The Barkeep (33 page)

“Are you going to get that or what?”

The voice was close enough to startle him out of his sleep. He turned over, and there she was, leaning on an elbow, staring right at him, her face still thick with sleep, her eyes slit in annoyance, her breasts bared and ripe enough to be angry.

Annie Overmeyer.

And when he saw her, he had a moment of desperate panic. Justin had spent an inordinate amount of effort to ensure that he never actually went to sleep with anyone so he could always awaken alone. It was bedrock in his life, no wake-up surprises, no awkward mornings full of playacting and lies. And yet here she was, in the flesh, a physical manifestation of everything he had been working so hard to avoid. He blinked at her, at first uncomprehending and then, a few seconds later, with puzzlement as the memories of the night before slowly returned.

It took him a moment to remember it all, and to process its meaning. But when he finally did, he flung himself at her, wrestling her onto her back, grabbing her thin wrists in his hands, rising over her until he stared down at those suspicious brown eyes.

Another series of heedless knocks on the front door.

“There’s someone downstairs,” she said.

“Screw him,” said Justin before leaning down and kissing her, hard.

She twisted her shoulders and jerked her head away. “I have morning breath.”

“Screw that, too,” he said, kissing her again.

She tasted funky and sour with a faint edge of morning rot, yes, and still it was the most electric thing he could ever remember.

To Justin, the single most attractive part of the barkeep’s credo was to never try to save a soul from behind the bar. He viewed with great suspicion the evangelical urge rampant in this country. Believe what you want, but leave everyone else the hell out of it. And yet Justin now had the unfamiliar impulse to grab the world by the lapels and shout out the truth. Like he had just discovered, that very night, for the benefit of all mankind, fire.

Justin had thought he had mastered the whole sex thing—and we’re not talking technique here—though if reviews given before the mirrors in the ladies’ room at Zenzibar were any indication, his technique was spot-on. No, what he thought he had mastered, through much rigorous practice, was a method of moving past the mutating messiness of emotional connections and experiencing with heightened awareness the brilliant physical clarity of the sexual act. Like the distilled flavor of a single malt, or the perfect breathless note sung by a beautiful
soprano. He believed he had successfully found in sex that which he was valiantly seeking to find in the entirety of his life, the ecstasy of the moment, unfettered by the past or the future, unfettered by the illusions that corrupted the universe. Whole, contained, rhythmic, tantric, peaceful and timeless, pure. It was like meditation gone blissfully feral. What could ever be better?

Well, sex with Annie Overmeyer, that’s what.

Sex with Annie was sloppy and acrobatic, rushed and slow all at once, hilarious, exhausting, and rich on so many levels it was impossible to keep track of what the hell was going on except that so much was going on. It was a Mahler symphony compared to the single note he had been experiencing before, and it was flat-out fabulous. Who the hell knew that emotional sex was the better sex after all?

That was what he wanted to shout to the world. Emotional sex, give it a try.

And that the swirling, twisted nature of the emotions he was feeling matched the swirling twisting of their limbs and tongues as they spun around in his bed and performed all kinds of tricks didn’t much matter. And “twisted” was the operative word, absolutely. Because he wasn’t just feeling something strangely powerful for this woman beneath him, or above him, or beside him, depending on the snapshot moment, no. He was also feeling a bizarre pull from his past, something about his father and his mother and the way he was before everything crashed around him, stuff that was way better left unfurled. Especially the stuff about how his father had been lying in this very same position with this very same woman. Yet combining explosively with all of this, he was also feeling an almost painful yearning for his future, a future maybe not controlled by loss but instead by possibility, if such a thing could even be imagined.

And here it was, all of those emotions, so damn bright they were limned in pain, embodied in this act, this woman, this kiss. It was enough to leave him breathless, even if she wasn’t just then sucking the breath out of him.

And then the knock again, louder than before, and a familiar voice calling out and reaching up to them through door and window. “Chase. I know you’re in there. Open the hell up.”

“Maybe you better get that,” she said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Okay.”

