Beware the Solitary Drinker

by Cornelius Lehane

  “I’m busy,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you. If you want me, you can arrest me.” I said this in my surliest bartender tone, walked away from him, and began washing glasses.

  When Sheehan left, I could see I’d gone up another notch in the estimation of the regulars. Every once in a while this happened: when I threw out a troublemaker, broke up a fight, or went home with a pretty customer. The winos grew friendlier and more animated, giving me a wink or a nod, patting me on the back as I walked by, as if I’d been wearing their colors.

  Not Sam the Hammer though. This time, he happened to be sitting at the bar in front of the sink and looked up from the coffee mug he’d had his eyes glued to while the cop was there.

  “I did that once,” Sam said. “I told them: ‘Book me or release me’—so they booked me.”

  Around one, Carl van Sagan and Nigel playing chess at the corner of the bar and Eric the Red watching them, Sam drinking coffee at the other end, Oscar came in to announce that Danny was in jail for killing Angelina. Oscar usually was the last to get the news.

  “I knew he was no good,” said Oscar, casting an accusing glance my way. “I told you he’s on drugs.…I don’t want them coming in here.…I told you, none of them—”

  Oscar was prepared to go on with his tirade, a variation on his usual theme that I, McNulty, attracted too many unsavory types to Oscar’s. Normally, when he got on his respectability kick, he looked to Nigel for affirmation. But, this time, something in Nigel’s expression slowed him down. Nigel’s face took me aback too: the pain and sorrow in his eyes, as if he was taking on Danny’s trouble for him.

  I wanted to tell Oscar he was wrong, too. But what could I say? That Danny was a good guy, and even if he had killed Angelina, it would have been a terrible mistake, something he would never forgive himself for, the result of abuse and war and drugs and all the ways life had beaten on him? You had to believe in your own purity to demand vengeance. I couldn’t muster it up. A too-real sense of my own horrors got in the way.

  “He didn’t do it,” I said.

  Oscar’s jaw dropped. Everyone turned to look at me, waiting for me to say something else. I waited myself to hear what I’d say next. How did I know Danny didn’t do it? I had no idea. Something told me he hadn’t done it, some piece of information that clicked when I heard it, then went out of my mind before I could put things together. It was useless to try to explain this, so I walked away.

  Later, when Nigel left and everyone else had gone about his business, such as it was, Carl leaned closer to me as I poured his drink. I’d been wondering if he’d seen Danny and Angelina, as I had, and maybe was the person who dropped the dime. He must have read my mind. “Danny wasn’t the only person with Angelina that night,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw her and somebody walking on West End Avenue.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t Danny?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I didn’t really pay attention. But I think the guy was white…and maybe wearing a suit.”

  “Don’t you know? Didn’t you recognize him? Didn’t you talk to her?”

  Carl’s eyes were sad like Snoopy’s. “I didn’t pay attention,” he said. “If I’d known he was going to murder her, I’d have run up for a look.”

  “I guess so,” I said absently. “But that doesn’t mean Danny didn’t get to her later. Maybe he freaked out because she’d left him for someone else.”

  “Maybe.” Carl’s eyes were still sad and his expression sagging after a long night of drinking scotch, yet he seemed to possess a patient sort of wisdom.

  “Did you tell the cops?”

  Carl shook his head. “What am I gonna say? Maybe I saw somebody, but I don’t know what he looked like. If I told them that, they’d say, ‘Could it have been Danny.’ I’d say ‘no.’ They’d say ‘How do you know if you don’t know what the person looked like?’ It’s a waste of time telling the cops. Still, I’d want to know who that person walking with her was.”

  “And who called the police to say she was with Danny.”

  We looked at each other for a few seconds. “You’re starting to sound like a detective,” Carl said. He’d finished his drink and was nudging his glass toward me, lest I neglect my primary role in his life. “Maybe Oscar would give you a raise if you cracked the case.”

