Free Thorazine Beach by Bradley Harris

Her blouse gapped, and I started thinking: boob job.
    “So…” She leaned in. “Jack.” She smiled. “Lovely to see you.” She did something throaty and wonderful and nineteen-thirties with the ‘o’ in
lovely
.
    “You too,” I said lamely, sure I couldn’t invest my own
lovely
with what she’d given hers.
    “Um…your voice is different, Barbara Jean.”
    Smile. “Speech. Elocutions lessons,” she said with obnoxiously immaculate articulation.
Private
lessons, she told me, with more than a touch of pride on private. A Miss Mary Hail-sham, she told me. Old school. “England, you know,” she said in a want-to-be-British way.
    Nikki wanted
in
on this, it was apparent. Last time she’d indulged anyone with table service was Mac’s cup of tea a few days back. And before that, months ago, a guy in a wheelchair—and even he got a sigh and a roll of Nikki’s eyes. Quite the conversation they’d had, Nikki and Barbara Jean, apparently. “Another latte for you, BJ,” Nikki said, setting it down. “On the house. And you, Jack? My treat.”
    “Oh, my,” I said. “Your discretion, Nikki. Thank you.”
    Nikki banged off something resembling a curtsy—for my benefit, I recognized, a kind of pantomimed sarcasm.
    “‘Bee-Jay,’ “Barbara quoted. “Charming, isn’t she? I haven’t been called that in years. Never used to like that, till now—it always felt so…”
    “Unseemly?” I filled in.
    “Yes, I suppose so,” she said.
    Was that a faint blush on those cheeks?
    “But I like it from
her
,” she said.
    I smiled blankly.
    “Lovely girl.”
    I held that smile.
    “I love young ladies like that,” she said. “It’s the spunk, I think. Have you known her long, Jack?”
    “Been spunked for several years, now. Since about the time—”
    “Oh, yes, since…well,” she said in a let’s-not-talk-about-it way.
    “Right.”
    “So…”
    “Yes.”
    “Jack, it’s been a very—”
    “Long time, indeed,” I said, nodding. I wanted to ask something in the what-the-hell’s-the-point-of-this vein, but nothing I was composing in my head matched the woman before me, even less the one I’d remembered. I’ve got rude, somehow, in my old age.
    “Well, Jack, I suppose you’ve been wondering why…”
    Thank you, Jesus
. “I had been.”
    “Well,” she said. “I did want to say hello, did want to bring you a casserole”—she laughed at that, turned serious. “And talk to you about…something.”
    Portentous. High control needs, my old shrink would have said. It was meant to make me ask. “And what is that something, Barbara Jean? Exactly.”
    “Blackmail,” she said with surprising directness, looked me square in the eye.
    I looked back, eye to eye. “Details?” I said.
    “That’s the gumshoe in you,” she said, smiling again. “I’d have thought you’d say, ‘Oh, Barbara Jean, I’m
so
sorry’—something like that.”
    There she was, the Barbara Jean of old—always needing to correct you on
something
.
    “I do, of course, feel that way. Must be a terrible—”
    “It is!”
    I leaned in, the way she had, nodding to Nikki’s bringing my coffee. A tall Americano, I noted, recalling that ‘tall,’ in Buck-Speak, means ‘short’. Uselessly small, criminally unflavourful. No cream, no sugar, and not a thing I’d ever drink voluntarily. Nikki avoided my look.
    “Barbara Jean, you’re clearly here to ask my help, my advice, something. In order to help, it’s details I need. Not meaning to be rude or presumptuous, but that’s where we need to go.”
    “Shall I begin at the beginning?” She looked like she was about to start back in high school.
    “Start in the middle,” I said. Then, remembering Eileen’s description of their talk, I decided I’d better manage this more closely. “What—exactly—are they blackmailing you
for
? Paint me a real tight picture.”
    My control-tactic registered on her face unpleasantly. “All right,” she said, a little coldness