“But maybe I should, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering who is at the door and what happened last night.”

“Last night.” She twisted him off her, turned away from him, contracted her body into a lovely curl. “I had almost forgotten.”

“It has nothing to do with us. With this.”

“No?”

“No.”

“It’s pretty to think so, isn’t it?”

“I won’t let it.”

“Go get the door,” she said.

He rose from the bed, a move for him as natural as breathing, but it felt wrong suddenly, like he was abandoning a newfound truth.

“You’ll stay, right?” he said to her as he put on a T-shirt and reached for a pair of jeans.

“I have to get to work.”

“Please.”

“We’ll see,” she said. “That’s the best I can do.”

“I’ll make some tea.”

“Coffee.”

“How about I brew us a pot of something strong, like Earl Grey?”

“Earl’s a weenie. I need coffee.”

“A woman who knows what she wants. I think I have some somewhere,” he said before heading down the stairs.

As he reached the ground floor, he could see the unsmiling face staring in through the front window. “Come on in, Detective,” said Justin after he opened the door, “and I’ll make you something to drink.”

“I didn’t come to socialize,” said Detective Scott. He stepped through the door and stopped, suddenly, like he had walked into a wall. “You alone?”

“At this hour I’m always alone. I’m making some coffee. Want some?”

“Coffee, huh?”

“Late night last night.”

“Maybe I will have myself a cup.”

“Good,” said Justin. As he walked to the kitchenette and started opening cabinet doors in search of the coffee, Detective Scott ambled over to the small dining table and pulled out a chair.

“We were looking for you last night,” said the detective.

“It was getting a bit heavy. I needed to get out of there.”

Behind a cloth sack of basmati rice, Justin found a yellow-and-brown can. He opened the plastic lid and took a sniff. Fresh enough, he supposed.

“How’d you get home?” said Scott.

“The girl drove me.”

“The girl, huh? Nice-looking girl.”

“I hadn’t really noticed,” Justin said as he filled a kettle with water and put it on the burner.

“Why are you lying to an old dog like me?”

“Habit?”

“That was one screwy crime scene.”

Justin kneeled down and took out a French press from deep within a rarely used corner cabinet next to the stove. He began ladling coffee into the press. One tablespoon. Two tablespoons. Three tablespoons. “It all looked pretty straightforward to me,” he said without looking at the detective. “I mean, the gun was in her hand, right?”

“That it was.”

“Any note?”

“No note, but we found some interesting stuff that we wanted you to look at. Of course, you had disappeared.”

“But you knew where to find me.”

Scott took a photograph out of his jacket pocket and tossed it on the table. “You ever see these before?”

Justin leaned over and gave it a look. A pair of dangling diamond earrings in a drawer, next to some other stuff. There was something about the earrings that tolled familiar, but Justin couldn’t figure out what.

“I don’t know. Why?”

The detective pulled the picture back. “They seem to match a set of earrings that were found missing after your mother’s murder.”

“Let me see them again,” said Justin quickly. When the detective gave him the photograph, he looked more closely. And he remembered his mother, dressed to the nines, leaning over him and giving him a kiss as he sat in his pajamas in front of the television with Frank. Hanging from her ears, glistening like a constellation of stars…

“Oh my God,” said Justin just as the kettle started whistling.

“And we found some powder right next to the earrings,” said the detective as Justin went over to take the kettle off the stove. “Powder that might link up to the drugs that killed Timmy Flynn.”

“That’s almost hard to believe,” said Justin as he poured the heated water into the French press and fitted in the filter.

“You’re telling me.”

“But it all makes some sense, doesn’t it? If Mrs. Moss was responsible for my mother’s murder, then she might have kept the earrings that were stolen from the scene. And later she might have sent that sleazebucket Nicosia to kill Timmy Flynn to keep my father in jail, which would explain the powder. And somehow she must have gotten scared that it all would be figured out, and that was why she killed herself. It seems a clear enough connection.” He paused a moment, tried to make his question feel as offhand as possible. “The only mystery is how she would have found out that you were looking at her.”

