In solo time, p.4
In Solo Time, page 4
I lit a cigarette, daring Burton to hassle me about the no-smoking ordinance. The bar wasn’t officially open until eleven anyway.
He tried the coffee, pulled a face, then dipped his hand into his shirt pocket like a reformed smoker. Pulling it out again, he pointed at the picture of Phil Esposito, the Bruins great.
“You changed the name. Didn’t this place used to be the Vat or the Pit? Something like that?”
“The Cellar,” I said. “You know he was as much the reason they won as Orr. Pretty boys get all the glory.”
Burton held up his hands in a peacemaking gesture, as if I’d offered to fight him. His smile was a study in innocence. He’d probably grown up in Southie or Charlestown, where that angel look was as important to surviving as the toughness underneath.
“And I suppose Conigliaro was too long a name for a bar?”
I nodded at his wit.
“What was business like that night, Elder? Busy? Slow? You get a good crowd in for the music?”
That didn’t seem like a trick question.
“Lot of places are closed on Monday nights. It’s usually pretty slow. Thirty, forty maybe? Maybe twenty that stayed for both sets.”
“No arguments among the patrons? Fistfights?”
I didn’t like to lie but I didn’t want the Esposito’s reputation to backslide, either.
“Nothing.”
“What about you?” Burton opened the notebook. “You get along with Mr. McGuire all right?”
I was more than ready for a drink but not willing to show him my weakness.
“I think I told you already I didn’t have that much contact with him. That I hired him through the piano player. Nance? I don’t think ten words ever passed between me and Timmy.”
Burton put his hand on the coffee mug but didn’t pick it up.
“He took a nice solo on How Insensitive,” Jacquie said.
I’d been hoping she’d stay in the kitchen and mind her business. Nothing good could come of her sticking her nose in.
Burton’s eyebrows twitched.
“And you are?”
“This is Jacqueline Robillard, my night cook.” I glared at her but she wasn’t taking messages. “Inspector Burton is investigating Timmy McGuire’s murder.”
Burton flashed his teeth—definitely a smoker—in what he probably thought was a friendly smile.
“Call me Dan.” He reached over the bar to shake Jacquie’s hand. “You knew the victim?”
“The victim had a name, Dan.” She seemed to hold onto Burton’s hand a beat longer than necessary. “Timothy.”
He didn’t even look slightly chastened.
“You were working on Monday night as well?”
Jacquie glanced at me, a little obviously. Burton must have seemed stupid enough for her to ham it up.
“I closed up the kitchen around eleven, like usual. Sometimes Elder lets me go home early if there isn’t much business.”
“He let you go that night?”
“Oh no.” She smiled. “We went out for drinks after work. The Blue Orb. You know it?”
Burton jumped to the conclusion she wanted him to, that we’d continued the night together after the drinks. I couldn’t see how to correct it without making a big deal.
“Did you see anything unusual here that night? Arguments, loud discussion? Any tension?”
This would have been her cue to mention Ted and Myron but instead she looked at me again, as if asking me how much she should say.
“No,” she said finally. “Not a thing.”
Burton made a disbelieving face.
“Mr. McGuire didn’t hit on anyone’s date? Slobber beer all over someone’s Ralph Lauren? Play grab-ass with the waitresses?”
Jacquie snickered.
“You see any waitresses in this place?”
Burton gave her a flat appraising look. I wondered if she realized she was as good as taunting him.
“There was one loud drunk,” I said, to divert Burton. “Rich asshole, expensive suit. Not much of a jazz fan and probably slumming. Kept yelling for the Orange Blossom Special.”
“Your band had a fiddle?”
I shook my head. He grimaced. Maybe he really was a jazz fan.
“How drunk?”
“Not sloppy,” I said. “Determined, though. Timmy blew him off twice. They might have had words.”
“Timmy wouldn’t have cut him, though,” Jacquie said.
I wished she would either shut up or go back in the kitchen, preferably both.
