Beware the Solitary Drinker

by Cornelius Lehane

  Sitting hunched into his Yankee jacket, Sam looked me over. “The girl talked too much”—nodding toward Janet— “just like her.”

  “About what?”

  Sam was fighting some battle with himself, trying to tell without telling. He was a hoodlum whatever else he was, with whatever code of honor a hoodlum has—a hoodlum and a gentleman, as they say. Usually, I could decipher his messages, but I couldn’t make sense of this one. What did Angelina know?

  “About movies…” Sam sounded disgusted with me and with himself when he said it. Then he left.

  I thought this one through while Janet chattered at me. Her approach to difficulty was to talk at it, mine was to keep quiet.

  “What about movies,” Janet asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do, too.” She spun me around on my stool to face her.

  She was right. I did know. The porno flicks Carl had told me about. I was getting too close to the Boss. But what could Angelina have known or talked about that would hurt the Boss?

  “Wait here,” I told Janet. Then, I ran down the street to 811 West End. Duffy stood like a sentry next to the door.

  “Do a lot of kids come in and out here?” I asked him.

  “For music lessons,” he said, not blinking an eye.

  “At night, too?”

  He nodded, rising and falling on his heels, staring straight ahead. “Be careful, McNulty.” He looked at me without sympathy.

  Janet was standing in front of La Rosita when I got back.

  “You trust this guy Sheehan?” I asked her.

  She began to squirm, averting her eyes, coming back at me then too eagerly. She was easy enough to trap. “What do you mean?”

  “You talked to him.”

  “Well, he asked me questions.” Her dander rose. “He’s the police. You’re so damned suspicious of everyone. All these crooks you know don’t tell you anything. I only talked to him.”

  “Calm down.…I just want to know what I asked. Do you trust him?”

  “I think so. I think he really wants to find out who killed my sister.”

  “Call him. Tell him to meet us someplace downtown.”

  Sheehan met us at a coffee shop on Broadway just below Columbus Circle. On the walls were pictures of the old Miss Rheingold ads that used to be all over the subways, memorabilia of my youth. Sheehan sat at a booth with his hat on the table in front of him. Once more, I was walking into 1955, though in one concession to the contemporary world, the menu had a lunch special named after Mayor Koch. I ate a hamburger and drank more coffee. Sheehan didn’t look smug exactly; he looked officious, like it was about time that I came to my senses and recognized the authority of the state.

  I told him about Angelina, the Boss, the movies, and what I suspected about the children. I’d tried to prepare Janet on the subway ride downtown. It wasn’t enough. The truth of her sister’s life shook her. Spread out in front of me now, it looked putrid also, desperate and sad, terrifying at the end.

  “You think the Boss killed her?” Sheehan asked when I was finished. His tone was intimidating, telling me I’d better have a good answer.

  “I’m just passing on some information.”

  Janet jumped into the conversation with both feet. “Why don’t you arrest him on the pornography charge; then, you can search that place…” Wrapped up in her own ideas, she spoke too quickly to notice that Sheehan gave no sign of sharing her enthusiasm.

  “That’s not so easy.” Sheehan shifted uncomfortably in the booth that was too small for him, avoiding Janet’s eyes, not hiding very well the irritation curling the corners of his mouth. “That’s not my jurisdiction. And your information isn’t good enough for me to pass along.”

  What he meant was the tangled internal relationships between vice and homicide; he had to figure whose toes he might step on. “We already picked the Boss up and leaned on him. We didn’t find out anything.”

  “If someone’s doing something illegal, don’t you arrest them?” Janet asked.

  “You gave me some information. It’s hearsay, right—supposition?”

  Janet nodded.

  “Ask your friend McNulty here. I thought you kind of people believed in all that civil liberties shit.” Bearing down now, he seemed to tower over us, though he hadn’t left his seat. “When we have some hard evidence, we’ll move. Let us handle it, okay?”

  “Fine,” I said, pulling myself out of the booth, and Janet with me. We left Sheehan unfolding himself from the booth, gesturing impatiently for the waitress.

