Black Cat Weekly #1

REMISSION, by Michael Bracken-2

* * * *

Two nights later I found Stella occupying my stool again, and she was well into her third martini and fifth cigarette when I straddled the stool next to her. She wore a different black sheath dress but the same pearls. After glancing at me, she asked, “You made a decision yet?”

I had talked with a few people who had done business with her husband, and none were encouraging about my chances of a successful resolution to her problem. “Not yet.”

“At least that’s something.” She finished her martini and tapped the glass with her fingernail. “Anyone else would have turned me down flat.”

McGinty replaced her martini and put a shot of Jack Daniel’s in front of me. I downed it in one quick gulp.

“You want your father’s things. What does your husband want?”

“Me.”

I couldn’t offer him that. “Anything else?”

“He can buy whatever he wants.” Stella took a drag from the cigarette trapped between her fingers. “And what he can’t buy, he can take.”

McGinty replaced my shot glass, and I contemplated her answer while I downed the Jack. “You don’t give me much to work with.”

She shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

We spoke no more about her problem, and between drinks she asked how I’d come to make McGinty’s my office. The story I gave her was no more coherent than the one she’d given me three nights earlier, but I’m certain she gathered that I’d once been married and that I’d lost everything when I let my wife go.

Once we were sufficiently lubricated, we staggered back to my apartment. I stripped Stella down to her underwear, tucked her into my bed, and then climbed in beside her.

I woke the next morning to find the tomcat pinning my legs to the bed and Stella up on one elbow staring down at me. “Did we—?”

“No.”

“We should have.” She slipped out of bed and padded down the hall to the bathroom. A moment later I heard the shower running, so I climbed out of bed and made breakfast. I didn’t break the yolks.

Stella came to the kitchen table wearing a white button-up dress shirt, one of several I had not worn since my last court appearance. Only the bottom two buttons were fastened, and she wore nothing beneath it.

She looked at the sunny-side-up eggs on her plate. “You’re better at this than I am.”

I broke a yolk and dipped the corner of my toast in it.

She looked up. “This is nice.”

“Yes?”

“Waking up next to you, having breakfast together.”

We ate in silence, and I stole glimpses of what the open shirt revealed until the tomcat jumped on the table between us, startling my guest.

I said, “He’s hungry.”

“I can’t have a pet.”

“I don’t have him,” I said about the tomcat. “He has me.”

One corner of her mouth twitched as if a smile had died aborning.

“John once strangled a stray kitten I wanted to take in.” She pushed back from the table. “I need to go.”

I fed the tomcat while Stella dressed, and I met her in the living room as she exited the bedroom fully dressed. I walked her to the door and held it open. As she stepped into the hall, I said, “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

She stretched up and lightly kissed my cheek. “That’s all I can ask.”

* * * *

Stella had not updated her driver’s license, and I remembered the address on it from the first night she slept in my bed. I showered, dressed, and drove to their home, a two-story colonial behind an iron gate. After a pat-down, I was escorted to Carter’s home office by a side of beef masquerading as a man.

Carter sat behind a desk the size of a pool table. He looked up when I entered.

“I’m here on behalf of a friend,” I said. He reeked of floral cologne, and I tried not to gag as I spoke. “You have something she wants, and I’ve come to request it from you.”

Carter laughed hard, loud, and long. When he finished, he said, “I know all about your wheeling and dealing, barfly, and you have nothing I want.”

“You want your wife back.”

His eyes narrowed. “And you think you can deliver that?”

“I don’t know what I can deliver,” I told him. “I just need to know my options.”

He misquoted an old aphorism. “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was meant to be,” he said. “I did that. Now I’m waiting.”

“You haven’t set Stella free if you’re holding on to something she values.”

Carter smiled, but the smile never reached his eyes. “We’re done here.”

The muscle that had escorted me into the room escorted me out.

* * * *

“I saw it in his reaction,” I told McGinty. “Carter wants his wife back. The only way Stella gets her father’s things is by returning to him.”

“He’s human cancer,” McGinty said. McGinty’s had not yet opened for the day, and we were the only people inside, separated by the bar, a pair of shot glasses, and an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter between us. McGinty poured refills. “Carter kills everything good in people, and your girl’s in remission.”

I stared at the shot glass as I spun it with my thumb and middle finger.

“He knows you drink here,” McGinty said.

I looked up.

“He knows you take her back to your apartment.”

“How—?”

“He sent a guy to talk to me. Said he would shut me down if I kept serving you.”

There had been a McGinty behind the stick since the place opened in the early 1900s, surviving Prohibition as a members-only tearoom serving Canadian whiskey and bathtub gin, and circumventing recent smoking ordinances by encasing a single table in a Plexiglas cube and calling it the No-Smoking Zone.

