“I hit her once,” Reuben said.
My blood stood still. I thought he was talking about Angelina.
“But I hit her hard. She caught the corner of the sink with her head.” His thick body softened; he seemed to melt into himself.
I wished I didn’t know Reuben killed his wife. Invading people’s lives burdened you. Like that picture of Dorian Gray, you start picking up the ugliness from them when they let go of it.
I left the West End not knowing much more than when I got there. After sharing his secrets, I didn’t know if I felt closer to Reuben or more distant. I didn’t know if he’d killed Angelina or not.
Finding out about everyone’s past was shattering whatever illusions I had about goodness in the world, but hadn’t brought me a step closer to finding Angelina’s—and now Ozzie’s—killer.
I was discouraged because I couldn’t figure out anything. What had Ozzie seen? He’d been scared to death to tell me. But he’d started to tell me something. If only shit-headed Nigel hadn’t happened along. Why was he so scared when he saw Nigel? As far as I knew, Nigel was the last person to see Ozzie alive. I wondered if the cops knew this. I didn’t know how they would, except if Nigel told them himself. Or I told them. I should have asked Reuben where he was last night, too. I wasn’t doing so well at this sleuthing business.
***
Carl showed up that night at Oscar’s. He hadn’t been in since our escapade with the Boss, and I hadn’t spoken to him since he hung up on me when I asked about the movie. He looked ready to meet his fate when he sat down. I couldn’t help grinning.
“So you showed her the movie you palmed from the Boss. Did she like it?”
“She wanted to keep watching, but I made her turn it off.”
“I decided when I gave up being a Catholic that sex was not immoral.”
“What about inflicting pain?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What about murder?”
He stared at me.
“Did you make any movies with Angelina?”
“No. But I saw one of them. A rare beauty. She should have sex with the gods. She transcended the sordidness. They didn’t know what to do with her. No movie, no characters, only Angelina—everything else disappeared. The movie should be a classic.…I can’t believe the jerk burned it.” Carl’s face flushed when he finished. He’d said more than he’d meant to. Drink does that. His enthusiasm for his fantasies about Angelina was embarrassing.
“So,” he said, when he’d regained himself, “how goes the sleuthing?”
For the first time, I was cagey around Carl. How did I know he didn’t leave his post for a half-hour to go into the park with Angelina?
“When did you first meet Angelina?” I asked.
Carl hesitated. “I don’t remember. Around the time she began coming in here.”
“Did you ever sleep with her?”
For a few seconds he looked angry. “No. It seems like she would sleep with anyone else in the world except you and me.” His cynicism and wit overcome, his eyes reflected truth. Then he looked over my shoulder as the door to the bar opened and Nigel came in. “Even him.”
For the rest of the night, as Carl sank slowly into his stupor, loquacious and intent on the conversations he held first with Nigel, later with Max and Peter Finch, who had stopped in for a quick one and stayed for hours. Then, as the night closed toward the small hours, drinking his scotches faster and faster, absorbed in deep and profound discussion with Ntango, whose cab waited with the hood and trunk open in the bus stop outside the door, and Eric the Red, who once more made it only as far as the bar when he closed up the kitchen—for that night, I watched Carl, who was as close as I got to a friend, and kept picturing him walking with Angelina down 104th Street toward Riverside Park.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask him anything else. I settled for Nigel, with whom I decided to eat breakfast at the greasy spoon. This time, I tried to ask questions methodically.
“Did you talk to the cops yet?”
Nigel nodded.
“You did?”
“You’ve been in bars too long,” Nigel said between dainty spoonfuls of his rice pudding. “It’s not a crime to tell things to the police. Despite what you believe, they want to catch murderers.” He paused between spoonfuls. His eyeballs looked gigantic behind his glasses. “Besides, I walked Ozzie right up Broadway. Why should I hide anything? Any number of people could have seen us. Just like they could have seen you run across the street to talk to him.”
“Did you tell the cops that?”
“I might have mentioned it. What do you care? You have an alibi. I can even vouch for you.” He chuckled.
“You weren’t in the bar.”
“Are you kidding?” Nigel said. “I was there till closing.”
I tried to remember, but it was too blurry.
“I came down right after I dropped Ozzie off.”
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t even know where I am half the time.”
Nigel laughed.
“Why did Ozzie look so scared when he saw you?”
Nigel sat back and raised his eyes from his rice pudding. “Ozzie was afraid of his shadow. How did he look when you ran up to him?”
Nigel had a point there. Ozzie wasn’t any more scared of Nigel than he had been of me. “Did he say anything on the way home?”
“He blabbered most of the way. But I have no idea what he was talking about.”
“Do you know where he was coming from?”
Nigel shook his head. “He sometimes stops off in the Village for a few on the way uptown after work.”
I remembered what Janet had said about Angelina meeting someone at a bar near Hanrahan’s. “Does he stop off down around Lincoln Center, too?”
“I think he might. He used to stop off to see Angelina at Hanrahan’s.”
