Beware the Solitary Drinker (24 page)

“No need,” said Mr. Barthelme from the landing of the small staircase. Standing on that balcony, he once more looked vastly superior to the rest of us mortals, perhaps more so this time because he held a small revolver that matched the gray of his eyes. “You've broken into my house. You and a Negro, who's probably carrying drugs. I could kill you as trespassers.”

He was right about the Negro, wrong about who was holding, right about getting away with shooting us—he probably had a fix with the judges.

“Now you want bodies on your doorstep?” I asked. “When's it going to stop?”

For a second, his eyes lost their glitter of superiority. Edwin Barthelme, newspaper magnate, Wall Street tycoon, philanthropist, political power broker, a mansion on the hill, a butler in the foyer, a gun in his hand, all that against a bartender and a cab driver with their cocaine highs wearing off.

“Your story isn't going to hold,” I said politely. I wondered if my deferential tone came from my respect for his gun or from some primordial acceptance of his station in life, like my kid, unduly impressed by wealth. Whatever the reason, I spoke politely.

He looked interested.

“Your son called the police, Mr. Barthelme. The cops record all their calls. A technocrat like him should have known about voice prints.”

It was a good bluff. But Barthelme senior had the nerves of a good poker player. “My son and I were here. I've checked my records and recall handling a rather complex financial matter on the phone that evening. A half-dozen unimpeachable witnesses can establish that Nigel was here and not in New York that evening.”

“You must know about the girl's body on Den Road.” I watched his eyes. “Maybe you don't. Sharon Collins. You bought her for Nigel, too.” I could see some pain in his eyes. He wasn't going to get any weaker, so I went for him. “Let's reel your son in, Mr. Barthelme, before he does any more harm.”

“Look to your own son, Mr. McNulty,” he said, and froze my heart.

Then it hit me. “Shit!” I said. “It wasn't Nigel. It was you.” The logjam cleared, the facts tumbled into place. The older man Carl saw with Angelina on West End Avenue wasn't Ozzie. Edwin walked Angelina to the park that night. And it wasn't Nigel who shot Ozzie. Nigel just left Ozzie's door open for his old man, who did the dirty work. Then I came along and fingered Sharon Collins for him. What kind of jerk was I?

At this moment a long, gray-blue, steel barrel poked through the door from behind Ntango. “Mr. Barthelme,” said Tim the gardener.

Mr. Barthelme lowered his gun and then let it thud to the floor. He knew his gardener well enough.

“Where's my son?” I asked, reaching for the gun on the floor. Ntango got to it first. Barthelme went once more to his well of contempt. “Where's my son?” I asked again. “What about my son?”

“The young lady was nice enough to call,” Barthelme said.

I knew the questions but not how to connect them. If Edwin was the murderer, who had my son?

It had to be Nigel. But why would Nigel bring Kevin into this?

“Where is he?” I asked Barthelme again, knowing he wouldn't tell me—and understanding at that moment why interrogators tortured their prisoners.

Nothing. Then, “The Barthelmes' yacht in the city…it was opened up yesterday,” said Tim. “The yacht club called to ask if it was okay. When I asked Mr. Barthelme, he said not to worry…Nigel would be using the boat now and then.”

I didn't understand what that had to do with anything.

“The boat basin,” Ntango said.

I still didn't get it.

“79th Street,” said Ntango, and Tim nodded.

“What?”

“79th Street,” Ntango said. “The boat basin.”

I bolted for the cab, Ntango right beside me, except one of the dogs got his leg. I kicked in a fury and felt the animal sag against my foot. Ntango screamed from the bite, but jumped behind the wheel anyway. The fucking gate was closed. Ntango skidded to a stop, leaned the thick taxi bumper against it, dropped the Impala into low, and pushed like a bulldozer. The city cab took out the country fence, and off we went down a dark country lane toward the Thruway to the city.

I couldn't stop the dread that poured through me. How could I have gotten Kevin mixed up in this? How could I have left him alone? I thought of all the safe places he might be. All the reasons this couldn't be happening. But, every few seconds, I pictured Nigel, with an arm around Kevin's shoulder, walking him down a dock toward a rich man's yacht moored in the murky Hudson.

