The Barkeep (36 page)

“We had no such thing.”

“You been smoking that wacky weed, boy? Didn’t your momma tell you that stuff kills the memory? I said clear as day, if we started on something, we was going to finish it, remember?”

“We never started, Birdie.”

“You must be smoking something, you don’t remember you giving me the go-ahead. That’s the only reason I gave out my clue. And I must say, I was mighty impressed the way you ran that doggie to the ground.”

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“A man like me, he keeps his eye on his investment. Oh, I been watching you, and watching that cop watch you, too. I got myself a good idea of everything what’s going on.”

Justin felt a chill just then. Cody had said that Birdie
wasn’t alone, that he had a companion. Justin would have spotted Birdie if he was spying, but maybe not the muscle.

“How’s your daddy doing?” said Grackle.

“He’s doing.”

“Always better than not doing, that’s for sure. Things are working out?”

“They look like they might.”

“Then all is as you could have hoped. I figure I earned my fee. So what’s the problem, boy?”

“You didn’t finish anything, Birdie.”

“No?”

“I found someone who might have fit your description, but even if she was the right one, you had nothing to do with what happened to her. She killed herself.”

“Is that right?”

“I saw the scene with my own eyes. She put a bullet into her head. I’m sure it’s a disappointment for you, Birdie, but you weren’t needed. Let’s say I pour you one more drink, we call it even, and then we part our ways forever.”

Birdie’s slick dark tongue slithered out of his mouth and licked his upper lip. “I could go for the drink part, that’s for sure.”

Justin eyed the old man for a moment and saw the need in his eye. It was almost out of pity that he opened the bottle and started pouring into a lowball. When he poured in two shots’ worth he stopped and looked up at Birdie. Birdie was staring at the glass, not moving to grab it as of yet, just staring, waiting. Justin tilted the bottle until the thick brown liquor rose to the rim.

“Thank you, doctor,” said Birdie, reaching for the glass.

He lifted it for a moment, but his hands started shaking so badly he had to put it down again and slide it to himself. His
head lowered and he slurped at the glass until the level of liquor was secure enough that he could lift it without risking a drop. He drank deep as if it were water from a tap, and his eyes fluttered as if he were in the throes of something obscene. It was almost enough to get Justin drinking again.

“That’s the stuff,” said Birdie when he had downed half, “to put an atheist on his knees.”

“I’m glad you like it, because it’s the last of anything you’ll ever get from me. Our game is through.”

“You think it’s that easy, boy? We had usselves a cash deal. And like I told the nurse at the sperm bank what helped me out that time—cough it up.”

“I’m not paying a cent, Birdie.”

“You’ll pay,” he picked up his glass, let the light cut through the amber color, and then took a gulp. “One way or t’other.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Not you, because you the one going to pay me. Only a fool would do something that stupid. But there’s that brother of yours, that—”

“Leave him out of this.”

“Or his wife, what comes visiting you in that big old truck to get whatever you’re slipping her.”

“That’s enough.”

“But I’ll end up with my ten thousand, one way or t’other.”

“For what, you old fraud? What the hell did you ever do for me? You’re a con man, and not even a good one. And now the con is over. Get out of my bar.”

As Justin said those last few words, he took hold of the half-full lowball. A bartender never leaves alcohol in front of a customer he is finished with. It is not up to a troubled patron on the other side of the wood to decide how long to stay, how long to ruminate, when to erupt. When a bartender decides
that a customer is done, the barkeep pulls their drink as quick as that, and that’s what Justin was doing.

But before he was able to slide it away, Birdie grabbed at it with two gnarled hands and started pulling it back, pulling it back with all the desperation of a man dying of thirst fighting over the last dreg of muddy water. There was a tug-of-war as the old man strained to lift the glass to his trembling lips and liquor sloshed within the walls of glass. With a final fraught yank, Birdie Grackle pulled the glass free, splashing half of what remained across his face. Staring at Justin, he lifted his chin and drained what was left, his Adam’s apple bouncing with ferocity. The sound of the glass slapping down on the bar and a growly sigh came at the same time.

