Small Town

twenty-nine

The eye-opener, Jim Galvin had to acknowledge, was probably a mistake. If you waited awhile, if you had a decent breakfast in your belly, eggs and rashers and a link or two of sausage, and here it was getting on for lunchtime, surely no one would begrudge a man a drop of the hard stuff. If you held out until midafternoon, that was even better. But when that first one went down the hatch before breakfast, or instead of breakfast, well, that didn’t look so good. There it was, John Jameson’s finest, in your belly and on your breath, and no one who smelled it was going to mistake it for altar wine.

On the other hand, nothing else really got you going after a bad night. He knew men who swore by Valium, said it straightened you out without knocking you out, and left your breath discreetly unscented. But he also knew a man who’d developed a Valium habit and almost died trying to get off it. Poor bastard wound up in Beth Israel hospital, where they told him Valium detox could be tougher than heroin. Thanks all the same, but I’ll stay with the whiskey. It’ll kill me, too, in its own good time, but at least it’ll taste good going down.

Last night had been a bad one, though it had seemed good enough while it was taking place. A few bars, a few old friends, a few new ones, and a couple of laughs. A feeling of abiding love for the old friends, for the new friends, for the whole human race. A sense that it wasn’t such a bad old world after all.

Grand thoughts, grand feelings, and there were only two ways he knew of that a man could get to have them. Have a fucking jelly doughnut for a brain, or have a couple of drinks.

He’d had the latter, and now he felt as though he had the former, and that the jelly was oozing out of the doughnut. So he took down the bottle and filled a six-ounce jelly glass halfway full. And picked it up and looked at it, like you’d look at — what? An old friend? An old enemy?

He drank it down. Just the one, just to take the edge off, just to lighten the load the least bit.

He had breakfast around the corner on Avenue B, in a Ukrainian place where they didn’t worry any more about cholesterol than he did. He had salami and eggs and crisp hash browns and three cups of lousy coffee, and by God he felt fine by the time he walked out of there.

Now he had to figure out something to do with the day.

He was off the clock. Maury Winters had given him a lot of hours, first rooting around for the writer, Creighton, and then doing some background checking on a couple of prosecution witnesses in a robbery case. The robbery case pleaded out, with a better deal resulting in part from a lead he’d developed, so he had to feel good about that, and Maury was probably feeling good about him.

But he hadn’t been able to turn the trick for Creighton.

He’d figured there was probably a limit to what he could accomplish, given that you didn’t need psychic powers to know the writer was guilty. Lady walks into a bar, walks out with a guy, and wakes up dead, you don’t reach for the tea leaves and the crystal ball. You pick up the guy, and he goes away for it.

So he’d gone through the motions, but he’d been a good cop and he was making an effort to be just as good at this racket. Before he’d been busting his ass to put bad guys in prison and now he was working almost as hard to keep them out, which seemed weird now and then, but the work itself wasn’t all that different. It was a similar mix of headwork and footwork, and he had the head for it. And the feet, although they were starting to go on him.

He’d done what he could for Creighton, coming up with a couple of witnesses who could at least blow a little smoke up the prosecution’s ass, and then the fucking Carpenter came along and opened up a whole new world of possibilities. All you had to do was link him to Fairchild and you could get Creighton off the hook.

A couple of ways it could have happened. Harbinger had been sighted in the neighborhood, he’d been confirmed buying gasoline at Thirteenth and Eighth, so he could have staked out Fairchild same as he did the one in Brooklyn, staked her out and followed her home.

Say he watched her apartment, and let himself in when she let herself out. He waited for her to come home, but when she did she had Creighton with her, two of them and one of him, and Creighton was a big guy, so the Carpenter’d be in the closet while they did a little mattress testing. Then Creighton went on home, and out pops the Carpenter, just in time for sloppy seconds. And, just to make sure nobody else comes along for thirds, he strangles her and takes off.

Or, even better, he gets his first look at her when she walks into the Kettle of Fish, and tails her when she walks out with Creighton. He gets into her brownstone — how hard is that, he times it right and Creighton holds the door for him on his own way out. Knocks on her door, says he’s back, he forgot something. Yeah, what did you forget, I’ll get it for you? You won’t be able to find it. Lemme in. And she opens the door and he says I forgot to kill you, you stupid bitch, and he does.

Maury liked that, he could sell it to a jury, hey, coulda happened, reasonable doubt, yadda yadda yadda. Put him in the Kettle, Maury said. Put him in the brownstone. Put him on the stoop of the house across the street, sharpening his dick with a whetstone. Anything, just put him in the picture, and it’s frosting on the cupcake.

Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t fucking do it, and all he was doing was following the cops around, because they’d showed the Carpenter’s picture all over the neighborhood, as if everybody hadn’t seen it enough times in the papers and on TV. Both bartenders at the Kettle, the day guy and the night guy, looked at the picture and said sure they recognized it, it was the Carpenter, and what else was new? Had they seen him before? Yeah, in the Post, in the News, on CNN, on New York One, on America’s Most Wanted, on every fucking thing but Seinfeld reruns. But up close and in person, in the bar? Nope, sorry, can’t help you out.

