What kind of beers do you have?” I asked.
The woman behind the bar did her best Helen Keller impersonation and languidly shifted her eyes from me to the tap handles right next to us. She apparently didn’t have the energy or will to read them off to me. I ordered a domestic. The dirty line it traveled through, or the dirty glass it was served in, added a slightly rancid aftertaste to an otherwise unimpressive flavor profile. And being served on a chilly day in February in Bakersfield counteracted the beer’s only virtue—the fact that it was cold.
SOHAR was a barfly’s kind of bar. A handful of patrons worked the stools spaced far enough apart for ease of conversation and ease of detachment. There was neither great joy nor great sadness on any of their faces. They were all just content to have a warm, comfortable place in which to get systematically obliterated every night.
We listened in on the bar chatter, waiting for an opening. This crew covered a wide range of topics ranging from twin-cam fathead engines (best Harley ever produced) to zoology (lions are color-blind) to medieval history (Martin Luther had a foot fetish). The primary source of their knowledge was a mounted TV over the bar. Countless hours watching off-hour programming had given them just enough information to be truly insufferable on a wide array of topics.
I discovered a newfound empathy for the bartender. I had only been in the bar for five minutes and the blabbering was already grating on me. I’d pretend to be a deaf-mute, too, if I had to work there.
“Are you going to ask someone?” Rebecca said impatiently while pretending to sip a ginger ale.
“These sorts of things are delicate,” I whispered. “I have a lot of experience in this area,” continued the lecture. “Let me take the lead.”
My approach was to engage someone on a harmless topic in order to establish rapport. I casually asked the gentleman next to me about the curious name of the bar—SOHAR. It worked. He took my question and launched into a detailed breakdown of famous NYC acronyms: SOHO stood for south of Houston, DUMBO—down under Manhattan Bridge overpass, TRIBECA—triangle below Canal.
“So what’s the HAR stand for?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“SOHAR,” I repeated. “Stands for south of what?”
“Oblivion,” someone muttered several seats down.
I chuckled but no one else did.
Rebecca grew tired of my approach and tried the direct route.
“Does anyone know James Fitch?” she asked.
The room quickly got quiet.
“What you want with him?” the acronym expert asked.
I watched the man’s posture on his stool. Everyone’s a tough guy in front of someone who is weaker than them, and this drunk was clearly feeling his oats in front of Mr. Corporate Casual and his sick sidekick. HR had honed my skills in evaluating people, and as I studied him, I safely assumed this guy was all hot air. It was my turn to do some pushing around.
I took a long, confident gulp of my beer.
“Never mind what we want with him,” I said. “Just answer the lady’s fucking question.”
I don’t know if the welt on my head came from the actual punch or the dramatic tumble I took after it. I do know that the front of my shirt was soaked in beer from the glass I had been holding, but how the back of my shirt got wet was a mystery. I remained conscious through the entire fight—if one punch could be deemed a fight—but it was all a blurry recollection of snippets, the most embarrassing one involving an attempt to get to my feet that only succeeded in knocking over the popcorn machine. The floor becoming littered with three-day-old popcorn seemed to be the one thing that angered the patrons the most.
“You’re going to have to clean that up!” the formerly mute bartender shrieked at me.
She was joined by a chorus of murmurs, and I soon found myself with a broom in my hands. I managed to get a fraction of the popcorn into the dustpan. The rest I ground into an already sticky carpet. The bartender mercifully put an end to my cleaning duty with the exasperated words, “Just leave it.”
I sheepishly returned to my stool, where I found a freshly poured glass of rancid beer, courtesy of the man who put me on my back. We spent the next five minutes trying to out-apologize each other and finally agreed that we were both at fault.
Now that we were best friends, he and everyone else unlocked the vault on James Fitch. It was almost too much information, bordering on inappropriate. Rebecca and I endured a litany of failed jobs and the long periods between them, his problems keeping tequila down, his propensity to constantly readjust himself, particularly in front of the ladies. Any attempts to provide structure to the dialogue went unheeded.
“Let’s all try to stay on point,” I tried, reminding them to keep their comments to the one or two important things about Fitch, at which point they provided twenty things at two levels below trivial. Several times I interjected: “That’s great information…very helpful…more than we could ever use.…” And yet they continued to a point where I wished we could return to the topic of color-blind lions.
But in the deluge was a handful of useful information. Arizona featured prominently in the narrative. Fitch was raised there and still had some family outside Phoenix, they believed. A sister was mentioned several times who Fitch had repeatedly claimed had been murdered, but from the comments I heard it didn’t sound like the folks in the room had believed him. I got the sense they believed a small fraction of the stuff Fitch said but didn’t necessarily begrudge him for it. They all seemed to think he was a decent man.
When Rebecca questioned them on what the trailer park manager had said about Fitch coming into some money recently, the room got a little quiet.
“It wasn’t much,” my combatant finally said, “though Fitch kept saying ‘it was only the beginning.’” It was yet another claim that no one seemed to believe, but I remembered the wad of cash Lois Hearns’s ex-husband had pulled out of the freezer and wondered if they might be wrong on this one.
