Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (25 page)

She found nothing about Bark and Charmaine that she didn’t already know, except that Charmaine was a few years older than she admitted to, and Bark, the grand old man of the Bowery, was a few years younger. Boris had gotten his job through ARFSU, but if he’d had a personal recommendation from Lucinda, it was not on the computer. He had his green card, and if he had ever been in trouble, the agency didn’t know about it. Darryl, on the other hand, had had to disclose his felony record to get hired, and it was worse than they had imagined. He had done time for manslaughter and aggravated assault as well as the inevitable drug-related charges.

As she stared at the screen, the door clicked open behind her. Her heart thudding, she grabbed the mouse. The usual home page leaped up onto the screen, covering the page she had been looking at. Swiveling her chair around, she found Darryl looming over her.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

“Working the night shift,” she faltered. “Bark asked me. What are you doing here?”

Could she close his personnel file without it appearing on the screen? If he realized she had looked at his private information, he would be angry. With Darryl, the violence pulsed just beneath the surface even at a staff or AA meeting. With trepidation, she forced herself to meet his eyes. If she locked his gaze, he couldn’t focus on the computer screen. Her heart was pounding so loud she could hardly believe he wouldn’t hear it.

“I work here.” His voice dripped sarcasm.

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Yes, it is. You really like snooping around here, don’t you?”

It would be more productive to go on the attack than to get defensive. If only her blouse wasn’t getting soaked with sweat. If only her hands weren’t shaking and her voice threatening to soar up into a squeak. If only she didn’t suddenly have to pee very badly.

“And what about you? Every time I cover a night shift, there you are. If you’re supposed to be here, how come Bark has to bring me in?”

“None of your business.”
Ha!
she thought. He wasn’t supposed to be here. She was not sure putting him on the defensive would turn out to be a good idea, but she had nothing better to run with.

“It is if you’ve been messing around with the clients,” she retorted. “What about Godfrey—the guy who died at New Year’s? What were you up to there?” Oops. That had come out more baldly than she had intended.

“What the hell are you talking about?” His eyes flashed, and his fists clenched.

She rolled her chair back until it slammed against the back of the desk. Her arm shot out, and her sweaty hand came down on the phone, fortuitously just within reach. Darryl’s eyes went to the phone jack, which was within his reach. He’d only have to jerk the cord to pop it out of the wall. To her relief, he started pacing instead. The overstocked goldfish bowl of a room offered space for no more than a couple of strides without turning. He moved like a caged tiger in an unmodernized zoo, lashing his figurative tail.

“What the fuck do you know about it?” he said. “Bourgeois little vanilla cupcake!”

Better than “bitch,” she thought, repressing the impulse to say it out loud. She must not forget for a second that this man was dangerous.

“Mommy and Daddy always bought you everything you want, I bet. Have you ever been on the streets? Have you ever been down and out?”

“You don’t know anything about my life,” she said, cheeks hot with indignation.

“I know enough, bitch,” he said. “What are you going to tell me, the silver spoon in your mouth was plate instead of sterling?”

How expressive, the dissociated ironic part of her thought, though her crotch was melting with fear. Usually it was a lot of fuck this, fuck that.

“Fuck that,” he said. “That bastard didn’t need the money, and I did, see. You want to fight with me about it?” He grinned, disclosing a diamond chip set into one of his terrifying teeth.

“So you’re the one who’s been stealing things. You’re the one who took God’s money.”

“Who says I did? You weren’t there, you couldn’t know, and we didn’t have this conversation.” He bared his teeth again. The diamond glinted. “If you know what’s good for you.”

She hunched her shoulders and turned her back on him, whirling the swivel chair around. The lights provided some reflection from the screen. In it, she watched him warily. She still had one hand on the phone. She hoped he couldn’t see her trembling. Darryl was a predator, and it would be better not to look too much like prey.

“Go away,” she said, steeling herself to sound as rude as possible. “Since we didn’t have this conversation, I have things to do.”

If he attacked her, she could scream. There was a ward full of sleeping men out there. Of course, they had all had the sleeping pill, and most of them were weak as babies from detoxing. Besides, she would be embarrassed. A codependent was someone who would literally rather die than make a scene. She must remember that. It would get a big laugh at her Al-Anon meeting, if Darryl didn’t kill her first.

