The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

Daniel Handler Delmonico

From McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

“What’s a Delmonico?”

The two gentlemen had scarcely entered the place. From where I was sitting they were only silhouettes in the shiny doorway, blaring with rude sun. It was after six but dead summer, so the sun hadn’t set. I don’t drink in the daytime, but if it’s after six you’ll probably find me at the Slow Night. It’s been remarked to me that my regular spot at the bar isn’t the best one, as I have to whirl around whenever somebody walks in, just to see who it is. I Suppose that’s true, that I could choose a better bar stool if I wanted a better view of the outside world. But that’s not what I like to look at when I come in.

Davis was at the cash register, her back to the door, holding two or three dollars in her palm. She was about to give them to a guy, as change for the drinks she made for him and his girlfriend. Then the guy was going to hand them back to Davis. This is how it went with Davis as long as I’d ever seen it. Davis was gorgeous, is what she was, gorgeous not in the way she looked but in the way she was. When she mixed you a drink and handed back your change you’d hand it over to her no matter what you paid and what you ordered. It wouldn’t matter if you had your girl with you, waiting at one of the tables with a high-heeled foot tapping on the carpet. You’d give it back, all your puny dollars, and still you’d feel like you hadn’t forked it over fast enough. “Delmonico?” Davis said, and looked back at the gentlemen. She cocked her head, but not like she was thinking, more like she was considering whether these guys deserved the real answer. They didn’t move. I tried to look at them myself but the sunlight still made them nothing but shadows. All I could notice was that one was taller than the other. Davis had probably noticed six or seven things more, and she’d just that second turned around from the register. “Delmonico,” she said again. “Gin, vermouth, brandy. A dash of bitters.”

The shorter gentleman gave his friend a little tap with his hand. “I told you she was smart,” he said, and then the two of them stepped inside and let the door shut behind them. Davis put her hands on her hips like this offhand compliment wasn’t nearly enough. The guy slid his money back to Davis and took his seat. Time and time I want to tell Davis that I love her, but she’s so smart there’s no way she hasn’t figured it out already.

The Slow Night is on a fairly main drag, more or less half a block away from two other bars and just about across the street from another. These bars are called Mary’s, and O’Malley’s, and The something. I’ve never been inside them and never intend to. One of them — Mary’s, I think — has those little flags all over the ceiling, fluttering like a used-car lot. You can see it from the street because they prop the door open. All of them have the neon in the window and even on a quick walk-by you can hear the roar of music and laughing and the little earthquakes of bottle caps falling to the floor. The bars are full in the evenings, because I guess there are lots of people in the world who like to have a pitcher of something, and sit underneath a TV yelling at each other. In the daytime they’re dead like anyplace, with just a few puttering around. One of them has a pool table and people gather for that, with the chattering of the balls like teeth on a chilly day. I don’t wish any of these people any harm and am grateful that these other bars take them away. The Slow Night looks closed from the outside, with heavy draperies on the windows and no real sign, just the name fading away over the entrance. The doors are closed except when someone is walking through them. From the doorway are two steps down into the bar — mostly for show, I think, because it’s not a basement place. Inside, all the furniture’s realreal bar stools, real tables and chairs, and a real jukebox giving the world the music of the lonely, with Julie London and Hank Williams, and some quieter jazz things I never can determine. They don’t serve food although sometimes a bowl of nuts might appear from someplace, and the only thing one might call entertainment is a few sections of the day’s paper stacked up at the very end of the bar, in case one needs to check on something outside. Nowhere is there any advertisement of any sort, except the clock which says Quill, right in the middle of the face. Davis doesn’t know what that is. It came with the place.

