The Origin of Dracula (13 page)

Lee stepped up to me. “Where is he?”

I pointed out Dan T., then thanked the waitress and started toward the end of the bar with Lee in tow. But that didn’t last long. When Lee saw that I was politely making my way forward, he cut in front of me and muscled himself a path. He was still pissing people off, though not quite as badly as before, since now he wasn’t actually cutting in line.

Just before he made it to Dan T., he stopped and waited for me to catch up. When I did, he said, “You’re up.”

So even though he’d led me through the swamp, he expected me to take the lead when it came to interrogating Dan T. Of course, he had every reason to expect me to—so far, this night had been my show.

I stepped up to the bar and made eye contact with Dan. He stopped his conversation and flashed me a friendly smile. “What can I help you with?” he said.

It was only then that I realized I hadn’t thought this through. I didn’t know the homeless man’s name, and he was my only connection to the Firegrill.

“I’m sorry to butt in,” I said, “but I wanted to ask you a few questions.” Was there any other lead I could ask him about? Anything that didn’t make me sound like a lunatic?

He grinned. “A few questions? Am I in trouble with the law?”

“No—not at all—but you might know someone who is,” I said, regretting it immediately. I couldn’t jump right into asking him about Lucy’s or Grace’s murders.

“Are you serious?” His grin disappeared.

“It’s a long story, but—”

“Listen, if you’ve got a beef with me or my place, you need to talk to my lawyer.” He was calm, but his friendly demeanor had turned ice cold.

His buddy at the bar glanced at me with narrowed eyes, as if he was ready to defend Dan T. using his fists. With his leathery skin and thick neck, he looked more rural than suburban. He was wearing a T-shirt with the motto
Virginia Is For Lovers
on it, but the word
Lovers
was crossed out and
Americans
was stamped over it, declaring his bigotry to the world.

“I’m doing a crappy job of explaining,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you a few questions about a former customer. He said you could help us.”

“Who’s the customer?” Dan said, still cold, but also still calm.

“I don’t know his name.”

“That’s a bad start.” He turned his attention back to his buddy. “You ready for another beer, Frank?”

Lee lurched forward, brushing up against Frank, who instantly leapt off his stool with a “What the fuck?” Frank was ready to brawl—his chest was puffed out and a blue vein bulged in his forehead.

Lee ignored him and focused on Dan. “Listen, we don’t want to be here as much as you don’t want us here. But I got a problem. A big problem. My wife was murdered and I want to know who did it.”

Frank retreated a few inches, not so eager to brawl anymore. His eyes began to dart back and forth between Dan and Lee as if he was now expecting Dan would be the one getting into a brawl with Lee.

“Why the hell would I know who did it?” Dan said.

“I don’t know why, but I know you do,” Lee barked out, exaggerating the lead we had beyond recognition. “One of your former customers told us you do.”

Dan shook his head, disgusted, pulled out his cell phone, and began typing a text. “I got some friends who are going to help you find your way out.”

Lee leaned across the bar. “I don’t need your goddamn bouncers to show me the way out.”

“Then get the fuck out yourself.”

This venture had turned into a bust, built on imaginary connections. It wasn’t worth salvaging, and my thought was that we
should
get the fuck out.

Dan looked over at Frank. “So—can I get you that refill?”

“That’s what I been waiting for,” Frank said, and sat back on his barstool.

Dan grabbed the empty beer mug and was about to turn away when Lee put all our cards on the table. “Some homeless drunk told us you could help us out. He said we can’t see things. We’re stuck in a cave or some shit like that, and we can’t see the killer. He told us we’d find something here.”

It was clear from the curious expression on Dan’s face that Lee had hit a nerve.

“Do you know what any of that means?” I said.

“I know what part of it means,” Dan answered.

“Then tell us,” Lee said. His tone was still belligerent, so I added: “Then we’ll be out of your hair.”

“Your homeless drunk was talking about the Allegory of the Cave,” Dan said, then walked away with the empty beer mug. I stood there dumbfounded, taken aback at hearing a reference to the Allegory of the Cave in a bar in Old Town Alexandria. Dan dumped the mug into a plastic bin filled with dirty glasses and dishes.

