Beware the Solitary Drinker (6 page)

I started walking.

In a little while, she caught up with me. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I feel so horribly awful…I can't bear it…I don't know what to do.”

“I'm sorry, too. I don't know what you do with this kind of sadness. But I do know what you shouldn't do, and that's come down here and start rummaging around looking for someone who might be a killer. You're not going to find whoever it is—and even supposing you're able to, the odds are the murderer will find out about you long before you find him—or her—so you could get yourself murdered. The good offensive guy beats the defensive guy because the offensive guy knows where he's going and the other guy doesn't.”

Janet, purposeful again, sized me up. “I'm not a fool. That analogy doesn't make sense.” She glared at me. But, this time, something behind the glare reached out to me. It was as if she asked for help. The expression reminded me of Angelina; that was her expression too.

“Let the cops handle it. This is the kind of case cops solve. If your sister was black and got murdered in Brooklyn, it might be a different story. But she's young and white and pretty, and got killed in a neighborhood where people with money live, so the murder is a big deal for the papers. Then it becomes a big deal for the cops. They'll find a murderer.”

“God, you're so cynical—”

Here was this attitude again: Ms. Success. She'd done okay in life, why couldn't everyone? The cops not care about poor black people? Who'd believe such a thing? Angelina wasn't like that. Angelina knew all along what was on the other side of the glitter.

We'd completed our trek to the top of the hill, so Janet sat down on a bench we found there. “I like to walk,” she said. A combination of words and action I thought was at least as contradictory as my basketball analogy.

“If you think the police will find who killed my sister, why did that detective say you wouldn't help him?”

“Number one, I don't know much he won't find out anyway. And number two, I don't know what he's looking for.”

“What does that mean?”

“It has to do with being cynical.”

Janet looked at me significantly. “You know more about Angelina than you told him or you're telling me. Why won't you tell me about my sister? Don't you trust me either?” Her tone wasn't angry, but she looked into my eyes the way Sheehan did until I stopped looking at her.

“If you won't tell me about her, I'll tell you.” She liked to talk, this big sister from Massachusetts. Under the blue sky, in the declining autumn sun, on a park bench above the Sheep Meadow, Janet Carter blurted out her story.

“My father took care of me before he died. He left money for me to go to college in a trust fund. He didn't leave anything for Angelina…He never really cared about her. …Angelina didn't even remember him because he left my mother right after she was born, so my mother wouldn't let him see Angelina after he did that.” She sighed.

“They had a pretty stormy relationship. My mother is very demanding and high strung—and I guess my father had a temper. Angelina came along when they already hated each other. My father left us and said he wasn't Angelina's father. That's how the poor kid started out in life, something for my mother and father to fight over.

“Was he? Was your father Angelina's father?”

“My mother said he was, and there weren't any other men in her life. My mother doesn't like men very much, so I'm sure he was. He just hated my mother so much he didn't want to believe it—so he ignored Angelina.” Janet looked down at the stubble of grass beneath her feet.

“He loved me, though. He began telling me when I was five that I would go to college. Then, after they broke up, he told me that whenever I saw him, all through grade school. My mother really hated that.”

Janet raised her eyes. “A big part of their problem was my mother really thought she married beneath her. She thought she was the perfect everything. She thought my father should have a better job and make more money. She went nuts when she discovered he'd saved so much money for me. He worked in the post office. Then he died when I was sixteen…. My father was the only thing in my life I didn't share with Angelina. I regret that now…I should have…She always wanted to be with him, but I liked having him for myself.” Tears seeped from the corners of Janet's eyes, so I left her with her memories for the moment and watched the edge of the city beyond the park.

She gathered herself together after a few minutes and started in again. The older sister by almost ten years, she'd more or less raised her baby sister until she went to college. Some of what she told me I knew already from Angelina: the molestation that was the centerpiece of her life. But Janet told me something Angelina hadn't.

