Beware the Solitary Drinker (12 page)

“Barkeep. Barkeep,” said the Boss, clucking a little and shaking his head, like he was the principal and I was the kid gone bad. This parasitic, degenerate sucker of society's blood, purveyor of filth, corrupter of children, pilferer of the quarters and dollars of the poor, this boil-like symptom of society's systemic corruption,
he
was clucking like a duck and shaking his head at me.

“I told you to pour drinks,” he said sadly. His eyes looked completely closed. I wondered how he knew it was me.

My insides crashed in a lump somewhere around my ankles. Frozen to the spot, I stared, as if it might all go away if I looked long enough. This feeling of absolute awfulness that I'd felt only once before in my life—when I knew my mother was dead—this feeling of irreparable doom jolted through me like high-voltage electricity, standing my hair up straight and wobbling my knees.

“Hello Boss,” I said when I could talk. “What are you doing here?”

“People think it's fine to take things that don't belong to them,” the Boss said. “Tell stories about a person's business. I treat you like a gentleman.…I treat everyone like a gentleman who knows how to act like one.” His little weasel eyes opened a crack and bored into mine. “When was I not a gentleman?”

He phrased the question broadly, I thought. Certainly, I could guess at some times when he wasn't. But, all in all, he had always acted well around me. He talked pleasantly, tuned me up, tipped well, paid me compliments on my bartending and my intelligence, talked to me about his sons, introduced me to his wife. I didn't know whom he had extorted or beaten or stolen from, or even murdered—or if he had done any of these things; it seemed hard to believe he would, but then I couldn't imagine anyone would. Yet Angelina was still dead, and the guy with him still held a gun. Maybe it was already out of the Boss's hands. He wouldn't kill me if it was up to him, but it wasn't anymore. The boys from Jersey had sent this other thug over to take care of it.

“Look, Boss, you've always been okay with me,” I began.

He looked hurt; his eyelids drooped again, his nodding slowed from self-righteousness to martyrdom, his lips pursed and his clucking stopped. “Why do you do this?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

His eyes flickered open and anger sparked from them; his face hardened, and he seemed capable of all the evil I'd ever imagined for him. Then the elevator bell rang like a shot. We all jumped. I was amazed the gun didn't go off.

“Take it up,” the Boss told the goon.

The goon looked at me and then at the Boss. “I don't know how,” he said.

The Boss shook his head, then looked at me. “Take him up,” he said, nodding toward the goon, who looked like he'd been dressed for the job by Damon Runyon. Dark jacket. Black shirt. White tie. Baggy black pants. Small and skinny. He wasn't young either. While he followed me to the elevator through the dank, murky cellar, I decided I could take him. Somehow I could do it. I had the feeling in my bones, a rush of excitement like a hit of coke. The shot of adrenaline. I thought I could take him, but decided to wait. I wanted to see who rang the bell. Maybe it was the cops.

I drove the rickety elevator up one floor, opened the iron grating, waited for the big outside door to open. There stood Carl—and Janet Carter.

Things get to a point where they can't get any worse; then, they do.

“What's taking you so long,” Carl asked in a jittery voice. Not nearly as jittery as it was about to become, though. He looked at the man behind me; he looked at me. Understanding and fear registered on his face, but then as he stared at the goon a couple of puffs of anger rose to the surface from the Captain Haddock side.

“What did you find?” Janet asked excitedly, not grasping the significance of the character behind me. “Do you have them? Did you look at any of them?” When I didn't answer, she looked at Carl. Seeing his face, she looked back at me. She noticed the man and the gun. She screamed.

“In,” the man said. I could tell that Carl, who had just snorted a couple of times like a bull, made him nervous.

“Now everybody's here,” the Boss said when we got back to the boiler room. His manner was obsequious, like the worst kind of funeral director. “Good evening, miss. As I told your friend here before, I am very sorry about your sister.” Through their narrow slits his eyes burned into hers. “Not me,” he said. “I told him.”

