“Awesome.” It actually was. He’d been sober even longer than Jimmy. “I guess you’ve been qualifying at a lot of meetings.”
“I share my experience, strength, and hope,” he said. “All any of us have is today.”
“Look at poor Neil,” I said. “There but for the grace of god, huh? I found the body.”
Hank seemed suitably shocked, when I told him I felt scared I might be the prime suspect. I lied, but it got me what I wanted, three names from Neil’s resentment list.
“I hate to break his anonymity,” Hank said.
“Dead is dead,” I said.
Pete, another kid from Yorkville, had gone into business with Neil, before Neil got clean and sober. They’d opened a pizza place on Second Avenue. I remembered it well. The pizza wasn’t bad, but the weed they sold out of the back room was outstanding. When Neil got into the Program, he bowed out of both sides of the business. Pete couldn’t make a go of it alone, progressed from booze and pot to crack, went a little psycho, and blamed Neil for wrecking his life.
Then, there was Ted, a guy Neil had sponsored for a while. He was also from the neighborhood, another son of a drunk with a long pedigree. When Ted relapsed, Neil decided he needed some tough love. So, he refused to sponsor Ted until he got clean and sober again. Ted had been slipping and sliding ever since. He, too, blamed Neil.
“Did you know Angie’s sister?” Hank asked.
I did. Stella was a chubby kid with a headful of dark curls and a whiny voice, who tagged along with the gang because Angie had to babysit her. She had morphed into a major hottie, at puberty.
“Neil had a fling with her,” Hank said, “before he stopped drinking.”
“Before or after he married Angie?”
“It started at the wedding. He felt very bad about it.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “He made amends by confessing to Angie.”
Hank plucked four sugar packets from the holder on the coffee shop table, flicked them against his palm a couple of times, tore the corners across, and poured the sugar into his third cup of coffee.
“I told him not to. He was so set on ‘clearing the wreckage of his past’ that he couldn’t see he was only stirring up trouble.”
It sounded like a motive to me, for both Angie and Stella. The sisters’ relationship must have deteriorated after that little revelation.
“I BET it wasn’t planned,” I told Jimmy and Barbara later. “Someone lost their temper.”
“Someone angry enough to bash him on the head,” Jimmy pointed out. “Then, they freaked out and ran away when he went crashing into the fish tank.”
“I would have stayed to save the fish,” Barbara said.
“You wouldn’t have killed him in the first place, petunia,” Jimmy said.
“The point is, the divorce wasn’t about the guppies,” I said. “He cheated on her with her sister.”
“If he was paying child support,” Barbara said, “you’d think Angie would want him alive, not dead.”
“Maybe she didn’t need his money,” Jimmy said. “That funeral cost a bundle, and she paid for it. I heard she went back to school and became an accountant.”
“Angie arranged the funeral?” I asked. “They’ve been divorced for years.”
“The kids are his kids,” Jimmy pointed out. “And Neil didn’t have any family left.”
I remembered Neil’s parents. His dad had been a hard drinker with a short fuse and a heavy hand. His mom had been one of the downtrodden, fade-into-the-wallpaper moms, rather than a yell-out-the-window mom like mine.
I knew where to find Ted. When he wasn’t out on a slip, he was a regular at a big afternoon meeting on West Ninetieth Street near Amsterdam. He told me he was back on track, working on ninety days.
“I feel bad about Neil,” he said. “I had a resentment. I didn’t forgive him, and now it’s too late.”
“Yeah, well, they say it’s never too late to make amends.”
“Just for today, I’m giving myself the tough love poor Neil tried to give me.”
Ted edged into my personal space, his head bobbing a couple of inches from my face.
I stepped back a pace.
“One day at a time,” I said. “Gotta go now.”
I was afraid he’d offer me a hug. Some days, I can’t believe the company I keep to stay sober.
I caught up with Pete on East Thirty-seventh Street off Lex, in the basement of a building— not a church— where they had meetings more-or-less around the clock. I found him by the communal coffee pot near the door. His hand shook, making the brown liquid in his Styrofoam cup look as if it had minnows beneath the surface, instead of sludge. By the look of him, he needed a new slogan: Don’t drink, go to meetings, and shampoo.
