Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

by Judson, Daniel

  “I’ll do anything you want, you know that.”

  “Good. I’m going to go out for a while,” I said. “You probably won’t be here when I get back. If I don’t see you before, I’ll see you Thanksgiving, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled on my sneakers and then put on my denim jacket. Tina stayed where she was in the bedroom doorway. We looked at each once again, and then I left her.

  I went down the two flights of stairs to the bar below. There was a good lunch crowd at the bar. George saw me as I slipped into the antique phone booth and closed the door. I dialed Eddie’s number. His wife, Angel, was working the dispatch and answered on the third ring.

  “It’s Mac,” I said. “I need Eddie to meet me.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside the Hansom House.”

  “What time?”

  “As soon as he can.”

  “He’s on a run to Water Mill. He’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Thanks, Angel.”

  “Take care, Mac.”

  We hung up. I sat in the booth and thought things through. I was tired. I had no idea where to look now for the man Frank thought could help us clear Augie. I felt helpless and frustrated. I wanted more than anything to be up in my warm bed, but of course Tina was there. I looked through the narrow panes of glass in the booth door and saw the bar and the people seated at it. I recognized a few faces. I wanted to be among them, drinking Jack neat and not caring about anybody or anything. I didn’t want Augie’s fate in my hands; I refused on a good day to carry even my own. I had made my choice long ago, when I decided not to enter the police academy, not to follow my father, and stepped off into the fringe of life and was content to stay there, if only people like Frank would let me. The first trouble I had gotten into was when I saved a neighborhood girl from being mauled in the street by a mastiff the summer I was ten. It seemed someone always turned up in need of some kind of help or another every now and then since. It was, a girlfriend of mine told me once long ago, my karmic debt. Some I saved, others I didn’t. Was that all part of some cosmic checks and balances? Would failing to save Augie diminish or increase some debt? I wondered as I sat there in that booth if it was possible to be someone else if you wished long enough.

  I hadn’t had anything to drink in a while – months – and a part of me missed the way it relaxed me, the effect it had that nothing else in the world had. Every time I drank I could see why people drank. If every machine has its friction, than booze is the oil to the human machine. Things go easier, friendships seem deeper, strangers are welcomed. For a while anyway. I always drank for free at the Hansom House, when George was behind the bar, and that didn’t make it any easier to practice restraint. I was never an ugly drunk, or a sloppy one, or even a sullen one. I was simply inebriated, impaired, useless. A girl named Becky once died because I was too drunk to pull a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from the hands of her irate boyfriend, my old house-painting partner and longtime friend, Jamie Ray. She had been cheating on him, and when he cornered her and demanded to know who, she lied and told him she was cheating on him with me, thinking he would not dare make trouble with me. He dragged her to the Hansom House one morning and sent George to get me. When I came down, still in the bag from the night before, I found them on one of the overstuffed sofas in the parlor room off the bar. Jamie Ray sat beside her with his arm around her and the shotgun to her head. He wanted to hear it from me that she and I were lovers. But there was no talking to him. He was drunk, spitting mad. I stalled him and stepped closer to them and waited for the best possible moment. It never came, and when it became clear he had reached his end, when he rose up on his knees beside her and pressed both barrels against the side of her head, I moved as fast as I could, grabbing the gun with both hands. I felt the shot rush through and I felt the heat swelling within my grip. The next day Jamie Ray hanged himself with his shoelaces in his cell at the Suffolk County Jail.

  Drinking makes it easier, makes the failures easier. I could forget them for a time after a few tumblers of Jack. I could be free of it for a time, free of the weight, and awaken in the morning on my living room floor with holes punched in my memory and more pressing concerns with which to deal, like the collapsing star just behind my forehead and the ringing anvil in my ear. I’ve chosen each drink I had. I’ve chosen this life I live.

  This was the deal:

  Augie and I, while waiting for a sports car to tail, see a man in the dark alongside the road a few hundred feet behind us and witness a car wreck in which a high school girl, the daughter of a wealthy man, is killed. According to Augie, the Chief’s boys do more of a clean-up job than document the scene. Augie and I go back for a look later, hear a sports car gearing through the back roads in the distance. Augie finds what seem like the marks of a spike strip, a device police use to blow out the tires of cars. Back at our homes, Augie and I are sacked, told to mind our own business. Augie shoots a man who was armed but no weapon is found by the police. Frank suspects the Chief is up to something and coerces me into finding the man who had sacked me so he might lead us to a man who might clear Augie of manslaughter charges and might give Frank something to use against the Chief. I enter the girl’s home and find her room ransacked but priceless artwork and top-of-the-line appliances untouched. The door to the house had been broken into but the alarm wasn’t triggered.

  This was what I knew, this was all I had. It was noon and all my leads were exhausted. All but one.

  I left the phone booth and walked out of the bar without making eye contact with George. It wasn’t long after I got outside that Eddie’s cab came down Elm and stopped. I opened the door and got in.

  I told Eddie what I needed. A dark late model LTD, a man with a limp. I told him where I’d be. He nodded and listened, watching me in the rear view mirror. The conversation only took a minute, and then I got out again into the cold and closed the heavy door. Eddie drove away, and I went to my car and got in and drove back to the hospital to wait.

