Peril

ABE

It was a slow night. By ten there were only four people left in the bar, all of them regulars, some who’d even known McPherson when he’d still owned the place and Abe when he’d played for tips, the Bordeaux glass filling slowly with crumpled bills and pocket change as night crawled toward morning, and Lucille leaned back against the piano and drew a red feather boa along her bare white shoulders and broke into the final, melancholy song before last call.

He ran his fingers over the keyboard, playing the notes of “As Time Goes By,” giving it that bitter edge Mavis’ betrayal had taught him.

Milo Barnes leaned back slightly, the scotch a little loose in his hand. “Where’s Lucille?” he asked.

“Out sick,” Abe said. He closed the cover over the keys and glanced out over the nearly empty bar. “I should probably check on her.”

He picked up the phone beside the register and dialed Lucille’s number. There was no answer. He’d called her a few times since early in the afternoon, attributed the fact that she hadn’t answered to a nap or a brief walk or maybe that she’d gone out for groceries, her laundry. But now he was worried.

“I’m gonna check on Lucille,” he said to Jake as he grabbed his hat from the wooden peg near the bar. “She’s not answering the phone.”

He knocked at her door a few minutes later, waited, knocked again, and when there was still no answer, unlocked the door.

The apartment was pitch black, and something in the depth of the darkness told him what he’d find when he turned on the light.

“Lucille,” he said quietly as he flipped the switch.

She was lying on her back, eyes closed, one arm across her brow as if, in the last moments, she’d shielded her eyes against a blinding light. A bottle of Seconal rested on the table beside the bed, along with a half-empty glass of water. She’d left a piece of sheet music on the old battered spinet she’d once used to rehearse some song that had taken her fancy.

“Lucille,” he repeated, and then stepped over to the bed and, in a distant hope he might be wrong, shook her gently. When she didn’t move, he touched her face, felt a strange slackness in her skin, as if life were little more than the force that kept things taut.

The EMS ambulance arrived a few minutes later, then a couple of cops, one in plainclothes who introduced himself as Detective Melville.

“I just have a few questions,” he told Abe. “You found the deceased?”

“Yes.”

“And you are?”

“Abe Morgenstern.”

“When did you get here?”

“Just a few minutes ago,” Abe answered. “I called as soon as I found her.”

“You’re a friend of hers?”

“Yes. And she worked for me. McPherson’s. On Twelfth Street. She called in sick this afternoon.”

“How did you get into her apartment?”

“I have a key.”

“So you’ve known her a long time?”

“A long time, yeah,” Abe said, the years rushing by on a white-water stream.

There were a few more questions, all of them routine, Abe guessed, though he could not be sure, since he’d never been questioned by a policeman before.

Detective Melville closed his notebook. “Okay, thanks.” He touched his hat, then went up the stairs, leaving Abe alone on the street.

He was still there when Lucille was brought down and loaded into the ambulance. Her body seemed infinitely small beneath the sheet, far too small to have contained the heavy life she’d lived, the huge obstacles she’d overcome just to get this far. It wasn’t that she’d killed herself that struck Abe as particularly sad, but that she’d had to fight that urge for so long, and in that protracted struggle lost what small amount of happiness she might otherwise have grasped.

Once the ambulance pulled away, Abe walked back up the stairs and into the apartment. The super was there, looking around, as if already calculating the trouble this would cause him.

“She have any relatives?” he asked.

Abe shook his head.

“So, what you want I should do? With her stuff, I mean.”

“I’ll have it picked up.”

The super looked relieved that clearing the apartment would fall to others’ hands. “No rush. I mean, she’s paid up through the end of the month.”

The super left, but Abe lingered a few more minutes in her room. He was not sure why, save that some part of him simply hated letting things go. He’d hated to admit that Mavis had actually gone. Hell, he realized, he’d even felt the same about that fucking cat she’d left him with, Pookie, who’d died on him three weeks later.

He headed down the stairs and out onto the street, where he stood absently, his eyes cast upward into the misty sky, and tried to make himself believe that there might really be someplace toward which Lucille’s unburdened soul was now ascending, its slender wings beating softly to the ballad she’d always used to close her set, “Bird Alone.”