Beware the Solitary Drinker Read online

  “I’m the bartender.”

  “Oh.” She looked confused. “I thought you owned the bar.”

  I didn’t know why she would think that.

  “You said I should come to your bar. I thought you meant you owned it.”

  I poured her a dark rum and grapefruit juice and braced myself. She’d put on a good bit of make-up, but it didn’t hide the reddened eyes and the puffiness beneath. She had a professional kind of presence. I wouldn’t say it was a false front. But it was automatic: a smile, a handshake, a way of giving her full attention, as if what you said must be really important. I didn’t know what she did for a living. But she was polished, used to making her way in some area that used to be a man’s world. Much of this style was muted by the toll Angelina’s death had taken on her. But, like I said, how she presented herself was automatic. She was charming without trying, without even thinking about it.

  “I’m not sure this is the right place to find out much about your sister,” I said. “I didn’t know her that well. She took singing lessons, I know. She worked further downtown…. You’d probably find out more about her down there.” I was tiptoeing around because I didn’t want big sister Janet to find out too much about Angelina’s habits in Sin City, and I especially didn’t want one of Oscar’s blabbermouths to spill the beans about Rocky’s porno flicks.

  “Angelina was here the night she died,” Janet said by way of establishing that she was settling in for a while. “Who were her friends? Did anyone here now know her?”

  “She wasn’t here that long,” I said, groping for an answer that sounded like it said something without actually doing so. I’d become an oracle—except I taught untruth. “People knew her, I guess. I don’t know who all were friends.”

  “Do you know if she had a boyfriend?”

  “I think she was sort of shopping around.”

  “Did she try you for size?” Janet Carter arched an appraising eyebrow.

  Even though I didn’t say anything, she seemed to have her answer. I began to think a red light lit up on my forehead when I toyed with the truth.

  Nigel picked that moment to arrive. He was a pretty good yacker so, while I would have preferred Carl, Nigel would do, certainly better than Reuben or Oscar or Sam the Hammer. Self-effacing as usual, and in much better shape than the last time I’d seen him, Nigel perked up immediately—as all of the regulars would—as soon as he spied the new and pretty female face at the bar.

  Janet Carter carried herself well, and her body fit nicely into her more relaxed clothes, her breasts straining just so slightly against her silk blouse that was open along her neck, her jacket tapered along her hips. She was good to look at, though some hardness in her manner suggested not easily touchable. She flashed him a brief smile, and Nigel beamed.

  “He knew your sister,” I told Janet, and Nigel’s face dropped like I’d kneed him in the balls.

  I didn’t blame him. One of the advantages a bartender has is control of the conversation—he can get two people next to one another talking or arguing then walk away to the end of the bar. For them, committed more or less to their chosen barstools, walking away is not so easy.

  I hoped Nigel would keep her busy with small talk, so she wouldn’t get a chance to pump the regulars for any real information. He usually had a lot to say. Every situation that came up reminded him of something that had happened to him in the past. His stories weren’t boring, but they somehow never related to him, the teller. If he told of getting stoned with the Allman Brothers or driving from Chicago to Minneapolis with Jerry Garcia, you thought it was exciting or interesting but it did nothing to alter your opinion of Nigel who was telling the story. He still seemed wimpy and uninteresting.

  But my plan didn’t work. She got away from him, managing to accost Reuben and Duffy, the Boss, and even Oscar. She created discomfort, not unlike Sheehan, as she went from one bar stool to the next. She paid no attention to the clear differences in class and style, not seeming to notice how the winos reacted—as if the madam of the house had descended into the servants’ quarters.

  “All of these men knew Angelina,” she said well into the night when she came to rest on her barstool after floating from one end of the bar to the other for a couple of hours. She didn’t seem concerned that I’d misled her. “Everyone is so nice.”

  Ignoring her sociable smile, I watched instead the sadness and rage hiding in her dark eyes.

  “Did you find out all you need to know?” I asked, suspecting she hadn’t found out much.

