The Barkeep

by William Lashner

LATTE

  Annie Overmeyer had a suspicion that needed to be scratched. And she might not have been willing to admit it to herself, but she had something else that need scratching too. Deep in the still-tender recesses of her largely galvanized heart lay the hope that this visit just might relieve both itches.

  The suspicion part was rooted in the letters that Austin Moss had written to Justin’s mother and the way Janet Moss had described her relationship with her husband. Annie had been the other woman enough to know there was something in both that didn’t feel right.

  Annie became involved with married men for all the right reasons. They were safe. They were attentive. They bought her Mai Tais, one after the other. They were fun in a what-the-hell-let’s-debase-myself-a-little-more sort of way. And they somehow filled the emotional needs she chose not to deal with in other, less productive ways, like sitting in some badly decorated office and blathering on about her father’s cold demeanor and all the affection he didn’t shower on his little girl. Sure, the sex wasn’t always that terrific, but these married men sure did appreciate the hell out of her body. And that right there was the key.

  The notes she received from her married lovers, breathless letters from the romantics or shorthand text messages thumbed into a BlackBerry from the terminally busy, might have started out with paeans to emotion—oh my heart, oh my soul, oh my love—but always ended with not-so-oblique references to the carnal—your lips, your breasts, your… Yeah, yeah, yeah. They wanted to screw her, she got that. It was always there, behind every drink, every dinner, every line. Whatever they were trading, sex was the currency. And it was precisely that, the sex, that was missing from Austin Moss’s letters. And it didn’t matter that Eleanor Moss might not have had the body of a twentysomething anymore; sex was sex, and if it was burning somewhere, it would have come out on the page.

  Buttressing Annie’s suspicions about the letters had been Janet Moss’s description of her marriage. We felt like we had been pulled out of something and saved, she had said of her relationship with her husband. It wasn’t perfect, our marriage, it wasn’t a model, I admit that. But it was ours. And it was all I had. There was much in all of this that tolled familiar to Annie. She had thought she would feel a kinship to Janet Moss in Moss’s role of the long-suffering wife. The cheated-with and the cheated-on are both inextricably linked; one can’t exist without the other, and both, in their way, are willing participants in the epic drama of infidelity. But there was a whiff here of something else that Annie could relate to even more strongly: marriage as a saving grace, a blissful fading into a secure and contented future.

  Annie had felt the urge herself, to give up the life she was living and give herself over to something, anything. She had been proposed to a number of times by these married men, and she had considered it, more seriously than she would like to acknowledge, not because of love, because she hadn’t been in love, or because the sex was so brilliant, because it was usually as pedestrian as an old lady shambling down the street with tennis balls stuck onto the feet of her walker. No, she had considered it because she was tired, exhausted actually, lonelier than she would ever admit, and wanted it to end. All of this, to end.

  Someone once said that marriage was the death of hope, and he was half-right. The true seductiveness of marriage, to Annie, was not a matter of settling but of suicide. The dream was to see all the impossible hopes, all those futile expectations, bleed through sliced blue arteries into a bathtub, before something new and shiny arose from the red-stained water: a lovely little corpse pushing baby carriages, attending PTA meetings, steaming vegetables, flirting with handymen. To even imagine the peace of it now was to swoon in anticipation.

  Janet Moss, she sensed, had made that exact deathly leap with Austin Moss. And though her marriage wasn’t perfect, containing, as Annie imagined, neither love nor, more significantly, sex, it was all she had. Until it was under threat by Eleanor Chase. But what was Eleanor Chase offering if not sex? That was the question Annie was coming back to the Moss house on Mantis Drive to discover.

  And what would be the result if she was right? Then she’d have a nugget of information. That she would have to share. With Eleanor Chase’s youngest son.

  And there it was, the second itch.