“McGuire pulled a knife? And you didn’t think it was worth mentioning?”
“It was theater,” I said. “He was up on the stage; the guy was down here. And Timmy was blind, remember. Nothing happened.”
Jacquie sighed as if we were boring her and retreated to the kitchen, Burton watching her ass the whole way.
“I don’t think she had anything to do with it,” I said. “Isn’t stabbing more a man’s method of killing someone?”
“Appreciate the insight,” Burton said. “You must have read a lot of books. The bloodiest case I ever worked was a twelve-year old girl out in Rowley who decided her father and two brothers couldn’t screw her any more if she cut off their willies. Though technically, I suppose that wasn’t a stabbing. You mind?”
He slid one of my cigarettes out of the pack and lit it. Under other circumstances, I thought I might enjoy having a drink or two with Burton. He had a wry layer under the cop focus and I suspected that we shared some perspective on the idiocies of the known world.
He exhaled smoke and nodded at the kitchen.
“She was close to McGuire?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t get involved in my employees’ private lives.”
“Unless they invite you to, I imagine.”
First Cy, now Burton. I had to wonder if I was following Jacquie around with my tongue out or something.
“There were two of them, actually.”
Burton nodded.
“She knew them,” I said. “The one, Myron, was quiet. Hardly touched his wine, didn’t yell at anyone. Ted was the jerk-off.”
“They regulars?”
“No such thing in this bar. Yet. I’m retraining all the bad drunks to stay away. I’m sure they thought they were slumming.”
Burton gave me a wide-eyed look.
“You’re not holding anything back here, are you, Darrow? Because I’m having a very hard time finding anyone who saw what went on here. Your cook was dating him, I heard?”
Where had he picked that up so fast? The desire for a drink slipped over me, urgent as the need to piss.
“Dating’s a pretty polite word. And I’m not lying to you. All I want to do is run my bar.”
“So Ms. Robillard is a valued employee? Someone worth protecting?”
“She’s all right. You can’t think she did this?”
“Do you?”
I lit another cigarette and laid it in the ashtray next to Burton’s, which had burnt down after the first and only drag. Shook my head.
“She’s the original good-time girl. As long as she’s having a good time, nothing much else matters. If things got complicated—with Timmy or anybody else—I’d expect her to bail. Not confront someone, let alone stab them. She wouldn’t let herself care that much.”
Burton grinned as if I’d just exposed myself.
“Sharon’s like that. My soon-to-be-ex. ‘She’s often been a trial but she’s never been a bore.’”
“Fuck a bunch of country music.” I blew out smoke, not impressed by Burton’s attempt at confraternity. All I wanted was to get back to work, though he apparently wasn’t through.
“So Ms. Robillard was well-acquainted with the deceased,” he said. “And you didn’t much care for that.”
“You watch too much Perry Mason.” I wiped the bar, for something to do with my hands besides pour a drink. “Ask her yourself.”
“I’m asking you.”
“She knew who he was. Their social life? I couldn’t tell you.”
Burton flushed. Something I’d said, or not said, had pissed him off.
“That’s all I know,” I said. “I’ve told you everything.”
He rapped the bar with his knuckles.
“You have not, Mr. Darrow. But you will. Eventually. So prepare yourself.
He turned away and stalked across the black and white checkered linoleum. His shoes boomed on the metal stairs going up and at the top, he turned sideways to let a big-chested woman in a green cloth coat with a fur collar step past him. He pointed a finger at me and disappeared.
My hands shook as I poured that long-deferred Scotch. Even though I hadn’t actually lied to Burton, I was all done covering for Jacquie. I’d be stupid to think I could spar with someone who caught out liars for a living.
5
Ted, the mouthy one, showed up at the Esposito around eleven the next morning, as ready to rumble as a man in pleated Dockers and basket-weave loafers could be. Wes Montgomery’s version of Caravan was driving through the speakers and I was bent over with my head inside the ancient Hobart dishwasher trying to figure out why the beer glasses would not come clean. The first thing I knew anyone else was in the place was when he slapped the bar top and made the steel sides of the Hobart thunder. I banged my head as I pulled out.
