Trouble at the Brownstone

Chapter 4

After a dinner of veal birds in casserole with mushrooms and white wine, followed by raspberries in sherry cream, I chose to forgo coffee in the office with Wolfe and walked out into the night instead, my destination: McCready’s Bar on Tenth Avenue.

From the outside, the saloon looked like countless other Manhattan watering holes, Irish or otherwise. A pair of bright neon signs cut the night gloom, advertising competing beers, along with a hand-lettered poster that read HAPPY HOUR WITH FREE SNAX and was surrounded by decals of shamrocks.

I pushed inside to the sound of a jukebox playing Sinatra. Faces, all male, at the long bar that ran along the left side of the room, turned in unison to consider me and then quickly swiveled back to their drinks, mostly beer, and focused on the Yankee game on the TV set. I went to the far end of the bar and, although I have never been big on beer, I ordered a draft from a lanky young bartender.

“I heard there’s a card game in here,” I asked as he slid a foamy stein in my direction.

“Ah, but if you are looking for big-time gambling, this surely is not the place you would be wanting,” the bartender said. “Those gents in the back room, they indulge in games like pinochle and bridge. Not much coinage changes hands, which is jake with the boss. And they buy enough drinks to keep him happy.”

“I play those games, too,” I told him.

“Well, then you might be just the very fellow that they are looking for,” he said, jabbing a thumb toward a partly open door in the back.

The smoky room turned out to be surprisingly large, compared to the cramped quarters of the barroom. At the back, four men slouched around a pool table, cues in hand and cigarettes dangling from lips. They could have served as models for a John Sloan painting, circa 1925. Much closer to me, three men somewhere between fifty-five and seventy clutched cards in their hands as they leaned forward across a table from one another.

I stood watching silently until one of them, wearing half-glasses and a wary expression, turned toward me, his face a question mark.

Before he could speak, I asked, “What’re you playing?”

“Pinochle,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Good game for three,” I replied.

“Yeah, but for us, it’s not anywhere near as much fun as bridge. Say, do you play bridge, by any chance?”

“I do, although I’m no Goren or Jacoby or Blackwood.”

“Since you even know those names, you should fit in here. Want to play a few hands?”

“Before you sit down,” a second man, with wisps of hair and needing to go on a diet, cautioned, “in all honesty, we aren’t that great, but we do have a good time. And unlike those hotshots who play in big tournaments, we don’t go getting mad at each other. And we don’t use a lot of those fancy bidding systems. It’s straight rubber bridge, right out of good old Charlie Goren, none of this duplicate stuff and none of those goofy bids that have become popular.”

“That sounds good to me,” I said. “By the way, I’m Art.”

“And I’m Sid,” said the one with the goatee, shaking my hand. “This is Harvey,” he went on, motioning to the guy with the half-glasses and a squint. “And over there is Chester,” he said, indicating the one who was overweight. “He’s the one who got us together after we met at some YMCA bridge lessons.” Chester, who could give Nero Wolfe competition in the weight category, smiled and nodded, which made his jowls jiggle like Jell-O.

“All right, Art, have yourself a chair and we’ll draw for partners — high and low card are a team.” Sid and I ended up against Harvey and Chester. All three them of them turned out to be fairly good, and I played at their level, even if it meant dropping my game down a notch.

After two hands, with each team having made its bid, I asked, “Who is usually your fourth?”

“A very nice fellow named Ted,” Chester replied. “He had played with us for, oh... a couple of months or more, it’s been. But he just quit coming a week or so back, and we don’t know why. He never mentioned where he lived, so we have no way of getting ahold of him. We just hope he isn’t sick or something.”

“What is this Ted like?”

“As I said, he is very nice, polite, and very much on the quiet side,” Chester said. “Told us that he hadn’t been playing bridge for all that long, but he seemed to know what he was doing. And he sure enjoyed himself.”

“I wonder if he’s retired,” I said.

Sid laughed. “You mean like us? We all are pensioners. I was a barber, Chester here worked at the post office, and Harvey sold insurance. But it sounded like Ted was still getting a paycheck; he said he worked as some kind of gardener. You still working, Art? You look like you’re young enough.”

