Beware the Solitary Drinker (11 page)

He was right. He wasn't going to persuade me of anything.

“My father destroyed our family making sure he stayed rich. I have no family. My parents are divorced.…I'm here.… Until a week ago, I hadn't seen either of my parents since I was a kid.”

“Why'd you go see your father last week, after all this time?”

“Family business.”

Only rich people have family business. The rest of us have problems and things we have to do, but never any family business.

“I've been debating this,” I told Nigel. “Should I go see Ozzie myself?”

“Tonight?”

“No, not tonight. I thought I might catch him when he got home from work tomorrow while he was still relatively sober.” That might not work either, since he'd probably hit the first bar he came to downtown after work and be drunk before he got uptown.

Nigel sat spooning up his rice pudding and letting it plop back into the bowl. “Talk to Ozzie if you want.…But I don't think old Oz would make much of a witness.”

***

I called Janet Carter at her hotel the next day. I wasn't sure she'd still be there, or, if she were, if she would talk to me. She was. She'd decided to take a few days' leave from her job. I asked her to have lunch. Her tone was cold, and I sensed she was about to say no. So I told her the note we'd found under my door had been from Sam the Hammer.

“What did he want?”

“I don't want to talk about it over the phone.”

Her tone brightened a bit, and she whispered something excitedly.

“I can't hear you,” I said.

“Can you tell me everything at lunch?”

“Everything,” I said.

As eager as a pup, she sat across from me at the Terrace. I told her Sam had given me a gun.

Her eyes widened. The excitement colored her cheeks pink and sparked from her dark eyes. “We must be getting close,” she said seriously.

“To what?” I counted back five cups of coffee to explain my jitteriness to myself.

“To the killer.”

“You may be close. I don't have any idea.”

“Someone thinks you do.”

“Sam does.”

“He must know something.”

It hadn't registered with her that if Sam wanted to tell me something, he would have. The gun was all he would tell me. I ate my omelet and brooded.

“It's even more important now that we find him.” Janet looked into my eyes compassionately.

“Who?”

“The killer. We have to find him before he kills you.”

***

Once more, I crossed up my instinct, which told me to go looking for Ozzie. Instead, I went with Janet to look for Sam. We found him at La Rosita, a hole in the wall Cuban-Chinese, sipping espresso and going over
The Racing Form
with his friend the Greek. He barely nodded to me.

“Go ahead,” Janet said. “Go ask him.” I was sitting at the counter staring in front of me. Janet was on the stool next to me leaning against me breathing in my ear. We were like two kids afraid of the grown-up.

“No, not now.” I raised my shoulder to push her back from me.

We waited, so I drank another cup of coffee, this one espresso, while Janet sulked.

“You drink too much coffee,” Janet said.

Sam knew I wanted to talk to him. But he sat with the Greek for another twenty minutes, then more or less shooed him away, saying he would see him on the bus to Yonkers.

He sat down next to Janet and looked at me across her. “Nosey must run in your family,” he told Janet.

“Why did you say that?” she asked.

“Why'd you say that?” Sam mimicked, then sat in silence for quite a while.

“Who should I be afraid of?” I asked.

Sitting hunched into his Yankee jacket, Sam looked me over. “The girl talked too much”—nodding toward Janet— “just like her.”

“About what?”

Sam was fighting some battle with himself, trying to tell without telling. He was a hoodlum whatever else he was, with whatever code of honor a hoodlum has—a hoodlum and a gentleman, as they say. Usually, I could decipher his messages, but I couldn't make sense of this one. What did Angelina know?

“About movies…” Sam sounded disgusted with me and with himself when he said it. Then he left.

I thought this one through while Janet chattered at me. Her approach to difficulty was to talk at it, mine was to keep quiet.

“What about movies,” Janet asked.

“I don't know.”

“You do, too.” She spun me around on my stool to face her.

She was right. I did know. The porno flicks Carl had told me about. I was getting too close to the Boss. But what could Angelina have known or talked about that would hurt the Boss?