“Shit!” I rubbed at my crown. “What’s that all about?”
“The fuck did you tell that cop?” Ted’s face was a grayish purple and his breath smelled like last night’s garlic. “That chump had the motherfucking gall to come to my office and bother my father—my fucking father—with his fucking questions. My father wasn’t here that night? Was he?”
He slapped the bar again. I reached for the Little League slugger I kept underneath.
“I didn’t mention your name specifically,” I said in my best calm-the-barking-dog tone. “If you think I have any control over what the cops do, you’re dreaming. He wanted to know who’d been in here the night the guitar player got killed. Jacquie told me your name.”
Having to process what I said slowed Ted down a little. Instead of batting him, I extended my hand for a shake.
“Just your bad luck to be drinking in a place when someone gets killed. I’m Elder Darrow. I own the place.”
My bartender’s experience of the last couple months convinced me that in most cases, a polite and calm response trumped most belligerence. Even if someone was looking for a fight, they usually didn’t want to alienate whoever was pouring the drinks. Hecklers were bullies and bullies were cowards. Which didn’t mean Ted’s manners didn’t come grudgingly.
“Ted Quincy.” His palm was clammy.
The surname tickled a note of recognition but I couldn’t quite hear what key. He didn’t look a whole lot sharper than he had the other night. The pale blue hopsack blazer wasn’t cut to conceal the extra meat around his waist and he still needed a closer shave. His lips were fleshy and almost too pink to look natural and he twisted his blunt hairy fingers unconsciously.
“You go to Harvard?” I said. “Just trying to place you.”
His mouth dropped open as if I’d started preaching from the Koran. He untangled his hands and put them in his lap.
“Is this a fucking bar or isn’t it?” he said.
“My mistake. I thought you came in to yell at me. What can I get you?”
Something about Ted was off, as if some neural circuits might have been closed down or burned out. Maybe he was a drunk too. Everyone else I’d run into the past few days seemed to be.
“Bourbon sour,” Ted said. “In a shaker.”
I grimaced. Fruity drinks at eleven in the morning. As long as I didn’t have to drink it, though, I suppose I could sell it.
Getting his drink order in seemed to calm Ted down. He hunkered over the bar like a frog leaning on its front legs and watched me mix the drink as if I were performing a rare and difficult surgery.
I strained it into a glass, floated a slice of lemon on top, and set it down in front of him.
“Six-fifty.”
He peeled a twenty off a big roll and dropped it on the bar, right in a wet spot.
“You didn’t have any oranges?”
First the Orange Blossom Special, now this. Did he have some kind of orange fetish?
“Haven’t had a chance to cut them up yet, Ted. Technically, we’re not even open.”
I rang up the drink regardless.
Ted leaned over and sipped off the top without picking up the glass. He frowned as if disappointed and I thought about slapping him. It wouldn’t help me find out what he was doing here, though.
“I’m sorry if Burton jammed you up with your father. But there wasn’t any way he wasn’t going to find out you were here. They cross-checked their list with Jacquie and the guys in the band.”
I was trying to be polite. He and Myron had drunk three bottles of expensive wine, after all.
He waved his hand, magnanimous now with half his drink down the hatch.
“De nada, man. The little ones will do what they have to do. I just assumed . . . a little neighborhood place . . . you know, if I didn’t want my wife to find out I was here . . .”
The convoluted thought dribbled off. Either he’d been half-shot when he came in or he had practically a negative capacity for alcohol. I’d bet his wife, if he were married, wouldn’t want to find him at all.
“No problem.”
“’Cause I’m supposed to stay discreet when I’m out in public, if you know what I mean.”
He lay his forefinger alongside his nose as if the gesture was supposed to mean something. Was he implying he was mobbed up? Or did something else outside the law? I couldn’t imagine trusting him with anything more complicated than pouring a drink.
