Beware the Solitary Drinker (15 page)

I remembered her, then. Mannequin-thin with big brown eyes. She came on to me the first night she was ever in the bar. But I didn't want anything to do with her. She scared me. I thought she was crazy.

My memory formed a picture of her; then it formed a picture of Nigel. It was a couple of weeks after Angelina had arrived in town. Nigel came in to Oscar's with her. The skinny girl watched him and Angelina, stared at them for a long time, then this girl began screaming at Nigel and pointing, coming at him from the far end of the bar, screaming. I grabbed her and wrestled her out of the place. She'd come at him with her claws. “You raped me,” she screamed at Nigel.… “He did,” she screamed at Angelina, who like all of us watched her in shock. “He raped me,” she screamed. Nigel weathered the accusations totally unruffled except for the sick expression on his face. He kept telling her to calm down, asking her name, trying to talk to her.

Reuben grabbed Nigel around the neck, as if he would run out the door. But Nigel had only been smiling sickly and trying to talk to the girl. It was the kind of situation where, if you try denying it, you only begin to look guiltier. The girl's hysteria and the fact that she wanted to fuck almost every man in the bar before her encounter with Nigel didn't do her argument any good. She was about falling-down drunk and didn't make sense.

Reuben took over as her protector, so no one else cared very much. She didn't want Reuben as a protector, it turned out, and since he made it impossible for her to get rid of him, I finally pushed her out the door and into a cab. The whole thing was weird. Sloppy drunk and zombie-like, as if she'd done too many Quaaludes, she tried to pull me into the cab with her, holding on to me and kissing me. I remembered she looked so bony she should feel hard like a bag of sticks; instead she felt soft and yielding. I wanted to go with her. But she really was too crazy.

An hour later the cops showed up in the bar and took Nigel out. The next night Nigel was back. Someone, not her, had called the cops. So they checked out her story, Nigel told us, and decided she was wacky. She never came back to Oscar's. Remembering how she felt in my arms, I'd actually hoped she would come back, but I never saw her anywhere again.

I didn't tell any of this to Janet because I didn't want to set her off after Nigel, and if Eric remembered, he kept quiet about it. “Do you think you could find out her name?” I asked Eric.

“She was pretty wasn't she,” Janet said, no longer giggling.

“Too skinny,” said Eric. “Like a rope.”

I'd had enough of skin flicks for the day, so Janet and I walked up Broadway to have lunch at Tom's.

“Does that make Eric and Carl suspects now?” she asked. She was serious.

“Not Carl, he was working.” We walked some more. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a fleet of squad cars in front of Betsy's building. “Come to think of it, not Eric either. He was with me.”

“Oh,” said Janet, her tone suspicious again. “Where were you?”

I started to tell her I was with the fluegelhorn player, and had left Eric in the sack with her friend, but I thought better of it. “We were drinking in Oscar's,” I said.

“Any other witnesses?”

“No.” Maybe Eric had gotten up and gone for Angelina. Maybe Carl had sneaked away from his post for a half-hour. No one told the truth, not even me.

“A likely story,” said Janet, once more in that superior tone that suggested she sullied her reputation by associating with me.

The fact that the cop cars were in front of Betsy's apartment building finally dawned on me. I got really scared as soon as I realized what it might mean. I began running.

“What?” Janet screamed after me. “What happened?”

I ran as fast as I could. It couldn't be, I told myself. Not Betsy, too. Pictures of her grumpy, sad, and cheerful face ran through my memory. My lungs hurt. I think I'd forgotten to breathe while I ran. In the doorway, I ran into Sheehan. His face was grim.

“Your pal Ozzie bought it,” he said.

At first, his words went right through me. It took a while for Ozzie's death to become real. Soon it did sink in, and sadness for Ozzie replaced the sadness for Betsy.

I walked away without another word to Sheehan. Maybe he expected my compliments on a job well done. But, in truth, I felt just as bad about Ozzie as I did Angelina. Poor pathetic Ozzie shooting it out with the cops seemed just as much a cold-blooded murder as Angelina's.

Forgetting about Janet, I walked away, too depressed and disgusted to even be angry, across Broadway toward my own apartment. It was over. Janet had her vengeance. I didn't feel any good at all about catching Angelina's murderer. I'd fingered Ozzie. I should have figured the cops would come down on him like storm troopers and one way or another scare him to death. I wasn't cut out for rooting out the bad guys. I never could tell the bad guys from the good guys.

