Beware the Solitary Drinker (13 page)

Pop puttered around the apartment, back and forth to the kitchen, making some coffee, looking for a coffee cake he thought he had, and finally finding it. He has surprisingly good-sized shoulders and an almost-flat stomach. He was in better shape than I was and looked respectable if not distinguished. He kept his hair crewcut short, and his clothes were plain and neat, a cardigan sweater over a sport shirt and gabardine slacks, the same kind of clothes he'd worn all his life. Like his movements, his blue eyes were quick and alert. He poured me some coffee, and I told him about Angelina's murder, about the Boss and the cops on the take. I asked him about the
Journal-American
, and Reuben.

“Newspaper indexes, except for the
Times,
don't exist or are incomplete. They miss things. But somewhere there should be the clip files and someone who remembers…and the
Times
sometimes would cover a murder if they thought it was important. Let me make a couple of calls.”

I liked how my father worked. I watched as he opened his flat ancient metal alphabetical file of phone numbers, sliding the clip along the side of the metal book until it lined up with the right letter, then pushing the clip so it sprang open. He'd had the phone book since I was a baby; many of the numbers still began with exchanges like MU 6 or BU 8. Watching him now made me quiver with the same excitement I felt as a kid. I loved watching him work then, even if it was only making a phone call. I thought he did it better than anyone else in the world ever did. I brought the same faith now, as I waited for him to get the information, as I did when I came to him as a kid with a math problem or a question of history, when I knew he did everything I'd ever learned a good father should do only to be shunned by the neighbors, fired from his jobs, and disowned by his friends and relatives.

“November 18, 1952,” my father said when he put down the phone. I stared at him. “Don't write down the date,” he said. “You can call me back from the library when you forget it.”

He joined me at the round dining room table after attempting to warm up the coffee and boiling it in the process. I couldn't remember a time in recent years that he'd heated up the coffee without boiling it. He sputtered and muttered but poured it out anyway. It tasted like a brew of old shoes.

Even though he had a nicely furnished living room, which was neat as a pin, life took place around the dining room table. When I came to visit, we sat at it to talk. On the nights I stayed over, I came out from the bedroom to find him reading at the dining room table. I remembered that years before, when I visited him in North Carolina where he was organizing for the Furniture Workers Union, we sat at this same round dining room table. Besides a bed, it was the only piece of furniture in the small house he rented down there.

He patted the volume of Lenin he was reading. “His meanings are twisted by his followers. Like Freud, Darwin, even like Shakespeare. If you want to learn about something, read the originals, not their interpreters.”

“Lenin interpreted Marx,” I reminded him.

“You can't make sense of Lenin without reading Marx; that's what I mean.” His face tightened and his eyes hardened; he wouldn't be made fun of. But I could see in his eyes that once more the quixotic hope of rescuing me from failure had taken hold of him.

“Most murders are committed by ordinary people,” he said. “Usually someone the victim knows.”

Janet pulled up a chair at the table. Kevin watched from in front of the TV, interested now that the subject of murder had come up, the figurines given a breather. When my pop spoke like this, you felt like you should sit at his feet and listen.

“If you want to find out who killed the girl, you need to know everything there is to know about her: What did she do? Where did she go? Who did she talk to and why?”

“Why?” I asked. “Why bother? What difference does it make if we find the killer? It doesn't bring Angelina back to life.” At this moment, everything seemed futile. I couldn't think of any reason to do anything, so I took it out on my old man.

As usual, he had an answer, whether I wanted one or not. “Taking a life is wrong. Wars, executions, crimes of passion, or just plain neglect, all of it is wrong. Life is the only thing we have. Instead of doing what it takes to prevent murder, our society's response in these barbaric times is to track down and capture the culprit. We think this makes up for not doing what we might have done to keep the murder from happening in the first place. But maybe it's a step in that direction, a recognition that life is sacred.”

***

Janet and I took Kevin into Manhattan. He wanted to see the Star Wars movie.

