Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (21 page)

That still hit home. Jimmy and Barbara hadn’t exactly thrown me away. They had backed off, and I had avoided them as carefully as I could while stumbling around yawing between blackouts, the shakes, and the remedial hair of the dog.

“And while they’re drunk or high and far from medical help,” Barbara went on, “that’s when they get run over or OD or get stabbed in a fight or their liver finally gives out.”

“Can you see any other patterns?” asked Jimmy.

“That’s not enough?” I asked.

“Nothing is random. Chaos is just order that we haven’t figured out yet.”

“Thanks for sharing,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” Barbara said. “This is really weird. In every one of those programs, there’s a sister from Sister Angel’s community on staff.”

“Avenging angels?” Jimmy joked. “Communal poisoning?”

“It is absurd. They’re Catholics. The whole pro-life thing. Going to Hell for suicide, or is it Purgatory?”

“Hell,” said Jimmy. “Unless you say you’re sorry at the last moment.”

“Which is probably physically impossible a lot of the time,” Barbara pointed out.

“Homicide’s a mortal sin too, my pet. And with these particular sisters, the idea of them giving clients booze is even more bizarre.”

“Forget the nuns,” I said. “What I really want to know is this: Were all those people murdered?”

“Good question,” said Jimmy.

The phone rang. Jimmy scooped up the receiver with a long swipe of the arm without taking his other hand from the keyboard until he’d listened for a while. Then he put it over the mouthpiece.

“It’s for you, Barbara. It’s your friend Emmie, and she sounds upset.”

“Oh!” said Barbara, pleased. “She’s never called me before.” She took the phone. As she listened, her smile crumpled.

“Emmie, I’m so sorry! What happened?” To us, she mouthed, “Her sister died.”

“Frances?” Jimmy asked.

“Lucinda,” she whispered. “Shh.”

While Barbara made condoling noises and asked if there was anything she could do, Jimmy turned to the computer. It only took him a moment to find the story online.

“The police think she interrupted a robbery,” he said softly, so the woman on the other end of the line couldn’t hear. “She was beaten, and some valuable art she had was gone.”

“The icons!” I exclaimed.

“Of course I’ll come to the funeral,” Barbara said into the phone.

She wrote down the information and said goodbye with many soothing noises.

“Poor thing! She could hardly talk for crying. You’ll go with me, won’t you?”

“To the funeral? I will, but Bruce had better not,” Jimmy said.

I got his point immediately. Frances would probably fly in. I doubted she would be pleased to see me again.

“Now aren’t you glad I went to Ohio instead of you?”

“Now aren’t
you
glad you went to Ohio instead of me,” Barbara retorted. “I can’t say I love a funeral, but that poor woman. I’m not sure why I like her so much, knowing that she may have stood by while her son got abused.”

“Denial,” Jimmy said. “Hers, not yours. It’s like with the alcoholic—you can’t bear to know, so you don’t know.” He was still keyboarding and clicking away. “Listen to this. Lucinda had a fabulous collection of Russian icons, not necessarily of known provenance.”

“Meaning she may have gotten them under the table?” I asked.

“Now I feel guilty,” Barbara said. “Sherlocking when her body is hardly cold.”

“It could be connected, pigeon,” Jimmy said. “We’ll give her a moment of silence if you want. And I said I’d go to the funeral with you. But it won’t help Emmie or anyone else not to know who killed her, and we’re the only ones who can see the whole picture.”

“If we’re right,” Barbara said. “Okay, okay, carry on. What does it say?”

“Not all of the icons were on display. The ones you guys saw when you peeked through the living room window were only the tip of the iceberg. But her closest friends had seen them all. It sounds like she had one of those shady collection rooms where she could show them off, and they must have thought it was wiser to come clean.”

“So where does Boris fit in?” I asked.

“I knew there was something fishy about his showing up there,” Barbara said.

“Whoa, let’s not leap to conclusions,” Jimmy said. “But—”

“But if he already had a relationship with her,” Barbara said, “and he knew how valuable the icons were—”

“He might even have been involved in helping her acquire them,” I said.

“A counselor’s salary,” Barbara pointed out, “is not the greatest. And he didn’t even have his credential, so he’s making less than I am.”

“What did Boris do before he came here?” I asked.