  ***

  Janet stared in front of her, silent and sad, on the ride uptown on the train. I couldn’t think of anything to say that might make her feel better.

  At the 96th Street station, in the quiet while the local waited for the express, she asked, “Do you think she was a prostitute?”

  I was thinking about other things: about the cop, about the Boss, about Ozzie. The whole thing was making me angry. I was mad that I kept giving Sheehan information.

  “She was pretty. She was a commodity. Everything’s for sale. Prostitution is one of the pillars of the national character.”

  Janet’s eyes were icy. “Don’t tell me your goddamn politics. I’m talking about my sister. Don’t you have any feelings?”

  Janet was determined that we should force Sheehan to arrest the Boss. I told her things didn’t work that way and we should just drop it. But she kept talking at me—relentlessly. First, she accused me of corrupting her sister, of exploiting her. She said I was a coward and a liar, a drunk, and a bum. On and on, she went, until I discovered I’d agreed to sneak into Rocky’s cellar to steal one of the porno flicks as evidence that would force Sheehan to arrest the Boss.

  I had to be nuts. The only saving grace was that Rocky lived alone and was totally predictable. I asked Jim, the day guy at Oscar’s, to stay until ten-thirty that night. This wasn’t really fair because I could come in, work the back half of the shift and make all the money, which came at the end of the night. But I’d tightened Jim up a few times in the past, and for reasons of his own, he got a charge out of deferring to me, probably because I’d started bartending when he was in diapers.

  Rocky would be sucking scotches beginning like clockwork shortly after nine. Duffy would be on the door. My best hope was to convince Carl to go in early and get rid of Duffy, so Carl would be on the door if anything came down.

  “I really don’t think you should do this,” Carl said.

  “Me neither. I got myself into this because she said she’d do it herself anyway. Look, I’ll just run in, grab one of the movies, and slip out. Who would go into the basement besides you and Rocky?”

  “You may not like what you find out,” Carl warned me. Everyone’s idea of peace was to stay ignorant.

  “That’s like people are afraid to go to doctors if they think they have cancer.”

  “I never go to doctors,” Carl said.

  “Switch with Duffy, will you? I don’t trust him not to tell Rocky or the Boss.”

  “You’d get hurt,” Carl said.

  “That’s why I want you there.”

  Carl agreed finally, when he saw that I was desperate. Actually, I used the same approach on him that Janet used on me. If he didn’t help, I’d go in when Duffy was there. He very unhappily told me that he owed Duffy a couple of hours anyway for coming in late one night the week before. We agreed Carl would get there at ten. I would get there at ten-fifteen, do the deed, and be at work by ten-thirty so I would be covered if anyone asked.

  The giant brass and glass lobby door of 811 was almost always open that time of night because tenants were going in and out every few minutes. Carl watched the door and ran the elevator, so I waited in the doorway across the street until I saw one of the tenants enter, then followed a few seconds behind him. I caught a glimpse of Carl as he peeked out the closing elevator door. He tried for a smile of encouragement, but actually looked like he was sticking his head out of the elevato
r to throw up.

  I knew this was ridiculous, slinking around like the Continental Op, but on I went to the far end of the lobby and through the door that led to the service elevator—a conveyance I’d learned to operate when I used to go with Carl to smoke dope in the cellar. It was the only elevator to the cellar; the only other way was a stairway that they kept locked. If I kept the elevator with me, someone might wonder who was in the cellar, but no one would be able to get down to find out without either ringing the bell for the elevator or getting the key from Carl. Sam the Hammer would have called it a sure thing. Thinking about Sam, I remembered the gun, wondering if this were the kind of caper he had in mind when he gave it to me. I’d forgotten all about it; it never even occurred to me that I should have it with me. The idea of it sent shivers down my back and turned the cartilage in my knees to sponge.

