Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (17 page)

“Christmas?” I said, startled. I knew where God had been on Christmas Day.

“A few days before,” Beverly elaborated. “The party is always before, so many people take off around the holiday. I thought Chuckie would turn purple, he was so embarrassed. You know how he likes to present himself to top management especially as never having a hair out of place. This uncle was a wild hair, all right.”

So God had visited his nephew in the course of his final bender, the one that landed him in detox. Had he made a return visit on his last pass?

“Did he give him money?”

“Took it right out of the office safe. He had me guarding Uncle Black Sheep out here while he was in there, didn’t want to risk anyone seeing the combination.”

“And was that the last of Uncle Black Sheep?”

“No, he was back right after New Year’s. That time, Chuckie sent him off to Uncle Sam. Didn’t give him anything but a cup of coffee.”

*

The next day, I got to see Dr. Sam Weill for myself. He arrived at 11:45 for his lunch date with the boss. Beverly told me to go out and get him from reception. Of course I was invisible to him, just the retriever bringing back the game. He was a stubby little guy running to paunch and jowls. Vertical bad-temper lines had worn deep grooves into his face. Chuckie stood in the doorway of his office, looking as close to jovial as he ever did, which wasn’t very.

“Sam,” he said. He waved the doctor into his office. They both ignored me. Once the door had closed behind them, I picked up a couple of letters I had typed for Chuckie’s signature and applied myself to loitering. My ear snuggled up as close to the door as it could manage. It didn’t take long for the doctor to start getting loud.

“Dammit,” I heard, “just put it in something that’s going up!”

There was a pause, I assumed for a tight-lipped reply from Chuckie.

“What the hell do I pay you for?” the doc’s grating voice demanded. Sounded like he was expecting his nephew to turn a bear market into a bull for his personal benefit. Good luck.

Inaudible interpolation from Chuckie, then a tirade from the doc that ended with “…kids’ teeth!” After that, I couldn’t catch anything for a while. When I did, it was right on target.

“…Emmie’s goddamn loser of a brother!” grated the doc. The voice fell, and I wondered if I’d do better going in. If I knocked on the door and asked for the signatures I needed, I’d hear better. But it would interrupt the flow. I decided to let well enough alone.

“…two thousand dollars in cash!” the doctor howled.

I strained my ears as if better hearing on my part would help him be explicit.

“And where is it, dammit? …returned with his effects, hell, no!” The doc directed some explosive and comprehensive cursing at the detox, the morgue, the police force, and the City of New York in general. Eventually it stopped, as Chuckie presumably spoke soothingly. By the time the door opened, Dr. Weill had pulled himself together. I was back at my desk with my eyes glued to the monitor and my fingers playing a scherzo on the keyboard.

“Back at two,” the boss said curtly. The two of them strode away toward reception and the elevators. The moment they were out of sight, I hit my high-speed connection to the Internet. Staff rumor claimed that management read our emails. So I kept it short and cryptic. I typed in Jimmy’s screen name and left the subject blank.

“Unc S pd G to go away,” I wrote. “2K msng. Who?”

*

I was still stalling on asking Glenn to be my sponsor, but I made myself go out for coffee after the meeting. I sat in a greasy spoon with Glenn, Gary—the guy who did the coffee at what I guessed had become my home group—and two other guys, Roger and Mike. Roger asked me how long I’d been sober.

“Day One was Christmas Day.”

“You must have had one helluva Christmas Eve.”

“I probably did.”

Everybody laughed. They’d all had blackouts too.

“Bruce was in detox with a friend of yours,” Gary piped up. “You don’t mind, do you?” he added, turning to me.

“Be my guest,” I said. “It’s all in the family.”

“Who?” Roger asked.

“Your ex-business partner,” said Gary.

“Oh, God,” said Roger. “That bastard. Don’t remind me.”

“I heard he died,” said Mike.

“You mean I don’t need to pray for him every day any more?” said Roger.

Glenn looked scandalized. Roger caught the look.

“I know, I know, I can’t afford resentments. It’s just that I wanted to kill the guy.”

“You were ready to.” Gary grinned. “I thought we’d have to pull you off him.”

“Tell them,” Mike said. “That guy really screwed Roger good.”

“I should have known better,” said Roger. “Don’t get into deals involving money with people from the program.”

