The Right Wrong Number: An Ed Earl Burch Novel Read online

  She giggled and gave a short Nazi salute — not the full stiff arm, just the casual upward flip of the hand Hitler used in all those candid newsreel shots.

  “Sieg Heil, y’all. By Gott-in-Himmel, yav-ohwl. Silly squarehead. How can a girl just take a powder from work just to follow a guy down to Mexico on a weekday for some divin’ even if he fucks like a tiger? What good is all that? And what good is he out of bed? The man would diddle a snake even with you watchin.’”

  She was speaking to her empty glass, one of those oversized, overturned cones on a stem that Louie used to serve up Silver Bullets. Louie poured a drinker’s drink and his martinis were the biggest guns in the house, a signature of sorts. A tipped glass and an olive marked the sign above his door and the T-shirts he sold behind the bar.

  With the slow precision of the thoroughly plowed, she placed the glass on the bar and picked up a pack of Salem Lights, tapping out a cigarette, smoothly placing it on her lip and moving her hand to drop the pack back on the bar, missing by three inches and not hearing the plastic thump when all those Grade A smokes hit the floor.

  Boston Sean, the bartender with the face of an altar boy, the body of a jockey and the soul of a bookie, stepped up quickly to light her cigarette and swipe the shaker away. She held his wrist lightly, inhaled and locked her eyes on Sean’s.

  “Thanks. And what’s the name of the man who makes such great martinis only to take them away when a girl really needs one?”

  Sean gave his name, moving his mouth around the toothpick that hung from his lip so the sliver never moved. She changed her grip to a handshake.

  “Sean. Savannah. You’re going to pour me the rest of my drink, right Sean?”

  “Not if I can avoid it.”

  He said that with a slight Southie accent and a smile. She smiled back, control and poise fighting the alcohol, erasing all the slur and street talk from her voice.

  “You can’t and you shouldn’t worry. You’re going to pour, watch me drink it down and then you’re going to call me a cab.”

  “What if you fall down? I’d hate you to mess up that nice suit.”

  “Sean, I don’t plan on falling down. And if I do, I’ll get this big guy over here to pick me up. He seems interested enough to eavesdrop, I’m sure I can get him interested enough to help me put my foot back on the rail if worse comes to worst.”

  That broke the bubble that surrounds perfect strangers drinking shoulder to shoulder in a bar. He took his time, sipping Maker’s Mark from his shot glass, chasing it with ice water from a juice glass, tapping ash that wasn’t there from the Lucky that burned near the knuckles of his left hand. He turned and looked her up and down. Slowly.

  “It looks like an interesting foot. I’d try to keep it on the bar rail.”

  “Ah, he speaks, Sean. Thought he might be one of those true-life statues you see. You know the ones, Sean? The businessman eating lunch off his briefcase, the bum sleeping on the park bench with the newspaper over his face, the fat man scratching his belly in the lawn chair?”

  “I’m the Disney version — the regular bellied up to the bar. An automaton. Look.”

  He took a sip of Maker’s.

  “I drink.”

  He took a drag.

  “I smoke.”

  He smiled, turned away from her, winked at Sean and took a parting shot over his left shoulder.

  “I even listen to drunk women rattle on about scuba diving and German boyfriends. Sieg Heil, y’all.”

  He flipped his hand up Hitler style then finished the Maker’s shot. She cracked him across the back of the head with a half-filled bottle of Old Style, the pissy beer of Louie’s beloved Chicago, catching him where his hairline ended and his bald pate began, opening the type of shallow head cut that only looks like a major artery has been popped open.

  The blow caused him to pitch forward, his forearm and forehead plowing across the bar, sending his glasses, his ashtray, his Luckies, his Zippo and his ice water flying over the bottles in the well and onto the duckboards near Sean’s feet. As his head cleared and his ears stopped ringing, he could hear the cackles from a table full of regulars — Mike the Mick, Lizard Brad and Mister Injured Reserve, most likely.

  “That’s for mocking me, you smartass sonuvabitch! Do it again and I’ll crack you again.”