The bar has something of it reputation, in guidebooks fools buy and read. “Don’t let the exterior fool you,” is the sort of thing that passes as praise, “the Slow Night is the real deal — the sort of place in which your parents might have met, with real leather booths and a lady behind the counter who will mix you any poison you can dream up.” But these lazy lies — no booths, you don’t dream up cocktails — aren’t really the thing. Below the surface of the city, murmured between I don’t know who, is the story that Davis is very smart. Not smart like a bartender who knows his World Series, but smart, like if you have a problem you can bring it up after you’ve ordered a drink and she will likely solve it for you. I’ve seen this in action — actually seen it happen. Divorce lawyers. Grad students. Geological survey men. She fixes their puzzles, although they’re no less puzzled, really, when they leave. The gentlemen must have known this too, although the tall one had to ask his quiz master question before he believed it. They took off their hats and sat down.

“Holy—” the guy said from the table, but his girlfriend shushed him. The tall gentleman gave the guy a real angry look, and the guy lowered his eyes and took a long, long sip from his drink. Martinis, both of them, the guy and the girl both. That’s the kind of couple that stays together.

“My friend here,” said the short gentleman, “was hoping not to be recognized.”

“You wander around hoping not to be recognized,” Davis said, “then you ought not to let everybody know.”

“Do you know who I am?” the tall gentleman asked.

“A customer, I’m guessing,” Davis said. “I recognize everyone who comes in that way. I ask them what they want to drink and they tell me and we go from there. So far it’s worked okay. Do you gentlemen really want Delmonicos? It’s no drink for beginners.”

“Scotch,” said the shorter one. “For both of us, please,” at the same time as his friend said, “I’m not sure I like your attitude.” Davis just kept her hands on her hips. I looked down at the rest of my bourbon. Davis has offered to make me something nicer, time and time again, but just a little bourbon on ice is what I get, and what she gives me. The shorter one coughed a little into his hand, and looked at his friend. “You’ll have to excuse him,” he said to Davis. “He’s going through a lot.”

Davis wasn’t sure this was enough, but she nodded. “What kind of Scotch?”

“What kind is there?” the tall one said.

“There’s cheap,” she said, “there’s good, and there’s pretentious.”

“I usually drink Banquo Gold,” he said. “Eight-year-old, if you have it.”

“Pretentious it is,” she said, and his friend smiled. “Ice? Lemon?”

“I don’t have to take this,” growled the taller one. “It’s a stupid idea, anyway. Bruno, let’s get out of here. I should get out of here. I should have my head examined. I have a lawyer taking my money fast enough. I don’t have to chase after some legendary bar skirt.”

Bruno, a short name if there ever was one, tried to grab his friend again. “Relax, okay?” he said. “So she jokes around, so what?”

“I’ve had enough of women joking around,” the taller one said. “Let’s go.”

“Look, why don’t we have a drink?” Bruno said. “You want one anyway, right?”

“We can go across the street,” the taller one said.

“You think they won’t know you across the street?” Bruno said.

“Sure,” Davis said. “Everybody across the srreet’ll want to buy a drink for the guy who killed his wife.”

The girlfriend gasped at her table. The two gentlemen flicked her a look of annoyance. “So you do know me,” the taller one said. “You recognize me, what, from the papers?”

“Papers, TV,” Davis said, shrugging. “You think that hat makes you invisible? Callahan Jeffers. That’s who you are.”

“I didn’t kill my wife,” the man snarled. “But I suppose you won’t believe that unless it’s in the papers, too.”

“Don’t you want it in the papers?” Davis asked. “I believe that’s known as clearing your name.”

“Let’s go,” Callahan Jeffers said to Bruno. “She’s not going to help me if she thinks I did it.”

“I don’t think you did it,” Davis said. “But I still don’t help people who get rude in my bar.”

“What have I done that’s rude?” Jeffers asked. “You’ve been mocking me since I sat down.”

“You haven’t sat down,” Davis said. “You know what I mean.”

“What I mean,” Davis said, “is why don’t you sit down, drink some good Scotch, and ask me what you want to ask me?”

Callahan Jeffers looked at her for a second or two, and put his hat down on the bar. “Ice,” he said, “and lemon.”

