Free Brooklyn Noir by Tim McLoughlin Page B

me to have Jameson’s Irish whiskey, that having been my father’s drink. I’d never considered myself much of a drinker. I liked a couple of beers on a Friday night, and perhaps twice a year I would get drunk. I almost never drank hard liquor, but this crew was insistent, they were matching me shot for shot, and they were paying. It was the sort of thing my father would have been adamant about.
    I began to reach for the photograph in my pocket several times and stopped. Finally I fished it out and showed it to the bartender. “Who is she, Marty?” I asked. “Any idea?”
    The manner in which he pretended to scrutinize it told me that he recognized the woman immediately. He looked at the picture with a studied perplexity, as though he would have had trouble identifying my father.
    “Wherever did you get such a thing?” he asked.
    “I found it in the basement, by my father’s shop.”
    “Ah. Just come across it by accident then.”
    The contempt in his voice seared through my whiskey glow, and left me as sober as when I’d entered. He knew, and if he knew they all knew. And a decision had been reached to tell me nothing.
    “Not by accident,” I lied. “My father told me where it was and asked me to get it.”
    Our eyes met for a moment. “And did he say anything about it?” Marty asked. “Were there no instructions or suggestions?”
    “He asked me to take care of it,” I said evenly. “To make everything all right.”
    He nodded. “Makes good sense,” he said. “That would be best served by letting the dead sleep, don’t you think? Forget it, son, let it lie.” He poured me another drink, sloppily, like the others, and resumed moving his towel over the bar, as though he could obliterate the mildewed stench of a thousand spilled drinks with a few swipes of the rag.
    I drank the shot down quickly and my buzz returned in a rush. I hadn’t been keeping track, but I realized that I’d had much more than what I was used to, and I was starting to feel dizzy. The rest of the men in the room looked the same as when I walked in, the same as when I was twelve. In the smoke-stained bar mirror I saw Frank Sanchez staring at me from a few stools away. He caught me looking and gestured for me to come down.
    “Sit, Danny,” he said when I got there. He was drinking boilermakers. Without asking, he ordered each of us another round. “What were you talking to Marty about?”
    I handed Frank the picture. “I was asking who the woman is.”
    He looked at it and placed it on the bar. “Yeah? What’d he say?”
    “He said to let it lie.”
    Frank snorted. “Typical donkey,” he said. “Won’t answer a straight question, but has all kinds of advice on what you should do.”
    From a distance in the dark bar I would have said that Frank Sanchez hadn’t changed much over the years, but I was close to him now, and I’d seen him only last night in the unforgiving fluorescent lighting of the funeral home. He’d been thin and handsome when I was a kid, with blue-black hair combed straight back, and the features and complexion of a Hollywood Indian in a John Wayne picture. He’d thickened in the middle over the years, though he still wasn’t fat. His reddish brown cheeks were illuminated by the roadmap of broken capillaries that seemed an entrance requirement for “regular” status at Olsen’s. His hair was still shockingly dark, but now with a fake Jerry Lewis sheen and plenty of scalp showing through in the back. He was a retired homicide detective. His had been one of the first Hispanic families in this neighborhood. I knew he’d moved to Fort Lee, New Jersey long ago, though my father said that he was still in Olsen’s every day.
    Frank picked up the picture and looked at it again, then looked over it at the two sloppy rows of bottles along the back bar. The gaps for the speed rack looked like missing teeth.
    “We’re the same,” he said. “Me and you.”
    “The same, how?”
    “We’re on the