Great.

He went back to his apartment, thinking it hadn’t been that long ago that cops wouldn’t walk here except in pairs, and not even then if there was a way to avoid it. Now he’d had to call in favors to find a place here he could afford, and it was four flights up and not a whole lot nicer inside than when they were thrilled to get fifty-five dollars a month for it. The good part, by the time a broad climbed up four flights of stairs, she wasn’t going to change her mind. She had too much invested in the whole business.

The stairs were either keeping him in shape or killing him, and he was never sure which. He got to the top thinking he deserved a drink for that, but decided he’d collect later. Because, off the clock or not, he wondered if there wasn’t something he could do for Creighton. Had to be something nobody thought of.

He went over his notes, made a couple of calls. And sure enough, there it was. It might not go anywhere, if there was one thing he’d learned on the job it was that anything you tried had a chance of going nowhere at all. But if you tried enough things, and if you used your head and your feet, now and then something paid off.

He could have had a small one on the strength of that, too, but decided he’d wait. He locked up and went down the stairs, which was always a lot easier than going up them. Funny how it worked.

He walked across town, taking his time, and it was early afternoon when he got to Sheridan Square and walked into the Kettle of Fish. The day guy was behind the bar, which figured. Eddie Ragan was his name, same as the last president Galvin had thought much of, though twenty years later he didn’t look as good as he did back then. Bartender spelled it different, though, left the e out. With the e it was Irish, and without it who the hell knew what it was. Probably Polish, probably cut down from something with thirty zs and ws in it.

“Hey, Eddie,” he said.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” A nice easy smile, you had to say that for him. “You gonna show me that picture again?”

“You remember, huh?”

“I may not remember every last person who showed me that picture, as many as there’ve been. You I remember. Bushmill’s, right?”

“Actually it’s Jamesons.”

“Hey, close enough. Rocks or water back?”

He took it with water back, and while he sipped the water he nodded for a refill. Part of the job, on or off the clock. You go to bars, you want to get information from bartenders, you can’t sit there sipping a Coke.

And, watching Ragan do it again, he remembered that, by God, he had been drinking Bushmill’s the last time he’d come in. He’d stopped someplace else first and that was the only Irish they had, and it went down well enough, so he stayed with it at the Kettle. He thought of telling Eddie he was right after all, but why bother? What difference did it make?

“What I wanted to ask,” he said. “Forget the picture I showed you.”

“You and everybody else, but fine, I’ll be happy to forget it.”

“What I was wondering,” he said, “was if you happened to recall a fellow, probably came in here by himself...”

“I get lots of those.”

Fucking moron. “Didn’t say much,” he went on patiently. “Maybe didn’t speak at all, but he ordered a drink and then never touched it. Stood there or sat there for a while and then—”

“Walked out and left it there,” Ragan said. “Tuborg!”

“Tuborg?”

“That’s what he drank, except he didn’t. Just like you said, the sonofabitch sat there with the bottle and the glass in front of him, and next thing I knew he was gone, and he never took so much as a sip of that beer. I thought he stepped out for a minute, I thought he went to the john, I even wondered if he did a Lenny Bruce and died there. Gone, no forwarding. I never saw him again.”

“Did you ever see him before?”

“I don’t think so. I know I never saw him pull that shit before, because that I would have remembered.”

“What did he look like, Eddie?”

“I dunno. Older guy, wore a cap. You see an older guy in a cap, that’s all you see, you know what I mean? Anyway, I got a lousy memory for names and faces. Drinks, that’s something different. I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles it was a Tuborg he ordered. Shit, if you’re not gonna drink it, why go for the imported stuff? Rolling Rock’s good enough if all you’re gonna do is look at it.”

“You remember his voice?”

Eddie was leaning on the bar, propped up on his elbows. He screwed up his face and scratched his head, and Galvin decided he looked like a fucking monkey, found himself checking for an opposable thumb.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t know that I ever heard his voice. You see the Tuborg sign? I think he pointed to it, and I said Tuborg? and he nodded. Or we got Tuborg coasters. Maybe he pointed to one of them. What’s sure is what kind of beer it is, that part I wouldn’t forget. You know, I could of sworn you had Bushmill’s last time you were here.”

Jesus, he thought, would there ever be a time he let something slide without having it come back to bite him in the ass? Evidently not. He said, “You know, I’ve been thinking, and it was. I never order Bushmill’s, but that particular day...” And there he was, delivering the whole fucking explanation, and this moron was nodding along happily, thrilled to have gotten something right for a change.

And now he could drag out the picture. “Eddie,” he said, “could this have been him?”

“That’s the same picture? Holy shit, are you telling me the Carpenter was here watching a Tuborg go flat in front of him?”