“Mother’s milk there,” said Birdie Grackle as he wiped his face with his hand. He stared at Justin as he licked the wet from his fingers one by one.

“You must have had a hell of a mother.”

“She was that and more. So I guess that’s it, that’s all we got. This little romance of ours, it’s over. Fitting then that I’ve got for you a good-bye gift. Something to remember old Birdie by.”

Onto the bar the old man placed a little box, wrapped in blue paper and bound by a red ribbon tied into a bow, and slid it to Justin.

“There’s nothing you have I want,” said Justin.

“Open it.”

Justin gave the old man a look before he slid off the ribbon and ripped away the blue paper. Slowly he lifted the top off the small cardboard box. He stared at the contents for a moment before putting the top back on.

“What did we agree on?” said Birdie, his head dropping low so he was staring at Justin now through his wild, weedy
eyebrows. “Ten thousand dollars? Minus the drink.”

“What did you do?” said Justin. “What the hell did you do?”

“I did what I do,” said Birdie Grackle. “What did you think was going to happen? You got three days, boy. If you don’t have the money, get it from that brother of your’n.”

“What makes you think I won’t start yelling bloody murder?”

“You won’t tell them cops because what would they think, except that maybe your daddy, he ain’t as not-guilty now as he might look. And you won’t tell your daddy because you got your own secrets to hide from him, don’t you, you randy piece of jerky. Three days.”

Justin took a deep breath and took the top off the little box again. A bird, small and yellow. A canary. Justin poked at it with his finger. It was real all right, he could feel the tiny bones right through the feathers. It was real and it was dead.

“What’s the matter?” said the foul old man. “Birdie got your tongue?”

53.

A STEAMING PILE

J
ustin had to admit this about Birdie Grackle—he was a raw and bracing piece of reality.

Justin knew better than to check out from the present, with its hard and beautiful truths, and turn his face to the future, which was nothing more, really, than a shade of an image of an idea of a hope. But that is exactly what he had been doing, losing himself in a blizzard of conjectures about his father and Annie and his own little life. Would his father get out of jail? Would they have the kind of relationship he had always hoped for? Would Annie be his lover or his stepmother or disappear entirely from his life? He had been busily constructing castles in the sky when Birdie Grackle sauntered into Zenzibar, sucked his big fake teeth, and presented his truths flat on the bar like a steaming pile of crap.

It might not have been a pleasant thing to smell, but it sure as hell did wake him up.

Because what did Birdie represent, really, but reality itself, namely the truth about what happened to Justin’s mother, the truth about the guilt of Justin’s father, the truth about Justin’s own responsibility for a host of crimes? And being face-to-face with Birdie Grackle left Justin face-to-face with the most
awful truth of all: that he still knew nothing. And it seemed that everything he had done since Birdie first walked into the bar had left him further from knowing anything at all.

But even in his state of perfect ignorance, he still had to deal with that human piece of excrement. He had been avoiding doing anything about Birdie because all the alternatives were rank. But there was no choice now. This man, who claimed to have killed his mother and now who was claiming to have killed Janet Moss, needed to be dealt with, and fast, before someone else ended up dead. And as far as Justin could see there were only three options: turn him in, pay him, or kill him.

What he wanted to do was kill him, brutally and quickly, with a maximum amount of blood spilled about his rotting carcass. It shocked and horrified Justin how much he yearned in his gut to stick Birdie Grackle’s chest with a knife or to inside-out his brains with a Louisville Slugger.

But no matter how satisfying it might seem in the imagining, Justin was no killer. Even if he was certain that Birdie had actually killed his mother, even if he had more proof than the old con man’s say-so, he still couldn’t do it, it wasn’t in him, thankfully. A murder like that could only arise from a deeply held belief, of which Justin proudly claimed none. And in his state of pure ignorance, even the idea of murder was anathema. No, Justin would have to bask in the satisfaction of some sort of karmic justice, knowing that a cockroach like Birdie Grackle would inevitably come back to life as, well, a cockroach.