  Because there was something about Justin Chase that snagged at her consciousness like a grappling hook. Maybe it was that he wasn’t grappling at her whenever he was around, or maybe it was his preternatural calm, so different from her scattershot energetic approach to ruining her own life. Or maybe it was the sheer perversity of doing both father and son. Whatever it was, she couldn’t deny that she felt a ripple of thrill run through her as she turned at the Applebee’s and made her way down Mantis Drive. Because after she found out what she expected to find out, she was going to have to give Justin a call. And they’d have to meet. And they’d have lattes at some Starbucks and they’d sit across from each other at a small round table and lean their heads one toward the other and talk softly as they tried to figure it out together. And somehow, more than anything, that was the goal of this whole expedition.

  It was dark out, the sky thick with clouds, a light rain falling. But the Moss house was well lit, both the first and second floors. Quiet and dry and well lit, a refuge, a home. Everything Janet Moss had bargained for. Somehow put at risk by Eleanor Chase. Of course she would be pissed. Who wouldn’t be? Annie would have scratched the meddling woman’s eyes out, but that was just Annie’s way. Janet Moss maybe had handled it differently.

  Annie parked her car on the street right in front of the house. She pulled her jacket tight and jogged through the rain, down the empty driveway to the little path that led to the front door. She stood beneath the arched overhang and rang the bell once, twice.

  Through the side window by the door she could hear the bell ring, and another sound beneath the bell, faint and high-pitched. She turned around and checked behind her while she waited. Empty. A dead suburban street deadened further by the rain. She turned around, pressed the bell again, and banged on the door. Nothing.

  Though she had gotten the phone number from the Internet, she hadn’t called first, afraid that Mrs. Moss would somehow get that creep Eddie Nicosia to oversee their conversation if she had been given a warning. Now she took out her phone and made a call.

  She heard the phone ring inside. And ring. And ring some more until it was picked up, finally. She started talking after the hello until she realized it was a machine. She shut her phone, felt a chill, pulled her jacket closed, and remembered how drugged out Janet Moss had seemed, how barely in control.

  She knocked again, calling out “Mrs. Moss?” before taking hold of the door latch and pressing down with her thumb. The latch depressed. She pushed the door open slightly, heard the high-pitched sound more clearly, a whistling. And in addition, she could pick up, slipping through the sliver of doorway, the sound of a distant television.

  “Mrs. Moss? Are you there?”

  Nothing.

  She pushed the door open and stepped inside, into the lighted foyer. “Mrs. Moss?”

  Nothing.

  The television was on upstairs, she now could tell, some fatuous show going on and on about celebrities, a show that Annie often watched herself before lurching into the alcohol-drenched night. Gently closing the door behind her, Annie looked around. The place seemed quiet, not so much empty as deserted. And there was a smell, something beneath the smell of the bird, something furry, like a wild animal had been let loose inside. She moved into the well-lit living room with its sense of lapsed order. In the corner was the canary cage, the newspaper on the bottom still piled with droppings, but now the door was open and the bird gone. She spun around, suddenly frightened, looking for the bird.

  The high-pitched whistle had grown louder. A kettle on the boil? Expecting the loosed bird to dive at her head at any moment, she ducked down and stepped through the living room into the kitchen. A mess on the table, dishes in the sink, the kettle shaking on t
he stove. She went over and turned off the burner. The whistle faded slowly before dying.

  She headed out of the kitchen and toward the stairs that led to the second floor. When she reached the foot, she called out again. No response, no sound other than the television. With a steadying hand on the baluster, she began to climb.

  As she rose, the furry smell strengthened and twined with something sharper, darker. The two smells together frightened her even more than the emptiness. She let the sound of the television guide her, upstairs and then to the right, to a darkened hallway that ended at an open door leading to a room lit only by the dim flashing of a television. She walked past a couple of closed doors, the furry smell growing stronger. A chirp from the bird came from someplace distant. She stopped, looked around, saw nothing winging its way through the air. Slowly she stepped forward through the open doorway.

