The Bar Watcher

by Dorien Grey

  *

  Although I knew the timing was really bad, the moment I walked into the office I went to the phone book to see if I could find George Atkins’s number. There were two “G. Atkins” listed, but I recognized one of the addresses and wrote it down on a piece of scratch paper on my desk. I did have the decency to wait until around 9:30 to call.

  When I dialed, the phone was answered on the second ring.

  “George?” I asked, not recognizing the voice.

  “No, this is John. Can I help you?”

  “John,” I said, having no idea who he was, “this is Dick Hardesty, an old friend of George’s. I just heard about Lynn’s death, and wonder if I might talk to him for a minute, if he’s up to it.”

  There was a brief pause, then: “Hold a second, I’ll see if he can talk with you.”

  A muffled hand-over-mouthpiece comment, pause, another comment, then the sound of the receiver exchanging hands and George’s voice.

  “Hi, Dick. It was nice of you to call.” He sounded a bit tired, but not bereft. Considering all he’d put up with from Lynn, I hardly expected him to be.

  “I just heard about Lynn,” I said, “and wanted to extend my condolences.”

  “I appreciate that, Dick,” George said, “but I think you know the situation between Lynn and me. Condolences aren’t really needed, to be honest.”

  I was somehow relieved to hear him say that.

  “I’m glad you’re looking at it realistically,” I said. “You’ve always been such a damned kind soul, I was afraid you might have been devastated in spite of what you’ve had to go through.”

  “Well, he was part of my life for a long time,” George said, “so naturally, there’s some sense of…well, loss, if you will, but….”

  I decided to push my luck.

  “I know this isn’t a good time, George,” I began, “but I’m working on a case, and I think that Lynn’s death might be connected with it in some way. Would it be at all possible for us to get together for a few minutes and talk about it?”

  There was almost no hesitation before: “Sure. It would be good to see you. We didn’t have a chance to talk the…the other night. When would you like to meet?”

  “The sooner the better, really,” I said. “Whenever it’s convenient for you, that is.”

  “Today’s fine. I’ve got some arrangements to make on behalf of Lynn’s parents later this afternoon, but if you wanted to come by this morning, yet, that’d be all right.”

  “Great!” I said. “How about in an hour?”

  “Good. We’ll see you then.”

  I hung up, not unaware of the “we’ll” and wondering just who John might be.

  *

  John, I discovered, was a co-worker at the insurance company where George worked. From watching the two of them together, it was fairly obvious how John felt about George, and it was also fairly clear that now Lynn was out of the way, George and John were free to become something more. John seemed like a really nice guy, and I was glad to think George might at long last have a chance to be happy.

  “We’d been to an office retirement party Sunday night,” George explained as the three of us sat in his living room drinking coffee. “And when the party broke up quite a bit earlier than expected, John suggested we stop by the Mardi Gras for a quick drink before heading home. I was a little hesitant after what had happened at Venture, but Lynn knew I was going to be late, so I agreed. They were having some sort of anniversary party, and the place was jammed for a Sunday. So we walked in and…”

  He paused and stared into his coffee cup. John, who was sitting beside him on the sofa, picked up the story in mid-sentence, casually, as though they were already used to finishing each others’ sentences.

  “And there was Lynn, at the bar, all over some guy, but when he saw us, he went ballistic. I’d never even met him, but he came storming over to us and started screaming and yelling really terrible things at George at the top of his lungs. I won’t even begin to tell you what he said, but I’m sure you can imagine the gist of it.

  “The whole place just stopped dead. Finally, the bouncer who’d been checking IDs at the door came over and told Lynn he’d have to leave.”

  George picked up the story in a way that reminded me of two jugglers effortlessly tossing tenpins between them.

  “‘Oh, I’ll leave, all right,’ Lynn yelled as the bouncer started to pull him toward the door. ‘I’m gonna go out and get myself fucked by a real man, you fucking eunuch.’ And that was the last time I ever saw him.”

