Small Town

“Hey, Eddie,” he said.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” A nice easy smile, you had to say that for him. “You gonna show me that picture again?”

“You remember, huh?”

“I may not remember every last person who showed me that picture, as many as there’ve been. You I remember. Bushmill’s, right?”

“Actually it’s Jamesons.”

“Hey, close enough. Rocks or water back?”

He took it with water back, and while he sipped the water he nodded for a refill. Part of the job, on or off the clock. You go to bars, you want to get information from bartenders, you can’t sit there sipping a Coke.

And, watching Ragan do it again, he remembered that, by God, he had been drinking Bushmill’s the last time he’d come in. He’d stopped someplace else first and that was the only Irish they had, and it went down well enough, so he stayed with it at the Kettle. He thought of telling Eddie he was right after all, but why bother? What difference did it make?

“What I wanted to ask,” he said. “Forget the picture I showed you.”

“You and everybody else, but fine, I’ll be happy to forget it.”

“What I was wondering,” he said, “was if you happened to recall a fellow, probably came in here by himself...”

“I get lots of those.”

Fucking moron. “Didn’t say much,” he went on patiently. “Maybe didn’t speak at all, but he ordered a drink and then never touched it. Stood there or sat there for a while and then—”

“Walked out and left it there,” Ragan said. “Tuborg!”

“Tuborg?”

“That’s what he drank, except he didn’t. Just like you said, the sonofabitch sat there with the bottle and the glass in front of him, and next thing I knew he was gone, and he never took so much as a sip of that beer. I thought he stepped out for a minute, I thought he went to the john, I even wondered if he did a Lenny Bruce and died there. Gone, no forwarding. I never saw him again.”

“Did you ever see him before?”

“I don’t think so. I know I never saw him pull that shit before, because that I would have remembered.”

“What did he look like, Eddie?”

“I dunno. Older guy, wore a cap. You see an older guy in a cap, that’s all you see, you know what I mean? Anyway, I got a lousy memory for names and faces. Drinks, that’s something different. I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles it was a Tuborg he ordered. Shit, if you’re not gonna drink it, why go for the imported stuff? Rolling Rock’s good enough if all you’re gonna do is look at it.”

“You remember his voice?”

Eddie was leaning on the bar, propped up on his elbows. He screwed up his face and scratched his head, and Galvin decided he looked like a fucking monkey, found himself checking for an opposable thumb.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t know that I ever heard his voice. You see the Tuborg sign? I think he pointed to it, and I said Tuborg? and he nodded. Or we got Tuborg coasters. Maybe he pointed to one of them. What’s sure is what kind of beer it is, that part I wouldn’t forget. You know, I could of sworn you had Bushmill’s last time you were here.”

Jesus, he thought, would there ever be a time he let something slide without having it come back to bite him in the ass? Evidently not. He said, “You know, I’ve been thinking, and it was. I never order Bushmill’s, but that particular day...” And there he was, delivering the whole fucking explanation, and this moron was nodding along happily, thrilled to have gotten something right for a change.

And now he could drag out the picture. “Eddie,” he said, “could this have been him?”

“That’s the same picture? Holy shit, are you telling me the Carpenter was here watching a Tuborg go flat in front of him?”

“Does it look like him?”

“Jesus, is it? Like I said, I never really looked at him. I have to say it could be.”

A definite maybe, he thought.

“When was this, Eddie?”

“There’s a good question. I’m thinking. Been a few months, that’s as close as I can come.”

He wasn’t a lawyer, wasn’t in court. Where did it say he couldn’t lead a witness?

He said, “Eddie, you figure it was around the time Marilyn Fairchild got killed?”

The monkey face, indicating Deep Thought. “You know, that’s right when it was.”

“Oh?”

“Like maybe one, two, three days later. You want to know how come I know? Because I was thinking, suppose I get asked about this. And it was that murder put me in that frame of mind.”

“And this would have been in the afternoon?”

“Just about this time of day. Nice and quiet, the way it is now.”

“Who else was here, do you happen to recall?”

“Well, Max was here. Max the Poet, he’s always here. Hey, Max!”

The wine drinker looked up, turned. Long face, wispy beard, long fingers wrapped around a glass of the house red. I get like that, Galvin thought, somebody please shoot me.

“Max,” Ragan said, “you remember that guy, couple of months ago, ordered a Tuborg and didn’t drink it?”

Max thought it over. “I drink wine,” he said, and turned away.

Did that mean he wanted a drink bought for him before he remembered anything? Galvin asked what the hell that was supposed to mean, and Ragan shrugged and said that was Max, that’s how he was, and he didn’t remember shit.