Forty-Three

 

Chad represented the family at that month’s city council meeting. He made a gallant effort on our behalf, noting that neither of the incidents—the first shooting or the second knifing/shooting—were the fault of the bar owners and could have happened any place where liquor flows freely, including Hooters and Buffalo Wild Wings. It was a pathetic argument, which Police Sergeant Stakoff destroyed when he reminded the board about the five pounds of weed found at the bar and Vince’s subsequent arrest.

Sara insisted on attending the meeting, and since I was still borrowing Roy’s truck, I had to pick her up and drive her there. We sat in the front row and when it came her turn to speak, Sara said it wasn’t fair that she should be penalized because of her no-account kids, and that since she was homebound she couldn’t be expected to know everything that was going on at the bar, and if the council would let her keep her liquor license she would fire me and get someone competent to run the bar, someone who wasn’t so “damn trigger happy.”

Mind you, she said all of this with me sitting right beside her.

In his statement to the board, Stakoff noted that the Carroll family had run The Brass Lantern for generations and it had always been a welcome part of the business community as well as the social life of the town. “Heck, when I was a boy the Lantern sponsored my little league baseball team,” he said. “But the current generation—with the possible exception of my friend Chad Carroll—has proven itself unfit to operate such an establishment. In the past five years there have been three violent deaths on the premises, in addition to a drug arrest for which one of the owners served four years in prison. I therefore have no alternative but to ask the board to rescind the Class C license of the Carroll family to service liquor in the city.”

In the end, the board went with the recommendation of the police and voted seven to one to revoke “indefinitely” our liquor license. The only no vote came from my alderman and son’s basketball coach, Dale “Equal Time” Schuhardt. Funny. I thought the guy hated my guts.

The next morning I began the long, hopeless process of looking for a job. The only skill I had was running a tavern—it was all I’d ever done and all I was good at. And there were damn few taverns anymore that weren’t corporate chains. The manager of a place called Hooligans Sports Bar and Grill in St. Louis County called me back and said they couldn’t offer me a manager position or even a bartender job, but they could use a dishwasher. Like I was going to drive Roy’s truck eighty miles round trip to wash dishes for a lousy seven bucks an hour or whatever the hell minimum wage was in Missouri. That was about as low as I’d ever felt. After a few days I stopped looking for work. I filed for unemployment, which was immediately garnished for child support, and I went back to sitting around The Brass Lantern in the dark drinking up the stock and listening to Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn on the shot-up jukebox.

Looking back, I suspect if something hadn’t happened soon I would’ve either drank myself to death or sucked on the barrel of my nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson. It seemed like everything had gone sour inside me. I’d taken to fantasizing about Reva driving over to the bar, all set to harangue me over child support, and finding me sprawled on the barroom floor where I’d been rotting a good week or two, the back of my head blown off. I hoped I looked nice and disgusting so she’d have that ghastly image to haunt her dreams the rest of her goddamn life.

Then a couple of things happened. First, we got an offer on the bar—some out-of-state developer who wanted to raze the building and put up a parking garage, contingent on receiving a shit ton of tax abatements and subsidies from the city. He offered us seventy thousand. He acted like he was doing us, the city, and all of mankind a great favor. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of parking downtown. That’s pretty much all downtown was—an empty parking lot.

That turned out to be the only offer we got. We took it.

Sara got half the sale price and we split the rest. I sent a third of my take to Toohey and mailed the rest to Reva.

The other thing that happened was I ran into Stakoff in the parking lot of a greasy spoon called the Hi-Ho Diner. It was around midnight. He and some buddies had been out drinking, and I had on my usual drunk. He greeted me like an old friend, all back slaps and glad hands. He told me he was truly sorry about having to shut down the bar, but he didn’t have a choice. He said he had some news that would cheer me up. Cops had put Clay Goodwin’s murder in the cold case files. Off the record, he said, whoever killed Goodwin did St. Clair County a service, maybe even deserved some kind of medal.

Then he shook my hand and wished me luck.

The next afternoon I was moping around The Brass Lantern. We were down to the last of the liqueurs: sweet vermouth, triple sec, crème de menthe. I didn’t care, as long as it contained alcohol. I was paging through an old photo album containing ghostly snapshots of Uncle Chuck and Pop and long-dead regulars, thinking how in a month or two the bar would be a goddamn parking garage, when somebody knocked on the door. I yelled that we were closed, but the asshat kept right on knocking. I got up and opened the front door.

“We’re closed! Can’t you read the goddamn sign?”

It was some tall dude I’d never seen before. A guy with a lantern jaw and prominent gut. “Denis James Carroll?” he said.

“What?”

He shoved an envelope in my hand. “You’ve been served.”