The Barkeep

by William Lashner

  Mia looked up at Scott and without turning to Dechert said, “What’s in the packet?”

  “We haven’t tested it yet,” said Dechert.

  She turned toward the suburban detective. “Have you found anything else that points toward intravenous drug use? Needles, burnt spoons, a kit of any sort? Anything?”

  “No. It might not be what it looks like. We’ll have it sent to the lab right away.”

  “When you do,” said Scott, “have them check it for fentanyl.”

  Without turning from the suburban detective, Mia nodded her agreement. She and Scott both had the exact same idea, but something was wrong. It was too damn obvious, the whole damn thing. “Detective Dechert, did you move stuff around in the drawer to uncover the apparent drugs?”

  “I didn’t touch a thing,” said Dechert, “and neither did anyone on our team. We just slid it open.”

  “So that little clearing was made by someone else.”

  “Maybe so. Interesting. Don’t move anything before I get a photograph.”

  When Dechert left the room for a moment, Mia said to Scott, “Do those earrings look familiar?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because we’ve never seen them before except maybe in a photograph, hanging from a pair of earlobes. Go out and get Chase and bring him up here. See if he can identify them.”

  “You think they’re his mother’s, don’t you?”

  “Just get him, all right?”

  “This is screwy as a lightbulb.”

  “You bet it is. And make sure that Annie Overmeyer sticks around. I’ve got some hard questions for her.”

  “Dechert might want her first.”

  “This may be his jurisdiction, but he’s going to have to wait in line.”

  When Detective Scott returned about five minutes later, he didn’t have Justin Chase in tow. Instead he brought in Eddie Nicosia, handcuffed and accompanied by Detective Kingstree. Nicosia had a pale, pained expression on his face, like he had been dragged up the stairs by his ankles.

  “What the hell’s going on?” said Eddie Nicosia to Detective Scott. “Your cop wouldn’t tell me a thing the whole ride down. What the hell is going on, and what the hell is that smell?”

  “Be quiet, please, Mr. Nicosia,” said Mia.

  “I’m not talking to you,” he snapped at Mia before turning his attention back to Scott. “I’m just asking, what the hell are you blaming on me now? I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Shut up,” said Mia, sharply enough to quiet the creep. “Where’s Chase?”

  “Gone,” said Scott. “Along with the Overmeyer girl.”

  “Didn’t you tell them to stay put?”

  “Sure I did, and Dechert asked them to stay, too. I guess it didn’t take.”

  “He asked them, did he?” said Mia. “That’s putting the hammer down. He didn’t have anyone keeping an eye on them?”

  Scott didn’t say anything, he just shrugged resignedly at the working of the suburban police force running the crime scene.

  “What the hell am I doing here?” said Kingstree. “It was the seventh inning of a tie game.”

  “There may be a connection between what happened here and what happened to our pal Timmy Flynn.”

  “What kind of connection?”

  “That’s what you’re here to find out.”

  “Are we ready?” said Dechert, sweeping into the room with a photographer trailing.

  “Ready,” said Mia.

  Dechert motioned the photographer toward the open drawer and then faced Eddie Nicosia.

  “Detective Dechert,” said Mia, “this is our Detective Kingstree. He’s here to observe, if that’s all right. And this is Eddie Nicosia. He was—how would I say it—involved in Mrs. Moss’s life.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” said Nicosia. “I been locked up this whole time.”

  Dechert eyed Nicosia for a moment and then said, “That’s fine, Mr. Nicosia. We’re not accusing you of anything. We just have some questions. This way, please,” he said as he took hold of Eddie’s elbow. Slowly he led him over to the tarp atop the body in the chair. Mia motioned for Kingstree and Scott to follow and keep tabs on what was happening before she backed away into the hall.

  She didn’t want to hear the words that were being passed back and forth, she just wanted to catch Nicosia’s expression. How much of this was a surprise to Eddie? How much of this was inevitable? Nothing he said would be of interest—he was a lying scumbag of the worst stripe—but his raw expressions might tell her something.

  And this is what she saw on Eddie Nicosia’s face when Dechert lifted the yellow tarp: shock, yes, definitely shock.

  This tragedy, this apparent suicide as judged by the suburban cops, was nothing that Nicosia had anticipated in the least. Not that he seemed the most emotionally prescient of guys, but still, you would have thought he was close enough to see it coming if it had been coming. That was the first thing she saw on Nicosia’s face.

  The second thing was bereavement. A crushing bereavement that shut his eyes and forced out tears and bent his knees so that Kingstree had to keep him from tumbling onto the floor in grief. How did you like that? Eddie Nicosia had a heart as soft as his exterior was slimy. Some things just couldn’t be gauged, and the human heart was one of them. Twenty years on the job and it was something she still had to learn every damn day.

  She had seen enough. The sight of the bloodied and blasted skull, the stained housedress, the sweep of the arm ending with the gun, Nicosia’s tears, the smells of death, all of it drove the low-level nausea that had been percolating in her gut up and into her throat. She gritted her teeth and bolted down the stairs, out into the thick, rainy night.