“It's not what you think, Dad,” he said, patronizingly, standing on the corner of 41st and Broadway in his black jacket, his shoulders hunched, one hip thrust out—a stance learned on the street corners of Brooklyn.

“Oh?” I said. “And what is it that I think?”

“That it's violent and pro-capitalist and anti-working class.”

“Is that what Grandpa said?”

“That's what he says about everything: TV, movies, my school books.”

“Maybe he's right.”

Kevin's sullenness broke; his face shone with that kid's earnestness too often missing. “Everything isn't terrible, is it? Something is good, isn't it?”

All of a sudden, he was young again, eager, earnest, hopeful. Watching him, I remembered the night I talked with Nigel about his not seeing his father for so many years. It made me wonder if I might be driving Kevin away with my own bleak take on life. I thought again how lucky I was—even if I was a lousy father—to have my son. This was one of those moments when just because I was with Kevin I was filled up with this whatever it was—joy, or something ridiculous like that.

I tousled his head. “Sorry, pal.” I said, then, as brightly as an ingenue, “Let's go to the movies…”

He laughed, then grimaced. It was a line from
Annie,
a movie he loved when he was little—something he was now too cool to own up to.

***

When we'd walked up Broadway a block or so, Kevin stopped me. “I got an idea,” he said. “Her and I can go to the movie. You go to the library.”

This was okay with me, and seemed to be even better than okay with both of them. We agreed to meet later at my apartment, so I gave Kevin a quick hug and handed Janet the key to my apartment, kissing her quickly on the lips as I did, figuring she wouldn't make a scene and slug me in front of the kid.

I'd gone a half block east on 42nd Street toward the library when Kevin trotted up behind me. “We decided to stay downtown. Meet us in front of the theater at 5:15.” Then, as he turned to leave, he almost smiled. “She's nice,” he said and trotted on into the crowd.

***

In the library, I found the
New York Times
from November 18, 1952. From thirty years past, on paper now yellowed, bound in one of those pebbly black hard back covers that pre-date microfilm, a blurred picture of a young, strong Reuben Foster looked stonily out at me. He stood between two gray-suited detectives, both surely retired by now if not dead. He'd just been convicted of manslaughter for the murder of his wife Dorothy, the story stated matter-of-factly. Murders weren't happening three to the day in 1952, but even so I was surprised he got a write-up in the
Times
until I realized his wife was white. Fascinated, I read the news story over and over, expecting it would tell me something about why Reuben killed his wife, about what their lives had been like. But it told the story without really telling me anything, just facts and figures.

***

Later at Nathan's, where we'd gone on my insistence, Janet told me something I would have known myself if I watched TV and went to more movies: a manslaughter charge meant you killed someone without having intended to in advance.

“What now?” I asked after my hot dog, french fries, and beer.

“God, what a lame supper,” Kevin said. “Let's walk around until we get hungry and eat something decent.”

We browsed through record stores, bookshops, and a couple of glittering electronics stores, meandering our way uptown. I sucked in the hum of the street and the glaring lights, the unending rush of people picking us up like a conveyor belt, rushing us forward until we got off at our next stop. The energy electrified me. I took strength from the city on nights like this; chaotic life made sense for a time.

Around 9:00, we ate a late dinner at a Chinese on Broadway in the Nineties. Kevin stayed at my apartment that night. Janet agreed to have breakfast with us the next morning downtown and go to the comic bookstore across from the Strand on Broadway near Twelfth.

The first thing Janet said when we slid into the booth across from her in a coffee shop on Eighth Street the next morning was, “The older man with Angelina drank Jack Daniels.”

“That's a start,” I said. “But lots of people drink Jack Daniels.” What I didn't say was that Ozzie was one of them.

After breakfast, I thumbed through Tin Tin books in the comic store, more pleased than I would let on that Kevin told Janet about how I used to read them to him and that he still had his copies home under his bed, along with his Madeline and Babar books.