“For two,” Bruno said.

Davis poured, and the gentlemen took their drinks — like you might take a hike if a very dangerous person suggested it. Bruno laid a bill on the table Davis couldn’t see, but from her bored glance it must have been enormous. She turned around and rang out change, placing her hard-earned cash on the bar before she even picked up the bill. The men let it stand. They were going to tip her later. I hated those guys. They weren’t gentlemen after all.

Jeffers took a seat and took a sip and nodded. “So,” he said, “there’s no invisibility potion in a Delmonico, right? Or the gin, brandy, and whatever don’t turn into an invisibility potion?”

“When your mother told you that there was no such thing as a stupid question,” Davis said, “you didn’t believe her, did you?”

“He’s not used to women like you is all,” Bruno said. “Since I’ve known him he goes for a different type.”

“I don’t want to hear about the type,” Davis said. “I want to hear about the girl.”

“She’s no girl,” Jeffers said. “She’s my wife. Or was. Or is. She’s gone.”

“So you say,” Davis said. “Do me a favor and don’t tell me things I know already. You’re Callahan Jeffers. You’re very rich. You’ve never worked a day in your life, and neither did your father. You were sent to Europe for what rich people call ‘schooling’ and what everybody else calls ‘school.’ When you returned you made a big splash as an eligible bachelor. You invested in things for what we might call a living. You beat up a room-service waiter during a seventy-two-hour birthday party in an enormous suite, and you gave him a lot of money and two years later the mayor had you on some special citizens’ commission on crime.”

“I was drunk,” Jeffers said. “That night in the hotel. I was very drunk and it was wrong. I’ve said it a thousand times. I had a drinking problem, and I worked it out.”

“There are many people who come into my bar and order Scotch,” Davis said. “None of them are reformed alcoholics.”

“I just said I worked it out,” Jeffers said. “That’s what I believe. What you say about paying off the waiter was true. He was a fag and I bought him what fags want, which is a condo on the beach and a handsome face. I don’t think that’s a crime. People who resent me for money would do the same thing if they had it.”

“And yet,” Davis said, “with these statements, the police nevertheless suspect you of some sort of crime.”

Callahan Jeffers stood uh, although not without first taking another gulp of his drink. If you spend time in a bar you hear a number of men snarl. I don’t know if they snarl more in bars or if that’s just where I hear them snarl, but they snarl, like some animal you find messing around in the trash, or out in the angry woods where stupid people camp. “I didn’t kill my wife!” he said. “I don’t know how she did it, but she set me up. She’s a bitch, a bitch someplace laughing at me. And she’ll keep laughing until I’m all locked up.”

“They’re not going to lock you up,” Bruno said.

“Says you.” Callahan didn’t sit down but he finished his drink. It made him look weak, the grab for the glass but still standing like he might leave.

“Says everyone, including the lawyer,” Bruno said. “There’s no body, so there’s no crime. You haven’t even been arrested.”

“Arrested,” Jeffers said. “Everything’s gone now even if the police never touch me. I killed her is what everyone thinks. Mayor’s special commission. I was going to be Mayor.”

“He was weighing the odds of running, yes,” Bruno said. “Those odds have changed.”

“My whole odds have changed with this,” Jeffers said. He looked around like he was going to spit on the floor and then looked at Davis again. What would have happened if this guy had spat on the floor’ I think of that sometimes on sleepless nights, when the sugar from the bourbon wakes me up and makes me look at life. “I’m not the mayor now. I’m just a man who killed his wife. I’m gone and she’s laughing. She’s not dead any more than I’m Santa Claus. She fucked me somehow. I don’t get it. No one gets it. Bruno said maybe you might.”

“No,” Davis said. “I certainly don’t get why anyone would fuck you. You want another Scotch?”

“Take mine,” Bruno said quickly, and handed over his drink. Where do they get guys like him? All the way back in his family tree maybe there were whipping boys.

