Beware the Solitary Drinker

by Cornelius Lehane

  He’d slipped out of the kitchen to exchange my late night snack—escargot—for a healthy belt of cognac before Oscar returned to perch at the end of the bar until closing time.

  “She’s a real beauty. I’m sorry your heart is broken.”

  “She wasn’t my girl friend. My heart isn’t broken.”

  “She doesn’t even talk to me,” said Eric, “and mine is broken.”

  “I’m in love with a fluegelhorn player.”

  “Me, too,” said Eric. “Where is she?”

  “At the end of the bar.”

  He stroked his beard and gazed at her lovingly. “She’s with a friend. We should all go to my apartment for breakfast, a joint, and Slivovitz.”

  We did just that. After we necked for a while on Eric’s couch, I dropped the fluegelhorn player, whose name was Cecilia, off at her apartment on 104th Street around five and ran into Angelina and Danny on Broadway, arms around each other, both of them so starry-eyed I didn’t know if they’d even noticed me.

  Pretty much sober myself by then, I read for a long time before I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until four in the afternoon. Even though it was Thursday, I wasn’t working that night because Phil, the other night guy, had asked me to switch.

  I bought a steak at the market at 110th Street, and for the first time in months picked up a copy of Variety at the newsstand next door. I ate the steak, looked up auditions in the paper, and wondered about calling the fluegelhorn player. Instead, I went out around nine for a drink at the Terrace. Nick, the day guy, a long-time pal, was reading the next morning’s Daily News at the corner of the bar. He slid it toward me when I sat down. The paper was open to page three, and the story he’d been reading was about the police finding Angelina’s body Thursday morning in Riverside Park.

  Chapter Two

  I never left my barstool the entire night, just sat there with the paper in front of me, reading the story over and over again until my eyes stopped focusing. I didn’t see the blood or the blows or the hands around her throat. It wasn’t her death I imagined, but her terrifying anticipation of death, like a nightmare that turns you rigid, when you’re so scared your voice won’t work to scream, and you wake up finally in cold sweat but into familiarity and relief. But not for Angelina— no waking from her terror. She died with her scream frozen in her throat.

  David, the night bartender, kept tuning me up with blow, so I woke up sick and terribly nervous Friday afternoon in Betsy Blumberg’s bed. I’d been sleeping and waking fitfully during the morning, trying to make myself sleep instead of thinking about Angelina. The coke boiled inside me; I couldn’t stand myself. I needed a Valium, and I needed to fuck Betsy. Good old Betsy came through on both counts.

  She was in love with David Beattie, the bartender at the Terrace, but, on the frequent nights he found someone else to sleep with, she took whoever was left at the bar at closing time home with her for comfort; once in a while it was me. This morning—or afternoon—after we had fucked ferociously, and I had almost pulled her hair out while her nails dug long scratches into my back, I went back to sleep in her arms. When I woke once more, we fucked again. Then she cooked me eggs and a steak.

  “Today has been wild,” said Betsy. She looked coy and pleased, sitting across her dinette table from me, her blue bathrobe carelessly tied so when she moved slightly it opened at the top, baring her breast. “You’re becoming my number one beau.”

  “What about David?”

  “He’s a pig, and even when he does come here, he doesn’t spend all afternoon…you know—” She smiled again.

  “I know what?”

  “You know….”

  “What?”

  “Fucking me. He doesn’t spend all afternoon fucking me.” Her smile was lascivious.

  “The last time I was here I couldn’t get it up,” I reminded her.

  “You made up for it.” She rested her chin in her hands, elbows on the table, and looked longingly in my direction.

  “I don’t want to be your beau, Betsy.”

  “I know.”

  I concentrated on eating.

  “I’m really sorry about Angelina,” Betsy said tentatively. “The poor kid.”

  I didn’t know why I’d spent the night with Betsy. I didn’t know why I had to get laid the day after Angelina was killed. Bottomless pits were opening up just beneath my consciousness.

