Some little nobody was copying
the way she killed people. The unidentified wretch had taste, because
Rose considered this her best murder yet. She’d felt more pride in how
she’d killed this victim than about anything else she’d done in years.
Her latest murder boasted all the best signs of a Rose Leary work.
“Olive juice, Rose.”
The most disgusting part was how Rose had reveled in the woman’s death.
She’d been thrilled, plotting out every last gory, splattery detail-including
where to find that filet knife in the kitchen. When its blade slipped
between the victim’s ribs, she’d felt torn between gagging and bursting
into self-congratulatory applause.
Definitely one of the best scenes she’d ever written.
“Darling, you heard me say olive juice, didn’t you? Remember that
light green liquid with more salt than Bambi and all her cousins could
have licked? Do you want me to describe the gin, too? You know, the
funny clear stuff that smells like hair spray?”
Jimmy’s sweet farm-boy features undermined his world-weary attitude
and erased years from his age. Tall and very thin, he held his spine
as straight as the perfect part in his shining nut-brown hair. The ghosts
of dry-cleaning bags fluttered behind the starched white shirts and
creased black pants he wore to work. He’d chosen large onyx squares
as his cufflinks du jour.
Rose laughed. “What are you gibbering about now?”
“I’m not gibbering, my dear. I am simply giving you a drink order.
Since the order is almost as unusual as the creature who requested it,
and since the look on your face shows that your thoughts are not centered
on the task at hand, I thought I would help you along. That’s how this
quaint establishment has things structured. I, the waiter, relay the
patrons’ drink orders to you. You, the bartender, then make the aforesaid
drinks, with whatever ingredients necessary. Then I take the beverages
back to the parched customers, and everyone is happy. Now do you want
me to explain how tipping the bartender works? Or will you just give
me the miserable martini with olive juice instead of vermouth and go
back to your daydreams, or sexual fantasies, or whatever you’ll pass
the time with until the bar fills up? I need a dirty martini before
dawn, please.” His lips pursed around the word “dirty.”
Rose, who’d grown up in restaurants, wondered how to adequately express
her gratitude for service lessons from a man who’d decided that a career
as New York’s bitchiest waiter logically followed twelve years teaching
fourth-graders in Fresno. She kept waiting for him to check that her
fingernails were clean.
She’d occasionally considered slapping his hands, just to see if that
would shut his mouth. But, each time his chatter approached the limits
of her patience, something in his monologue made her laugh hard enough
to save both his knuckles and her temper. Laughing felt better than
slapping. Jolly girls had more friends than shrews.
Rose checked the back-up garnishes, prepared for disappointment. Diane
had left three shriveled lemon twists and fewer than a dozen lime slices
rattling around in the white plastic bins. A good day-bartender would
have refilled them after the lunch rush to prep for the busier night
shift. She really did need to have a little chat with Diane.
Rose sighed, then started cutting extra fruit, just in case. February
was traditionally a slow month, but Thursday nights could draw crowds
eager to begin the weekend early. After only two weeks at My World,
Rose couldn’t predict business as well as she could anticipate Jimmy’s
antics.
Slicing through a lime with the paring knife, she remembered the thrill
when she’d finally calculated the precise angle at which a butcher knife
had to enter a woman’s body for a quick kill that didn’t require extraordinary
strength. Rose had argued with herself for hours, debating whether she
should leave the knife in the victim’s body or return it clean to its
drawer. She’d been particularly pleased about leaving the body slumped
below the chef’s 86 list, with the blackboard empty except for a huge
arrow pointing down to the corpse.
It had been one of the most satisfying chapters she’d ever written,
structurally far superior to the stabbing here at My World last month.
Leaving a corpse in the big walk-in, on the vegetable side at that,
didn’t rank high on her list of creative touches. The ubiquitous junkie
suspects must have been in a hurry.
“Penny for your thoughts. Must be creepy, filling a dead girl’s
shoes-or at least her job.”
Rose smiled and stopped gloating about having written a better murder
than the one that actually happened.
He dropped a fifty on the bar, “Gimme an Amstel.”
She gave the man his beer and took his money. His opening lines didn’t
encourage witty repartee. Should she agree that it was very creepy indeed,
being the successor to a corpse? She could describe how horrified and
frightened she felt, thinking about her predecessor Susan as a real
woman with a real name who really had been cruelly killed. By a real
murderer.
Rose wondered if he’d be relieved to hear she was able to find a tiny
amount of comfort by thinking about it in the abstract. The similarities
between Rose’s novel and Susan’s death were not all that eerie, if you
only thought about them logically. Murderers only had so many ways to
kill people, after all, and the anonymous copycat had offset his plagiarism
with her new job.
Death struck a blow against unemployment: one bartender killed, another
hired. Simple social work.
Slow down, Ro. Don’t forget the first commandment of bartending writers:
never tell a customer about your book, unless you want to hear the story
he has for you, the same one he’s going to get around to writing himself
one day, the one that will boast the same author and hero. Stories?
He has stories. Believe it or not, just his life would….
The forest would lose all its trees.
“You’re prettier than the one who died, anyway.”
“Thank you,” Rose said. This gent had really flunked charm
school. What should she reply? Oh, then it’s good she’s dead? Survival
of the cutest? Guess nobody misses the hag anyway?
She smiled again and tried to remember the weather forecast. Today was
perfectly normal, seasonally cold for February in New York. No major
storm or strong warming trend expected. If God invented weather to give
bartenders conversational topics, He should have made it consistently
worthy of discussion.