  “I’m not really sure what I found out.” Her expression grew quizzical as she thought over what she’d heard. “Everyone talks in riddles.” She’d just spoken to Sam, and before that Oscar, so the longer she thought it over the less sure she would be.

  Just like god damn Sheehan to pick that moment—when I thought I might hustle her out of the joint—to saunter in and sit down beside her.

  “Hello, McNulty,” he said, wiping at the bar in front of him with his fingers as if it might be sticky. “Had a couple of days off?” I waited for him to acknowledge that the bar was clean. “Went to the girl’s funeral I understand.” He leaned forward onto his elbows. “Nice gesture…See anyone from the neighborhood?”

  Janet hadn’t taken her eyes off Sheehan since he sat down, so it didn’t take him long to sense her interest. Turning to her with a more engaging manner than I thought him capable of, he held out his hand and said, “I’m Detective Pat Sheehan.”

  “I’m Janet Carter. Are you investigating my sister’s murder?”

  “Yes. I am,” he said. He looked her over in an appraising sort of way that I thought she should find offensive, but she didn’t seem to notice, or care if she did notice.

  She didn’t take her eyes off his face. Her own face was rigid.

  “I’m surprised to see you in New York. In fact, I’ve just finished reading a statement you gave to the Springfield police this morning.”

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  “No.”

  “I want to find out,” Janet said. Her voice shook, and she seemed to freeze over. It was rage—anger so deep and brooding that it surprised me. She’d been wearing a pretty convincing mask, this poised professional from Massachusetts. For that moment, she seemed as tough as Sheehan.

  “So do we,” said Sheehan. “Maybe you could convince McNulty here and his cronies to cooperate.”

  When she turned to look at me, the rage was still in her eyes, but it wasn’t directed against me as I expected it to be; it went inward. She went after herself, a look of bitterness you might associate with failure or despair or self-hate. She might fit into Oscar’s after all.

  Sheehan stood up and without speaking to me walked to the end of the bar toward Oscar, said something to him, then left the bar without looking at me again.

  When he left, Janet nursed a drink and brooded for a long time. She seemed to have lost interest in conversation but did tell me she’d be in town for a couple of days, staying at a hotel in the Sixties, the Empire, next to Hanrahan’s.

  Trying to cheer her up with a bit of New York City lore, I told her it was the hotel the ballet dancers stay in when they come to town to dance at Lincoln Center. I’d always wanted to work at Hanrahan’s, mainly because of the ballet dancers, but also because of the name. Its full name was Hanrahan’s Baloon. Legend has it that they told Hanrahan, who’d just put the name of his new joint—Hanrahan’s Saloon—in lights, that he couldn’t use the word saloon because saloons are against the law in New York. So Hanrahan, rather than paying for a completely new sign, changed the S to B.

  Janet said she picked the hotel because Hanrahan’s was the last place Angelina worked, and went back to nursing her drink.

  Around one, I put her in a cab right in front of Oscar’s, and, under the delusion I worked for the Visitor’s Bureau, asked her to have lunch with me the next day.

  She seemed surprised and thought about it for a minute before she said yes, her respon
se bringing a sparkle of light to her eyes and a flush of color to her cheeks.

  “I’ll pick you up at the hotel around two,” I said.

  “Isn’t that a little late?”

  “I thought it was early myself.”

  ***

  We ate lunch at an American Restaurant in the Seventies, one of a chain of Upper West Side Greek coffee shops, a kind of upscale greasy spoon. On the walk up Broadway, I pointed out the Ansonia Hotel, one of the West Side’s most intriguing buildings, which was across the street from the Central Bank building where my socialist dentist had his office.

  After Janet’s lunch and my breakfast, we walked to Central Park. This time, I showed her the Dakota, where John Lennon once lived—realizing, when her face crumbled, that I wasn’t doing a very good job of steering her away from thoughts of death and murder.