  A bedroom, with a sharp, smoky scent, like an oily cigarette. The bed at the far wall empty, the television on against the near wall. And in the corner, facing the television, a figure sprawled on an easy chair. Mrs. Moss, drugged enough by her pills to have fallen asleep watching TV, after having forgotten that she had put on the kettle. Most likely smoking, which explained the scent. The whole thing was too sad for words. Annie, ready to help her into bed, reached to her right and switched on the light.

  Blood.

  Everywhere.

  Drenching the woman in the chair, staining the wall.

  Blood.

  Before she knew what she was doing, Annie bolted toward the bloodied Janet Moss. The blood was no longer flowing, but still wet and glistening. When she reached the chair, she caught sight of the woman’s right arm flopped over the side of the chair, ending with her hand dragging on the carpeted floor, loosely gripping a gun.

  “Oh God,” she gasped.

  She bent down, put her hand on Mrs. Moss’s bloody chest, pressed hard, felt nothing. The pressing shifted the body slightly and the head bobbed forward. There was a burned patch of flesh on the side of the woman’s head closest to the gun. On the other side a great gap had been gouged by the gunshot. Annie gagged, backed away, fell to her knees, retched and threw up on the floor.

  Then she heard something rise above the nattering of the television. A thump.

  And she suddenly remembered that the upstairs lights had been on when she arrived.

  45.

  SUNSET BOULEVARD

  Cody was a mess.

  Not that he looked a mess, sitting at the bar with a shiny gold jacket, a sharp black shirt setting off his gold chain, a silver-and-gold Rolex on his wrist. He looked killer. But his fingers were tap-tapping frenetically on the bar, and there was something both nervous and haunted in his eyes, like he had just looked into a mirror and seen a specter behind him reaching for his neck.

  “What can I get you today?” said Justin after he had worked his way down the crowded bar to Cody. “I learned this drink called a Sunset Boulevard that would be right up your alley. Want to give it a try?”

  “Does it have vodka?” said Cody, looking over his shoulder.

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Then is the other stuff really necessary?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, fine. But why don’t you just give me the vodka.”

  Justin squinted at Cody. “Okay if I add some tonic and lime to make it go down easier?”

  “Sure, anything, but don’t skimp on the main course.”

  “Coming right up,” said Justin as he turned and reached for a bottle of Skyy. He poured a couple of ounces into a highball with ice, put in a spritz of tonic, squeezed in some lime, and slipped a fresh slice on the rim.

  Cody grabbed at it hungrily and closed his eyes as he swallowed half at once. When he opened them again, he looked like a guy who had been slapped in the face and was glad for it.

  “Has anyone come in looking for me?” said Cody.

  “Stewie and Louie from the night before?”

  “Them or anyone else. Especially anyone else.”

  “No.”

  “If anyone does, you don’t know me, never saw me.”

  “Who are you again?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened?”

  “I just read something in the paper that made me a little sick.”

  “Box score?”

  “Obituary.”

  “Someone you knew?”

  “Not really. I only ran into her once. But it stayed with me, you know?”

  “Sure I do,” said Justin, giving the bartender’s flat, noncommittal response and regretting it immediately. Cody was in some sort of trouble and Justin was offering only the barkeep’s reflexive detachment. The rote interaction made him feel cheap. Just doing what he had done on his father’s behalf—following a lead, asking questions, turning what he had found over to the cops—had given him a peculiar satisfaction. His investigation was the exact opposite of drifting; he had taken some control and he felt ready to take more.

  “I think maybe I need to get out of here,” said Cody.

  “That’s a good idea,” said Justin. “Go home, get some sleep, start fresh in the morning.”

  “I’m talking about out of here. Here. What do you know about Tallahassee? I’ve heard good things about Tallahassee.”

  “That must have been a hell of an obituary.”

  “You got any money you can lend me quick? I need a stash to get me to Tallahassee.”

  “Is that a Waylon Jennings song?”

  “Hey, Justin,” said Marson from the far end of the bar, a look of disapproval on his face and a telephone in his hand. “You got a call.”

  Justin tapped the bar and pointed at Cody in encouragement before heading over to take the phone.

  “It’s getting busy,” said Marson.