He grinned. “I like girls who smile a lot. Matter of fact, I like
everybody who works for me to smile. Good for business. Makes the customer
happy; makes the employee think he could be happy. Looks nice.”
Ah, common ground at last. Maybe he’d tip her with one of those adorable
little happy-face buttons, or some turn-of-the-century coins.
“It’s what joints like this really sell, you know. Smiles, food,
and booze. And sex, or at least the smell of it. Know what I mean, sweetheart?”
This was getting trickier. Rose nodded and hoped he wasn’t leading in
to a come-on.
The man who loved smiles was almost six feet tall, maybe sixty-three
years old, with half a head of hair graying away from dark brown. He
would have been wiser to start with the lite beers a while back. She
feared she spotted the glint of gold among the gray hairs on his Florida-tanned
chest, which both a good mirror and the calendar would have suggested
he cover by at least two more buttons.
He returned her look steadily. She doubted he’d ever suffer the embarrassment
of dropping his eyes first.
“You’ll do fine here, kid. I’m Joe Victors, your bosses’ boss.
Keep smiling.” He winked as he stood. The ten dollars he left on
the bar made his instructions easy to follow. Thank God she’d kept it
up anyway. Bad test to flunk.
Jimmy stood at the service station. “Two white wines, one red,
and a rum and Diet Coke. Girls are here early tonight. How’d you like
God the Father?”
“Who?”
“That august presence from whom all blessings flow was God the
Father, as we all adoringly call Joe. Ben, who hired you, and whom you
must never, ever call by his full name of Beneto, is known as The Son.
Ben’s brother Thomas is The Holy Ghost, completing the trinity. You’ll
have to wait to meet him, since he’s on one of his frequent extended
vacations. I imagine the shock of finding Susan’s body and going through
all those nasty police questions inspired this particular jaunt.”
Jimmy smoothed his collar.
“Did Joe give you the smile-and-smell-of-sex routine? He’s not
as stupid as he sounds. I consider him the only one of the trinity with
any real brains. Beneficent, too, because he paid for having Susan’s
body flown back to Ohio and, rumor has it, the funeral costs. Least
he could do.”
Jimmy lowered his voice, “He’s so generous that he gave the precious
sons this place, no doubt to keep them out of trouble. The theory of
infallibility is now open to serious question, however. But you’ll discover
all the rest yourself eventually, won’t you? I’d hate to ruin any of
the suspense.”
“Jimmy, you can’t keep your mouth shut long enough to build up
any suspense about your next word. Go see if your customers want another
drink.” Rose started sticking olives onto pics for the martini
rush. While Jimmy charmed his customers, she could think of a good topic
sentence for the essay on My World that he might assign later.
He feigned insult and walked away, maintaining the mock-adversarial
roles he and Rose had established their first night working together.
Rose ignored Jimmy’s act as she considered his information. The bar
she tended was the heart of an old restaurant in Manhattan’s far West
Village. Nearly fifty years of blue-collar lunches and drinks had mellowed
the joint into a sweetly seedy character since the Victors had opened
it in the 1940s. Reading the writing on the wall, or at least the real
estate ads in the Times, the owners had allowed the forces of evolution
to start several years ago. This wasn’t just the meat-market area anymore.
My World had changed with more grace than the neighborhood. Steam-table
cuisine departed, but the food remained good, honest, and relatively
cheap. Pasta and mixed greens coexisted with meat and potatoes. The
wine list graduated beyond bicolored but still fit on the back of the
menu. Gentle prices for strong drinks and the absence of slushy tropic
delights gave the bar at least the illusion of integrity.
The crowd seemed a good mix, too. Old-time Village residents who remembered
the place “back when” charmed recent neighbors who had just
discovered My World and loved it. Folks from other neighborhoods considered
it a find and swore several of their closest friends to mythical secrecy.
My World succeeded because everyone thought it belonged to them.
Not even Susan’s murder last month had hurt business. The curious came
once or twice, and the regulars returned to sympathize. Some admitted
to feeling safer here now, since New York wisdom dictated that a recently
robbed place might stay safe for a while. That the stabbing was related
to robbery seemed to be accepted as Gospel by everyone from the press
to the porter.
My World was a fine place to work, if you had to work in a restaurant
at all. If you wanted a decent amount of cash and plenty of time to
write, you might have to work in a restaurant. Rose had quickly run
through the small advance her devoted agent managed to wrangle for her
second mystery. More slowly, she’d realized that it would be a long
time before she saw, much less spent, her share of the profits from
selling the Massachusetts restaurant she’d owned with her ex. Her pride
in receiving any advance at all, after the ten-year lull between her
first published mystery and this work-in-progress, had no buying power.
She needed cash and writing time. My World should provide both.
Knowing she’d gotten this job because her predecessor died still disturbed
her. “Died,” her writer’s mind insisted, made a weakling synonym
for “stabbed to death.”
But Rose had two jobs: a bartending job and a writing job. The two were
not the same and mixing them would be asking for trouble she didn’t
need. She decided to try to live through the rest of the night without
thinking about either the murdered woman or the way she died. Imagination
served her writing better than it did her bartending. The service economy
had its own grammar.
“Hey, beautiful, give me a double vodka on the rocks. Then let
me tell you about the day I had.” Mr. Distraction looked as if
it had been a rough one.