Death Will Tank Your Fish Read online

  DEATH WILL TANK YOUR FISH

  Elizabeth Zelvin

  OUTSIDER BOOKS

  Death Will Tank Your Fish

  "Sure, I'll feed your fish," I said. "No problem."

  "You gotta promise, Bruce," Neil said. "Those little fellas mean a lot to me."

  The Monday night AA meeting in the High Episcopal church at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 90th Street had just ended. As we stood on the street outside, the smoke and babble of recovering alcoholics bonding eddied around us.

  "I know, man, I know."

  Neil was probably the only alcoholic in town whose story about hitting bottom involved stumbling home in a blackout and crash landing in a tankful of guppies. Apart from that, we'd heard it all before in the church basements of New York: the shattered glass, the brokenhearted children bawling, and the soon-to-be-ex-wife screeching as she kicked him out. How does an alcoholic make amends for a two-hundred-guppy mistake? If you've flushed your dead, you can't apologize or visit their grave. All Neil could do was replace the tank and take very, very good care of it.

  "It would break the kids' hearts if it happened again." Neil lit another cigarette from the stub of the last and ground the old one into the pavement with his heel. "And Angie would kill me."

  Angie was his ex. We'd all played in the streets together, back when the yuppie Upper East Side was working-class Yorkville. Angie's mom had been a woman who never forgave or forgot, especially broken glass. I knew, from when I'd pitched a memorable curve ball right into her living room window. Angie had turned out just like her.

  "So give me the key." I held out my hand, and he forked it over, along with instructions—guppies, care and feeding of—and directions to his apartment that I didn't need. I knew where he lived: in his parents' old rent-controlled apartment, like me.

  "I'll only be gone a couple of days," he said.

  "I got it, dude," I said. "Food's on the foyer table. Sprinkle it across the top, check that the heater's on, say the Serenity Prayer, and it's a wrap."

  Neil growled low in his throat. His Higher Power had not yet lifted his temper.

  "It's not a joke, man! I don't want those little guys to end up floating on the top of the tank."

  They didn't. When I walked into his living room around noon on Tuesday, fish food in hand, I found him face down on the floor with the back of his head crumpled and bloody. The tank was shattered because he'd fallen on it. The dead guppies were scattered not only around him but on his shirt and jeans. There were even a few in his hair.

  "He was supposed to be out of town," I told the cops. "He gave me the key last night."

  "Any witnesses, Mr. Kohler?"

  Yeah, about five dozen smoke-filled sober drunks. Should I remain anonymous? No. Neil was dead, and my best friend Jimmy wouldn't want to see me in the slammer. He'd been drinking coffee and schmoozing a few feet away when Neil handed me the key. I'd shown it to him before we said goodbye. He knew Neil from the old neighborhood as well as AA.

  "And this morning, Mr. Kohler?"

  All I'd done was get up, flush the system with coffee, and walk the few blocks to Neil's.

  "What kind of work do you do, Mr. Kohler?"

  I was still temping, a recovery job that didn't interfere with my real life in those church basements. I hadn't called the temp agency this morning. Now I was sorry I'd rolled over and gone back to sleep instead. No alibi. But they wouldn't find my fingerprints on anything but the fish food.

  "I didn't do it," I told my friends Jimmy and Barbara in Starbucks a few hours later. My encounter with the cops had left me in grave need of a triple espresso latte.

  "Do the cops know that?" Jimmy asked.

  "Did they search you for guppies?" Barbara asked.

  "If it had happened this morning," I said, "his clothes would have been soaked. That tank held two hundred gallons. But his shirt was dry. Besides, if I'd killed him, I wouldn't have called them."

  "So who wanted Neil dead?" Barbara looked like a robin with a worm: bright-eyed and perky. It would be deerstalker hats for three again for sure.

  "I'd put Angie at the top of the list," I said.

  "She never coshed anyone back in school," Jimmy said.

  "She was a thrower," I said. A shoe, stiletto heel first. An algebra textbook heavy enough to raise a classic goose egg. A live mouse.

  "I could go talk to her." Barbara's eyes sparkled. She loves to hear about our dysfunctional childhoods, since she's a nice Jewish girl from Queens with the kind of parents we only saw on TV.

