Beware the Solitary Drinker (19 page)

His face lit up. “Someone's after you?”

“I'm afraid for you.…I'm afraid for me.”

“But I'm your son. I'm supposed to stick with you when things get tough.”

I put my arm around him. “Kevin. Kevin. Kevin. What would I do without you?”

“So?” he asked, a prosecutor's glare in his eyes.

“Okay. Okay. You can stay. We'll just need some backup now and again. You can hang out with Eric and maybe Janet this afternoon, and I'll find someone to stay with you tonight while I'm at work.”

“A babysitter? I don't need no babysitter.”

“Not a babysitter. Backup. You're my backup and you need a backup when I'm not around.”

Pop was at a Communist party convention at a borderline seedy hotel in Chicago. I called and had him paged out of a meeting.

“You've got to come home,” I said.

“Oh,” said Pop. “Did someone die?”

“No, but I might. Kevin is here. Someone broke into my apartment last night and stole my gun.”

“Since when do you have a gun?”

“It's a long story.” I told him part of it. He said he'd be back tomorrow.

I called and asked Eric the Red if Kevin could visit him for a while. Then I called Janet and asked if she would meet Kevin at Eric's and take him out for the afternoon. When she said she would, I went looking for Sam the Hammer and found him drinking coffee on a bench in the middle of Broadway at 107th Street. He didn't look surprised to see me.

“Nice weather,” I said.

He nodded, not inviting me to join him but not sending me away either. I seemed to blend into the day for him. There was the sun, the sky, the traffic on Broadway, and now someone standing in front of him making conversation. Sipping his coffee, he took it all in with equanimity.

“That gun you gave me a few days back,” I said. “Someone stole it from my apartment.”

Sam grimaced.

“Did someone know I had it?”

Sam shrugged his shoulders, hunching a little further into his Yankee windbreaker.

“How would they know where to look?”

“In your bureau?” Sam guessed. “Behind some books in your bookcase?”

My expression gave me away. “What should I do?”

“Forget it.”

I sat on the bench next to Sam. He looked at the world of Broadway in front of him. I did, too. This thing had gone far enough. My kid might be in danger; I certainly was. Only one person probably wanted me dead. And like a fool I kept looking for him.

“Why was Ozzie killed?” I asked Sam.

Sam watched the cars coming up Broadway. He looked at the foot-high cement wall recently installed along the curb between the island and the street. “They put those things in so Broadway would look like a race track and everyone would drive faster,” Sam said. After a suitable pause, he went on. “I talked to the Boss. He'll lay off you unless he hears that his movies have become famous.”

“Does the Boss kill people?” I asked in all seriousness.

“Naw, he's a shoe salesman.” Sam punctuated his statement with a couple of hunches of his shoulder, body language telling me to go away.

“And a gentleman,” I said. “How can I find out who killed Ozzie?”

“What did Ozzie know?” Sam did not shift his gaze all this time.

“Who killed Angelina.”

“What do you think happens to the person who knows who killed Ozzie?”

“Is that who stole the gun?”

“No one knew you had it unless you told them.”

“Not me,” I said. We sat for a while longer watching the traffic. A panhandler came by. Sam gave him a quarter.

“I need you to take care of my kid tonight,” I said when the panhandler shuffled off.

“I'm a fucking babysitter?” Sam said, taking in the view, as if he sat on the back porch of his mountain retreat, watching the Great Smokies roll off into the distance, instead of yellow cabs and gypsy cabs battling for position with delivery trucks.

“Not a babysitter. Backup.”

“Huh?”

Sam saved my life once when a lunatic came into Oscar's after me with a gun. A bartender had been sleeping with his wife. He'd gotten the wrong bar and the wrong bartender but was too distraught to make distinctions. Everyone dove for cover, except Sam who sat in his place drinking his coffee. When the maniac got close, Sam stood up and reached into his pocket.

“Take that gun out and you're dead,” the man said.

“Yeah,” said Sam, “and so are you. We'll go together tonight.” I saw Sam's eyes and knew he meant it. The irate husband stood facing Sam for what seemed like hours. Finally, he walked away.

