Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (13 page)

“Oh, by the way,” said Jimmy, turning back. He screwed up his face in a lopsided Columbo leer. Just good enough that I got it. Jimmy and I had watched a helluva lot of TV together over the years. “Barbara’s met the sister. Better than met.” He beamed with what would be uxorious pride if those two would ever say the hell with it and get married. “She took her to a meeting.”

“An AA meeting? I don’t get it.”

“Nope.” Jimmy grinned. “An Al-Anon meeting. They’ll be telling each other their life story in no time.”

*

It took me five days and more hours at the downtown law firm than I would have chosen to spend. I couldn’t do anything personal on the Internet while the lawyers, the paralegals, or the full time secretaries were around. I needed the job, not just for use of the computer but for the nice paycheck that went along with it. One of the best things about temping is that you don’t stand or fall by how you get along with any one set of people that you meet along the way. But I couldn’t afford to alienate the agency that had sent me there by getting kicked out or complained about. There were plenty of temp agencies, but not that many that thought Bruce Kohler was not only a crackerjack word processor but a reliable guy.

Shorn of the legalese, the family got the money. The sister Barbara had met, Emily Brandon Weill (Mrs. Samson Weill), and her son Brandon both figured in the trust, which came from a grandfather, Maxwell Brandon. That must be God’s mother’s father. His father’s father had to be Godfrey Brandon Kettleworth Senior, so the Brandon connection on the paternal side must have been a generation back. God’s great-grandmother was probably a sister of Maxwell, the one with the big bucks. It was confusing, and I got confused. I used up many pieces of paper making little diagrams to keep it all straight.

Luckily, the office computers were well stocked with fancy programs for making graphs and charts. Afterwards, Jimmy told me he had state-of-the-art genealogy software on his computer at home. But hey, he wouldn’t want to spoil my fun. I know the way his mind works. He thought exercising my brain would speed up the recovery of my faculties as the neurons dried out or whatever it is they do in early sobriety. Emmie’s two younger children weren’t mentioned. They probably hadn’t been born when the trust was established. The will might have covered unborn children, but it didn’t. Maybe the whole gang of them figured God would straighten up once he’d sown enough wild oats. Something they feed wild horses? I was a wild barley man myself.

The other two sisters also benefited. Frances was the one in Ohio. I found the address. Her last name was Standish. The husband seemed to be a history professor, and she figured in various social pages as Mrs. Henry Standish. These women’s charity circuit might be the only place in America, barring maybe a down-home church or two, where married women still toted around their husbands’ names. Or am I being provincial? They say New Yorkers don’t have the foggiest idea what America is really like.

Frances, out there in the heartland, had two sons, Charles Gregory and Robert Miles. Jimmy pointed out that the Miles could have been either a literary reference or an actual claim of descent from the historical Miles Standish. The original Standish must have married somebody after the legendary John Alden, as Jimmy put it in his inimitable style, “copped this broad Priscilla from right under Miles’s snoot.” He was kidding when he used the word “broad.” Otherwise, Barbara would have sicced her coven on him. Er, her women’s group. The third sister was Lucinda Kettleworth. Same last name as God’s. Unmarried, or married without changing it. Either way, she didn’t have any kids. At least, the trust didn’t mention any.

God did have a will. The beneficiaries were the same, except Emmie’s two younger children, Lucille and Duncan, were mentioned by name. With the possible exception of Emmie, none of these people had been speaking to him. He’d told me so himself. He might have intended to change his will. I remembered his saying he’d seen a lawyer on that last day out. He probably wouldn’t have gone to the attorney whose name I had here, since he figured not only in Grandpa’s trust and God’s will but on every family document Jimmy had found. God would have wanted a lawyer who was in nobody’s corner but his. No new will had been executed. The one that was now in probate was eight years old, made when Emmie’s youngest was a baby. But what if he’d taken steps toward changing it and mentioned it to the wrong person? That would be anyone who could expect to get cut out.

