Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (7 page)

They had a nice apartment. Half of the living room housed the computer and the rest of Jimmy’s high-tech home office. The other half was crowded with overstuffed furniture in the saturated colors Barbara liked—rich gold and rust and peacock blue, with a riot of fat little cushions in shades of crimson, orange, and rose. Floor to ceiling bookshelves lined the walls. Books were piled everywhere in disorganized heaps, Jimmy’s history and military and computer library crammed in with Barbara’s counseling texts and psychology books, mysteries, and the more readable kind of classics. Tumbling and meandering around and over and between the books were the toy soldiers that Jimmy had collected since he was a kid and the cuddly stuffed animals that Barbara always fell in love with in the store and felt impelled to rescue and take home. About the clutter, Barbara would say, “I know, I know, we flunk feng shui. But we like it this way.” Jimmy would say, “What clutter? I know where everything is.”

When we walked in the door, Jimmy had an old Planxty album playing, and he was fighting the Battle of Antietam on his Civil War reenactment website on the computer. The Web is Jimmy’s time machine. He can tell you the name of Robert E. Lee’s horse and what Ivan the Terrible ate for breakfast.

“Hi, pumpkin,” he said.

Barbara went around behind him as he sat at the computer. You could always find Jimmy at the computer. She leaned over and kissed the back of his neck.

“Pumpkin yourself. Look who I brought home with me.”

“Hey, fella.” Jimmy greeted me as casually as if I had never been banned. “I’m starving,” he said. “You guys want to eat?”

Like many New Yorkers, none of us cooked. I had solved the problem for years by not bothering much with food. Jimmy and Barbara ordered out. Less than half an hour later, we sat in the kitchen working our way through a big container of guacamole with a huge pile of blue corn tortilla chips and some very spicy burritos.

“How’d the job hunt go?” Jimmy asked. He lost a chip in the guacamole, fished it out, and licked his fingers.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“You did fill out an application?”

“Yes, Dad, Mommy made me promise.”

“Stop that!” Barbara threw a chip at me.

“No food fights, guys.” Jimmy grinned like a wolf. “She only wants you to be happy.”

I smiled back reluctantly. “I know you two mean well.”

Barbara mimed getting stabbed.

“Ooh, that hurt.”

“So stop nudging,” I said, giving it the New York Jewish pronunciation. Rhymes with pudding, not with fudge. “After your boss kicked me out I hung around the corridors watching all the little worker bees going to and fro. The job that looked the most fun was pushing a cart filled with vials of blood up and down the halls, like a Good Humor man for vampires. And that’s setting the bar very, very low.”

“Glad to hear you didn’t like the pharmacy best.”

“I’m not stupid. I know ‘people, places, and things’ are out.” If I meant to stick with this recovery thing, a job involving access to pharmaceuticals would be a lot more fun than I could afford to risk.

“What about a desk job? You can do computers, and you have plenty of office experience. Human Resources? Billing? Medical records?”

I put my head in my hands, clutched a couple of fistfuls of hair, and groaned. “You mean I do have to die of boredom to stay sober? I’ve done that kind of job as a temp, but full time? Permanent? I did consider it. For about ten seconds. I took one look around that Human Resources office and my heart sank like the
Titanic
.”

Barbara shot Jimmy a conspiratorial look. Jimmy raised his eyebrows, tilted back in his chair, and flung up his hands in an I-give-up gesture.

“Speaking of not getting bored,” she said, “we were thinking—”

“We, white man?” Jimmy said. But he sounded resigned.

“No, seriously, Bruce. We were talking about your friend. I know you liked him. And I know you’re upset.”

“You think I need closure?” From the buildup, it sounded like Jimmy hadn’t told Barbara I’d already said I wanted us to look into God’s death. This way, he kept the leverage of magnanimously supporting her desire to snoop.

“Yes, I do,” Barbara said.

“Gee, Barbara, I don’t know. It’s not really our business. And we’re not experts.” Then I relented. I might joke about what Barbara would call the process. But I had liked the guy. It had shaken me to watch him die. Especially not taking the edge off it with booze or drugs. And something about it felt wrong. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Before I left that night, the three of us talked it through as far as we could without further information.

