The Good Family Fitzgerald by Joseph Di Prisco

Author:Joseph Di Prisco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2020-03-30T20:15:07+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Brendan

Gala night, while the bishop was slapping backs and shaking hands and tugging sleeves and sipping the last martinis he would ever have in his life, his driver slipped into The Emerald Green for a couple of pops. This was not a first for him. He routinely repaired to a bar when he had a long wait ahead and hours to kill. Perched on a barstool, he would await the call to return and pick up His Excellence and drive him home at the end of the festivities—and until then he would tune his own internal strings. Brendan was proud of his ability to hold his liquor, and if he was slightly impaired, legally speaking, it never showed. The bishop’s suspicions never arose for obvious reasons: blind driving the blind. A couple of hours into this evening, in the general swell of humanity, while the party raged in full swing across town, Brendan headed into the tavern’s men’s room. He did not walk out.

Fast forward several hours.

Around closing time, a patron reported to the bartender that something was amiss: a man was unconscious and sprawled on the floor inside a bathroom stall. That was Brendan, and soon he was being jostled awake, afflicted by the biggest, acidy-toilet-disinfectant-laced headache he’d ever known, with no recollection of what had happened. He looked for a clock, nonexistent in the men’s room, and realized that he had certainly lost his job—as well as his watch. Along with his cell phone, and his wallet, and the cash in his money clip—and the limo keys. When he got to his feet and rushed outside, the car was nowhere in sight. He called the police on the Emerald Green’s phone, and they arrived a casual hour later. The uniform wanted to know if he needed a hospital, but Brendan said no. The cop was considerate enough to drive him to his apartment, where he took to his bed. Of course, he had no idea of what had transpired with the bishop. He had to assume that Mackey got home somehow, and that he would get fired first thing in the morning.

“The bar was crowded,” Brendan told the detectives the next afternoon in the interrogation room. “Don’t remember much.” He had dressed in coat and tie for the interview today, he couldn’t tell you what prompted him to do so, but it may have seemed right, respectful. He was the sort of man whose clothes seem to have been borrowed from somebody else, in his case borrowed from a larger man, a roommate and off-and-on partner. Being nervous about what awaited him at the police station, Brendan had shaved a little too energetically and his neck was nicked. If pressed, he might have said he wanted to present himself in the most flattering light possible for the authorities.

“How many drinks you throw down?”

“One or two.”

“One or two?”

“Or three.” Brendan had to figure the detectives knew how many. He certainly didn’t.

“Drinking with anybody special?”

“So many people, you know the Green is packed every night, college kids to truck-drivers to lawyers—to cops.

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