  ***

  That night, a police sergeant introduced himself to me at the bar. Oscar clocked him the moment he entered. The first thing Oscar had said when I got to work was that the broad getting herself killed was going to get his place closed. Now, with a knowing grimace, he nodded toward the man in the door and buried his face in The Racing Form.

  The cop introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Pat Sheehan. He had sandy hair, bluish eyes, stood a good few inches over six feet, and gave the impression that he had a perfect right to do whatever it was he might be doing, despite the chilling pall his presence cast over the bar. He might just as well have driven a squad car through the door.

  He didn’t order a drink or show me a badge, just settled like a searchlight into my eyes. “A woman named Angelina Carter was murdered in Riverside Park Thursday morning. Did you know her?”

  “I’m sort of busy right now,” I said politely. I was pretending that if I went back to work, he would go away.

  Oscar squirmed and bounced on his stool at the other end of the bar, trying to hear everything and be inconspicuous at the same time. The cop looked at him. Everyone looked at him because he kept thumping around like a percolator.

  “Can someone take over for you for a few minutes?” the cop said. “You are McNulty?”

  I nodded and called Oscar, who sprang off his stool, then tried to act nonchalant as he came behind the bar.

  “How do you know me?” I asked Sheehan when we sat down at a table. Except for his feet, which kept up a non-stop tapping under the table, he seemed at ease, uninterested in the impression he was making or in establishing any kind of rapport. He was intimidating without trying to be. I didn’t know if he thought me the best witness or the prime suspect.

  “You’re the beneficiary on her life insurance policy.”

  “I’m what?”

  “She had a five thousand dollar life insurance policy from the restaurant where she worked. She named you beneficiary.” He sat back in his chair, tilted his head to the side, and watched me from this vantage.

  “Why did she do that?” I didn’t want money from Angelina being dead.

  “You won’t get the money until we find the killer.”

  “I don’t want the money.” When I said this, it occurred to me he might think I killed her for the money. “What do you want from me?”

  “What can you tell me?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know who did it.”

  “Tell me anything you know, anything you think might be helpful.” His face held an open, guileless expression you might mistake for simplicity, but his questioning was purposeful and measured.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  I wanted to tell him, but Oscar had sworn me to secrecy. It was a stupid delusion of Oscar’s that the cops wouldn’t figure out that she’d been in the bar. But at that moment Oscar carried more weight in my life than Sergeant Sheehan. “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “Was she in here Wednesday night?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He looked me in the eye long enough for me to avert my gaze. “Do you want the person who did this to be caught?”

  I didn’t want to tell him the truth, which was that I really didn’t care. It wasn’t going to help Angelina—so I didn’t say anything.

  He waited, looking me in the eye whenever I looked up at him, his expression patient.

  “Were you in love with her?” he asked, really taking me by surprise. He looked right into my face when he asked, and I’m sure my face registered the changes I went th
rough like a computer screen.

  “I wasn’t in love with her,” I said, but my voice wavered.

  Oscar had been rubbing the same section of the bar with the bar rag for about ten minutes watching us. When Sheehan left, Oscar came out from behind the bar. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him you did it.”

  Oscar didn’t get immediately that I was kidding. His eyes went wide and his face lost some of its color. For all I knew, he had done it.

  “I didn’t tell him anything, Oscar. But he’ll be back. Someone else will tell him she was here.”

  “We can say no,” said Oscar, still scheming. This was the same Oscar who, when he burned the top of the Quiche Lorraine in the broiler, served it upside down on a bed of lettuce. “It’ll be their word against ours.”

  The cop found me again the next morning at my apartment. It was almost noon but I’d drunk too much and hadn’t gone to bed until six. My health was going downhill fast. If I didn’t let my system flush itself out, I’d start shaking soon. Drinking in the morning to stop the shakes—a new horizon loomed. Looking at Sheehan through the peephole in the door, I imagined what had happened. He discovered that Angelina used to live with me, that everyone in the neighborhood thought we had something going. He’d found out she’d been in the bar talking to me most of the night I said she hadn’t been there. Next, he’d check the FBI records and find out my father was a Communist. Everyone knows Communists never tell the truth.