God had come back to the detox on time and apparently clean. He’d given in his urine without any stalling or kvetching, as Barbara put it. He might have OD’d, but I couldn’t see how. God had eaten whatever they’d served for dinner, along with me and everybody else.

“It’s not as if the cook was out in the woods picking poison mushrooms that afternoon,” Barbara said.

“So whatever killed him was something he took or got hold of while he was out,” Jimmy said.

“Seems so,” I said.

“Remind me again,” said Jimmy, “I keep forgetting. Why is it our job to figure it out?”

“Because if we don’t,” said Barbara, “no one will. Doctor Bones will have signed the death certificate, and that’ll be it.” His name wasn’t Doctor Bones. But that’s what they’d been calling the docs in detox since 1967.

“It’s still none of our business.” Jimmy made a stern face that didn’t impress either of us. “Bruce, your job right now is to stay clean and sober. And Barbara, yours is to live my life—I mean your own life.”

“Good one, Jimmy.” I grinned.

“Very funny,” Barbara said. “Anyhow, we already agreed doing this will help Bruce stay clean and sober. Oops.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. She did that a lot. Jimmy called it her Tenth Step Twitch. Step Ten is “When we were wrong, promptly admitted it.”

“Ohhhhh,” I drawled, “this is my therapy. But you weren’t going to tell me. ‘Don’t drink, go to meetings, and investigate a murder.’”

Having made her amends, Barbara moved right on. As we all knew, she’d say anything.

“The best reason you might actually make it this time is that you have real feelings about this. You cared about God, and it hurt you when he died.”

“So it’s deerstalker hats for three,” Jimmy said.

“He needs closure,” Barbara said.

“And here I thought you were motivated by sheer unholy curiosity.”

“I was,” said Barbara with her usual devastating frankness. “But Bruce hasn’t let himself feel anything for years. If finding out why God died keeps him interested in staying sober, we have no choice. Or rather, we have choices—we always have choices—and we choose to take this to the limit if I have anything to say about it.”

“Thank you for sharing,” I said. “Why don’t you just cut me open and display my bleeding heart?” But she was right.

“Okay, okay,” Jimmy said, “I’m for truth and justice and Bruce having feelings too. But I’m still not sure why we think God was murdered when the professionals don’t.”

“Think about it,” Barbara said. “It’s not an English country house weekend in a murder mystery. Everybody expects drunks on the Bowery to die. No one will go looking for evidence of murder, and if they did, they wouldn’t run around like Lord Peter Wimsey hunting down appropriate suspects. They could lose the paperwork. They could lose the corpse, for that matter. You know what the city bureaucracy is like. Or if you don’t, I do. I’ve worked in city hospitals. I have stories that could curl your hair.”

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” Jimmy said. “Bruce needs closure. You need to make sure he doesn’t shut down emotionally.”

“Also, I’m the only one who can get back into detox. I’ve been thinking about that, and I have a great idea. I’m going to call and ask for some per diem work—they always need counselors, and I can do a couple of night shifts at least. It’ll be a great chance to snoop through the records.”

“Great, so now we’re raiding confidential records.”

“You’re not,” said Barbara, “and I’m inside the confidentiality loop if I go back to work there as a counselor, even temporarily.”

“Okay, that’s why you’re in. And I get why Bruce is in. But what about me? How come I’m involved in this?”

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” said Barbara. “We’ll need the Internet.”

Barbara emerged from the subway into the dark. She paused at the top of the stairs to catch her breath. The steps at Broadway-Lafayette had to be the steepest in the city. Even climbing them every day as an intern had never improved her wind. Waiting for the green light so she could cross the broad expanse of Houston Street, she clutched her handbag, tucked up under her armpit in streetwise New Yorker style, and glanced from side to side. She had never feared the streets of New York or its subways at night, though common sense demanded that she remain alert and cautious. The flutter at the pit of her stomach came not from dangers without but from doubts within.

