The Barkeep

by William Lashner

  “It’s something,” said Justin’s father. “It’s a possibility. And in here, that’s everything.”

  They stood there a bit longer, even as the guard came over for a third and final time.

  “Okay, then,” said Justin’s father before hesitantly and stiffly reaching out a hand.

  Justin stared at the hand for a moment, and then took hold of it and gave it a little shake. It was an awkward moment, over in a flash, the tiniest of gestures. But it was also the first time he had touched his father since he had found his mother dead on the floor. And somehow, for some reason, it made his heart sing.

  A song of hope.

  42.

  CHAMOMILE

  The car parked on the edge of Fitler Square was boxy and brown, with the familiar squat figure sitting inside, drinking coffee and writing on a folded newspaper. Justin hadn’t seen the car when he went out for his run, but it was there when he came back. His habits had become so regular that a guy like Detective Scott could set his watch by Justin’s running times. He couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but for some reason it made him think of Annie Overmeyer.

  He shook her out of his head as he ran over to the car. It was a cool morning, the sky congealing with clouds for a rain that was coming. While jogging in place, he knocked on the roof to get Scott’s attention.

  “Nice morning, Detective,” he said, in a series of breath-catching syllables.

  “’Tis all of that,” said Scott.

  “I was actually looking for you when I went out.”

  “Something came up.”

  “A Starbucks?”

  “Their lemon squares are quite tasty. A little expensive for a cop, but I have so few other joys in this life.”

  “Sitting in a car all day, drinking coffee,” said Justin, shaking his head. “I bet you have to pee something awful.”

  “At my age, the only time I don’t have to pee is when I’m peeing.”

  “I have a bathroom in my house. You’re welcome to use it.”

  “Thanks for the offer, truly, but I’ll just keep my eye on you from out here.”

  “And if you want I’ll brew us up a fresh cup of chamomile to calm down the nerves frazzled by all that caffeine.”

  “Drinking tea is like kissing your dog. It’s warm and wet, sure, but where’s the kick? If I need to, I’ll just pick up another Venti at the Starbucks and use the bathroom there.”

  Justin stopped the jogging and leaned forward, putting his hands on the windowsill. “Come on in and have the tea. I don’t have any lemon bars to go with it, but I do have a story you might want to hear.”

  43.

  VICODIN

  Mia Dalton stood behind the glass and examined the man seated alone at the table in the green interrogation room. He was wiry and hard-looking. His boots were dirty, his jaw was unshaven, his unkempt hair thick and ruffled. He sucked his crooked teeth to pass the time. Staring at the rumpled figure of Eddie Nicosia made Mia feel like an alien, not from another country but from another planet.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t think you would,” said Scott, standing by her side, holding a file and a paper bag.

  “We’re each part everything if we’re honest enough to admit it. I look at plenty of guys and feel something stir. But if what you’re telling me is true, the standards for gigolos have plummeted beyond my capacity to understand.”

  “You don’t think he has a certain sexual animalism?”

  Eddie Nicosia stuck a finger in his ear, swirled, extracted, examined the tip.

  “Like a mangy three-legged dog,” said Mia.

  “They say his cock is huge.”

  “Well, that explains that. When you’re done interrogating him, give him my number.”

  “Any particular way you want me to play it?”

  “Set him up one way and then scare the hell out of him. He won’t admit to anything, but it should be interesting to see how he reacts.”

  “Will do.”

  “And don’t be gentle.”

  “My guess,” said Scott, “is that our boy Eddie Nicosia hears that a lot.”

  Mia kept her gaze on the suspect as Scott left her side and a moment later entered the room behind the glass. Nicosia, sprawled in his chair, didn’t change his posture when the detective walked in. He simply lifted his head and followed the detective as Scott made his way to the opposite side of the table, dropped the file and bag onto the tabletop, and took a seat, all without so much as looking at the suspect.

  “When can I get the hell out of here?” said Nicosia.

  Scott didn’t respond, he simply opened the file, took out a stack of papers, tapped the stack on the table to neaten its edge, and began asking for Nicosia’s name, address, occupation, all things they knew already. Nicosia’s impatience showed as he spit out the answers.

  “Now, just as a matter of protocol, Mr. Nicosia,” said Scott, “I’m going to read you a list of your constitutional rights and then ask you to sign a statement to indicate that these rights were read to you and that you understood them.”

  “Isn’t this a bit over the damn top for a broken taillight?”

  Mia watched the ritual unfold at Scott’s slow pace as he began reading the document to Nicosia. She had watched many of the detective’s interrogations and was always impressed by the simplicity of his technique. He didn’t threaten or browbeat, he didn’t lie to catch another lie. He was calm, and polite, and there was always a sense that he was a little on the suspect’s side. All of it made Timmy Flynn’s claim that he had been forced into lying about Chase a bit far-fetched. But there were occasions when Scott seemed to take the case a bit more personally, when a child was dead or a woman in the hospital, and on these occasions he would often lose it, pounding the table with a brutal anger as he squeezed out what answers he could. Mia would always wonder which Scott would show up. It appeared to be the calm one today.