  I sat in my LeMans in the parking lot and thought of Gale close to the end of her shift inside. A little after two I saw her come out and get into her Jeep Cherokee and drive off. She didn’t see me. I thought about the envy I felt, how maybe life would be better if she was mine. But that’s not the way things were. At some point after she drove off I fell asleep sitting up. When I awoke it was dark and I was disoriented for a few long seconds. The parking lot lights were on but there was no LTD to be seen. It was cold in my car, so I started the engine and turned on the heat. It didn’t take long for me to convince myself that this was a waste of time.

  When I got home my apartment was empty. There was a note from Tina telling me that Augie was home and to call when I got in. But I didn’t call. I guess I just wanted to be free of it for a while. I made something to eat and then got into bed with my clothes on.

  I awoke sometime later to the phone ringing. It felt like the middle of the night. I felt disappointment at my return to consciousness. I let the phone ring three times, lingering in what was left of my slumber, then got up and staggered into the living room and picked up the receiver in the middle of the fifth ring.

  “Yeah,” I muttered. I expected Augie’s voice, or Tina’s, but instead I heard the musical accent of my Jamaican-born friend.

  “I got him,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I got him. I found him. The man you wanted. Old LDT, limp. I got him.”

  “Jesus, Eddie,” I said. “Where are you?”

  Chapter Four

  Bars in New York close at four in the morning, and that always seemed to me a particularly soulless time of night. When I worked as a bartender for a few years in Sag Harbor, it was, in the summertime, dawn by the time I got back to the Hansom House. I drove west on the back roads, along the rim of Peconic Bay, and watched the sky fill with light shades of gray and blue till it was finally light. I quit the bar business because I grew tired of getting people drunk and taking mon
ey for it. I grew tired of the knowledge that people I had gotten drunk were on the roads of my town. In the wintertime, when my ride home was through darkness that spread out around me without a hint of an end, I would think of kids waiting for school buses and my customers, reeling as they left, virtually handicapped, out on the roads.

  Now it was November, and as black as ever outside my windshield. I could barely see the bare branches of the trees that flickered past my driver’s door window. I was alone on the long road to Sag Harbor. During my entire ride out there I didn’t pass one car. I saw nothing at all that resembled human activity or life till I turned onto a side street on the backside of town and saw Murph’s Backstreet Tavern through my windshield.

  It was a small tavern, like something out of the American Revolution, painted green and falling apart. Beams sagged, the stone foundation was crumbled out in places on one side, gnarled trees surrounded it as close as framework. I remembered Murph’s well from my drinking days. It was known to some as an after-hours bar, sometimes serving drunks like me till seven in the morning.

  I saw Eddie’s cab right off, parked across the street in the lot of an auto shop, just where he had said he would be. His lights were off and his cab was parked perfectly in line with the other cars in the lot. He was hidden well enough from the casual eye.

  Before I pulled into the lot I looked to my right, into the long dirt, tree lined drive that ran past Murph’s. In it was only one car, a dark LTD circa 1975. I hit the blinker and turned into the lot and backed my car in between two wrecks.

  I walked across the crowded auto shop lot to Eddie’s cab. He wound his window down, and a burst of cloves and cigar smoke raced out at me on the steady current of heated air that fled his cab.

  “He’s in there,” Eddie said. He nodded toward Murph’s.

  I looked around, surveying the scene. I focused on the ramshackle bar and studied it for a while. A few dull lights were on inside but I could hear no voices or music, nothing. The LTD was the only car anywhere to be seen, beyond the contents of the auto shop lot. It was late--it was past late.

  “I was dropping off a fare in Bridgehampton when I spotted him. He was coming out of that bar on the corner, the one that changes names every year, what’s its name?”

  “Winston’s,” I said. A light went out inside Murph’s. I watched the windows.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Eddie said. “He’s been here about an hour. He looked drunk enough to me when he limped in. I can only imagine what he’s like now.”

  I didn’t take my eyes of the bar. “Thanks, Eddie.”

  “You want me to wait?”

  “No, go home.”

  “You want me to call anyone?”

  I thought about having him call Frank and tell Frank to meet me somewhere in an hour. But I thought it would be better to have the man with the limp in my possession before I did that. As much as I wanted to remain an amateur, I didn’t want to look like one in front of Frank.

  “I can take care of this, Eddie,” I told him. “Get out of here. And thanks.”

  “We do what we do, Mac. I’ll see ya.”

  I walked back across the crowded lot to my LeMans, opened the passenger door, and leaned in. In the glove compartment was my Spyderco knife. I removed it and clipped it inside the right hip pocket of my jeans. Then I started across the street to the LTD.

  I went to the passenger door of the LTD and saw at once that it was unlocked. I opened the door and climbed into the back seat. It was as cold in the car as it was outside. I thought of the laws I was breaking and the laws I was about to break, and then I thought of Augie and the shit storm he was in and knew there was nothing else I could do.

