by D. W. Buffa
“Scotch and soda,” I said in a whispered shout.
I laid a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and watched the bartender take it with one hand while he set the drink in front of me with the other. While the bartender rang up the sale on a refurbished bronze cash register just a few feet away, I was hunched over the bar, running my fingers along the base of the glass. He stacked the change in front of me, and with the same silent question took another order from someone else. Lifting my eyes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the other side of the bar. All around me people seemed to be having a good time, talking, telling stories, making jokes, and laughing every chance they got. I was older than most of them, and much older than some.
I felt out of place and alone.
After I finished the drink, I ordered another, and then one after that. It had been a long time since I had come to a bar by myself and done nothing but drink. I had almost forgotten the wonderful self-indulgence of self-pity, the free fall into the full enjoyment of every felt emotion, the pure untrammeled luxury of caring nothing for what might happen next, the fervent belief that you could tell the world to go screw itself in one breath and have everyone love you in the next. I had another drink, and another, and I was almost there, the lucid madness of intoxi-cation.
I saw my reflection in the mirror, and I seemed older than I had just a few minutes before, and everyone crowded all around seemed even younger. It used to make me pause, the sight of a middle-aged man, drinking alone at a bar, when I was still young and certain nothing like that would ever happen to me. Looking down at the half-finished drink in front of me, I shoved it away with the back of my hand.
I reached inside my coat and pulled out my brown leather wallet and thumbed through the bills until I found another twenty.
With my hand on the bar, I swung off the stool and stood up.
“There a phone here?” I asked above the din as I picked up the change and counted out a tip.
The telephone was in the back, just outside the door to the rest rooms. “It’s me,” I said gruffly into the receiver. My head was leaning against the wall and I was staring straight down at my shoes. They needed a shine. “I’m in a bar. I’ve had too much to drink. You think you could come?”
Fifteen minutes later, Howard Flynn found me at a table in the corner, drinking a cup of black coffee. “Thanks,” I said, somewhat embarrassed. “Order something. I’ll buy dinner.”
He settled into the chair opposite and shook his head. “Hell, I thought you called because you wanted someone to get drunk with.”
I peered at his heavy-jowled, impassive face and tried to smile.
“Tell me something. How long was it before you figured out that AA didn’t stand for ‘anytime, anywhere’?”
“It was one of my life’s bigger disappointments,” he said with a grin. His thick upper arms bulged inside the white dress shirt he was wearing buttoned at the wrists and open at the collar.
“You did good,” he said in his slow, methodical way.
“I did good? Why? Because I came here and started to get drunk?”
“Because you didn’t get drunk. Not all the way. And because you had sense enough to know you couldn’t get home by yourself.” He looked at me through half-closed eyes. “Besides, it isn’t like you went into a liquor store and got yourself a bottle of Thunderbird.”
My head was spinning. I lifted the coffee cup with both hands to make sure I would not spill it.
“How many guys have you seen in the gutter drinking Chivas Regal out of a paper bag?”
“It’s where you end up, not where you start,” I replied.
With a show of impatience, Flynn waved his large, puffy red hand. “You sure you’ve never been in AA? You’ve got all the answers down pat. Listen. I didn’t come down here to hold your goddamn hand. I came down here because you sounded like if you were left alone you might just keep drinking, maybe all night, maybe longer. I’m here to see you don’t. Okay? Now, finish your coffee and let’s get the hell out of here.” His heavy-lidded eyes moved from one end of the teeming bar to the other. “I can’t stand to be around people when they’re having such a good time.”
Flynn pushed back his chair, stood up, and waited for me to come. We shouldered our way through the boisterous crowd, past the bartender with his starched white shirt and black bow tie filling the glasses and emptying the pockets of everyone who lined up for the chance to feel even better than they did already.
Outside, Flynn put his burly arm around my shoulder. “I meant what I said. Don’t get down on yourself. You did good. You knew when to stop.”
Flynn drove me home. He held the bottom of the steering wheel with three fingers of his left hand while his right arm was draped over the back of the seat. Each time the car hit a bump, it vibrated like a hard board plank dropped twenty feet onto a concrete floor. He did not seem to notice as the shocks dissipated in the round folds of muscle around his neck. I was not so fortunate. Each time it happened, I doubled over a little farther and wondered how long the queasy feeling in my stomach would last.
“You know why I drive this car, don’t you?” he asked in the apparent belief that an explanation would make me feel better.
“It isn’t just because I don’t want to spend the money on a new one.”
I knew the reason. I had heard it one time or another from every recovering alcoholic I had known. It was part of the list, the twelve steps to sobriety.
“It’s because it’s good for my humility,” he said, his eyes fixed on the road.
