Beware the Solitary Drinker (18 page)

“Mother's pretty hard to take sometimes,” she said in answer to my unasked question. “She can be so cold. That's how she was with Angelina, just so cold…”

“Why do you still live with her, if you don't mind my asking?”

Janet blushed. “I don't know, really. I lived away from home for years, in Boston. The position at the bank in Springfield is recent, or fairly recent. I planned to stay with Mother for a few weeks until I found a place. At first, it was fun because Angelina was there, and I spent some time getting to know her again as an almost grown-up. Also, she and mother fought all the time, and I was a kind of buffer.” Our dinner came and Janet looked it over like it was leftover stew from Sam's hash house. “Since Angelina left, I've been meaning to move out. But I guess I feel sorry for my mother. She's sad and lonely.”

“Meanness does that to you.”

Midway through dinner, Janet pointed to a gray-haired man in a blue suit who'd tucked away three martinis while I was drinking my beer and who I expected was now about to go face down in his wiener schnitzel. “That's the DA,” she said. “Rumor has it that he's been coming in here and getting drunk every night for the past ten years.”

“Was he the DA when Angelina was raped?”

“Probably.”

“Let's go say hello.”

Janet hesitated, her eyes narrowed with worry. “I don't think people are supposed to notice when he's drunk.…The bank is very sensitive…our position in the community…”

I waited. She stood and walked to his table.

“George,” she said, as he raised his gaze. He reminded me of a basset hound. “This is Brian McNulty.” She raised an eyebrow in my direction. “He's a private investigator from New York.”

I raised an eyebrow myself. But I did have a suit on—albeit borrowed—I was fortified by the Wurtzburger, and had finished the first third of a Lew Archer book. What the hell!

“Pleased to meetcha,” he garbled, holding out his puffy, pink hand, and looking at me droopily with his bloodshot eyes. “What can I do for you?”

“A number of years ago,” I said in what I imagined was a hardboiled tone—I really needed a hat and a cigarette to bring this off—“a number of years ago, a ten-year-old girl was molested by a college student. Do you remember it?”

“No,” said the DA, hovering over his martini like he suspected I might steal it. We might have gotten along better if Janet had introduced me as a bartender.

“Try,” I said. “I doubt they'd bury that kind of case without you knowing about it. Maybe you keep a file of cases that never got prosecuted.”

“Not if there were no charges,” he said.

I didn't get it.

“We can't force parents to file charges, can't force a kid to testify if the parents say she's too traumatized, they just want her to forget it and get on with her life.” The DA's eyes shone with cunning through the red lines and puffiness. “Ask her.” He nodded toward Janet. “It was her sister.”

“I know. I want the name of the suspected molester.”

“No can do.” He dismissed me with a wave of his hand and returned to his martini.

I didn't take the hint. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

He rolled his eyes toward Janet, hinting that she should take me away. But he did answer. “Something allegedly happened between the boy and the girl, but both families got involved. They agreed something happened. But they agreed also that nothing criminal had happened.”

“Was the girl examined by a doctor?”

“I don't know.” He turned on Janet. “Tell your friend who doesn't take hints to ask his questions during office hours. I come here to relax.”

Janet began sputtering an apology.

“Just a friendly chat,” I said.

“Good. Nice to see you.” Genial, nary a slurred word, he held his liquor well, polishing off another martini while we spoke.

“Our dinner's waiting,” I said.

“I don't have anything to hide,” the DA said as we walked away.

***

Janet wanted to leave for the city. This time she was driving back and keeping her car. But, optimist that I am, I talked her into spending the night in Springfield and driving back in the morning. We found a hotel a few blocks from the restaurant. It was connected to an inside shopping mall, so after we registered we walked around for a while browsing in stores.

Janet asked again why I'd become interested in Nigel, but I didn't have anything to tell her. It was the sort of feeling I'd had about Danny's innocence. And it had to do with the girl Sharon Collins who'd accused Nigel of raping her. Since her accusation was probably false, I didn't want to tell Janet.

