Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (22 page)

“Oh, you know that wall too?” I cracked.

“Intimately.” He grinned. “Have you found a sponsor yet?”

“I know I should. I know, I know, famous last words.”

“What do you think is holding you back?” He still sounded as if he just really wanted to know.

“Sheer orneriness. I’ve been a maverick my whole life. Seems like that’s harder to give up than the actual chemicals.”

“I’ve got good news and bad news for you, bud. Every single one of us is a maverick.”

“Is that the good news or the bad news?”

“Both.” As I thought about that, he added, “I’d be glad to be your sponsor. Honored, in fact.” He didn’t make it a question, just reeled me in with no further ado.

*

Two days later, by appointment, Glenn arrived at my apartment with a copy of the Big Book under his arm. I broke into a sweat the moment I saw it.

Glenn intercepted my aversive glance. “It’s not gonna bite you,” he said. “I just thought maybe I’d pick out some of the good parts for you. Have you ever read any of it?”

“Not if I saw it coming. I’ve heard bits and pieces at meetings, but never anything to convince me it could ever be my bag.”

“Maybe I’ll manage to surprise you,” Glenn said. “Ever heard the Promises?”

“No,” I said. “I have to promise not to take another drink? I thought the whole program was all just suggestions.”

“It is. Even the Twelve Steps are just suggested. Take what you like and leave the rest. One of the best arguments that AA is nothing like a cult, if you ask me. No, this is promises the program makes to you. Here, listen. It comes just after the ninth step.

“ ‘We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.’” He went on. There were about a dozen of them. I didn’t hear anything I could say I didn’t want for myself, and it was oddly moving. When he finished, he closed the book and raised one eyebrow at me. He let the silence speak for him. I didn’t know a damn thing about this guy. Yet he might end up telling me the most embarrassing and evil things he’d ever done, just to prove to me that I wasn’t the only one. What a weird program. But it works.

We talked about the Steps for a while. I pissed and moaned about surrender. Glenn made some suggestions that weren’t too terrible. We discussed what meetings I would go to every week. We drank a lot of coffee. Finally, he looked at his watch.

“I have to go soon,” he said, “but there’s one more thing I think we should talk about.”

“And that is?” I asked, pretty relaxed by now.

“Prayer,” he said. Then he cracked up at the horrified expression on my face. “Sorry for laughing, but it’s so predictable.”

“Damn! Gotta work on that poker face. Okay, what do I have to do? Is this where we kill the chicken?”

“Shoot, I knew I forgot to bring something! Sorry to disappoint you. No chicken. No speaking in tongues. What I do is get on my knees.”

“I’d rather have the chicken,” I said.

“It’s not required, but it kind of sets the stage. Helps me remember this is something I take seriously. How about trying it once? If it doesn’t work for you, that’s okay.”

“Please say you don’t mean now.”

“I’ll close my eyes.” He was humoring me.

“Just don’t tell anybody,” I said.

Glenn mimed locking his lips and throwing away the key. I slid out of my chair. My joints creaked, protesting. The uncarpeted floor was hard against my knees.

“This isn’t going to hurt,” Glenn said. “And if you’re a good boy, you can have a lollipop afterwards.”

After all that buildup, all he did was have me repeat the Serenity Prayer. I couldn’t argue about the sentiments. I couldn’t even argue about the simple elegance of the prose.

“See?” said Glenn. “You do know how to pray.”

“That’s it?”

“It’ll grow on you,” he promised.

“I don’t know about the knee thing.”

“Not a deal-breaker.”

“How long do I have to do it?” I demanded.

“One day at a time.” He grinned.

“Just the Serenity Prayer?”

“Come back when you’ve mastered it,” said Glenn, “and I’ll give you another. We probably met in a previous life, and I’m sure we’ll be able to find each other in the next one.”

I disentangled that more slowly than I would have if I’d fed my neurons more spinach and fewer hallucinogens. “You mean I’m more than a few days away from perfect wisdom?”

“That’s right. It takes a lifetime of practice to achieve a spiritually sound state of imperfection.”

“Oh, if that’s all!” I said, getting my wind back.

Glenn looked around for his jacket, found it slung over a chair, and put it on.

