No Sign of Murder by Alan Russell

Author:Alan Russell [Russell, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Tails Press
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

I drank four glasses of Scotch in about forty minutes. Mal didn’t question my thirst. He was unobtrusive, gliding in with the Glenfiddich, and lingering for that extra moment to see if I wanted to talk. I didn’t, not yet. I was early, and needed the extra time and drinks before Norman arrived. My pewter mug felt good in my hand. It was antique, had somehow survived the Revolutionary War. Probably a Tory had owned it, I thought, a Tory who wouldn’t give it up for the bullets of a new nation. You start thinking like that after four quick drinks.

There was a method to my madness, and I wasn’t exactly new to it. Some cases don’t allow you to just go through the motions, and this was one of those cases. I had to walk with it, and work with it, and think with it. And now I was going to get drunk with it. Victor Hugo was my inspiration. Hugo had written about drink in Les Misérables, had written about the four goblets that lined a wall, and the inscriptions upon them. The first was monkey wine; the second, lion wine; the third, sheep wine; and the last, swine wine. The animals marked man’s descending degrees of drunkenness. I was at the Edinburgh Castle ready to oink in swine wine, in search of a dirty drunk so that I could think dirty thoughts. It wasn’t scientific, but sometimes it worked.

I was at least halfway to my wallow when Norman joined me. Like Mal, he didn’t question my need for the drinks. He just attempted to keep up. He was on his swine wine glass when he started talking freely, complaining too loudly that the wine was no good.

“So, don’t order wine in a Scotch bar,” I told him again. The same advice had been given on his monkey, lion, and sheep glasses.

Norman wagged his finger at me. “I don’t know why you always bring me here,” he said. “It’s antique, like your drink. Who drinks Scotch nowadays?”

He raised himself from his barstool and started to walk toward the bathroom. He was a little unsteady, but cloven hooves do that to you.

It was Saturday at the Edinburgh Castle, a night I usually avoided. Tourist night, gawk at the bagpiper, throw some inaccurate darts. But even on its worst night the Castle is one of San Francisco’s best bars. Model airplanes and jets hang from the ceiling, and Winston Churchill busts stare at you from amidst countless labels of Scotch. A suspicious parrot, with the same Churchill stare, and same first name, rested in the corner. Winston rarely squawked, never spoke, and wasn’t very good about accepting new fingers. He had grown to accept mine. By standing tradition I didn’t drink until Winston came over to have his head scratched, and luckily, he hadn’t kept me waiting tonight. Sometimes the bird wasn’t so cooperative, but a good Scotch doesn’t worry about a little extra aging. The mugs of the regulars hung on the racks, each one distinctive.

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