A Drink Before the War

  Angie half shrugged, half nodded in that way she has, and lit a cigarette. She hung her arm out the window and the gray smoke pooled by the rearview mirror, then separated into equal strands and floated out the windows. She said, “If we’re smart enough to figure out where she is, wouldn’t someone else be? We can’t be the only ones who know about the sister.”

  I thought about it. It made sense. If whoever “they” were had put a tail on me in the hopes of following me to Jenna, then they must have put a tail on Simone. “Shit.”

  “Now, what do you want to do?”

  “Wait,” I repeated, and she groaned. I said, “We follow Simone when she goes somewhere—”

  “If she goes somewhere.”

  “Positive energy, please. When she goes somewhere, we follow, but we hang back first, see if we have company.”

  “And if our company is already on to us? If they’re watching us right now as we speak, thinking the same thing? What then?”

  I resisted the urge to turn around and look for other cars with two immobile occupants, staring in our direction. “We deal with it,” I said.

  She frowned. “You always say that when you don’t have a clue.”

  “Do not,” I said.

  At seven-fifteen, things started happening.

  Simone, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, faded jeans, and generic sneakers the color of an oyster, walked out of the house with determination and opened her car the same way. I wondered if she did everything the same way—with that set look on her face, that the-hell-with-you-if-you-can’t-keep-up air about her. Could people sleep that way?

  She went straight up Merrimack, so we gave her a few blocks, waiting to see if we were the only interested party. It seemed to be the case, and if not, I wasn’t about to lose my only lead. We pulled out, and with one last look at my thirty-seven thousand dollars worth of automobile—insurance company estimate, mind you—we tailed her through Wickham. She went straight through the center of town and hopped on I-495. I was tired of being in the car and hoped like hell she didn’t have Jenna stowed away in Canada. Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be the case, because she got off the expressway a few miles later, turning off into Lansington.

  If possible, Lansington is uglier than Wickham, but in imperceptible ways. In most respects, they’re identical. Lansington just feels dingier.

  We were waiting at a traffic light near the center of town, but when the light turned green, Simone didn’t move. I felt two cold spades press together around my heart and Angie said, “Shit. Think she’s on to us?”

  I said, “Use the horn.”

  She did and Simone’s hand went up in apology as she realized the light had changed. It was the first undetermined thing she’d done since I’d seen her, and it felt like a jump start: we were close.

  All around us were squat two-story clapboard buildings, circa the late 1800s. Trees were sparse and gnarled in hideous ways where we saw them. The traffic lights were old, still round, no Walk/Don’t Walk signals or neon pictures for those who couldn’t understand the Walk/Don’t Walk parts. The lights made clicking sounds when they changed, and as we drifted along the two-lane road, I felt that we could just as easily have been in rural Georgia or West Virginia.

  Ahead of us, Simone’s left blinker went on, and a fraction of a second later, she pulled off the road into a small dirt parking lot filled with pickup trucks, a Winnebago, a couple of dusty American sports cars, and those wretched testaments to Detroit’s bad taste—El Caminos. Two of them. A car that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a truck; a truck that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a car—obscene, hybrid results.

  Angie kept going and a half mile down the road, we U-turned and went back. The parking lot belonged to a bar. Just like Wickham, you wouldn’t have known what it was without the small neon Miller High Life signs in the windows. It was a low two-story building, a little deeper than most of the houses, stretching back an extra ten yards or so. From inside I could hear glasses clinking, a smattering of laughter, the babble of voices, and a Bon Jovi song coming off the jukebox. I amended that last thought; maybe it was just a stereo tuned to a radio station and no one inside had actually paid money to listen to Bon Jovi. Then I looked at the pickups and the bar again, and I wasn’t hopeful.

  Angie said, “We going to wait here too?”

  “Nope. Going in.”

  “Goody.” She looked at the building. “Thank God I’m licensed to carry a firearm.” She checked the load in her .38.