  “We went out the back door just in case Lynn might be waiting out in front,” John said, “and I insisted George come spend the night at my place.”

  “That finally did it for me,” George said. “I knew I couldn’t live one more minute like that, or with Lynn. John said I could stay at his place for a while, until I could get Lynn out of here or find another place. Almost everything here is mine, but I figured Lynn could have it all just to get rid of him.”

  “I loaned George a change of clothes so we could go to work Monday,” John said, “and then Monday night we came over here to pick up some of his things. We were dreading another encounter with Lynn, but of course we didn’t have one. There was a message from the police on the answering machine.”

  “Did the police question you at all?” I asked.

  George shrugged. “Not really. I guess they took John’s word that we’d been together—we’d gone to a coffee house and talked for about an hour after we left the bar, and we had witnesses there. And the doorman at John’s building saw us go in. To be honest, the police didn’t really seem all that interested.”

  Why am I not surprised? “Did you by any chance notice anybody who left the bar right after Lynn did?”

  George gave me a weak smile.

  “A lot of people left,” he said. “They went out the front, and we went out the back.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, until George spoke again, quietly and almost to himself.

  “Lynn had no reason to be the way he was. I never cheated on him…never! And while I don’t know how I could have gotten through the past few days without John, I really don’t know why he is being so kind to me—we’ve known each other for two years, but we’d never so much as touched one another, except for a handshake.”

  Well, maybe George didn’t know, but John obviously did, and I certainly could make a good guess.

  *

  While there were several complicated and interwoven links between most of the six—six, I feared, and counting—dead men, there was one indisputable link other than their cruelty—the bars. While Comstock and D’Allesandro were more or less public figures who amply and regularly displayed their despicableness in their workplaces, they, like every single one of the others, had been observed mistreating someone in a bar.

  Nuh-uh! my mind taunted like a little kid. Not D’Allesandro.

  Damn! That’s true. I realized I didn’t know if D’Allesandro even deigned to go to bars, although I was sure that, if he did, being D’Allesandro, he could hardly have avoided doing something to call attention to himself by hurting or embarrassing someone. I made a mental note to check that out.

  So, if it did check out that the bars were a link, that would lead to one conclusion—somebody was watching.

  Well, that’s a cheerful little bit of paranoia, I thought. But my gut told me it was true. And, of course, just when I’d started working up a nice lather over potential suspects among the guys I’d run into so far, the fact the killer could be practically anybody neatly blew my little rubber duckies out of the water.

  Well, I consoled myself, it isn’t quite that bad. We can narrow it down to “he’s male and he’s gay.”

  Sigh.

  The route between George’s apartment and Kimmes’s office took me past one of my favorite little diners, so I took advantage of that fact to stop and have one of their gourmet delights—an olive cheeseburger. A half-pound hamburger patty piled with
about half an inch of chopped green olives held in place by a slab of melted cheese—oh, and with a side of fries greasy enough to turn any paper napkin transparent in twenty seconds. Good eatin’!

  As for Kimmes and the Rage probable embezzlement problem, until I knew for an absolute certainty the bars were the key, I couldn’t let myself get sidetracked again from the path—Paths, Hardesty, lots and lots of paths—I was already following. A small part of me hoped it wouldn’t be the bars. It would be hard enough if I were limited to just the vague suspects I already had, but to try to find out which one of any given 120 guys in any one of twenty-odd bars might be looking for the next rotten SOB to send to his reward…

  Life ain’t easy, kid.

  *

  For being one of the leading accounting firms in the city, Kimmes’s offices kept a pretty low profile. The atmosphere was efficient to the point of being Spartan—the kind of place where you automatically knew when you walk in the door that levity was not a frequent or welcome visitor, where smiles never revealed teeth. Everything was also neat. Very neat. You sensed you could go through every single desk in the building and not find an unsharpened pencil, and that paperclips were kept in separate little compartments according to size.

  No polished oak or bronze raised lettering or Italian marble. Lots of chrome and extruded aluminum and good, sturdy stain-resistant upholstery.