I had planned to say I was an insurance investigator if asked, but when Harvey turned out to have worked in the insurance business, I figured he would ask questions about my employer and find me out as a fraud, so I switched horses: “I’m at a small company that does job printing for actuarial companies — all kinds of brochures and folders full of tables about life expectancy, stuff like that.” That had the desired effect — a total lack of interest among my audience.

“You married, Art?” Harvey asked.

“Nope, I guess nobody would have me,” I replied with a self-deprecating chuckle.

“None of us are married, either,” Sid replied, “although I was once, but we both decided we weren’t suited for each other. And we were both right.”

“Me, I never even gave it a shot,” Chester put in with a small laugh that was enough to get those jowls jiggling again. Harvey shrugged, saying of marriage, “no one ever came along who made me want to give up the life I was leading.”

“Yeah, when you’re a playboy, you hate to get tied down,” Sid said to a chorus of laughter.

“Some playboy,” Harvey replied. “Once I went two years without a date. But I wasn’t complaining. I could do what I wanted to and when I wanted to.”

The others clapped, and Sid said, turning to Chester, “Enough talking, Miller. Let’s deal ’em out.”

The rest of the evening was uneventful, other than occasional swearing and raucous laughter from the nearby pool players. “They can be a pain,” Sid observed quietly, “and they don’t much like us — we’re just too lame for a bunch of longshoremen. Ted really seemed to dislike them — as well as the other dockworkers who fill up the bar most nights — even more than the rest of us did. He once said they were ‘up to no good.’”

“Hmm, interesting. Did he get specific?”

“No, and he acted kind of mysterious when we asked him about that. But when we were playing, I did notice that he seemed to have one ear cocked to the conversation around the pool table.”

“Did you hear anything from those guys that made you suspicious?”

“I didn’t,” Sid said. “How about you two?”

Both Chester and Harvey shook their heads. “I’ve mainly heard them cursing and talking about women — and not very respectfully,” Harvey said. We were far enough away from the pool table that we couldn’t be heard by the guys with the cue sticks.

“It isn’t always the same bunch who shoot pool,” Chester said, “but as far as I’m concerned, they’re interchangeable, and they are all rough around the edges. And some of them behave like they’re hiding something, although damned if I know what that is. It does make you curious, though.”

As if on cue, so to speak, one of the pool players, a chunky character with tattoos on both of his thick arms, walked by our table, probably on his way to the bar. He sneered and said, “Having fun in your little game, boys?” Chester started to answer, then decided discretion was the better part of valor and clammed up, biting his lower lip.

I wanted to ask more about Theodore but didn’t want to appear too nosy, so I shifted gears. “Turns out we were more or less even tonight,” I said, looking at the score pad, which Sid kept. “One rubber each, although you two” — I nodded to Chester and Harvey — “finished with two hundred more points than us. Congratulations.”

“Hope you can join us again,” Harvey said, “if we don’t get Ted back. We’re usually here Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights — Fridays there’s just too much noise in the bar. If there are only three of us, we play pinochle as we were doing when you came. But bridge is more fun, at least as far as we’re concerned.”

I told them I agreed about bridge and said that they might see me again. When I got back home, Wolfe was still at his desk, rereading The Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, a volume I had seen on the bookshelves since my earliest days in the brownstone. He looked up, eyes wide, suggesting that I report.

I gave him my impressions of the bar, the bridge group, and the longshoremen as he leaned back, eyes closed. “Theodore seems to be well-liked by the bridge players,” I said as I provided Wolfe with a verbatim report on my conversations with Sid, Chester, and Harvey. “He apparently didn’t tell them very much about himself, other than that he worked as a gardener. From what they told me, he didn’t say where he was employed or give any specifics about his job.”

“While you were away, I received a call from Theodore’s sister, who as you know lives in New Jersey,” Wolfe said. “She has been visiting him every day, and she told me he shows no indication of emerging from the coma.”

“Not a good sign.”

“However, Dr. Vollmer says he has known of numerous examples in which individuals regain consciousness and also their full faculties after long extended periods — sometimes months — in a comatose state.”

“So, where do we go from here?”

Wolfe glared at his empty beer stein as if looking to it for inspiration. “Have Saul, Fred, and Orrie here tomorrow night at nine.”

My employer thinks all he has to do is issue an order, and I will carry it out — the faster, the better. As I have said about Wolfe more than once, he never puts off until tomorrow what I can do today.