We sat for a few minutes longer. I realized I liked having Nigel around. Somehow, without my intending it, he’d become part of my life. He helped shore me up. We didn’t talk for a while, and it must have been that he was lost in thought, too. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “These are sad things to talk about, aren’t they? Your life goes along its usual route. It’s ordinary. You might even think boring. You think nothing will ever be different. You don’t even notice you’re growing older. Then something tragic happens and all the ordinariness is gone. You don’t feel safe anymore. Did you ever think your friends would be murdered?”
***
The next morning, Janet called to tell me she was going to help Peter get some information that might help Danny. I wondered if this meant she’d spent the night with Peter. She had some things to do, she said, and would call me later at my apartment. I felt that sinking feeling I get when I realize I’m being supplanted, like the guy coming home and finding a pair of men’s shoes in front of the couch. I didn’t expect I’d be seeing her later.
Well, it wasn’t the first time, and since she’d already woke me up, I decided to do something useful rather than sit around feeling sorry for myself. I sat around for a few minutes in a stupor of sorts, finally settling on a plan that included getting a handle on Angelina’s life at Hanrahan’s and then visiting Pop and talking things over.
Angelina’s reputation at Hanrahan’s was a bit better than her uptown one. Not so surprisingly, she wasn’t the only one who went slumming above 96th Street. She’d been a day waitress for the most part, so getting there in the quiet time when folks were setting up, but before the lunch rush, was the best time to try to find out something. The day bartender and I had a couple of mutual acquaintances, both in the bars and in the theater. He was a big handsome Midwesterner, like ninety percent of the male out-of-work acting profession in New York. But he was pretty serious about his acting—and his bartending. Hanrahan’s was a good, union job, and he handled it well. He’d also had enough luck off-Broadway that I’d seen a couple of his plays. We talked about this and that, and he even owned up t
o having seen me on the stage in one of my rare appearances.
His name was Bob Lewis, and he wasn’t a bullshit guy, so I leveled with him. And it seemed he leveled with me.
“The cops asked a lot of questions about her,” he said, once the preliminaries and my first cup of coffee were finished. “I don’t think I told them anything very important.”
“Who’d she hang out with? Any of the other waiters or waitresses?”
Bob Lewis shook his head.
“Did you spend any time with her?”
He shuffled around, looking a little sheepish.
“You slept with her?”
“Just once.”
“Did anyone else.”
He didn’t know. “Most of the waiters are fags, so I doubt it.”
“Any special customers?”
“The cops asked me that. I told them, no. But there was one guy who came in pretty regularly for lunch—an older guy.”
“Wear a suit?”
“I think so.”
“What’d he drink?”
“Jack Daniels on the rocks.”
“Did he stand up all the time?”
Bob Lewis looked perplexed. “Stand up? I don’t remember.”
When I got to Pop’s house in Brooklyn, I went over everything I’d found out since I’d seen him last. I told him I was stymied. Nothing I found out led me anywhere.
Pop put on the coffee pot to heat up, and we sat down at his dining room table. “Most reporters already have the lead in mind when they go to get the story,” he said. “They already think they know what the story is about and what they should be finding out. It’s like finding proof for your theory. Sometimes they’re wrong. But most of the time it beats stumbling around in the dark.”
I wasn’t so sure. “It sounds to me like you’re still stumbling around in the dark. You just pretend you know where you’re going.”
Pop digested this with some difficulty. Then, he jumped up to run into the kitchen to remove the boiling coffee from the gas-jet flame. He came back muttering and swearing at the pot and poured out two cups. I sipped my burned coffee, rubbing my fingers against the dark mahogany of the dining room table. On the sideboard that didn’t quite match the table was a picture of my mother when she was young, holding a curly-haired child whom my father said was me. Next to this picture stood my high school graduation picture: a truculent youth with Vaseline slicked-back hair and a sneer for a smile. My father was watching me when I drifted back to the present. I realized he must be lonely.
“Unless you have a better idea, why not follow a hunch? Pick someone. Investigate him. Try to trap him. If he comes out clean, go on to someone else.”
I didn’t like this plan. I didn’t like my father proposing it, either. “Do you think that’s fair? Isn’t that what happened to you?”
His face blanched. I felt like I’d slapped him. He sat still, leaning on his dining room armchair, as if only those wooden arms kept him from sinking. Even for these informal discussions, my father sat in his designated chair at the head of the table.
When he spoke, his voice was hushed. “You can’t tell anyone your suspicions. You can’t accuse anyone until you’re certain. Those people—the slime from the FBI—didn’t investigate me. You’ve got that wrong. They set out to destroy me. They had no interest in finding out the truth.”
“I wasn’t trying to compare you.…” My voice shook. We’d never talked like this before.
“You think you know what happened during that time?” he asked sadly.
“I was here.”
Tears formed in his eyes. He made no attempt to wipe them away. With all my heart, I wanted to get up from my chair to go to him and put my arms around him. But years of restrained emotions held me back. The McNulty men, poor Kevin, too—no emotions on our sleeves—full of all this love and not able to get it out.
***
Later that afternoon, in a somber mood, I opened my apartment door for Janet. Seeing her surprised and comforted me. I wanted to put my arms around her too, but again I held back.
