The Barkeep

by William Lashner

  “Three minutes and forty-three seconds,” said Mia. “That’s enough time to catch up a bit, don’t you think?”

  “I told you we didn’t talk.”

  “Okay, Justin, you have your story and you’re sticking to it. Just like there was no one inside your apartment beating the hell out of you just before Detective Scott showed up. That’s all for now. Thank you so much for being so forthcoming. Do you need a ride home?”

  “I can manage,” he said as he stood up to leave. “I have to say though, that I feel like I was just interrogated about something. I thought Uncle Timmy died of an overdose.”

  He stared at her with such an impassive expression that she was a bit terrified of him at that moment, like he was cold enough to be capable of anything. She turned to Scott and nodded to him.

  “Flynn did die of an overdose,” said Scott. “But there are details of the death we can’t square, and there is some suspicion of foul play. We have concerns that if there was foul play, it might involve your father’s case, since Mr. Flynn was scheduled to meet with us to talk about his changed testimony the day after his death.”

  “And so you naturally called me in for questioning,” said Justin with the same impassivity, no fear now, no resentment, just something cold.

  “Naturally,” said Mia.

  “Merely wanted to get that straight. Seeing as I’m a suspect in a murder case, I guess I should watch my step.”

  “Where were you thinking of stepping?” said Mia.

  “It was an interesting experience seeing you both again.”

  “Don’t leave town.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  After Justin closed the door behind him, it took a moment for Mia to catch her breath. It wasn’t often she was taken by surprise in her job anymore, but this whole interview with Justin Chase had swept her off her bearings. What the hell had happened to the kid she had known, and what was going on behind the flat, dark eyes of the cold man he had become?

  “He’s changed a bit, hasn’t he?” she said to Scott.

  “He toughened up,” said Scott, with a touch of admiration in his voice. “You said he was in an asylum after he left law school. That will change anybody.”

  “He was lying.”

  “About what happened just before I showed? Of course he was. But there could have been a lot of things going on. If it was something personal, maybe a fight with a pal, it would make sense that he wouldn’t want the cops involved. And it’s not as if he made a good show of it. It was like he was telling us that what was going on in there was none of our damn business.”

  “What about the rest? What about the phone call?”

  “All he said was that he hadn’t talked to Flynn. Just because Flynn called him didn’t mean they spoke.”

  “The conversation was over three minutes long.”

  “Maybe someone else answered. Maybe it went to voice mail.”

  “He didn’t say he got a voice mail.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “How did he get so cold?”

  “He found his murdered mother’s body,” said Scott. “That will do it.”

  “He scared me.”

  “You’re getting jumpy. He just seemed a little mixed-up is all.”

  “He seemed more than that,” said Mia.

  “You got something against the kid?”

  “Maybe I do,” she said, wondering if it was something personal and then dismissing the notion. “Or maybe I’m just suspicious by nature. Check with the brother and then find out what you can about our Justin. I want to know who he hangs with, who he sleeps with, where he spends his money. He’s into something, I’d bet you that, and whatever it is, it’s rotten to the core.”

  14.

  THE LORD OF DEATH

  Now what?

  Justin had been so whipsawed by the events of the past few hours that he hadn’t really had a chance to think them through. He had moved without respite from Birdie Grackle to the surprise visit of his brother at the bar—where all Justin’s Zen cool had devolved into adolescent brattiness—to the warning that had been violently administered in his house by the strange assailant, to his interrogation in Mia Dalton’s office, where he learned that Timmy Flynn had probably been murdered and he, Justin, was a prime suspect.

  It had required all Justin’s control to hold onto whatever semblance of calm he still retained through Mia Dalton’s questioning. But as soon as he was down the elevator and out of that building, he felt it, the past rising terrifyingly high, like a rogue wave coming from behind, about to crash down and obliterate him. And that was when he decided, with a rush of jittery panic, that the only thing to do was to run. Fast. To get the hell out of Dodge.

  It wasn’t a fear for his physical safety, and it surely wasn’t a fear that he’d end up in jail. Instead it was the fear of dealing with it all again, the pain, the loss, the blood and guilt, dealing with the whole murderous mess that had slammed upon his head six years before. He feared he would break apart again if he had to revisit any of it. Which was why he had lied to the police about the beating, and why he hadn’t told them about Birdie Grackle. It all needed just to go away, and that wasn’t going to happen if he set the police onto Grackle’s trail.

  Something dark was going on, something full of twists and lies, and it would take some heavy digging to figure out exactly what it was. But Justin simply wasn’t going to dig. Let them all play their little games—Frank, Mia Dalton, Detective Scott, Birdie Fucking Grackle—let them all dance around the maypole of his mother’s murder. He was after something deeper and more meaningful than the mere solution to an earthly puzzle. He wasn’t going to allow himself to get distracted. It was saner just to up and get on the road to someplace far away where he could find the peace he needed to perfect his life. Mia Dalton had told him to stick around, but she could simply stick it.

