The Devil Knows You're Dead Read Free Page B

front of the Flame he said, “Here’s where I get off. Hope your meeting goes well. Interesting case?”
    “At this stage,” I said, “it’s hard to tell.”
    It wasn’t a case at all, of course. It was an AA meeting in the basement of St. Paul’s. For an hour and a half I sat on a folding metal chair and drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. At ten o’clock we mumbled our way through the Lord’s Prayer and stacked the chairs, and a few of us stopped in at the Flame to take nourishment and other people’s inventories. I thought I might run into Holtzmann there, lingering over the dregs of his Greek salad, but by then he’d gone on home to his little cabin in the sky. I ordered some coffee and a toasted English and forgot about him.
    Sometime in the next week or two I saw him waiting for a Ninth Avenue bus, but he didn’t see me. Another time Elaine and I had a late bite at Armstrong’s and left just as the Holtzmanns were getting out of a cab in front of their building across the intersection. And one afternoon I was at my own window when a man who might have been Glenn Holtzmann emerged from the camera shop across the street and walked west. I’m on a high floor, so the person I saw might as easily have been someone else, but something in his walk or stance brought Holtzmann to mind.
    It was the middle of June, though, before we spoke again. It was a weekday night, and it was late. Past midnight, anyway. I’d been to a meeting and out for coffee. Back in my room, I picked up a book and couldn’t read it, turned on the TV and couldn’t watch it.
    I get that way sometimes. I fought the restlessness for a while, until around midnight I said the hell with it and grabbed my jacket off a hook and went out. I walked south and west, and when I got to Grogan’s I took a seat at the bar.
    Grogan’s Open House is at Fiftieth and Tenth, an old-fashioned Irish ginmill of the sort that used to dot Hell’s Kitchen years ago. There are fewer of them these days, although Grogan’s has yet to earn a bronze plaque from the Landmarks Commission, or a spot on the Endangered Species List. There’s a long bar on the left, booths and tables on the right, a dart board on the back wall, an old tile floor strewn with sawdust, an old stamped-tin ceiling in need of repair.
    They rarely get much of a crowd at Grogan’s, and this night was no exception. Burke was behind the bar, watching an old movie on one of the cable channels. I ordered a Coke and he brought it to me. I asked if Mick had been in and he shook his head. “Later,” he said.
    This was a long speech for him. The bartenders at Grogan’s are a closemouthed lot. It’s part of the job description.
    I sipped my Coke and scanned the room. There were a few familiar faces but no one I knew well enough to say hello to, and that was fine with me. I watched the movie. I could have been watching the same picture at home but there I’d been unable to watch anything, or even sit still. Here, wrapped in the smell of tobacco smoke and spilled beer, I felt curiously at ease.
    On the screen, Bette Davis sighed and tossed her head, looking younger than springtime.
    I managed to get lost in the movie, and then I got lost in thought, caught up in some sort of reverie. I came out of it when I heard my name mentioned. I turned, and there was Glenn Holtzmann. He was wearing a tan windbreaker over a checked sport shirt. It was the first time I’d seen him in anything other than a business suit.
    “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I went to Armstrong’s but it was too crowded. So I came here. What’s that you’re drinking, Guinness? Wait a minute, you’ve got ice in your glass. Is that how they serve it here?”
    “It’s Coca-Cola,” I said, “but they’ve got Guinness on draft, and I suppose they’ll give it to you with ice if that’s how you want it.”
    “I don’t want it at all,” he said, “with or without ice. What do I want?” Burke was right in front of us. He