“Let her go,” I said. “She'll go back home and forget about all this.”

“See, you are a gentleman,” said the Boss. He moved slowly and spoke softly, turning toward me when he spoke. He was smaller than I had thought too. I judged the Boss and the goon together didn't make up one of Carl. “We would all like to keep the lady out of this. But what does she know?”

“She doesn't know anything,” I said.

“All of you take things that don't belong to you and don't mind your own business. She knows everything you know. Just tell me now what do you want? You want movies, take them.” He handed a packet to Janet. “To watch them at home? To give them as gifts? Once I had a movie of your sister—a work of art. Now I had to burn it. You want all the movies to burn up?”

Janet stared at him. Her face was white, but she stood straight and held herself firmly. He knew what we wanted the movies for; he'd known we would be there. Of course the cops wouldn't come to our rescue. I didn't know if she'd figured it out, but I had.

“We made a mistake,” I told the Boss. “We talked to someone we shouldn't have.…Maybe we didn't know who was a gentleman.”

Still unruffled, his eyes slits once more, the Boss smiled. “We're all gentlemen,” he said. “Perhaps you didn't know how things work.”

“I guess not.”

“Too bad,” said the Boss. “You look for one thing, you find something else. We'll have to leave here now, all together.”

“Maybe we can work something out,” I said.

Carl, who had been speechless since we met at the elevator, perked up. “You don't have to kill us,” he said in what I gathered he thought was a reasonable tone, though he sounded to me a bit argumentative for the position we were in. He was fully into one of his Captain Haddock moods and under normal conditions not to be trifled with. These, however, were far from normal conditions.

“We're good secret-keepers,” I agreed. “The bartender's code: ‘I enter my friend's house deaf; I leave dumb.'”

The Boss liked that. “You were always a gentleman,” he said. “Too bad.”

As we walked solemnly to the elevator, Carl in front muttering to himself, Janet clutching my arm, I got an idea. Putting my head close to hers, I whispered a two-sentence plan. “Now lean against Carl in the elevator and tell him,” I said.

I could see Carl's body puff up a bit more when she told him. The plan unfolded quickly when the elevator bounced to a stop at the main floor. Since Janet and I were to get off first, we jumped ahead. Carl whacked the lever that sent the elevator bouncing and grumbling back toward the cellar. Then, he jumped. The elevator was already a couple of feet below the floor when the goon and the Boss realized what was happening. In their panic to get out, they forgot about us, and when they did clamber up out of the elevator well, they instinctively looked back for a quick second at the gaping cavern created by the descending elevator. In that split second, Carl let out a roar, jumped forward, and shoved. The goon followed the elevator into the abyss.

The Boss, looking more dapper than ever, stepped back from the hole, peered over at his departing colleague, dusted off his hands as if that was a phase of his life that no longer mattered, then, his eyes wide open, smiled at Carl.

“Nice!” he said.

I had no idea what to do next now that we seemed to have captured a gangster and a gunman. Actually, I wanted to call the whole thing off. Janet, however, was not to be thrown off the scent.

“Who killed my sister?” she asked the Boss, looking into the elevator shaft. “Did he?”

The “he” in question was remarkably quiet. I expected him to yell. But it occurred to me that folks in his line of work would not want to see anyone who might choose to help them.

“Not us,” the Boss said.

“Who?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You should know.”

With much talk about gentlemanliness and peace, we reached a Mexican standoff with the Boss. He recognized that our interest was in who killed Angelina and not his varied nefarious activities. We'd stumbled onto an operation we would forget about. The Boss would persuade the gentleman in the elevator well that there would be no hard feelings. We would stay alive. Life would return to its everyday sordidness.

Chapter Seven

“Why would you believe him?” Janet asked after the Boss and his henchman left—the latter nursing lumps and bruises and limping along behind—and we sat shaking together in Carl's small cubicle off the lobby.

“He's a gentleman,” Carl reminded her.