It was just a word, but the sound of it, repeated so often, had become part of a secular scripture, but one that seemed without either context or depth. There was something trancelike about the way it was used, like the mumblings of a catechism in a language no one understood. There was something depressing about it, a reminder of how empty things were when something as simple as this was deemed sufficient. Or was it a form of snobbery, a kind of intellectual condescension on my part? I had called Flynn not only because I knew I should not drive, but because I did not want to be alone. Those supposedly simpleminded for-mulae he followed like they were his personal Ten Commandments had made him into the kind of man who would come out in the middle of the night to help someone else stay out of the bottle that once nearly destroyed his life.
“Of course, humility is kind of relative,” he was saying. “We’ve got a guy in our group who got up at the last meeting and reported that he thought it was pretty humble on his part when he got rid of his Mercedes and got a Lincoln instead. Well, whatever works.”
He drove on, and the spinning inside my head began to slow down, and my eyes became heavier and heavier until I could barely keep them open. We were almost there. The gate at the bottom of the drive loomed out of the darkness.
“It’s too bad about that guy who killed Jeffries,” I heard him say. He said something else, something that made me want to ask a question, but I could not find the words. And then, though I tried to listen, I could not make sense out of anything Flynn was saying. A moment later, I could not hear anything at all, except a voice somewhere inside my own head telling me something was wrong.
Thirteen
_______
With a start, I sat up in bed, peering into the darkness, wondering whether I was really awake, surrounded by a dream that seemed more real than any daytime thought. The smooth, naked body of the girl I had just married, curled around me as she slept, a soft, unworried smile floating on her mouth, the warm breath of life flowing through her like a mysterious gift. I closed my eyes and tried to reach her one last time before she faded into the morbid gray light of dawn.
I lay back down and felt as if I had fallen into the sea. The twisted sheets were drenched with slick cold sweat. Throwing off the covers, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. My head was throbbing. I put my hand on it to make it stop, but my hair was wringing wet, and I pulled it away. With slow careful steps I moved across the familiar room unt
il I reached the bathroom door. I found the switch on the wall and squinted into a blinding glare. A few minutes later, I plodded back into the bedroom and opened the shutters to let in the late morning light.
After a shower I threw on a white terry cloth robe and wandered downstairs to the kitchen. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafted through the air. I tried to remember if I had set the coffeemaker on automatic the night before, but I could not remember that or anything else. My head still hurt and my eyes felt like sandpaper.
Hunched over the kitchen table, reading the morning paper as if he had all the time in the world and no better way to spend it, was Howard Flynn. Without looking up, he extended his arm toward the coffeemaker on the counter. “I made the coffee,” he said, as he turned the page.
I poured myself a cup and sat down on the other side of the table. Through an open window I heard the sound of a wood-pecker hammering its beak against an oak tree in the backyard.
Cradling the cup in both hands, I sipped on the steaming black coffee and tried to figure out what Flynn was doing here.
Folding up the paper, Flynn neatly arranged each sheet in the section until it was exactly the way it had been when he brought it in.
“Anything interesting?” I asked when he finished.
“On page three,” he said, shoving the paper across to me. “They left out most of the details.”
He could tell I did not know what he was talking about. “You all right?” he asked, grinning. “I brought you home, in case you don’t remember.”
It started to come back. I remembered the bar, and I remembered bouncing around in Flynn’s car, but that was all.
“I managed to get you upstairs,” he explained. “We left your car downtown. I thought you might need a ride in this morning.”
Reaching into his shirt pocket, Flynn pulled out a small tin case. He opened it with a flick of his thumbnail and removed an oblong-shaped green pill. In one fluid motion, without using either hand for support, he rose straight up from the chair. His weight on the balls of his feet, he walked in the pigeon-toed fashion of someone once trained to make each movement as efficient as possible. He tossed what was left of the coffee into the sink and filled the cup with water.
“Take a look at page three,” he said as he put the pill in his mouth. He took a drink of water, then threw his head back and swallowed hard. “Would have been interesting to know why he did it,” he added. Staring out the window, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Resting his other hand on the sink, he turned and looked directly at me. “If he did it.”
I had that vague feeling you get when someone tells you something you think you should know. I picked up the paper and turned to page three. My eye drifted across the stories above the fold, and then, in the bottom right corner, I found it. The story was not very long, four column inches at most, the short report of a suicide.
When I glanced up, Flynn was looking down at the floor, his left hand gripping tight on to the edge of the sink. He was clenching his jaw so hard, the muscles rippled down the side of his face.
“Are you all right?”
He managed to nod once, and then, lifting his head, took a deep breath and seemed to relax. “Yeah. Nothing,” he said with an expression that was part grin, part grimace. He tapped his right hand against his chest. “Little angina, that’s all.” Gesturing toward the newspaper, he asked, “What do you think?” Before I could answer, he added, “It’s all a little too easy, isn’t it? They find the guy who killed Jeffries, and he still has the knife he did it with. Instead of denying it, he gives them a full confession—
doesn’t even bother to ask for a lawyer—and then, as if he hadn’t been helpful enough, he kills himself in his cell before he had spent so much as a single night in jail.”
Suddenly it came back to me. “You told me about this last night, didn’t you?”
