Small Town

The record ended, and there was a commercial, and on the television set someone hit one over the ivy. A Met, evidently, because they had the usual shot of one of the Bleacher Bums throwing it back. Remarkable, he thought, that people still did that, showing their disdain for balls hit by anyone but their beloved hometown losers. Suppose you were from out of town, suppose you didn’t give two shits about the Cubs, and you caught a home run ball hit by the visiting team. Would they be able to pressure you into giving it back, the way Big Paul, Droopy-eyed Paul, pressured people into tipping him?

Another record played, the Stones with “Ruby Tuesday,” and he looked over and the beer was still there and the guy was still gone. Something wrong with the beer? He went over and sniffed it, and it smelled like beer, and he was going to take a sip and thought better of it. He got a fresh bottle of Tuborg from the cooler and poured an ounce or two into a glass and held it to the light. Clear enough, and he took a sip and it tasted fine.

He got two clean glasses, divided the remaining beer between them, and set them in front of the two movers. “Taste test,” he said. They gave him a look, shrugged, and sipped the beer.

“Well?”

“Tastes like Tuborg,” the tall one said.

“Meaning you saw the bottle. It taste all right?”

“It’s not going to win me over from the black stuff, if this is a marketing thing.”

“I just wondered if the case was off,” he said. “Guy ordered a beer, didn’t touch a drop. Look at it, full to the brim.”

“There a fly in it? That’d put a person off.”

“No fly, and wouldn’t you say something if there was?”

“This asshole? He’d drink it, fly and all.”

“Protein,” the other agreed. “You’re gonna drink, you gotta eat. Maybe he quit drinking.”

“He never even started,” Eddie said. “Not one drop.”

“Maybe he quit a while ago, and came in here to test himself. Ordered a drink and walked out without touching it.”

“He must have stared at it for half an hour.”

“There you go, man. Testing himself, proving he’s stronger than a bottle of Tuborg.”

“Anybody’s stronger than that Danish piss,” his friend said. “Let’s see him try it with Guinness.”

Earlier, when the papers were full of the Marilyn Fairchild murder, they’d had their share of curiosity seekers, drawn by the media attention. Corpse-sniffers, Lou called them. Lou had been on that night, and had served drinks to the woman and to Creighton, the man who’d walked out with her and later strangled her. (Or allegedly strangled her, as the papers were careful to put it, allegedly being accepted journalese for We know you did it but we don’t want your lawyer up our ass.)

The corpse-sniffers came mostly at night, hoping Lou could tell them something they hadn’t read in the tabloids. Funny thing was that Lou, working nights, never saw much of Creighton, who was more likely to come in and nurse a brew in the afternoon, a Beck’s or a St. Pauli Girl, enjoying the peace and quiet the same way Eddie did. He’d stop in occasionally at night — otherwise he and Fairchild would have missed each other, to the benefit of both of them, unless you believed in karma and kismet and destiny. Anyway, Lou served them that night, but it was Eddie who’d shot the shit with him many times, and you wouldn’t have figured him as a guy to do something like that, but then you never knew, did you?

One thing he did know, the mystery man in the cap wasn’t coming back for his Tuborg. Eddie carried the bottle and glass to the sink, and poured them out.

Now if there was anything the least bit important about the mystery man, he thought, then he, Eddie Ragan, had his hands full of evidence. Because the guy had almost certainly touched the bottle or the glass, hadn’t he? Eddie had set them both in front of the man, the glass topped with its creamy head, the half-full bottle beside it, and didn’t the man then take hold of them and move them an inch or two closer? Everybody did, it was a reflexive response, even if you weren’t going to take a drink right away.

Or, in this case, ever.

If he’d touched the glass or bottle, he’d probably left his fingerprints. Because he certainly hadn’t been wearing gloves. The cap was an odd touch on a mild day, but there were guys who never went anywhere without a cap, they felt naked without it. Gloves would have been ridiculous, though, gloves would have stuck out like a sore thumb (he had to grin at that one), so the guy had clearly been gloveless, and would have left prints.

An ambitious bartender, he thought, might slip the bottle and the glass into separate plastic bags and set them aside for when the police came calling. Or he might even ring them up over at the Sixth Precinct — he knew a couple of cops there, as far as that went. Hey, got a clue, he could tell them. Give it to the forensics team, lift the prints, check the FBI computer, find out who this dude is.