  “I’m on top of things,” said Justin.

  “There’s a party over there that’s been waiting.”

  “Then the sooner I take this, the sooner I can get to them.”

  Marson waited a second longer with his normal sour attitude before handing him the phone. Justin took the phone, turned his back to his boss, and said into the handset, “Chase.”

  “Justin?” said Annie Overmeyer, in a voice rent with terror. “Justin? Oh my God.”

  46.

  BLOOD AND VOMIT

  As a thick nausea spread in her gut, Mia Dalton stood within the twining scents of blood and vomit and stared at the lump slumped in the bedroom chair, tastefully covered by a shiny yellow tarp. The local police were already describing Janet Moss’s death as an apparent suicide, and while the bloody tableau beneath the tarp certainly backed up that assumption, Mia couldn’t help but think that something here was wrong as hell.

  And even though she was way out of her jurisdiction and had no authority here, she was going to do something about it.

  She retreated from the stench into the hallway and down the stairs, where she took a spot next to Scott, who was standing beside the empty birdcage.

  “When is he getting here?” she said to Scott.

  “He just reported in,” he said. “A few more minutes. He wasn’t so happy about the whole thing. He was at the ball game.”

  “Poor little fellow,” said Mia. “One way or the other, this is part of the whole, and Kingstree needs to be aware of it. Quite the tender little scene outside, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It brought tears to my eyes,” said Scott.

  Mia was referring to Justin Chase and Annie Overmeyer, who were sitting side by side on the curb, in the rain, leaning their heads together as they talked. Even though soaked to the bone, the girl’s clothes were still bloodstained and her skin blood-smeared from her encounter with the corpse of Janet Moss. And it appeared that the son of Overmeyer’s former adulterous paramour was actually trying to comfort her.

  “What the hell are the two of them doing together?” she said. “Do we have any idea?”

  “Somehow they found each other.”

  “The
son and the lover. It sounds like a Reader’s Digest version of D. H. Lawrence. Am I the only one who thinks it’s creepy?”

  “No.”

  “Do we believe her story about why she was here?”

  “It sounds just far-fetched enough to be true.”

  “And the mysterious figure who ran out of the house after she got inside the bedroom?”

  “Probably her imagination run wild. It’s tough seeing your first corpse.”

  “That was a tough sight for anyone, no matter the number. When you brought Chase over, did you get any sense about what he thought of this?”

  “He was worried about her.”

  “Such a tender heart.”

  “And he was wondering how this affected his father’s case.”

  “It damn well better not,” said Mia. “And what the hell happened to the bird?”

  A local detective by the name of Dechert descended the stairs, his head ducking down to avoid the low ceiling. He was a soft-spoken man in a sharp blue suit, his hands still covered in latex. Plenty of suburban cops would have thrown Mia out on her ear for horning in on his crime scene, but Dechert seemed grateful for the help. She admired that, as well as his manners.

  “Any idea when your witness is coming, Ms. Dalton?” he said.

  “Momentarily.”

  “We found something else we’d like him to look at.”

  “What exactly?”

  “Something a bit alarming. Come on up and take a peek if you want.”

  Mia winced, not sure she wanted to go back into that room with its bloody stink, but then nodded. Dechert led her and Scott up the stairs and into the bedroom again. Mia had to put a hand over her mouth and nose to stand the stench, but neither Dechert nor Scott seemed to be bothered. Cops. She was surprised they weren’t eating hoagies while standing over the body. She’d seen that before, even seen stray bits of shredded lettuce drift down onto the blood.

  “Over there,” said Dechert, gesturing with one of his gloved hands toward a low table set beside the bed. The table lamp was on and the drawer open. Mia and Scott both leaned over to look. A bunch of junk, tissues and keys, cheap costume jewelry, glasses, loose pills. And, in a little clearing in the middle of all the detritus of Janet Moss’s now-ended life, a glassine envelope filled with some damp reddish clumps of powder next to two silver earrings with diamonds set into the dangles.