Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (10 page)

*

I had a date to meet Jimmy and Barbara at a Starbucks near their apartment. Alcoholics love Starbucks. We’ll drink any kind of coffee that’s not unleaded. Barbara had arrived before me. She sat at one of the little tables with her nose buried in a book.

“Hey, it’s Espresso Bar Barbie.”

In one economical movement, she stood up, closed the book, and swatted me upside the head with it. Not too hard, though.

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, no Jewish girl who hasn’t been surgically altered looks anything like Barbie.”

“Yes, dear.”

Jimmy arrived at that point, and we got down to the serious business of ordering coffee. Jimmy picked the cups up at the counter and plunked them onto the little table along with a couple of trees worth of napkins and an AA meeting list. I glanced around at the crowded room with a quick left and right that struck even me as furtive.

“Jeez, Jimmy, put it away, will ya? We’re in a public place. And trust me, just seeing you reminds me I should go to a meeting.”

Jimmy grinned, picked up the fat pamphlet, and made flapping motions at me with it. He knew I didn’t want to be conspicuous.

“Cut it out. I’ve got one, I’ve got one.”

“Nobody’s looking, Bruce,” said Barbara. “And considering how many times you did it in the street and frightened a helluva lot of horses, it wouldn’t ruin your reputation if anyone noticed you were sober.”

“It?” I said.

“Whatever you did drunk,” she retorted.

“You don’t have to rub it in.”

I can usually make Barbara feel guilty when she gets on my case. She knows she shouldn’t nag, but she isn’t very good at refraining.

“It’s usually best,” Jimmy advised, “to say ‘Yes, dear’ and be done with it.”

“Seriously, Bruce, how are you doing?” Barbara asked.

“Aside from the recurring instant replay of my buddy choking himself to death and me being up in the middle of the night ready to kill for a drink, just fine and dandy.”

Barbara put her hand on my arm. I decided it was too much effort to go on being caustic. Jimmy looked around at the coffee drinkers who thought it was cool to bring their laptops out in public. You could see him thinking, Amateurs! He made a sympathetic face at me.

“No one says it’s easy.”

“It was a shock.”

Their concern, I must admit, was comforting. I felt a rush of what I hoped was grief and not self-pity.

“Well, it was. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I got interrupted before I finished skimming the notes,” Barbara said, “but I didn’t see any indication that they thought he was poisoned or anything like that. It’s not the first thing you think of when an addict dies, is it.”

“I still don’t believe he picked up. When he was discharged, sure, maybe, he might have, but on a pass? And then come back? For the luxurious accommodations on the scenic Bowery?”

“Did you look at the medical records?” Jimmy asked.

“Nothing current,” Barbara said. “Hepatitis B and pancreatitis in the past. Wrong kind of tummy ache. Anyhow, active pancreatitis would have put him in the hospital before they got the alcohol out of his system.”

“He had twenty-four hours out on his own,” I said. “He could have gone anywhere, taken anything.”

“I found an address,” Barbara said. She dug some folded papers out of her bag and shuffled through them. “East Sixties.”

“Expensive part of town.” Most of the people I knew wouldn’t even think of it as a residential neighborhood. “I could check it out. All I’m doing for the next few days is going to meetings.”

“Sure you’re okay?” Jimmy meant did I have any money.

“Fine for now. Really.” And when I started to run short, I’d temp. It wasn’t a long-term plan, but it had the merit of feeling doable. One day at a time. Dammit. Don’t you hate it when the preachy stuff turns out to be right?

“If it’s a relative,” Barbara said, “you could certainly introduce yourself as a friend who was there when he died. Or no, maybe you’d better just have heard that he died. You don’t want them to have a knee-jerk reaction to you as another drunk. You did say he’d alienated all his relatives, didn’t you? So you’d better show up there looking squeaky clean.”

“What’s the uniform? Pinstripe suit? Tennis whites?”

“No, you goofball. It’s January, anyhow. Just don’t wear fuzzy white socks with your black leather shoes, okay?”

“No, ma’am.” I grinned. Barbara had a theory about socioeconomic status and socks. I had heard it before.

“You’re not going to be breaking the bad news to anyone close, I hope,” Jimmy said. “If they notified anyone at all, it’ll be whoever’s at the address he gave, I should think.”