On the other hand, Emmie was the only one he was speaking to. So Emmie was the relative he was most likely to have visited that day. I wondered how her husband was fixed for money. And how badly, comparatively speaking, he got along with God. It was also possible that God had deliberately visited one or more of the relatives he resented most to tell them they could kiss his money goodbye. Or on the other hand, he could have gone in a conciliatory frame of mind and then quarreled with them. As far as I knew, he was planning to stay sober. He knew you weren’t exactly supposed to cling to being a sonofabitch if you wanted it to work. But he still could have gotten mad all over again. That might have made him want to lash out at them. He could have told them what they’d lose. Would it have made someone want to kill him? Someone with the same crappy impulse control as an addict and immediate access to some kind of poison?

It couldn’t have been the sister in Ohio. Were her sons in New York? What did they do? How prosperous were they? Had God said one was a lawyer? I wasn’t sure. Barbara says there’s a study that proves alcoholics remember only ten percent of what they hear during the first week of sobriety. The other Standish brother might be broke. He might be a perennially out-of-work actor moonlighting as an underpaid waiter. New York is full of those. Or a stockbroker whose firm had gotten busted by the SEC.

I couldn’t help wondering if there were any other addicts in the family. Whether it’s alcohol, gambling, coke, or heroin, there’s nothing like an addiction to make money flap its flimsy wings and fly away. In Debtors Anonymous, they saw high finance as just a socially acceptable form of gambling or compulsive spending. And if they still had debtors’ prisons, kids with college loans would waste away in those long before they could get their first job. Jimmy knew all about debtors’ prisons. The bottom line: Even the rich, like God’s family, were not immune to need or greed. The annotated bottom line: Would they kill to keep it?

“Eugene of Savoy,” Jimmy said.

“Yes, dear,” Barbara said.

I stayed out of it.

“Military genius. Louis XIV wouldn’t give him a commission, so he went over to the Hapsburgs and spent the rest of his career whipping Louis’s ass all over Europe. The frigging Duke of Marlborough gets the credit for Blenheim, but he wouldn’t have won without Eugene.”

“Yes, dear.”

Jimmy gets so excited when he talks about history. Luckily, Barbara thinks it’s cute, even when she pretends to be—or actually is—bored. I’d been picking up information cheap when it interested me and letting the rest roll off my back for many years. Take what you like and leave the rest, as the program says.

“There’s hardly anything written about him in English,” said Jimmy, scrolling down what looked like an endless list. “Maybe I should write a book.”

It took a while, but eventually she got him into the present century, and then we were able to pursue the topic of our own personal little mystery. Barbara, blast the girl, thought it was highly amusing that Jimmy had gotten me to do the scutwork of scrolling through the fine print on endless pages on the Web. I had spent a lot more of my life than Jimmy avoiding anything that might remotely be called boring. Not that I felt bored these days. Barbara thoroughly approved of how emotionally engaged I was, and even Jimmy was impressed. I knew because I eavesdropped. I went to the kitchen for a glass of club soda. It still seemed peculiar to me to open a refrigerator, especially mine or Jimmy’s, and not see any beer. When I came back out, they were talking about me.

“Jimmy, do you think Bruce is different this time around?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know—he cares more. Seeing his friend die like that really rattled him. And look at the way he’s taking on these assignments you’ve been giving him. Maybe he’s really getting it this time. Maybe he’s finally going to get sober for real. What do you think?”

“I think,” said Jimmy, “you need to stop daydreaming about Bruce’s sobriety and get on with your own life. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to have learned in Al-Anon?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Barbara said indignantly. “You alcoholics are lucky. You put a cork in the bottle, and that’s that.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I didn’t mean that it was easy. Would you really want me to give up managing other people’s lives
completely?
”

“Yes.”

“And then what would I do for fun?” she demanded. She came up behind him, flung her arms around his neck until he squawked, and dropped a kiss on the top of his head. One thing about Jimmy spending all his time at that computer, he was a sitting duck when she needed him to be. Before they could turn it into a necking session, I shoved off the doorway I’d been lurking behind and propelled myself into the room.

“Fun?” I said. “Did I hear fun? Are we having any yet?”

“We were about to,” said Barbara, “but never mind.”

“You must have had fun,” Jimmy told me, “I gave you all those websites to check out.”