“Hey, man,” he said, biting at the knuckles of the hand not holding the coffee.
“Pete. Haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Just got out of the cuckoo’s nest.” He tittered and winked at me.
He meant Bellevue, or someplace else with a locked psych ward. I wondered if that gave him an alibi.
“You heard about Neil?”
“Oh, man, what a bummer.” He winked the other eye.
Pete seemed more brain-fried than last time I’d talked to him. You never know when a relapse will be one relapse too many, and you can’t make it all the way back.
“Saaay, don’t I know you from somewhere else? Detox maybe?”
The guy’d sat next to me in kindergarten.
The cops talked to me a couple more times, but I was sure they never considered me much of a suspect. They never found the weapon. I couldn’t have killed Neil right before I called 9-1-1, because of the evaporated water. They didn’t find my fingerprints on anything but the box of fish food. And I didn’t have the shadow of a motive. Eventually, they left me alone. The detective in charge, a grizzled black guy named Washington, with world-weary eyes and a soft voice, gave me his card and told me to call if I thought of anything that might be relevant.
The next thing that happened was that Jimmy got a wedding invitation.
“Angie’s getting married?” Barbara squealed. “Neil’s ex-Angie? Oh, Jimmy, we’ve got to go!”
“Women!” I couldn’t resist jerking Barbara’s chain. “Next thing out of her mouth will be ‘What’ll I wear?’”
“What’ll I— oh! Bruce, you are a dead man!”
“Who, me?”
“Never mind that,” she said. “It’s a motive.”
“What do you mean? They were long divorced.”
“Were they?” Barbara bounced up and down the way she does when she gets excited. “Are you sure?”
“I remember the big Catholic wedding,” Jimmy said. “Barbara’s right. We’ve been assuming the quiet divorce. But maybe they never got one.”
“Less hassle from her family,” Barbara said.
“Why bother, unless you plan to remarry?” I said.
“She’s marrying in the Church again,” Jimmy added, waggling the invitation at us. “She needed to be a widow.”
“And now she’s prettying it up,” Barbara said, “by inviting Neil’s old friends.”
“Not me,” I pointed out.
“If you’d gone to the wake, she would have,” Jimmy said.
Don’t ask how Barbara talked me into crashing the wedding. I slipped in the door with her and Jimmy. I exasperated her by not dressing-to-blend in gray slacks and a navy blue blazer, like Jimmy, but my olive-green cargo pants with the pockets—not just front and back but all down the legs—were the nicest pants I had. I hadn’t been sober long enough to own a navy blazer. But I wore the white shirt and corduroy jacket I used when I temped and, under protest, a tie.
We found Pete at the food table, scoffing up shrimp puffs and baby cannoli. He didn’t even look up. Ted, on the other hand, buttonholed me and Jimmy as soon as he spotted us.
It was not a sober wedding. Waiters circulated with trays of champagne. The insidiously cheerful
hubbub of normal people getting tanked swirled around us.
“So, where do the rest of us get a drink?” I asked.
“The sodas are on that table over there.” Ted pointed out a white-clothed table bristling with bottles, the recovering folks’ designated watering hole.
I had just snagged myself a ginger ale, when Barbara joined us. Champagne fizzed merrily in the glass she clinked with mine.
“Cheers,” she said.
“Church basements,” I responded.
“Have you seen the sister?” Barbara asked. “She’s one of the bridesmaids.”
“Oh, is that what the Barbies with the matching orange dresses are?”
“Not orange. Pumpkin.”
“What’s with the giant bows on their butts?” I asked. I’d seen half a dozen girls wrapped like Halloween presents floating around. I hadn’t spotted Stella yet.
“Hideous, aren’t they? I think the idea is to make sure the bridesmaids don’t outshine the bride. Oh, look, Stella has the right idea.”
I followed the path of her pointing finger. The bouncing black curls had been gelled or moussed into soldierly spikes, with the big bow, ripped off the rump of her dress, perched on top of the hairdo.
“She looks like a cockatoo at a Tupperware party,” Barbara said.
“The bride looks happy,” Jimmy said. “Is that Hank she’s talking to?”
