Beware the Solitary Drinker

by Cornelius Lehane

  “Good evening, Father,” a cultivated voice said gently. “What might I do for you?”

  “I know this is a terribly unusual request,” I said, modulating my voice, speaking carefully in the tone of one used to addressing an audience of worshippers. I built my character around a large church in Manhattan, where I was a veteran, first-string curate. Holy though I was, I was a man of the people. I knew the score. I was a forgiver. That’s why sinners came to me. I wasn’t going to throw the first stone. “I would like an audience with one of your employees.”

  “I understand, Father,” she said, softly and reassuringly. “We are the pinnacle of discretion.”

  I paused while that registered. “Uh, that’s not what I had in mind,” I said, almost losing my character. “You understand I can’t reveal the concerns of my client. But if I can speak in complete confidence.”

  “Of course,” said the woman, a little more cautiously.

  “My client wishes me to speak on his behalf to a woman named Patricia.”

  “About what?”

  “I can’t say, madam, as you, I’m sure, understand. But it is of great importance to him and of little trouble to her, I can assure you.”

  “How do I know who’s sending you?” Her carefully modulated tones were slipping a little too.

  I whispered, “He’s quite broken up, but you might have one word with him, if you’re careful.” I handed the phone to Carl.

  He muffled his voice and tried to make it sound cracked and strained. “Yes,” he said. “Ms. Trinkle. I’m Patricia’s friend, Nigel.”

  He listened for a second. “Yes, please,” he said. Then, I yanked the phone away and whimpered into it for him. A poet is not an actor.

  Returning to my priestly role, I said, “I’m sorry, the poor man—perhaps I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Yes, Father,” the woman said. “I know him. I’ll ask Patricia. But it will be up to her.”

  In a minute she came back to the phone and told me Patricia would meet me at four the next afternoon in a lounge on Madison Avenue between 39th and 40th.

  In the morning, I went to a wardrobe shop over on 50th to pick up a priest’s outfit that I put on in their dressing room. Murray the clothier, a long-time friend, wasn’t in the store. The new guy was a pain in the ass.

  “Is this for a part?” he asked sharply. “You can’t use my costumes for panhandling.”

  I showed him my Equity card.

  The girl I soon spoke to in the living room-like lounge on Madison introduced herself as Patricia.

  She wore a short yellow wool skirt that slid up her thigh as she sat down beside me on the couch and crossed her legs. She sat close enough for me to touch her, and I could feel immediately why someone might pay two hundred dollars: her legs were slender and muscular, her body taut, her breasts high and firm and bra-less against her maroon sweater. I also liked her smile, the way the auburn ringlets of her hair curled around her pale forehead, and her dark brown eyes. She looked quite young and being young talked easily about herself. She seemed flattered that a priest wanted to talk to her.

  When she ordered a split of champagne for fifty dollars, I realized the lounge was a front for the pleasure palace around the corner. “You can drink the champagne,” she said. “I don’t really want it.” Her leg brushed against my hand as she settled in comfortably beside me. She didn’t wear stockings, and her skin felt cool.

  “Me neither,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

  She stretched, so her breasts pushed against her sweater. She twisted in her seat to face me, and her skirt slid farther up her thigh. My priestly character was falling apart. I wanted to bury my face in her lap.

  “I’m on duty in a little while,” she said. “So this has to be pretty quick.”

  “What’s on duty?”

  “I need to move around the bar and socialize.”

  “Socialize?”

  “Make men horny.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s my job.” She smiled into my eyes.

  “What if I want to spend more time with you?”

  “You got a credit card? For a hundred dollars we can go in back in private for a while. Otherwise, I have to move around up here and socialize.”

  “I don’t have a credit card,” I told her honestly. “And I can’t afford a hundred dollars.” I regained my composure, handed her a twenty-dollar bill, and asked her to sit for as long as she could.