“Wait here,” I told Janet. Then, I ran down the street to 811 West End. Duffy stood like a sentry next to the door.

“Do a lot of kids come in and out here?” I asked him.

“For music lessons,” he said, not blinking an eye.

“At night, too?”

He nodded, rising and falling on his heels, staring straight ahead. “Be careful, McNulty.” He looked at me without sympathy.

Janet was standing in front of La Rosita when I got back.

“You trust this guy Sheehan?” I asked her.

She began to squirm, averting her eyes, coming back at me then too eagerly. She was easy enough to trap. “What do you mean?”

“You talked to him.”

“Well, he asked me questions.” Her dander rose. “He's the police. You're so damned suspicious of everyone. All these crooks you know don't tell you anything. I only talked to him.”

“Calm down.…I just want to know what I asked. Do you trust him?”

“I think so. I think he really wants to find out who killed my sister.”

“Call him. Tell him to meet us someplace downtown.”

Sheehan met us at a coffee shop on Broadway just below Columbus Circle. On the walls were pictures of the old Miss Rheingold ads that used to be all over the subways, memorabilia of my youth. Sheehan sat at a booth with his hat on the table in front of him. Once more, I was walking into 1955, though in one concession to the contemporary world, the menu had a lunch special named after Mayor Koch. I ate a hamburger and drank more coffee. Sheehan didn't look smug exactly; he looked officious, like it was about time that I came to my senses and recognized the authority of the state.

I told him about Angelina, the Boss, the movies, and what I suspected about the children. I'd tried to prepare Janet on the subway ride downtown. It wasn't enough. The truth of her sister's life shook her. Spread out in front of me now, it looked putrid also, desperate and sad, terrifying at the end.

“You think the Boss killed her?” Sheehan asked when I was finished. His tone was intimidating, telling me I'd better have a good answer.

“I'm just passing on some information.”

Janet jumped into the conversation with both feet. “Why don't you arrest him on the pornography charge; then, you can search that place…” Wrapped up in her own ideas, she spoke too quickly to notice that Sheehan gave no sign of sharing her enthusiasm.

“That's not so easy.” Sheehan shifted uncomfortably in the booth that was too small for him, avoiding Janet's eyes, not hiding very well the irritation curling the corners of his mouth. “That's not my jurisdiction. And your information isn't good enough for me to pass along.”

What he meant was the tangled internal relationships between vice and homicide; he had to figure whose toes he might step on. “We already picked the Boss up and leaned on him. We didn't find out anything.”

“If someone's doing something illegal, don't you arrest them?” Janet asked.

“You gave me some information. It's hearsay, right—supposition?”

Janet nodded.

“Ask your friend McNulty here. I thought you kind of people believed in all that civil liberties shit.” Bearing down now, he seemed to tower over us, though he hadn't left his seat. “When we have some hard evidence, we'll move. Let us handle it, okay?”

“Fine,” I said, pulling myself out of the booth, and Janet with me. We left Sheehan unfolding himself from the booth, gesturing impatiently for the waitress.

***

Janet stared in front of her, silent and sad, on the ride uptown on the train. I couldn't think of anything to say that might make her feel better.

At the 96th Street station, in the quiet while the local waited for the express, she asked, “Do you think she was a prostitute?”

I was thinking about other things: about the cop, about the Boss, about Ozzie. The whole thing was making me angry. I was mad that I kept giving Sheehan information.

“She was pretty. She was a commodity. Everything's for sale. Prostitution is one of the pillars of the national character.”

Janet's eyes were icy. “Don't tell me your goddamn politics. I'm talking about my sister. Don't you have any feelings?”

Janet was determined that we should force Sheehan to arrest the Boss. I told her things didn't work that way and we should just drop it. But she kept talking at me—relentlessly. First, she accused me of corrupting her sister, of exploiting her. She said I was a coward and a liar, a drunk, and a bum. On and on, she went, until I discovered I'd agreed to sneak into Rocky's cellar to steal one of the porno flicks as evidence that would force Sheehan to arrest the Boss.

