Beware the Solitary Drinker (7 page)

She probably didn't mean to be offensive. But I thought she was condescending and reminded her that factory workers, busting their asses to keep alive, didn't get the chance to do the things she'd experienced.

“You're making me sound like an elitist.” She looked from Eric to me. Eric, pretty well sloshed to begin with, leaned toward her, as if to commiserate.

Leaning away from him, she moved closer to me, looking sincere and almost relaxed for the first time since I met her; the tautness gone from her face; her mouth soft and sensuous instead of tight-lipped. “I'm not,” she insisted. “I believe everyone should have opportunities and help. But you don't get something for nothing. People who have advantages worked hard to get where they are.”

“You don't think folks work hard in factories? They don't work as hard as your crew—those plastic people in expensive suits, shoring up capitalism and eating quiche and guacamole?”

Eric growled agreement.

Janet and I argued for an hour. She accused me of cynicism and bitterness and having no respect for people who were successful. Her spirit showed through. She liked arguing more than I did, enjoyed the exchange of ideas, so to speak. I don't like arguing. I'm not particularly fond of my beliefs; I just can't get rid of them. They came from my father and follow me like a specter.

“You can't say that no one in all of business cares about their employees. You can't say no rich person cares at all about poor people.”

“I just did. If they really cared, they'd do something. They don't care about anything but making money—”

“Now, wait just a minute,” said Janet. “I happen to know you're wrong. I work for a large commercial bank and we're devoted to serving our community. We raise money for charities. We support education and cultural activities. Our employees go into the schools on their lunch hours to help poor children learn to read—” She was taking a breath for a second wind when Eric interrupted her.

In his eagerness for the discussion and frustrated by not having the language to get his thoughts out, snarling and growling and gesturing with his thick hands, he lunged at her like Quasimodo's younger brother. In guttural tones, pounding on the bar and staring into her eyes, tapping her shoulder when she tried to look away, he explained how Tito had taken the land from the banks and given it to the farmers like his father. “There would be no schools for the peasants if not for Tito,” he said, as if this might explain everything. “I could never read or write…I could not come to America.”

Still, slightly tipsy in an Upper West Side neighborhood bar, long after four in the morning, sitting between a confirmed Titoist and an American cynical anti-establishmentist, Janet held her own pretty well, refusing to give up her reasonable positions. “You can't hate the whole establishment,” she told me with finality.

I did. But what was the point in telling her, who, it turned out, made a pretty good living as public relations director for a Massachusetts banking corporation? I should have known better. You don't talk about religion or politics if you want to stay sane as a bartender. But here I go again. I'm the only bartender in Manhattan who gets red-baited. I couldn't wait to tell Pop I'd spent the evening trying to convert a banker to socialism. Well, if nothing else, I consoled myself, it took her mind off her sister's murder for a while.

But not for long. Over breakfast at Tom's, under her prodding, I did tell her more of what I knew about Angelina's life in New York and how she might have gotten herself killed by taking too many chances on too many people. I told Janet her sister was a lost and lonely girl driven by compulsions having to do with men and sex that she couldn't control. She did dangerous things, picking up men in bars almost every night; and the bars were filled with men who hated women; that was how most of the drinkers got there. They hated women for being pretty and not belonging to them. Some were driven crazy because a girl like Angelina wouldn't sleep with them, others because she would, and still others because she slept with someone else. The bars of New York were filled with suspects. Then, I told Janet, honestly, I didn't know much about Angelina's life, except what I knew from Oscar's.

“But you could find out…” Janet said eagerly. She leaned across the table toward me. I tried to back up into the corner of the booth. But she was having none of it. “You know these neighborhoods. You know the nightlife and who the players are. You could find out a great deal.”

“And why would I do that?”

Into the restaurant, at this moment, came Max and Danny. They stopped beside the booth to say hello but didn't sit down with us. I asked if they were playing at Oscar's tomorrow night. Max said yes.

“They're the ones my sister left the bar with the night she was killed,” Janet said as they walked away. “Have you asked them about what happened?”

I told her I hadn't, but I thought the police had talked to them.

“Do you think they'd talk with me?” Practically quivering with excitement, she craned her neck to look over at them, then back at me.

“You'll have to ask them.”

She squirmed in her seat for another minute or two and kept looking over at them. They sat across from one another in a booth and didn't seem to have much to say. Max had his long legs stretched out into the aisle. He looked bored. They both looked sober.