“I hope not. That would be tacky, wouldn’t it. And awkward for me. Not the kind of situation I’m dying to be in, especially sober.”

“Maybe I should do it.” Barbara looked stricken. “Maybe you shouldn’t risk it.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Barbara thought for a moment.

“How about this? Jimmy, why don’t you check that address online first? Find out who lives there. In fact, let me give you all the names I got. Sisters. Find out where they are, what they do, what their financial position is.”

“He talked about his sisters,” I said. “The one he liked was Emma. Emmie.”

“Emily,” said Barbara, looking at her notes.

“He called her Emmie. She might not have been speaking to him. He said everyone in the family was pissed off at him.”

“She’d still be upset that he died. Especially if she’d been mad at him. I know I would.” Barbara riffled through her notes. “Did he talk to you about women?”

“Other than his sisters, no. I told him I was going to see Laura on my pass. But he didn’t come back at me with any reciprocal confidences.”

“According to his psychosocial, he’d never been married, wasn’t in a relationship, and hadn’t been with anyone for very long. Any chance he was gay?”

“No way. And why wouldn’t he have told the counselors? They ask about it at least three times, the way they ask about everything.”

“Just because everybody we know who’s gay is out, it doesn’t mean that everyone is out. Jimmy, if you were gay, would you want to tell a nun about it?”

Jimmy shuddered.

“I may be lapsed, but I’m still an Irish Catholic.”

“That Sister Angel in the detox is not exactly your typical nun,” I said.

Barbara grinned.

“Yeah, she’s pretty cool, isn’t she.”

“Tough,” I said. “Savvy. And gets the information out of you with a scalpel if she needs to.”

“Besides,” Barbara said, “she’s not the only one who worked with him.”

“If I was gay,” I said, “I’d rather tell Sister Angel about my love life than some of the counselors there. You know Darryl?”

“He was the one who interrupted me while I was looking at God’s chart,” said Barbara. “I don’t know what he was doing there in the middle of the night. Not exactly sweetness and light, is he. Did he give you a hard time?”

“I managed to stay away from him. He and God had one or two big blowups, though. Mutual antipathy, to say the least.”

“Rumor says he was a big dealer. Do you think it’s true?”

“Probably. He didn’t do five years in the slammer for selling Girl Scout cookies. Doesn’t mind talking about it, either. One of his routines is Done Harder Time Than Thou.”

“Yeah, he was like that when I did my internship there. At the time, it kind of impressed me. You know, the glamour of living on the edge.”

“I hope that’s worn off, now that you’re making a living off us bums and desperadoes,” Jimmy said.

“The big question on the ward about Darryl,” I said, “was, Is he dealing now?”

“A counselor selling drugs?” said Jimmy. “Now you shock me.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“So Jimmy checks online—”

“Family, finances, known addresses. I’ll get on it tonight.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Barbara said. Jimmy would be up and online all night every night if he lived alone. “And I’ll take the sisters.”

“I met a couple of folks who knew him at the meeting,” I said. “This woman Mo, this guy Gary. I’ll see what else I can find out. Hot on the trail of justice. And not even tanked.”

“At least you won’t get bored.” Barbara always has to have the last word. At least she didn’t say the rest of it. If I didn’t get bored, maybe I wouldn’t drink again.

*

I spent the next day making the rounds of temp offices. To my relief, not all of them remembered me. When I couldn’t stand any more of it, I went over to Jimmy and Barbara’s.

Jimmy greeted me in his characteristic way.

“Did you know that Frederick the Great used a lot of snuff and got it all over his clothes? He wasn’t noted for fastidious personal habits. He wrote some nice flute music, though.”

“Yes, dear.” I used Barbara’s line. Jimmy had never wanted to live in this century. Sometimes we just had to let him be. Luckily, Barbara came bounding in before he told me even more about Frederick the Great than I wanted to know.

Barbara stays in this century, but she’s a master of the blow-by-blow account.

“We had staff meeting today. Dr. Arnold brought Krispy Kremes again. Hey, has it ever occurred to you that if you cross potato chips—can’t eat just one—with M&Ms—melt in your mouth—you get Krispy Kremes?”

Jimmy and I gazed at her with wonder.

“Never,” I said.

“She lives to digress,” Jimmy told me.