“Reuben Foster killed his wife before I was born,” Janet said as we browsed through the Strand after dropping Kevin and his armload of comics at the subway.

We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant on MacDougal Street and, following my father's advice, decided we were going to talk to every single person Angelina knew. The race was on. At the moment, Reuben challenged Ozzie for the pole position, but Ozzie held on to the lead. We were barely into the first turn with the field crowded and the track sloppy.

Thinking through what my father said about knowing everything I could about Angelina, I wondered why she'd chosen the Upper West Side of all the neighborhoods in New York. If she'd been Jewish, a classical musician, a leftist, a former Barnard student, a serious acting student, it would make sense. If she knew one of the above, it would make sense.

“Why did Angelina come to New York,” I asked Janet again.

“Excitement, I guess. She wanted to be an actress or a singer. And she wanted all the glitzy and trendy things of New York, too. She wanted to dress in high heels and wear make-up. She wanted to date men who wore three-piece suits instead of guys in dungarees with grease under their fingernails. She wanted to marry a millionaire. Why? Don't thousands of girls come to New York for the same reasons?” Her dark eyes clouded as she tried to peer deeper into mine.

“Why did she come to the Upper West Side then? Why not the East Side?”

“What's the difference?”

“The East Side is trendy, not the Upper West Side. The East Side is where she'd find the guys in the suits and the millionaires. Did she know anyone in New York?”

“No one I could name.” Janet wrinkled her brow, not even noticing the guacamole salad the waitress put in front of her. I, however, noticed my bottle of Dos Equis. “But she might have. She went to New York a few times. Then, one day, she decided she'd move. I wondered, then, if she might have met someone.”

“But she said no? She didn't seem to know anyone when I first met her.”

Janet said, “Looking back now, I wonder…” I pointed to her guacamole. When she returned from her memories, she took a bite and said, “Angelina was smug and secretive when she was moving, which she never was with me. There was something about New York she wasn't telling me.”

“Is there anyone around Oscar's you might have seen before?”

“No.”

“Anyone who'd ever been in Springfield or wherever it is?”

“No.”

“Anyone who knew more about Angelina than you expected?”

“Why do you ask all this?” Janet pushed her plate away; her eyes flared at me. “What are you getting at?”

“I don't know. When Angelina first started coming into the bar, I sometimes got the feeling she was looking for someone. All of a sudden, she had a lot of money. She said she had a sugar daddy. I thought she was kidding, but maybe she wasn't. She got a really good job. I thought the money must come from that. But it seems to me now she might have had too much money for even that good of a job. A kid with no experience shouldn't make that much money, not even if she's as pretty as Angelina.”

“Where do you think she got the money?”

“I'm not thinking. I'm wondering.”

Janet searched my face, as if she suspected I was keeping something from her. I wondered, too, what she might be keeping from me.

“Anyway,” Janet said when she had looked at me long enough. She had an orderly business type mind and the ability to stick to the question through thick and thin. “To answer your question, the person who seems to know most about her besides you is Nigel. And also Carl. You should know how well she knew them.”

I tried to remember when Angelina met Carl or Nigel. It seemed she'd known Carl as long as she'd known me, although I couldn't remember when she first met him. I did remember when she first met Nigel. He wasn't around when she began coming into Oscar's. When she did see him, though, she really latched on. Then everything cooled off fast. Maybe he'd become insanely jealous. But, Nigel, as weird as he was, didn't seem the insanely jealous type. He'd stayed friends with her, pined after her, hung around and made a pest of himself. But I'd seen enough insanely jealous, control freak drunks to know he wasn't one of them. Besides, Nigel told me he was in Connecticut that night.

“Do you think we should find out more about Nigel and Carl?” Janet asked, interrupting my reverie.

“I just happen to know that Nigel was visiting his father when Angelina was killed and Carl was working.”

“Oh,” Janet said, looking up abruptly from her salad. “How do you know?”