“Your fun is my damn homework,” I growled.

“You did it, then.” Barbara sounded surprised. I was surprised myself. I was becoming quite the busy beaver. “What did you find out?”

I slung myself onto their old leather couch and stretched out full length. I’d spent many a night passed out on it before Jimmy stopped drinking and decided he’d better draw some boundaries.

“For one thing, I’ve located the Standishes. The Ohio sister’s sons.”

“God’s grownup nephews. Where are they?”

“In New York.”

“Great!” Barbara crowed. “Did you find out what they do?”

“One is a stockbroker who was interviewed in one of those online magazines a couple of years ago talking about the joys of day trading.”

“I knew it!” she said triumphantly. “In other words, an upmarket gambler. Too much is not enough. And the other?”

“An attorney.”

“What kind?”

“Corporate. Big downtown firm.”

“The kind of place you might wangle a temp assignment,” Barbara said.

“Oh, thanks a heap,” I said. “Feel free to auction me off.”

Barbara ignored my feeble rebellion.

“Do they live in Manhattan?”

“Nope, one in Westchester, the other out in Nassau County. Larchmont and Garden City.” Both high-rent suburbs. Expensive lifestyles. Prone to embarrassment by a black sheep uncle, maybe.

“Genetics being what it is,” Jimmy pointed out, “one or both of them might be functional alcoholics themselves. Four martinis with lunch and knock back a few more before you go home, but your employer still thinks your performance is great.”

“Or the day trader could be doing coke,” Barbara added. “I’ll get Emmie Weill to tell me about them.”

“Are you pretending to be that woman’s friend?” Jimmy demanded. He was so upset he took his hands completely off the keyboard.

“I’m not pretending,” she protested. “Her alcoholic brother just died, she’s hurting, I took her to a meeting. What was I going to do?”

Jimmy shook his head. “You’re the one who’s always talking about boundaries.”

“I know, I know,” Barbara admitted. “But how are we supposed to find out anything without getting to know any of the people involved? Besides, Emmie really likes Al-Anon.”

“So you’re really just doing a good deed.” Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t know, petunia.”

Petunia? Since I started spending more time with them again, I got an inkling that Jimmy and Barbara talked an awful lot of baby talk together when nobody was around. Sometimes it slipped out in public. Maybe they didn’t consider me “public.” The thought cheered me considerably. Anyhow, Barbara rolled right on.

“It’s a great place to hear that it’s possible to love someone without going down the tubes with them. Emmie seems to be one of those codependents who can always find someone who needs rescuing. She’s like a magnet for other people’s pain. She’s told me a lot about God’s great promise as a kid and his road to destruction, all the way to the Bowery and then the morgue. She also talks a lot about her oldest son, they call him Brandy. She worries about him because he’s become very withdrawn.”

“How so?”

“Isolated, uncommunicative. Not into sports, not interested in girls.”

“Maybe he’s drinking.”

“He’s fourteen!” Barbara protested.

Jimmy and I looked at each other. We had been fourteen when we chugged those first two bottles of Colt 45 that changed our lives forever.

Barbara went on talking about Emmie and her family.

“According to her, Brandy was God’s favorite when he was younger, but they hadn’t been close in recent years. She also went on about her husband, who isn’t any kind of addict as far as I can tell from what she says, but he sounds a lot like someone with a narcissistic personality disorder.”

“And what’s that in plain English?” I asked. “I can never keep them straight.”

“A self-centered bastard who thinks the world owes him and is never going to change.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “I know what those are.”

“Meanwhile, back at the detox,” Barbara said, “I finally saw the death certificate.”

“That’s good news, isn’t it?” I sat up. Jimmy tilted his chair and peered around the computer to get a little closer to the conversation.

“It is,” she said. “I had to do some fancy dancing to check God’s chart again. But it was worth it. I guessed right, Dr. Bones signed it. It said acute gastritis and heart failure, which doesn’t tell us anything. His family certainly hasn’t questioned it. Emmie’s made it clear that the rest of them didn’t want to think about God once he started deteriorating physically, emotionally, and socially. And once he was dead, they just wanted him hustled out of the way.”