“Tell me everything you know about the night Angelina was murdered,” I told Janet when we'd found our way back to the hotel and to a small lobby bar.

“She left Oscar's with the band,” Janet said.

“Right.”

“She went with them to that person Max's apartment on 114th Street where they jammed for an hour or two. Maybe they drank and did drugs. The police lab found alcohol and marijuana in her blood.”

“But not much.”

Janet let the information register. She was tired; it showed in her eyes. The tension was gone, yet not from any release, just weariness. It took effort for her to go on. “She left with Danny.”

“They went for breakfast,” I said.

“Right. That was in the laboratory report also.” She rubbed her eyes and rested her face in her hands. “They walked up Broadway, right? I'm having a hard time remembering.”

“Right. They'd been in the park.”

She leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. “How do you know?”

“Danny said that's where they'd been. Angelina wasn't wearing a sweater.”

“Where were they heading?”

“Danny said he walked her home and left her in the lobby.”

She sat up in her seat again, alertness returning to her eyes. “Why wouldn't she bring him home with her?”

“That's strange, isn't it? Angelina wasn't shy about bringing men home.”

“Maybe she was tired.”

“Maybe someone was already there.”

Janet's eyes registered surprise. “Who?”

“Good question. Less than two weeks later, Ozzie gets killed in the same building, in his own apartment. How did the murderer get in?”

“The police said there was no forced entry.” Janet sat back in her chair. She hadn't touched her drink. “Ozzie must have opened the door.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe he forgot to lock the door.”

“Maybe.”

I ordered one more cognac for each of us. “I feel creepy,” Janet said. “It seems like we must almost know who killed Angelina. Yet we don't.”

“We've pretty well narrowed the field,” I said, sniffing my brandy instead of taking a drink. What I didn't tell her but expected her to realize anyway was that the closer we got the more likely it was that the murderer would know it.

***

Janet and I shared a double room. To cut down on expenses, she'd said. I'd had grander plans.

“It's funny,” Janet said, having changed in the bathroom into a wooly, floor-length Planned Parenthood nightgown. “You're the most disreputable person I know. Yet I feel totally safe sharing a hotel room, despite your tough guy facade and your alley cat sexual morals.” She looked at me apologetically. You might say, with sympathy. “I don't trust you romantically. I can't bring myself to be with you that way again…not now. I don't expect you to understand. But I know you'll accept what I say.”

Talk about deflating romance. I tried to see through her words to find the passion hidden by some fear, reluctance that might be overcome with patience and gentleness. But it was like looking into an adding machine. After a tentative embrace, Janet hung her head, said she was tired and needed to sleep. I didn't have much trouble sleeping either, despite my plans coming to naught.

***

When we got back to New York, I went to try out a theory I'd developed on the way home. It followed from my thinking about Romeo the cab driver and led to my remembering how one gets an apartment on the Upper West Side. Janet went to see what she could find out about Romeo. I walked down Broadway to 103rd Street, turned east, and found the building Angelina had first lived in, a five-story walk-up in a Spanish neighborhood. I dug around in a few cellars until I came up with a super who took care of most of the buildings on the block.

“Any apartments?” I asked. He shook his head and mumbled something in Spanish that suggested he knew nothing of apartments and didn't recall ever having heard the word before.

“My friend Carl at 811 West End said one might open up. I got three hundred dollars.”

The super smiled. “Maybe for next month,” he said.

“Remember the girl Carl sent? The blonde?”

The super nodded sadly. So did I.

***

I walked back uptown, remembering something I overheard my father telling my mother once. It was during the Inquisition in the Fifties, and he sat at the mahogany dining room table while my mother tried to persuade him to give up. He was drooped over the table. I can picture the tired and defeated look on his face. “It's worse when you know too much,” he said. I didn't know what he meant then, but it was so different from what he always told me about the importance of knowledge that it stuck in my mind.

