The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  And with that, he turned and left.

  * * *

  . . .

  On her way back to the ER, before leaving the administrative offices, she peered in some of the open doors, hoping to find Oscar. She wasn’t sure how aggressively she would confront him: she wondered if she had the courage right now to ask him what he had been doing at Austin’s apartment on Monday. She was staring into one of those offices, empty at the moment, and trying to decide if it might be Oscar’s, when she felt a hand on her shoulder and jumped.

  She turned and there was Sally Gleason. “Need something?” she asked. Her lipstick was a deep red wine, the gloss distinctive and moist.

  “You scared me.”

  “No, I didn’t. I startled you. There’s a difference. And I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. But do you need something more?”

  “No. I was just—”

  “You were just snooping.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Of course you were!” Sally told her, her tone incredulous, though even now it seemed as if she were trying hard not to smile. “But I understand. I do. But maybe it would be best if you went back to work. Don’t you think?”

  Alexis knew the woman was right, but she was struck by the way Sally seemed to be suppressing her bemusement—as if she were enjoying this. “Why do you always look like you’re about to laugh at something?” she asked. “And why right now?”

  “Oh, trust me: I see nothing funny in any of this. Austin’s death and his parents’ grief? It was horrifying. I was grateful a phone call took me away.”

  “And yet,” Alexis said, “your face. You look like you’re restraining a small chuckle.”

  “That’s just the Botox talking,” the other woman said. And this time she did smile. Then she added, “Let me walk you to the elevator. You’ll be much better off downstairs in the ER than you are up here amidst the suits.”

  21

  Ken Sarafian looked at the online PDF with the campus map of the boarding school in New Hampshire where Austin Harper had graduated. He was just confirming what he had already learned from a conversation he’d had with a guy who had been in Harper’s class: the science building wing—and it was a little wing, but still a wing—was named after the guy’s grandfather. It was clearly a quid pro quo: the school had punished Harper for unspecified violations of the academic honor code, but hadn’t expelled him.

  A person could change a lot as they grew up, but in Ken’s experience—as a soldier, as a cop, and now as a PI—once a cheater, always a cheater.

  * * *

  . . .

  Ken didn’t mind dive bars at all. He didn’t appreciate them the way he once had, but he’d spent plenty of time in them as a young man, especially the ones in some of the more down-at-the-heels Long Island suburbs where he’d grown up. (His favorite? The pub near JFK that always had a soccer game on the TV, which pleased him because he didn’t give a damn about soccer, and neither did his friends when he was a young man back from the war, and so you could drink there without people turning away from you midsentence to look up at the screen to see what the hell had just happened at some faraway stadium. The place was still there, and he still went there on occasion: now it had flags along one wall from the United States, Ireland, and Armenia. It was kind of perfect.) And so tonight he went to the East Village bar where Austin Harper had been shot in the arm and where the guy had met some dart player named Douglas—a fellow who, according to Alexis Remnick, Austin hadn’t seen again. At least as far as she knew.

  The bartenders early tonight were a tall guy with long red hair pulled back into a ponytail and held in place with the sort of thin blue rubber bands Ken associated with asparagus in the produce section, and a muscular woman with purple hair that fell in a bob and a small metal rod at the outer edge of each eyebrow. She was wearing a denim shirt that he saw, when she turned around to get a bottle of tequila from a shelf behind the bar, had an image of horror show hostess Elvira silkscreened onto the back. There were two dartboards against a wall and three university kids, two men and a woman, rather aimlessly tossing darts at one of them. The floor was sticky in spots from spilled beer, and the place had the smell of a fraternity-house basement: humid and dank. The music was retro: a Rolling Stones song from the early seventies he liked a lot, though he died a tiny bit inside when he realized he no longer knew the song’s name. How was it possible to know the lyrics but not the title? It was not only possible, he understood, it was inevitable when you were on the far side of sixty-five.

  The female bartender spotted him as soon as he found a spot at the edge of the badly scratched mahogany balustrade, and he ordered an IPA the place was promoting on a chalkboard above the impeccably lit bottles of alcohol. After she brought him his beer, he pulled his card from his blazer pocket and introduced himself.

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure what that card means,” she said. “Are you a cop or not?”

  “Not,” he said. “A private detective.”

  “So, this isn’t a police investigation.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Nope.”

  “And I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Again, nope. But you’ll be doing a solid for a very nice couple whose son died in a bike accident and a very nice woman whose boyfriend died in a bike accident.”

  “Same dude, I assume?”

  He nodded. “Same dude. What’s your name?”

  “Amber.”

  “Hello, Amber. I’m Ken Sarafian.”

  She raised an eyebrow in greeting, and the piercing moved with it. He showed her a photograph of Austin Harper and asked, “This fellow was shot in the arm here on a Saturday night back in late March. Were you working that night?”