  Justin didn’t have a car, but he did have a motorcycle, a Harley he had bought for two months’ worth of tip money from a guy he worked with a couple of spots before he worked at Zenzibar. The bike was old and loud and smelled like something was burning when he rode it, but it was also loaded with chrome, its tank was a sweet cobalt blue, and with the detachable windshield and leather saddlebags that came with it, it was in shape enough to carry him out onto the road all over again. Throw some shirts, underwear, and the proverbial towel into the saddlebags and head west, ever west, until he reached Sedona and found a spot in the desert where he could meditate his past into submission beneath a moon-drenched sky stretched over canyons and red mesas.

  It was a plan—not much of a plan, but enough to capture his imagination. He liked the simplicity of the solution. Just go, get out, hit the open open road. And it wasn’t like the idea hadn’t risen within him over and again the past few months. It was why he bought the Harley in the first place, along with the tent and the compression sleeping bag that he could tie onto the seat. It was his route out, that Harley, his escape pod. And a run west would fit his philosophy of drift perfectly. Everything was pushing him away. And if everything was pushing him away, it only made sense to go with the flow.

  He was already rifling his drawers for the essential clothes to toss into his saddlebag when he came upon the small black book, and he stopped, suddenly, as if someone had smacked him in the head and told him to get a grip.

  Be not terrified. Be not awed.

  He sat down on his bed and opened the book. He had read the volume so often that the words, familiar as a favorite old song, had begun to lose their sense. But the words now shivered with meaning in front of his eyes. And as he read, he realized why Birdie Grackle had gotten under his skin, and why he had reacted like an adolescent to his brother, and why the thug had bashed his face into the floor, and why Mia Dalton had called him in for an interrogation. They were tests, all of them, and he was failing.

  The book prophesized that he would be so tested, that a series of fiends would come to him, one after the other, the so-called blood-d
rinking wrathful deities, one after the other, brandishing grotesque weapons and licking at skulls full of blood, and he would be tempted to run away in terror. But to run would show only how far he still was from any kind of enlightenment. The thing to do was to hold his ground, to look closely at the demons arising against him and see the truth behind their horrifying visages.

  Be not terrified. Be not awed.

  And in that moment he saw not the truth behind the wrathful deities sent his way, but instead the truth of his own pathetic failures. For the past years, he had been blind and awestruck, running away as fast as he could, running from his past, his truth, himself. He had read the book over and again and still he hadn’t understood a word of it. His detachment was a trick, nothing more. If he was running, as he had been running for the past six years, it meant he was still in thrall to what he had been, in thrall to what had happened to his mother, to what had happened to his life. Still chained to the rock-hard lies of the physical world.

  He had failed at every step of his journey, he had failed at every test that had been thrown his way. But according to the book, there was one last test, one last demon to face in order to prove his worthiness. And this demon was described with utter clarity in the book. His eyes glassy, his hair knotted on top of his head, big-bellied, narrow-waisted, shouting out “Strike! Slay!,” licking human brain, drinking human blood, tearing the heads from corpses, tearing out the hearts, filling worlds with blood. He was the final and most fearsome of all the demons the book predicted Justin would have to face, the Dharma-Rāja, Yama, the Lord of Death, holding in his hand the karmic register of Justin’s own life, having come into the world to drag Justin down into the pit of hell.

  Which, all in all, was a pretty fair description of Justin’s father.

  15.

  BRASS MONKEY

  Justin was wholly unprepared for what he felt in the visiting room of the State Correctional Institution in Graterford.

  He wasn’t surprised at the interminable wait, at the rudeness of the guards behind the visiting desk when he showed his ID and signed in both his motorcycle and himself, or at the kindness the other visitors showed a first-timer. He wasn’t surprised at the way he was required to empty his pockets before he went through the detectors and put everything, along with his helmet, into a locker. And he wasn’t surprised at the shabbiness of the visiting area, like the stale-smelling cafeteria of a decrepit grade school in the Soviet archipelago, or at the crap that was sold in the vending machines. He had never been in a prison before, but still, none of it was unexpected. It was as if the good folks at Graterford were trying hard to live down to all his foulest expectations.

  No, what surprised him were the emotions he felt as he waited for his name to be called—the fear and nervousness, the bitterness, the anger, the hatred—emotions he had thought had been bled from him long ago. But even more surprising was the keen expectation that cut through those emotions like a shining blade slicing through a dark curtain. Suddenly, trumping all the hard truths was the simple fact that he was a young man waiting to see his father, and whatever the reality of their relationship and their pasts, just the generic notion of a generic young man waiting to see his generic father for the first time in half a decade couldn’t help but send the generic parts of his heart aflutter.

  And then Justin stood as if ordered to attention when the inmate door opened and Mackenzie Chase, in his brown prison uniform, stepped into the room. His father’s gray hair was pulled back neatly, his face had the hard, tight quality of an executive just off the golf course, and he held himself with the same haughtiness with which he had tromped through life before his conviction. He looked at the now-standing Justin with an achingly familiar air of authority and disappointment. Nothing had changed, absolutely nothing.

  It was all enough to lodge a stone in Justin’s heart.

  His father stared at him for a moment longer and Justin stared back, speechless in the truest sense of the word, not just decidedly quiet but actually numb and dumb, as if the speech had been knocked out of him by the very sight of this man, who haunted his life and his dreams. The Lord of Death indeed.