  One good thing, I was in Sag Harbor, not Southampton. I didn’t have to fear the Chief here. Still, a felony was a felony, no matter what town I was in. And I wasn’t convinced that, one way or another, the Chief wouldn’t get his hands on me no matter where on the East End I got busted.

  I tried to keep my mind focused on Augie, on his needing my particular help, the trouble he was in. Now and then, though, Tina would cross my mind. It was hard to think of him without thinking of her. I remembered the warm nights last summer when Augie was still in the hospital and Tina was staying with me. I remembered us spending late-weekend nights sitting in my living room and listening to the radio and speaking Spanish. She had studied it for two years at school and wasn’t half bad. Of course, this was before her attentions turned dangerous and I started hiding from her in the bar downstairs, drinking myself senseless and making myself impervious to her attempts at getting me to want her.

  I don’t know how long I had been there waiting when I finally heard the sound of a door open and close, followed by footsteps on the dirt driveway. Even though I could hear him make his approach it seemed almost sudden when he appeared at the driver’s side and opened the door. I slid the Spyderco out of my pocket and held it tightly. I waited while the driver’s door opened. A hinge squeaked. The man with the limp more fell into his seat than anything else. He closed the heavy door and fumbled with his keys. After a moment, the ignition cranked and the engine caught. He switched the heat to high, shifted into drive, clicked on the lights and, after a long pause, started down the dirt drive to the street.

  The car moved forward with a jolt. He turned left, then left again, heading toward the bridge to Northhaven.

  I waited as we crossed the bridge. A minute after we rolled onto ground again the LTD began to slow for a stoplight. I could hear the heater fan running up front but felt nothing but cold around me still. When the car came to its stop, I drew a breath and made my move.

  I jumped up and wrapped my left hand around the man’s forehead, pulling his head back. I placed the closed knife against his throat so he’d feel metal and said, “Pull over.” I could see his eyes in the rear view mirror, half opened, the eyes of a man well past drunk.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Pull the car over.”

  “Who the fuck … ?”

  I flipped open the blade with my thumb. It clicked loudly. I pressed the four inches of serrated metal against his throat. Even though it was a bluff, we were clearly well across the line now.

  “Pull over.”

  “Where?”

  “Turn left onto Long Beach. Beside those bushes and trees. Start too fast or stop too sudden and you cut your own throat, got it?”

  He turned left on Long Beach, then pulled the LTD over under an ash tree. The man with the limp did everything slowly, more out of drunkenness than caution.

  He shifted into park, one gear at a time. His clothes reeked of cigarettes and sweet whiskey.

  “Kill the motor and the lights,” I said.

  He turned the key and the engine cut off. Then he switched off the lights.

  We sat there together in the dark. I looked to make sure there were no other cars around. I could see the night sky clearly through the windows. It looked as cold as a pile of coal ash.

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “I don’t want money,” I told him. “Move over into the passenger seat. Now.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it, now.”

  “Why?”

  I said nothing more. Our eyes met in the rear view mirror. There was a moment of cognition when I looked into the calm eye at the center of his drunken storm. Somewhere in there was a sober man. He waited, as if debating something in his head, then said, “Okay,” and climbed over the console into the passenger seat. He moved clumsily. I kept my hand on his forehead and the knife to his throat, moving behind him. Once he was in the passenger seat, I pressed his head against the headrest, my left hand clamped tight on his forehead.

  “If you want the car, take it.”

  “I don’t want your car,” I told him. “Remove your belt.”

  He tried to look at me out of the corner of his eyes, but I was directly behind him, out of his peripheral vision.

  “Who are you … ?”

 
“Just remove your belt.”

  He reached down and undid his belt and slowly pulled it off.

  “Hand it back to me.”

  He held it up. I took it. I held the knife against his throat with my right hand and made a loop out of the belt with my left. Then I tossed the loop over his head and around the headrest till it made a noose around his throat. I pulled it tight. He gagged but I didn’t loosen it. I made a hole in the belt with the knife, then closed the knife and clipped it back in my right hip pocket. I used the new hole to fasten the belt buckle. I quickly double-checked my work. His head was pressed even harder against the headrest. His body seemed pulled rigid, as if slouching would lynch him.

  I reached around and searched through his overcoat pockets. I found a blackjack and stiletto. In a shoulder holster was a 9mm Taurus semiautomatic.

  “You carry a lot of tools, don’t you?” I said into his ear. “Can’t decide if that’s the sign of a craftsman or a hack.”

  He said nothing. I could tell he was sobering up fast.

  “You like hurting people?” I said.

  “It pays the rent.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing slowly. It looked like his neck was a snake swallowing an egg whole.

  “What do you want with me?”

  I removed the Taurus by the butt, holding it between my thumb and forefinger. I removed a handkerchief from the pocket of my denim jacket and used it as a glove as I removed the clip and the chambered shell from the gun. I emptied the clip and placed the bullets into my jacket pocket, then wiped down everything I had touched, including the clip and the gun. Then I placed everything on the handkerchief, tied its corners together, and tossed the bundle out the window and into the roadside scrub outside. The bundle landed noisily in a patch of overgrown winter grass.

  “Lift your feet up onto the seat and place them beside each other, ankles touching.”