I was sure that the Allegory of the Cave fell far down the list of usual discussion topics at a place like the Firegrill—below work, gossip, relationships, sports, politics, and at least several hundred other more common topics of conversation. But I remembered the reference from a college philosophy class—it came from Plato, that much I knew—but I didn’t remember the allegory itself.

Dan plucked a fresh mug from a rack of clean ones hanging over the bar and stuck it under a tap. As the beer flowed into the glass, he sent another text, which I assumed canceled his request for bouncers—for now. Then he grabbed the mug, wiped the foam from the top with a small wooden paddle, and headed back our way.

He plunked the beer in front of Frank and looked to Lee. “I’m sorry about your wife,” he said.

Lee nodded, but it wasn’t gracious gesture of peace. It was a gesture that said
Let’s get on with this
, and Dan responded in kind: a flicker of hardness covered his face and his jaw tightened. So I said something to keep the lead alive. “Can you just take a minute to tell us why you think your former customer wanted us to know about this allegory?”

“I have no idea why.”

“Can you just tell us the allegory then?”

“How the hell is my little bar story going to help you with a murder case?”

“Who knows?” I said, and that was the truth—though I had to admit that when he had used the word “story,” it had given me a slight bit of hope.

“Why aren’t the cops involved?” he said. A reasonable question.

“They are,” I said. “But so are we.”

He stared at me a beat, then smiled. “Good answer.” He looked over the Firegrill as if he was surveying his kingdom, then said, “Okay. No skin off my back.”

Frank grabbed his beer and slid off his stool. “I’ll check back in later. I heard this one already.” He retreated into the crowd.

“I’m giving you the bite-size version,” Dan said, and dove right in, clearly ready for us to be on our way. “There’s a bunch of people who live in a cave, and they’ve lived there all their lives. They’re chained down, sitting on the ground, like prisoners. So they can’t move.
And
they’re facing this blank wall. It’s the only thing they can see.

“Now, behind them, there’s a fire. They don’t know about it, and they don’t know there are other people in the cave walking in front of that fire. Those people are carrying these wooden figures—figures of all different shapes and sizes. And because of the fire, the figures are casting shadows on that blank wall. So to the prisoners, those shadows are the real world, because it’s the only thing they’ve ever known. They’ve never seen anything else. But if someone freed them, they’d see that the shadows are just shadows. And that the real world is something else.”

Dan folded his arms. “So that’s my little story, boys. Sometimes I stretch it out if people aren’t getting it.”

I got it. It all came back to me from that college philosophy class. I looked over at Lee to see if he got it. His brow was creased, and I thought it was because he was thinking about it. But I was wrong.

“So what?” he said, confronting Dan even though Dan had obliged our request.

Before Lee pissed him off again, and in case there was more information to be gleaned, I ignored Lee’s belligerence and answered his
so what
. “It means what we think is real isn’t real. It’s just a shadow of what’s real.”

“I got that,” Lee said, and before he said anything more, I interjected.

“Why do you tell your customers that story?” I asked Dan.

“It does some good for some of them,” he said.

“How? Why that story?” I was pressing him because I had nothing. No breadcrumb.

“I came up through the ranks, and any bartender who does has got to be a psychologist,” he said. “That story is part of my go-to advice.”

“I don’t get it.” I didn’t see how the allegory would help his customers, and I certainly didn’t see how it would help us.

“I’ll bottom-line it for you. If someone has a problem they’re obsessing about, sometimes it’s all in their head. The reality they’re seeing isn’t real at all. It’s just a shadow on a wall. If they get out of their cave and look behind them, they’ll see another reality. The one outside their head.”

Lee grunted—annoyed and dismissive. “When your wife dies, that’s fucking reality.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

“Of course,” Dan said, “I get that. If the problem isn’t in your head, then I got other advice. For example,
you
need to calm the fuck down.”

I was sure Lee was going to leap across the bar. But he didn’t. He actually took Dan’s advice. He shook his head, not so much disgusted, just ready to give up. Then he glanced at me and said, “Let’s go.”