“Tell me the thing,” Davis said, “while I get everybody another round. Mr. Jones, you okay back there?”

I stay quiet when the bar’s got customers, so I just nodded into my bourbon. It was half-gone. Maybe six months before it was a man with stolen eels. He was a marine something — you know, not like he’d actually ever been in the marines. The eels were valuable and shipped across the ocean from a faraway sea, or maybe it was the other way around. When the man opened the tanks there was nothing but grime and seaweed. The eels were valuable but only if they were alive, and it was hard enough keeping them alive if you were a specialist with a government grant, let alone some blackmarket eel thug. Davis found them. She drew a little map on a cocktail napkin with the words “Slow Night” written on it, the address below, because the man was from out of town and didn’t know where the warehouse district was. You’d think a man who spent too much time with eels would have lost some social skills, but he was gorgeously grateful.

“I’ll tell you the thing,” Bruno said. “Mr. Jeffers met Nathalie at a club.”

“The circus was in town,” Jeffers said.

“It’s true,” Bruno said. “This girl was trash, I told him. Her parents were from different countries and ate fire for a living. She spun around on one of those things they dangle from the top of the tent.”

“Trapeze,” Davis said. “I remember the wedding pictures.”

“I told him she’d never clean up,” Bruno said. “Girls like that, from a circus? No. He made me go to her last show. She leaped through a hoop; I don’t know what else she did. She takes a bow with the clowns and the Chinamen and he wants to marry her?”

“She was a beautiful woman,” Davis said. “I remember the pictures.”

Callahan Jeffers looked at her and almost smiled. “She was,” he said. “She hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Davis put two fresh Scotches down on the counter. Behind her the guy and his girlfriend were listening, their martinis forgotten. “And what’d you hit her like?” Davis said.

“It was just some fights,” Jeffers said. “She had a temperament, you know? I guess it was wrecked from the start. I bought us a beautiful house, furnished it up, but she just couldn’t sit still.”

“A Wesson, wasn’t it?” Davis asked. “One of the last untouched Wessons in this town.”

“You know architecture?” Bruno asked.

“Why is it,” Davis asked, “that people think a girl sitting around a deserted bar all day is less likely to be well-read?”

“It’s completely restored,” Jeffers said, with what would have passed for pride among the very dim. “The staircases, the banisters, the window dressings, the whole bit. I paid a flouncy faggot to track down as much of the pricey crap as he could dig up. Two benches in the front hall. The dining table and twelve chairs. You know, black and square — all that German minimal stuff he did. Nathalie was crazy about it. She said it calmed her down — no. What was the word? Whittled her down. The whole place was whittled down. The living room had one couch and a mirror balanced in the corner. The bedroom had just two huge black bureaus with square drawers. My study had one of Wesson’s only rugs, a big black thing with one gray stripe, and a chandelier from his personal collection, all spidery on the ceiling. And a desk that looked like a fucking altar. It was enormous. It cost everything. But I bought it to show her I cared.”

“The study,” Davis said, “where you last saw her?”

“We were fighting,” Callahan Jeffers said.

“What else is new?” Bruno Said.

“She got home late,” Jeffers said. “I don’t know how it started. Bruno and I went to the fights. She’d never do that with me. We got home around ten but she still wasn’t home. An hour later she walks in with Timothy Speed.”

“The designer,” Davis said.

“The fag,” Callahan Jeffers said. He put one fist down, ven gently, on the bar, like a man showing his gun. “The fag I paid a fortune to spend my fortune on furniture to whittle down my wife. I threw him out.”

“Mr. Jeffers’d had a drink or two,” Bruno said with a very small shrug.

“She yelled at me, I yelled at her, she pushed me around a little...” Callahan stopped talking. “I know what you’re going to say. I shouldn’t hit women.”

“You shouldn’t hit women,” Davis said.

“I know that,” Jeffers said. “But it was fighting. It was a fight. We were always getting worse. She thought I was catting around, which I was a little. But she drove me there! As soon as I married her she went a little crazy.”