“What did you tell him?”

McGinty reached under the counter and placed a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun on the counter. “I introduced him to Betsy. Said if he came back I’d make sure they got real intimate.”

I downed my second shot and pushed the empty glass across the bar.

* * * *

I went home alone that night but not the next. Like before, Stella was sitting on my stool when I arrived, martini on the counter in front of her and a cigarette trapped between her fingers. She wore the same pearls and same black sheath dress as the first time I’d seen her, as if her apparel choices were limited.

This time we didn’t wait until we were three sheets to the wind before leaving McGinty’s. Once inside my apartment, she removed her own clothing and helped me remove mine before we slipped into bed. I had not been with a woman since my wife’s passing, and Stella didn’t pretend to enjoy what we did, but it was something we both needed. Afterward she lit a cigarette and smoked it in silence.

The tomcat joined us. He sat at the end of the bed staring at us until Stella finished her smoke and kicked him off. Then she settled into the crook of my arm and he found somewhere else to sleep.

* * * *

I woke the next morning to the sound of my telephone ringing, and I stumbled into the kitchen to answer it.

McGinty said, “Get down here.”

I didn’t ask why. I just ended the call and returned to the bedroom. Stella looked up at me and asked, “What is it?”

“I have to go.” I pulled on my clothes. “McGinty needs me.”

A few minutes later McGinty let me into his bar and showed me the dead man on the floor. A significant portion of the dead man’s abdomen had been spread across the Plexiglas cube and the floor around it. I recognized the muscle who had patted me down at Carter’s home a few days earlier and looked at McGinty. “What have you done?”

“He came back,” McGinty said, “so I kept my promise.”

Betsy lay on the bar, breech open and two spent shells on the counter beside it. I said, “We need to get this guy out of here before someone comes looking for him.”

We put on gloves, wrapped the body in plastic McGinty found in the storage room, and put it in the trunk of McGinty’s car. Less than a mile away we dumped the body into a concrete form for one of the elevated highway’s unpoured support pillars.

Then we returned to the bar and scrubbed down the Plexiglas cube and the floor surrounding it. Any of the dead man’s body fluids remaining in the cracks and crevices merged with that remaining from decades of bar fights, stabbings, and shootings.

“What will you say if someone comes looking for him?”

“Looking for who?” McGinty opened a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel’s and offered me a shot.

I shook my head. I needed to think, not drink.

* * * *

Stella was dressed and sitting on the couch when I let myself into my apartment. She rose and came into my arms. “I didn’t know when you’d be back,” she said, “and I didn’t know how long I should wait.”

I held her at arm’s length and stared into her eyes. Nothing reflected back. The cancer that was John Carter had already infected Stella, and through her had infected McGinty and had infected me. “You want your father’s things?”

She nodded.

I phoned Carter’s home. When he answered, I asked, “If I bring your wife with me, will you give her what she wants?”

“Of course.”

After ending the call, I turned to Stella and saw that she’d been listening. I said, “It’s the only way.”

Less than an hour later, Carter answered our knock. When he saw Stella standing beside me, he smiled. This time the smile reached his eyes. “I knew you couldn’t stay away.”

“I didn’t come for you,” she said. “I came for my father’s things.”

He led us into his office. Atop his desk lay a wooden display case containing Stella’s father’s burial flag, folded so that only a triangular blue field of stars was visible, along with his silver First Lieutenant bars and several medals that I did not recognize mounted on a black felt backboard. Stella started toward it, but I stopped her.

I asked, “What’s the catch?”

“She stays.”

I had loved Erica, but when cancer reduced my wife to a husk kept alive only by artificial means, when I realized that you don’t negotiate with cancer, and when I felt I had run out of options, I set her free by taking her off of life support. I might yet save McGinty and myself, but I could not save Stella and had to remove her life support. I said, “Okay.”

Stella looked at me and then at her husband. I don’t know which of us she was addressing when she said, “You son of a bitch.”

Surprising only Carter, Stella pulled the .38 caliber snub-nose revolver from her clutch and pointed it at him. They each had what they wanted, so I backed out of Carter’s home office, turned, and walked toward the front door.

His voice echoed through the foyer. “You can’t live without me.”

“Then I won’t.”

I heard two gunshots and kept going.

When I walked into McGinty’s that night I was, for the first time ever, disappointed to see that my bar stool was empty, and I drank until I no longer remembered the blonde’s name or my own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Bracken is the author of several novels and more than 1,300 short stories, including stories selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2018 and The Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021. Additionally, he is the editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and several anthologies, including the Anthony Award-nominated The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods. “Remission” was originally published by Level Best Books in Landfall: The Best New England Crime Stories 2018. Learn more at crimefictionwriter.com.