It was so easy now putting it all together. Angelina had come to the West Side to visit Carl, stumbled across Nigel, remembered the big payoff to her mother. She put the bite on Nigel for her share. He couldn't pay enough, so she went for the old man. Edwin had been around enough to know it was senseless to pay a blackmailer and was ruthless enough to do something about it. Now that we'd caught him, it should all be over. Instead, my stumbling around might have created another murderer—and this one might have my son.

Ntango pulled up to a phone booth in a shopping center across from the Thruway entrance. I called my ex-wife's number. No answer. I tried Janet at her hotel. No answer. I finally reached my father.

“Don't panic,” he said, but his voice shook. “Kevin isn't here. I thought he was at your house.” I told my father to call Sheehan and tell him about Nigel and the boat basin.

“Why would he take my son?” I asked my father in a choked off, sobbing voice.

“Mistakes,” my father said. “We've all made mistakes. I got off the phone with Janet five minutes ago. She was on her way to meet Nigel Barthelme, and Kevin is with her.”

“And Nigel's after her to dump her in the river. What should I do?”

“Find them.”

I called Oscar, who babbled into the phone about firing me because I hadn't shown up for work.

“Is Janet there?”

“No,” he said. But I knew she might be sitting right next to him. “My son, Oscar, has my son been there?” He had to be able to hear the terror in my voice.

“Last night,” Oscar said. “He was here last night looking for you.”

I didn't know whether to believe him or not. “Nigel,” I said. “Has Nigel been in?”

“Come in or you're fired,” said Oscar.

“Let me talk to Eric.” Giving up on Oscar, who continually created his own reality, I now tried Eric, who understood about fifty words in English that didn't have to do with food, drink, or getting laid.

“I'm in trouble, man,” I said and immediately, through the language barriers and across the cultural prisms, heard Eric settle down to help. Not much good at taking care of himself, he understood trouble better than most and how we all are required to take care of one another.

I told him Nigel might be after Kevin and Janet.

“What?”

“Keep Nigel away from my son and away from Janet. If they come in, bring them in the kitchen and keep them there. If Nigel comes in, call the cops and lock him in the walk-in.”

“What's coming down, man? You mad at Nigel?”

“Nigel might kill Kevin.”

Dead silence on the other end of the phone.

“Eric! Eric!” I screamed.

“This no good, man.…Man, Brian, I didn't know. Don't tell me this—”

“What? Eric, what's the matter?” I tried to keep my voice down, but I kept punching the telephone as hard as I could to get him to answer.

“Kevin's around, man. He said not to tell you. Last night, he stayed in your apartment.”

The lights around me grew dimmer; I got colder and colder.

“Nigel's been around, too, Brian. He walked up with us last night. He knows Kevin's at your place.”

“Janet?”

“I don't see her. I'll do something,” Eric said. “I'll go look.”

Back in the car, I stared into the darkness and at my reflection when the headlights from passing cars flashed it onto the window and thought about how easy it would be for me to give my life for Kevin's. I felt no anger, only terrible regret for getting him into this, and hope against what I knew to be terrible truth. Ntango stared grimly into the darkness in front of him and we flew.

When we hit Bruckner Boulevard, Ntango pulled over at another phone. It was after midnight. I called Oscar's. Eric was back.

“They're together, the three of them,” he said. “Nick saw them getting in a cab in front of the Terrace.”

Trying to keep my voice from shaking, I asked Eric to go downtown and ask the bartenders around 79th Street for a kid, a woman drinking bourbon and water, and a man drinking ginger ale—or perhaps vodka and orange juice.

Over the Triboro and across 125th Street to Broadway, Ntango flew. I craned my neck, bouncing from one side of the cab to the other, peering out the window.

“Try Riverside Drive,” I said, and Ntango cut across 123rd. Six blocks later I wanted to go back to Broadway.

“We can get down into the park at 96th,” Ntango said; his expression clear and resolute, but calm as always.

We drove by Oscar's. I hopped out. Sam the Hammer stood in the doorway. Freshly shaved, his hair slicked back, he was waiting for the Greek to go to the track. “That kid of yours,” Sam said.

“Where is he?”

“With that broad and Nigel.”

“Where?”

“Downtown, near 72nd Street.” His face had gone tough, like he was ready for a scrape—and he was—but he wouldn't show me any sympathy.

A cab stopped in the inside lane on the uptown side of Broadway; Eric the Red came dancing through the traffic toward us waving and yelling. “They were in a burger place and Teacher's,” he said, “near 83rd.”