“A lot of immigrants have to give up professions or skilled occupations because their English isn’t up to it or because they can’t get the jobs,” Jimmy said. “Like our elevator man from Albania.”

“That guy wasn’t a professional comedian?” I asked.

“Biologist,” Barbara said. “Boris’s English is okay, but let’s find out. Give me the phone. Charmaine? Hi, I’m fine, how about you? Glad to hear it. I have a quick, dumb question for you. What did Boris do for a living in Russia? Yeah, our Boris, Boris the counselor.”

“Really? Wow, that’s interesting. Oh, for a paper I’m writing about who goes into counseling.”

She shrugged at us. She had no reason to write a paper, since she wasn’t in school. Thinking on her feet. But Charmaine wasn’t looking for flaws in her story.

“He hasn’t? And he didn’t call? I know, making sure you’ve got coverage is the pits. Glad I’m not an administrator! Sure, sure, let me know when you need me. I’m always glad to get some work and see you all—two birds, right. Take care. Yeah, I will too.”

She hung up and turned triumphantly to us.

“Well! Boris was a curator in an art museum—or maybe just a security guard, there’s a faction on the staff that thinks he inflated his job history—but either way, he would know icons and might have had access. And that’s not all. He hasn’t shown up for work for two days, and he hasn’t called. She tried his home number, but the phone’s been disconnected. And he needed money because he was hoping to bring over his wife’s family.”

“So do we tell the police,” Jimmy asked, “that you guys saw him near Lucinda’s?”

“Oh, Jimmy, sometimes you’re no fun since you stopped drinking.” Barbara pouted. “Just kidding, just kidding.”

“Well, do we tell?” Jimmy persisted. “They probably have no idea he exists.”

“They have no idea we exist either,” I said, “and I’d like to keep it that way. I don’t much care to put myself at a murder scene.”

“Good point,” Barbara admitted. “Anyhow, maybe he had nothing to do with it.”

“Then why did he disappear?” Jimmy asked. “Unless he did it.”

“The police could find him,” Barbara said. “I mean find a documented connection with Lucinda, if he was a protégé of hers through this immigrant foundation.”

“She had an in on the Bowery, too,” I remembered. “She might have gotten him the job.”

“I can’t ask Charmaine that,” Barbara said. “I’d have to look at the personnel files.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you yet,” Jimmy demanded, “that it might not be safe wandering around down there looking at things you’re not supposed to be seeing?”

“Oh, Jimmy, don’t be silly. Anyhow, they’re short a counselor again. I couldn’t tell her I wouldn’t help. She knows you’re no company when you’re doing your online thing.”

“Yeah, yeah, blame it on me,” he said. “Great maneuver: feint, then counterattack.”

“I learned it from you,” Barbara reminded him.

“What? When? You’re not interested in military strategy.”

“When you were drinking. ‘Don’t be silly, Barbara,’ you would say. ‘It’s just a beer. If you didn’t nag, I wouldn’t have to drink.’”

“Oh, that.”

“I never knew how lucky I was,” I remarked, “doing all my drinking single.”

“Son, you have no idea,” Jimmy said.

“I still don’t see, though, what Boris has to do with God.” Barbara was ready to stop fooling around. “I don’t see any connection.”

“Unless God caught him doing something at the detox,” Jimmy said.

“Something that wasn’t kosher,” Barbara added.

“Like stealing money from people’s desks,” I said. “You should have heard the lecture they gave us. They were oh so fair-minded, but they obviously suspected the patients. Maybe they were wrong. Though I’d have thought,” I added, feeling slightly hurt as I said it, “that God would have told me, whether or not he went to Bark or Charmaine about it.”

“It didn’t have to be the stealing,” Jimmy said. “It could be anything.”

“Like Darryl with the drug dealing,” I said. “If he is dealing drugs. He could be operating out of the detox.”

“The Russian could be trafficking in stolen art on company time,” said Jimmy.

“Highly unlikely, even bizarre,” said Barbara. “Anyhow, where would he hide it? There isn’t a whole lot of extra space. In the laundry room? The client storage room?”

“You two know the layout,” Jimmy said, “I don’t. They have computers, don’t they? He could have been doing the business part of it from there.”

“So could Darryl,” I reminded him.

“But Boris could do it in Russian,” Jimmy pointed out. “He’d hardly even need a password. It would be like the Navajo signal guys in World War II. A foreign language is a code no cryptographer can crack, because it’s not a code.”

