until the gunfire stopped.
The young couple fell to the ground, hovering for cover under their table.
The couple in the first booth sat frozen with fear, staring at each other, still holding their knives and forks.
The two businessmen never turned their heads. One of them, the pretzels in his hand crushed to crumbs, had wet his pants.
The two waitresses stayed in the kitchen, shivering near the grill, the cook by their side.
The old man in the corner had his head on the bar and slept through the shooting.
John and Tommy put the guns back in their holsters, took one final look at Sean Nokes, and turned to leave the pub.
“Hey, Jerry,” Tommy called over. “Be a pal, would ya?”
“Name it,” the bartender said, his eyes now open, trying not to look over at the fresh body in the back booth.
“Make those brisket sandwiches to go,” Tommy said.
2
IT HAD BEEN eleven years since my friends and I had been released from the Wilkinson Home for Boys.
In all those years we had never once spoken to each other about our time there. We remained caring friends, but the friendship had altered as we traveled down our separate paths. Still, we were friends. By the time of Nokes’s murder, the friendship had become less intimate, but no less intense.
Michael Sullivan, twenty-eight, had moved out of Hell’s Kitchen shortly after being released from Wilkinson. Never again would he have a problem with the law. Father Bobby called in a handful of chits to get Michael accepted at a solid Catholic high school in Queens, where Michael was sent to live with his mother’s sister and her accountant husband. He continued to date Carol Martinez, twenty-seven, until the middle of his sophomore year, when the distance and their evolving personalities finally conspired to cool their longing. But he continued to see his Hell’s Kitchen cohorts as often as he could, unwilling to give up the friendship, needing to be with us as much as we needed to be with him.
Michael graduated with honors from high school and moved on to a local university. Then, after a hot and fruitless summer working as a waiter at a Catskills resort, he decided to enroll in a Manhattan law school.
At the time of Nokes’s shooting, Michael was rounding out his first six months as a New York City assistant district attorney.
We tried to share a meal once a week, the bond between us difficult to sever. When we were together, often joined by Carol, Michael still held sway. He was always our leader and still the toughest of the group. Only now his strength was of a different sort, not physical and violent like that of John and Tommy, but carried quietly within. The months at Wilkinson had changed Michael in many ways, but they could not strip him of his drive. If anything, the horrors he endured gave a focus to his life, a target toward which he could aim.
He worked out at a gym, two hours every morning, a strenuous mix of aerobics and weights. He didn’t smoke and he drank only with dinner. His fellow students and coworkers considered him to be a loner, a reticent man with a sharp sense of humor but a gentle manner. He had grown tall and good-looking, his boyhood freckles giving way to the clear face of a confident man. He had a deep, soulful voice and a twelve-inch scar running across his shoulders.
Michael kept his world private.
He had an apartment in Queens that few were permitted to see. He dated frequently, but never seriously. His loves were kept to a minimum—the Yankees, foreign movies, Louis L’Amour westerns, the silent halls of museums. In a loud city, Michael Sullivan was a quiet stranger, a man with secrets he had no desire to share.
He walked the streets of Hell’s Kitchen only occasionally, and then only to visit Father Bobby, who by now had risen to principal of our former grammar school. He loved his work and buried himself in studying the subtle ways the law could be maneuvered.
“There are a thousand different crimes that someone can commit,” he said to me shortly before the shooting. “And there are more than a thousand ways to get him out of any one of them.”
John and Tommy had both stayed in Hell’s Kitchen, finished grammar school, then attended a technical junior high, close to the neighborhood, for less than the required two years. In that time they continued to do odd jobs for King Benny, took in some numbers action for an Inwood bookie, and occasionally strong-armed players late on loan shark payments. They also began carrying guns.
They never recovered from the abuse of Wilkinson. In our time there, Michael and I realized that we weren’t anywhere near as tough as we had thought. John and Tommy, however, came away with an entirely different frame of mind. They would let no one touch them again, let no one near enough to cause them any harm. They would achieve their goal in the most effective way they knew—through fear. It was a lesson they learned at the Wilkinson Home for Boys.