But if he wasn’t able to kill the son of a bitch, neither was he willing to pay him. From the moment Birdie stepped into the bar, he was looking for a payday. He had something else going on other than this ten-thousand-dollar scam—Cody had
made that clear—and so Birdie might just end up with his score, but he wasn’t going to get it from Justin, because Justin would sooner pull out a toenail than pay it.

No, Justin wasn’t going to kill Birdie, and he wasn’t going to pay him either. Which left one crappy option.

54.

SCREWDRIVER

M
ia Dalton had a headache, and it was Justin Chase who was giving it to her. Each word was like a cymbal clash right next to her ear. Nothing he said made sense, or maybe everything he said made sense, but because she couldn’t be sure which was which, the whole thing was giving her a headache.
Clash clash.
Listening to Justin Chase was like playing chess with a Russian: you began seeing plots everywhere.

Generally, in the middle of an interrogation, Mia always asked questions on the slant; the answer she was seeking was never directly related to the question. She searched instead for hesitations, improbabilities. You never ask for the thing you really want to know from those on the other side of the desk because they might tell you what you don’t want to hear and then where the hell would you be? But now, after hearing the strange story of Birdie Grackle, from the moment he first strode into Justin’s bar until the last unsettling meeting just the night before, she broke her rule.

“Justin,” she said, “do you want your father to get out of jail? I mean really?”

“He’s my father,” said Justin.

Mia looked at him for a moment and then smiled in
admiration. She had asked a straightforward question and Justin Chase had answered on the slant. Too bad he never took the bar, he would have been a hell of a lawyer.

The phone rang. She picked it up and heard her secretary tell her there was a call for Detective Scott. “It’s for you,” she said to the old man.

Scott grunted as he pushed himself out of the chair. He grabbed the phone and barked his name into the handset.

“Okay, good. Did you check the book?…How about the description? Anything?…Remember, he wouldn’t be alone. There’d be some muscle with him…Yeah, it would be hard to miss the tattoos. What about a walk-through?…Just do it so we can say we did it, or Dalton will be chewing my ass…You don’t got to tell me. Okay, good. Oh, and Kingstree, it’s the Parker, so don’t go in alone.”

He hung up the phone, gave Mia a look she couldn’t decipher, and eased back to his chair right next to Justin’s. “Kingstree gives his regards and told me to watch out for frostbite.”

“What did that lunkhead learn?”

“No Birdie Grackle registered at the Parker,” said Detective Scott, “as well as no one named Birdie and no one with the last name Grackle. Though it is the Parker, which means that a photo ID is not strictly required before they put a name in the book. And the description Chase gave, old alcoholic with yellow hair and bad dentures, fits about half the current residents. Kingstree is going to go floor by floor to see if he can pick up anything other than a rash.”

“Who did you say followed him there?” said Mia to Justin.

“Just some guy,” he said.

“Who?”

“I don’t want to get him involved.”

“You already did. A name would help.”

“No.”

“Okay, so here we are,” said Mia, rubbing her temples in an attempt to relieve the pain. This whole thing was like a screwdriver in her brain. “You’ve told us this story, which we can’t corroborate, about a guy who claims he killed both your mother and Janet Moss, six years apart. And because of the fentanyl we found in the drugs in her drawer, we can assume, if he killed Janet Moss, he killed Timmy Flynn, too. So we have three possibilities. Either you’re lying, or he’s lying, or we have some sort of serial killer on our hands. But since we can’t confirm anything you said, it makes it more likely that someone is lying.”

“I’m not,” said Justin.

“Good, since that is settled, then he is probably lying, which makes the most sense. Scott here is going to do everything he can to find this”—she looked down at her notes—“this Birdie Grackle, and if he succeeds he’ll bring the old man in for questioning. And, of course, the old man will deny everything. So in all likelihood, nothing will come from it, but we’ll try.”

“What about the bird?” said Justin, indicating the small box he had put on her desk.

“It’s a bird, Justin. We’ll have Eddie Nicosia look at it, and we’ll have our scientists see if we can compare it to anything left in the cage, maybe compare DNA with some of the feathers or dung, but you and I both know it could have come from anywhere. Go into a pet shop, buy a yellow canary, twist its sweet little neck and put it in a box.”