  “Damn straight,” I said, climbing out of the car. “First thing you do when we get inside, shoot the stereo.”

  Simone was nowhere in sight when we entered. This was pretty easy to ascertain, because the moment we stepped through the door, everyone stopped moving.

  I was wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and a baseball cap. My face looked like I’d had a disagreement with a pit bull, and the jacket that covered my gun was a raggy, faded army thing. I fit right in.

  Angie was wearing a dark blue football jacket with white leather sleeves over a loose white cotton shirt that hung untucked over a pair of black leggings.

  Guess which one of us they were looking at.

  I looked at Angie. New Bedford isn’t terribly far from here. Big Dan’s Bar is in New Bedford. That’s where a bunch of guys threw a girl down on a pool table and had their version of fun at her expense while the rest of the bar cheered them on. I looked at the patrons of this bar—a Heinz 57 mix of eastern rednecks, white trash, mill workers only recently immigrated from the Third World, Portuguese, a couple of black guys—all poor and hostile and gearing up to let off some steam. Probably came here be cause Big Dan’s was closed. I looked at Angie again. I wasn’t worried about her; I was considering what would happen to my business if my partner shot the dicks off a barful of people in Lansington. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think we’d be able to keep that office in the church.

  The barroom was larger than it looked from the outside. To my left, just before the bar itself, was a narrow staircase of unfinished wood. The bar ran halfway down the floor on the left side. Across from it were a few tables for two against a dark plywood wall. Past the bar, the place opened up and I could see pinball and video machines on the left and the corner of a pool table on the right. A pool table. Terrific.

  The place was medium to crowded. Just about everyone wore a baseball cap, even those who I assume were women. A few people had mixed drinks, but for the most part, this was Budweiser country.

  We walked up to the bar and folks went back to what they were doing, or pretending to.

  The bartender was a young guy, good-looking and bleached blond, but a townie if he was working this place. He gave me a slight smile. Then he gave one to Angie that, in comparison, looked as if his lips exploded. “Hi. What can I get you?” He leaned on the bar and looked into her eyes.

  Angie said, “Two Buds.”

  “My pleasure,” Blondie said.

  “I’ll bet,” she said and smiled.

  She does this all the time. Flirts her ass off with everyone but me. If I wasn’t such a rock of self-confidence, it would annoy me.

  My luck was good tonight, though. I felt it the moment the Bon Jovi song ended. While Blondie went for the beers, I looked at the stairs. In what passes for a moment of stillness in a bar, I could hear people moving around overhead.

  When Blondie placed both beers in front of Angie, I said, “Is there a back door to this place?”

  He turned his head slowly in my direction, looking at me as if I’d just bumped his knee stepping onto the bus. “Yeah,” he said with extreme slowness and nodded in the direction of the pool table. Through the smoke that hung over the back I saw the door. He was looking at Angie again, but out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Why, you planning on sticking the place up?”

  “No,” I said. I flipped through all the cards in my wallet until I found the right one. “I’m planning on citing you for building code viola
tions. Lots of them, asshole.” I flipped the card on the bar. It said, “Lewis Prine, State Building Inspector.” Lewis made the mistake of leaving me unattended in his office once.

  Blondie stopped looking at Angie, though I could see it hurt. He stepped back a bit and looked at the card. “Don’t you guys have badges or something?”

  I had one of those too. Good thing about badges, most of them look pretty much the same to the untrained eye, so I don’t have to carry fifty of them around with me. I flipped it at him, then put it back in my pocket. “All you got’s that one back door?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. Nervous. “Why?”

  “Why? Why? Where’s the owner?”

  “Huh?”

  “The owner. The owner.”

  “Bob? He’s gone home for the night.”

  My luck was still holding. I said, “Son, how many floors you got here?”

  He looked at me as if I’d just asked what the atmospheric density of Pluto was. “Floors? Uh, two. We got two. Rooming house’s upstairs.”

