Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) by Elizabeth Zelvin Page B

ordered out for pizza.”
    “What kind?”
    “My favorite, mushrooms and—oh, you! Jimmy, tell us what you got on God.”
    “I looked up his address for you.”
    “In the East Sixties? Some comedown to the Bowery. So did he really live there? Whose address is it?”
    “I don’t know if he lived there or was staying there or what. But the owner of the whole building is a Dr. Weill, which is the name of the sister that you gave me—Emily Brandon Weill.”
    “That’s the one he got along with,” I said. “Though I think he said there’d been some kind of rift. And she’s a doctor?”
    “No, it’s the husband, if that’s who he is. Dr. Samson Weill. I looked him up. He’s a plastic surgeon. Publishes occasionally in medical journals, so he’s not a quack. And he must make a bundle.”
    “If he owns a whole building in the Sixties, he must be loaded. Though she may have family money too. God had a trust fund. I don’t suppose you looked her up?”
    “O ye of little faith. Wellesley, Class of 1984, majored in anthropology. On the boards of several charities and her class reunion committee in the college alumni association. Alumnae. Three children: Brandon, Lucille Marie, and Duncan. All in private school.” He named a well known institution.
    “That’s the kind of place you register your kids for at birth,” Barbara said, “if you have a lot of money and want to make sure they get into Harvard.”
    “Yeah, that fits. Lucille Marie rides horses, competes in horse shows—she won some kind of trophy out in the Hamptons three years ago—and Brandon, the older boy, plays chess. Competitive chess. The little one danced in
The Nutcracker
this Christmas.”
    “A family of high achievers,” Barbara mused, “and Uncle God, the Bowery bum.”
    “Bum?” I said. “Now you’re hurting my feelings.”
    “I’m just saying how they’d think of it,” Barbara said. “You’re not a bum. You just think not drinking is no fun.”
    “Isn’t it?”
    “And when you do drink, you can’t function.”
    “Not so hot,” I admitted. “Sounds like a bum to me.”
    “Are we having fun yet?” Jimmy chipped in.
    “He doesn’t mean that,” Barbara told me. “He just says it all the time because it’s in the ACOA handbook.” There is no handbook for adult children of alcoholics. But I knew what she meant.

Chapter Twelve
    Barbara got off the crosstown bus at Lexington Avenue, shaking her head as she did every time over the inconvenient demise of the bus stop at Park Avenue. The Christmas lights strung overhead across East 86th Street every year had been dismantled, to her disappointment. But on Lex, shop windows still glittered, hoping to lure buyers for their unsold holiday stock. She had meant to take the subway down to the Sixties, but she decided to walk. The air held a hint of January thaw. The city smelled and looked less wintry than it had, if not springlike yet. All traces of the last big snow had vanished. Since the last act of even the most spectacular blizzard in the city consisted of raggedy mounds of blackened, icy snow liberally stained with bright yellow dog urine barring the egress of cars unfortunate enough to be parked on the street when it snowed, she wasn’t sorry.
    She window shopped her way down the crowded avenue, content to look without covetousness. She and Jimmy had celebrated the holidays to satiation point. He had introduced her years ago to the Christmases he’d never had: mysterious, artfully wrapped packages heaped under the tree, a fresh cut evergreen bristling with tinsel and hung about with minor works of art, and peace, if not on earth, at least in the family. She had chipped in the secular Jewish American’s Chanukah: a menorah, a present every night for the eight nights of the holiday, and abundant potato latkes made from scratch with the traditional blood sacrifice produced by knuckles scraped as the raw potatoes were grated.
    Emily Weill’s address in the Sixties must