4th Musketelle

by Brian Bakos

28. Serendipity at the Bar

  Back at the casino lounge, the Eldorado Explorers Club conferred over tumblers of what passed for rum punch. Well, what could you expect from an establishment like this? Its sole purpose was to inebriate people so as to loosen their purse strings out on the gambling floor. They had this whole end of the bar to themselves, as nobody wished to sit near them. A video poker screen embedded in the bar’s surface flashed and beckoned seductively, but the three ladies ignored it.

  “How did it go with the blond one, Ilsa?” asked Margaret.

  “Ach ... I tried to put a bug in her ear,” Ilsa replied, “I don’t know if it did any good, though.”

  She fished through her purse and withdrew something.

  “Look what I have,” she said.

  “Show me! Show me!” cried the other two.

  Ilsa presented a photograph of several couples seated at a large, round banquet table. They were obviously prosperous sorts, judging by their fine clothes and self-satisfied expressions.

  “This was taken at a dinner for business hot shots,” she said.

  The other two studied the picture intently. Margaret placed a bony finger beneath the image of a bitter, tight-lipped woman who was seated beside a rather smug middle-aged man.

  “Why, that’s you, Isla!” she said.

  Isla nodded.

  “And that must be Mr. McIntyre next to you.”

  “Right again,” Ilsa said with a trace of hostility in her voice.

  “When was this picture taken?” Pauline asked.

  “Over ten years ago,” Ilsa replied, “shortly before Alfred’s ... unfortunate demise.”

  Margaret and Pauline traded furtive glances. Ilsa’s tone of voice hardly conveyed the notion of ‘unfortunate.’ They went back to examining the photo.

  “Why, it’s the pretty one!” Pauline exclaimed, indicating an elegantly-dressed young woman sitting two couples away from Alfred and Ilsa.

  “That it is,” said Ilsa. “You’re very perceptive, dear.”

  “She looks to be an absolute child,” Margaret said. “Who’s that man next to her?”

  “That’s Frank Armstrong,” Ilsa said. “They were newly married then. He did everything but pound his chest like a baboon showing her off.”

  “What sort of man is he?” Pauline asked.

  “Just like my Alfred was,” Ilsa said, “coarse, domineering, in love with himself and with power.”

  “I see ...” Pauline said.

  “He and Alfred were business associates,” Ilsa said, “real birds of a feather. The kind of men who deserve whatever misfortune befalls them.”

  “I see ...” Pauline said again.

  She and Margaret shifted uneasily on their bar stools. The conversation was getting perilously close to the topic of Alfred McIntyre’s ‘unfortunate demise,’ and, although they’d have loved to find out more, they knew it was dangerous to broach that subject.

  Ilsa stabbed her finger at the images of Frank and Laila Armstrong.

  “There’s something up between those two,” she said, “and it can’t be pretty.”

  Margaret and Pauline sipped their rum punch, deeply impressed with Ilsa’s sleuthing abilities. Hadn’t she known to summon them here today just after the pretty one’s friends had shown up? What else did she know, they wondered, gathered in by her ‘6th sense’ and by the shadowy investigators she was known to employ?

  “Have you started your new book yet, Ilsa,” Margaret asked, “or should I say, Carlita?”

  “Soon, soon,” Ilsa said, “and when I do, all the members of this drama will have their parts in it.”

  She nodded and smiled, enjoying some private thought.

  “I am interested to see how things turn out with them,” she continued. “In the meantime, there’s no harm in throwing a monkey wrench now and then to push the story along, is there?”

  “None at all,” Margaret agreed.

  “When can we read it?” Pauline asked.

  Ilsa shrugged noncommittally.

  “Sometime after all this hurly-burly’s done,” she said.

  She put away the photograph and turned to her rum punch, indicating that the topic was closed for now. The other two went along with her decision.

  “How about a game of video poker, Pauline?” Margaret suggested.

  “Certainly, let’s give it a try,” Pauline said.

  While her cohorts played the bar-top video game, Ilsa concentrated on her own brooding thoughts. She wasn’t the sort of person to admire anyone much, but in the course of her investigations, she’d taken something of a shine to the one called Laila, seeing her as almost a kindred spirit – a woman who was journeying down a path that she herself had once trod. Where would it lead her, Ilsa wondered?

  A big, very overweight woman with bristly red hair entered the lounge, the one who’d been playing at the far end of the slot machine row. She took a place in the vacant area between the Eldorado Explorers Club and the more normal patrons. The bartender was absent, to her obvious chagrin.

  She smacked her hand on the bar.

  “Hey, can I get some service here?”

  Margaret and Pauline were jarred out of their poker game. The other patrons looked askance at the newcomer.

  “Bartender!” the woman cried.

  A rather harassed-looking man appeared behind the bar.

  “Sorry about the delay,” he said.

  “I was beginning to think you didn’t know who I am,” the woman said.

  She extended her hand; the bartender reluctantly took it.