Once more, I was afraid and needed help.

“You got a television?” Sam asked.

“Yep, but it's a small scratchy black and white. I could borrow a different one.”

“Naw, maybe I'll read one of your books.” He thought some more. “Does your kid play chess?”

Once more I was taken aback. “As a matter of fact, he does. Do you?”

Sam glanced at me contemptuously before going back to his coffee.

He showed up just as I gathered myself together to leave for work. Kevin noticed
The Racing Form
under his arm.

“I've been to the track,” Kevin said.

“How'd you do?” asked Sam.

***

Noticing Reuben at the bar as I came in Oscar's door, I wondered for a moment if he waited to kill me. Oscar trotted back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen. Neither the waitress nor Eric had shown up. Janet came in five minutes behind me to tell Oscar Eric was on his way. Oscar asked if she wanted to be a waitress for a night. Before I could stop her, she said yes.

“I need some drinks,” Janet hollered thirty seconds after she'd taken over her new position. I was talking to Reuben at the other end of the bar. Waitresses never hollered at me. I didn't keep them waiting for drinks either. I always knew who needed what at my bar. In this case, there wasn't such a big hurry, and Janet wasn't a waitress. She drummed her fingers on the bar while I finished talking with Reuben. Then, I sauntered over.

“You don't have to call me,” I said. “I know when you're at the service bar.”

“You weren't looking.”

“I would have looked.”

“But you didn't.” She had a mildly crazed look in her eyes.

“Have you ever been a waitress before?”

“Once,” she said sheepishly. “At Friendly's.”

“What?”

“What?” she glowered at me.

“What?…What do you want?”

She thumbed through her notepad at a frantic pace and ordered hesitatingly: “A beer, a vodka martini, a Coke, another beer, a whiskey sour.”

“That's not how you do it,” I said.

“Stop lording it over me, just because you're the bartender.” She held her notepad like a rock she was about to throw.

“Order liquors, mixed drinks, stirred drinks, shaken drinks, wine, beer in that order. Group your drinks. Get your own glasses and ice.”

Janet fumed. Fury darkened her eyes. I wasn't trying to piss her off. This was how things were done. The bartender was the boss. Waitresses shouldn't argue, particularly waitresses who didn't know what they were doing. All this I knew, yet I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. Janet gritted her teeth and did what I told her. Totally flustered, always behind herself, she grouped her drinks, iced her glasses, and waited at the bar until I came to get her order. I'm fast; I didn't keep her waiting. I thought I was helpful and charming. She continued seething. When she finally did have a break, I told her she was doing fine.

“Go fuck yourself,” she said, from the waitress station section of the bar where, like a wounded animal, she rested, breathing heavily, her eyes filled with pain.

“Why are you mad?”

“You act like I'm a slave.”

“No,” I said. “It's to be efficient. The bartender controls the bar.”

Her face took on this momentary look of horror. “You really are a Neanderthal.”

***

Reuben and I talked about this and that, politely ignoring the topic of murder. While we talked, I got the impression he wanted to tell me something. He would be saying one thing, but the distant expression in his eyes suggested he thought about something far beyond what he was saying.

I had just given him his third rum on the house, which would bring his total intake almost to double figures, when he got around to saying it. “Do you remember a long time ago when a girl started screaming at Nigel that he'd raped her?”

I froze with the rum bottle in my hand. I couldn't get that girl off my mind.

Reuben took his glasses off and cleaned them with a bar napkin for about the fifteenth time that evening. “I saw her a couple of times at the Buffalo Roadhouse. She never changed her story.”

“Did you tell the cops that?”

Reuben slugged down his shot of rum and shoved the empty glass toward me. “C'mon, McNulty. I can't go tell stories to the cops.”

Rum sometimes worked like truth serum. Other times, the rum produced mouthfuls of lies. Maybe Reuben was trying this out on me so I could steer the cops away from him. I pushed my luck. “Did you go to the Buffalo Roadhouse after work?”