“She couldn’t take it, with the swells,” Bruno said. “A circus performer, Mr. Jeffers. She was climbing the walls because she climbed walls for a living. You can’t dress that up.”

“She dressed up fine,” Jeffers said, “but nothing made her happy. I couldn’t take it forever, you know? You want to make someone happy, but if the first fucking fifteen thousand tries don’t do it, you get tired of an unhappy person and her yelling.”

“So she locked herself in the Study,” Bruno said. “It locks from the inside. She wouldn’t come out.”

“What did you do?” Davis asked.

Callahan Jeffers looked at her like a horse I saw once. Some kids were making fun of it. The horse’s eyes said, Someday I will not be pulling this flatbed hayride. I will come to your room when you are sleeping and I will stomp on you, you damn kids. The rich man lifted both fists and pounded in slow, heavy beats. Everybody’s drinks bounced. “Come out!” he yelled. “Come out! Come out! Come out! Come out!”

He stopped and sat down. The jukebox finished a song — “And here I am, facing tomorrow, alone in my sorrow, down in the depths of the ninetieth floor” — and stopped, out of money, like much of this town. The guy and his girl shared one quick glance and skedaddled. When the door swung open and shut it was much darker outside. For a moment I couldn’t remember anything I’d done before Callahan Jeffers entered the Slow Night and started yelling. The rich man, once an eligible bachelor and probably one again, drew a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. I took a sip, mostly melted ice.

“It’s true,” Bruno muttered. “That’s what he did.”

“She didn’t come out,” Jeffers said. “We waited all night, Bruno and I.”

“Bruno and You,” Davis said. “Where did you wait?”

“Outside,” Jeffers said. “Just outside that locked door. There’s a little space with two chairs that hurt to sit in. We sat in them.”

“Could you hear anything?”

“She made a crying phone call,” Jeffers said. “It was Timothy Speed. He told me. I practically had to beat it out of him. he said she called and went through the whole blow by blow, and cried. She said I was going to kill her. That’s what he told the police. He Said She Said. Why they would believe that of me—”

“You, a known drunk who beats people up,” Davis said.

“I didn’t kill her!” Jeffers said. “She cried to the fag and she hung up. She hung up and ordered a drink.”

“What?” Davis asked.

“She said she wanted a drink,” Jeffers said. “A Delmonico. She always liked the fancy things. When I met her she was asking for a Singapore Sling.”

“Gin again,” Davis said. “Gin, cherry brandy, bitters, lime, ginger beer. There are some who say you can’t trust a gin woman. How did you make her a Delmonico if you didn’t know what it was?”

“I don’t make the drinks in my home,” Jeffers said. “I have a man.”

“He woke up Gregor,” Bruno said. “It was late.”

“Gregor loved it,” Jeffers said. “Gregor loves Nathalie and he loves... I don’t know. Drama. The trick with the mixing and the right glass for a lady who asks. He made one and brought it on a tray with a shaker and everything. He knocked on the door and she made him swear we were at least fifteen feet away.”

“Which we were,” Bruno said.

“He handed her the tray and she slammed the door again and locked it. We heard the cocktail shaker pour and then we heard nothing.”

“Nothing?” Davis said.

“For two hours,” Jeffers said. “It was morning, almost morning. Gregor went back to bed. Bruno fell asleep in the ugly chair I paced outside and pounded some more. Bruno woke up.”

“I did,” Bruno said. “I woke up and made the point that perhaps you should go to bed rather than pounding on a door that incidentally cost a fortune. You were making marks.”

“And then we heard a shattering of glass,” Jeffers said. “Give me another Scotch.”

“I’ll think about it,” Davis said. “You’re making enough noise without another round. You scared two customers away before the martinis were over.”

“Not my problem,” Jeffers said.

