“The night my sister was murdered?” Janet’s voice was very quiet.
“I’m sorry.” He cast his eyes down, his face that of a sad, aging man.
“Uh, about that ten years, Mr. Barthelme?” I asked, interrupting the solemn silence.
He swung around to face me, and his eyes suddenly flamed with rage like I had landed a punch below the belt after the bell.
“I wondered why you hadn’t seen Nigel in ten years,” I said.
“That’s our business, sir. It doesn’t concern you.”
***
The three of us waited for the elevator in strained silence. Janet paid our thanks. Edwin Barthelme stood beside her by the elevator door. I was struck by the equality we had achieved. No longer propped up by mystique, he seemed as bewildered and overcome by life as the rest of us.
As soon as the elevator doors closed, Janet moved to the far corner and glared at me. “You’re awful,” she said. “How could you be so awful?”
“Awful?” I had no idea what had happened.
“How can you be so unfeeling?”
“Unfeeling?”
“You just trampled right over that man’s feelings. You belong in that skid-row bar with your bums for friends. You don’t know how to act among decent people.”
“Being rich makes you decent?”
“You just can’t get over that, can you? You can’t forgive anyone for being successful or well-to-do.”
“I thought we wanted to find out something.”
“We did. You didn’t have to act like a thug.”
“Thug? Mr. Suave back there is tougher than all the thugs on Broadway. He’d chew them up and spit them out, then go out to dinner at the Four Seasons. You’re the one with a problem.” My voice rose in opposition to the descent of the elevator. “You’re the one who thinks that asshole is better than the folks I know on Broadway because he’s rich. He’s rich off the backs of his workers and the old ladies he dumps into the street.” I was puffing when the elevator touched ground. The doors opened and Janet stomped out, through the lobby and off down Fifth Avenue. I gave her the finger from the doorway.
Then I walked across the street to Rockefeller Center to look at the murals of the workers. Mad at myself for getting mad, I moped through the building where Diego Rivera had attempted to memorialize Lenin. Rockefeller’s dad made him take it down. I remembered the poem by E.B. White that ended, “But after all, it’s my wall.…‘We’ll see if it is,’ said Rivera.”
***
The next morning the phone, clanging like a fire alarm, woke me at ten-thirty, approximately four hours after I’d passed out on my bed. The night before, Ntango and the Eritreans held a reunion at the end of the bar, and Ntango kept tightening me up with blow. Consequently, I drank too much and stayed up too late, and couldn’t fully remember coming home.
Janet came directly to the point. “I want to see the movie you picked up that night in Rocky’s cellar,” she said.
At first, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid of what my voice would sound like.
“Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I croaked.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m sick.”
“Did you get drunk?”
“I don’t remember.…Why do you want to see the movie? Angelina isn’t in it.”
“How do you know what’s in it?”
***
I told her I’d meet her at three in front of Oscar’s and went back to sleep. When I woke up again I still felt shaky and sick. Nonetheless, I called Carl to ask him to set up the projector in the cellar, this being Rocky’s weekend in Staten Island, but Carl hung up on me.
I called Eric the Red, told him I had some porno flicks and asked him to pick up Rocky’s movie projector and meet me at Oscar’s.
After poached eggs and bacon at Tom’s, I walked down the street a few blocks and found Eric and Janet standing in front of the darkened Oscar’s. I wasn’t sure what Janet was after. But I was pretty sure the Boss had already gotten rid of the films with Angelina in them, so I wasn’t that worried.
“Why isn’t Oscar open in the daytime,” Janet asked as I unlocked the door.
“He used to be but no one came in. Our customers only come out at night.”
“For good reason,” said Eric.
Eric set up the projector; the joint was dark enough to run the film on the wall. The first figure that appeared when the film came into focus was Carl van Sagan, wearing only a leering grin on his face, otherwise bare-ass naked but with his engorged penis at full salute, walking toward the camera and a dark-haired woman in a supine position, whose hair and back were all that were visible. The camera switched angles quickly to show the woman’s face. She was young and waifishly pretty, and looked familiar. Her expression was enthusiastically lewd, suggesting she couldn’t wait for Carl and his penis to arrive, but the sadness and fear in her eyes belied the enthusiasm.