“I called her and asked her some questions about your mother that night, that’s how.”

“So that’s it. Don’t you see?”

“Yeah, I see it all right,” said the detective as Justin slowly pressed the plunger on the French press. When it was down as far as it would go, he poured a mugful for Scott. “I don’t have milk or sugar, but I could put in soy milk and honey if you want.”

“Soy milk and honey?”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll have it black.”

“Good choice,” said Justin as he set the mug before the detective.

The detective took a sip and winced. “You having any?”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“Well, aren’t you something.” He took another sip. “This whole scenario of yours is pretty damn neat, wouldn’t you say? I been doing this for longer than you’ve been alive, and they don’t come tied any tidier than this. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect someone had tied the bow himself.”

“That’s because you don’t want to admit that maybe you made a mistake six years ago.”

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing, Justin. When I was your age, sure, last thing I ever wanted to admit was that I blew it. It was a pride thing, I was swollen with pride. I made detective four years in, and for weeks on end I strutted around like a mummer on Broad Street. But at my age now, the only thing that’s swollen on me is my prostate. I am more than ready to let go of my mistakes, if they are mistakes.”

“Maybe my dad is one of them.”

“You think?”

“I don’t want to blame anyone, Detective. But if my dad didn’t kill my mom, then I am partly responsible for putting him in there. I want to be responsible for getting him out. And maybe I’ll have my dad again. Maybe things will end up being the way they were before.”

“What would the Buddha say about that?”

“Frankly, I don’t give a damn.”

“You ever hear of a girl named Rebecca Staim?”

“No.”

The detective looked at his coffee. “She was a Penn student, one of those foolish kids who think they can change the world. Took a semester off to do volunteer work in Guatemala, that sort of thing. A kid bound for disappointment, but who knew what she’d accomplish before that happened. She was killed a few days ago in a burglary gone bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“She was the one fatality in a wave of successful burglaries that hit Center City last week. And here’s the thing. There’s a connection—tenuous as hell, but a connection nonetheless—between what happened to her and what happened to Flynn. And maybe to what happened last night, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, yet. But I will, trust me on that. You know anyone who has suddenly seemed to fall into some money?”

Justin thought about that for a moment and then felt a chill. “Not me,” he said, trying to cover his reaction.

“I know not you. What would you do with all that cash? Buy a bigger TV?”

Justin laughed a little too loudly. Scott stood.

“Thanks for the coffee, though it was more than a little stale and could have used some fixings. We’re not through here, you know.”

“I know.”

“And I’m going to need to talk to that Annie Overmeyer, too.”

“I’ll let her know if I see her.”

“You do that.” The detective stepped over to a coat flung on the couch. He picked it up by the collar, gave it a quick look, found the bloodstains right off, and then held it out for Justin. “And you might want to give her this too.”

Justin took hold of it sheepishly.

“You don’t think it’s weird?” said the detective.

“You ever been crazy for someone, Detective?”

“In my time.”

“Tell me, how weird was that?”

50.

SOMETHING WET

T
he spate of violent deaths seemingly stalking his family’s past was not what scared Justin to the bone. And while the peculiar vulnerability he felt now when he thought of Annie Overmeyer was as alarming as it was delicious, that wasn’t it either. Nor was it the questions that still had to be answered about Birdie Grackle, that murdering son of a bitch, or Cody’s strange new affluence, which was the first thing Justin thought of when Detective Scott asked about anyone falling into money. No, what terrified Justin the most was that, in the course of a single night, he had reverted back to that which he had been before blood and death twisted his life onto a new course; he was once again a young man with a future. Not as young, true, and with a future not quite as bright, absolutely, but still.

He felt the frightening power of all his possibilities as he sat stiffly and waited in the visiting room at Graterford. This was no longer just a visit with a lifer in prison, this was a visit with his father, who might soon be released and become again an integral part of his life. And in a way, that made it so much harder.