  She was red-faced fury, curls flying, the blood and anger coarsening the surface of her cheeks and forehead like rough-cured concrete. The bar was dead silent with the sudden quiet that hits when the church choir sings the final amen to a long, soaring hymn about God’s saving grace.

  Sean handed him his glasses. He nodded and put them on.

  “Another Maker’s, Sean.”

  “You’re bleedin’, man.”

  “I know. Another Maker’s, bossman. And a drink for yourself, the lady and those assholes behind me.”

  “She’s flagged and 86ed.”

  “Give her one for the road, Sean.”

  “I can’t do that. She smacked a regular — Louie’s rules, man.”

  “And the regular wants to buy her a drink. Do it before I bleed all over your damn bar, Sean.”

  “I’ll pour what’s left of this one, but that’s it, Burch.”

  He could feel the cut begin to heat up, tighten and swell. He could feel the wet track of blood through his hair and on his neck. He could hear the guffaws from the boys.

  “Better polish up them pickup lines, boy. She ain’t buyin’ that one.”

  “She’s a southpaw, Burch. You ain’t worth a shit against southpaws.”

  “Sign her up, Double E. She’s like all your exes — drunk and difficult.”

  “Hey, Burch — you don’t have to marry that one to know she’ll clean your clock.”

  He said nothing. He could feel the heat of her stare. He looked straight ahead. He waited for Sean to pour his shot, rattle the shaker of martini remnants and pull down a bottle of Jameson for himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Young Suzy the Virgin Waitress, brown bangs over black, button eyes, rack up a tray of beers for the boys.

  The wild woman was standing to his left, wobbly and breathing hard. He didn’t look her way. He could hear her breathe, but only saw her when she weaved into the edge of his vision. She set the Old Style bottle on the bar with slow precision and hoisted the spun glass cone that held her final Silver Bullet of the night.

  “Wait just a second, please.”

  “What?”

  “I bought you that drink. I’m bleeding because of you. The least you can do is wait when I ask you to.”

  He picked up his Maker’s and turned toward the boys.

  “Ladies, gentlemen. Grab your beers and join me in a traditional toast.”

  Chairs scraped the floor as the boys stood up.

  “Repeat after me. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!”

  “IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!”

  “Again. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!”

  “IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!”

  He threw back the Maker’s, tilted his face toward the ceiling and began to howl. The guys and gals barked back, yipping and yowling to the laughter of the crowd.

  Barks started breaking out across the bar, from SMU youngsters in baseball caps, baggy shorts and page boys, from a table of drunk lawyers in dark suits, French cuffs and bad tie-and-suspender combos that looked like amoebas with the bends, from Fast Sketch Harry and the East Dallas Lifetime Waiters Association, from Delores the Dwarf Accountant and the Slut Sister Real Estate Choir. From everybody except a tall, round-shouldered man with a beer gut, a pink golf shirt, squinty gray eyes, lank black hair that hung to his shoulders and a badly pitted face.

  He slapped Burch in the chest with the back of a hard-knuckled hand.

  “You think you’re funny, doncha?”

  Burch started eyeing the bar for a loose bottle. The man slapped him in the chest again.

  “Doncha?”

  “Mister, when a woman smacks you in the head with a beer bottle for no damn reason, you
got to make a joke out of it. What do you want me to do, smack her back?”

  “Seems like she had plenty reason to crack on you.”

  “Care to name just one?”

  “You made fun of her with that little Hitler routine.”

  “Come on, son. You can do better than that.”

  “I don’t have to. All I have to do is say I don’t like your damn looks and smartass barkin’ and tell you I’m the sumbitch that’s gonna kick your ass.”

  Burch saw the loose bottle he was looking for. It was too late. His glasses flew over the spouted bottles in the bar well one more time. His Zippo and his Luckies, soggy and dented from their last trip to the duckboards, stayed put.

  He didn’t get up.

  The barking resumed. So did the laughter.

  He didn’t hear it.

  “My husband’s been murdered.”

  “Hmmmm — no emotion in your delivery. Do better with the cops, Irish. Might make you less of a prime suspect.”

  “Or he might not be.”