But I wasn’t ready to give up. We didn’t have another lead, and I didn’t understand why Dantès wanted us to hear the Allegory of the Cave, if indeed he did.

“What about Plato?” I blurted out. “Why bring up Plato?”

Dan raised his eyebrows, amused. “You mean why would some dumb fuck bartender know about Plato?”

“You own this place, so that makes you a hell of a lot smarter than me,” I said.

He grinned, glanced at Lee, then came back to me. “You’re lucky I’m used to loudmouth customers.”

Lee just shook his head again and didn’t attack. I was grateful for it.

“My dad was a philosophy professor at Georgetown,” Dan said, “so he was always talking philosophy. He made sure I knew what each big-name philosopher had to say. Locke, Nietzsche, Rousseau, all of them. But Plato was the one that stuck with me.” He leaned back and folded his arms, and a wistful look crossed his face. “My dad told me that when you got right down to the nitty-gritty, Plato and his crew had some crazy ideas. Ideas that got buried by Aristotle and were never recovered. Plato and his crew thought science and magic were part of the same world. Equal. That fact and fiction came in the same package—that everything was kind of like a giant shake and bake. I always liked that idea.”

Fact and fiction came in the same package—a giant shake and bake.
Was that the breadcrumb we’d come for? It felt like Dan had confirmed something, but I wasn’t sure what that something was. It had the flavor of novel therapy, but no specifics. It would’ve been so much better if our conversation had yielded something specific—somewhere to go, someone to see—but it didn’t. The best I could come up with was that if fact and fiction were the same, then attention had to be paid to the bizarre and unexplainable elements of the past and present—from the strange, dank fog and the husky wolf, to the homeless man’s missing reflection and his strange story about the man who’d turned into a blanket of darkness.

Lee said, “Are we outta here?”

“Sure.” I didn’t know where to go next, but I thought our trip to the Firegrill had run its course. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Lee took off, using aggressive
excuse me’s
to once again cut a path through the throng of patrons.

“Thanks for your help.” I stuck out my hand to shake, and Dan took it.

“Don’t see how I helped,” he said, “but you’re welcome. And do me a favor. Make sure your chum there doesn’t get himself into any trouble until after he gets out of the Firegrill.”

I nodded and turned to go, but I couldn’t locate Lee up ahead. I scanned the crowd from left to right and back again. There was no sign of him. He couldn’t have gotten through the crowd so fast, but he must have. I moved forward, zigzagging through the crowd, toward the doors, assuming that Lee was well on his way out. As I was making my way around one of those islands in the swamp, I finally spotted him.

He was a few yards away, standing still between two clusters of people, focused on something or someone near the booths. I made my way over to him.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” he said.

I followed his gaze and saw a man in a dress shirt and loosened tie gesticulating wildly to a group of men also with loosened ties. I saw two young women, nodding to a third, as if they were agreeing with her about some profound insight. I saw three guys barely above the drinking age, laughing uproariously. But I didn’t see the reason for Lee’s incredulity.

“What’s up?” I said.

“I know why we’re here.”

“Fill me in.”

He didn’t. Instead he plunged forward, dispensing with the aggressive
excuse me’s
altogether and letting his hostile pace do the talking. Which it did—people scooted out of his way.

He made his way to the booths that lined the wall. Every one of them was jam-packed with people—all except for one. There, two men in their sixties were drinking bottled Budweiser and eating barbecued ribs.

Lee had slowed down, and when I caught up to him, he motioned toward that booth. “The one on the left—that’s my dad. Macon. The last time I saw him was ten years ago. He came over to Uncle Harry’s place on the day I was moving Harry out. I thought he’d come over to help me pack. It turned out he wanted to see if Harry had anything worth selling. He wanted to pocket the cash.”

I was already predisposed to dislike Macon, and his appearance didn’t do anything to change that. He was wiry, with a sharp, rat-like face, and narrow lips that were currently wrapped around a greasy rib. His hair was gray, thin, and slicked back.

“You think we’re here because Dantès wanted us to run into him,” I said.

“Yeah.” Lee headed to the booth.

Macon spotted Lee, and while still gnawing on his ribs, he grimaced as if he’d seen something troubling.