“The police found a bloodstained jacket in the garbage chute at Danny’s building on Amsterdam,” she told me before I’d even closed the door. “It’s his. Danny said he’d lost it. Peter said he might have lost it at Oscar’s the last time he played there.”
“Nice to see you, too,” I said.
“Peter said it’s a set-up,” Janet went on, ignoring what I said. “Ozzie was shot in bed. Why would Danny have gotten blood on his jacket?”
“It might be worth finding out when he did lose the jacket,” I said, walking her into my living room.
Janet nodded absently as she walked. We both knew the last night Danny played at Oscar’s was the night Angelina was killed.
“I told you you can’t trust the cops,” I told her. “They plant evidence.”
“You don’t know it was the cops. It could have been anybody.”
I didn’t trust Sheehan. Janet did. I was still smarting over the Boss finding us in the cellar. And I kept thinking it was my fault Ozzie got killed because I told Sheehan about him. The cops didn’t tell us what they knew. Why should we tell them anything?
Now, I wondered if the cops kept a record of the complaint the porno actress made against Nigel. Did they decide to drop it because Nigel was the wrong guy? Or was it that cops are underpaid and overworked, and this girl wasn’t important enough to jack them into using up their time? I’d have liked to get my hands on the police report. But I didn’t want to send Janet to Peter to try to get it. I didn’t want to seem like I was making accusations against Nigel again. Whatever I thought of Nigel, it wasn’t right. Accusations were dirty stuff that followed you around, making you an outcast whether you deserved it or not. Just like someone accusing your old man of being a Communist.
“I checked into Hanrahan’s,” I told Janet instead. “It looks as if there was an older man she was involved with there, too. But I don’t know if it means anything. I didn’t think to ask the bartender if the guy still came in to Hanrahan’s.”
“You mean if he stopped coming in after Angelina’s death, then…?”
“Or after Ozzie got killed. I don’t know. I just should’ve asked if he still came in.”
“Are you sure it was Ozzie?”
“I would be if I’d remembered to ask.”
Janet plopped down on the couch, sighing and looking exasperated. “We have so many different possibilities I don’t know what to do. This person at Hanrahan’s may not have anything to do with anything. But we should still find out; don’t you think?”
“We should. But that reminds me—” I gathered up about a week’s worth of the Daily News so I could sit down beside her. “Can you get the court records from the time Angelina was molested when she was a kid?”
Janet cleared her throat loudly enough to make me stop my gathering and turn toward her. Her eyes narrowed with worry. Getting up from the couch, she began pacing, not looking at me. She looked like Eric did the night he came out of the men’s room to tell me he’d accidentally dropped my packet of coke into the toilet.
“It wasn’t reported,” she said very quietly.
I stared at her, grappling with my armload of newspapers.
She sat down again and fidgeted with her fingers in her lap. She spoke looking down at them. “My mother didn’t file a complaint, so the police dropped the charges.”
“Why didn’t she file a complaint?”
“It was a college boy who molested Angelina. His father paid her a lot of money. He said my mom could use it to send Angelina to college. But, really, he had my mother figured out. He gave the money to her. Angelina never got it. A couple of years later, Angelina was raped again. This time by a friend of my mother’s. Angelina kept trying to please everyone.” Janet cried while she told me this. The longer she talked, the harder she cried, until she wailed like a baby, her face blotching red, her eyes swimming in tears.
This valley of tears, my mother use
d to say. I stood awkwardly over Janet while she hid her face and cried. I told her once or twice that everything was okay.
She turned her blotchy and tear-stained face toward me accusingly. “My sister’s dead,” she screamed. “How can that be okay?”
“It isn’t,” I said, then left her alone to cry and went into the kitchen to make coffee. I sat at my small kitchen table watching the water boil until she joined me.
“It’s hard to admit that I come from such an awful family,” she said.
I couldn’t answer her; I wondered if my own son would say that someday. Again, I was reminded I owed him something, like maybe making sure he knew he had folks who cared about him more than Angelina’s cared about her.
“What’s with your mother anyway? Didn’t she know she was supposed to take care of Angelina?”
We sat across from one another drinking coffee until the red blotches were gone from her face and her eyes became clear. “My mother thinks she’s perfect. Because she’s perfect, everyone else has to be also. That’s what was wrong with my father: He wasn’t good enough for her…and then Angelina was her little doll. When she was little, Mom even tried to make her a child model. Then, this thing happened.…Angelina was abused, so she was tainted. She wasn’t perfect anymore, and my mother couldn’t stand her.…Pretty awful, eh?”
“What about you?”
“I’m her last hope, the accomplishment in her life. I’m a success, she thinks, so she is also.”
Janet didn’t hide the bitterness, so I wondered, without asking, what her success meant to her. The more you find out about people, the more tangled up you find their lives really are. I got this awful feeling I might be normal, after all.
When I thought Janet had calmed down enough, I asked again about Angelina’s rape, which even she had trouble putting the right name to.
“What was this college boy’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he look like?”
“I never saw him.”
Beware the Solitary Drinker Page 15