“No,” Davis agreed, and walked out of the bar to collect the glasses the kids had left behind. “Mine. If the study is the rounded room on the ground floor, then there are three enormous windows—”

“Painted shut,” Jeffers said. “We were going to redo them They hadn’t been touched.”

“And a small one in the far corner,” Davis finished.

“That’s the one that broke,” Bruno said. “But the window doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a what’s-it. A lightwell. Even if she could have fit through that window, which she couldn’t—”

“She might,” Jeffers said. “She was wasting away. I know she looked fine in the picture but she was starving herself. She wasn’t doing well. She was making herself skinny to make me angry.”

“That’s not usually how it goes,” Davis said.

“She was depressed, she said.” Jeffers shook his head. “What’s that thing where girls make themselves skinny for attention?”

“Marriage,” Davis said.

Jeffers gave her one curt laugh. “I heard the window, I didn’t know what to think. One day we were fighting and she found a nail on the ground. A nail! And scratched herself across the arm. With broken glass, I didn’t want her to—”

“We used one of the chairs to break the door down,” Bruno said. “Gregor heard us and came upstairs. The chair was broken too.”

“Now what else is really in this room?” Davis said. “Rug and desk, you said. Curtains?”

“Heavy dark things,” Jeffers said. “Like in here. Just like in this place. Timothy Speed made her get them. That’s the first place we looked. We thought she’d thrown herself out one of the big windows, although she was so light they might not have broken. Who knows. But she wasn’t there. And don’t think behind the door because I looked there and kicked the goddamn wall. I’m telling you she wasn’t hiding. She must have gone out the other one.”

“It’s a lightwell,” Bruno said. “It goes up,” to a skylight made of marble you can shine light through. The light is yellowy. I don’t like it. But that’s where it goes.”

“Up to a skylight,” Davis said, “and down to where?”

“To another window, in the basement,” Bruno said. “Painted shut. Not messed with. The police used what I have read was a fine-tooth comb.”

“She was gone,” Jeffers said. “When we saw the window we ran downstairs to the basement. There were four cases of wine stacked up against that window. They were dusty. She wasn’t there. We ran all the way up to the roof. The sun was coming up over the park, I’m telling you, the goddamn birds were singing but my wife was not on the roof and there’s no way she was ever on the roof.”

Davis stopped wiping the table. “Afraid of heights?”

“No,” Jeffers said. “You can’t open that marble thing. It’s old. Wesson didn’t build it to be opened.”

“Who went up on the roof?” Davis said. “All of you? Gregor too?”

“Gregor’s old,” Jeffers said. “He dozed in the other chair.”

“The police have been with him a million times,” Bruno said. “That’s why they haven’t arrested Mr. Jeffers, I think. They believe that I’d help him murder somebody and hide a body, but not Gregor. They thought maybe they couldn’t shake me, but two hours with the cops and Gregor would cry like a baby.”

“He lost his mom young,” Jeffers said. “That’s why he’s such a fucking baby.”

“I really don’t like you,” Davis said. She walked back to the bar and ran a thoughtful hand down the wood, close to where I was sitting. I couldn’t help watching her even though it must have looked schoolboy. “A girl,” she said, “goes into a room with nothing in it but antique furniture and closed windows. Someone brings her a drink. Glass breaks. A tiny window that goes nowhere is broken. The other ones aren’t, and you’re sure, right? Became they’re tall. You might have missed a small break at the top.”

“When we got back from the roof I ripped those drapes down myself,” Jeffers said.

“Which hasn’t helped your case,” Bruno said. “He trashed that whole room and then had to tell the cops that nothing had been broken but the window. We got an Italian guy doing the wiring and an old man with a shop in his garage. He’s the only man who can fix a Wesson chair, so he says.”

“Yes,” Jeffers said. “I threw the chair.”

“The chair that broke the door?” Davis asked.

“No,” Jeffers said. “Another chair. The chair by the desk. It was like a throne but I lifted it and I snapped it over the desk.”