Except this wasn't what happened. Breathless, Janet caught up with me at the door to my building. “Where are you going? Why didn't you wait?”

“I can't stand this shit,” I said. “I liked Ozzie, the poor bastard.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“What?” My head spun. I sat down on the doorstep.

“Are you all right?” For a moment I only noticed the concern in Janet's eyes, and how pretty they were.

“No. I'm not all right,” I said. “What happened?”

She looked perplexed. “Someone murdered Ozzie. Didn't you listen?”

“Who?”

“No one knows.”

“The cops didn't?”

“Of course not.”

But as my head cleared, I still wasn't sure. I told Sheehan that we might have something on the Boss. The Boss gets a tip. I tell Sheehan Ozzie might be the murderer or—as I should have known and didn't and Sheehan would have figured out—knew who the murderer was, and Ozzie gets bumped off.

Chapter Eight

I kept my suspicions to myself, not so much because I wanted to keep anything from Janet, but the suspicions were insubstantial, unformulated, like daydreams; they hadn't come together enough to be formed into words. I did tell her that when Sheehan told me Ozzie had been killed, I thought he meant he was shot when the cops came to get him.

“Why would they come to get him?”

“I told Sheehan Danny saw Ozzie in the building lobby the night Angelina was killed.”

Janet's eyes widened. “You don't think—”

“What I think is whoever killed Angelina found out Ozzie saw him or her. I don't know if the cops announced this. But I give you eight-to-five they grab Danny again.”

***

That night a harried and angry Max Christianson showed up at the bar around nine before the winos had arrived and while the small dinner crowd was munching away on Eric's Calves Liver Grandmère, the liver and onions his grandmother used to serve him back in Yugoslavia.

Max's face was thin and haggard to begin with, his body as taut as one of his guitar strings. On a good night, he broke a guitar string four or five times. On this night, he looked like one of those strings wound to the breaking point.

“The cops just picked up Danny again. The fuckers. He pushed one of them, so they knocked him down the stairs.” Max's eyes darted around like a pinball. “Handcuffed, the bastards.”

Peter Finch showed up a few minutes later to meet Max. He ordered a martini. I used the mixing glass and stirred the drink with the bar spoon, the spoon not the handle, until the glass frosted over, then poured it in front of him, the amount in the mixing glass filling exactly the stem glass I'd placed there. Both he and Max watched me mix the drink and pour it. It felt good to be able to do something correctly and precisely.

“Very good,” Peter said after taking a sip. “I'll take a six pack.”

“That bad?”

“Worse. They're charging him on two murders. Now he has a black eye, so they're adding resisting arrest. It won't be so easy to get him out this time.”

“He didn't resist arrest.” Max turned on Peter.

Peter looked at him over his martini. “When the cops slap you around and it shows, they charge you with resisting arrest.”

“Are they saying he killed Ozzie?”

Peter nodded, then finished his martini like he really meant to drink a six pack. I made him another.

“How was Ozzie killed?”

“He was shot twice—executed—while he slept. They found a gun in a sewer grate near Danny's apartment building.”

Max shook his head. “Danny never had a gun. The gun he used to fire would have taken the building down.”

***

When I told all this to Janet on the phone in the morning, she wanted to call Peter to get the story straight. I'd already told her the story straight, so I didn't know why she needed to do that. The next thing I knew, she called back to tell me she was having dinner with him that night.

“I thought you were supposed to be helping. So now Danny can rot in jail while you to go off to a fucking fancy restaurant to have dinner!”

“Everyone eats dinner,” she said primly. “Besides it's my first date since I've been in New York.”

“What about me?”

“You weren't a date. You picked me up.”

***

That afternoon, by accident, I found Reuben at the West End. I just wandered in that direction, but I must have had a hunch he would be there looking for the Barnard girls. Half the degenerates on the Upper West Side claimed to have fathered children by Barnard girls over the years. This said something about aspiration in America. Reuben was genial, sober, and alone so I sat down and took my chances, asking him a couple of questions.

“Why do you think Ozzie was killed?” I asked for openers.

“How should I know?”