  The receptionist, whose neat metal nameplate identified her as “Miss Zablonski”—God forbid she should be so informal as to have a first name—gave me a pleasant no-teeth smile and, when I announced myself, efficiently reached into a lower drawer of her desk and produced a relatively thick letter-size envelope with my name neatly typed. I thanked her, asked her to convey my thanks to Mr. Kimmes, and left.

  *

  When I got back to the office, I had a message from Jared, asking if I’d like to meet him for a quick happy hour drink at Ramón’s. Ah, ESP lives, I thought. I had been planning to call him when I got home, and meeting at Ramón’s would enable me to hopefully talk to both him and Bob Allen about what they might know about D’Allesandro’s bar habits—if there were any.

  Turning my attention to the envelope from Kimmes, I opened it to find several pages of what appeared to be Xeroxed copies of a detailed “Telephone Time Spent” form apparently required of each accountant. They showed Sharp’s outgoing and incoming calls: the person called/calling, the time and date the call was made/received, and the exact duration of the call. I would not have been surprised to learn that each employee had to also keep a record of their bathroom visits.

  There were a total of thirty-five calls made between Rage’s partners and Sharp over the six months since Kimmes took on the Rage account. There were no calls to or from Glen O’Banyon, twenty calls (nine out, eleven in) to/from Barry Comstock averaging six minutes each, and fifteen calls (three out, twelve in) to/from Bart Giacomino averaging two minutes each. Thirteen of the Giacomino calls were made in the month preceding Sharp’s death. Most interesting.

  I decided I’d definitely like to talk to Giacomino again, but that I’d better go to O’Banyon first to see if he might want to talk to Giacomino himself—it was, really, a matter between the two of them. And since I was technically working for both of them, it would be awkward, to say the least, to let one of them think he was a suspect in the case he’d hired me to solve.

  *

  I got to Ramón’s at around 5:15 and was rather surprised to see Bob behind the bar. No sign of Jared yet, and the place was pretty quiet, since the happy hour crowd usually didn’t start coming in until between 5:30 and 6:00.

  “Jimmy’s day off?” I asked as I pulled a barstool out far enough so I could swing my leg over it and sit down.

  “He’ll be in a little later,” Bob said, putting a napkin in front of me. “What can I get you?”

  I ordered, and when he returned with my Manhattan he handed me a small stack of quarters.

  “Do me a favor and feed the jukebox?” he asked. “It’s kind of quiet in here.”

  I pulled out a bill to pay for my drink and picked up the quarters.

  “Anything special you’d like?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Surprise me.”

  I left my drink on the bar and walked over to the jukebox. It was one of those old “flip the pages” affairs with about a hundred or more selections. I ignored the few country and western, flipped quickly past Elvis, and started looking for the old standards. When I got to Judy Garland’s “Swanee,” I got a very strange sensation in the pit of my stomach. Much as I loved her music, I just couldn’t bring myself to listen to her anymore. Too many memories I’d just as soon keep shut away.

  Luckily, Bob liked standards as much as I did, and I found some really great old classics—Glen Miller’s “String of Pearls,” the Andrews Sisters’ “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” some Johnny Mathis.

  Just as I used up the quarters and headed back toward the bar, the door opened, and Jared walked in. Actually, with the contrast between the bright sunlight behind him and the dimness of the bar, all I saw was a very impressive silhouette, but even in silhouette, Jared isn’t the kind of guy you could easily confuse with anyone else.

  He waved, and we vectored in on my barstool near the end of the bar. I sat down, and he pulled out the stool next to mine.

  “How’s it going, Dick?” he asked, his knee automatically finding my thigh.

  “You got a couple hours?”

  Bob came over to take Jared’s order, and before he could turn to reach for a glass, I stopped him.

  “When you’ve got a second, Bob,” I said, “there’s something I’d like to talk over with both you and Jared.”

  “Sure,” Bob said. “Be right back.”