“I'm afraid to go ask them,” Janet said. “What should I do?”

“Go back to Massachusetts.”

This was enough. She got up and walked over to their table. Max looked up for a minute or two while she stood nervously in front of them, explaining who she was and that she wanted to know about her sister. Max didn't move, but Danny slid over to let her sit down.

When I'd told Janet about Angelina, I'd made it a point not to mention the porno flicks, nor did I tell her I'd seen Angelina with Danny. I didn't tell her about the porno flicks because I couldn't bring myself to say it. As for not telling her about Danny, I was pretty sure no one else saw him with Angelina, so I wasn't going to be the one to blow the whistle. The cops would pick him up as soon as they knew. Black junkies make good suspects. They're always guilty of something.

Janet talked with Danny and Max for five or ten minutes before I wandered over. Max made room for me. I didn't interrupt, just listened. Max did the talking. Angelina would have been great with the band, he said. They'd even worked out a couple of arrangements that night. They'd smoked a joint and had some beer. But nobody got wasted. He didn't think Angelina even drank anything. Danny said she didn't.

“When did she leave your place?” Janet asked. Max looked at Danny. Maybe Max didn't stiffen. Maybe Danny didn't look at me. I was on my fourth cup of the Greek's coffee, which is about the hallucinating level anyway. I could have imagined it all. Danny looked back down at his uneaten eggs. Max said she left around five. Maybe four thirty.

“Did she say where she was going?” Janet asked.

“I thought she was going home,” Max said. Danny began eating his eggs but he looked at me once more. He chewed his eggs like they were alive and he had to wrestle them down before he could swallow. It might have been my imagination, too, but I thought Janet listened most intently to Danny Stone, who had only spoken a few words.

***

While we stood waiting for a cab on Broadway, Janet took my arm in her hands and made me look at her. Her face was tired and soft. In her weariness, she resembled Angelina again; some of her little sister's vulnerability showed through. “I know you were kind to Angelina, and I'm very grateful.” She didn't let go of my arm, just stood there while her eyes filled with tears again. “I know you think there's nothing you can do…

“But you could…I know it's terrible to ask when you've already said no…but I have to go back to Massachusetts to work tomorrow…” She stopped talking to get her voice under control again. She steeled herself. I could see the resolve flow into her eyes pushing the tears aside. “The men in the restaurant…the band. They weren't telling me everything. I could see it in their eyes.…In the bar, too, I could tell.…Those men knew things about Angelina they wouldn't tell me.…I'm sure they wouldn't tell the police either—but they'd tell you.”

“Maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't. What good would it do?”

“It would mean someone cared enough to find out what happened to Angelina, that everyone didn't forget she existed, like her life meant nothing—that whoever did this would pay.”

“Like in vengeance?”

“Yes, vengeance—” She tried to spit the word out so it sounded bitter and hate-filled, so it would carry her rage and hate out into the night. But it didn't work. The word sounded flat and empty to me.

Again, I said, “Angelina will still be dead.”

She stared at me while her own eyes went empty in her head. I wanted her to say something. This wasn't how I wanted this to end up. I started to speak, but it wouldn't do any good. She held back her tears but didn't trust her emotions enough to say anything, just stuck out her hand for another banker's handshake and walked away.

***

After I watched her cab head downtown into what was left of the Broadway night, I walked uptown on my way home. Near 110th Street, I noticed a group of men on one of the benches in the island in the middle of Broadway. I thought they were the usual bag people and bums who hung out on the streets panhandling, so I fished around in my pockets for some quarters for when they came upon me.

Instead, this voice from the Broadway bums cried, “Hey Brian.” Sam the Hammer sat on a bench with the Boss. I went over.

The Boss, who is small and thin and has a kind of olive complexion that might make him Latin or Arab or Greek or even Black, did not get up. He sat on the park bench in the middle of Broadway as if he were in his office sitting behind a desk.

“You're a good guy, McNulty,” the Boss said.

Uncomfortable because I didn't know what he was up to and embarrassed because I did in a weird way enjoy his praise, I waited.

“This little girl's murder was a terrible thing…such a pretty thing…really wild about you, too.” The Boss didn't look at me when he spoke. This made me nervous, as did his manner of speaking, because he went off on tangents and became elliptical. He left big clumps of information out of what he was saying when you weren't really sure what he was talking about in the first place. “I like you, McNulty. These other guys don't know.…They talk like they know something. You told that guy it was smoke.…Smoke he told him,” the Boss said to Sam and chuckled.