  “I don’t want to crack a case. You read too many books. Why would I want to catch a murderer?” I dropped some ice cubes in his glass with one hand and poured with the other.

  “Maybe you believe in justice. Maybe you don’t want Danny to get screwed. More than likely, though, it has to do with Angelina’s sister, who seems to be your type. Whatever the reason, you’re the man for the job.”

  “Catching the murderer?”

  “Precisely.”

  “What if I get killed? Murderers kill people.”

  “Unarguably true,” Carl said, taking a healthy slug of his scotch. “You’d have to be careful.”

  “Why would I do that? Why don’t you?”

  “You have more at stake than I do. You, in fact, have taken responsibility for the two people most heavily involved. But I’d like to be kept informed.”

  Reuben arrived and behind him the rest of the last-call winos, drifting in from the other joints along Broadway that had sense enough to close up before four. This was the time of night when I made my living. I concentrated on my work, forcing myself to move faster and faster, planning far ahead so I never had to stop to think, just run, my fingers flying on the cash register keys, holding the liquor bottle in one hand, soda gun with the other, using the calluses between my thumb and forefinger to twist the caps off the beer bottles, glad-handing the guys I liked, making a joke, taking a joke, scooping money off the bar, sliding a beer past three or four regulars to Eric the Red at the end of the bar, keeping Oscar in Budweisers. High-speed life on Broadway.

  Carl joined the winos in the chase, settling in to serious drinking and the serious thoughts behind the booze. I kept his scotch full, charging him for every fourth or fifth drink, until he no longer noticed what I did. The booze hit its mark. He fought whatever battle it was with whatever held him captive, and, for that moment, after that ninth or tenth scotch, he had it on the run. He was coming out on top and would stagger off with the other winos into the Broadway night sure he had won, only to wake in the morning to find he hadn’t after all. Whatever it was he thought he’d fought off would still be there, perched on the bedpost, waiting for the night and the scotch and the next battle.

  I drank a couple of beers while closing up, then sat in the darkness at the bar. When I’d been there for a half-hour, I heard tapping on the window. It was Peter Finch.

  “I don’t suppose I could get a drink this late,” he said shyly. Not one of the winos, he didn’t know how things worked late at night. He thought I closed up the bar and went home.

  I gave him a scotch on the rocks. He looked shaken. “I didn’t know it was murder,” he said after his first swallow. “Thanks a lot.”

  Taller than me—and thinner—in pretty good shape, his light colored hair thinning in front, his face pale and thin, Peter always seemed serious and thoughtful, even more so now. “I stopped the interrogation,” he said. “They’re holding him on a drug charge, not murder.”

  “What happened? What did he say? Why did they arrest him?”

  “Someone called the police this morning…said he saw Danny with the girl around four or five in the morning the night—or morning—she was killed. Danny said he was here that night. He thought you could tell me something that can help him.”

  “I don’t know anything that would help him. The only thing I can tell you is Carl might have seen her with someone else that same night after I saw Danny with Angelina.”

  Peter’s eyes sprang open. “With Danny? Danny said he wasn’t with Angelina that night.”

  I shrugged.

  Whatever energy had been holding his face up gave out on him. “S
hit,” Peter said, downing the rest of his scotch in one swallow.

  Chapter Five

  A couple of mornings later I woke up once more in Betsy Blumberg’s bed. We’d hooked up at the Terrace in the early hours of the morning, drinking brandy at the bar and snorting coke in the ladies room in the basement. On one of the trips to the cellar, we began necking in the ladies room. Later, we staggered off into the night, wrestled each other down the street and into her building, where I opened her blouse and unbuckled her bra in the elevator while she opened my fly. We fondled our way to the fourteenth floor and fucked on the rug inside her apartment door before we were out of our clothes.

  “I thought you had a new girlfriend,” Betsy said in the morning as we ate bagels that she’d gone out to the corner for before I’d even pulled myself out of her bed.

  I didn’t say anything, though I knew what she was talking about.