  While we waited for him to return, Jared and I back-and-forthed on general topics: how school was going for him, the upcoming Olympics—zeroing in on the American and Russian male gymnastic teams and men’s swimming, mostly. Bob finished his conversation with one of the regulars at the far end of the bar, and came back to us.

  “So what’s up?” he asked.

  “I’d like to know if either of you know anything at all about Carlo D’Allesandro, especially if he frequented any of the bars.”

  Jared shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. I never heard anything that I can remember.”

  I looked at Bob, who had his brows knit in thought. Then his face relaxed, and he, too, shook his head. “Nope. Afraid not. Sorry, Dick.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Just thought I give it a shot.”

  Bob suddenly got his knit-brow look again and said, “Wait a second…there is something. Let me think.”

  We were all silent, except for Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are” in the background.

  “Ah, that’s right,” Bob said finally. “Mario mentioned D’Allesandro once. He worked at Faces before he went over to Venture, and he was telling me something about D’Allesandro being a regular there.”

  “Bingo!” I said, both to myself and out loud.

  “I-sixty-nine?” Jared asked, grinning, and I grinned back.

  “No,” I said, feeling as though I’d just found that corner piece of the puzzle that joins two of the sides. “I knew there had to be a bar connection in there somewhere! I’ve got to talk to Mario.”

  The door opened to admit two new customers. Bob raised his hand to me and said, “Hold that thought,” as he moved off to wait on them.

  Faces was a very nice, expensive gay restaurant whose semi-exclusive clientele was composed of two major groups—very wealthy, usually older, often married businessmen, and very expensive male hustlers. I’d been there a couple of times for dinner, but I was most interested to hear what Mario had to say about the place in general, and Carlo D’Allesandro in particular.

  “So,” Jared said, bringing me back to reality with something of a start, “anything new on the case?”

  I filled him in on Lynn Barnseth and his eyes grew wide.

  “
No shit?” he said. “Jeezus, I heard that on the news the night they found him and read it in the paper yesterday, but I never put two and two together. Of course, I wouldn’t have recognized his name anyway, but… How many now? Six?”

  I nodded.

  “Jared,” I said, “how about doing me a real favor?” I immediately caught the look on his face and added, “Other than that.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like you to ask all the bartenders on your route to tell you any time there’s an incident in their bar like the one we saw with Richie at Glitter, or with that Lynn character at Venture. Neither you nor I can be in more than one place at a time, but every bartender in the city knows exactly what’s going on in his own bar. If we can have some way of knowing when something is going on, we just might be able to keep some other rotten son of a bitch from getting himself killed.”

  Jared started to say something just as Bob returned.

  “Mario’s coming in in a few minutes, and we’re going to go grab something to eat,” he said. “You guys want to join us?”

  “Sure,” I said, then looked at Jared, nudging his knee with my thigh. “You got the time?”

  He grinned. “Yeah, if we can make it a fairly early evening. I’m about halfway through my thesis, and I’ve really got to spend some time on it tonight.”

  “Not a problem,” Bob said, then looked at his watch. “Mario should be here any minute, and then as soon as Jimmy comes in, we can go.”

  About ten minutes later, Jimmy came in the back door just as Mario came in the front. We all exchanged greetings, and while Bob went over some business with Jimmy, Jared and I finished our drinks—Mario said he’d wait until we got to the restaurant. When Bob had done whatever he had to do to transfer the shift to Jimmy, we left.

  *

  Dinner, at a quiet little mostly gay restaurant within walking distance of Ramón’s, was very pleasant. The food was good if not exceptional, the drinks were served in larger-than-normal glasses and were themselves larger than normal, the conversation was easy and relaxed. Jared, though he’d known both Bob and Mario only casually, fit right in. It’s always fun to watch friends interact, and it’s especially nice when newer members of a group feel comfortable in it. Of course, Jared was the kind of guy who could fit in anywhere—as, come to think of it, could Bob and Mario. Me I’d have my doubts about, but…