Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) by Elizabeth Zelvin Page B

spent a long time gazing at the gorilla. I couldn’t decide if he was sad or pissed off, but he looked like he needed a meeting. When Barbara got off work, I met her at the hospital and we drove downtown, past a helluva lot of commuter traffic going the other way, to their apartment on the Upper West Side.
    It was the first time I had been invited to their place in years. They may have thought I hadn’t noticed, but I had. Jimmy would talk to me on the phone for hours, or he would meet me at a meeting, and Barbara would meet me for coffee any time. But neither of them wanted to be around me when I drank. Jimmy knew my altered states on everything from ’ludes to speed. He could always tell. So I hadn’t been there in a very long time.
    They lived in one of those prewar buildings that had never had any pretensions to being classy but was built for solid comfort and never came anywhere near going downhill. A genuine live elevator man ran the elevator. All Albanians, Barbara told me, because the current super was Albanian. The guy who was on when we got there had limited English and a terrible sense of humor. I guess he told us an Albanian joke. He wouldn’t open the elevator door until he’d reached the punch line. Talk about a captive audience. I didn’t understand a word he said, but he found himself excruciatingly funny. We had to wait politely until he stopped laughing and slid open the cagelike grill to let us out.
    They had a nice apartment. Half of the living room housed the computer and the rest of Jimmy’s high-tech home office. The other half was crowded with overstuffed furniture in the saturated colors Barbara liked—rich gold and rust and peacock blue, with a riot of fat little cushions in shades of crimson, orange, and rose. Floor to ceiling bookshelves lined the walls. Books were piled everywhere in disorganized heaps, Jimmy’s history and military and computer library crammed in with Barbara’s counseling texts and psychology books, mysteries, and the more readable kind of classics. Tumbling and meandering around and over and between the books were the toy soldiers that Jimmy had collected since he was a kid and the cuddly stuffed animals that Barbara always fell in love with in the store and felt impelled to rescue and take home. About the clutter, Barbara would say, “I know, I know, we flunk feng shui. But we like it this way.” Jimmy would say, “What clutter? I know where everything is.”
    When we walked in the door, Jimmy had an old Planxty album playing, and he was fighting the Battle of Antietam on his Civil War reenactment website on the computer. The Web is Jimmy’s time machine. He can tell you the name of Robert E. Lee’s horse and what Ivan the Terrible ate for breakfast.
    “Hi, pumpkin,” he said.
    Barbara went around behind him as he sat at the computer. You could always find Jimmy at the computer. She leaned over and kissed the back of his neck.
    “Pumpkin yourself. Look who I brought home with me.”
    “Hey, fella.” Jimmy greeted me as casually as if I had never been banned. “I’m starving,” he said. “You guys want to eat?”
    Like many New Yorkers, none of us cooked. I had solved the problem for years by not bothering much with food. Jimmy and Barbara ordered out. Less than half an hour later, we sat in the kitchen working our way through a big container of guacamole with a huge pile of blue corn tortilla chips and some very spicy burritos.
    “How’d the job hunt go?” Jimmy asked. He lost a chip in the guacamole, fished it out, and licked his fingers.
    “I’m not sure,” I said.
    “You did fill out an application?”
    “Yes, Dad, Mommy made me promise.”
    “Stop that!” Barbara threw a chip at me.
    “No food fights, guys.” Jimmy grinned like a wolf. “She only wants you to be happy.”
    I smiled back reluctantly. “I know you two mean well.”
    Barbara mimed getting stabbed.
    “Ooh, that hurt.”
    “So stop nudging,” I said, giving it the New