“Isn’t that Carl?” Janet sputtered in a shocked tone of voice somewhere between a whisper and a gasp.
“Jesus,” said Eric, in a whispered gasp of his own. “You can’t. Where the fuck did you get this? Turn it off, man.” He reached for the projector.
I said, “No!”
“You don’t understand, man,” Eric moaned.
“My God!” This time, Janet really shouted. There in front of us, his brilliant white teeth shining through his black beard, his body hairier than most bears’, his weapon, as they say, at battle ready, was Eric the Red. Janet covered her face with her hands, sinking down in her seat. I shut off the projector.
“I told you, man. This is crazy,” said Eric. “You nuts?” He went behind the bar and poured himself a half a glass of vodka, which he threw down in one slug. “Why you do this? I’m embarrassed.”
“I didn’t know you and Carl were movie stars.”
“You should mind your own business.” He poured another shot. “Just once…” Eric said. “Someone didn’t show up.…The Boss and Rocky gave us about a pound of blow. We all got naked to have a party. Rocky took pictures.”
“Can we watch the rest of the movie,” Janet asked.
Eric blushed. I could see the red through the black of his beard.
“Who was the girl?” I asked Eric.
“I don’t know. She worked for them. She’d been in here a couple of times—not that night. Oscar told me she gave Rocky blow jobs for nose candy.”
I remembered her, then. Mannequin-thin with big brown eyes. She came on to me the first night she was ever in the bar. But I didn’t want anything to do with her. She scared me. I thought she was crazy.
My memory formed a picture of her; then it formed a picture of Nigel. It was a couple of weeks after Angelina had arrived in town. Nigel came in to Oscar’s with her. The skinny girl watched him and Angelina, stared at them for a long time, then this girl began screaming at Nigel and pointing, coming at him from the far end of the bar, screaming. I grabbed her and wrestled her out of the place. She’d come at him with her claws. “You raped me,” she screamed at Nigel.… “He did,” she screamed at Angelina, who like all of us watched her in shock. “He raped me,” she screamed. Nigel weathered the accusations totally unruffled except for the sick expression on his face. He kept telling her to calm down, asking her name, trying to talk to her.
Reuben grabbed Nigel around the neck, as if he would run out the door. But Nigel had only been smiling sickly and trying to talk to the girl. It was the kind of situation where, if you try denying it, you only begin to look guiltier. The girl’s hysteria and the fact that she wanted to fuck almost every man in the bar before her encounter with Nigel didn’t do her argument any good. She was about falling-down drunk and didn’t make sense.
Reuben took over as her protector, so no one else cared very much. She didn’t want Reuben as a protector, it turned out, and since he made it impossible for her to get rid of him, I finally pushed her out the door and into a cab. The whole thing was wei
rd. Sloppy drunk and zombie-like, as if she’d done too many Quaaludes, she tried to pull me into the cab with her, holding on to me and kissing me. I remembered she looked so bony she should feel hard like a bag of sticks; instead she felt soft and yielding. I wanted to go with her. But she really was too crazy.
An hour later the cops showed up in the bar and took Nigel out. The next night Nigel was back. Someone, not her, had called the cops. So they checked out her story, Nigel told us, and decided she was wacky. She never came back to Oscar’s. Remembering how she felt in my arms, I’d actually hoped she would come back, but I never saw her anywhere again.
I didn’t tell any of this to Janet because I didn’t want to set her off after Nigel, and if Eric remembered, he kept quiet about it. “Do you think you could find out her name?” I asked Eric.
“She was pretty wasn’t she,” Janet said, no longer giggling.
“Too skinny,” said Eric. “Like a rope.”
I’d had enough of skin flicks for the day, so Janet and I walked up Broadway to have lunch at Tom’s.