  She raised her chin and closed her eyes and let the soft rain spread its cool fingers over her hot face. She wanted to think it through, what this all meant, but her thoughts were chased out by the nausea. She’d been to enough crime scenes, she should be used to it by now. But there was something that was eating at her. Worry? Guilt? Had she blown it six years ago when she went after Mackenzie Chase with all her claws bared? That’s what the dead woman seemed to represent in there, that was the message of her apparent suicide. And maybe that was the cause of the distress she was feeling. That or the chewy piece of veal she’d had for dinner.

  When her stomach calmed, she opened her eyes. Scott was waiting for her in the covered area by the front door. She thought she detected a smirk on his face, but when she got closer, she realized it wasn’t that at all.

  “You okay?” he said, his evident concern evidently all too real, which for some reason pissed her off.

  “Worry about yourself,” she said, a little too quickly. “What did he say?”

  “It was her gun, all right. It had been in the drawer by the bed where they found the earrings.”

  “Did she know how to use it?”

  “He didn’t think so. He had gotten it for her a couple of years ago after some burglaries in the neighborhood, though he claimed she had been too afraid to load it. The clip was supposedly in the drawer too and he doubted she knew even how to slip it into the gun, not to mention chambering a round. He figured it was safer for everyone that way. She would just wave it around if anyone showed up.”

  “Well, someone showed her how to do it,” said Mia. “What about the drugs?”

  “He was adamant that other than her prescribed pills and a little pot, she wasn’t a user.”

  “Forensics will tell us the truth on that. And the earrings?”

  “He had never seen them before.”

  “I bet not. Find out what you can about the dead woman’s husband.”

  “Other than that he’s dead?”

  “Dig a little, Detective. Find out why he’s dead and how. And you said Chase was at the bar when he called before you picked him up to bring him here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Find out when he started his shift and see how it coincides with the time of death here.”r />
  “You don’t think that—”

  “I don’t know what the hell I think, except that something is wrong here. Did Kingstree find any link between that Rebecca Staim who died in that apparent robbery and Mackenzie Chase?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing, other than the print that matches the one we found on Flynn’s phone.”

  “Tell him to keep looking, and to check on all the prints they find here, especially on the gun and the clip. This is the third crime scene I’ve been to in a very short time that is somehow related to the Chase case. An apparent overdose. An apparent robbery. An apparent suicide. And we’re supposed to think that nothing is going on?”

  “Apparently.”

  “I hope to God it ends here, but I doubt it will. We might have to consider whether we have a serial killer on our hands. But for now, I’m out of here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” she said as she started down the walk. “When I throw up, I prefer to do it in my own damn toilet. Get what you need from Dechert and then find out what the hell is going on between Justin Chase and the Overmeyer girl.”

  47.

  OOLONG

  Later, they would tell themselves it just happened. But of course, that would be a lie.

  It never just happens. It is always preceded by an intimation, a curiosity, a flash of fantasy that immediately embarrasses, and most of all a yearning, sometimes as raw as a hard-core blue reel flickering on a stained white sheet pinned to the fringes of your mind, and sometimes as soft and as lovely as a prayer. But there is always something first, and then, if the fates conspire, it happens.

  “You have to think about it,” said Justin, after the blood and the death and their escape from the scene, but before anything more.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” said Annie.

  “It’s like an elephant. If you try not to think about it, it just gets bigger and bigger.”

  “Then I’ll think about the elephant.”

  “Don’t try to run away from it, Annie, because you can’t.”

  “If I agree to think about it, do I get to hit a pillow with a baseball bat?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I took this anger management class and they had me hitting a pillow with a baseball bat. It didn’t help much until in my backswing I took out a vase. That felt pretty good.”

  “I’ll be sure to hide my pottery.”

  They were sitting cross-legged on the third-floor tatami mats, Justin Chase and Annie Overmeyer, freshly scrubbed and in the robes, facing each other but still well apart with the teapot and their cups between them. They had been sitting in the rain outside the Moss house and they decided, on the spur, to get out of there, not to tell anyone, not to let the cops know, just to leave. So they did, in Annie’s car. When she stopped the car on Fitler Square to drop him off, she broke down into tears. So he invited her into his house for some tea to calm herself. When she took off her coat and spied the blood on her still-wet dress, she started shaking from more than the cold. So he told her to go upstairs and take off her stained clothes and wash the blood and the scent from her skin. When she was out of the freezing shower and enveloped in terry cloth, he brought her to the third floor to cleanse her emotions. This last part wasn’t going so well.

  “If the goal is to forget what happened tonight,” she said, “why don’t we just drink something stronger than the tea?”

  “But it’s an oolong,” said Justin.

  “I meant alcohol.”

  “I know.”

  “Generally I’ve found if I want to forget something, drunkenly collapsing into a pool of my own vomit really does the trick.”

  “That itself is an image I’d like to forget. Look, just give this a try, okay? And I’ll do it with you so you won’t ever be alone. Sit up, straighten your spine. Good. Now even out your breathing. In. Out. In. Out.”