“Bill W. was always lending money to drunks,” said Glenn, referring to the legendary founder of AA. “It never got them sober. We’re supposed to have learned a thing or two in more than sixty-five years.”

“It wasn’t lending money to a drunk,” said Roger. “It was trusting someone I thought was in recovery to keep up his end of a deal that was really important to me. I also thought he had plenty. Doesn’t he—didn’t he have some kind of trust fund?”

“That’s what they say,” said Gary.

“That didn’t stop him,” said Roger angrily, “from defaulting on the loan he co-signed on. I ended up losing the business I’d been dreaming of for years, just when it was about to take off. Now I’m working a day job that I hate and I may never get back to where I was before that bastard practically begged me to be partners with him and swore he’d never let me down. I was stupid, but I still wish I’d beat the shit out of him when I had the chance.”

“You’d only be feeling remorseful now,” Glenn said. “The guy’s dead.”

“I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if I had,” said Roger. “I hope he suffered.”

There was a charged silence. Then we all started talking very fast about other things.

*

I ran into Mo again at a meeting down in the Village. It happened to be a gay and lesbian meeting. That wasn’t my bag. But any meeting is open to anyone with a desire to stop drinking, and I was in the neighborhood. I guess my Higher Power wanted me to be there. Or to put it in less spiritual terms, my damn train went out of service at the Christopher Street station, and I could either stand on a crowded platform for half an hour or get out of the subway and make the best of it.

Anyhow, I walked in late, and Mo was qualifying. I hadn’t known that Mo was into women. She’d been involved enough with God to get hurt. I didn’t see how she could have meant anyone but him when she told the group about the guy who was the first person she’d had sex with in sobriety. So she was humiliated when he had the bad taste to have trouble performing, refused to talk about it, and ran away.

The rejection triggered massive feelings of abandonment because it echoed her childhood in an alcoholic family, blah blah blah. After that, Mo concluded that men sucked. And then God conveniently up and died.

“Would you call a sexual rejection like that a motive for murder?” I asked Barbara later.

Asking Barbara a simple question yielded an information dump, as usual. The short answer was yes. Or maybe.

“Okay, I get it,” I said. “They were both fucked up about sex and newly sober. He humiliated her. But to kill him?”

“It does sound far-fetched,” Barbara conceded. “Also, how did they get together the day he died? Unless he looked her up with some harebrained idea of making amends.”

I shook my head. God had definitely not been in an amends kind of mood that day.

*

They asked me to stay on another week at Chuckie Standish’s firm. The secretaries and paralegals were going down like ninepins with the flu, and Beverly liked me. I figured my Higher Power was telling me to snoop some more. I wanted a look at Chuckie’s files, which I couldn’t get by listening at the door. I decided to work late one night. The fact that I got paid by the hour could have been a problem. I had to tell Beverly that I had a dinner date in the neighborhood and didn’t mind finishing up some filing on my own dime. She looked incredulous, as well she might. But she finally left me alone. Luckily, Chuckie had had to rush out to some date or meeting. He hadn’t had time to put his office in its usual finicky order. My offer to put away the books and papers on his desk induced her to trust me with access to his sanctum when she left with her duplicate key.

“Just don’t forget to lock that door from the inside before you close it,” she warned. “And he doesn’t need to know I let you in there.”

“I’ll wipe off every fingerprint,” I promised.

It took me only fifteen minutes to do the work I’d deliberately left undone. Chuckie’s office beckoned. The first thing I did was to sink into his luxurious burgundy leather chair and put my feet up on his rosewood desk. Ahhhhhh. The chair swiveled fluidly. The deep bay below the window let me prop up my legs at an even more convenient height. He had left the burgundy velvet drapes pulled back on a spectacular unobstructed view of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. I doubt I would have wanted to pay the price of three years’ grind at law school and the eighty-hour weeks that fledgling corporate associates put in if they wanted to make partner. But it was fun pretending. I let myself space out for a while.

When daydreams of career success shifted toward visualizing Chivas Regal, it was time to get up and do some work. After some internal debate, I cracked the door open. If the cleaning team that went through the offices at night came this way, I figured I would hear them. Just in case, I started by putting away the things he had left out. Once those were out of sight, no one could tell that anyone but Beverly had come in there once Chuckie left.

