DEATH WILL TRIM YOUR TREE

Elizabeth Zelvin

 

I sat on the floor in Jimmy and Barbara’s living room with a pile of blinking electrical spaghetti in my lap and ground my teeth. For this I’d stayed sober for 357 days and changed my whole life? Cursing the malevolence of circuitry, I began to

disentangle the single strand of tiny bulbs that I’d finally gotten to light up all at the same time from the rest.

“Think of it as a meditation,” Barbara said, perky as one of Santa’s elves.

“You wanna take over?”  

“I can’t. I’m making latkes.” Barbara does Chanukah along with Christmas. She showed me puppy eyes soft with regret.  Her feminism flies south at this time of year. Women cook. Men wrestle with the frigging lights.  

“Why don’t you run over to Broadway and pick up some that work?” Jimmy suggested. Computer geniuses supervise.

I growled low in my throat, sounding more like a pit bull than I expected. Jimmy took it in stride.  

“These lights are obsolete, anyhow,” he said. “With the new ones, if one bulb goes out, the rest stay on. Replace the one, and you’re back in business.”

“Thank you for sharing.”

I didn’t bother asking so how come we were still using the old ones. I knew the answer: Barbara never throws anything out. I picked bits of last year’s tinsel off my sweater, grabbed my down vest off the back of a chair, and headed for the door.

“Bruce!” Barbara called after me. “While you’re at it, pick up a pint of sour cream.”

I could pretend I hadn’t heard. But I’d probably get the sour cream. As people were always telling me, AA interferes not only with your drinking but also with such cherished traits as surliness and willingness to disappoint people.

I headed for Manny’s Hardware over on Broadway. Manny was long gone, but the hole in the wall he’d founded in 1923 still carried everything you could possibly need, from the oddball size of screw to a giant silver samovar that had been sitting there for years. Or maybe they kept selling and replacing it, one samovar at a time.

In spite of its eight million people, New York is a small town. In the old days, I knew someone in every bar I stumbled into. Now, wherever I went, I saw someone from the program. AA meetings are better lit than bars, so the faces stayed with me.  

At Manny’s, I recognized the clerk.

“Hi, Tim.” I read the name off his shirt, greeting him as I would have at a meeting.

He nodded, giving me a half-smile to acknowledge that he knew me too but wasn’t about to break my anonymity by saying so. We said, “What’s happening?” and “Not much,” and then we were ready to talk hardware. I described the kind of lights I needed. He said they’d been flying off the shelves, but he still had a few boxes in stock. They never don’t have what you need at Manny’s.

“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ll go in the back and get them.”

 Tim opened a door in the wall behind the counter. I could see a stockroom bigger than the shop. A half-open door in the rear offered a glimpse of one of those hidden New York back yards that visitors don’t even know exist. The tall, narrow space was lined with ceiling-high gray metal shelves crammed with merchandise and towers of giant brown boxes. He’d have a job finding one carton.

“I may be a while. I know we’ve got ’em, though.”

“No problem.”

Tim sketched a salute and dove into the storeroom, closing the door behind him.

I browsed the shelves for a while, decided I didn’t need a set of Phillips head screwdrivers or a non-stick pizza stone, and went out front for a smoke. The faint jingle of Salvation Army Santa Claus bells served as background music. The even fainter scent of pine trees from Maine and Canada stacked three deep on wooden scaffolding down the street provided ambience. I drifted off, thinking about nothing in particular. I was far away when a female voice broke into my reverie.

“They’re not closed, are they? If I don’t find red and gold tinsel, I’ll have a panic attack.”

New Yorkers.

I dropped the butt I held pinched between my fingers. Grinding it out with the toe of my shoe, I realized I’d stood there long enough to suck up and crush out four cigarettes.

“No, it’s open. The clerk went out back to find something for me.”

I held the door, which clanged the way shop doors do, and let her precede me into the store. She was a tall, thin woman with a white streak bisecting jet black hair like Cruella de Vil, bundled up in a faux fur coat with matching trim on her faux leather gloves. She lugged a bulging Zabar’s shopping bag in each hand.

“Yoohoo!” She bumped her way through the narrow aisle to the counter. “Can I get some service here?”

Tim did not appear.

“He’s been gone for a while,” I said. “Maybe I should go back there and take a look.”  

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I love Manny’s. I could browse in here forever.”

Her eyes lit up as she spotted a cut-glass punch bowl on the highest shelf. I’d better get Tim back out here, or she’d be asking me to get it down for her.  

            I ducked under a hinged flap in the counter top, then opened the stockroom door.

            “Tim?” I called. “You’ve got a customer.”