I didn't know what the Boss was talking about, but I knew, as sure as I stood there, that he was warning me.

“A shoe salesman,” the Boss said and chuckled again. This one, I remembered. One of the college kids had discovered the Boss was connected, as they say, and was drunk enough to bother him. He asked me if it was true, and I told him I thought the Boss was a shoe salesman. The Boss had overheard.

“I'm fifty-three,” the Boss said. “A man of peace.…They all come to me.…I tell them I'm a man of peace.” He looked at me through his half-closed eyes for confirmation, so I agreed with him.

“The cops think I know something. What do I know?” This time he waited for an answer with his eyes closed.

“I don't know what you know,” I said.

He chuckled good-naturedly. “They all want to know what I do.”

“I don't know what you do,” I said. He laughed once more, taking out his coke vial, shoving some up his nose with his little spoon. He handed it to me, but I said no, I wanted to sleep.

“You're smart,” he said, “because you don't ask questions and you don't know answers.” He seemed finished when he said this, leaning back on the bench, letting his eyes droop, drifting away into his own thoughts.

“I'm going to bed,” I said, taking the opportunity to edge away.

“Good-night, McNulty,” said the Boss.

Chapter Four

The next morning—afternoon to everyone else—when I walked out of the shadows of 110th Street into the sunlight and bustle of Broadway on my way to Tom's at 112th for breakfast, a park bench in the middle of Broadway called to me once more.

This time, Danny Stone sat on the bench, alone on the island except for an old lady in a gray overcoat who had parked her shopping bags beside him and was rooting through the garbage barrel. Danny looked like he'd been up all night. This wasn't a meeting I wanted. Danny knew I'd seen him with Angelina. I didn't know if he'd pretend I hadn't seen him or ask me to lie. I didn't know what I'd say or do in either case; too much strategy was involved, certainly too much strategy before breakfast.

“I'm going to eat,” I told Danny. “Wanna come with?”

“I want to talk to you about something.” His eyes were cold, his face serious, his manner chilling, as if he'd discovered some wrong I'd done him and was here to do something about it. “Let's walk.” He started west across Broadway.

“Where you going?”

“To the park.”

I froze. My face must have registered the shock I felt, because when he looked at me his did. We'd both made the same connection. He stared, as if the Grim Reaper were lurking behind me. “Maybe you should eat something,” he said, changing direction and heading for Tom's.

As we crossed Broadway, I got the sense of something unusual. Broadway's a busy street, teeming with cars and cabs, trucks, buses, vans, baby carriages and strollers, and, because 110th Street is where the 24th Precinct ends and the 26th begins, more often than not, you see a couple of squad cars nosing around. But this morning, there were too many cop cars, marked and unmarked, from the two-four and the two-six, on either side of 110th Street and both sides of Broadway, doing that slow crawl they do when they're looking for someone. I noticed the cops the way you sometimes notice something out of the ordinary: it registers but you don't remark on it.

At Tom's, Danny sat across from me drinking a cup of coffee that he'd put five teaspoons of sugar into. I played with my fork, drank my coffee, looked everywhere in the restaurant except at him, racking my brain for a piece of small talk so I could stop sitting there looking like I expected him to murder me as soon as I finished breakfast.

“You got a good appetite,” he said after my eggs and sausage arrived. I kept eating. I didn't have to talk if I was eating.

“You know what I want to talk about?” His expression was less angry. It was more like impassive; I couldn't tell what he felt.

I said no, but I was afraid I did.

“Angelina…”

I didn't look at him but I felt his eyes on me all the same. “What about her?”

“Finish eating and let's get out of here.” We were in a booth next to a plate glass window that faced 112th Street. Danny's reflection in the window when he stopped looking at me to stare out of it seemed sad rather than anxious. I'd never been afraid of Danny, whether he was drunk or sober, which was not something I'd say about most of Oscar's patrons. We'd spent a lot of time talking about mostly nothing on the slow nights during the band's breaks. I liked him for how good he was at what he did. He played for the pure joy of it, not because he thought he was going to be famous or rich or successful; he got off on the music; it was enough all by itself. My liking him was instinctive, built up of watching him through many things over a long time. You knew when someone was genuine. You called him a good guy when you talked about him. You knew he'd do the right thing.

Watching his reflection in the window, I remembered one time when Oscar was getting antsy about a friend of Danny's who sat nodding out at a table near the band. “I don't want these tough guy junkies coming in here,” Oscar said. He was trying to get Danny to tell the guy to leave so he wouldn't have to.