“So there was another chair in the room,” Davis said. “What else?”

“Papers in the desk,” Jeffers said. “I don’t know. Nothing. A letter opener, maybe? When I tipped it over I didn’t notice anything missing.”

“The drink,” Bruno said.

“What?” Davis asked.

“The Delmonico,” Bruno said. “The tray was there and the little shaker full of melting ice. But the glass and the drink were gone. Gin, vermouth, brandy, dash of bitters.”

“An invisibility potion,” Jeffers said. “Like I said. Gone like her.”

“Mr. Jones,” Davis said, “put something on the jukebox.”

She handed me two of Callahan’s unearned dollars. He glared at me. I walked to the jukebox and chose Chet Baker, which is what I do often.

“What was she wearing?” Davis asked.

“A necklace,” Jeffers said. “A lot of money around her neck. Diamonds and I think sapphires, I don’t know. A vintage thing somebody found for me. A present after a fight. And a silk dress I ripped. And her shoes, but her shoes were sitting on the desk, right next to the phone which I tipped out oí the wall. Just tell me where the fuck she is or stop with the stupid questions. I’m so tired of this. The cops ask all the same things, what was she wearing, like I would have forgot to mention jet-pack.”

“I’m going to pour you one more Scotch,” Davis said. “And you’ll drink it and I’ll tell you something and you’ll leave. And you’ll pay for another bourbon for Mr. Jones.”

“Who the hell is Mr. Jones?” Jeffers asked.

“A customer who doesn’t give me any trouble,” Davis said, her back to the bottles. She poured, and then she reached up and coaxed two martini glasses from a rack above her head. I always forget about that. The gentlemen sipped and I sipped and she filled the two glasses with ice and left them on the bar, while she busied herself with a shaker. Gin. Brandy. You know where this is going. She trembled the bitters bottle over the shaker, stirred, and shut the lid. The ice shifted in the glass. The jukebox played.

There’s something about this I’m not telling right. How nasty Jeffers was, maybe, or the sheer implausible mess of a circus wife, a thuggish friend, a tale of an old butler and a locked-up room. The gorgeous shadow of the Slow Night while outside the sun sank, and the quiet of an early drink you didn’t deserve. You do not meet people very often like Davis, with a smile from nowhere and a wavering frown, thinking things over so beautifully just to watch her was beauty enough, like the lilt in a good jazz singer, the curve of a good lyric like a secret closing in on itself. This suspense is killing me. I can’t stand uncertainty. Tell me now. I’ve got to know whether you want me to stay or go. Love me, or leave me and let me be lonely. You won’t believe me. I love you only. I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else. You might find the nighttime the right time for kissing, but nighttime is my time for just reminiscing, regretting instead of forgetting with somebody else. There’ll be no one unless that someone is you. I intend to be independently blue. I want your love, but I don’t want to borrow — to have it today, to give back tomorrow. For my love is your love. There’s no love for nobody else.

When the song ended Jeffers lifted his glass to drain it. It finished, and the sliver of lemon hit his grimacing mouth. “Well?” he said, and pointed to the icy glasses. “What’re those?”

“Delmonicos,” Davis said. “Like the one that vanished. But it didn’t vanish. She threw the glass at the window. Both broke. You couldn’t tell one from the other.”

Jeffers turned his glass over. This wasn’t polite. The Scotch was on the rocks, and the bar got wet with the slop of his ice. The puddle stopped before the two glasses, the ice ghosting into water, that Davis had ready for I couldn’t imagine who. “And my wife?”

“That I can’t tell you,” Davis admitted. She opened her palm and brushed the pile of money, very slowly, into the puddle of Callahan’s drink. “Time to go, fellas.”

“She’s not smart,” Jeffers said to Bruno, pointing at him and sneering. “She doesn’t know.”

“I’m smart enough,” Davis said. “If you don’t stand up and leave I will walk out of this bar myself. Across the street is a roomful of drunk cops. I’ll tell them that Callahan Jeffers, a man finished in this town, is harassing me.”