            No answer. I marched down the narrow aisle toward the rear door. An open carton blocked the way. Christmas lights. I straddled it and proceeded to the door. It wasn’t ajar any more, though a strip of thin winter light still filtered in. I pushed it open with my shoulder and stepped out into the yard.

Tim lay sprawled face down on the concrete, to one side and a few yards beyond the back door. If he was dead, I didn’t want to touch the body. I’d rather keep my DNA to myself. But if he wasn’t dead, and I failed to help, I’d feel guilty. No more Jack Daniel’s to help me blow it off, either. I took a cautious stroll around him, hands in my pockets. The far side of his head, crumpled like a ball of paper, lay in an ooze of blood and brains. Too late for CPR, then.

I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths until the desire to throw up subsided. I’d better call 911. To tell the truth, I would rather have walked away. But for the new me, that was not an option. As I drew my cell phone from my pocket, I looked around the yard. No handy two-by-four coated with blood and gray matter in sight. Tim had fallen onto concrete. The area wasn’t exactly a garbage dump. But recent litterers had left six cigarette butts, seven pop tops, and three candy wrappers within a foot of his outstretched hand.

I would have picked the litter up, out of respect for the abandoned body. But I didn’t think the police would appreciate it. I’d better make my call from out front, with the lady customer as witness. While I was at it, I could scoop up my own butts, hopefully before the cops got there. Taking one last look at the body, I saw a familiar-looking bronze coin half hidden by the sprawl of his hip. He’d gone outside wearing only a white T shirt and faded jeans. They’d pulled apart when he fell. I could see a bit of pale skin in between. It looked smooth and vulnerable.

I squatted and fished the coin out with my thumb and forefinger: a medallion with the AA triangle and “3 months” on one side, the Serenity Prayer engraved so small that I had to squint to read it on the other. The bronze was antiqued, so it wasn’t shiny. But it didn’t look worn, not as if it had been hanging out in somebody’s pocket for years. These “chips” were cherished in the fellowship. The only way you could get one was by staying sober for ninety days. Or stealing it off a corpse. I tucked the chip into the pocket of my jeans.

I went back into the store and out the front. Cruella was still there. I broke the news and said I’d call 911.

“I live right around the corner,” she said. She looked longingly at the pile of

shiny housewares and appliances she’d selected from Manny’s shelves and piled on the counter by the cash register. “Do you think it would be okay if I pop back home and get my holiday goodies into the fridge before they spoil? I could come back.”

“Please don’t go,” I said. “The cops might take a dim view of your leaving. And I would really appreciate it if you’d tell them you saw me go behind the counter only a few minutes before I found—before I called the police.”

“When you put it that way—oh, why not?” She put the Zabar’s bags gently down on the sidewalk and flexed her fingers. “I’ll stay. It’s Christmas.”

Shortly after that, the uniformed cops arrived, then two detectives, crime scene folks, and a parade of snoopy Upper West Siders who didn’t want to miss the excitement. It knocked the warm fuzzies from Cruella being nice right out of me. When the detectives asked if I’d known Tim outside the store, I lied. They took my address and told me where to report to be fingerprinted. Then they shooed me off the scene along with the nosy neighbors.

When I got back to Jimmy and Barbara’s, I told them what had happened and showed them the ninety-day chip.

“It’s evidence, Bruce!” Barbara’s voice soared into a shocked squeak. She kind of lost the moral high ground when she added, “Couldn’t you have picked up those lights while you were at it?”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, peanut,” Jimmy said. “I’ll order some online.”  

 “Why did you take it, Bruce?” Barbara said. “Here, have some latkes.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I had some kind of goofy idea of protecting AA. I didn’t want cops busting into every meeting in the city to ask questions.”

“They’ll figure out he was in AA sooner or later,” Jimmy said. “The guy had a job and an apartment. At the very least, they’ll find a meeting list.”

“Okay, so AA was part of his life. But a chip on the scene makes it part of his death. I didn’t want them getting the wrong idea.”

“Maybe it’s the right idea,” Barbara said. “Maybe somebody in the program killed him.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Lots of people carry their anniversary coins on them all the time.”

“It wasn’t his coin,” Jimmy said.

“How do you know?” Barbara asked.

“You knew Tim?” I asked. Why was I surprised? Jimmy knew everyone.

“I go to the hardware store now and then,” he said. “I knew Tim from meetings. If he was alone in the store, we’d talk.”

“Still, how do you know it wasn’t his chip?”

“He didn’t have ninety days,” Jimmy said. “Last week, I went into Manny’s to get the new Christmas tree stand.”