“He didn’t need it,” he said sullenly. “Besides, the muh-fuh cops or the EMTs would have gotten it if I hadn’t. You just make sure you keep your fucking mouth shut!” He slammed out, banging the door behind him.

Barbara breathed a shaky sigh. Her sweaty fingers were slick on the keyboard. She opened an email window, typed in Jimmy’s address, and wrote, “Help!” She hit Save and minimized the window. If Darryl came back, she could send it in a second. Glancing over her shoulder, she brought Darryl’s file back up and closed it. Thank heaven he hadn’t seen that she had opened it. He would have gone right over the edge. Once it was safely off the screen, she was able to concentrate on what he had said. Evidently Darryl had swiped the two thousand dollars in cash from God’s body—or more likely, his clothes—after he was dead. He had robbed him, but if he’d told the truth, he hadn’t killed him.

She could tell Bark or Charmaine about the theft. They would probably believe her, and they could keep an eye on Darryl, hoping to catch him doing something else, if they chose not to confront him right away. Her safety, at least for now, depended on Darryl believing he had intimidated her enough that she wouldn’t dare tell anyone. After that, all she had to do was stay far away from Darryl. That was easily accomplished by not working any more per diem on the Bowery. Jimmy would be pleased, and it would be a relief to her as well. She had only worked this last couple of times in order to snoop around, as Darryl had rightly concluded.

Thoroughly rattled, Barbara got up and paced the cramped space much as Darryl had. She didn’t feel like a tiger, though—more like a gazelle with no place to bolt. That reminded her of one more precaution she could take. She locked the nursing station door. Her fingers still shook, but she didn’t want to stop now. She sat back down and opened Sister Angel’s file. She had never known the name of what the nun called “my community,” but here it was: the Sisters of the Blood of the Lamb. She had listed other sisters as emergency contacts. With a start of recognition, Barbara read the name Perseverance. There couldn’t be two of those. And Eileen’s Sister Agnes, with a Brooklyn area code.

What a small world! Or was it? Connections clicked into place in her mind like a jigsaw worked by invisible hands. A rash of unexpected client deaths in hospitals. A flock of bloody lambs. Sisters everywhere. One in every program, all connected. It all pointed to a conclusion that still felt absurd. Back in Jimmy’s drinking days, steeped in confusion and denial, she had said, “Sometimes I think the real problem is your drinking.” When he said that was ridiculous, she’d thought he must be right. Her mind had told her to ignore her gut, and her mind had been wrong. Hadn’t she better pay attention to her gut now? The “still small voice within” was just the spiritual term for a gut feeling.

She clicked open file after file. She scrolled down a list of trainings Sister Angel had taken or, in some cases, presented. Homeless, psychiatric, social services—abuse. She had participated in a panel on pedophilia. Next, a whole series of seminars on child sexual abuse, more than required by current regulations for helping professionals. It seemed to be one of her specialties, even though she had worked for decades on the Bowery with men who had left their families far behind.

Besides the official personnel file, there might be personal files. Employees were not supposed to keep their updated resumes or half-written novels on the office computer, but everybody did. She had friends at work who kept their cover letters to other employers on the hard drive and didn’t even have a password. More paranoid colleagues kept their personal material on something portable, like a flash drive, and took it home with them every day. The Bowery staff fell somewhere between the two. Everybody had a passworded folder. Once again, Barbara summoned up her ingenuity to figure out their passwords. Bark’s was “in a box”—the way he always described his drinking years on the Bowery. She skipped Darryl’s. The thought of his coming back and finding her reading it frightened her too much to contemplate. She skipped Boris’s, too. If he had any sense of self-preservation, it would be in Russian. Who next? Charmaine? No, Sister Angel. She struck out with religious associations, but finally hit a homer with “Lucky.” Part of Sister Angel’s legend was the pack of cigarettes she’d whip out to gain a client’s confidence in the days before smoke-free zones. Before filter cigarettes, the brand she’d carried had been Luckies. Bark remembered and still occasionally teased her about it. She would say, “It’s a message from God. With God, even these broken men can improve their luck.”