“I was just wondering why anyone would kill someone,” I said as if to myself.

Reuben sipped his drink, staring straight ahead.

Since I couldn't figure out how to lead up to the questions I wanted to ask, I considered for a few seconds of silence what advice my father would give. I was sure he would say, “If that's the question you want answered, ask it.” So I did.

“Did you ever kill anyone?” I asked.

Reuben turned toward me with thirty years of pain cascading through his eyes. He didn't answer, just stared at me. I didn't want to make him lie, but a perverted form of discretion kept me from saying I knew he murdered his wife.

“May you never know how it feels,” Reuben said, throwing back the three fingers of dark rum in his glass.

“Danny's been arrested again.”

Reuben nodded. “When I first came to New York, this was one of the few bars in the city where whites and blacks drank together.” We surveyed the bar together. The West End wasn't much to look at. The bar loomed in front of you as soon as you opened the door. It stretched off into the distance, made the far turn like the track at Yonkers and circled back, leaving room against the side wall for a few narrow booths and space for the standees. A workingman's steam table lunch counter stood to the left of the door; tables and game machines lined the back wall. Sometime in its more recent history a jazz room had been added by breaking through the wall to what had been the store next door. The jazz was real, the West End a historical monument.

“The Beats used to drink here,” Reuben said. He looked away. “I met my wife here.”

I knew without asking which one he meant.

“Didn't the cops check you out? Oscar told them you were the killer.”

He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “If Oscar told them, they figured I didn't do it.” After sipping his replenished drink, he went on. “They did check me out. Maybe I'm the fall guy if they can't pin it on Danny. I was home in bed. No one saw me.” He drank. I signaled the bartender for another round.

“I hit her once,” Reuben said.

My blood stood still. I thought he was talking about Angelina.

“But I hit her hard. She caught the corner of the sink with her head.” His thick body softened; he seemed to melt into himself.

I wished I didn't know Reuben killed his wife. Invading people's lives burdened you. Like that picture of Dorian Gray, you start picking up the ugliness from them when they let go of it.

I left the West End not knowing much more than when I got there. After sharing his secrets, I didn't know if I felt closer to Reuben or more distant. I didn't know if he'd killed Angelina or not.

Finding out about everyone's past was shattering whatever illusions I had about goodness in the world, but hadn't brought me a step closer to finding Angelina's—and now Ozzie's—killer.

I was discouraged because I couldn't figure out anything. What had Ozzie seen? He'd been scared to death to tell me. But he'd started to tell me something. If only shit-headed Nigel hadn't happened along. Why was he so scared when he saw Nigel? As far as I knew, Nigel was the last person to see Ozzie alive. I wondered if the cops knew this. I didn't know how they would, except if Nigel told them himself. Or I told them. I should have asked Reuben where he was last night, too. I wasn't doing so well at this sleuthing business.

***

Carl showed up that night at Oscar's. He hadn't been in since our escapade with the Boss, and I hadn't spoken to him since he hung up on me when I asked about the movie. He looked ready to meet his fate when he sat down. I couldn't help grinning.

“So you showed her the movie you palmed from the Boss. Did she like it?”

“She wanted to keep watching, but I made her turn it off.”

“I decided when I gave up being a Catholic that sex was not immoral.”

“What about inflicting pain?”

“I'm not sure.”

“What about murder?”

He stared at me.

“Did you make any movies with Angelina?”

“No. But I saw one of them. A rare beauty. She should have sex with the gods. She transcended the sordidness. They didn't know what to do with her. No movie, no characters, only Angelina—everything else disappeared. The movie should be a classic.…I can't believe the jerk burned it.” Carl's face flushed when he finished. He'd said more than he'd meant to. Drink does that. His enthusiasm for his fantasies about Angelina was embarrassing.

“So,” he said, when he'd regained himself, “how goes the sleuthing?”

For the first time, I was cagey around Carl. How did I know he didn't leave his post for a half-hour to go into the park with Angelina?

“When did you first meet Angelina?” I asked.

Carl hesitated. “I don't remember. Around the time she began coming in here.”

“Did you ever sleep with her?”

For a few seconds he looked angry. “No. It seems like she would sleep with anyone else in the world except you and me.” His cynicism and wit overcome, his eyes reflected truth. Then he looked over my shoulder as the door to the bar opened and Nigel came in. “Even him.”