I looked at everything before I filed it. Nothing personal showed up. The drawers in the rosewood desk were all locked. He had a laptop, but he always took it with him. Well, I’d be damned. He must have been in one helluva hurry. The laptop in its padded leather case stood on the floor near the door, half hidden by a gray suit in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag that hung from an elaborate brass coat stand. Well, well, well. I gently lifted the case onto the nearest flat surface, a small refrigerator that looked like a hotel minibar, and zipped it open.

To boot or not to boot, that was the question. If the cleaning people came through, I had figured I would just seem to be doing my job. It sure would look suspicious if I was playing with the boss’s computer. I thought about it for a while, prowling around the office. I stuck my head out the door. Nothing there but mute computers in their cubes. Not even the muffled roar of vacuuming in the distance.

I opened the minibar door and stared into it a while. Refrigerator trance. No Chivas. I guess they finished it off at the Christmas party. He did have a bottle of Glenlivet single malt. Had he offered God a real drink? Inducing relapse is an awfully haphazard way of killing someone. Putting something toxic in their drink is not. But we knew God had made it back to detox sober. The little fridge held a few small bottles of mixers, too—Perrier, ginger ale, tonic—as well as a lemon and three limes, an open pint container of half-and-half, and one of those insulated brown paper sacks of fresh ground coffee. The guy had his own espresso machine, complete with frother. Beverly had said “a cup of coffee.” Pretty fancy cup of coffee. Not much room for pills or poison in the little cup. Hardly a mouthful, but strong espresso might disguise a peculiar taste.

How badly had Chuckie wanted Uncle God out of the way? Maybe the laptop held something that would tell me. I lacked Jimmy’s expertise, but you couldn’t do office work without computer skills. I pressed the power button. The laptop whirred, and the screen lit up and started going through its routine. Good. The battery worked. As soon as the icons popped up, I right clicked and checked the charge. Sixty percent remaining. Good. Not having to plug it in meant I could leave it in the case, ready to zip up fast if I heard someone coming.

What should I look at first? Financial? Legal? Personal? I decided to go with email. If Chuckie had said anything to Dr. Weill or anyone else in the family at the time of God’s visit to his office, it should leap right out at me. I opened AOL. His primary screen name was Chaz. At least his computer didn’t call him Chuckie. I started scrolling back.

January 2. Well, well, well. A cry for help to Dr. Sam. Oh, this was cute. The good doctor called himself FriarTuck online. He wasn’t fat or, as far as I knew, religious, so that had to be a reference to the tummy tucks that were his brioche and butter. I liked the Robin Hood association. You could call plastic surgery robbing the rich. However, neither of these bozos had any intention of giving to the poor. Or tithing, either.

“Uncle G just showed up again,” Chuckie had written. “Your turn to buy him off. I did my bit at Xmas. Sending him uptown.”

The next one said, “So don’t tell Aunt Em. This can’t go on. We need a more permanent solution.”

That had to be in response to one from Sam Weill. There it was.

“Don’t do that! Emmie will want to take him in.”

Before that, Weill had asked, “Is he on anything? What do you expect me to do?”

Chuckie’s answer: “No, but he’s still a nasty piece of work. He’s not going to cooperate about the property. Give him something to get rid of him. Just make sure it’s enough.”

There was one more exchange.

Uncle Sam said, “Screw you, Charles. Don’t send him.”

Chuckie’s read, “Too late. Screw you too.”

All that was suggestive, to say the least. Was “enough to get rid of him” drugs or money? But I didn’t get a chance to think about it. I had had my ear cocked for the vacuum cleaner all this time. Now a different sound, the multiple dinging of the elevator bell, startled me. A car had stopped at this floor. I heard a single person walking quickly. The footsteps clicked on the marble floor around the elevators. When they passed onto the silence of thick carpet, I risked a quick peek through the crack in the door. Damn! Chuckie had come back for his laptop.

I slapped the cover of the laptop down and drew the zipper all around with one quick movement. I eased the case gently to the floor. The man was so compulsive that he’d remember to a millimeter where he’d set it down. No way to get out of the office before he got here. No way I could explain my presence. I had no objection to getting fired, but I sure didn’t want him calling the cops. Behind the door? For a second I considered it. He would enter the room in a hurry, pushing the door inward as he came. That would conceal me, all right, but only until he bent down to pick up the laptop case. Then, unless he wore blinders, he’d see me flattened against the wall.