Beware the Solitary Drinker by Cornelius Lehane Page B

holding his face up gave out on him. “Shit,” Peter said, downing the rest of his scotch in one swallow.

Chapter Five
    A couple of mornings later I woke up once more in Betsy Blumberg’s bed. We’d hooked up at the Terrace in the early hours of the morning, drinking brandy at the bar and snorting coke in the ladies room in the basement. On one of the trips to the cellar, we began necking in the ladies room. Later, we staggered off into the night, wrestled each other down the street and into her building, where I opened her blouse and unbuckled her bra in the elevator while she opened my fly. We fondled our way to the fourteenth floor and fucked on the rug inside her apartment door before we were out of our clothes.
    â€œI thought you had a new girlfriend,” Betsy said in the morning as we ate bagels that she’d gone out to the corner for before I’d even pulled myself out of her bed.
    I didn’t say anything, though I knew what she was talking about.
    Betsy grumbled, “Angelina’s sister. I’ve seen you with her—a high-class broad.”
    â€œShe’s very nice,” I said. “But she’s gone back to Massachusetts.”
    â€œWhat a thing to say! I saw you moon around after her, and all you can say is that she’s nice?” Betsy regarded me sadly. “You acted differently around her. I bet you haven’t even noticed. When she came into the bar that time, she was the most important person there for you. It’s never like that when I walk into anywhere.”
    â€œYou just haven’t found your niche yet, Betsy.”
    â€œI don’t think I have one,” she said even more sadly.
    Betsy was easy, but not at all in the negative sense of the word. She was one of the good people who make it easy to get along with them, who don’t have prerequisites for friendship. It’s a way of being I like, one of the reasons I prefer the winos to many of the solid citizens I’ve run into. And I didn’t feel dishonest about sometimes fucking her because she knew I really did care for her.
    Why I was thinking this, sitting across a bagel from Betsy Blumberg, had to do with something I’d thought of the night before then lost in the fog: Betsy would know about men in the neighborhood.
    â€œDo you think Danny murdered Angelina?” I asked her.
    She looked at me strangely. “Don’t the police think he did?”
    â€œDo you?”
    She wrinkled her eyebrows and seemed to think about it.
    â€œDo you think he’s capable of it?” I asked when she didn’t say anything.
    â€œEvery man I’ve ever met has seemed capable of murder.”
    â€œIncluding Danny?”
    â€œI guess,” she said thoughtfully. “But I wouldn’t think he’d kill Angelina; they were too much alike.”
    â€œWho do you think would?”
    â€œSomeone who had a weird idea of her. Men made her into things. She was something different for everyone, like one of those women who make a living acting out men’s fantasies.”
    â€œWhy not Danny, then?”
    â€œHe’s like her, the both of them like they weren’t nearly hard enough for the city. Despite being cool and all that stuff, they were babies. Besides, Danny didn’t have hang-ups about women. Women like him. He’s really natural about sex. Not hung up on it, if you know what I mean.”
    Hung up on it myself, I wasn’t sure I did. My own fetishes rose before me: tiny feet and slim-legged girls in summer dresses. What was Angelina in my fantasies?
    Betsy might have a point, but I wasn’t about to get involved in other people’s sex fantasies; this was too sordid and unpleasant a pursuit even for me. Privacy was a reasonable right. Still, I wondered what sex fantasies Angelina knew about. I thought about who in the neighborhood she might have slept with. Thinking this over, I got my internal cameras going and began a newsreel