  Betsy grumbled, “Angelina’s sister. I’ve seen you with her—a high-class broad.”

  “She’s very nice,” I said. “But she’s gone back to Massachusetts.”

  “What a thing to say! I saw you moon around after her, and all you can say is that she’s nice?” Betsy regarded me sadly. “You acted differently around her. I bet you haven’t even noticed. When she came into the bar that time, she was the most important person there for you. It’s never like that when I walk into anywhere.”

  “You just haven’t found your niche yet, Betsy.”

  “I don’t think I have one,” she said even more sadly.

  Betsy was easy, but not at all in the negative sense of the word. She was one of the good people who make it easy to get along with them, who don’t have prerequisites for friendship. It’s a way of being I like, one of the reasons I prefer the winos to many of the solid citizens I’ve run into. And I didn’t feel dishonest about sometimes fucking her because she knew I really did care for her.

  Why I was thinking this, sitting across a bagel from Betsy Blumberg, had to do with something I’d thought of the night before then lost in the fog: Betsy would know about men in the neighborhood.

  “Do you think Danny murdered Angelina?” I asked her.

  She looked at me strangely. “Don’t the police think he did?”

  “Do you?”

  She wrinkled her eyebrows and seemed to think about it.

  “Do you think he’s capable of it?” I asked when she didn’t say anything.

  “Every man I’ve ever met has seemed capable of murder.”

  “Including Danny?”

  “I guess,” she said thoughtfully. “But I wouldn’t think he’d kill Angelina; they were too much alike.”

  “Who do you think would?”

  “Someone who had a weird idea of her. Men made her into things. She was something different for everyone, like one of those women who make a living acting out men’s fantasies.”

  “Why not Danny, then?”

  “He’s like her, the both of them like they weren’t nearly hard enough for the city. Despite being cool and all that stuff, they were babies. Besides, Danny didn’t have hang-ups about women. Women like him. He’s really natural about sex. Not hung up on it, if you know what I mean.”

  Hung up on it myself, I wasn’t sure I did. My own fetishes rose before me: tiny feet and slim-legged girls in summer dresses. What was Angelina in my fantasies?

  Betsy might have a point, but I wasn’t about to get involved in other people’s sex fantasies; this was too sordid and unpleasant a pursuit even for me. Privacy was a reasonable right. Still, I wondered what sex fantasies Angelina knew about. I thought about who in the neighborhood she might have slept with. Thinking this over, I got my internal cameras going and began a newsreel of how she looked with some of Oscar’s regulars. The whole process turned perverted enough to make me stop. But Betsy was onto something. Perverted sex had everything to do with Angelina’s life; it must have something to do with her death.

  Betsy, munching on her bagel, looked thoughtful. Like lots of people who didn’t make any pretenses to be so, she was smart. Why was she so unhappy then? Why didn’t David fall in love with her?

  “How well did you get to know Angelina?” I asked.

  She looked at me nervously before she answered. “Not so well and then pretty well. She was needy and loving and really vulnerable.” Betsy laughed. “So needy she made me feel together and in control…” No longer munching, Betsy stared at me like I knew a terrible secret about her. “…We were lovers,” she said in a whisper.

  “Oh?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “How would I know?”

  “I thought you knew by the way you looked.…I thought Angelina would have told you. I thought that was why you were asking me about her.…I thought she would tell you everything.”

  “I guess not.”

  Betsy and I went over all the men in the neighborhood. I trusted her instincts, not that I thought she could intuit who the murderer was, but that, like Angelina, she knew about men and what they wanted. She thought that the Boss, Oscar, Rocky, Reuben, Danny, Eric, Carl, Duffy, and Nigel were possible murderers.

  “That certainly narrows the field.”

  “You asked.”

  “What about me?”

  She looked into my eyes. “No, not you.” Her answer was serious and her voice kind. I was touched by what she said. All too aware of my own depravities, I needed someone to think kindly of me.

  “And Ozzie, too,” she added as an afterthought.

  “Ozzie?”