  “Sorry,” he said when I opened the door. “I thought you’d be up by now.” Once more, he had me at a disadvantage; this time, I was embarrassed because I was so obviously hung over. He seemed chipper, despite a probable lack of sleep, wearing the same rumpled gray suit but a fresh blue shirt, with a red knit tie replacing the blue knit tie of the night before. He didn’t seem to like me very much.

  “Everyone lies to me,” said Detective Sergeant Sheehan.

  “You haven’t heard anything yet,” I warned him. “Wait till you talk to Oscar.”

  “She was in the bar that night.”

  I nodded.

  “Who was she with?”

  “No one.”

  “Who did she leave with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do; she came over to say goodbye before she left with the band. Who’d you leave with?”

  “That’s personal.”

  “Did you see her after she left the bar?”

  “No.”

  “Did you call her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you go to her apartment?”

  “No.”

  “Did she come to your apartment?”

  “No.”

  “Did you look for her?”

  “No.”

  “Who did she spend time with besides you?” Sheehan didn’t smile or change his expression, which suggested he was already looking ahead to something and losing interest in me. Still, he questioned relentlessly, and I felt like a fraud.

  “I’m going to find answers.” Sheehan pulled himself up taller, seeming to take up most of my small foyer. “I’m going to know everyone who was in the bar and where they went after the bar closed. I’ll know your personal business, too. I don’t understand why you think it’s cool to protect a murderer.”

  “Bartender’s code. We only care whether they’re good tippers.”

  When Sheehan left, I tried to figure out for myself what I was doing. I acted out of habit. Not helping the cops was something I’d learned growing up in Flatbush when the FBI crashed through the neighborhood telling everyone my father was a traitor.

  When I arrived at work that night, Saturday night, I found Oscar at his corner of the bar with Sergeant Sheehan. Oscar spoke with a Spanish accent, had black hair, thick black eyebrows, and a pug’s face. He told enormous lies and was impressed by financial successes like doctors and lawyers, and especially business men, some of whom, remembering him from the West End Bar during their college days, stopped by once in a while to say hello. He didn’t mind gangsters but hated drug dealers, blacks, and cops. With Sheehan he was having trouble. I could tell by his gestures and the workings of his face muscles that he was telling bigger and bigger lies to get out of the lie he’d just been caught in. Oscar was talking about a lieutenant he thought he knew, while trying to ascertain if Sheehan was on the take so he might arrange something to keep his joint out of the murder case, so he wouldn’t lose his liquor license.

  If you carry yourself the right way as a bartender, after a while people forget you’re there no matter what kind of secrets they’re talking about.

  “I don’t care about your club,” Sheehan said. “I just want one guy.”

  “I know, I know,” said Oscar. “Me, too.”

  “Look, Oscar. I’m not on the take. I’m not after your joint. I just want the perpetrator.”

  Oscar wasn’t so much unwilling to tell the truth—he just didn’t recognize it. He refused to conform his view of things to someone else’s idea of reality.

  “The first time she was ever here,” Oscar said, his thick eyebrows bobbing enthusiastically.

  “She was a regular, almost every night,” Sheehan said.

  “She came in but never hung around.” The eyebrows stopped.

  “She was a friend of the bartender.”

  “He never paid attention to her.” The eyebrows crept down over his eyelids.

  “She used to live with him.”

  “He never let on.” Oscar’s eyes squinted closed.

  When Sheehan left, Oscar leaned over the bar. “You got to tell the truth,” Oscar said. “Tell him everything you know, or he’ll have the place closed. He’s a big man in the cops, a chief or something. You can’t fool around with him.”

  “He’s a sergeant.”

  “Yeh, but he’s in charge of things—he’s a big guy from downtown.” Gazing out from under those eyebrows like he was peering out from under a rock, Oscar made sure no one was listening. “He knows who did it,” he whispered.

  “Who?”

  “Reuben.”