“Then God couldn’t have cracked it either,” said Barbara, “unless he happened to speak Russian. And if God couldn’t catch Boris doing anything wrong—”

“Then Boris had no reason to kill God,” said Jimmy.

“But if Boris killed Lucinda,” I asked, “who killed God?”

“And if he didn’t,” Barbara said, “if he stole the icons but didn’t kill her, or if he didn’t steal the icons but he had something to do with them—”

“Smuggling them in,” I suggested, “selling them to her on the black market.”

“Or physically bringing them to the house,” Barbara added. “That would put his fingerprints there, plenty of reason to run away, especially if he was illegal. Even legal immigrants get paranoid about the law.”

“With good reason,” I put in.

“But if Boris didn’t kill Lucinda,” Jimmy asked, “who did?”

Having made up my mind I wasn’t going to drink again, I was having a royal bitch of a time with the first step. I was having trouble getting into the proper attitude of surrender. I had always had to rely on myself. My mother had been depressed and ineffectual. My father had been too busy slowly dying of the booze himself as his ambitions got smaller and smaller.

After I met Jimmy, we backed each other up. We stood together whether we were wading into a ritual Saturday night fistfight with the crowd on the next block or playing one of the historical war games Jimmy pushed us into with endless inventiveness. Our block boasted probably the only group of urban white trash kids in New York who had heard of the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular campaign or the Carthaginians’ attempt on Rome. We fought them all over the neighborhood, complete with elephants.

But Jimmy and I couldn’t always protect each other. In our world, admitting powerlessness could be fatal. Surrendering even to God was dangerous. Jimmy went to Catholic school and got chased around the school yard by a horny priest. After that, he decided he didn’t want to be a missionary after all, though it sure would have gotten him out of the neighborhood. My dad’s family were kind of half-assed Presbyterians. They seemed to view religion as an endless procession of rummage sales and good works.

A lot of people had told me first-step surrender was a paradox. Not Jimmy—he usually said, “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t drink and go to meetings.” Sometimes admitting powerlessness and unmanageability made a glimmer of sense to me. Sometimes it sounded like pure and total hooey. I tried to keep it simple the way they said. Go to work, eat real food, read or watch TV instead of hanging out in bars. Don’t drink, go to meetings, investigate a murder.

I had gotten into the habit of going out for coffee with Glenn and his friends, though I had yet to use his number. The phone was willing, but I was powerless over my fingers. I usually got to the coffee shop first. The others all had people to talk to, smoke with, and exchange those interminable hugs with when the meeting let out. Those hugs still embarrassed the hell out of my inner John Wayne. So far nobody had said I couldn’t be sober without them. So I wasn’t having any truck with them.

On this particular evening, Glenn arrived five minutes after me. It turned out that no one else was coming. Glenn was a savvy dude. He knew I would have bolted if I’d known it would be just him and me. So he hadn’t told me. So there I was, one on one with a potential sponsor. Talk about powerless and unmanageable.

Glenn grinned at me. “Looks like HP wanted us to be alone together tonight.”

I looked around again to make sure nobody was within earshot. I’d rather be arrested for drunk and disorderly than let anybody catch me talking about a Higher Power in public. We were in a booth, and the place wasn’t crowded. No escape there.

“How’s your sobriety going?”

“We-e-ell,” I drawled, “I’m not drinking.”

“Sucks, doesn’t it.” Not what I expected him to say.

“Hell, yes,” I said. “When I hear someone in the meeting say their worst day sober is better than their best day drinking, I want to smack them.”

Glenn laughed. “It’s all a matter of perspective. I remember the first day I heard the words ‘grateful recovering alcoholic’ come out of my mouth. It scared the shit out of me. I thought I’d been invaded by the body snatchers.”

“Being sober scares the shit out of me,” I admitted.

“You ever see that T-shirt that says ‘Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs’? I sometimes wonder why only active addicts wear it. It’s true in recovery too.”

“It’s humiliating,” I complained, “thinking of myself as someone who can’t handle drugs.”

“Beats me,” he mused, not in an argumentative way but as if he really wanted to know, “how come we find it so much more humiliating to admit chemicals have us licked—only partly our fault, when you consider most of us got stuck with the genetic programming—than to be caught pissing against a wall in full view of dozens of strangers.”