“We can get into the park at 79th,” Ntango said.

Eric and Sam piled into the cab with me, and Ntango tore along Broadway, using the sidewalk for a half a block when the street got crowded at 86th Street. We drove into the park, under a stone bridge and in by the boat basin. The walkway along the river that ended up near 110th Street began there at 79th. I knew the walk was wide enough for a car because the cops used it, and the area was deserted, so we began following it. It was the walkway where, way uptown, they'd found Angelina's body.

The walkway curved away from the river about three blocks from the boat basin. Ntango navigated the twists and turns of the asphalt walk until, a hundred feet up the path, it became a two-lane white cement walkway with a grass island in the middle. Almost directly across from us was a gigantic tunnel-like structure that housed the railroad tracks running beneath the park and Riverside Drive. Nango turned, drove up against an entryway in the wall, and shone his headlights into the darkness. It was cavernous like a field house with a dirt floor and rows of railroad tracks. From inside, their eyes glittering red in the reflected light, a dozen rats looked back at us.

I told Ntango we should go back to the walkway, so he backed out and headed north. After a short distance, the path sloped down and ran beside the river again. There, far in front of us, specks appeared against the sky beneath the canopy of the bridge far in the distance. They were specks in motion, running every which way like the vanguard detachment of ants when you've kicked over their hill.

“It's them,” I screamed, not knowing if it was or not. The cab groaned like a dynamo, hit passing gear, and shot forward. The noise froze the specks. But one figure began moving again before the headlights hit them, running north on the path. Ntango slowed for one split second while I rolled out of the car, then sped after Nigel. Kevin watched wide-eyed as I gingerly picked myself up off the ground after a couple of somersaults. I expected him to be in hysterics. He seemed unruffled, except perhaps a mite bewildered by his dad's entrance. Janet looked scared. I didn't know if Nigel had scared her, or if she thought I'd killed myself tumbling out of the car.

They were both all right, so I hugged and hugged Kevin instead of talking. When I reached out my arm for Janet, she came closer, holding a gun.

“Did you take that from Nigel?”

Janet looked down at her hand as if she had forgotten she held it. Then she dropped it. Lying on the ground it looked harmless enough. It was the gun I'd gotten from Sam.

“From my apartment?”

She nodded. “I had it with me. I've kept it since—”

“The key. You found the spare key to my apartment?”

She nodded again, this time without raising her head.

“Why…?” I began to ask.

Then the quick flash of hatred in her eyes when she looked up, and I knew why.

“You weren't going to use it,” she said.

We began to walk quickly, following the path of the cab. Around one short turn, we saw its taillights at a strange angle, in against the fence next to the river, and I knew it had stopped. After a few more steps, I could see some figures. There was a struggle going on. It was dark. But there were dim streetlights scattered along the walkway and shadows, so I could make out who everyone was by the shapes. Ntango, even in the struggle, was regally straight, slim, and tall. Sam, thick, lumbering, massive like stone, slow-moving, relentless, outlined against hollow sky above the river. Eric, quick, slight, hunched into his tight pants and short jacket, his long-flowing beard twisting and turning like the silhouette of a shrub in heavy wind.

The smallest shape—weak and tentative in his movements—took on the attack of the other shapes, trying to run, flopping, scrambling to get up and run again. It was like watching when a pack of wolves have cornered a deer. The deer is fighting back but it's doomed, and you see the doom in the weakness of how it fights back and the strength of the pack as they rip at it with their teeth and the animal offers a feeble kick of resistance.

This was the dance I watched as Nigel struggled against Ntango, Eric, and Sam. These were hard men, who'd been in battles for their lives before. Nigel struggled and got away, but they caught him and held him. They dropped him to the ground. But he scrambled up again. Then, all at once, in his desperation, Nigel bolted from them, breaking away, blindly charging along the path in our direction. I braced myself; I'm not sure for what. Sam and Ntango came after him, not running, not even hurrying, yet coming after him relentlessly all the same. When Nigel got close enough to make out who we were, he faltered and tried to turn in toward the park, but fell. He scrambled to his feet, looked at me. He was close enough now for me to see his expression in the hazy light of the street lamp. I expected to see fear. I expected to see in his face an expression that asked for forgiveness, for sympathy, for help. But that wasn't what was there. Not panic, not fear. Was it anger? Resignation? Hate? I couldn't tell. But it was terrible, his expression. It was evil.