  “Did the cop say that?”

  “He didn’t have to say. I know.”

  I didn’t believe Oscar, but I began to wonder if Reuben did kill Angelina. He seemed capable of it. Most of Oscar’s clientele—bitter, angry men, with lifetimes full of unresolved grievances—seemed capable of murder. Already, I knew two of our regulars were murderers, Sam the Hammer and Boss Abbott. There wasn’t any reason to believe Angelina’s killer frequented Oscar’s. But Sheehan seemed to think it was as good a bet as any that the killer was one of Oscar’s lost souls.

  Standing behind the bar near closing time, I’d begun sifting through Oscar’s rogues gallery for any hint that one of them had it in for Angelina when Nigel walked in with Carl van Sagan, just ahead of the nightly crew drifting back home for last call. Nigel looked like I felt, shaken and drawn, like he might be hung over. If he’d been drinking the night before, I was glad I’d missed it. With those thick glasses magnifying the grief in his eyes, he looked at me for sympathy, but I didn’t want to talk to him, or anyone else, about Angelina. Nigel drank a ginger ale. Carl had scotch.

  “Duffy showed up yet?” Carl asked. I’d known Carl for years. We’d been watching basketball games together at various corner bars since Earl Monroe began playing for the Knicks. Though we’d each left the neighborhood a few times, we’d always gravitated back. When I saw him now, it felt like we’d grown up together. Carl was my age but a bit heftier. He drank a good deal more than was good for him, but was a peaceful man and a thinker. He also possessed an amazingly expressive face. On his peaceful days, something in the cast of his eyes reminded me of Snoopy; on the days when the hustle of life in the Big Apple became too much for him, he thundered and blustered around the neighborhood like Captain Haddock. When he was thoughtful, he wrinkled his forehead, pursed his lips, and took on an owl-like guise.

  He usually relieved Duffy the doorman at midnight, but tonight was his nigh
t off. Carl had trouble keeping track of what day it was because his shift started at midnight. The first week on the job he was off on Saturday, so he got drunk in Oscar’s with me Friday night. When he went into work Saturday night, Duffy was mad as hell.

  “What are you doing here now?” Duffy bellowed at him. “And where were you yesterday?”

  “You sure this is your night off?” I asked Carl.

  “No. But I don’t give a shit.” He took a sip of his drink and grimaced. He was in one of his Captain Haddock moods. “We’re all being investigated.”

  “You, too.”

  “All the doormen on West End Avenue. We’re watchdogs for the community.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw Angelina.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “No.” He looked defiantly at Nigel.

  Nigel had a higher opinion of law enforcement than the rest of us since he seemed to think of himself as a member of respectable society, so I, too, expected him to complain. But he didn’t, just played with the lime section floating in his ginger ale.

  Sam the Hammer, hunched into his Yankee windbreaker, drank coffee at the end of the bar next to Oscar, who was doping out the races for the next day at Belmont.

  “They busted Boss,” he told no one in particular. “They’re closing his numbers joints.”

  We all sympathized in the way the neighbors might if Mrs. Murphy’s plumbing went awry.

  “Did he forget to pay someone?” Carl asked.

  “The girl getting murdered,” Sam said, still not looking up, as if he might not be talking to us after all. “They got to do something.”

  Everyone clammed up and looked at his drink when he said this. We hadn’t talked much about Angelina, but she was on my mind, not far from the surface most of the time. I figured it was like that for everyone else, too.

  Sam didn’t have much to say beyond that; he was a guy who kept his own counsel, anyway. Distinguished in a certain New York City ne’er-do-well style, Sam wore his hair in a slicked-down, fifties DA, even though it was turning gray, as were his eyebrows and his salt and pepper walrus mustache. He knew about crime, Sam did. That is, he knew who did it most of the time—knew them personally. He might know who killed Angelina. But Sam was closed-mouthed; he would say what he wanted to say. If you asked him anything beyond this, he’d snort, hunch up further into his jacket, and might not speak to you again for a couple of days.