“Does that make Eric and Carl suspects now?” she asked. She was serious.
“Not Carl, he was working.” We walked some more. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a fleet of squad cars in front of Betsy’s building. “Come to think of it, not Eric either. He was with me.”
“Oh,” said Janet, her tone suspicious again. “Where were you?”
I started to tell her I was with the fluegelhorn player, and had left Eric in the sack with her friend, but I thought better of it. “We were drinking in Oscar’s,” I said.
“Any other witnesses?”
“No.” Maybe Eric had gotten up and gone for Angelina. Maybe Carl had sneaked away from his post for a half-hour. No one told the truth, not even me.
“A likely story,” said Janet, once more in that superior tone that suggested she sullied her reputation by associating with me.
The fact that the cop cars were in front of Betsy’s apartment building finally dawned on me. I got really scared as soon as I realized what it might mean. I began running.
“What?” Janet screamed after me. “What happened?”
I ran as fast as I could. It couldn’t be, I told myself. Not Betsy, too. Pictures of her grumpy, sad, and cheerful face ran through my memory. My lungs hurt. I think I’d forgotten to breathe while I ran. In the doorway, I ran into Sheehan. His face was grim.
“Your pal Ozzie bought it,” he said.
At first, his words went right through me. It took a while for Ozzie’s death to become real. Soon it did sink in, and sadness for Ozzie replaced the sadness for Betsy.
I walked away without another word to Sheehan. Maybe he expected my compliments on a job well done. But, in truth, I felt just as bad about Ozzie as I did Angelina. Poor pathetic Ozzie shooting it out with the cops seemed just as much a cold-blooded murder as Angelina’s.
Forgetting about Janet, I walked away, too depressed and disgusted to even be angry, across Broadway toward my own apartment. It was over. Janet had her vengeance. I didn’t feel any good at all about catching Angelina’s murderer. I’d fingered Ozzie. I should have figured the cops would come down on him like storm troopers and one way or another scare him to death. I wasn’t cut out for rooting out the bad guys. I never could tell the bad guys from the good guys.
Except this wasn’t what happened. Breathless, Janet caught up with me at the door to my building. “Where are you going? Why didn’t you wait?”
“I can’t stand this shit,” I said. “I liked Ozzie, the poor bastard.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“What?” My head spun. I sat down on the doorstep.
“Are you all right?” For a moment I only noticed the concern in Janet’s eyes, and how pretty they were.
“No. I’m not all right,” I said. “What happened?”
She looked perplexed. “Someone murdered Ozzie. Didn’t you listen?”
“Who?”
“No one knows.”
“The cops didn’t?”
“Of course not.”
But as my head cleared, I still wasn’t sure. I told Sheehan that we might have something on the Boss. The Boss gets a tip. I tell Sheehan Ozzie might be the murderer or—as I should have known and didn’t and Sheehan would have figured out—knew who the murderer was, and Ozzie gets bumped off.
Chapter Eight
I kept my suspicions to myself, not so much because I wanted to keep anything from Janet, but the suspicions were insubstantial, unformulated, like daydreams; they hadn’t come together enough to be formed into words. I did tell her that when Sheehan told me Ozzie had been killed, I thought he meant he was shot when the cops came to get him.
“Why would they come to get him?”
“I told Sheehan Danny saw Ozzie in the building lobby the night Angelina was killed.”
Janet’s eyes widened. “You don’t think—”
“What I think is whoever killed Angelina found out Ozzie saw him or her. I don’t know if the cops announced this. But I give you eight-to-five they grab Danny again.”
***
That night a harried and angry Max Christianson showed up at the bar around nine before the winos had arrived and while the small dinner crowd was munching away on Eric’s Calves Liver Grandmère, the liver and onions his grandmother used to serve him back in Yugoslavia.
Max’s face was thin and haggard to begin with, his body as taut as one of his guitar strings. On a good night, he broke a guitar string four or five times. On this night, he looked like one of those strings wound to the breaking point.