“Couldn’t have been too much,” I offered. “I saw his trailer and his landlady said he was always behind.”
There were some furtive glances, very subtle, but I caught them.
“We, uh, helped him celebrate,” was how someone explained where the money went. The guilt lingering after this admission was a nod to the two non-barflies in the room of a standard barfly code—one person’s good fortune is everyone’s good fortune.
“It’s what we do,” he added.
The conversation shifted to something lighter, yet no less pathetic: Fitch’s love life. This topic got everyone quite excited as they recalled the long list of hags, skanks, and decent girls who all eventually figured out they were better off without Fitch. By this time I was half-listening, but then a remark recaptured my interest.
“Remember chai tea lady?” someone asked, laughing. “She was a piece of work.”
“She used to bring her own organic tea bags,” the bartender explained in response to my quizzical look. This all sounded familiar.
“Short, white hair? Talks like a man?”
“Not even close,” the bartender replied. “Really long hair. Blond. Down to her ass.”
So I was wrong about Fitch rendezvousing with Julie, but he did meet the caricaturist Lois with some regularity.
“Remember she wanted to draw my picture? Too weird,” said the man on my left. “I don’t get naked for nobody.”
The group collectively agreed something was strange about the woman and her relationship with Fitch. Apparently they were very secretive, always talking privately in the back booth. Some believed their relationship bordered on “kinky.”
“What makes you say that?” Rebecca pressed.
“There was always another guy with them.”
I recalled the man in the hotel room looking for Fitch, the man who I thought had followed us in the Coupe DeVille.
“Short and bald,” I filled in for them. “Looks like a big bowling ball.”
“Tall and thin with a ponytail.” They all laughed at me. “You’re terrible at this game!”
Maybe it wasn’t the mystery man but it was someone I recognized—Lois’s husband. It appeared he was much more aware of what his ex-wife was up to than he let on.
A rainy, nighttime drive over the Tejon Pass loomed larger with each glass of beer and meaningless detail about Fitch’s life. But despite all attempts to extricate myself from the conversation, I couldn’t make it very far from the stool. This group seemed impervious to every disengagement tactic I threw at them.
I must have checked my watch ten times but no one picked up on the cue. None of my repetitions of “Well, we should be hitting the road” seemed to work. At one point I started requesting they put their thoughts in an email—a classic corporate technique to combat people’s propensity to discuss topics endlessly rather than actually work on them. Those requests went unheeded. Finally, a distraction in the form of a new customer offered us a break to run for it. They all turned to see an unfamiliar face pad into the bar. He was unfamiliar to all of them but not to Rebecca and me.
Short, bald, and stocky, the bowling ball of a man looked around the bar in the same manner he had surveyed Rebecca’s hotel room. He wasn’t holding a gun, but I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t under his coat. My theory about tough guys proved true in this instance. Everyone rightly assumed he was the toughest in the room, and in a single swoop he accomplished something I had tried to do for two-plus hours—he got them to be quiet.
I seized on that moment to slide off my stool and quietly whispered in Rebecca’s ear to follow me. We headed for the bathroom but went right past it. We scampered through the storage room and emerged in the back parking lot.
We hustled into my car and pulled around front. Standing under the SOHAR sign, the garish red light illuminating the top of his bald head, was the bowling ball man. He glared at me as I sped past his Cadillac and out onto the main drag and headed back toward Los Angeles.
The rain came sideways with such ferocity that I thought the passenger window would shatter. With each gust my car seemingly lifted up on its tires, the steering wheel becoming that much easier to turn. I fought the urge to overcompensate and jerk the car back into position, a move that had sent many a vehicle down into the gulley.
Authorities had to be near the point of closing the pass, but we continued on. We rode up on another pod of blue whales, their red taillights looming ahead. I caught Rebecca settling further into her seat, as if slightly lower in the vehicle was a safer place to be. While the wind gusts sent my sensible sedan off course a mere inch or two, they grabbed the broad sides of the trucks and rocked them back and forth.
Blue lights flashed in my mirror, and instinct led me to tap the brakes first. My heart sank at the prospect of a forced wait in traffic that could very well extend long into the night. I saw visions of a dank motel and separate beds and a sick woman far away from her next treatment. My foot pressed on the accelerator.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw the comforting visual of two police cars slaloming up the hill at an ever-decreasing pace. The intended effect was a growing mass of car and truck headlights piling up behind them. The pass was officially closed, and we had made it through.
Nearing the crest, my windshield wipers stuttered over icy buildup on the glass.
“It’s snowing,” Rebecca whispered.
The large, wet flakes got caught up briefly in my headlights before melting into the black mass of the asphalt. My foot slowly depressed the accelerator and we gained ground on the semis. Passing the first one, I glanced over at Rebecca but got no indication that she wanted me to slow down.
The pull of wanting to be home tugged at both of us. It guided us up and over the crest and drew us down into the Valley and all the way back to Eagle Rock, where a rain-glistened sedan with two Palos Verdes detectives inside sat waiting for us with the news that Julie St. Jean was dead.