It was true. Funny thing: Davis lets cops drink for free, but hardly anybody ever takes her up. Across the way, O’Malley’s lets them drink for half price, and by closing there’s a whole platoon staggering outside. Bruno grabbed Callahan’s shoulder. Callahan put on his hat. When the door swung open the light was almost gone, and when it swung shut Davis poured the ice out of the glasses and drained the cocktails from the shaker. “Join me,” she said. “I haven’t had one of these in years.”

I put my bourbon aside. “It’s not a drink for beginners,” I said.

“You’re not a beginner,” he said. She’d overmeasured or maybe some of the ice had melted — the glasses were brimming full. Carefully, carefully, she walked them both over, nearly teetering “All those fishbowls I had to carry in Miss Brimley’s class,” she said. “Finally coming in handy. To us, Mr. Jones. To our good health.”

I didn’t drink. “Where is she?” I said.

Davis shrugged, which was a sight to see, each shoulder rising and falling, like a sheet in the wind. “I don’t know. Probably in some summer cottage of Timothy Speed’s. Dyeing her hair or however that goes. Everybody wants to join the circus when they run away from home, but that might be too easy. He’d look for her there, maybe. But a dead girl’ll need money.”

“Speed could help her sell the necklace,” I said.

“That’d be a start,” she said, and sighed. “When did you figure it?”

“When you reached for those glasses,” I said. “Nobody ever remembers to look up. The drink broke the window and made them look the wrong way. Just the time she needed. They took a trip to the basement, they took a trip to the roof, and by the time they got back from the roof she was out the front door like a person. Speed left a car maybe.”

“And Gregor? Really dozing, you think?”

“Really dozing, I think,” I said. “Without shoes she could tip toe past him. Or maybe he could lie to the cops after all. Maybe he watched her swing down from that chandelier, as skinny as she was, and let her go after all the fights he saw. She must have been very scared.”

“Scared?” Davis said. “She hatched a plan to ruin her husband. It’s like he said. They’ll never charge him but he’ll never be mayor, either. He’ll just be a rich guy who got away with murder.”

“That’s what he is anyway,” I said. “That’s why she was scared. Scared to fall. If she fell it’d be the end of her — maybe from hitting the floor, or maybe from her husband hitting her. It was a risk. Even an acrobat. Even someone who’d whittled herself away to almost nothing.”

“Then she had almost nothing to lose,” Davis said. She took a sip and pursed her lips. It’s a bitter drink, or maybe bitter’s not what I mean. It’s sharp and sour. It’s complicated. It’s difficult to get down unless that’s the sort of thing you like. “I feel that way myself sometimes,” she said. “Almost nothing, or maybe that’s just Chet Baker nudging me to say that. You think I was wrong not to tell him.”

“You told him where the drink went,” I said. “That’s enough for someone like that. Without a body they won’t charge him. He’ll never know for sure. Maybe Timothy Speed will even blackmail him.”

“Or just keep overcharging him for furniture,” Davis said. “Wesson never made any rugs. The whole point of a Wesson is the sheer lines of the place. The floors are bare so you can see the wood.”

“Callahan Jeffers,” I said, “would never see the wood.”

“Not for the trees,” Davis agreed. She put her drink down and walked to the jukebox with one of Jeffers’s damp bills. She punched a number in and her hair just slayed me in the red lights shining inside the machine that sits in the Slow Night waiting for people to ask it to sing. I tried the drink myself but didn’t like it, but I liked watching the tilt of the surface of the drink as I moved the glass, like water too cold to swim in. When we’re alone like this the room sinks in a bit, like we’re locked away from all the people. There are some who can’t stand to stay in a room like that but this is my regular spot, right here at the bar where I can see her. Time and time I want to tell Davis that I love her, but of course she’s so smart — of course she is — there’s no way she hasn’t figured it our already.