“The cops just picked up Danny again. The fuckers. He pushed one of them, so they knocked him down the stairs.” Max’s eyes darted around like a pinball. “Handcuffed, the bastards.”
Peter Finch showed up a few minutes later to meet Max. He ordered a martini. I used the mixing glass and stirred the drink with the bar spoon, the spoon not the handle, until the glass frosted over, then poured it in front of him, the amount in the mixing glass filling exactly the stem glass I’d placed there. Both he and Max watched me mix the drink and pour it. It felt good to be able to do something correctly and precisely.
“Very good,” Peter said after taking a sip. “I’ll take a six pack.”
“That bad?”
“Worse. They’re charging him on two murders. Now he has a black eye, so they’re adding resisting arrest. It won’t be so easy to get him out this time.”
“He didn’t resist arrest.” Max turned on Peter.
Peter looked at him over his martini. “When the cops slap you around and it shows, they charge you with resisting arrest.”
“Are they saying he killed Ozzie?”
Peter nodded, then finished his martini like he really meant to drink a six pack. I made him another.
“How was Ozzie killed?”
“He was shot twice—executed—while he slept. They found a gun in a sewer grate near Danny’s apartment building.”
Max shook his head. “Danny never had a gun. The gun he used to fire would have taken the building down.”
***
When I told all this to Janet on the phone in the morning, she wanted to call Peter to get the story straight. I’d already told her the story straight, so I didn’t know why she needed to do that. The next thing I knew, she called back to tell me she was having dinner with him that night.
“I thought you were supposed to be helping. So now Danny can rot in jail while you to go off to a fucking fancy restaurant to have dinner!”
“Everyone eats dinner,” she said primly. “Besides it’s my first date since I’ve been in New York.”
“What about me?”
“You weren’t a date. You picked me up.”
***
That afternoon, by accident, I found Reuben at the West End. I just wandered in that direction, but I must have had a hunch he would be there looking for the Barnard girls. Half the degenerates on the Upper West Side claimed to
have fathered children by Barnard girls over the years. This said something about aspiration in America. Reuben was genial, sober, and alone so I sat down and took my chances, asking him a couple of questions.
“Why do you think Ozzie was killed?” I asked for openers.
“How should I know?”
“I was just wondering why anyone would kill someone,” I said as if to myself.
Reuben sipped his drink, staring straight ahead.
Since I couldn’t figure out how to lead up to the questions I wanted to ask, I considered for a few seconds of silence what advice my father would give. I was sure he would say, “If that’s the question you want answered, ask it.” So I did.
“Did you ever kill anyone?” I asked.
Reuben turned toward me with thirty years of pain cascading through his eyes. He didn’t answer, just stared at me. I didn’t want to make him lie, but a perverted form of discretion kept me from saying I knew he murdered his wife.
“May you never know how it feels,” Reuben said, throwing back the three fingers of dark rum in his glass.
“Danny’s been arrested again.”
Reuben nodded. “When I first came to New York, this was one of the few bars in the city where whites and blacks drank together.” We surveyed the bar together. The West End wasn’t much to look at. The bar loomed in front of you as soon as you opened the door. It stretched off into the distance, made the far turn like the track at Yonkers and circled back, leaving room against the side wall for a few narrow booths and space for the standees. A workingman’s steam table lunch counter stood to the left of the door; tables and game machines lined the back wall. Sometime in its more recent history a jazz room had been added by breaking through the wall to what had been the store next door. The jazz was real, the West End a historical monument.
“The Beats used to drink here,” Reuben said. He looked away. “I met my wife here.”
I knew without asking which one he meant.
“Didn’t the cops check you out? Oscar told them you were the killer.”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “If Oscar told them, they figured I didn’t do it.” After sipping his replenished drink, he went on. “They did check me out. Maybe I’m the fall guy if they can’t pin it on Danny. I was home in bed. No one saw me.” He drank. I signaled the bartender for another round.
Beware the Solitary Drinker Page 14