  “Two,” I repeated with an air of moral revulsion. “Two floors and the only exits are on the first.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “‘Yeah’? How people on the second floor supposed to get out if there’s a fire?”

  “A window?” he suggested.

  “A window.” I shook my head. “How about I take you up there right now, see how well you land jumping out a fucking window? A window. Jesus.”

  Angie crossed her legs, sipping her beer, enjoying this.

  Blondie said, “Well…”

  I said, “Well what?” I gave Angie the get-ready look. She raised her eyebrows and downed her beer happily. “Boy,” I said, “you’re gonna learn some shit tonight,” and I crossed the floor to the plywood wall and pulled the fire alarm.

  No one in the barroom ran for an exit. No one really moved at all. They just turned their heads and looked at me. They seemed a bit pissed off.

  But on the second floor, no one could tell if there was a fire or not. Bars always smell like smoke.

  A rather large woman with a rather small sheet over her nude body and a skinny guy with a lot less coverage came down first. They barely glanced at the bar before they hopped out the door like rabbits during hunting season.

  Two kids were next. Sixteen or so, both with a little acne. Probably registered as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They flattened against the wall as soon as they cleared the last step, staring at all of us, chests heaving.

  Then suddenly, Simone was there, looking very put out, looking to find someone responsible, her eyes working their way from Blondie, around the crowd of hicks, and finally settling on moi. I glanced at her but passed by, my eyes slowing and holding at a point just over her shoulder.

  On Jenna Angeline.

  Angie left my shoulder and disappeared around the corner, on the other side of the plywood wall. I waited, my eyes fixed on Jenna Angeline, hers finally meeting mine. They were eyes that screamed resignation. Old, old eyes. Brown and numb and too beaten to show fear. Or joy. Or life. Something passed through them, briefly, and I knew that she recognized me. Not who I was. What I represented. I was just another form of cop or collection agent or landlord or boss. I was authority, and I was coming to decide something about her life whether she liked it or not. She recognized me all right.

  Angie had found the main cables and the clarion blast bleated away to nothing in one wheezing second.

  I was the center of attention now, and I knew I was about to face resistance, at the very least from the Angeline sisters. Everyone except them, the bartender, and a big, going-to-fat, ex-football player type to my right faded slightly behind a haze of gauze. The football player was leaning forward on his toes and Blondie had his hand under the bar. Neither of the Angeline sisters looked like they had any intention of moving without help from a crane.

  My voice seemed loud and hoarse when I said, “Jenna, I need to talk to you.”

  Simone grabbed her sister’s arm and said, “Come on, Jenna, let’s go,” and started leading her toward the door.

  I shook my head and stepped in front of the door, my hand already in my jacket as the football player made his move. Another hero. Probably a member of the auxiliary fire department. His right hand was heading toward my shoulder and his mouth was open, a gruff voice saying, “Hey, asshole, leave the women alone.” Before he reached my shoulder, my hand cleared my jacket and whacked his arm away and brushed my gun against his lips.

  I said, “Excuse me?” and dug the muzzle of the gun hard against his upper lip.

  He looked at the gun. He didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t move my head, just kept my eyes on the barroom, looked everyone in the eye who’d meet mine. I felt Angie beside me, her gun steady, her breathing shallow. She said, “Jenna, Simone, I want you to get in your car and drive to the house in Wickham. We’ll be right behind you and if you try to take off, believe me, our car’s a lot faster than yours and we’ll end up talking in a ditch somewhere.”

  I looked at Simone. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be dead now.”

  Simone gave off some sort of body language that only a sister would recognize, because Jenna put a hand on her arm. “We do what they say, Simone.”

  Angie opened the door behind me. Jenna and Simone passed by and walked out. I looked at Football Player, then pushed his face back with the gun. I felt the weight of it in my arm, the muscles beginning to ache, my hand stiffening and sweat popping out of the glands all over my body.