  After Nicosia signed the statement, Scott carefully placed it into the file and then reached into the bag and, one by one, pulled out a series of sealed plastic bags with labels on the outside, each containing a number of orange pill bottles.

  “We found these in your van, Eddie,” said Scott. “Hidden beneath a mess of screws and bolts in one of your tool cases.”

  “Shit,” said Nicosia, “is that what this is all about? They don’t mean nothing.”

  “Valium, OxyContin, Tylenol No. 3, Vicodin, all controlled substances under state and federal law. And your name is not the name on the labels. Were these prescribed for you?”

  “Not for me, but they was prescribed. You can check it out. I just filled some prescriptions for friends of my mine.”

  “Gloria Nader,” said Scott, reading now from the labels. “Miranda Holmes.”

  “Call them up, they’ll tell you. These are old ladies that need help running errands. I do stuff for them, you know what I’m talking about. I also take care of their houses, their yards. You know.”

  “Yeah, we know.”

  “I provide services. And sometimes I fill prescriptions when they need them filled.”

  “Ida Switt,” read Scott from the labels.

  “I’m just helping out, being a good Sumerian. Since when is that a crime?”

  “Do you keep some for your personal use, Eddie? Or to sell? Is that what this stash in your truck is all about?”

  “You got me wrong here, I’m telling you.”

  “So tell me.”

  “It’s these ladies,” said Nicosia, leaning forward, like he was passing a secret just between the two of them. “They’re old as dust, they forget. It’s dangerous for them to have too much all at once. They’d take a couple, forget they took them, and take some more. Next thing you’d know, the bottle is empty, they’re dead on the floor, and I’m shit out of luck. So I keep the bottles in the truck and dole out just enough to fill their little weekly pillboxes, you know, seven daily doses at a time. It keeps them healthy and
alive.”

  “Mildred Payne,” said Scott.

  “Go ahead, call them all,” said Nicosia, “and they’ll tell you they like what I provide. That they’ve come to depend on me. You want the numbers? Call whoever the hell you want.”

  “Janet Moss.”

  “You hear what I’m saying? Call her.”

  “We already did,” said Scott.

  “Good, then you know. She told you, didn’t she?”

  Scott didn’t answer, he simply looked down at his file as if the secrets of the universe were written there.

  “What did she tell you?” said Nicosia.

  “She told us that you did what you did without her knowledge.”

  “That’s a lie. She gave me the prescription, gave me the money, even paid me for the time. You can find the damn checks if you want. And I told her I wasn’t going to give it all to her at once. That woman is so whacked, I give it to her all at once you’d be spending the next week fumigating the house. She’s crazy enough to want to die.”

  “She wasn’t talking about the drugs, Eddie.”

  “Then what the hell was she…”

  Eddie Nicosia stopped midsentence and stared at Scott for a moment before his face creased with an emotion close to fear and Mia felt a shiver of anticipation. Even after all these years, whether in the interrogation room or in the courtroom, these moments where the truth of things were slowly revealed never got old. And she sensed that here, now, the doubts that had been plaguing her since the Chase case concluded would somehow be confirmed or dismissed, and either result would ease her burden.

  “What did she say about me?” said Nicosia to Scott.

  “You know what she said.”

  “Oh crap.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But she got it wrong. I swear she got it wrong.”

  “Then let’s go over it. How long have you known her?”

  “Five, six years.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  “I was doing gutters down the street. I had some time, so I was knocking on doors, looking for another job. She answered, gave me the eye, you know.”

  “And you knew she was having trouble with her husband after he moved out.”

  “More than trouble. She told me everything, yeah. That’s the way it always is. I’m like their confessor. I hear about their marriages, their bunions. It’s harder work than you could imagine. You ever seen a bunion?”

  “And you knew she was struggling to keep the house,” said Scott, “and that her financial problems would become more severe if he divorced her. But you also knew there would be an insurance windfall if he died.”

  “She told me that, yeah. We talked about the options, yeah. I didn’t know the amount of the insurance, just that there was some. So all of that’s right. I won’t deny any of that. I’m trying to be honest here.”

  “Try harder. You were servicing her at the time—that’s the way you put it, right? And she was paying, right?”

  “Getting her money’s worth, too.”

  “And you were afraid the money train would stop.”

  “It looked likely.”

  “And so you ran him over with your van.”

  “No, I didn’t. I swear.”

  “But that’s what she said you said.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “You didn’t say that to her? Is she lying? Should we haul her in?”

  “I think I need a lawyer. I thought this was just about my broken taillight. You said I could have a lawyer, right? That thing I signed. Well, hell, before I say anything else, I want a lawyer.”

  “Do you have a lawyer already?”

  “Not one I don’t owe money to. But you said you’d get me one, right?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Okay then. That’s what I want.”

  The detective calmly put down his pen, leaned back, put his hands behind his head like he was enjoying a day at the shore.