“Bruce didn’t even notice the stand,” Barbara said.

“Yes, I did. I noticed the tree didn’t fall down this year. Yet. Go on, Jimmy.”  

“I asked Tim if he wanted to qualify at the Thursday step meeting. He said, and I quote, ‘I don’t have the clean time. I’m only seventy-two days back from a slip.’”

“Then the chip must have belonged to the murderer,” Barbara said. “Bruce, you should have left it there.”

Oops.

            In the next couple of weeks, with some reluctant help from Jimmy and overenthusiastic help from Barbara, I trolled the twelve-step programs for gossip that might suggest a motive for Tim’s death. Tim was a well-known chronic relapser. He’d get a few months together and then pick up. So far, he’d managed not to lose the job at Manny’s. But the slips meant that he was perennially on Step One, admitting he was powerless over alcohol. He could put dealing with all his other shortcomings on hold. Like cheating on his girlfriend, Suzanne, whose tearful share I heard one night at a meeting.

“What was I supposed to do?” she wailed to the group of thirty or so alcoholics. “Break up with him every time he had a slip?””

 I heard a few quiet mutters of “Yes!” and “Go to Al-Anon!” The woman next to me said, “Stop going to the hardware store for oranges.” It’s what people trying to recover from addictive relationships tell each other.

“I told him I’d move in with him,” Suzanne said, “when he got a year together. I thought it would motivate him to stay sober.”

More mutters and a sigh or two from the folks who had mentioned Al-Anon.

“But he didn’t want me to move in. He said he wanted to leave his options open. Ha!” For a moment, the rage broke through. “He was seeing someone else, I know he was. And now he’s dead!” She broke down sobbing.

Afterward, Suzanne came over to the woman next to me. I eavesdropped, pretending to take part in the conversation of a group of guys I didn’t know, as they rattled on.

“In Al-Anon they talk about the three Cs,” her friend said. “You didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it, and you can’t control it”—“it” in this case being Tim’s drinking.

“I don’t get it,” Suzanne said. “I loved him. How could I not try to help him stay sober?”

They also talked about Tim’s infidelity. Her friend tried to give her some tough love about jealousy, possessiveness, and paranoia being shortcomings that could only hurt her in the end. That went right over Suzanne’s head as she obsessed about who the woman Tim was seeing on the side could be. She thought it might be somebody Tim had met at Manny’s, if not a program person. Her friend didn’t think it could have been a program person, but she got flustered in the middle of telling Suzanne why not. I understood. No alcoholic with good long-term sobriety would have thirteenth-stepped—the polite term for hitting on a newcomer—someone whose recovery was as shaky as Tim’s. And of course Suzanne had done just that.

She might have killed him. She was plenty messed up herself. And messed-up alcoholics have some predictable symptoms, including poor judgment, impulsive behavior, denial, and simmering rage that could blow any time. All it would have taken was an angry confrontation, a moment when she lost control, and a blunt instrument.

 We also found Tim’s sponsor, Malcolm. He’d been in the program for ten years or so, and Jimmy knew him. Jimmy reported back to us that Malcolm had talked mostly about his own moral dilemma. Did he owe it to society to tell the police what he knew? Or did he still owe it to Tim to protect his anonymity?

“What did he know?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” Jimmy said. “And no, I didn’t try to pry it out of him. I told him that if his conscience was bothering him, he should go to the police.”

Barbara and I had a good time speculating about what Tim might have told Malcolm and nobody else. Sponsees are supposed to be completely honest with their sponsors. Maybe Tim had turned over a resentment list. The idea is that you’re supposed to let go all your grudges with the help of a Higher Power. But Tim, with his periodic relapses, could have made the list of resentments without being ready to let them go.

I uncovered one of Tim’s secrets when I ran into a guy I knew, Gary, in a church basement that hosted a lot of meetings. I was on my way to AA; he had just come out of a Debtor’s Anonymous meeting.

“Did you hear about the program guy who got murdered?” he asked.

Gary had never been Mr. Anonymity. If I told him I’d not only found the body, but also been the last person to see him alive, it would be all over the city in a week.

“Yes,” I said.“Did you know him?” Hey, if my Higher Power hadn’t wanted me to hear Gary’s gossip, I wouldn’t have run into him.

“I owed him money,” Gary said. “He got me a couple of power tools I wanted at a discount. I just started DA, and if I want to be solvent, I have to make a plan to repay all my debts and not incur any new ones. I cut up all my credit cards, but to tell the truth, I’m not so sure I can get by without them. Say, do you think now that he’s dead, that cancels the debt? It’s not as if he had a wife and kids or anything.”