“I don’t,” I said. “But don’t bother explaining. I’m a little bit slow.”
“As long as you’re discreet about it.”
“As discreet as the law allows.”
He laughed wetly. He’d liked that one. When he leaned in over the bar again, his eyes were all pupil. Being a doper would explain the conversational roundabouts. A half-scabbed scratch showed on his neck, disappearing down into the collar of his lime green golf shirt.
“Harvard. Class of ’81,” he said. “Wasn’t that what you were asking me?”
I backed away from the dead-garlic cloud. I’d dropped out in ’79 but we might have crossed paths. Cambridge was not a large town.
“Fight Fiercely Harvard.” But he didn’t seem to recognize the name of the fight song. “What brought you two down to this neighborhood?”
“Pub crawl.”
A more polite way to say slumming but still.
Suddenly, he threw his hand over the bar and grabbed mine, shaking it with a shit-eating politician’s grin. In spite of the sloppiness, he was someone who believed in his own superiority.
“I’m Ted Quincy,” he said. “And you are?”
I felt as if I’d stumbled into an episode of the Singing Detective. If he wasn’t high, why would he act that way?
“Elder Darrow,” I said.
“Miz Jacquie here?”
I’d been wondering if she was the reason they’d dropped in Monday night. It couldn’t have been Timmy McGuire and the band. But this version of Ted made me nervous. Drunks don’t usually turn into completely different people under the influence—alcohol just intensifies their normal character. This Ted was out in space somewhere.
I stepped back into the kitchen. Jacquie was holding up the cover to a big stainless pot, steam swirling out. She tasted from the end of a wooden spoon.
Standing on her tiptoes made made her calves flex below the bottoms of her black pedal pushers and the strip of bare skin between her sweater and the waist of her pants showed blue-green lines, a bit of spider web or a claw. That was new since the last time I’d seen her naked and the thought of seeing the whole tattoo made me short of breath. I wondered how jealous of Ted I needed to be.
“Someone out front to see you,” I said.
“Minute.” She clashed down the lid and went to wash her hands.
Back out behind the bar, I poured myself a small Scotch and tucked the glass on the shelf under the bar. Ted wrapped both hands around his glass and stared into the mirror as if I wasn’t there.
“Quince, baby!”
Jacquie slipped past me, trailing a cloud of gardenia perfume. She’d applied fresh lipstick and was rubbing lotion into her hands.
She walked up behind Ted and wrapped her arms around his waist, perched her head on his shoulder, and smiled, a little too widely to be believable. Quincy arched his neck and tried to kiss her but she twisted her face away.
“Easy, fella,” she said. “I’m supposed to be working here.”
I felt her watching me and wondered if I should be taking a message from that. She nodded slightly at the bar—she liked Absolut over ice.
I shook my head. She wasn’t drinking on my time.
She pouted and turned her attention back to Ted.
“What brings your cute little behind down here to the South End? You didn’t come all this way to visit me, did you?”
Ted wriggled on the stool like a happy puppy—I only hoped he didn’t wet himself. I moved down the bar to give them privacy and slipped in a disc from a big band in Oregon, the Art Abrams Swing Machine.
“That cop came around to my father’s office asking questions,” Ted stage-whispered. I wouldn’t have had trouble hearing him even if I wasn’t listening. “Did he come and talk to you?”
Jacquie shot a look at me but I made myself busy reassembling the Hobart. She sneaked a sip of Ted’s drink.
I buried my head inside the machine, thinking that I really ought to fire her and let her take her chances with Burton, even if it made me look bad by association. I didn’t know what she and Ted had been up to but I was tired of her trying to get away with things around the Esposito. Maybe Cy Nance could find me a nice college girl from Berklee who could cook. Someone who’d be grateful for the work.
“Now why on earth would he want to talk to me?” Some of the syrup in her tone turned to vinegar. “You and I didn’t have anything at all to do with that unpleasantness. Did we?”