  Jimmy and I looked at each other.

  "Naaah," we said simultaneously.

  "Why not?"

  "She's not, um, psychologically oriented," Jimmy said.

  "Probably paste you one in the mouth if you said, 'And how do you feel about that?'" I translated.

  "Not as a counselor," Barbara said.

  "Yeah, right," I said, because Jimmy was too nice to say it. We both knew Barbara could seldom resist playing shrink when she got the chance.

  "Woman to woman."

  "Forget it."

  "So one of you go see her."

  "It had better be Jimmy," I said. "Angie and I have history." In tenth grade, Angie had flirted with me, trying to make Neil jealous. So Jimmy promised to attend the wake and snoop around some.

  "What about Neil's AA sponsor?" Barbara said. "He'd know Neil's secrets if anyone would."

  "Who was his sponsor?" I asked.

  Jimmy knew, and Barbara persuaded him to tell. She said that death trumps anonymity.

  I already knew Hank from the program. I found him the next day at a meeting in the gym of a church off Central Park West in the Seventies. When it ended, I suggested we go out for coffee.

  "How's it going?" I asked when we were settled in the nearest Starbucks.

  "Not bad at all." He took a sip of coffee. You could tell he was an oldtimer because he didn't order a latte. "I just made my twenty-five years."

  "Awesome." It actually was. He'd been sober even longer than Jimmy. "I guess you've been qualifying at a lot of meetings."

  "I share my experience, strength, and hope," he said. "All any of us have is today."

  "Look at poor Neil," I said. "There but for the grace of God, huh? I found the body."

  Hank seemed suitably shocked when I told him I felt scared I might be the prime suspect. I lied, but it got me what I wanted, three names from Neil's resentment list.

  "I hate to break his anonymity," Hank said.

  "Dead is dead," I said.

  Pete, another kid from Yorkville, had gone into business with Neil before Neil got clean and sober. They'd opened a pizza place on Second Avenue. I remembered it well. The pizza wasn't bad, but the weed they sold out of the back room was outstanding. When Neil got into the program, he bowed out of both sides of the business. Pete couldn't make a go of it alone, progressed from booze and pot to crack, went a little psycho, and blamed Neil for wrecking his life.

  Then there was Ted, a guy Neil had sponsored for a while. He was also from the neighborhood, another son of a drunk with a long pedigree. When Ted relapsed, Neil decided he needed some tough love. So he refused to sponsor Ted until he got clean and sober again. Ted had been slipping and sliding ever since. He too blamed Neil.

  "Did you know Angie's sister?" Hank asked.

  I did. Stella was a chubby kid with a headful of dark curls and a whiny voice who tagged along with the gang because Angie had to babysit her. She had morphed into a major hottie at puberty.

  "Neil had a fling with her," Hank said, "before he stopped drinking."

  "Before or after he married Angie?"

  "It started at the wedding. He felt very bad about it."

  "Don't
tell me," I said. "He made amends by confessing to Angie."

  Hank plucked four sugar packets from the holder on the coffee shop table, flicked them against his palm a couple of times, tore the corners across, and poured the sugar into his third cup of coffee.

  "I told him not to. He was so set on 'clearing the wreckage of his past' that he couldn't see he was only stirring up trouble."

  It sounded like a motive to me, for both Angie and Stella. The sisters' relationship must have deteriorated after that little revelation.

  "I bet it wasn't planned," I told Jimmy and Barbara later. "Someone lost their temper."

  "Someone angry enough to bash him on the head," Jimmy pointed out. "Then they freaked out and ran away when he went crashing into the fish tank."

  "I would have stayed to save the fish," Barbara said.

  "You wouldn't have killed him in the first place, petunia," Jimmy said.

  "The point is the divorce wasn't about the guppies," I said. "He cheated on her with her sister."

  "If he was paying child support," Barbara said, "you'd think Angie would want him alive, not dead."

  "Maybe she didn't need his money," Jimmy said. "That funeral cost a bundle, and she paid for it. I heard she went back to school and became an accountant."

  "Angie arranged the funeral?" I asked. "They've been divorced for years."