  Hyper-alert, I heard and measured every creak and groan of the elevator chains. When the creaking stopped and the elevator thudded softly to a stop, I opened the iron grill, peered into the murkiness of the cellar, then made my way stealthily toward the rumble of the boilers. Why I tiptoed across the cellar if I was certain no one was in the basement might have been a mystery itself had I thought of it. But I didn’t think; I’d become a creature of cunning and wits and senses, all instinct. I crept toward the cabinet in the makeshift lounge of sagging couches behind the boilers where Rocky kept the films and his movie projector. I didn’t have a flashlight or anything to pry open a lock with if that were necessary, this B&E thing not being my first line of work. It occurred to me that people in the business probably did an apprenticeship before they went off on their own, as there was not much room for mistakes during on-the-job training.

  Maybe the cabinet wasn’t locked. And if no one was in the cellar, there was no reason not to turn on the lights. If I could only find the light switch…

  Someone saved me the trouble. In a glare of light that will stand in my memory as bright as the Second Coming, the boiler room lit up like Yankee Stadium. I was caught between first and second and the pitcher still had the ball.

  Actually, only one little light bulb went on; it swung jauntily from its own wire a foot or so above the head of the Boss and his goon—who had remembered to bring his gun. The Boss smiled placidly; the goon stared grimly.

  “Barkeep. Barkeep,” said the Boss, clucking a little and shaking his head, like he was the principal and I was the kid gone bad. This parasitic, degenerate sucker of society’s blood, purveyor of filth, corrupter of children, pilferer of the quarters and dollars of the poor, this boil-like symptom of society’s systemic corruption, he was clucking like a duck and shaking his head at me.

  “I told you to pour drinks,” he said sadly. His eyes looked completely closed. I wondered how he knew it was me.

  My insides crashed in a lump somewhere around my ankles. Frozen to the spot, I stared, as if it might all go away if I looked long enough. This feeling of absolute awfulness that I’d felt only once before in my life—when I knew my mother was dead—this feeling of irreparable doom jolted through me like high-voltage electricity, standing my hair up straight and wobbling my knees.

  “Hello Boss,” I said when I could talk. “What are you doing here?”

  “People think it’s fine to take things that don’t belong to them,” the Boss said. “Tell stories about a person’s business. I treat you like a gentleman.…I treat everyone like a gentleman who knows how to act like one.” His little weasel eyes opened a crack and bored into mine. “When was I not a gentleman?”

  He phrased the question broadly, I thought. Certainly, I could guess at some times when he wasn’t. But, all in all, he had always acted well around me. He talked pleasantly, tuned me up, tipped well, paid me compliments on my bartending and my intelligence, talked to me about his sons, introduced me to his wife. I didn’t know whom he had extorted or beaten or stolen from, or even murdered—or if he had done any of these things; it seemed hard to believe he would, but then I couldn’t imagine anyone would. Yet Angelina was still dead, and the guy with him still held a gun. Maybe it was already out of the Boss’s hands. He wouldn’t kill me if it was up to him, but it wasn’t anymore. The boys from Jersey had sent this other thug over to take care of it.

  “Look, Boss, you’ve always been okay with me,” I began.

  He looked hurt; his eyelids drooped again, his nodding slowed from self-righteousness to martyrdom, his lips pursed and his clucking stopped. “Why do you do this?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  His eyes flickered open and anger sparked from them; his face hardened, and he seemed capable of all the evil I’d ever imagined for him. Then the elevator bell rang like a shot. We all jumped. I was amazed the gun didn’t go off.

  “Take it up,” the Boss told the goon.

  The goon looked at me and then at the Boss. “I don’t know how,” he said.

  The Boss shook his head, then looked at me. “Take him up,” he said, nodding toward the goon, who looked like he’d been dressed for the job by Damon Runyon. Dark jacket. Black shirt. White tie. Baggy black pants. Small and skinny. He wasn’t young either. While he followed me to the elevator through the dank, murky cellar, I decided I could take him. Somehow I could do it. I had the feeling in my bones, a rush of excitement like a hit of coke. The shot of adrenaline. I thought I could take him, but decided to wait. I wanted to see who rang the bell. Maybe it was the cops.

  I drove the rickety elevator up one floor, opened the iron grating, waited for the big outside door to open. There stood Carl—and Janet Carter.