“So you’re all set for now, huh?”

“Just peachy,” I assured him.

“Oh, before I forget. You know what’s the biggest problem a recovering alcoholic faces after making ninety days?”

“Never got close enough to think about it, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

“For most of us, it’s what the hell to do on day ninety-one.”

“Makes sense,” I admitted. “I’ve met a number of guys in detox who had a brilliant idea about how to celebrate.”

“Exactly. We don’t want you to be one of them, so I’m going to make it easy for you. Once you have your ninety days, I’d like you to join my men’s group.”

“Men’s group? Real men or quiche-eating men?”

“I’d say we hit the golden mean between macho and wimpy. Sober guys, in other words. You know some of them already.”

“The guys we have coffee with? Mike, Gary, Roger?”

“And a few others. We don’t talk about it much because it’s not a meeting, just a private thing we do. I didn’t mention it to you before because for a while there, I wasn’t sure if you were just resting between slips or really going for it this time. But I think you’re serious, don’t you?”

“Good Lord, a compliment. Be still, my heart.” Okay, I didn’t know how to handle feeling an unaccustomed pleasure and pride. But that was all right. Glenn saw right through me. It confirmed my awful premonition that he might be the right sponsor for me for the long haul.

“I do appreciate it,” I managed to get out. I didn’t want to come off like a total dork. “Hold on a sec. I’ll walk you out.” I had run out of cigarettes, and I wasn’t about to turn in my smoke rings for a halo quite yet.

“We didn’t use to be so careful,” Glenn explained, as we clumped down the stairs. “But we learned something from that unfortunate dustup with your friend.”

“God was in that group?” I said, surprised.

“He asked,” Glenn said, “and as I said, we weren’t screening new guys all that carefully. The fight with Roger that you heard about? That actually happened in the group. The other fellows had to pull them off each other, literally. It almost broke up the group, and every one of them hated him by the end. He had what my shrink calls boundary issues, and he also tended to act as if he thought his money made him—well, God.”

“Well, you won’t have that problem with me,” I said. “I only knew the guy in detox, and I didn’t see that side of him at all.”

“He was only human,” Glenn said, “and we all know how deflated you feel the first few days sober.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” I said.

“He would have gotten over it soon enough. Just go easy on mentioning him to the other guys.” I might have mentioned once or twice to Glenn that I was poking around on the subject of Godfrey K. in general. “Some of them still have very short fuses where he’s concerned, and you don’t want to set them off.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“In their minds, he’s the proverbial drunken sonofabitch. Know what you get when a guy like that gets sober?”

I paused in the doorway of the bodega where I usually got my cigarettes.

“I give up.” I knew, but I knew he wanted to tell me. “What?”

“You get a sober sonofabitch.”

“So how was the funeral?” I asked.

“Crowded,” Jimmy said. “Episcopalian.”

“I hardly even got to speak to Emmie,” Barbara said. “A quick hug and a few words. I didn’t want to foist myself on her, even if I could have, but I’m glad I showed up. All the Lucinda groupies we saw at the lecture were there. Two of them talked about how brilliant she was, and one read a poem that nobody understood.”

“I understood it,” Jimmy said. “Death is scary, but if you’re an intellectual it’s okay because the afterlife blows your mind like a ‘Eureka!’ moment.”

“How does he do it?” I asked Barbara.

“Beats me. Oh, we saw your Frances—”

“She’s not my Frances,” I objected. “And it’s not my Ohio.”

“Whatever. She had a man with her,” Barbara said. “We haven’t even talked about the husband.”

“Professor Henry Standish,” I supplied.

“You didn’t even try to make contact with him while you were in Dayton.”

“I couldn’t think of a good excuse.”

“Not after you’d established yourself with Frances as God’s friend,” Jimmy said.

“Besides,” I said, “I don’t see how he could have had anything to do with it. He lived six hundred miles away.”

“Unlike his brother-in-law,” Barbara said, “the nasty Dr. Weill.”

“You’ve really got it in for the guy, haven’t you,” I said.

“At least I know what he looks like now,” Barbara said. “He was there. His nose is bigger than mine.”

“You’ve got a beautiful nose, my puffin,” Jimmy said tenderly.