  "The kids are his kids," Jimmy pointed out. "And Neil didn't have any family left."

  I remembered Neil's parents. His dad had been a hard drinker with a short fuse and a heavy hand. His mom had been one of the downtrodden fade-into-the-wallpaper moms, rather than a yell-out-the-window mom like mine.

  I knew where to find Ted. When he wasn't out on a slip, he was a regular at a big afternoon meeting on West 90th Street near Amsterdam. He told me he was back on track, working on ninety days.

  "I feel bad about Neil," he said. "I had a resentment. I didn't forgive him, and now it's too late."

  "Yeah, well, they say it's never too late to make amends."

  "Just for today I'm giving myself the tough love poor Neil tried to give me." Ted edged into my personal space, his head bobbing a couple of inches from my face.

  I stepped back a pace.

  "One day at a time," I said. "Gotta go now." I was afraid he'd offer me a hug. Some days, I can't believe the company I keep to stay sober.

  I caught up with Pete on East 37th Street off Lex, in the basement of a building—not a church—where they had meetings more or less around the clock. I found him by the communal coffee pot near the door. His hand shook, making the brown liquid in his Styrofoam cup look as if it had minnows beneath the surface instead of sludge. By the look of him, he needed a new slogan: Don't drink, go to meetings, and shampoo.

  "Hey, man," he said, biting at the knuckles of the hand not holding the coffee.

  "Pete. Haven't seen you for a while."

  "Just got out of the cuckoo's nest." He tittered and winked at me. He meant Bellevue or someplace else with a locked psych ward. I wondered if that gave him an alibi.

  "You heard about Neil?"

  "Oh, man, what a bummer." He winked the other eye. Pete seemed more brain fried than last time I'd talked to him. You never know when a relapse will be one relapse too many and you can't make it all the way back. "Saaay, don't I know you from somewhere else? Detox, maybe?"

  The guy'd sat next to me in kindergarten.

  The cops talked to me a couple more times, but I was sure they never considered me much of a suspect. They never found the weapon. I couldn't have killed Neil right before I called 911, because of the evaporated water. They didn't find my fingerprints on anything but the box of fish food. And I didn't have the shadow of a motive. Eventually they left me alone. The detective in charge, a grizzled black guy named Washington with world-weary eyes and a soft voice, gave me his card and told me to call if I thought of anything that might be relevant.

  The next thing that happened was that Jimmy got a wedding invitation.

  "Angie's getting married?" Barbara squealed. "Neil's ex-Angie? Oh, Jimmy, we've got to go!"

  "Women!" I couldn't resist jerking Barbara's chain. "Next thing out of her mouth will be 'What'll I wear?'"

  "What'll I—oh! Bruce, you are a dead man!"

  "Who, me?"

  "Never mind that," she said. "It's a motive."

  "What do you mean? They were long divorced."

  "Were they?" Barbara bounced up and down the way she does when she gets excited. "Are you sure?"

  "I remember the big Catholic wedding," Jimmy said. "Barbara's right. We've been assuming the quiet divorce. But maybe they never got one."

  "Less hassle from her family," Barbara said.

  "Why bother unless you plan to remarry?" I said.

  "She's marrying in the Church again," Jimmy added, waggling the invitation at us. "She needed to be a widow."

  "And now she's prettying it up," Barbara said, "by inviting Neil's old friends."

  "Not me," I pointed out.

  "If you'd gone to the wake, she would have," Jimmy said.

  Don't ask how Barbara talked me into crashing the wedding. I slipped in the door with her and Jimmy. I exasperated her by not dressing to blend in gray slacks and a navy blue blazer like Jimmy, but my olive green cargo pants with the pockets not just front and back but all down the legs were the nicest pants I had. I hadn't been sober long enough to own a navy blazer. But I wore the white shirt and corduroy jacket I used when I temped, and, under protest, a tie.

  We found Pete at the food table scoffing up shrimp puffs and baby cannoli. He didn't even look up. Ted, on the other hand, buttonholed me and Jimmy as soon as he spotted us.

  It was not a sober wedding. Waiters circulated with trays of champagne. The insidiously cheerful hubbub of normal people getting tanked swirled around us.