“There's no such thing as a tough junkie,” Danny told him. He went over, gently touched the junkie's shoulder, and nodded toward the door. The guy got up without a word and tiptoed out.

Drinking my third cup of Tom's coffee, I remembered hanging out with Danny when he opened for groups at the Lone Star or played downtown at the Bottom Line and Tramps. During the band's breaks, when the other guys were seeking out the sleek chicks, the assistant record producers, and the cool people in the audience, Danny wandered over to sit with me and whoever I brought with me. It was cool to be a friend of the band, but I would have been glad to see Danny if he'd been taking a break from washing dishes in the back. We were on some kind of wavelength that didn't require a whole lot of explanation.

One night, a drunk Dominican guy I was trying to eighty-six reached under his sport coat toward his belt line at the center of his back just as I came around the bar after him. Everyone in the joint knew what he was reaching for and froze, including me. As soon as he reached, I saw the gun come out, the explosion from the barrel, another bartender dead because some jerk-off drunk thought he'd been insulted. No one moved to help, except Danny. Danny slipped behind the guy where he could see his back and shook his head: no gun. I wanted to pulverize the guy, smash his face in, he'd scared me so much. But Danny wouldn't let me; instead he helped me walk the jerk outside and calmed him, like a good trainer with a frightened horse.

Now, in Tom's, I began to wonder if I really knew what Danny was capable of. I'd been happy for him that night I saw him with Angelina, happy for her too. In my romantic reverie, I saw Angelina and Danny become a couple. They were both troubled people. Angelina was too pretty and too sexy, and maybe she'd never be able to keep away from men. She also drank compulsively. Probably we were all drunks, but her drinking was the kind that led sooner or later to skid row and the shakes. Danny had worse problems: too much downtown, the monkey on his back. I'd never seen him sick, but in the way I came to know those things, I knew he was shooting smack every day just to stay even. Yet, in my foolish way, I wanted happiness for them. I wanted them to make records, play the great clubs of the world, when they were a little older settle down and raise kids together.

Instead, Angelina was dead, and maybe Danny murdered her. For a long time, I'd been around people who did not nice things to other people. None of them ever hurt me. I guess I believed that even if Danny had killed Angelina, he wouldn't kill me.

When we came out of Tom's, I noticed right away the cruisers were still there: two parked in the bus stop on the east side of Broadway, an unmarked car around the corner on 110th; a couple cruising uptown; another cruising downtown. They gave me the willies.

Danny and I walked to the end of 110th Street, then over an embankment that led down to Riverside Drive. A half dozen rats lay sunning themselves on the side of the hill. The sight of them scared me. If the city had to have rats, they should at least hide; they shouldn't be brazen, lying in the sun, they should run and hide when people came by. Something was terribly wrong with a place where the rats didn't have to hide. Like the drug dealers and the numbers joints and the illegal after-hours clubs and the crazy people from the SROs, they shouldn't be so readily visible, so out of control. It made me feel like no one was in charge—that we were all like the animals in the wild with only our wits to rely on.

I followed Danny across Riverside Drive to the street level of the park where the toddler playgrounds were and the path the joggers and bicyclists used. A stone staircase led down to another level where there were trees and grass and trails and benches. Below this was another level where the asphalt basketball courts were and beyond the courts more lawn and trees until you came upon Robert Moses's attempt to kill two birds with one stone—the West Side Highway. If you followed the right path, you went under a bridge to the lowest level of the park, the quietest and scariest part, the pathway next to the river that I had shown Angelina the first time I met her. It was down there they'd found her body.

I wanted to ask Danny what happened that night with Angelina. I tried to piece it together: A moment of passion… rage…despair. Maybe Angelina told him about her past—all the men. Maybe it drove him crazy. I didn't know what happened, but I knew the kinds of things pain and passion drove people to. I missed Angelina enough to bring tears to my eyes whenever I remembered her. But I didn't hate Danny if he'd done this. I felt sorry for him…sorry for Angelina…sorry for everyone. Something I must have gotten from my mother—understanding too much…feeling sorry for everyone.

I noticed the wispy white clouds high up in the blue sky. The air was limpid, not humid; there was warmth from the sun, but the trees cast long shadows even that early in the afternoon. It was a perfect fall day. What I noticed most was the quiet, like a hush, except for the cars passing on Riverside Drive, but even those sounds were muffled.