He weighed his answer before he spoke; his eyes narrowed into meanness. “Sometimes.”

“Where else in the Village?”

“The Fifty-Five. The Lion's Head.” He answered each question with a jerk of his head and an inflection at the end that said “so what?”

“Did you go with Ozzie?”

Even though he'd seemed to be waiting for it, the question hit him pretty hard. It took a while for his eyes to clear.

When he spoke, his voice was quieter and the truculence was gone. He seemed to sense more was coming. “I'd see him there once in a while.”

“In both places?”

“More often in the Lion's Head. I don't remember him in the Roadhouse.”

“Did Nigel ever go to any of those places?”

“No.” Reuben drew himself up and slugged down another rum. “I told him if he went near that girl, I'd break his head open.”

“Did you see Ozzie the night he was murdered?”

“No. I spent the evening in the law library at Columbia, then came here after midnight.” Reuben finished up what was left of his drink and picked up his change from the bar, leaving a couple of bucks for me. As he usually did when he felt the drink coming on him, he pulled himself up and out of the joint before his composure slipped. He had a jug at home to help him finish off the night.

I wanted to tell Reuben about my talk with Willie, to give him a chance to correct himself. Then I wanted to ask if he were in the law library preparing his defense.

Reuben knew what I was thinking. “I was reading about divorce and alimony,” he said, as he steadied himself on his feet to leave.

***

Janet and I continued to grate on each other's nerves for the rest of the night. Later, over breakfast, she continued to berate me. “I just don't believe you,” she said. “I don't know how any waitress puts up with you.”

“You don't know anything about being a waitress. Just because it's not a professional job with bankers and businessmen, you think it's easy. It's not. Anybody can be a lousy waitress—but not a good waitress.”

Janet continued to fume. “You just don't care at all about embarrassing me in front of people.”

“I didn't do that,” I said softly.

“Yes you did.”

“I didn't.”

“You did too.”

I ate my eggs in silence. Once more, things had turned on me. I'd started out the veteran professional bartender breaking in the novice waitress. Now here I was, eating humble pie with my greasy eggs.

Explaining the standards of excellence I adhered to as a bartender seemed silly now in the fluorescent light of the Greek's restaurant at five
A.M.
Once, having those standards made perfect sense; it meant doing things right. I couldn't explain this to Janet because now it sounded insignificant. But in not saying it I gave up something. Maybe it was small, but I felt it go.

Janet calmed eventually after we went back to my apartment and relieved Sam the Hammer, who was asleep in a chair with Kevin's chessboard in front of him.

When Sam left, we sat down in the living room. “Sergeant Sheehan found out about that cab driver for me,” Janet said in a bruised voice. I waited. “Romeo has been in jail since a week before Angelina was killed. He beat up his wife.”

“Beating his wife wasn't enough, he needed a younger woman on the side to beat up?”

Janet leaned back against the couch and closed her eyes. I felt sorry for her, for her grief, for her guilt about her sister, whatever it was. She might also be in danger now. Janet. Kevin, asleep in my bed. This all had to end.

“What if we're wrong?” Janet said. “Maybe it's not someone from Oscar's but a stranger, someone we don't know about. What about the man the bartender at The Pub told us about. Maybe it wasn't Ozzie? Or maybe it's the gangsters after all, and they'll just come and kill us too.”

Janet was right. Why concentrate on Oscar's? Why not suspect the Boss and his pals? Who was the man Angelina met downtown, who maybe stood up and maybe didn't? Did I stick with Oscar's because it was familiar ground? Or because most of Oscar's clientele were so obviously guilty of something, you couldn't help but suspect them? On top of this, I'd pretty much had it with sticking my nose in the Boss's business. I might already be on his to-do list for my last escapade.

Downtown was another matter. Hanrahan's and its environs were a part of Angelina's life I didn't know about. Downtown was where she found her gold mine and—I now remembered—her sugar daddy. If I could get my mind off the folks around Oscar's, it would be worth trying to find out if there really had been a sugar daddy. I wondered if the cops had found out.