  "So where do the rest of us get a drink?" I asked.

  "The sodas are on that table over there." Ted pointed out a white-clothed table bristling with bottles, the recovering folks' designated watering hole.

  I had just snagged myself a ginger ale when Barbara joined us. Champagne fizzed merrily in the glass she clinked with mine. "Cheers," she said.

  "Church basements," I responded.

  "Have you seen the sister?" Barbara asked. "She's one of the bridesmaids."

  "Oh, is that what the Barbies with the matching orange dresses are?"

  "Not orange. Pumpkin."

  "What's with the giant bows on their butts?" I asked. I'd seen half a dozen girls wrapped like Halloween presents floating around. I hadn't spotted Stella yet.

  "Hideous, aren't they? I think the idea is to make sure the bridesmaids don't outshine the bride. Oh, look, Stella has the right idea."

  I followed the path of her pointing finger. The bouncing black curls had been gelled or moussed into soldierly spikes, with the big bow, ripped off the rump of her dress, perched on top of the hairdo.

  "She looks like a cockatoo at a Tupperware party," Barbara said.

  "The bride looks happy," Jimmy said. "Is that Hank she's talking to?"

  "Looks like it," I said.

  "That's the guy who was Neil's sponsor?" Barbara asked. "It looks like he's got a glass of champagne in his hand."

  "Hank's been sober forever," Jimmy objected. "It must be ginger ale."

  "No, look," Barbara said. "He just knocked it back, and now Angie's pouring him a refill."

  She was right. I know a Veuve Clicquot bottle when I see one.

  "She's making a statement," Barbara said. "Her own personal living-with-an-alcoholic hell is over. She's vowed never to worry about someone's drinking again."

  "Wait till her kids hit their teens," I said.

  "I can't believe Hank's drinking," Jimmy said. "I heard him qualify at a meeting two nights ago, and he was sober then."

  "Or faking it," I said. "He's been getting a lot of mileage out of that twenty-five years. Maybe being a star went to his head."

  "There are no stars in prog
ram," Barbara said. "Lying about his sobriety won't hurt anybody but him."

  "Denial," Jimmy said. "If he's drinking again, he's not thinking straight."

  "But when did it start?" Barbara asked.

  I thought hard, trying to follow the faint thread of possibility beginning to shimmer in my mind.

  "How about this? Hank picks up, but he manages to hide it at first. Neil finds out."

  "How?" Barbara asked.

  "Suppose Neil made one of those three in the morning phone calls that your sponsor keeps telling you it's okay to make, and Hank was drunk enough that he couldn't cover it up."

  "He should have admitted he's back to Day One," Jimmy said, "so he can't sponsor Neil any more."

  "But instead," I said, "Hank lies. Neil knows he's lying."

  "Anyone would freak out if his sponsor relapsed," Jimmy said. "So what do you do?"

  "Suppose Neil confronted him," Barbara said. "Are we saying Hank killed him? To stop him from telling the world that he had relapsed?"

  "Neil wouldn't break Hank's anonymity outright," Jimmy said. "He wouldn't gossip. But you know how it is. Neil raises his hand in a meeting and says he's having a rough time because his sponsor has picked up and refuses to get help. Anyone who knew who Neil's sponsor was would have known. I would have known."

  "He got off on being an oldtimer," I said. "Maybe he thought he could pull himself together and stop drinking again without anyone having to know."

  "Denial," Jimmy said. "No way."

  "He didn't mean to kill Neil," Barbara said. "But you know what booze does to judgment and impulse control."

  "Neil tried tough love," I said, "and Hank lost it and beaned him."

  "And then did a Chappaquiddick," Barbara said. "Except nobody knew he'd been there at all."

  "The cops have never even heard of Hank," I said. "But they may have found his fingerprints in Neil's apartment."

  "So do we tell them?"

  "Let an active alcoholic get away with murder?" Jimmy said. "To call that enabling would be an understatement."

  "We can give the police his name," Barbara said, "but suppose his fingerprints aren't on record anywhere. If he's never committed a crime or worked for the government, they're probably not. Jimmy?"