  “She had an affair with Ozzie.”

  “With Ozzie?” Ozzie!? Why did anything surprise me? Jesus, Ozzie! I didn’t want to picture beetle-eyed, Alabama-accented, tow-haired Ozzie naked with Angelina. I couldn’t conjure him up as a lover of anyone. But with no encouragement from me, my mind’s eye pictured a naked Ozzie with an erection. It was repulsive. Yet he’d had a fifteen-year-old wife. Why not replace her with Angelina? His wife died. Why not reenact it with Angelina? It was crazy. But maybe Ozzie was. It made its own perverted sense. Not only could I now picture Ozzie as a naked lover, I could picture him as a murderer.

  “There’s another thing,” Betsy said. “That night in the Terrace, after Angelina was killed, before I knew about it and before you came in, Ozzie was in the bar and he was completely ossified. He could barely stand up. I think he was delirious. He was always talking to himself anyway, but this time he kept looking up with this horror on his face and talking to an empty barstool as if someone was there.”

  “The ghost of Banquo?”

  “Who?”

  “A play I was in once. Never mind.”

  “Nigel and Carl carried him home. Maybe he told them what he was afraid of.”

  ***

  That night, Friday night, Janet Carter appeared in Oscar’s, about a half-hour after I got to work. Stopping what I was doing, I looked at her for a long time. She fidgeted with her purse, danced around the barstool before she sat down, began to say something three or four times before she finally ordered a bourbon and water in a snippy, challenging tone as if I might not give it to her if she didn’t sound determined.

  “It’s nice to see you,” I said.

  The tension drained from her face, and she almost smiled. “I came back,” she announced. She didn’t need to say why she’d come; it was written on her face. She could barely contain her eagerness. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  I didn’t answer, instead made myself busy around the bar while she sipped her drink. She wasn’t really a drinker, even though she came on like one. She drank the drinkers’ drinks and seemed to be one of the boys, but if you watched carefully, which none of the regulars ever did, you’d notice that even on the nights she stayed until closing, she never drank more than two or three drinks.

  “If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll ask someone else. They arrested that person Danny that we saw in the restaurant. Then they let him go again. Is that what happened?”

  I didn’t know w
here she got her information, probably some contact in Springfield with the police grapevine. “Nothing happened. They arrested Danny on a drug charge. They haven’t charged him with killing Angelina.”

  “But he did, didn’t he—he killed her.”

  I held back an instinctive rush to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about and shouldn’t be throwing accusations around. Some wisdom told me trying to set the record would be a waste of time. Something about the way she came on bothered me. It was her eagerness: she was bloodthirsty.

  “You feel vindicated that they found someone to pin the murder on, right?”

  This I said in pretty nasty tone and it knocked her back a couple of notches. “I don’t feel vindicated at all…” she stammered. “…I feel worse than I felt before I knew who killed Angelina.”

  I felt a rush of anger, but once more yanked it back. “It’s just as well.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Like the cops, she’d settle for wishful thinking that got the case solved. Like them, she wouldn’t look at anything that might spoil the flimsy truth she’d latched on to. Once more, I wasn’t sure I liked her very much after all. She wanted me to lie just as she did. That’s what she came in for. Join her in letting Danny take the rap. He’d take the jolt. We’d each forgive ourselves for betraying Angelina: He’d take the rap for all of us. If I went along, some flickering light in her eyes told me, we could spend some time together on this trip to the city, some final mourning and consoling, maybe leading to some comforting in the sack. Yet something in those same eyes, some hope or fear or yearning, wasn’t letting her go. Part of her needed to get to the real stuff, too.

  “Can’t you just say you were wrong?” She challenged me with her dark brown eyes.

  “You want me to say he’s guilty?”

  Her eyes and her face broke rank, even her posture began to sag. She couldn’t get rid of the doubt, so she tried anger again. “How can you keep thinking he didn’t do it? What’s he to you? What’s with you? Some kind of white guilt?”