  “Might not be what — dead? Or murdered? Is this a multiple-choice test? Can I pick D — none of the above? What do you want to hire me for, Irish? To take an SAT?”

  “Knock it off, Eddie. I’m in trouble and it ain’t from the cops. It’s serious. And it’s business — big time business with some big players.”

  “I didn’t think it was love. With you, it’s sex, money or action. Maybe all three in the same package. Did you get the trifecta with this dude, Irish? Or just left with the short end when the cops came knockin’?”

  He called her Irish because her last name was Devlin. And in a sentimental moment brought on by one Maker’s beyond his normal whiskey curve, he trotted down to the Bodine’s Fine Cigars on Commerce in the first flushed days of their affair and had that nickname engraved on the side of the best-known product from Bradford, Pa.

  The new Zippo flashed in the winter sunlight. And there were the fresh-carved letters — Irish. That’s what he called her, but the genes that dominated her face, frame and temper came from her mother, a Czech émigré. Her father was a saloon sport and a Radio Free Europe announcer; she inherited his smooth words and capacity for alcohol.

  She slipped away the night he got decked. So did everybody else in the bar before he came to. Sean and Louie’s brother, Chris, stretched him out across an empty booth in the back, his long legs and snakeskin boots splayed out into the aisle, a wet towel under his head and the bleeding cut, nose pointed toward the white neon ring of an old Mobil Oil clock with the winged red horse flying between midnight and six o’clock.

  When his eyes opened, it was well past closing. His jaw was stiff and swollen. His head throbbed. The overhead lights were out. So were the neon signs in the windows. The clock was still lit. A light was on in the kitchen and in Louie’s cubbyhole office. He could smell cigar smoke. The boss was in, working the books.

  A small desk lamp bounced harsh glare off the wide, white pages of a ledger, casting Louie’s craggy face in an up-from-the-furnaces-of-hell light, like the old Life magazine portrait of the patriarch of the Krupp family, cannon makers for the Kaiser, for Hitler and for the west half of the Germany that followed.

  A Partagas double corona jutted from the bar owner’s bushy, iron-gray beard, giving him the appearance of an aging barbudo from Castro’s Rebel Army. The castors of his oak desk chair squealed as he swiveled around and shook Burch’s hand.

  “Mister Burch — always a pleasure. Rough night in Jericho, I hear.”

  “Sideswiped by a blonde and a bubba. Usual Saturday night in the D.”

  Burch never called his home city by its name or the nickname touristas and the Chamber of Commerce hung on it. To him, it was a merciless, mirthless town unworthy of any term of endearment, worthy of only a single initial and an anglicized version of the formal construction Hispanics used when referring to servants or a family member they had little fondness for. As in, the Maria, the Pedro, the Sebastian — the D.

  “Least you quit bleedin’. Thought we might have to take you in for stitches. Marty gave you the once over and said you’d live so we let you stay zonked.”

  “Nurse Marty. You let that chesty thing fondle me and didn’t bother to give me a wake-up call?”

  “Hey Burch, if them tits of hers aren’t enough to wake you up, too fuckin’ bad, I say.”

  Louie’s voice was an even mix of gravel, whiskey and smoke. When he started to laugh, it turned into a deep cough. The cigar never left his mouth.

  “You still keep a private bottle back here?”

  “Only ouzo.”

  Burch made a face.

  “You know a sick man shouldn’t drink licorice. What happened to that bottle of Barton you used to pour for your favorite customers?”

  “Top shelf on your right, next to Ditka and the boys. Bring the bottle back and we’ll have a few pops.”

  Burch wandered behind the bar, searching in the dim light for the photo of the Chicago Bears and their coach, grabbing the bottle of Very Old Barton bourbon and two short glasses. He walked back to Louie’s cubbyhole, feeling unsteady and light-headed.

  Louie poured — ouzo for himself, bourbon for his guest. They drank. Burch smacked his lips and pronounced himself healed.

  “Good whiskey — all a man ever needs when he gets his bell rung.”

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret — you’re really drinking Evan Williams poured into a Very Old Barton bottle.”

