The driver nodded at Abner, then backed away and quietly left the bar.
Miss Spence was wearing a full-length mink coat, thick pearls around her tiny neck, and layers of thick rouge and mascara that did little to hide the fact that she was at least ninety years old. David admired her immediately. His own grandmother was ninety-two and strapped to a bed in a nursing home, absent from this world, and here was this grand old dame boozing it up before lunch.
She ignored him. Abner finished mixing her drink, a baffling combination of ingredients. “One Pearl Harbor,” he said as he presented it to her. She slowly lifted it to her mouth, took a small sip with her eyes closed, swirled the booze around her mouth, then offered Abner the slightest of heavily wrinkled grins. He seemed to breathe again.
David, not quite plastered but well on his way, leaned over and said, “Come here often?”
Abner gulped and showed both palms to David. “Miss Spence is a regular, and she prefers to drink in silence,” he said, panicky. Miss Spence was taking another sip, again with her eyes closed.
“She wants to drink in silence in a bar?” David asked in disbelief.
“Yes!” Abner snapped.
“Well, I guess she picked the right bar,” David said, flopping an arm around and taking in the emptiness of the pub. “This place is deserted. Do you ever have a crowd around here?”
“Quiet,” Abner urged. His face said, “Just be cool for a while.”
But David kept on. “I mean, you’ve had just two customers all morning, me and old Eddie down there, and we all know that he doesn’t pay his tab.”
At the moment, Eddie was lifting his coffee cup in the general direction of his face but was having trouble finding his mouth. Evidently, he did not hear David’s comment.
“Knock it off,” Abner growled. “Or I’ll ask you to leave.”
“Sorry,” David said and went silent. He had no desire to leave because he had no idea where to go.
The third sip did the trick and loosened things up a little. Miss Spence opened her eyes and looked around. Slowly, and with an ancient voice, she said, “Yes, I come here often. Monday through Saturday. And you?”
“My first visit,” David said, “but I doubt it’s my last. After today, I’ll probably have more time to drink and more reasons for doing so. Cheers.” He leaned across with his pint of lager and ever so carefully touched her glass.
“Cheers,” she said. “And why are you here, young man?”
“It’s a long story, and getting longer. Why are you here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Habit, I guess. Six days a week for how long, Abner?”
“At least twenty years.”
She apparently did not want to hear David’s long story. She took another sip and looked as though she wanted to nod off. David was suddenly sleepy too.
CHAPTER 5
Helen Zinc arrived at the Trust Tower a few minutes after noon. Driving downtown, she had tried to call and text her husband for the umpteenth time, with no recent success. At 9:33 he had sent her a text message instructing her not to worry, and at 10:42 he’d sent his second and final text, in which he had said: “No swaet. Am ok. Don’t wory.”
Helen parked in a garage, hurried down the street, and entered the atrium of the building. Minutes later she stepped off the elevator on the ninety-third floor. A receptionist led her to a small conference room where she waited alone. Though it was lunchtime, the Rogan Rothberg culture frowned on anyone leaving the building to eat. Good food and fresh air were almost taboo. Occasionally, one of the big partners would take a client out for a splashy marathon, an expensive lunch that the client would ultimately pay for through the time-honored tricks of file padding and fee gouging, but as a general rule—though unwritten—the associates and lesser partners grabbed a quick sandwich from a machine. On a typical day, David had both breakfast and lunch at his desk, and it was not unusual to have dinner there as well. He once bragged to Helen he had billed three different clients an hour each as he shoved down a smoked tuna with chips and a diet soda. She hoped he was only joking.
Though she wasn’t sure of the exact number, he had put on at least thirty pounds since their wedding day. He ran marathons back then, and the extra weight was not a problem yet. But the steady diet of bad food along with a near-complete absence of exercise worried both of them. At Rogan Rothberg, the hour between 12:00 and 1:00 was no different from any other hour of the day or night.
It was Helen’s second visit to the office in five years. Spouses were not excluded, but they were not invited either. There was no reason for her to be there, and, given the avalanche of horror stories he brought home, she had no desire to see the place or spend time with the people. Twice a year she and David dragged themselves to some dreadful Rogan Rothberg social gathering, some miserable outing designed to foster camaraderie among the battered lawyers and their neglected spouses. Invariably, these turned into sloppy drinking parties with behavior that was embarrassing and impossible to forget. Take a bunch of exhausted lawyers, ply them with booze, and things get ugly.
A year earlier, on a party boat a mile out on Lake Michigan, Roy Barton had tried to grope her. If he hadn’t been so drunk, he may have succeeded, and that would have caused serious problems. For a week she and David argued about what to do. David wanted to confront him, then complain to the firm’s Standards Committee. Helen said no, it would only harm David’s career. There were no witnesses, and the truth was that Barton probably didn’t remember what he’d done. With time, they stopped talking about the incident. After five years she had heard so many Roy Barton stories that David refused to mention his boss’s name at home.
Suddenly there he was. Roy walked into the small conference room with a snarl on his face and demanded, “Helen, what’s going on here?”
“Funny, I have the same question,” she shot back. Mr. Barton, as he preferred to be called, ran over people by barking first and trying to embarrass. She would have none of it.
“Where is he?” he barked.
“You tell me, Roy,” she said.
Lana, the secretary, and Al and Lurch appeared together, as if they’d been subpoenaed by the same marshal. Quick introductions were made as Roy closed the door. Helen had spoken to Lana many times on the phone but had never met her.
Roy looked at Al and Lurch and said, “You two, tell us exactly what happened.” They tag-teamed through their version of David Zinc’s last elevator ride and without the slightest bit of embellishment presented a fairly clear picture of a troubled man who’d simply snapped. He was sweating, breathing hard, pale, and he actually dived headfirst back into the elevator, landing on its floor, and, just as the door closed, they heard him laughing.
“He was fine when he left home this morning,” Helen assured them, as if to emphasize the point that the crack-up was the firm’s fault and not hers.
“You,” Roy barked in the direction of Lana. “You’ve talked to him.”
Lana had her notes. She had spoken to him twice, then he stopped answering the phone. “In the second conversation,” she said, “I got the clear impression that he was drinking. His tongue was a bit thick; his syllables were not as sharp.”
Roy glared at Helen as if she were to blame.
“Where would he go?” Roy demanded.
“Oh, the usual place, Roy,” Helen said. “The same place he always goes when he cracks up at 7:30 in the morning and gets plastered.”