To Barbara’s relief, the file did not reveal a secret sex life. More lists of sister Sisters. Schedules of meetings with cryptic agendas. Medical and pharmaceutical information that would have looked perfectly normal on bookshelves in her office or bookmarks in her unpassworded files. And here was a file labeled “Mercy.” Another Sister? It sounded like that kind of name. She clicked it open.

They say the power of life and death are Thine. But am I not a channel of Thy peace? What peace can those poor souls have who are racked with pain and offered no palliatives in their misery but the very drugs we have seen destroying minds and lives? The mercy that we bring to those in misery is our sacrifice, mine and my sisters’, as Thy Son gave His blood upon the Cross to bestow the mercy of salvation upon all of us. I have sworn my life to Thy service, so how can I hold back, how can I not take upon myself for these unfortunates the cross of guilt, the sin of action? If they themselves raise a hand to end their agony, their souls are forfeit. We take it on ourselves, our mercy is the sacrifice, and we give it freely in the light of Thy love. This is not orthodoxy, but when have I ever been orthodox? Thou hast shown me favor all my life, giving me the strength to go among the lions in their very den, and the jackals and hyenas too, and I believe with all my heart that Thou art with me. And I will go further, smiting evil on Thy behalf. I take upon myself what some would call sin, but Thou knowest I am but the sword in Thy hand. I come to them in darkness when my sisters guide me to them. And in mercy I strike them down. I give them to drink of the chalice of Thy perfect love. And thus in mercy I bring them to Thy light.

Thanks to the twelve-step programs, Barbara could recognize a spiritual meditation. And her counselor training and experience had given her a fairly good instinct for psychopathology.

“Nuts,” she said aloud. “The woman’s nuts.”

At that moment, she heard a tap-tap-tapping down the hall behind her. Before she could react, the lock clicked, and the door creaked open. Sister Angel had a key.

“Bruce! Pick up the phone!”

I came to with a start. I’d fallen asleep in a chair. The video I’d been watching had switched itself off. I didn’t know how late it was, but it was dark. I’d imagined Jimmy’s voice.

“Bruce!
Bruce!
If you’ve chosen this moment to drink again, I will kill you with my bare hands! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
pick up the phone!”

It was Jimmy. I looked muzzily around. The phone was ringing, shaking as it trilled as if it had a life of its own. But Jimmy’s voice was coming from the computer. He had fixed me up some kind of gadget, but I’d never bothered to let him teach me what it was or how to use it.

“Okay, okay,” I mumbled, “keep your shirt on.” I stumbled toward the phone. I picked up the receiver clumsily, dropped it once, nearly fell over picking it up again, and poked it in the general direction of my ear.

“Yeah,” I said blearily. “I’m here.”

“That’s better. At least you get it that we’re talking. Bruce, you didn’t pick up, did you?” He meant pick up a drink.

“No, dammit!” I let myself sound as cross as I felt.

“Thank God! Now, listen. You’ve got to get to Barbara.”

“What?”

“It’s Barbara. She went down to the detox to take another look around. I can’t reach her, and I just got an email that said Help.”

“Help? Help what? Help who?”

“Just Help. Help Barbara, you moron.”

“Barbara said a one-word sentence?” My brain was slowly waking up, but my tongue was still stupid.

“Never mind that,” Jimmy growled. “You’ve got to get to her!”

Jimmy sounded desperate. He never sounded desperate. Jimmy had always been the cool one, even when we were seventeen and running from the cops across the Queensboro Bridge after ditching our one and only stolen car. They didn’t catch us, but the chase scared the bejesus out of us. And so did our fathers when we got home. We never figured out how they found out. Suddenly I was wide awake.

“I’m on it. I’ll grab a cab. Hop in one yourself. I’ll meet you there.”

“No!” Jimmy’s cry of anguish knifed into my gut. “It’s got to be you. I’m not home!”

“What? But you’re always home,” I said. “You’re at your computer.”

“Of course I’m at my computer, meathead,” he snarled. “I took the laptop with me to my sister’s. She’s having a baby.”

“But your sister lives in Patchogue.”

“Now do you get the picture, you dunderheaded jerk? You’ve got to get to Barbara before anything happens to her.”