  Things get to a point where they can’t get any worse; then, they do.

  “What’s taking you so long,” Carl asked in a jittery voice. Not nearly as jittery as it was about to become, though. He looked at the man behind me; he looked at me. Understanding and fear registered on his face, but then as he stared at the goon a couple of puffs of anger rose to the surface from the Captain Haddock side.

  “What did you find?” Janet asked excitedly, not grasping the significance of the character behind me. “Do you have them? Did you look at any of them?” When I didn’t answer, she looked at Carl. Seeing his face, she looked back at me. She noticed the man and the gun. She screamed.

  “In,” the man said. I could tell that Carl, who had just snorted a couple of times like a bull, made him nervous.

  “Now everybody’s here,” the Boss said when we got back to the boiler room. His manner was obsequious, like the worst kind of funeral director. “Good evening, miss. As I told your friend here before, I am very sorry about your sister.” Through their narrow slits his eyes burned into hers. “Not me,” he said. “I told him.”

  “Let her go,” I said. “She’ll go back home and forget about all this.”

  “See, you are a gentleman,” said the Boss. He moved slowly and spoke softly, turning toward me when he spoke. He was smaller than I had thought too. I judged the Boss and the goon together didn’t make up one of Carl. “We would all like to keep the lady out of this. But what does she know?”

  “She doesn’t know anything,” I said.

  “All of you take things that don’t belong to you and don’t mind your own business. She knows everything you know. Just tell me now what do you want? You want movies, take them.” He handed a packet to Janet. “To watch them at home? To give them as gifts? Once I had a movie of your sister—a work of art. Now I had to burn it. You want all the movies to burn up?”

  Janet stared at him. Her face was white, but she stood straight and held herself firmly. He knew what we wanted the movies for; he’d known we would be there. Of course the cops wouldn’t come to our rescue. I didn’t know if she’d figured it out, but I had.

  “We made a mistake,” I told the Boss. “We talked to someone we shouldn’t have.…Maybe we didn’t know who was a gentleman.”

  Still unruffled, his eyes slits once more, the Boss smiled. “We’re all gentlemen,” he said. “Perhaps you didn’t know how things wo
rk.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Too bad,” said the Boss. “You look for one thing, you find something else. We’ll have to leave here now, all together.”

  “Maybe we can work something out,” I said.

  Carl, who had been speechless since we met at the elevator, perked up. “You don’t have to kill us,” he said in what I gathered he thought was a reasonable tone, though he sounded to me a bit argumentative for the position we were in. He was fully into one of his Captain Haddock moods and under normal conditions not to be trifled with. These, however, were far from normal conditions.

  “We’re good secret-keepers,” I agreed. “The bartender’s code: ‘I enter my friend’s house deaf; I leave dumb.’”

  The Boss liked that. “You were always a gentleman,” he said. “Too bad.”

  As we walked solemnly to the elevator, Carl in front muttering to himself, Janet clutching my arm, I got an idea. Putting my head close to hers, I whispered a two-sentence plan. “Now lean against Carl in the elevator and tell him,” I said.

  I could see Carl’s body puff up a bit more when she told him. The plan unfolded quickly when the elevator bounced to a stop at the main floor. Since Janet and I were to get off first, we jumped ahead. Carl whacked the lever that sent the elevator bouncing and grumbling back toward the cellar. Then, he jumped. The elevator was already a couple of feet below the floor when the goon and the Boss realized what was happening. In their panic to get out, they forgot about us, and when they did clamber up out of the elevator well, they instinctively looked back for a quick second at the gaping cavern created by the descending elevator. In that split second, Carl let out a roar, jumped forward, and shoved. The goon followed the elevator into the abyss.

  The Boss, looking more dapper than ever, stepped back from the hole, peered over at his departing colleague, dusted off his hands as if that was a phase of his life that no longer mattered, then, his eyes wide open, smiled at Carl.

  “Nice!” he said.

  I had no idea what to do next now that we seemed to have captured a gangster and a gunman. Actually, I wanted to call the whole thing off. Janet, however, was not to be thrown off the scent.