“He was willing to kill us for what we found out.” She looked from me to Carl and back to me. “How do you know he'll leave us alone?”

“Life on a darkling plain…” Carl said.

He was right. The ground shifted beneath my feet; ignorant armies clashed by night. The world wasn't safe at all.

When I got behind the bar, an hour late, I poured myself a shot of tequila, washing it down with a beer.

“All sorts of people looking for you,” Oscar said to jangle my nerves again as soon as he sensed they might be settling. He and Sam sat next to one another at the end of the bar, each with his own copy of
The Racing Form.

“Who?”

“Big guy.…Tough.…Very tough.” Oscar looked carefully around him, as if the tough giant might be lurking in the dining room behind the partition.

“Who?” I asked again. Sam the Hammer swatted his hand in Oscar's direction, brushing him away. So Oscar zipped off to clear some tables and get in the waitress's way.

“What a night,” I said.

“Don't tell me,” said Sam. He stared angrily at
The Racing Form
, as if it had done something terrible to him, which it probably had.

My nerves let go when the tequila hit. I snapped. The tequila worked on me like Popeye's spinach. I'd had one riddle too many. I no longer cared; I'd had enough. I was ready to kill Sam, Oscar, and the rest of the fucking winos.

“Why the gun?” I growled at Sam through my teeth, my face an inch from his.

He didn't say anything. Dummied up is the proper expression.

“For the Boss?”

“That was your idea.” He looked at me contemptuously. “Use it to blow your fucking brains out.”

“Did the Boss have Angelina killed?”

He looked straight at me, no longer seeing, his face blank. I felt like I'd disappeared. Fortunately, I was rescued by a loud feminine voice.

“I've been looking for you for days,” Betsy Blumberg shrilled at me. “Have you forgotten I exist?” Already half-sloshed, she was starting to look a little disheveled, her mouth gone a bit slack, her lipstick smeared, wisps of hair loose from her ponytail. I hadn't noticed her at the bar when I came in. I really was glad to see her.

“I have some news, but I got a good mind not to tell you. I'm sick and tired of you never-come-back, never-call men.”

“It's okay, Betsy.” I patted her hand that rested on the bar. Just this was enough; she didn't need a whole lot of kindness, just a drop now and then.

“I missed you. Should I wait for you tonight?”

I was tempted to say yes. Janet had gone back to her hotel, depressed and disappointed, taking a cab downtown. The cab, in fact, had been Ntango's. He was parked outside Oscar's when we got there. Janet wouldn't come into the bar when I asked her. She didn't want to see me later. This time, I was sure she'd head back to Springfield, though she'd told me she'd taken the whole week off.

I wanted to spend the night with Betsy, but it wasn't a good idea. I needed to spend some time sober, thinking things through. Also, tomorrow was my Saturday to go to Brooklyn to see Kevin. Yet I didn't have the heart to tell Betsy to go away. While I tried to figure this one out, I caught a glimpse of a drunk staggering up Broadway. He was on the far side of the street, hunched down into his jacket—staggering furtively, if such a thing is possible.

“That's Ozzie,” I said out loud, as if that would explain everything. “I'll be right back.”

I dashed out of the bar, calling him. When he looked up, I felt like I'd turned into Dr. Death on my sprint across the street. He held both arms up to ward me off. I looked in my own hands for the scythe.

“Ozzie,” I said. “You okay?” His eyes and his mouth formed a silent scream of terror. Startled-looking, birdlike Ozzie looked like that bird after he'd gotten caught in a hard and heavy downpour: He couldn't quite get himself into the air the way his instincts told him he should, and he didn't know what had gone wrong.

Is this what a murderer becomes? I wondered. Why would anyone bother to punish Ozzie? He'd already done it himself, a worse punishment than any judge could dole out. “Take it easy, Ozzie. It's me, Brian. I'm a friend.”

For a moment he looked like he believed me. He reached out for my hand, catching my sleeve instead and holding on. The terror melted from his eyes. I put my arm around his shoulder.