  “I was,” she said, and then turned away from him to take an order from a young guy in a blue Bengal-stripe oxford shirt who had sidled up to the bar beside him.

  “I’ll have a Pimm’s and tonic,” he said.

  “Not here you won’t,” Amber told him. She waved at the bottles on the wall behind her. “Pick your poison.”

  But he was properly chastened and ordered a mug of cheap keg beer.

  “So, what do you remember about the shooting?” Ken asked when, once again, he had Amber’s attention.

  “Oh, I remember plenty. You don’t forget that shit. He pointed the gun at me—when he wasn’t waving it like a kid with a flag at a parade.”

  “I like that image.”

  “I was pretty fucking scared,” she said, her tone firm.

  “It’s good to be scared around crazy people with guns,” he agreed. “Or sane people with guns.”

  “I was about to empty the cash register for him. Everyone at the bar—you know, where you’re standing—had hit the ground or was backing away. But we keep the music pretty loud here, especially on a Saturday night, and it was crowded. Lot of people didn’t even know what was going on.” She used her thumb to point at the other bartender. “Jason wasn’t here, but the dude who was working that night was standing about where he is now. And for the first five or ten seconds, even he didn’t realize what was going down. No idea the guy had a gun.”

  “According to the police, he never took any money.”

  “So, you’ve spoken to the police?”

  “Of course. I was at the precinct this afternoon.”

  She seemed to take this in. “The only time I’ve ever been around a gun that was fired was that night. It wasn’t nearly as loud as I expected. More of a pop.”

  “It was a pretty crappy pistol.”

  “Maybe. But it hurt one of the guys playing darts.”

  He nodded. “That was the guy who died in the bike accident. Austin Harper.”

  “Oh, man. He had one hell of a shitty year.”

  “Yeah. Kinda. Tell me: you thought the junkie shot him by accident. True?” />
  “That’s what I told the police.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I do. The two guys playing darts didn’t even know what was happening at the bar. The music was so loud that they didn’t hear the junkie and they didn’t realize people were backing away. It happened really fast. The junkie was hissing at me like a fucking zombie and then he yelled something and then I was asking him to calm down. I was opening the register to give him whatever he wanted—whatever was in there—and then the gun went off. I think he was as surprised as anyone. And when he realized what he’d done, suddenly he didn’t give a damn about the money. He was just out of here.”

  “Like a shot,” Ken said.

  Amber smiled ever so slightly. “Yeah. Like a shot.”

  “They never caught him.”

  “I figured. No one ever asked me to ID him.”

  “I find that amazing—that they never found him. They never found the gun, either.”

  She shrugged and left him again to take care of a couple that wanted another round. They were a few feet away and were having mixed drinks, and so this time she was gone a little longer. He watched the college kids playing darts. They were terrible. He didn’t play darts, but the group sometimes didn’t even hit the board. They hit the badly scarred corkboard hammered into the wall behind it. How more people in this place didn’t get hit by wayward projectiles astonished him.

  He recalled his Jarts from when he was a boy. Lawn darts. The set he’d had as a child had thick metal points and must have been a foot long. You were supposed to lob them underhand at plastic rings you placed in the lawn, and the game was reminiscent of horseshoes. Instead, he and his friends hurled them as high into the sky as they could, heaving them from elevated backyard porches and second- and third-story windows to give them ever greater velocity as they fell back to earth. How many times had one nearly missed caving in his skull? Ten? Fifteen? Dozens? The metal-tipped ones were banned now. Thank God. The Internet was littered with heartbreaking stories of lawn dart cataclysms and lawsuits.

  God. He’d survived lawn darts and Vietnam. He’d survived thirty-five years as an NYPD cop. And now he was talking to a bartender about some yuppie paper pusher who got himself killed on a bike tour…after almost getting killed by a stray bullet about twenty feet from this balustrade. The world was unfathomable. Utterly unfathomable.

  Or maybe not. Maybe Harper’s number had come up this year, and when the bullet didn’t take him out here in the East Village, the truck did on the other side of the world.

  When Amber returned, he said, “We were talking about the junkie. I want to make sure I have this correct: The guy discharges his firearm by accident. Then he flees. Right?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Total mistake. It was a close call and the dude was terrified. Couldn’t believe he’d nearly killed someone. I mean, maybe he thought he had killed someone.”

  “Anyone try to chase him?”

  “Nope. I guess there’s not a lot of vigilante justice here on a Saturday night. If people were concerned, they were concerned for the man who was shot. Your Austin something.”

  He nodded. “Harper.”

  “A bunch of people went over to check on him and see how badly he was hurt,” she went on. “A bunch of other people just left—some, I must admit, without even closing their tabs and paying.”

  He smiled. “People.”

  “Right?”