  She talked easily about herself, no pretenses. It was as if she needed to tell her story. When we had talked long enough for me to have a good sense of her, I began to like her. She reminded me of Angelina. I wondered what might have happened if she’d become a waitress instead of a prostitute. She’d come to New York from New Orleans to be a dancer, she said. From a strict religious upbringing. Her father was a fundamentalist who, just before she left home, made her strip naked before he beat her. First, she was an exotic dancer. “Now I’m an escort,” she said. “I’m not really a prostitute. I only go to bed with men I want to go to bed with.” She seemed certain she was moving up in the world.

  “Nigel?”

  “My relationships are private,” she said primly.

  I told her about Angelina. She kept her eyes on mine while I spoke. When I finished, I was holding her hand. “I’m trying to find someone who killed a girl. A young pretty girl who wanted to be a star, just like you.”

  She nodded, her eyes narrowed into seriousness. Serious, she looked even younger.

  “Tell me about Nigel,” I said.

  “Everybody gets their kicks in weird ways.”

  “Does he hurt you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “But it’s rough?”

  “He takes me instead of me giving. He talks hard, but he doesn’t hit me.”

  “What does he talk about?”

  “Not much. He talks dirty for a while, yells right into my face about my being a prick teaser and a slut. Sometimes he pushes me. In the beginning, I was scared. But I got used to him. He tells me he loves me, and he says he’s sorry. Sometimes he cries. Then we fuck.”

  “What do you wear?”

  “Something like this,” she said, lifting the edge of her little skirt to show me, “and no top.” She ran her hand across her breasts. My mouth watered, but I had years of training. I kept my concentration.

  “What does he wear?”

  “Right,” she said. “That is a little weird. He always wears the same old college jacket.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said after thinking hard for a few minutes.

  “How often does he visit you?”

  “Every Wednesday night.”

  Wednesday night didn’t sound right. The answer came too quickly. Angelina had been killed on Wednesday night. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.”

  “He never misses?” I was badgering her.

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “I’m pretty sure.” She seemed hurt that I didn’t believe her.

  “Maybe you forgot.”

  “Maybe,” she said in a small voice.

  I sat with her for a little while longer, but I had to get out before I blew my cover. Something winsome and charming about her, a kind of openness I didn’t expect, made me not want to leave her. I also imagined my hands wrapped around the firm young breasts beneath her maroon sweater. I put my hand on her leg just above the knee and looked into her eyes when she handed me back the twenty. “God, you’re beautiful,” I said.

  “Do you think God understands?” she asked seriously.

  “I’m sure he does,” I said, removing my hand.

  ***

  Janet and Kevin arrived back at Oscar’s close to midnight Friday night when the place was hopping. I didn’t have time to talk to them. I was flying, and I needed to make some money to pay back that fifty bucks for the horse piss champagne I’d shared with Patricia, so, since Pop was back in town,
I asked Janet to take Kevin to my father’s house in Brooklyn for the night. Ntango was at the bar, so I asked how much he’d charge to take them. It really was a hell of a fare from the Upper West Side to Flatbush.

  “For you, Mr. Brian,” he proclaimed in his half-teasing manner, “never a charge to go anywhere.”

  I still had the twenty the hooker returned to me, so I gave it to him. I planned to make the fifty back off Oscar anyway.

  An hour later, Janet called to tell me Ntango picked up a fare to the airport from my father’s building, and my father offered her the spare room. I could barely hear over the bellowing of the drunks, but I finally grasped that she would stay there overnight, and I should come out there in the morning.

  “How about if I join you late tonight in the spare room?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Janet.

  Since Janet wouldn’t be around, I thought about going back to Patricia. The two hundred dollar nut talked me out of it, so I went home alone and fantasized about cuddly hookers, big brown eyes, short yellow skirts over long, slim legs, maroon sweaters lifting to expose firm pale breasts as white as lilies.

  Around eleven the next morning, I took the subway out to Flatbush and found my father, my son, and Janet eating bagels at the dining room table.

  “We didn’t find anything,” Janet said challengingly, as if it was my fault. “We went through court records and the Stamford Daily News clip files, but we didn’t find out anything on Nigel. We couldn’t even find a birth certificate.”