“Ask your DA sponsor, dude.”

I had never been crazy about Gary. He’d just confirmed my low opinion.  Still, he’d opened up a whole new area of speculation. Could Tim have been stealing from his employer? Selling stuff out the back door? Maybe not while he was clean and sober. But when you’re getting high, you’ll do anything for the money to score. Maybe Gary wasn’t his only customer. Maybe somebody else thought a blow to the head was a good way to cancel an inconvenient debt.

By the day before New Year’s Eve, I hadn’t found the murderer. And neither had the police. They had come by a couple of times to go over exactly what I’d done, seen, and touched between the front door of Manny’s and the puddle around Tim’s head. But I could account for all of it. By now, they knew that Tim had been in AA. They’d probably  found the Big Book on his night table and program phone numbers in his address book. But I’d never given him my number. And they didn’t have probable cause to search my apartment. So I played dumb and shook my head politely when they asked me if I went to AA too.  

“Now what?” I asked Jimmy and Barbara. I picked a strand of tinsel off the tree and ran it through my fingers. “I’ve been to tons of meetings, and nobody’s raised their hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Bob, I’m an alcoholic. I killed the guy in the hardware store, and I want to turn it over.’”

“Tomorrow is Amateur Night,” Jimmy said. He peered at me over the row of lights Barbara had run across the top of his computer monitor.

“So?” I had been only seven days sober and pretty fogged out last New Year’s Eve, but I knew that’s what sober alcoholics called it: the one night a year when all the civilians went out and got what they naively thought was drunk.

“There’ll be a marathon only a few blocks from Manny’s.”

He didn’t mean a race for runners, but round-the-clock AA meetings to help us get through the holidays clean and sober. I’d gone with Jimmy on Christmas Eve. We’d stayed for a couple of hour-long meetings. It hadn’t been boring. Recovering alcoholics telling holiday war stories can be very, very funny. Then I’d gone to sleep on Barbara and Jimmy’s couch with the Christmas lights, all present and accounted for, glowing softly, the tinsel shimmering, and the smell of pine in my nostrils. In the morning, there’s been stockings—Barbara had insisted—and presents under the tree. And between one thing and another, I hadn’t missed the booze.

“Did you get any clues at the Christmas marathon?” Barbara asked.

“No,” I said, “but I was kind of distracted.”

“Of course you were,” she said. “You were dealing with the holiday and having found Tim dead only a couple of days before, and it was the first anniversary of your Christmas hitting bottom in detox on the Bowery.”

Barbara never leaves anything to the imagination. But I could see the love in her eyes, so I responded with a token snort and left it at that.

“It has to be someone with anywhere between ninety days and one year sobriety,” Jimmy said. “More than that, and I don’t think they’d have gotten entangled with him either financially or emotionally.”

“Suzanne did,” Barbara said. “But she’s a total codependent. Can I come with you guys to the AA marathon? I do have boundaries, but it is New Year’s Eve, and I hate to get left out.”

Understatement.

            The meeting was packed. The holiday season was tough on the clean and sober.  There was an AA joke about the “threefold disease” being Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. But everyone in this room tonight had made it through without picking up. As people shared, the word “gratitude” came up a lot. It didn’t even embarrass me much any more.

            Since the meetings would run all night, even people who usually didn’t raise their hands got a chance to share. We heard from guys with forty years’ sobriety and newbies who had crawled in after celebrating Christmas with a binge and blackout, like me last year. In the back, people milled around chugging coffee and scarfing down Christmas cookies. I grabbed a styrofoam cup of java and leaned against the wall alongside the rows of folding chairs, where I could see as many faces as possible. 

“Tomorrow,” one guy said, “the civilians will all be making New Year’s resolutions—and breaking them within a week or two.”

Everybody laughed.

“I don’t make resolutions any more,” he said. “I live one day at a time, and it works for me.”

 A pillar blocked my view of the woman who spoke next. I was wondering if one more cup of coffee would make me hyper, so I didn’t hear her name. But I tuned back in when she said, “I made my ninety days right after Thanksgiving.” I started to work my way around to where I could see her as she went on about how things happen the way they’re meant to happen. “Sometimes life doesn’t come out the way you expect,” she said, “but maybe it’s for the best.”

I saw the white-on-black hair before I saw her face. It was Cruella. For the best, huh? For her, maybe, but not for Tim. She must have been the other girlfriend. She’d met him behind the store before she came around the front to use me as her alibi. Once I told the cops, they’d find someone who’d seen her. They might even find the murder weapon. They sell a lot of stuff at Zabar’s. But not blunt instruments.