Barbara’s face went through a lot of changes as she considered how to respond to this dubious compliment. I decided to divert her.

“You know, guys, right after New Year’s, the university was probably still on winter break. Jimmy, check the airlines. See if we can catch the professor flying to New York around the holidays.”

“You want me to hack into the airline computers,” he said. “Why am I not overjoyed?”

“We need that information,” Barbara said. “Can’t you go around them?”

“We have complete confidence in your abilities,” I said.

“Et tu, Brute?”

Of course Jimmy found a way. He remembered that Henry Standish was a historian. It took him only seven minutes to find out that Standish had presented a paper at an academic conference in San Diego on January second.

“Hmm, this is interesting. Want to hear what his paper was about?”

“Not really,” Barbara said.

He told us anyway. He told us all about the politics and economics of relations between England and Scotland in the 1590s. That was during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and King James VI of Scotland, who lucked out and became James I of England too when Elizabeth died.

“Especially,” Jimmy said enthusiastically, “the perennially shifting Border. He’s written a ton of scholarly work, it’s all listed here. Oh, and a biography of this guy who was a kind of supercop who ran around bashing heads and chasing cattle thieves on the Border. The whole population on both sides was into stealing cows and horses from each other whenever they could. It’s way out of my period,” he admitted, “but I have a certain fondness for fellow Celts with a flexible attitude toward larceny.”

“I can identify with that,” I said. “Is any of this relevant?”

“Actually, yes. That biography might have made money. Academics don’t usually get rich, but this sounds like more of a pop thing. If he was getting decent royalties, maybe the Standishes didn’t need God’s trust fund.”

“The definition of ‘need’ is highly elastic,” I said.

“Cynic.”

“But it’s moot. He wasn’t there. They were both in scenic Ohio when God got killed.”

The next day, we checked the news again. They still hadn’t found the icons or the murderer. Boris was still missing. And we still didn’t want to tell the police about Boris. The sticking point was that if we said anything, then we were involved. We all agreed, fervently in my case, that it was better not to be involved. We also talked about my discovery that God had had not one or two but numerous ill wishers among the people who had known him in AA. And another point I’d forgotten.

“I saw what looked like a lovely little Russian icon in Boris’s office one day.”

“I never saw anything like that when I was there,” Barbara said.

“He was kind of worshipping it when I happened to look in,” I said. “He probably kept it in a locked drawer most of the time. It looked valuable.”

“And everybody knew there was a sneak thief lurking somewhere,” she remembered.

“So what next?” Jimmy asked. “Are we getting somewhere? Anywhere? Nowhere?”

“I need to go back to detox,” Barbara said. “I’ve got to take one more look at that chart.”

“I could go,” I said. “I could have a few drinks and get myself readmitted.”

“No!” Jimmy and Barbara said simultaneously. Loudly.

“Keep your doublets on. I was just kidding,” I said.

“Boris is still missing,” Barbara said. “Bark and Charmaine are going nuts trying to keep the unit covered. I can work any shift I want. Anyhow, I thought the whole point of this,” she had to add, “was to keep you from picking up a drink over it.”

“And here I thought it was to keep you amused when keeping the focus on yourself gets too boring.”

She threw a cushion at me. Her aim wasn’t bad.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I yelped. “I didn’t mean it.” I fired a cushion back at her. Then we had a little pillow fight.

Jimmy looked on benignly. When we ran out of steam, he inquired, “Have we reached the end of the line here?”

We were both disheveled and out of breath. I sat down on the last cushion so Barbara couldn’t throw it at me.

“I’m going to give Ed Bark a call,” she said, “and ask for a night shift. One more little peek at the chart to see if anything pops out at me. And maybe a look at the computer in the nursing station.”

“Looking for what?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, but I’ll know it if I see it. Maybe.”

“And then you’ll be ready to let this thing go?” Jimmy asked, his tone making it clear what he wanted the answer to be.

“And then we’ll see.”

A week later, Barbara spotted Emmie at a meeting, looking paler and thinner and dressed in well cut black.

“Emmie!” Barbara put her arms around her, noting with pleasure that she barely stiffened before hugging her back. “How are you doing?”