“Looks like it,” I said.
“That’s the guy who was Neil’s sponsor?” Barbara asked. “It looks like he’s got a glass of champagne in his hand.”
“Hank’s been sober forever,” Jimmy objected. “It must be ginger ale.”
“No, look,” Barbara said. “He just knocked it back, and now Angie’s pouring him a refill.”
She was right. I know a Veuve Clicquot bottle when I see one.
“She’s making a statement,” Barbara said. “Her own, personal, living-with-an-alcoholic hell is over. She’s vowed never to worry about someone’s drinking again.”
“Wait till her kids hit their teens,” I said.
“I can’t believe Hank’s drinking,” Jimmy said. “I heard him qualify at a meeting two nights ago, and he was sober then.”
“Or faking it,” I said. “He’s been getting a lot of mileage out of that ‘twenty-five years.’ Maybe being a star went to his head.”
“There are no stars in Program,” Barbara said. “Lying about his sobriety won’t hurt anybody but him.”
“Denial,” Jimmy said. “If he’s drinking again, he’s not thinking straight.”
“But when did it start?” Barbara asked.
I thought hard, trying to follow the faint thread of possibility beginning to shimmer in my mind.
“How about this? Hank picks up, but he manages to hide it at first. Neil finds out.”
“How?” Barbara asked.
“Suppose Neil made one of those three-in-the-morning phone calls that your sponsor keeps telling you it’s okay to make, and Hank was drunk enough that he couldn’t cover it up.”
“He should have admitted he’s back to Day One,” Jimmy said, “so he couldn’t sponsor Neil any more.”
“But instead,” I said, “Hank lies. Neil knows he’s lying.”
“Anyone would freak out if his sponsor relapsed,” Jimmy said. “So what do you do?”
“Suppose Neil confronted him,” Barbara said. “Are we saying Hank killed him? To stop him from telling the world that he had relapsed?”
“Neil wouldn’t break Hank’s anonymity outright,” Jimmy said. “He wouldn’t gossip. But you know how it is. Neil raises his hand in a meeting and says he’s having a rough time, because his sponsor has picked up and refuses to get help. Anyone who knew who Neil’s sponsor was would have known. I would have known.”
“Hank got off on being an old-timer,” I said. “Maybe he thought he could pull himself together and stop drinking again, without anyone having to know.”
“Denial,” Jimmy said. “No way.”
“He didn’t mean to kill Neil,” Barbara said. “But you know what booze does to judgment and impulse control.”
“Neil tried tough love,” I said, “and Hank lost it and beaned him.”
“And then did a Chappaquiddick,” Barbara said. “Except nobody knew he’d been there at all.”
“The cops have never even heard of Hank,” I said. “But they may have found his fingerprints in Neil’s apartment.”
“So, do we tell them?”
“Let an active alcoholic get away with murder?” Jimmy said. “To call that enabling would be an understatement.”
“We can give the police his name,” Barbara said, “but suppose his fingerprints aren’t on record anywhere. If he’s never committed a crime or worked for the government, they’re probably not. Are they, Jimmy?”
“I can’t break his anonymity about what I’ve heard him share at meetings. But hypothetically, no.”
“So, suppose they have these unknown fingerprints from Neil’s apartment. The only thing they can do to compare them to Hank’s is to get Hank’s fingerprints. But don’t they need some sort of reason to ask for them? I mean something more concrete than us telling them he was Neil’s sponsor, and we think he might have a motive.”
“I know a way around that,” I told them. “Be right back.”
I headed toward where I’d seen Hank and Angie talking. The bride had moved on. But Hank was still standing by the same table, hanging onto his glass like grim death. As I approached, he caught my eye. He whipped the glass behind his back. Averting his eyes from me, he drifted away. He left the glass sitting on the table. That was fine with me. I pulled out a red bandanna and wrapped it loosely around the glass. It would give Detective Washington something to go on, once he checked these fingerprints with the ones in Neil’s apartment. I said a quick Serenity Prayer, raised the glass to my nose, and sniffed cautiously. Yep. It was champagne all right. I discovered that I didn’t even want to sample it before I stowed away the glass.
I knew the pockets in those cargo pants would come in handy.