She had always had the habit of self-scrutiny. On first reading the Twelve Steps, she had been alienated, if not horrified, by what she still thought of as the God stuff, but had thought the searching and fearless moral inventory sounded like fun. “No problem,” she had told first Jimmy and then her skeptical sponsor. “I’ve been making lists of what’s wrong with me my whole life.” She had learned a lot since then. Recovery had taken her a lot farther than the Bowery from her nice Jewish upbringing. Her mother, a strong personality and always a point of reference, had never said a prayer in a church basement or hugged a nun. Barbara grinned, thinking of tough little Sister Angel and crisp Sister Perseverance. Don’t be so impressed with your own broadmindedness, she told herself. She wished that as she moved through her life, she could refrain completely from thinking, Look, Ma! as she met the people, took the actions, thought the thoughts, and felt the feelings that went so far beyond the compass of her upbringing.

“Progress, not perfection,” she muttered. Her mother would have derided these upbeat twelve-step slogans if Barbara had ever been so foolish as to use them in her presence. But Barbara had discovered that they could be remarkably profound when applied on a practical level. On the other hand, she still experienced moments of stabbing fear that she was only kidding herself and in fact believed none of it.

So what was tonight’s anxiety about? Fear of a murderer? If Godfrey’s killer existed outside her imagination—and she had no illusions about whose imagination drove the three of them on this peculiar quest—surely he was long gone from the detox, if he had ever been there. The whole point of studying God’s chart was to discover his world. So many of the clients in that particular detox had none beyond the Bowery itself. Barbara had sat through her share of case presentations and treatment planning meetings as an intern. In the old days, that mythical creature who must never be called a bum—the old-fashioned chronic alcoholic on the model of Bark—had existed in the hundreds. She remembered taking notes: “On and off the Bowery for fifteen years….On and off the Bowery for twenty-two years.” That world hardly existed any more. In any case, God had been an anomaly in that last-resort detox. From what Bruce had told her about his history, it might even have been a stubborn pride that brought him there, to helpers and companions his aristocratic family hardly knew existed except as the shadowy recipients of a dutiful charity.

What stuck in her throat and made her palms prickle with sweat under the heavy mittens she wore against the cold? The ethics of the situation, she admitted to herself—not the dead man’s world, not the mean streets, nor the detox itself, a health care facility not so different from the one that employed her now, despite its quirkiness. It went against the grain, no matter how cleverly she rationalized it, as in saying that the limits of confidentiality become debatable when the client is dead. Or that unless they actually caught the murderer, she wouldn’t tell anyone but Jimmy—who never talked about the living or anyone who’d died after 1899 or at any rate 1945—and Bruce, who hardly counted because he already knew.

Look, Ma, I’m so self-honest! She gave a bark of laughter that sent what she hoped was a mouse rather than a rat scurrying for cover almost under her feet. Was she breaking confidentiality? Yes. Was she behaving in a professional manner? No. Was she willing not to do this, to let it go? No. For years she had watched with an aching heart as Jimmy blew off the loss of the best friend he would never admit how deeply he loved. AA, usually so wise, had easy answers: Don’t drink and go to meetings. We’re powerless over people, places, and things. Stick with the winners. He has his own Higher Power. Al-Anon, the twelve-step program for relatives and friends, couldn’t fix it either, though it offered tips on how to bear it: Keep the focus on yourself. Detach with love. Barbara knew perfectly well the importance of attending to her own life, not to mention the grandiosity of dreaming she could mend what lay between Bruce and Jimmy. But if she could do anything at all to help this friendship heal—which could happen only if Bruce stayed sober—a tenet or two of the counselors’ code of ethics seemed a small price to pay.

It had been easy enough to get both the official version of God’s death and an invitation to work the night shift out of Charmaine. One phone call had done it.

“Hey, I hear you lost another patient,” she’d said.

Charmaine had been off and running, not even asking how Barbara had heard the news. As she had told Bruce and Jimmy, people died in detox all the time. But even in detox, they usually didn’t die right before your eyes, especially not the relatively young and healthy. God had been exceptionally healthy for a client on the Bowery, having had a lifetime of good nutrition and minimal exposure to HIV, tuberculosis, and the many other ills that haunted the poor and drug addicted. So God’s dramatic demise had been noteworthy. Charmaine had given theme and variations, with a long coda on how much paperwork such a death generated and the impossibility of getting the staff to stop gossiping and get on with their work. That had given Barbara the opening she needed. She’d offered to cover a night shift, pleading the expense of an ecumenical holiday season—both Chanukah and Christmas—as her reason for taking on extra work.