“You need a cab to get home,” I said. “But later, I need to talk to you.”

He nodded dumbly.

“About Angelina.”

He nodded again.

“Did you kill her?”

He looked into my eyes, rolling his head solemnly from side to side. “I know,” he said. Then, once more, his eyes froze with terror. Someone else came up on us. God damn Nigel, with his lopsided grin. The cab I'd flagged down sat idling at the curb. I wanted to get Ozzie into it before the driver realized he was drunk and took off.

“Grab that cab, Nigel,” I said.

“Old Oz needs some help getting home? I'll take him along with me.” Nigel's good nature and cheerfulness was a rebuke to us weaklings worshipping at the altar of demon rum.

“Better take the cab.”

“I can hold him. He'd like the exercise. Wouldn't you, Ozzie?”

Ozzie had crumbled in the meantime. He looked like the condemned man who loses his nerve walking the final hallway to the death chamber: his knees buckle and he shits in his pants. Nigel held Ozzie up. He was surprisingly strong, holding Ozzie effortlessly with one arm. Nigel had a lot of experience walking drunks home. He and I were the neighborhood good Samaritans. The cab took off.

“I'm working or I'd go with you,” I told Nigel.

He waved me off with his free hand, hoisted Ozzie up against him with the other, talking encouragingly as Ozzie lifted one wavering foot and then the other.

“Maybe you can get him to talk about things on the way home.”

By this time, Ozzie's head had drooped so far that his chin rested on his chest. Nigel looked at him and shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said.

Somewhere around one, Janet showed up at Oscar's with Ntango.

“Ntango took me on a tour,” she said. Her mood had improved dramatically. “I think I found out something.” Once more she bubbled with enthusiasm. Bubbling until she spotted Betsy drooped over the end of the bar watching her. She stiffened like the old alley cat coming upon an arch enemy. How she knew I had anything to do with Betsy was completely beyond me. But I felt like she'd just walked in and found us in the sack.

“But I guess you're busy,” she said.

“No, I'm not.”

“You're an asshole,” Janet said. She swallowed her drink in a gulp, took Ntango's arm and walked out, returning Betsy's smile with an icy stare.

***

At the end of my shift, I closed out the register. Oscar usually pushed the limits of the closing law, and we often stayed with a dozen or so regulars and the lights down low until five, even later. This night, I told Oscar to take over and left with Betsy.

As we walked up Broadway, I told Betsy, who had somewhat sobered up, that I needed to go home because I had to get up early.

“It's alright,” she said sadly. “Your new girlfriend has really latched on, hasn't she? Maybe we could just have a cup of coffee.”

“I don't think I even want that,” I told her. But I did walk her home and kissed her goodnight in front of her building.

“This is quite gallant of you,” Betsy said. Then, when she had opened the door, she grabbed my arm and said, “I almost forgot. The other day when we were talking about who might have killed Angelina, after you left, I remembered that once, when I was in Reuben's apartment, I saw a clipping from an old newspaper about a woman who had been murdered. It was long before all this happened. I was just looking through some books and it was inside one of them. It was old and brownish and crumbly, from
The Journal-American
.”

“Do you remember the date?”

Betsy shook her head. “I just put it back. It made me feel creepy. Why would someone have an old newspaper article about someone being murdered?”

***

In the morning, I went to the 42nd Street library on the off chance the newspaper clipping Betsy found was about Reuben himself, and called Janet from a pay phone there to ask if she'd like to go to Brooklyn with me. I did it without thinking. I'd never brought anyone with me before.

“My, you're up early,” she said.

“I've been up for an hour,” I told her pointedly. “I left Oscar at the bar and went home right at closing.”

“Alone?”

“Of course.”

She agreed to meet me in the main reading room at noon, so I went to look through the back issues of the
Journal-American
. I'd gotten through about a dozen copies, going backwards from the final issue in 1966, before I realized that the paper was probably indexed. The idea was good, but there wasn't an index. So I kept slogging through the microfilm, but found no Reuben Foster. A bunch of Fosters over the years for various accomplishments and defaults, but nothing on Reuben, and nothing on a murder.