  “If that’s what you want, Eddie,” said Scott, “if that’s what you really want, then we’ll stop the conversation right here right now. We’ll have to lock you up for a bit, until your lawyer shows, but that will only be a couple of days. When we end up back here, you’ll just have to answer the same questions. And if you don’t talk based on your lawyer’s advice, we’ll just have to assume that everything Mrs. Moss told us represents the truth. Which means we’ll have no choice but to charge you with murder. With the drugs we found, and all those Social Security checks you cashed, the bail on a murder charge will be pretty high. A million maybe. And unless you can come up with a cool hundred thou, you’ll stay in jail until the trial. We’re a bit backlogged now, so figure a year, maybe more.”

  “Fuck you. I can’t be here for no year.”

  “And after the year’s up and we have the trial, we’ll see what a jury thinks of the whole mess, with all these women paying you all kinds of money to run their errands and service them in all your clever ways. But if that’s the way you want to play it, if you really want a lawyer, Eddie, that is your constitutional right, and we would never, ever want to impinge on your constitutional rights.”

  “It sounds like you’re doing a pretty damn good job of pinge-ing anyway.”

  “So, should I get you that lawyer?”

  Nicosia sucked his teeth and rubbed his jaw and did a decent imitation of a man trying to decide whether to bluff with his pair of twos or to chuck the damn thing in.

  “I told her what she said I told her, yeah,” said Eddie finally, rubbing a finger along the hard edge of the metal table.

  “Was it the truth?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you say it?”

  “Look, I’ll be honest.”

  “In these moments, that’s always a good idea.”

  “I got these women, the ones with their names on the pill bottles, taking care of me. It’s a sweet play, really. And we both get from it, you know? These women, sometimes I’m the only loving they got in their lives.”

  “That’s pretty sad.”

  “Innit? But there it is. They need me. And, with the state of my business and my debts, I need them too. It’s a mutual thing, you see. Symbolic, you understand. So I been hearing all this crap from Janet about her husband the creep and all, and then, bam, he gets run over. Hit-and-run. No suspects. And I see a way to make the thing we have, with the financial benefits, a bit more solid. A way to become like a hero in her life, and no one’s the wiser. So I tell her I done it.”

  “What you’re telling me is, it wasn’t murder, it was fraud.”

  “Pshaw. A little white lie ain’t fraud.”

  “Lying about a murder isn’t a little white lie.”

  “Now you’re getting all technical on me. Maybe it had a pinkish hue.”

  “What about the time before?”

  “What time before?”

  “When that Chase lady was killed.”

  “What, the one that got aced in her home?”

  “That’s the one. Did you just tell Mrs. Moss you did that, too?”

  “I didn’t tell her nothing about that. Why? What did she say?”

  “Mrs. Moss knew there was something going on between her husband and the Chase woman before the murder, right?”

  “She might have mentioned to me there was something between her husband and some woman at some point.”

  “And she was upset about what was going on between them, right?”

  “I assume she was. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “And then the Chase woman was killed.”

  “Look, the husband was still living there then. Maybe I might have wet the wick once or twice there while he was out, she sure wasn’t getting it from him, but I don’t ever get too involved if the husband’s still there. Too many guns in the world, you know what I’m saying.”

  “You didn’t know that the husband and the Chase woman were together.”

  “I would have been more shocked than anyone.”

 
; “Why’s that?”

  “Look, I never said nothing about that one. Nothing. In fact, Janet never told me who the woman was until after she was killed. We wasn’t that close yet, not until her husband moved out. And anyway, it was that Chase guy that did that, wasn’t it? You convicted him, right? How the hell would I take credit for that? And I sure didn’t do it…But wait. Wait.”

  “What, Eddie.”

  “The son of the Chase woman was just at the house and he was asking questions and…Oh, now I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “That little fucker is trying to pin his father’s crime on me. That little fucker wants to make me the fall guy. And you’re the sap that’s letting him.”

  “We’re just trying to find the truth here.”

  “Now it all makes sense. I was wondering how that taillight got broked. That little fucker.”

  “You got anyone working for you, Eddie?”

  “What, in the business? Nah, the way I work it, I need to work alone.”

  “No assistant? No mentally challenged helper to keep you on schedule?”

  “I’d have to pay him, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “What about a guy named Flynn? Timmy Flynn? You ever run into him?”

  “Who is he? A cop?”

  “No.”

  “A name like that, he should be a cop.”

  “Take a minute, Eddie,” said Scott, standing up. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “You mean that door, it ain’t locked?”

  “No,” said Scott. “It’s locked.”

  Mia watched as Scott left the room. A moment later he was by her side. “What do you think?” he said.

  She stood there a moment and looked at Nicosia. He was about as vile a specimen as she had seen in a long while. They had a raft of stuff they could get him on: fraud, embezzlement, drug counts, maybe even prostitution. Not to mention that broken taillight. And she was inclined to nail him on all of them. But that would be about it.

  “It’s not there,” she said. “Book him on what we have and keep him overnight, but it’s just not there.”

  44.