“Does it look like him?”

“Jesus, is it? Like I said, I never really looked at him. I have to say it could be.”

A definite maybe, he thought.

“When was this, Eddie?”

“There’s a good question. I’m thinking. Been a few months, that’s as close as I can come.”

He wasn’t a lawyer, wasn’t in court. Where did it say he couldn’t lead a witness?

He said, “Eddie, you figure it was around the time Marilyn Fairchild got killed?”

The monkey face, indicating Deep Thought. “You know, that’s right when it was.”

“Oh?”

“Like maybe one, two, three days later. You want to know how come I know? Because I was thinking, suppose I get asked about this. And it was that murder put me in that frame of mind.”

“And this would have been in the afternoon?”

“Just about this time of day. Nice and quiet, the way it is now.”

“Who else was here, do you happen to recall?”

“Well, Max was here. Max the Poet, he’s always here. Hey, Max!”

The wine drinker looked up, turned. Long face, wispy beard, long fingers wrapped around a glass of the house red. I get like that, Galvin thought, somebody please shoot me.

“Max,” Ragan said, “you remember that guy, couple of months ago, ordered a Tuborg and didn’t drink it?”

Max thought it over. “I drink wine,” he said, and turned away.

Did that mean he wanted a drink bought for him before he remembered anything? Galvin asked what the hell that was supposed to mean, and Ragan shrugged and said that was Max, that’s how he was, and he didn’t remember shit.

Who else was here, Galvin asked him, and it wasn’t just like pulling teeth, it was like pulling teeth with your fingers. “Draft Guinness,” he said, finally, snapping his fingers and grinning like he’d pulled off a miracle. “Two guys, they’re in couple times a week, sometimes together, sometimes not. Actors.”

“Actors?”

“Or maybe writers. Last I heard, it was something about a screenplay, but I don’t know if he was reading it or writing it. Way they pay for their Guinness, they’re movers.”

He didn’t know which company they worked for, or their names, or where they lived. Just that one was taller than the other.

“Or maybe it was the other way around,” Galvin said, and Ragan looked blank for a moment, then got it and grinned.

“They moved this woman from her boyfriend’s place, and one of them was saying she liked him, and maybe he should have hit on her. Whoever she was, she stiffed them on the tip, or the next thing to it.”

He went over it, found more questions to ask, but that was about all he got. He wrote it out in Eddie’s own words, or what his words would have been if the mope spoke English, and went over it with him and got him to sign it.

Which the bartender did, without hesitation. “You know,” he said, “I had a feeling. That’s another reason I know it was right after the woman got killed, because when I picked up the glass and the bottle it came to me that this could be a clue.”

“To the murder?”

“Not to that murder, but if all of this was, you know, like a movie. A TV show. Whatever. I mean, say something like that happens, and you have a shot of the bartender, and he’s holding up the glass, holding up the bottle, thinking these could have prints on them. I remember I had the thought, I should keep this glass. You know, just in case.”

Jesus, was it possible?

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

Mother of God. “Did you keep the glass?”

A slow smile. “Yeah, matter of fact I did.” And he pointed to a whole shelf of glassware above the back bar. “It’s one of those,” he said, grinning like a fucking chimpanzee. “But don’t ask me which one. It’s hard to tell them apart.”

It took the rest of that day and half of the next, but he found the moving men. There were half a dozen moving firms based in the Village and Chelsea, plus no end of Man-With-Truck operations. If it was just a guy with a van and a helper he was shit out of luck, but this sounded like guys who picked up day work when they weren’t going to auditions, which meant they worked for a company.

He didn’t have much to go on. A choice of three dates, draft Guinness (because the one thing he trusted Eddie on was who drank what), and a moving job for a woman. And Eddie’d come up with one more item, a colleague of the two named Big Arnie, with a droopy eyelid.

Big Arnie turned out to be the straw that stirred the drink, even though his name wasn’t Arnie at all. I know a guy like that, the desk man at one place told him, got an eye goes like this, and more so at the end of the day than early on. And he’s big, but his name ain’t Arnie. It’s Paul.

Big Paul had worked for him, but not lately. He’d had some complaints, no need to go into that now, but the last he heard Paul was working for Gentle Touch, on West Eleventh.

Which was his next stop, where he learned that Big Paul didn’t work there anymore, hadn’t for a while, but yeah, he was working for them around the time Galvin was asking about. And yeah, the books showed they had a local move on such and such a date when the client was a woman, a two-person job, and I guess I can let you have their names.

And he found them, and questioned them separately, and they both remembered the incident. They didn’t remember the guy, they never even saw the guy, but they remembered what Eddie went through, pouring another bottle of Tuborg into two glasses and making them taste it, to make sure the case wasn’t skunky or something. Fucking scene Eddie turned it into, when all it was was a guy didn’t finish his beer.

Sign a statement to that effect? Yeah, I suppose so. Why the hell not?