Janet found me among the wooden desks and creaking chairs in the silence of the reading room. She moved through the room toward me, rustling in her dress and October coat; her demeanor was reverent enough for the place, like someone who was used to it might tiptoe through a church at a pretty brisk pace.

She sat down next to me, and I told her what I was doing and about drawing a blank on the index. I made it clear that I was talking with Betsy only to gather information, so she should be ashamed of herself for thinking otherwise. But she saw right through my story.

“Oh yeah. Have you ever been to bed with her?”

I didn't answer.

“You have.”

On the train out to Flatbush, Janet told me what she'd found out and wouldn't tell me the night before.

“A bartender at a place across the street from Hanrahan's said Angelina used to come in there sometimes to meet an older man.” The train was noisy, so she had to lean close to tell me this. I leaned even closer until her mouth brushed my ear.

“Oh?” I asked when she moved away from me.

“Maybe we should find out who he was.”

“We should. But Angelina met a lot of men a lot of places.”

“You're downplaying this because I found out about it and not you.”

“Jesus,” I said. “All right. Let's find out. Did you ask the bartender?”

“Of course. He didn't know who the man was.”

“What did the guy drink?”

“How should I know?” Her expression suggested I might be dumber than she'd originally thought.

“The bartender would know if he came in any way regularly,” I said patiently. “Bartenders know people by what they drink.”

“I'll find out.”

Janet was relieved that we were picking Kevin up at my father's apartment, and she wouldn't have to meet my ex-wife. “I couldn't think of a more awful experience. What's she like?”

I didn't know why Janet was interested in this, but she seemed eager for an answer. “She's normal. She works for the telephone company, takes good care of Kevin, goes to church. She has a boyfriend, a neighborhood guy. He works for the phone company, too. Kevin likes him. Maybe they'll all have a new life. I certainly hope so.”

“Did she leave you or did you leave her?”

“We didn't have much in common. We got married because she was pregnant. I thought that was the right thing to do. She had a miscarriage. But we stayed married anyway. I thought it was okay. I could be married and still chase around a little on the side. Sort of the open-marriage idea.”

“Did she chase around?”

“The theory was she could, but I don't think she did. It got so I was never there, so I finally figured out I should leave. After I left, she told me she was pregnant. But she wouldn't let me come back.…”

I stopped because I realized this was self-serving talk, soft, looking for pity. Kevin was the one who needed an explanation. If I couldn't give one to him—not one that would make things right—then I had no reason to explain to anyone else. “This isn't something we should talk about,” I said.

Janet looked me over pityingly, like I might be dying of something.

***

For the first few minutes in my father's apartment, I wanted to leave. Kevin had grown sullen as he entered his teen years. He was playing a stupid video game he'd attached to my father's television. He didn't act glad to see me, and he wasn't friendly to Janet. This was his prerogative. He didn't owe me anything. Most of the time, though, we got along. Besides the fact he was my son, I liked him. He liked the Grateful Dead, peace better than war, felt sorry for poor people without thinking they had done something wrong to make themselves poor, didn't like Yuppies, thought Republicans sucked. I liked him a lot, even now when he thought himself too cool to hug.

“This boy's brain is turning to mush,” my father said. “He sits there shooting beams of light at little figurines for hours at a time. When he gets tired of one set he puts it away, then takes out another and sits there shooting beams of light at different figurines.”

“You're just mad because you can't do it,” he told his grandfather. My son had a nice face still soft with youth, and his eyes, green like mine, were shy and gentle looking.

“Can I try?” Janet asked politely. I thought he would immediately see through this ruse of the new girlfriend making friends with the sullen son. But he stood up, gracious as Sir Galahad, and let her sit down. She whooped and giggled and laughed like a ten-year-old. He cheered her on, and showed her some tricks of the trade. They talked back and forth, engrossed in one another and the game.