For the rest of the night, as Carl sank slowly into his stupor, loquacious and intent on the conversations he held first with Nigel, later with Max and Peter Finch, who had stopped in for a quick one and stayed for hours. Then, as the night closed toward the small hours, drinking his scotches faster and faster, absorbed in deep and profound discussion with Ntango, whose cab waited with the hood and trunk open in the bus stop outside the door, and Eric the Red, who once more made it only as far as the bar when he closed up the kitchen—for that night, I watched Carl, who was as close as I got to a friend, and kept picturing him walking with Angelina down 104th Street toward Riverside Park.

I couldn't bring myself to ask him anything else. I settled for Nigel, with whom I decided to eat breakfast at the greasy spoon. This time, I tried to ask questions methodically.

“Did you talk to the cops yet?”

Nigel nodded.

“You did?”

“You've been in bars too long,” Nigel said between dainty spoonfuls of his rice pudding. “It's not a crime to tell things to the police. Despite what you believe, they want to catch murderers.” He paused between spoonfuls. His eyeballs looked gigantic behind his glasses. “Besides, I walked Ozzie right up Broadway. Why should I hide anything? Any number of people could have seen us. Just like they could have seen you run across the street to talk to him.”

“Did you tell the cops that?”

“I might have mentioned it. What do you care? You have an alibi. I can even vouch for you.” He chuckled.

“You weren't in the bar.”

“Are you kidding?” Nigel said. “I was there till closing.”

I tried to remember, but it was too blurry.

“I came down right after I dropped Ozzie off.”

“I don't remember,” I said. “I don't even know where I am half the time.”

Nigel laughed.

“Why did Ozzie look so scared when he saw you?”

Nigel sat back and raised his eyes from his rice pudding. “Ozzie was afraid of his shadow. How did he look when you ran up to him?”

Nigel had a point there. Ozzie wasn't any more scared of Nigel than he had been of me. “Did he say anything on the way home?”

“He blabbered most of the way. But I have no idea what he was talking about.”

“Do you know where he was coming from?”

Nigel shook his head. “He sometimes stops off in the Village for a few on the way uptown after work.”

I remembered what Janet had said about Angelina meeting someone at a bar near Hanrahan's. “Does he stop off down around Lincoln Center, too?”

“I think he might. He used to stop off to see Angelina at Hanrahan's.”

We sat for a few minutes longer. I realized I liked having Nigel around. Somehow, without my intending it, he'd become part of my life. He helped shore me up. We didn't talk for a while, and it must have been that he was lost in thought, too. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “These are sad things to talk about, aren't they? Your life goes along its usual route. It's ordinary. You might even think boring. You think nothing will ever be different. You don't even notice you're growing older. Then something tragic happens and all the ordinariness is gone. You don't feel safe anymore. Did you ever think your friends would be murdered?”

***

The next morning, Janet called to tell me she was going to help Peter get some information that might help Danny. I wondered if this meant she'd spent the night with Peter. She had some things to do, she said, and would call me later at my apartment. I felt that sinking feeling I get when I realize I'm being supplanted, like the guy coming home and finding a pair of men's shoes in front of the couch. I didn't expect I'd be seeing her later.

Well, it wasn't the first time, and since she'd already woke me up, I decided to do something useful rather than sit around feeling sorry for myself. I sat around for a few minutes in a stupor of sorts, finally settling on a plan that included getting a handle on Angelina's life at Hanrahan's and then visiting Pop and talking things over.

Angelina's reputation at Hanrahan's was a bit better than her uptown one. Not so surprisingly, she wasn't the only one who went slumming above 96th Street. She'd been a day waitress for the most part, so getting there in the quiet time when folks were setting up, but before the lunch rush, was the best time to try to find out something. The day bartender and I had a couple of mutual acquaintances, both in the bars and in the theater. He was a big handsome Midwesterner, like ninety percent of the male out-of-work acting profession in New York. But he was pretty serious about his acting—and his bartending. Hanrahan's was a good, union job, and he handled it well. He'd also had enough luck off-Broadway that I'd seen a couple of his plays. We talked about this and that, and he even owned up to having seen me on the stage in one of my rare appearances.