I had to be nuts. The only saving grace was that Rocky lived alone and was totally predictable. I asked Jim, the day guy at Oscar's, to stay until ten-thirty that night. This wasn't really fair because I could come in, work the back half of the shift and make all the money, which came at the end of the night. But I'd tightened Jim up a few times in the past, and for reasons of his own, he got a charge out of deferring to me, probably because I'd started bartending when he was in diapers.

Rocky would be sucking scotches beginning like clockwork shortly after nine. Duffy would be on the door. My best hope was to convince Carl to go in early and get rid of Duffy, so Carl would be on the door if anything came down.

“I really don't think you should do this,” Carl said.

“Me neither. I got myself into this because she said she'd do it herself anyway. Look, I'll just run in, grab one of the movies, and slip out. Who would go into the basement besides you and Rocky?”

“You may not like what you find out,” Carl warned me. Everyone's idea of peace was to stay ignorant.

“That's like people are afraid to go to doctors if they think they have cancer.”

“I never go to doctors,” Carl said.

“Switch with Duffy, will you? I don't trust him not to tell Rocky or the Boss.”

“You'd get hurt,” Carl said.

“That's why I want you there.”

Carl agreed finally, when he saw that I was desperate. Actually, I used the same approach on him that Janet used on me. If he didn't help, I'd go in when Duffy was there. He very unhappily told me that he owed Duffy a couple of hours anyway for coming in late one night the week before. We agreed Carl would get there at ten. I would get there at ten-fifteen, do the deed, and be at work by ten-thirty so I would be covered if anyone asked.

The giant brass and glass lobby door of 811 was almost always open that time of night because tenants were going in and out every few minutes. Carl watched the door and ran the elevator, so I waited in the doorway across the street until I saw one of the tenants enter, then followed a few seconds behind him. I caught a glimpse of Carl as he peeked out the closing elevator door. He tried for a smile of encouragement, but actually looked like he was sticking his head out of the elevator to throw up.

I knew this was ridiculous, slinking around like the Continental Op, but on I went to the far end of the lobby and through the door that led to the service elevator—a conveyance I'd learned to operate when I used to go with Carl to smoke dope in the cellar. It was the only elevator to the cellar; the only other way was a stairway that they kept locked. If I kept the elevator with me, someone might wonder who was in the cellar, but no one would be able to get down to find out without either ringing the bell for the elevator or getting the key from Carl. Sam the Hammer would have called it a sure thing. Thinking about Sam, I remembered the gun, wondering if this were the kind of caper he had in mind when he gave it to me. I'd forgotten all about it; it never even occurred to me that I should have it with me. The idea of it sent shivers down my back and turned the cartilage in my knees to sponge.

Hyper-alert, I heard and measured every creak and groan of the elevator chains. When the creaking stopped and the elevator thudded softly to a stop, I opened the iron grill, peered into the murkiness of the cellar, then made my way stealthily toward the rumble of the boilers. Why I tiptoed across the cellar if I was certain no one was in the basement might have been a mystery itself had I thought of it. But I didn't think; I'd become a creature of cunning and wits and senses, all instinct. I crept toward the cabinet in the makeshift lounge of sagging couches behind the boilers where Rocky kept the films and his movie projector. I didn't have a flashlight or anything to pry open a lock with if that were necessary, this B&E thing not being my first line of work. It occurred to me that people in the business probably did an apprenticeship before they went off on their own, as there was not much room for mistakes during on-the-job training.

Maybe the cabinet wasn't locked. And if no one was in the cellar, there was no reason not to turn on the lights. If I could only find the light switch…

Someone saved me the trouble. In a glare of light that will stand in my memory as bright as the Second Coming, the boiler room lit up like Yankee Stadium. I was caught between first and second and the pitcher still had the ball.

Actually, only one little light bulb went on; it swung jauntily from its own wire a foot or so above the head of the Boss and his goon—who had remembered to bring his gun. The Boss smiled placidly; the goon stared grimly.