By the mid-seventies, John and Tommy had helped found the West Side Boys, farming the initial five-member group out as enforcers, thugs for hire. As the gang grew, they progressed to more lethal and lucrative action, including moving counterfeit cash and buying and selling large amounts of cocaine. They also took on contract murders. Their specialty—dismembering their victims’ bodies and disposing of the pieces throughout the area—evoked fear in even their closest associates.
When they killed, they got rid of everything except the hands.
Those they kept in freezers in a select number of Hell’s Kitchen refrigerators, preserved to provide fingerprints on the guns used by the gang. It was a tactic that made it virtually impossible for the police to pin the crew to any one murder. When prints were checked, the patterns led back to men who were already dead.
Along the way, both John and Tommy got hooked on cocaine and began to drink heavily. They remained best friends and lived in the same West 47th Street tenement, two floors apart. They were respectful toward King Benny, who, recognizing the changing times, gave their operation the space it needed to thrive and survive.
They still joked with Fat Mancho, played stickball in front of his candy store, and helped his bookie operation rake in thousands a week, their powerful support insuring that no one dared back down from a phone-in bet.
I saw them as often as I could, and when we got together, it was easy for me to forget what they had become and remember only who they were. We went to ball games, took long Sunday-morning walks down by the piers, and helped Father Bobby with the basket collections at mass. I seldom asked them about their business and they always teased me about mine.
Like Michael, I moved out of Hell’s Kitchen soon after my release from Wilkinson. Father Bobby also pulled some strings for me: I was admitted to a first-rate Catholic high school for boys in the Bronx. By my late teens I was taking night courses at St. John’s University in Queens, working a nowhere day job in a Wall Street bank, and wrestling with a fresh set of demons—the discovery that my father was a convicted murderer who had served nearly seven years for killing his first wife. I divided my time between a bed in my parents’ Bronx apartment and a two-room basement sublet in Long Island.
One summer afternoon in 1973, I was reading an early edition of the New York Post on my lunch hour, sitting on a bench in front of a noisy and crowded outdoor fountain, half a ham sandwich by my side. There, under the heat of a New York sun, I read a Pete Hamill column about former vice president Spiro T. Agnew. By the time I got to the last paragraph, I knew I wanted to work on a newspaper.
It would take three years before I would land a job as a copy boy for the New York Daily News, working the midnight-to-eight shift
, sharpening pencils, making coffee runs, and driving drunken editors home after a night on the prowl. By the time of Nokes’s death, I had worked my way up to the clerical department, typing movie schedules for the next day’s editions.
It was easy work, leaving me with plenty of free time, and most of it was spent in Hell’s Kitchen. I still liked the feel of the neighborhood, no matter how much it had changed. I still felt safe there.
I had coffee twice a week with King Benny, once again seeking refuge in the stillness of his club, as much a home to me as any place. Benny’s espresso was as bitter as ever, his mood as dark and he still cheated at every hand of cards we played. The years had made him older, his black hair touched by lines of white, but no one in the neighborhood dared question his strength.
I bought sodas from Fat Mancho every time I passed his store. He ran enough business from that front to fill a mall and was easily spotted in his loud shirts sprayed with colorful birds and palm trees, which his older sister sent over from Puerto Rico. Every time he saw me he cursed. We had known each other for more than twenty years and I remained one of the few people he fully trusted.
On weekends I would drive down and endure two-hour one-on-one basketball games against Father Bobby, more than twenty years older than me and still two steps faster. We all were aging, but Father Bobby always looked young, his body trim, his face relaxed. Whatever problems he had, he handled beneath the silent cover of prayer.
On occasion I would have dinner with Carol, who still lived in the neighborhood and worked as a social worker in the South Bronx. She had moved with ease from awkward teenager to a young woman of striking grace and beauty. Her hair was long and dark, her face unlined, covered by only the softest makeup. She had long legs and spend-the-night eyes that lit up when she laughed. Her concern for us was undiminished by the passing years.
Carol was passionate about her work and quiet about her life, living alone in a third-floor walk-up not far from where we had gone to school. She dated infrequently and never anyone from outside the neighborhood. Though I never asked, I knew she still held strong feelings for Michael. I also knew that when that relationship ended she had been with John during his more sober periods. She always had a special affection for John, could always see the boy he once had been. Whenever we went out as a group, Carol would walk between Michael and John, grasping their arms, at ease and in step between the lawyer and the killer.