As we walked along the asphalt on the joggers' trail and I waited for Danny to tell me what it was that he would tell me, I heard squealing tires and turned my head in time to see a parade of squad cars whipping around the awkward turn at 110th to head downtown on Riverside. A couple of the cars took off down Riverside and turned into the park a block or so below us. Some others pulled up alongside the low iron fence that separated the roadway from the thin swath of park along the road.

Danny started to say something, so I turned to him. The pupils of his eyes were pinpoints. From the sun or from drugs, I wondered. The whites were yellowish and streaked with tiny red veins. He looked at me while I fidgeted beside him. But, before he could say anything, the quiet afternoon exploded into the noise of men running, of shouts and pounding feet. Danny turned and ran, while shouts followed him and popping sounds. Men in suits and men in windbreakers, with badges hanging from their lapels, foul-mouthed men, yelling “Police,” “Stop,” “Cocksucker” and “Motherfucker,” came from everywhere.

In an instant, Danny lay on the ground, his face mashed into the blacktop walk; one cop knelt on his back pressing a revolver against his head, another stood over him with his gun pointed at him.

When I went toward Danny, following some instinct that told me to help him, I was pushed hard from behind, hard enough to snap my neck like a whiplash, and then slammed against the stone wall next to the asphalt path. Two burly, red-faced men waved leather wallets with badges pinned to them in front of my eyes. They leaned me against the wall to frisk me. Since I didn't have a gun, knife, or even a wallet, the pickings were pretty slim. I scraped my fingers on the rough surface of the wall, looking down into the park, picturing prison yards.

“You guys are nuts,” I said when I finally got my breath. A chunk of anger big enough to choke me rose in my throat: fucking storm troopers.

“What's your name?” the largest one asked, his blue eyes squinting against the sun while he tried to stare me down. For the moment, I was too mad to be intimidated.

“McNulty,” I said. “What's yours? And your badge number?”

“Looka this, Charley,” he roared to his partner. “A solid fucking citizen.”

“Up yours,” I said, continuing along the diplomatic track.

As a couple of the other cops gathered round, the oaf said he'd take off his gun belt and badge and have it out with me right there. Then one of the cops recognized me. He was a little, dark-haired guy, who was probably Puerto Rican or Dominican. He was from the 24th Precinct and recognized me. “This guy's okay,” he said very softly. “He's a bartender over on Broadway.” The other cops mumbled and growled like a pack of dogs being pulled off the scent. The little cop spoke carefully and diffidently, as if he recognized that being Latin he wasn't exactly one of the boys either.

The big blue-eyed cop left me to go harass Danny. The group of cops around him had picked him up and bounced him on the ground a couple of times. Then another cop came over carrying a Marlboro box from which he'd taken a set of works. He held it in Danny's face.

“Smart ass, right?” he said. “You think we're fucking idiots?”

“Read him his rights,” one of the cooler heads suggested.

“Don't say anything, Danny,” I said. “I'll find you a lawyer.”

“Shut the fuck up,” the blue-eyed cop shouted, coming toward me again.

All the cops were sweating, huffing and puffing, stomping around, coming down from the excitement. They reminded me of trained guard dogs, baring teeth, holding themselves back from biting you because they've been trained. But you're not quite sure they'll be able to hold themselves back because they've also been made vicious. That's what the cops felt like—on edge—if you poked one of them he would come right at you, teeth snapping.

The cops hustled Danny into one of the cars. Since the Puerto Rican cop had put in a good word for me, the cops—except for the blue-eyed one—were okay with me, kind of gruffly polite.

“Where are you taking him?” I asked the cops putting Danny into the car but no one answered.

“Where are they taking him?” I asked one of the other cops.

“Two-six,” he said.

They lost interest in me. I stood around for a couple of minutes while the cops finished up their business after Danny was gone. No one said anything else to me, so I left, walking slowly back up the blacktop path.

Peter Finch was a criminal lawyer who drank semi-regularly in the Terrace and on a rare occasion in Oscar's. He was a red-diaper baby like me, and maybe a Communist himself; I'd never asked. He used to be a civil rights lawyer in the South back in the Sixties. I didn't know him all that well, but we'd tucked away a few together more than once, so I stopped at the Terrace to ask Nick if it made sense to call him for Danny. Nick made the call and put me on with Peter. It turned out he knew Danny well enough to want to help. He said he'd find out why they grabbed him and what it might take to get him out of the slammer.