  “How about in, in, in, pop.”

  “Annie.”

  “Okay, fine. In, out, in, out.”

  “Slower.”

  “In. Out. In. Out.”

  “Feel it in your diaphragm.”

  “In. Out. In. Out.”

  “Good, now close your eyes and feel yourself floating, like you’re in a great, warm pool of water. I’m closing my eyes too, and I’m floating with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re just floating, calmly, together. Do you see me?”

  “No.”

  “Look. Keep your eyes closed and look. I’m right there beside you.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Don’t you see me?”

  “Yes. I see you. Nice robe.”

  “I got it at Goodwill. Now we’re falling, slowly, together, falling, until we find ourselves right back at that house on Mantis Drive, right at the front door.”

  “Yuck.”

  “It’s open. We float inside, together. We rise up the stairs, together. We smell that awful smell. Keep breathing. In. Out. We turn toward the room and, still floating, we glide forward, slowly, toward the open door. We slip inside the room, and there she is, Janet Moss, in that chair.”

  “Can we stop now?”

  “No.”

  “I want to turn around.”

  “This is no longer a choice, this is inevitability. We’re facing her, or what is left of her. And we move forward, together, closer to the corpse, and closer still. Do you see her? Everything about her?”

  “Oh God.”

  “Can you smell the death?”

  “Please, Justin.”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re hovering there, staring at her. Now open yourself to what you are feeling. You’ve spent a lifetime choking back your emotions. But this time, don’t hold them back, let them rise within you. Like water pouring into an earthen jug, rising higher and higher within you. What do you feel?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Okay.”

  “And sad, unbearably sad.”

  “Okay.”

  “And desperate.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything. For my life. It’s my life.”

  “It’s her life.”

  “No, you’re wrong. It’s me. With the gun in my limp hand, with half my head missing.”

  “It’s not you, Annie, it’s her. But this is good, you’re experiencing the emotions viscerally. Everything you’re feeling is right. Let it rise within you, all of it. Taste it, smell it, let it overwhelm you.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Yes you do. Let it flow, let it keep flowing.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Let it pour in. Feel every drop of it as it rises. The more you feel, the less you’ll find. The deeper you reach, the closer you’ll come to finding the true peace within your own soul. Trust it. Feel it.”

  And, shockingly, at least to Annie Overmeyer, she did. Trust it, because he told her to trust it, and somehow, for some strange reason, she trusted him. And feel it, because finding herself back in that place, that hellhole of blood and death, she couldn’t help but feel the pain and fear, the sadness, the despair.

  And it was new, in a strange way, all this trust and feeling, because she had spent so much of her past self-medicating with drink and tawdry sex to desperately avoid those very two things. The emotions felt thick, and red, like a scratchy Hudson’s Bay blanket, and they wrapped around her tightly, suffocatingly. She could sense her tears squeezing out beneath her lids and something rippling through her chest, which she realized were sobs. And it should have been unbearable, all of this emotion spilling out as she hovered before the dead body of Janet Moss, mourning the dead woman, mourning her own spoiled life and dead future, it should have been the darkest of pain.

  And yet it wasn’t. It wasn’t. And she couldn’t figure why. The more she felt, the less it hurt. The more she cried, the warmer became the swathing blanket around her. And in her mystified state, she turned
and saw him, next to her like he promised, his hard, gentle face, his long hair, his solid body wrapped in silk. She saw him floating next to her, and suddenly she knew why she wasn’t choking on it all. It was him, his kindness, his gentleness, the way he took her more seriously than she took herself.

  Still floating there, before the dead body of Janet Moss, she reached out a hand to him.

  Justin had thought this whole exercise was only about helping her exorcise her own emotions. But when he found himself once again face-to-face with the bloody suicide, a spectacle Detective Scott had showed him only briefly upon their arrival at the Moss house, he found a flood pouring into his own sterile pool. The only corpse he had ever before seen was that of his mother, and so the blood of one brought back the pain of the other. And the guilt. The anguished loss. The hatred and impotence. The love, spilled carelessly onto the floor along with the blood. And the certainty he had held then that his father had done this brutal thing. And the uncertainty he held now, facing this horror, about the very same fact. Because maybe this was all a result of what he had told Detective Scott. Maybe Scott had called this woman about the suspicions. And maybe this woman had killed herself out of guilt at what she had done, hiring someone named Preacher to hire someone named Birdie Grackle to kill Justin’s mother.

  And as all these emotions rose from some hidden chamber in his mummified heart, rising up to fill his throat and nostrils, he felt something else, something he had felt quite recently, an emotion that scared him more than all the others. Yes, hope. He felt the dark song of hope stirring his blood once more, and he assumed, logically, it was once again about his father maybe leaving that prison and entering again his life. But then, with his eyes still closed as he floated in that room of death, he turned his head and there she was, Annie Overmeyer, tears streaming down her pretty face, her hand held out to him like a gift, and he knew he was wrong. The song of hope he was feeling was not being sung about his father just then, it was being sung about her, about Annie Overmeyer.