  “Ol’ Evan makes a fine whiskey. If I could find it everywhere, I’d drink it. Which is why I drink Maker’s Mark. It’s always around and it ain’t an uppity bourbon that tourists drink to keep in touch with the masses. It ain’t all that high dollar, so Greek `tenders won’t try to switch it for something shitty like Cabin Still.”

  “Cabin Still, huh? Never heard of it.”

  “You’re missing one of life’s rawer pleasures, son. It’s the Sportsman’s Bourbon. Guaranteed to be less than a year old.”

  Louie laughed then coughed. He poured out two more shots.

  “Who was my unruly date?”

  “Don’t know her. Neither does Sean. Little Hutch says she’s been in a time or two. Not a tourist. Not a SMUster. Not a Park City Ranger drinking in coach. Random traffic. White-collar type. Business suit and briefcase, he says. And always a martini.”

  “The right drink for this bar.”

  “Not for her. She’s 86ed for life.”

  “Don’t be a hardass. You can’t toss a woman who drinks that much and looks that good.”

  “Hey, she whacked you with a beer bottle, opened your scalp and got you clocked by a bubba. Can’t have that happen in my bar, not to one of my regulars, no matter how many martinis she buys.”

  “Didn’t know you cared.”

  “Hey, the broad fucks with my regulars, she’s fuckin’ with my bottom line. Bad for the business.”

  “Well tell Hutch to give her my name and number when he throws her out. She at least owes me dinner and drinks.”

  Louie shook his head.

  “You don’t learn do you?”

  “Not since I left school.”

  She called five days later. From a pay phone. Mad because she just got tossed out of Louie’s. By Hutch. Who gave her Burch’s name and phone number. Sometimes life works that way. Most times you wind up wishing it didn’t.

  She called him an asshole when he said she owed him dinner and drinks. She hung up before he could call her a bitch. She rang back an hour later. His machine picked up that call — a terse time and place for dinner the next night. The message did not include a rude name this time.

  Steaks at the Hoffbrau. Drinks at the San Francisco Rose, up on the bar where the regulars hung out, poured with a wink and a leer by Tony the Softball King, who always teased him about the young heartbreakers he squired and the doubles he always ordered after they left him a flaming wreck.

  The night started cool and smooth and ended up hot — clothes flying, bodies banging tog
ether, sheets tangled. Lots of laughter. Lots of lewd talk backed by action that matched the words. He was hooked again and they both knew it. She wasn’t and they both knew that too.

  By the end of a week, he had told her about his three exes and she knew every emotional wound on his soul. By the end of three months, she was using that knowledge to add fresh cuts and gouges of her very own.

  The garden-variety slashes came first — the all-nighters when he went out of town, then the all-nighters when he was in town. And his favorite — the date canceled at the last second because an old friend just hit town. The phone would just ring-ring-ring in his ear when he couldn’t help it and made those three a.m. calls. And those old friends never had a woman’s name. It was a man. Always. Rick, John, Bill, Ricardo. Never Klaus though. She Sieg Heiled him out of her black book.

  “Just because your first wife cheated on you doesn’t mean every woman does. It doesn’t mean I do. I’m with you — what more do you need me to say? That I love you? I can’t say that so I won’t. I can say I’m with you and don’t want to see anybody else. And I don’t.”

  She said these lines perfectly, like the smooth talk she used on Sean that first night at Louie’s, nudging him her way with the calm sureness of a pickpocket until Sean yielded his bartender’s eye for the terminally drunk and poured that last Silver Bullet. The set of her jaw was just right. The tone was just emotional enough but cool at the same time. And the words had their desired effect — you stepped away from your best instincts, you stayed in one spot until she was ready to blow you down and blow you off.

  “Look — how long have you been poking this doxie?”

  “Doxie?”

  “Yeah — doxie, frail, skirt, gash. That’s the ’30s riff on women who are no good. Want me to go modern? Okay — bitch, cunt, whore. Want me to go Gloria Steinem? Okay — a woman exercising the wandering sexual prerogatives that men thought were only theirs. Want me to go Western? Okay — no-good, two-timin’ cunt whore bitch. Got it? Because she’s got you, my friend. By the cojones. And fist-fucking you with the other hand for good measure.”