“At least I take it one century at a time. And unlike some people, I never leave out the interesting parts. Now, be quiet and let me tell you. Two clients tested positive for hepatitis B, they’re making us watch the hand-washing video again, and another client died.”

I knew the important part of this was the client’s death, but Barbara’s style was contagious.

“Hand-washing video? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, really, it’s part of universal precautions. The hospital takes it very seriously, especially in the age of HIV. We have to watch it every year. I think it’s part of the nursing curriculum, but Dr. Arnold makes us all go.”

“A client died,” Jimmy prompted. He had a lot of practice getting her back on track.

“Another old one, Daniel. He was Ingrid’s client—she’s the nurse from Nebraska who works in addictions because she has more alcoholic relatives than I have any kind of relatives—and Marian, the social work intern, was his counselor. She’s never lost a client before and she only has a few so she got very teary. Carlo and Sister Perseverance had known him forever, of course, but they stayed calm about it—they’ve seen a lot of clients come and go.”

“They’re dropping like flies at your place, aren’t they?”

“No more than down on the Bowery. And Nikolai and Daniel had both been beat up pretty badly by the disease. They actually put ‘acute and chronic alcoholism’ as the cause of death in Daniel’s chart.”

“And this is a good thing?”

“Not for poor Daniel, obviously, but it shows that hospitals and the medical profession are beginning to get it about alcoholism and addictions. They used to put anything but—seizure disorder, heart attack—because it was so stigmatizing, and that just fed the denial, which led to lack of funding, which led to not enough treatment and training for health professionals, most of whom—well, a lot, anyway—come from alcoholic and dysfunctional families themselves.”

“They do?” I’d never thought of that.

“Yeah. They’re the family heroes and caretakers—they rescue and control anyway, so why not get paid for it? And if they haven’t had treatment and aren’t in program, they’re going to ignore the signs and symptoms in the clients just the way they do in their own families. Carlo said he was a dirty old man.”

She’d lost me.

“Carlo is a dirty old man?”

“No! He said Daniel was a dirty old man. Well, first he said he wasn’t exactly a nice old man—you know, trying to get Marian to stop crying. He called her honeybun—Carlo is hopelessly sexist, though I think he isn’t really, he just likes to push our buttons. We usually let him get away with it. There’s no point trying to get Carlo to pay attention to gender politics. He said Daniel was a great fanny patter. He called Sister Persistence cookie.”

“Daniel called her cookie? That sounds pretty out of line for a client.”

“No! Carlo did—when he asked her if she remembered. Only Carlo would dare call Sister Perseverance cookie. Marian said he never patted
her
fanny. She sounded put out about it. Students never get it that when clients make them the favorite, it’s a manipulation.”

“Then what happened?” Barbara’s saga sure was a new slant on treatment for me.

“Oh, Dr. Arnold made him stop teasing before Marian broke down and Sister Persistence murdered him. She reminded us that postponing the scheduled case presentations today would give us an unmanageable backlog in no time. So Ingrid and Carlo gave their presentations, and then we ordered out for pizza.”

“What kind?”

“My favorite, mushrooms and—oh, you! Jimmy, tell us what you got on God.”

“I looked up his address for you.”

“In the East Sixties? Some comedown to the Bowery. So did he really live there? Whose address is it?”

“I don’t know if he lived there or was staying there or what. But the owner of the whole building is a Dr. Weill, which is the name of the sister that you gave me—Emily Brandon Weill.”

“That’s the one he got along with,” I said. “Though I think he said there’d been some kind of rift. And she’s a doctor?”

“No, it’s the husband, if that’s who he is. Dr. Samson Weill. I looked him up. He’s a plastic surgeon. Publishes occasionally in medical journals, so he’s not a quack. And he must make a bundle.”

“If he owns a whole building in the Sixties, he must be loaded. Though she may have family money too. God had a trust fund. I don’t suppose you looked her up?”

“O ye of little faith. Wellesley, Class of 1984, majored in anthropology. On the boards of several charities and her class reunion committee in the college alumni association. Alumnae. Three children: Brandon, Lucille Marie, and Duncan. All in private school.” He named a well known institution.

“That’s the kind of place you register your kids for at birth,” Barbara said, “if you have a lot of money and want to make sure they get into Harvard.”