  “That happens,” I said.

  “Next time it can happen to you.” She glared at me, urging me to say something else so she could berate me some more.

  “Why are you mad at me?”

  “We went to Nigel’s father’s house,” Janet said.

  “He turned the dogs on us,” Kevin added. “Boy what a place, a big mansion like a castle. With a butler and everything.” Kevin was excited enough to have misplaced his usual nonchalance for the time being.

  My father cleared his throat for attention. “Your son is unduly impressed by the trappings of wealth.”

  “Yeah,” I shot back, “well, your son spent yesterday afternoon in a whorehouse.”

  Janet choked on her bagel. Kevin’s eyes opened wide. I never know what’s going to impress that kid. Before Janet threw her coffee, I explained myself.

  “That sounds like an excuse,” Janet said. “We’re wasting our time on Nigel.”

  I put some cream cheese on a bagel and asked my pop if he’d boil me some coffee.

  “Ha, ha,” he said.

  “They didn’t exactly let the dogs loose on us, but they do have dogs patrolling the grounds,” Janet said when my father went to the kitchen. She told me that the butler took her message and came back with a lawyer’s card, saying Mr. Barthelme wouldn’t talk to me, and if I wanted anything else I should call the lawyer. “I called,” said Janet. “But the lawyer wouldn’t answer any questions.…That’s not unusual, you know,” she went on, speaking rapidly, in case I’d mistakenly planned on disagreeing with her. “Don’t think it means they’re hiding something, because it doesn’t. It just means Mr. Barthelme’s interest isn’t served by talking to us, and the lawyer’s job is to protect his client’s interest. So he said not to talk to us.”

  Janet was on a roll, lowering her head like a bull about to charge, leaning across the table to make sure she had my attention. “This has been all wrong.” Why didn’t I follow up on Carl? she wanted to know. What about Reuben? He’d had time to cover all his tracks. And maybe Danny did do it. How did I know that he was such a good guy?

  “I’m not going to do what you say anymore. I’m going to do this on my own. You keep making me do the wrong thing.”

  She would not be comforted. I didn’t understand her anger; maybe I didn’t want to. She pissed me off, so I let her leave by herself. After she left, I moped for a while and then talked with my father, while Kevin’s video game boinged and beeped in the background. I told Pop about Janet’s mother’s version of Angelina’s rape.

  He thought for a long time, then asked, “Did you ever learn why she came to New York or why you came to know her?”

  I recapped what Janet had found out about Carl and my feeling that Angelina might have come looking for someone on the Upper West Side.

  Once more, he thought for a long time. Pop wasn’t self-conscious about long silences. “Have you considered blackmail?” he asked.

  “No. Who’s blackmailing whom?” We sat at the dining room table, Pop in his customary seat in the armchair at the head.

  “The girl would be the blackmailer. Who do you think might have done something in the past they wouldn’t want discovered?”

  I did a quick count of Oscar’s rogues’ gallery. “Everyone, as far as I can tell.”

  “Two threads in the stories you’ve told interest me. The first is the businessman who doesn’t fit with the girl’s lifestyle, yet has drinks with her. I don’t know why you haven’t tried to track him down. The second is the girl who accuses the man of raping her and turns out to be from the same town as the one she accuses. This one I can help you follow up on. What was her name?”

  “Sharon Collins. But I don’t see the connection between her and the businessman.”

  “I didn’t say there was a connection.”

  Pop went once more to his spring-open phone book and made two or three phone calls. “Sharon Collins went to New York six months ago. The captain said she’d been arrested for prostitution in Stamford. He didn’t know she was back in town. Nigel Barthelme, he never heard of. He didn’t know Barthelme had a son. Barthelme’s long been divorced, lives alone.”