  Next, I pointed out the Inn on the Park, where I’d once worked. The inn has white Christmas lights in the trees all year round, lots of floor to ceiling windows, sparkling chandeliers, and crystal vases with fresh flowers every day. We stood for a long time looking at it.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.

  “It’s a shit hole,” I told her. “I used to make piña coladas in a five gallon pail, using the bar boy’s broom handle to stir them, the same broom I used to chase the rats out of the garden…”

  She wasn’t shocked by my outburst, just looked at me curiously, as if not sure why I’d say such a thing. I wasn’t sure myself, except I didn’t like that she was impressed by the glitter. I wanted her to know what it was like behind the glitter.

  Janet Carter, dressed for an afternoon walk in slacks and a dress shirt with a sweater over it, had an air of casual, well-groomed confidence that I normally didn’t like. There was something vacant in how she was also, as if an important part of her was somewhere else. Me, I felt left over from the night before, red-eyed and murky of mind, flabby and out of sorts.

  When we walked across Strawberry Fields, this profound sadness caught up with me: for Angelina, for John Lennon, for the day not long after John Lennon was murdered that a couple of thousand of us stood in front of the Dakota singing “Give Peace a Chance.”

  For that moment, tasting sadness, climbing a grassy hill in the cool sun of a New York City autumn, for that moment, I felt unbearably lonely; I felt sad for everyone, and hopeless, and I shivered from fear that rippled through me like a chill.

  “Why’d you come to New York?” I asked Janet, who, head down, her own expression far from cheerful, climbed the hill beside me.

  “I don’t know—to get whatever my sister left behind, I guess.” She started to say more but stopped, as if she couldn’t make up her mind what she should say if she did go on.

  “I was afraid Angelina would be killed in New York…” she said suddenly, out of nowhere. We stopped on the hill and she faced me, her expression stony, her body going rigid. “…I tried to stop her. I feel like it’s my fault…I feel like it’s my fault she was murdered.”

  “How could it be your fault?”

  “I told her not to come.”

  “You told her not to come, and she came anyway.”

  “I had a premonition—”

  “Premonitions don’t mean anything,” I said—not something you should say to a visibly distraught, not-far-from-the-edge premonition believer.

  “No,” she said, all too calmly. “Angelina and I were really close. We had premonitions about what might happen to one another. It happened enough times that we both believed them.”

  This businesslike and self-assured professional woman had come unstrung for the moment. I was embarrassed for her and turned away. I didn’t want to hear about premonitions. If there were such things, why didn’t Angelina have a premonition about going to the park with someone who was going to murder her?

  “I need to find out for myself what happened,” Janet said to my back. It seemed that once she got started explaining herself, she needed to keep going until she was sure I understood.

  So I understood: guilt and anger brought her here. She came to the city to wear out whatever guilt she had.

  “You can wait just as well in Massachusetts and find out what happened to your sister. You don’t need to be here.”

  “I know I should be here….” Her eyes reddened, so she began walking away from me. After a few steps, she straightened her shoulders and turned around. “I have to find out what happened. I knew my sister better than anyone. I’d be able to help…I’d know things others wouldn’t know. I’d do anything to find her killer. Anything.” Her voice shook with anger; her eyes flashed with challenge.

  “Why? What good will it do if you do find the killer? It won’t bring her back. Angelina will still be dead.”

  Janet Carter turned on me. “How can you say that? You don’t care about finding the killer? You wouldn’t rip him apart? You wouldn’t kill him with your own hands if you knew?…What kind of man are you?”

  I started walking.

  In a little while, she caught up with me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel so horribly awful…I can’t bear it…I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’m sorry, too. I don’t know what you do with this kind of sadness. But I do know what you shouldn’t do, and that’s come down here and start rummaging around looking for someone who might be a killer. You’re not going to find whoever it is—and even supposing you’re able to, the odds are the murderer will find out about you long before you find him—or her—so you could get yourself murdered. The good offensive guy beats the defensive guy because the offensive guy knows where he’s going and the other guy doesn’t.”