NORTH ON CLINTON
k.j.a. Wishnia
LOTS of people think they know Long Island, but most of them don’t know from Shinola about the place. All they know is the Gold Coast and the Hamptons, but nothing about the endless miles of strip malls in between. They don’t know about towns like Roosevelt, the subprime foreclosure capital of Nassau County, or Wyandanch, where the public schools are full of ratty old textbooks telling you that JFK’s still the president, or Brentwood, where a murder vic can lie out in the street all night before the detectives decide to drop by and get to work.
You’ve probably heard of that other Brentwood, out in some fancy part of L.A., where all the rich and famous live, like O.J. Simpson and that nutty Lewinsky babe. Not the Brentwood I know.
Today, we’re taking Jamaica Avenue all the way across Queens to darkest Hempstead, south of the LIRR tracks, where the potholes are as big as missile silos, and the dope dealers own half the corners from here to Freeport. So, we’ve got to keep a close eye on the goods as we unload a shipment of TV tables at a warehouse surrounded by security cameras and razor wire, where they’re going to sit until they’re ready to move into their new home— a five-star hotel with state-of-the-art meeting rooms and banquet facilities next to the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale. Don’t ask me what the fuck there is to see in Uniondale that’s gonna make people want to stay at a five-star hotel. But we’re more than happy to fill the order. Three hundred TV tables is a big order these days. That’s six hundred matching Formica shelves plus twelve hundred brass, screw-in legs with heavy casters. We deliver them disassembled. Let those bowtie-wearing pricks put them together on their own time.
Besides, do you know how goddamn boring it is to have to make six hundred copies of the same piece? Usually, we just slap that stuff together with particle board, contact cement, and maybe a millimeter of Formica, but people will pay real money for the designer logos on some of our custo
mized pieces.
One time, we were putting in some countertops— cobalt blue with sparkling highlights— in a place up near Little Neck, when all of a sudden, Tony stops spreading the drop cloth and goes, “Holy shit. That’s not a reproduction. That’s a real Lautrec.”
He’s staring at a six-foot high, framed picture of a scrawny dancing girl kicking her skirts up. It looks like a crayon drawing to me.
“A what?”
“Toulouse Lautrec. A French artist. That poster’s gotta be at least a hundred years old.”
I nod and purse my lips, like I’m impressed. Tony knows about that kind of stuff. The other guys in the crew are Isaiah, a bass player from Trinidad, and Julio, who’s gonna go back to Ecuador as soon as he saves up enough of those off-the-books dolares to build his dream house way up in the Andes.
The company van’s from the Crustaceous Era, so it doesn’t even have a working radio, never mind an iPod docking port or something, so we could hear music from this decade. So, all we’ve got for a soundtrack is a whiny tape player spitting out eighties crap like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” and I’m about to throw the thing out the freaking window when Richie finally turns it down.
“Culture Club, for chrissakes? Culture Club?”
“Yeah, mon, I was wondering what your breaking point was,” says Isaiah, laughing and shaking his dreads at us.
“Yeah? Well, you found it.”
We’re heading north on Clinton, and as we cross Meadow, the dividing line between Hempstead and Garden City, it’s like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when everything changes from black-and-white to Technicolor. Suddenly, the houses get way nicer and shoot up in value. Garden City is one of those places that pays extra for its own police force, a bunch of glorified rent-a-cops who’ve got nothing better to do than cruise the pothole-free streets and lay traps for anyone who doesn’t wipe their feet first, and gets caught tracking in dirt from the other zip codes. They didn’t even let Jews in till the early sixties, for chrissakes.
I hate working for these country club stiffs. I mean, a regular Joe either wants the job done or he doesn’t. But rich people— they’ll hire you for a job so big, you’ve gotta take on three extra guys and clear the schedule for four straight weeks. Then, the morning you’re supposed to load in, they change their mind and go with something else, and you’ve gotta lay off the three guys you promised a month’s work to, and run around like an idiot trying to get back some of the jobs you turned away to make room for the big one that just vaporized. And the ten percent non-returnable deposit? Doesn’t mean a thing to them. It’s just pocket change. Thirty or forty grand is just pocket change to these people.
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