“I know this is impossible to believe but the boy who molested Angelina wasn't a terrible ogre…I mean, he was an ogre…but he wasn't a pervert who jumped her as she walked down the street. Angelina knew him. He was a college student who met her in the park. It was past the dying days of the Sixties, past the end of the hippie days when everyone loved everyone. But Angelina loved what she knew of the Sixties and wanted so much to be grown up and part of it. When she was four or five, she wore love beads and peasant dresses. By the time she was ten, with lipstick, she was so pretty—a real baby doll—and she was stunning. Although you wouldn't mistake that she was a child.

“For months, Angelina talked about her friend in the park. No one paid much attention. And then, she began calling him her boyfriend…I was the one who knew he'd done it …All of a sudden, she was in a tiff, mad at her boyfriend, but too grown up about it…It was too much like a jealous woman's anger. I got Angelina to tell me because I already knew…That's how close I was to her. I could feel what she felt.”

“How did she feel about being raped?”

Janet started and lost her footing. She seemed troubled by the word. “I guess she didn't think she was raped…She thought she had a boyfriend.”

“Didn't anyone explain the difference to her? Did she get counseling?”

“No. My mother said she didn't need it…It was the boy who was sick. I guess he was sick. He was from a really respectable family, my mother said…His father worked things out with my mother…He went into some kind of hospital, I guess, after it happened. We never talked about him again. I imagine the whole thing ruined his life.”

“Angelina's, too.”

Janet kept her thoughts to herself for a minute, watching the buildings and the traffic on the far side of the park, as I did.

“So you think this closeness will work a second time? You'll intuit who the murderer is? You'll get a premonition?”

“I'm not saying that…My sister and I were very close, Brian…I'm not going to let anyone forget what happened to her…I'd know things that other people wouldn't know…I might see something no one else would see.”

“Why don't you know what she did in New York then?”

Again, she looked startled. For a moment, she hemmed and hawed. “I do… At least I know some things about what she did here. She wrote to me…” She looked me straight in the eye. “Actually, I knew of you before I ever saw you…”

The spell broke. I'd been conned. Now, I didn't like this Janet Carter at all, this superior-acting upper-crust lady from Massachusetts, this pillar of respectability.

“I suppose I should have told you,” she said in what must be her most professional tone.

“I don't give a fuck what you tell me. This is New York… No one tells anyone the truth…You get used to it.” I'd let my guard down and Janet Carter got a couple of steps ahead of me. Lots of fancy footwork. Pop would tell me I was out of my element, like with the kid con men on Flatbush Avenue when I was growing up. “Life made them sly and cunning and tough,” Pop said the times I told him I'd been swindled. “You wouldn't want their lives.” Why this maxim applied to a proper young lady from Springfield, I wasn't sure. But I knew now she chose carefully what she told me; she didn't innocently gush out her life story.

“Why did Angelina come to New York?” I asked.

This time, I'd caught her off guard, and her eyes that had been looking into mine shied away for a second. “I'm not sure…She wanted to become something, an actress, a singer…”

I'd had enough. “Why don't you sit down with Sheehan and tell him everything you know?” I said. “That might get him moving in the right direction.” I had no reason to spar any longer with Janet Carter, I decided. She had her own agenda.

She smiled a superior smile. “Why don't you?” And walked away.

***

That night, Janet was in Oscar's again. Not particularly interested in me, except for ordering a beer now and again, most of the time paid for by one of the winos, she spent the evening in casual conversation with the regulars. For most of the first part of the night, with Ozzie Jackson. He kept crying and was too drunk to talk, even though he kept sputtering a language of some sort at Janet. I could tell by the bewildered way she looked about her she had no idea what he was talking about.