***

When I got back to my apartment, I knew right away someone had been in it. I noticed something wrong as soon as I turned from the foyer to enter my room, before I even saw my bedroom. My bureau had been torn apart, my books tossed all over the floor, Tolstoy dumped on his nose, the bookcase black and empty where he had stood. The gun gone. I'd never wanted the fucking thing in the first place; now it had gone off on its own to haunt me.

To begin with, someone could still be in the apartment. Through the door beyond the foyer was the kitchen, behind the wall in front of me my living room, off to the other side of my room the bathroom. Someone might be hiding in any one of those places. I flung myself against the wall of my bedroom, sliding along with my back arched against it—for God knows what reason—until I reached the bathroom door, slamming it open and diving through—in hopes, I suppose, of catching my would-be assailant in the middle of a before-murder crap. The bathroom was empty. I went out along the short hallway to the living room, yanking open the hall closet door on the way. No one in the closet or the living room. This left only the kitchen. Unless, of course, the assailant was doubling along behind me, hiding now in the bedroom ready to leap into the bathroom as soon as I got to the bedroom again. No one in the kitchen.

Instead of circling my apartment again, I went for a drink at the Marlin. When I came back, the eeriness hung from ceiling and walls, filling my apartment—the only place I ever felt completely safe—with fear as thick as fog.

I went to work and came home to the same awful feeling of fear and violation. Chills ran up and down my back when I opened the door; once more, I searched the apartment. Someone had taken my peace, like Macbeth had killed sleep. I lay awake listening to every sound from the street, every opening of the lobby door, every groan of the elevator starting up. I stayed awake until the morning, hypnotized by the clattering of cans and the groaning of the sanitation trucks, the grumbling hiss and roar of the M 104 bus on its way up Broadway. When I did finally fall into a rigid, fragile, wakeful sleep, the phone screamed out of the false twilight like a tortured banshee, and I dove straight up into the air and hit the floor running.

It was my ex-wife telling me Kevin was on his way over and to be sure and call her if he wasn't there by eleven.

“He can't come over,” I said.

“Don't be an asshole, Brian. He's been waiting for this since Christmas. I'm going to Florida. He has to stay there for two weeks.”

“He can stay at my father's.”

“Your father is in Chicago.”

“What the—” My street level window rattled and began to slide open. I dropped the phone, grabbed my baseball bat from behind the bed, and charged toward the window. Kevin's head appeared over the window ledge. Just in time, I checked my swing.

“Jesus, Dad…” he said.

“Are you crazy?” I shouted at him.

“I didn't want to wake you up.” Fear wrinkled his lower lip, not so much from the bat, I realized, as from, more likely, the murderous expression he saw in my eyes. “This is how I came in last time.” This was true. Then I had thought him cute and enterprising. I held my tongue.

“Go tell your mother you're here okay,” I said, nodding toward the phone.

“Hi,” he said into the receiver. Then a pause. “Yeah, except Dad tried to brain me with a baseball bat.” Another pause. His twinkling laugh. “No, Ma. It's fine.” He hung up.

“You gotta go someplace else,” I said. “It's too dangerous here.”

His lip quivered and his dark eyes went darker with the deep anger he got only when he was deeply hurt and feeling rejected.

“What do you mean I can't stay here? I'm supposed to stay here. You forgot I was coming…” His face—his god-damn face—his lower lip puffed out, the same expression he had when he was a baby just about to cry. That lower lip would puff out, ten full seconds before he began to wail.

And he had me. Boing. Right on the money. He'd been waiting to spend this week with me for months, so first I forget he's coming and then I try to send him away. What did the poor kid do to deserve this crap? I was turning into Angelina's mother.

I tousled his hair. “I'm just being a jerk, Kevin. My nerves are shot.”

“No,” he shouted. “You're just mad you can't invite women over and get laid when I'm here.”

“Kevin!…Sit down,” I said, and told him the whole story—or most of it. “Now, do you see what's going on? Why I'm worried about you staying here?”