“It was on the eleven o’clock news. He killed himself sometime around eight-thirty or nine. That’s all they reported last night, and they don’t say much more about it in the papers, either. All they say is that he killed himself. They don’t say how.”
“He hung himself,” I guessed.
Flynn came back to the table and sat down. Leaning forward on his arms, he twisted his mouth first to one side, then the other.
“I talked to a few people.” He lowered his eyes and with his finger traced an invisible line back and forth in front of him. “Never saw a suicide like this. He gets on the top bunk in the cell. There was a guy in the cell opposite. He wasn’t paying much attention.
Then the metal bunk started to shake, making a lot of noise, and he started swearing at the guy, telling him to knock it off. The guy is standing on top of the bunk, jumping up and down on it.
The other guy can’t believe it, and he starts to say something, but the next thing he knows the guy has jumped.”
“Jumped?” I asked blankly.
“He jumped off, head first, smashed his head on the concrete floor. But the thing is, he didn’t just jump, he held his hands behind his back, held them while he threw himself head first onto the floor. How could anyone do that, hold your hands like that and not let go? Wouldn’t you throw your hands out at the last minute, try to break your fall? And why would he want to kill himself like that, anyway? Why didn’t he just hang himself? Easy enough to do. Make a noose out of your shirt, your pants; that’s the way most jail suicides happen. Never heard of anyone doing this. It’s strange. The whole thing is strange, if you ask me.”
I poured myself a second cup of coffee. Across the yard a bushy-tailed squirrel launched itself in full flight from the oak tree that hung over the spiked fence to the top of the umbrella that covered a glass table at the end of the brick patio. It slid down the blue canvas, regained its balance just before it reached the edge, leaped onto a chaise lounge, then scurried across the lawn and out of view.
“What is so strange about it?” I turned around, the cup in my hand, and waited until Flynn lifted his eyes. “You have a random killing by someone who was probably demented or stoned out of his mind, he gets caught, and he decides to do away with himself instead of spending the next ten or twelve years in a cell waiting for his own execution? I admit that the way he killed himself wasn’t exactly normal, but—”
“It wasn’t random,” Flynn interjected.
“What?”
“It wasn’t random,” he repeated. “I told you, I talked to a few people. He confessed. He knew who he killed.”
“Then it must have been revenge. Jeffries must have put him in prison at some point, right?”
Flynn shrugged his shoulders. The lines in his forehead deepened. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a rumpled cigarette pack, and wiggled his index finger inside the opening. With a disgusted look, he crushed the empty pack in his hand and shoved it back in his pocket.
“Don’t know. He wouldn’t say why he did it. Jeffries must have done something that made him want to kill him. It would have been interesting to know what it was, and now we never will.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “The investigation is over. It’ll be a while before they get the DNA results on the blood left on the knife, but it’ll belong to Jeffries,” he said with complete assurance. “They have the knife, and they have the confession, and, as if that wasn’t enough, they have the suicide. People don’t go around killing themselves for something they didn’t do. No question, the guy did it. Now he’s dead. Case closed.”
Late that afternoon, after I caught up on all the work that, as Helen repeatedly reminded me, I should have done that morning, I called Harper Bryce to see if he knew anything more than what Flynn had found out. Harper had heard none of the details of the suicide and knew nothing about what the killer had said.
When I told him that it had not been a random killing, that the killer had intended to murder Jeffries, he expressed regret at the suicide, because, as he put it, “the trial might have been worth watching after all.”
It only seemed callous. Harper’s professional appraisal was exactly right. The murder of Calvin Jeffries had riveted the public’s attention because of who he was and because of the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his death. But once the killer had been caught and it appeared to have been a random act of violence committed by someone desperate enough to kill for a few dollars, it became for all practical purposes indistinguishable from any one of the thousands of accidental deaths that happen every year. Drunk drivers killed people they did not know, and people without names who lived on the street might at any moment decide to stick a knife in someone who did not give them what they asked for. It was one of the unfortunate facts of city life, and while it was always to be condemned, it held none of the same fascination as the deliberate, purposeful, intentional murder of someone you had a reason to want dead. That was what made people read newspapers and follow trials, not that someone had been killed, but that someone had actually taken that last, ir-revocable step, and, in that ancient phrase, “with malice afore-thought,” taken someone’s life. I agreed with Harper: It would have been an interesting trial. And now there would never be one.
There was a story in the next day’s paper about yet another political scandal, but there was nothing about the murder of Calvin Jeffries. There were stories about the state of the econ-omy and stories about what was happening on the other side of the world, but there was not so much as a line about the suicide of his killer. There were new things to read about, new things to talk about, and a day or two later the only people who thought about Calvin Jeffries anymore were the people who had actually known him, and perhaps not all of them.
Friday morning, Helen was waiting for me. “Judge Pritchard’s office just called,” she said, following me into my office.
“Let me guess,” I said as I sat down. “They want to reschedule the Burnett motion.”
She perched on the edge of the chair opposite, clutching in her hand a stack of telephone messages scribbled on pink paper.