  Pop also called to make sure a friend of his still worked for the Stamford Daily News. “Go see him. Albert Hawkins.” Pop’s eyes took on the faraway quality they always did when he traveled back into his memory. “He’s a fighter. He held one of the first half-dozen books from the Newspaper Guild. Blacklisted. Spent ten years laying linoleum and another ten covering Zoning Commission meetings, until they discovered affirmative action and made him an editor. He’d know what went on in Stamford.”

  ***

  I met Albert Hawkins in the Daily News newsroom Monday afternoon. I hadn’t slept except for dozing for forty-five minutes on the train out there. Monday was my day off, so I was hanging in for the duration. Albert Hawkins had a broad black face that wrinkled around the eyes and mouth when he smiled, curly hair with gray specks scattered through like snow flakes, a soft southern accent, thick working man’s hands. I’d met bunches of my father’s former comrades when I traveled around the country in the Sixties to this peace demonstration and that anti-war conference, thinking I was part of a revolution that was much smarter than my father’s had been.

  The old comrades put us up, we with our long hair, guitars, and sleeping bags, feeding us and listening to our tales of tear gas and billy clubs, cheering us on in our battles with the establishment. They were the folks we went to for contributions for the April Days of Protest or for Summer of Peace, and the people we went to for bail when things went sour.

  I told him about Nigel and Sharon Collins. Albert was a big man with a raspy voice, quick, intelligent eyes, and a brisk manner, as if he were used to getting things done. At first, he looked at me hard and long. Then, he chuckled. “You’re Kevin McNulty’s son all right. Your dad knows me all too well. Edwin Barthelme owns the floor you’re standing on. He owns the paper.” Albert cuffed me on the shoulder and grabbed his jacket off the coat rack. “I’ve got a file at home that might interest you.”

  Albert drove me by the Barthelme place before he took me to his home after work. He wouldn’t hear of a hotel; he went back too far with my old man. I would sleep on his foldout couch.

  A ten-foot-high stone wall wrapped around the Barthelme estate, which was at the Stamford-Greenwich border on the top of a hill overlooking a golf course and the town of Stamford beyond. We sat for twenty minutes or so in the driveway of
another walled estate across the street and looked at the wooden gate that blocked the entrance to the Barthelme place while Albert Hawkins told me an incredible story.

  “A deal with the devil, for sure,” said Albert. “But in his case the devil took the form of God.”

  He looked steadily at the estate across the street from us. “Edwin was a copy editor at the old World,” he began. “He might even have been there in your father’s time. Not a particularly good editor, kind of nondescript. During the first Guild organizing drive, the publisher did a management shake-up. Bernie Ross, the managing editor, was a good guy, so I guess he didn’t fight the union hard enough. One day we came to work, Bernie was gone and Barthelme had taken over.”

  Albert looked at me; he was holding back a smile. “That’s only the beginning,” he said cheerfully. “A few months later, I came into work to find that the publisher was gone and Barthelme had taken his place.” Now Albert let go and laughed heartily.

  “Some years ago, Edwin hooked up with a group of backers—rich, right-wing religious fundamentalists. He kissed their asses, and the money rolled in. He bought this paper, cut the editorial staff, brought on old war horses like me, who couldn’t command big salaries, subscribed to news services instead of hiring reporters, and everybody got rich. Except the workers, of course.” He laughed again. “They bought up small and mid-sized dailies like this one all over the country, using the same approach.

  “Everything was fine until his son got in trouble, and I know for a fact that he did. The trouble had to do with sex and a young girl and would have ruined Edwin Barthelme. He’d have lost his backing from the holy rollers, so he squashed the story and disappeared his son.”

  Albert lived with his wife in a brick garden apartment. The walls of the living room and the upstairs hallway were lined with bookcases, overflowing with books, many of the same old International Publishers editions my father had on his bookshelves. We drank a martini before dinner, then ate pot roast, mashed potatoes, and collard greens. Afterward, we drank coffee and Albert looked through his file.

  He sat surrounded by six or seven piles of that old brown newsprint reporters used to type their stories on in the old days. It was the paper my father had brought home from work for me to write and draw on when I was a kid.