  “I’m guessing they justified it this way: someone had just been shot in the bar and they themselves might have been killed. For that? The drinks should be on the house.”

  “Fair.”

  “The gentleman who took the bullet. I gather he came in here alone and met one of the dart players. I—”

  “He didn’t come in here alone.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Amber said, and she was definitive and sure. “He came in with a guy he was pretty chummy with. A guy who had his own darts. And they were serious darts.”

  “Go on.”

  “They came here to play. The two of them. But first they came to the bar and ordered. And the guy with the darts? He wanted his beer on ice, because he said that’s how a lot of people drink it in Vietnam.”

  “Was he Vietnamese?” Ken didn’t recall Alexis saying that the fellow who’d come to the ER with Austin had been.

  “No. He was American. Early forties. Tall. Light hair, kind of dirty blond.”

  “Glasses?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Eyes?”

  “He had two.”

  Ken appreciated the small joke. “You don’t recall their color?”

  “Sorry.”

  “But you’re positive they came in together.”

  “And I’m positive they were friends. They were boys in the hood, joking, laughing. And I know this was at least the second time they’d come here. Maybe the third.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I’m sure. Beer with ice? You don’t forget that, either. At first, I thought they might already be drunk and we were their second or third bar of the night. I thought they were pub-crawling. But they weren’t. They were just having fun.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “David, maybe? Douglas?”

  “Began with a D.”

  “I think so.”

  “What were they joking about?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Too long ago to recall?” he suggested.

  “No, too weird. They were joking about rats.”

  He kept his face perfectly still. He didn’t want to lead her on, but he remembered the abstract for the research study about rats that Alexis had found in Austin’s apartment. “Most people don’t see a lot of humor in rats.”

  “I believe David or Douglas or whatever his name was did something with rats or was pals with someone who did something with rats.”

  “Exterminator?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Okay, this is a long shot. Did you get the address of this David or Douglas?”

  She left him to pop the tops of a couple of beers and pour a very generous amount of what he suspected, based on the label, was a terrible Riesling into a wineglass. When she returned, she surprised him and said, “I don’t know the exact address, but it’s near here. He’d just moved to the neighborhood this past winter and told me he liked the fact that there was a bar nearby with dartboards, and so he could pop by and find a game.”

  “So, he’s been back?”

  “No, at least not when I’ve been here. But if you’d nearly been shot your second or third time here and your friend was, would you come back? I mean, there are plenty of bars in this city with dartboards.”

  “Good point. So, you know he lives near here. Anything more specific?”

  “Are you going to buy another beer?”

  “Nope,” he said, but he got the message and put a twenty down on the bar beside his mug. When she didn’t reach for it, he placed a second one there. This time she took both.

  “He lives in a brownstone. Third Street, maybe? Thirteenth Street? I overheard him and Adrian—”

  “Austin,” he corrected her.

  “Right, Austin. He and Austin,” she continued, “had some joke about giving the rats their own bedroom. The place has two floors. The top two floors. He was planning to pot some tomatoes on the roof when it got a little warmer.”

  “But you think it was near here.”

  “And I want to say there was a three in the street.”

  He repeated back to her the little she knew. She nodded. Then he thanked her and left. Tomorrow he’d take a flyer and walk Third Street and Thirteenth Street and see if he could find a brownstone where a fellow lived on the two
highest floors whose first name was Douglas or at least began with a D. You never knew what you might discover on the nameplates or mailboxes or buzzers outside.

  * * *

  . . .

  When Ken got home, the apartment smelled of rice pilaf and lamb. He and Taleen had sold the place in Mineola when their daughter—their youngest child—had finished college, and bought this co-op in lower Manhattan. It was a two bedroom, though they had christened that second bedroom the walk-in closet with a bed. It was small, and the window was the size and shape of a very modest welcome mat. But at least once a month, one of their two surviving kids and their significant other would be there with them, and it always thrilled Ken and his wife. They needed to see those two boys and their girlfriends this year—since Kathleen had passed—more than ever. Kathleen had stayed in that room a lot the last year of her life, and Ken and Taleen had even considered using that room for her hospice care the last month. But Kathleen had refused. She hadn’t wanted that room in the city; she’d wanted a hospice with more air and bigger windows and views of trees that reminded her of her childhood on Long Island. She hadn’t wanted to be a burden to her parents. And so it had been on Long Island, about five miles from where she’d grown up, that she’d died.

  Taleen had been a dentist, and after she’d retired but before Kathleen’s diagnosis, she’d spent a lot of her free time traveling around the tri-state area to see the things she’d never visited when she’d been working. After the diagnosis, she’d devoted herself to her daughter. Once the awfulness of Kathleen’s death had receded—though the emptiness was as present as ever—she’d begun to resume those explorations of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Today she’d been in Washington Heights at a haunted house that had some connection to Aaron Burr.