  Football Player met my eyes and I could see he was thinking about being a hero again.

  I waited. I leveled the gun and said, “Come on.”

  Angie said, “Not here. Let’s go.” She took my elbow, and we backed out of the bar into the night.

  9

  “Sit down, Simone. Please.” Everything Jenna said came out as a weary plea.

  We’d been back at the house for ten minutes and had spent all our time dealing with Simone’s ego. So far, she’d tried to push past me twice, and now she was walking toward the phone.

  “Man don’t come into my house, tell me how to act,” she told Jenna, then looked at Angie. “And the man ain’t going to shoot me with the neighbors awake upstairs.” She’d started to believe that by the time she reached the phone.

  I said, “Simone, who’re you going to call? The police? Fine.”

  Jenna said, “Put the phone down, Simone. Please.”

  Angie looked bored and antsy. Patience is not one of her prime virtues. She walked over and pulled the phone cord out of the wall.

  I closed my eyes, then opened them. “Jenna, I’m a private investigator, and before any of us decides to do anything else, I have to talk to you.”

  Simone looked at the phone, then at Angie and me, finally at her sister. She said, “Your bed, girl, lie in it,” and sat down on the couch.

  Angie sat beside her. “You have a very nice place here.”

  This was true. It was small, and the outside was nothing to look at, and it wasn’t like there was a baby grand by the window, but Simone definitely had an eye. The floor had been stripped, the blonde wood underneath polished to a high gloss. The couch where Simone and Angie sat was a light cream color with an oversize throw pillow that Angie was itching to hug to her chest. Jenna sat in a mahogany shell chair to the right of the couch and I leaned on its twin across from her. Four feet from the windows the floor rose eight inches and a small alcove had been created around the two windows facing the street, cushions on the window seats, a small wooden magazine rack, a hanging plant overhead, and the wooden telephone desk. A bookcase ran the length of the half wall behind Jenna and I saw poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Amiri Baraka, plus novels by Baldwin and Wright as well as Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Pete Dexter, Walker Percy, and Charles Johnson.

  I looked at Simone. “Where’d you go to school?”

  She said, “Tuskegee,” a little surprised.

>   “Good school.” A friend of mine played ball there for a year before he found out he wasn’t good enough. I said, “Nice book collection.”

  “You just surprised the nigger knows how to read.”

  I sighed. “Right. That’s it, Simone.” I said to Jenna, “Why’d you quit your job?”

  Jenna said, “People quit their jobs every day.”

  “This is true,” I said, “but why’d you quit yours?”

  She said, “I didn’t want to work for them no more. Plain and simple.”

  “And when you raided their files, how plain and simple was that?”

  Jenna looked confused. So did Simone. It’s possible they actually were, but then, if she had stolen the files, looking completely aware of what I was talking about probably wasn’t the best idea. Simone said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Jenna was watching me steadily, her hands kneading the fabric of her skirt. She was considering something and, for a moment, the intelligence that entered her eyes swamped all that weariness like a wave over a rowboat. Then it was gone again and the eyes dulled. She said, “Simone, I’d like to talk to this man alone for a few minutes.”

  Simone didn’t like it, but after a minute or so, she and Angie went into the kitchen. Simone’s voice was loud and unhappy, but Angie has a way with loud and unhappy. You don’t live in a marriage of arbitrary rages, unfounded jealousies, and sudden accusations without growing adept at dealing with another’s hostility in a small room. When dealing with whiners or ragers of any sort—those who always see themselves as victims of life’s vast conspiracy to ruin their day or are unreasonable or choking on some predictable, paltry anger—Angie’s gaze grows flat and level, her head and body become as still as a statue, and the whiner or the rager vents until that gaze forces them to sputter, to weaken, to exhaust themselves. You either wither under the calm logic of it, blanch in the face of its daunting maturity, or you lash out against it, like Phil, and negate yourself. I know; I’ve been the focus of that gaze a time or two myself.