  “I’m Sally Nagy. I’ll have you know that my husband cuts the grass of the great Frank Armstrong!”

  “How interesting,” the bartender said. “What can I get for you.”

  “Something cheap, I just lost my shirt out there,” Sally replied. “Make it a beer – domestic.”

  “Coming right up,” the bartender said, ducking away toward the cooler.

  Ilsa leaned in toward her companions and spoke in a hushed voice.

  “Here’s a rare bit of luck! She might know something useful.”

  Sally lit up a cigarette. Except for the occasional ‘cigar bar,’ this was the only drinking hole in the state where people could still smoke – a sop intended to keep tobacco imbibing gamblers from patronizing the smoke-free casinos across the border.

  The bartender placed a bottle of beer in front of her.

  “Thanks,” Sally said.

  Ilsa eased over to the stool next to Sally.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “I couldn’t help but overhear. It seems that good fortune has not smiled upon your efforts today?”

  Sally turned toward a boozy glance on her. “You don’t know the half of it ...”

  “Carlita,” Ilsa said.

  Farther down the bar, Margaret and Pauline stifled surprised gasps.

  “Right,” Sally said. “Let me tell you, Carlita, that old Lady Luck busted me in the chops real good today!”

  “Then perhaps you’d care to join me and my friends for another try at the slots,” Ilsa said, “my treat.”

  She turned to the bartender and gestured at Sally’s beer. “Put this on my tab, please.”

  Sally studied the rather peculiar woman sitting next to her. Had she been fully sober, she might have cringed away, like the rest of the people in the lounge. But the woman had raised the possibility of continued gambling, and Sally couldn’t resist that. A pro forma objection seemed in order, though.

  “Thanks for the beer,” she said, “but I couldn’t let you pay my way out there.”

  “Why not?” Ilsa said. “I have plenty of money; it’s interesting people that are in short supply. Besides, your luck just might change.”

  Sally grinned and raised her beer bottle in salute.

  “All right, Carlita, if you put it that way – lead on!”

  As they played the slot machines together, it wasn’t hard for ‘Carlita’ to dredge up interesting bits of information fr
om Sally Nagy’s wellspring of bitterness. Much of Sally’s angst centered on one-time boyfriend Bill Holbrook.

  “Bill was crazy about me back in high school,” Sally said. “But I just kind of blew him off – literally, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know quite well what you mean,” Carlita said.

  “I had to go for Bert Nagy, the big football jock. Worst mistake of my life!”

  “How unfortunate,” Carlita said.

  “Ah, but you should’ve seen him back then,” Sally continued, “big, handsome, and he had a solid job, too. Imagine, his dad got him in at an auto plant right after senior year football season – great pay and benefits. Why not take it? The only college interesting in recruiting him was some Podunk little school in the Midwest. It’s not like he was Big 10 material.”

  She rammed another token into the slot machine and watched the wheels spin up zilch again.

  “I thought we had it made,” she said. “Then he throws it all away to start this ‘landscaping company’ that hasn’t cleared a nickel!”

  I can certainly understand why, Carlita thought as she watched the money flowing out of Sally’s hands into the slot machine.

  The woman had the worst luck of anybody Carlita had ever met. Over time, she could have bankrupted General Motors. Yes, there was a place for Sally in the new book. Carlita filed her away as the ‘unlucky housewife’ of the dramatis personae.

  “And then there’s his weight.” Sally was saying. “I mean, he was always hefty – why else would they have put him on the defensive line? But the way he’s ballooned over the years!”

  Sally shook her head and sipped her drink from its plastic cup. Clearly this was a case of the pot calling the kettle sooty. Carlita wanted to find out more about Bert’s connection with Frank Armstrong, but Sally had one more bit of resentment to wring out.

  “Getting back to Bill Holbrook,” she said. “I meet him at the class reunion, and the guy looks wonderful. Get this – he has his own accounting firm! And his wife, what a piece! Well ... I wasn’t so bad in my time, either.”

  She buried her face in her plastic cup and commiserated with the alcohol there.

  “What was her name?” she muttered. “Cindy ... Candy ... whatever.”

  The time seemed ripe for a change of subject.

  “How did your husband get involved with Frank Armstrong?” Carlita asked.

  “Frank Armstrong?” Sally replied with mock ignorance. “Oh ... you mean ‘that sonuvabitch,’ as Bert calls him.”

  “I take it he doesn’t regard Mr. Armstrong with much affection?”

  “That’s putting it mild,” Sally said. “You know, I think Bert would like to kill the guy.”

  Carlita’s ears perked up.

  “Is that so?”

  For the next several minutes she pumped Sally Nagy for more details on this very interesting subject. The dramatic possibilities here seemed extensive.

  Throughout, Margaret and Pauline watched awestruck at the transformation of Ilsa McIntyre into the Carlita persona. Their stodgy friend now seemed rather daring, risqué, and mysterious. She looked younger and more energetic. Her posture was more erect, and she moved with an almost feline grace.

  Well, that must be how it was with those literary types.