Beware the Solitary Drinker Read online

  “For months, Angelina talked about her friend in the park. No one paid much attention. And then, she began calling him her boyfriend…I was the one who knew he’d done it …All of a sudden, she was in a tiff, mad at her boyfriend, but too grown up about it…It was too much like a jealous woman’s anger. I got Angelina to tell me because I already knew…That’s how close I was to her. I could feel what she felt.”

  “How did she feel about being raped?”

  Janet started and lost her footing. She seemed troubled by the word. “I guess she didn’t think she was raped…She thought she had a boyfriend.”

  “Didn’t anyone explain the difference to her? Did she get counseling?”

  “No. My mother said she didn’t need it…It was the boy who was sick. I guess he was sick. He was from a really respectable family, my mother said…His father worked things out with my mother…He went into some kind of hospital, I guess, after it happened. We never talked about him again. I imagine the whole thing ruined his life.”

  “Angelina’s, too.”

  Janet kept her thoughts to herself for a minute, watching the buildings and the traffic on the far side of the park, as I did.

  “So you think this closeness will work a second time? You’ll intuit who the murderer is? You’ll get a premonition?”

  “I’m not saying that…My sister and I were very close, Brian…I’m not going to let anyone forget what happened to her…I’d know things that other people wouldn’t know…I might see something no one else would see.”

  “Why don’t you know what she did in New York then?”

  Again, she looked startled. For a moment, she hemmed and hawed. “I do… At least I know some things about what she did here. She wrote to me…” She looked me straight in the eye. “Actually, I knew of you before I ever saw you…”

  The spell broke. I’d been conned. Now, I didn’t like this Janet Carter at all, this superior-acting upper-crust lady from Massachusetts, this pillar of respectability.

  “I suppose I should have told you,” she said in what must be her most professional tone.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you tell me. This is New York… No one tells anyone the truth…You get used to it.” I’d let my guard down and Janet Carter got a couple of steps ahead of me. Lots of fancy footwork. Pop would tell me I was out of my element, like with the kid con men on Flatbush Avenue when I was growing up. “Life made them sly and cunning and tough,” Pop said the times I told him I’d been swindled. “You wouldn’t want their lives.” Why this maxim applied to a proper young lady from Springfield, I wasn’t sure. But I knew now she chose carefully what she told me; she didn’t innocently gush out her life story.

  “Why did Angelina come to New York?” I asked.

  This time, I’d caught her off guard, and her eyes that had been looking into mine shied away for a second. “I’m not sure…She wanted to become something, an actress, a singer…”

  I’d had enough. “Why don’t you sit down with Sheehan and tell him everything you know?” I said. “That might get him moving in the right direction.” I had no reason to spar any longer with Janet Carter, I decided. She had her own agenda.

  She smiled a superior smile. “Why don’t you?” And walked away.

  ***

  That night, Janet was in Oscar’s again. Not particularly interested in me, except for ordering a beer now and again, most of the time paid for by one of the winos, she spent the evening in casual conversation with the regulars. For most of the first part of the night, with Ozzie Jackson. He kept crying and was too drunk to talk, even though he kept sputtering a language of some sort at Janet. I could tell by the bewildered way she looked about her she had no idea what he was talking about.

  Ozzie Jackson hailed from Arkansas or Alabama—I get them mixed up—and did something downtown that made him a lot of money. Word had it that he was an executive at Manufacturers Hanover. He’d never said what he did, and I’d never asked. He spoke in a Southern accent, waved his glass around when he spoke, said “har, har” fairly often, called me a “son of a gun” fifteen times a night. With his horn-rimmed glasses, his sandy hair and cowlick, and his friendly Southern face, he had a startled look about him, something like a bird, eyes darting, body tensed, ready to scatter, feathers fluttering, at the slightest sound. He looked almost boyish before he got himself sloppy drunk, and a lot more respectable than he actually was. I don’t think I’d ever seen him leave the bar sober.

  In all the months I’d worked at Oscar’s, I never saw Ozzie sit down either. He drank his Jack Daniels standing up and talked standing up, most of the time incoherently.

  Then one night—the night he first met Angelina—he told me about his wife. “You old son-of-a-gun,” said Ozzie when I’d given him his drink on the house.

  “That’s on us,” I said.

  “You old son-of-a-gun,” Ozzie said again, waving his glass in my direction.

  “How’ve you been, Ozzie,” I asked, even though I knew that no attempt at conversation would persuade Ozzie to talk sense.

  Yet this time was different. Angelina had just left the bar, stopping to kiss me on the cheek on the way out. I thought this might be why he was son-of-a-gunning me, but there was really no telling what he meant. I stood in front of him for a few minutes while he har har harred and called me an old son-of-a-gun a couple of more times.

  Then, speaking perfectly clearly, he said, “I married a girl who was fifteen.”

  “Good for you, Ozzie,” I said.

  “She died when she was sixteen.”

  This was all he told me; he went back to talking gibberish and never mentioned it again.

  But he really took a shine to Angelina, treated her like a princess, buying her drinks all night any night she chose a barstool next to him. She liked to talk to him, too, sitting beside him while, one foot on the railing and his arm on the back of her chair, he leaned toward her, laughing and listening, calling her an old son-of-a-gun, talking nonsense, and buying her drinks. Now, I wondered if he was telling Janet about Angelina or about his wife. She’d probably never know.

  Learning things about people when their defenses are down and their brains addled is a little like the priest hearing confession. At least according to the old school, it went this way. Telling secrets learned over the bar violated a public trust. If someone got stupidly drunk the night before, you didn’t bring it up the next day unless he did. If Reuben got himself slapped by one of the Barnard girls, you didn’t gossip about it. If Betsy, a little tipsy, necked at the corner of the bar with a stranger, she wouldn’t be reminded of it the next day. The Boss could drop his coke vial in the men’s room; if I found it, it was discreetly returned. Sam the Hammer was not reminded that the absolutely sure thing in the fourth race ran out of the money. If Carl hadn’t made a payment on his tab in three or four weeks, nothing was said when he needed a drink. You take up the stick deaf and leave it dumb, the old bartenders said.

  ***

  Somewhere during this night, when Janet Carter had so clearly lost interest in me, I found myself trying to get it back. I started after her with no more forethought than I used in taking a few hits from the Boss’s coke vial or a couple of shots of tequila with Eric the Red as the night waned.

  This particular combination left me more talkative than usual and more enamored of Janet Carter than might be wise. She wore lipstick this night, which she hadn’t that afternoon, and the red of her lips made her eyes a darker and a more sparkling brown. She wore a dress also, a pretty flowery dress that drifted and floated around her legs when she walked—not at all like the crisp blue suit that was all straight lines and stiff material or the sexless slacks and blouse she wore in the afternoon.

  She stayed until closing time, winding up sitting between me and Eric the Red, sipping a beer, while we had a couple of after-closing drinks. I sat close to her and felt her leg brush against mine and smelled the flower water scent she gave off. Though I was surprised she stayed with us, I und
erstood why she’d put off being alone. I also understood that, for the moment, she wanted to talk about something other than Angelina.

  She began to talk about New York. Visitors do this a lot, almost by way of apology for all the nasty things they said to their friends and neighbors before they got here. On this night, tourist Janet said Springfield was culturally deprived, and she liked New York because there were plays and museums, concerts and the ballet, things that people in Springfield didn’t care about. It was an old factory town filled with boring factory workers.

  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 ag
ain; 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.