  “So, you’ve come finally to visit your father, yes?” said Mackenzie Chase in his soft, precise voice, every perfectly pronounced syllable a rebuke. “Come to poke the animal in his cage.”

  “Frank said you wanted to see me,” said Justin, softly and not without a stammer.

  “If that is what Frank told you, then he was mistaken. I said it was you who needed to see me.”

  “I needed to see you?”

  “A boy needs his father, don’t you think?”

  “A boy needs his mother,” said Justin.

  “A whelp, maybe. But after the nursing is through, it is the father who straightens his boy’s spine.” Justin’s father eyed Justin’s long hair, his earring. “And it seems to me your spine needs some straightening. We’re only allowed contact at the beginning and end of the visits. But I think we can forgo the obligatory hug, don’t you?”

  Justin’s father took a seat at the table and gestured to the chair on the other side. And Justin felt a strange sense of deflation, as if deep in the unexplored tunnels of his heart lived the hope that his father, when he saw him for the first time in years, would have rushed over and hugged Justin hard, and buried his tear-wetted face into Justin’s neck. Justin took a moment to flood those tunnels with a fierce detachment before sitting down.

  “Frank says you’re pouring drinks in some lowlife bar,” said his father.

  “It’s actually a high-life bar, since we serve Miller.”

  “Is this why I sent you to law school, to serve liquor to weak-mouthed drunks?”

  “It’s against the law to serve them if they’re drunk.”

  “I remember when I tried to convince you to spend a summer clerking at Talbott, Kittredge, the firm your great-grandfather started, and you went to the public defender instead. You said you wanted to be Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall. I don’t remember Thurgood Marshall making Margaritas.”

  “How do you think he won Brown?”

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Someone killed my mother,” said Justin, with a dose of bitterness that surprised him, “and my priorities changed.”

  “So you ended up in a bar. She would have been so proud.”

  “I ended up where I ended up. It’s a job, it pays the rent. It has nothing to do with who I am, and that’s the way I like it.”

  “That’s what failures always try to tell themselves, but it is self-deception. You are what you do in this world, and what you do, Justin, is crap.”

  “What about you, Dad? What do you do now?”

  “I seethe.”

  And Justin could see it, in the hunch of his shoulders, the tightness of his jaw. His father’s fists clenched so stiffly the knuckles were white. Justin’s throat tightened at the sight of it, as if his father’s anger were reaching across the table to throttle him. For a moment, Justin had to look away to catch his breath.

  “Frank told me about Uncle Timmy,” said Justin.

  “It was inevitable.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you were close.”

  “Timmy was always troubled. Even when we were boys, you could see it. He couldn’t control his weakness, so he decided to feed it instead. He thought the junk would keep it at bay, but all it did was make the weakness stronger. It is no surprise that it overwhelmed him in the end.”

  “Frank said you asked him to pay for the funeral.”

  “It seemed the thing to do.”

  “I was surprised you would do that for him even after he testified against you.”

  “Timmy had an excuse,” said Justin’s father, a note of accusation ringing in his bitter voice before he looked away from Justin, as if for the moment he couldn’t bear the sight of his own spawn. “The police used his weakness to twist him around. I understood. In the end, weakness was all he had left. Without it, he would have been no
thing but bones.”

  “The funeral was this morning.”

  “Did you attend?”

  “No.”

  “Came to visit me instead. Penance?”

  “Not penance,” said Justin. “In fact, I actually wasn’t sure why I was coming, until I saw you walk in the door.”

  “And the grand revelation?”

  “You’re my father, it’s as simple as that.”

  Mackenzie Chase stared at his son, and for the briefest moment something soft slipped through his expression, like a darting fish. What was it Justin saw there in that instant? Regret? About what? About their failed relationship? About Justin’s dead mother? About all they had lost together? It was there and then it was gone and his father had changed the subject, but the effect lingered, like a hope.

  “I heard about your motion,” said Justin.

  “I’ll never stop fighting to clear my name.”

  “Is that what it’s all about, your name?”

  “It’s your name, too.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “You came to me, Justin. Obviously you’re looking for something.”

  “I think I want you to admit what happened. I think I want you to tell me the truth for once. No transcript, no tapes, nothing to prejudice your precious motion. I just want to hear the truth.”

  “You don’t want the truth, you just want some pabulum to fill your tummy.”

  “Try me.”

  “The truth is I didn’t kill her.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “And there we are.” Justin’s father took a deep breath. “I didn’t kill her, Justin. I loved her. I’ve been trying to prove that from the first. I still am. And I was close to proving it, because Timmy was going to come clean and tell the truth for once.”

  “Why did Timmy change his story?”

  “Maybe the guilt had been wearing on him. It can do that, you know. It can corrode like an acid until it turns your insides to mush. But for whatever reason, he came to me, out of the blue, and he apologized for the lie. And it was a lie. The very idea that I would say to him what he said I said. I mean, who knew better than me how unreliable he was? In this visit he said he would do anything to make it right. I had met a lawyer while in here who offered to take up my case. I sent Timmy to the lawyer and we filed our motion for a new trial.”