  Janet, purposeful again, sized me up. “I’m not a fool. That analogy doesn’t make sense.” She glared at me. But, this time, something behind the glare reached out to me. It was as if she asked for help. The expression reminded me of Angelina; that was her expression too.

  “Let the cops handle it. This is the kind of case cops solve. If your sister was black and got murdered in Brooklyn, it might be a different story. But she’s young and white and pretty, and got killed in a neighborhood where people with money live, so the murder is a big deal for the papers. Then it becomes a big deal for the cops. They’ll find a murderer.”

  “God, you’re so cynical—”

  Here was this attitude again: Ms. Success. She’d done okay in life, why couldn’t everyone? The cops not care about poor black people? Who’d believe such a thing? Angelina wasn’t like that. Angelina knew all along what was on the other side of the glitter.

  We’d completed our trek to the top of the hill, so Janet sat down on a bench we found there. “I like to walk,” she said. A combination of words and action I thought was at least as contradictory as my basketball analogy.

  “If you think the police will find who killed my sister, why did that detective say you wouldn’t help him?”

  “Number one, I don’t know much he won’t find out anyway. And number two, I don’t know what he’s looking for.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It has to do with being cynical.”

  Janet looked at me significantly. “You know more about Angelina than you told him or you’re telling me. Why won’t you tell me about my sister? Don’t you trust me either?” Her tone wasn’t angry, but she looked into my eyes the way Sheehan did until I stopped looking at her.

  “If you won’t tell me about her, I’ll tell you.” She liked to talk, this big sister from Massachusetts. Under the blue sky, in the declining autumn sun, on a park bench above the Sheep Meadow, Janet Carter blurted out her story.

  “My father took care of me before he died. He left money for me to go to college in a trust fund. He didn’t leave anything for Angelina…He never really cared about her. …Angelina didn’t even remember him because he left my mother right after she was born, so my mother wouldn’t let him see Angelina after he did that.” She sighed.

  “They had a pretty stormy relations
hip. My mother is very demanding and high strung—and I guess my father had a temper. Angelina came along when they already hated each other. My father left us and said he wasn’t Angelina’s father. That’s how the poor kid started out in life, something for my mother and father to fight over.

  “Was he? Was your father Angelina’s father?”

  “My mother said he was, and there weren’t any other men in her life. My mother doesn’t like men very much, so I’m sure he was. He just hated my mother so much he didn’t want to believe it—so he ignored Angelina.” Janet looked down at the stubble of grass beneath her feet.

  “He loved me, though. He began telling me when I was five that I would go to college. Then, after they broke up, he told me that whenever I saw him, all through grade school. My mother really hated that.”

  Janet raised her eyes. “A big part of their problem was my mother really thought she married beneath her. She thought she was the perfect everything. She thought my father should have a better job and make more money. She went nuts when she discovered he’d saved so much money for me. He worked in the post office. Then he died when I was sixteen…. My father was the only thing in my life I didn’t share with Angelina. I regret that now…I should have…She always wanted to be with him, but I liked having him for myself.” Tears seeped from the corners of Janet’s eyes, so I left her with her memories for the moment and watched the edge of the city beyond the park.

  She gathered herself together after a few minutes and started in again. The older sister by almost ten years, she’d more or less raised her baby sister until she went to college. Some of what she told me I knew already from Angelina: the molestation that was the centerpiece of her life. But Janet told me something Angelina hadn’t.

  “I know this is impossible to believe but the boy who molested Angelina wasn’t a terrible ogre…I mean, he was an ogre…but he wasn’t a pervert who jumped her as she walked down the street. Angelina knew him. He was a college student who met her in the park. It was past the dying days of the Sixties, past the end of the hippie days when everyone loved everyone. But Angelina loved what she knew of the Sixties and wanted so much to be grown up and part of it. When she was four or five, she wore love beads and peasant dresses. By the time she was ten, with lipstick, she was so pretty—a real baby doll—and she was stunning. Although you wouldn’t mistake that she was a child.