Ozzie Jackson hailed from Arkansas or Alabama—I get them mixed up—and did something downtown that made him a lot of money. Word had it that he was an executive at Manufacturers Hanover. He'd never said what he did, and I'd never asked. He spoke in a Southern accent, waved his glass around when he spoke, said “har, har” fairly often, called me a “son of a gun” fifteen times a night. With his horn-rimmed glasses, his sandy hair and cowlick, and his friendly Southern face, he had a startled look about him, something like a bird, eyes darting, body tensed, ready to scatter, feathers fluttering, at the slightest sound. He looked almost boyish before he got himself sloppy drunk, and a lot more respectable than he actually was. I don't think I'd ever seen him leave the bar sober.

In all the months I'd worked at Oscar's, I never saw Ozzie sit down either. He drank his Jack Daniels standing up and talked standing up, most of the time incoherently.

Then one night—the night he first met Angelina—he told me about his wife. “You old son-of-a-gun,” said Ozzie when I'd given him his drink on the house.

“That's on us,” I said.

“You old son-of-a-gun,” Ozzie said again, waving his glass in my direction.

“How've you been, Ozzie,” I asked, even though I knew that no attempt at conversation would persuade Ozzie to talk sense.

Yet this time was different. Angelina had just left the bar, stopping to kiss me on the cheek on the way out. I thought this might be why he was son-of-a-gunning me, but there was really no telling what he meant. I stood in front of him for a few minutes while he har har harred and called me an old son-of-a-gun a couple of more times.

Then, speaking perfectly clearly, he said, “I married a girl who was fifteen.”

“Good for you, Ozzie,” I said.

“She died when she was sixteen.”

This was all he told me; he went back to talking gibberish and never mentioned it again.

But he really took a shine to Angelina, treated her like a princess, buying her drinks all night any night she chose a barstool next to him. She liked to talk to him, too, sitting beside him while, one foot on the railing and his arm on the back of her chair, he leaned toward her, laughing and listening, calling her an old son-of-a-gun, talking nonsense, and buying her drinks. Now, I wondered if he was telling Janet about Angelina or about his wife. She'd probably never know.

Learning things about people when their defenses are down and their brains addled is a little like the priest hearing confession. At least according to the old school, it went this way. Telling secrets learned over the bar violated a public trust. If someone got stupidly drunk the night before, you didn't bring it up the next day unless he did. If Reuben got himself slapped by one of the Barnard girls, you didn't gossip about it. If Betsy, a little tipsy, necked at the corner of the bar with a stranger, she wouldn't be reminded of it the next day. The Boss could drop his coke vial in the men's room; if I found it, it was discreetly returned. Sam the Hammer was not reminded that the absolutely sure thing in the fourth race ran out of the money. If Carl hadn't made a payment on his tab in three or four weeks, nothing was said when he needed a drink. You take up the stick deaf and leave it dumb, the old bartenders said.

***

Somewhere during this night, when Janet Carter had so clearly lost interest in me, I found myself trying to get it back. I started after her with no more forethought than I used in taking a few hits from the Boss's coke vial or a couple of shots of tequila with Eric the Red as the night waned.

This particular combination left me more talkative than usual and more enamored of Janet Carter than might be wise. She wore lipstick this night, which she hadn't that afternoon, and the red of her lips made her eyes a darker and a more sparkling brown. She wore a dress also, a pretty flowery dress that drifted and floated around her legs when she walked—not at all like the crisp blue suit that was all straight lines and stiff material or the sexless slacks and blouse she wore in the afternoon.

She stayed until closing time, winding up sitting between me and Eric the Red, sipping a beer, while we had a couple of after-closing drinks. I sat close to her and felt her leg brush against mine and smelled the flower water scent she gave off. Though I was surprised she stayed with us, I understood why she'd put off being alone. I also understood that, for the moment, she wanted to talk about something other than Angelina.

She began to talk about New York. Visitors do this a lot, almost by way of apology for all the nasty things they said to their friends and neighbors before they got here. On this night, tourist Janet said Springfield was culturally deprived, and she liked New York because there were plays and museums, concerts and the ballet, things that people in Springfield didn't care about. It was an old factory town filled with boring factory workers.