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Murphy’s plumbing went awry.
    â€œDid he forget to pay someone?” Carl asked.
    â€œThe girl getting murdered,” Sam said, still not looking up, as if he might not be talking to us after all. “They got to do something.”
    Everyone clammed up and looked at his drink when he said this. We hadn’t talked much about Angelina, but she was on my mind, not far from the surface most of the time. I figured it was like that for everyone else, too.
    Sam didn’t have much to say beyond that; he was a guy who kept his own counsel, anyway. Distinguished in a certain New York City ne’er-do-well style, Sam wore his hair in a slicked-down, fifties DA, even though it was turning gray, as were his eyebrows and his salt and pepper walrus mustache. He knew about crime, Sam did. That is, he knew who did it most of the time—knew them personally. He might know who killed Angelina. But Sam was closed-mouthed; he would say what he wanted to say. If you asked him anything beyond this, he’d snort, hunch up further into his jacket, and might not speak to you again for a couple of days.
    One of the reasons Sam came into Oscar’s was because he liked Carl van Sagan. Carl was a writer, a poet who worked midnights as a doorman to support his muse. Sam told stories to Carl that I got to hear because I was the bartender. He wanted Carl to tell him how to write a book.
    â€œA book about characters,” Sam told Carl. “I know some real characters.”
    Carl raised an eyebrow.
    â€œYou’re a writer, right?”
    Carl nodded.
    â€œCan you make any money at that?”
    â€œI’m hoping to sell one of my poems to the movies,” Carl said.
    Nodding his head, pursing his lips, Sam looked Carl over. “I suppose not…”
    Carl hitched up his glasses, wrinkled his forehead, which he did when he was interested in what was being said, and which gave him that owl-like look, and bought Sam a drink. The only time Sam drank was under such auspices.
    â€œI just want to know how you write it down,” Sam said after sipping his beer, the foam decorating his mustache as he turned to look at Carl with some earnestness. “I mean, do you got to start when the guy’s born?”
    His first character was Nick. “I told him they’re going to build a statue of him in Greece. When those guys get off the plane there, he’ll be right in front of them.” Nick, it turned out, was a handicapper who went to the track with Sam, but who only gave tips to Greeks. “They love him,” Sam said.
    Carl wrinkled up his forehead, cleaned his glasses, and ordered another scotch. Sam wanted coffee.
    When I got back with the drinks, they were talking about capital punishment.
    Sam was in favor of it. “If I go back again, it’ll be the third time,” Sam said over his coffee cup. “That means for keeps. I’d rather be dead.”
    Listening to Sam talk to Carl, I found out how he’d gotten to jail in the first place. It was back in the Fifties when he thought he was a hot shot and went to work running numbers for Boss.
    â€œThree guys jumped me in an alley behind the Terminal Bar down on 10th Avenue. They were going to kill me. They threw me against a loading dock. I looked down and there was a hammer. God must have put that hammer there. I picked it up and clobbered the guy closest to me.
    â€œThe cops came in the Terminal an hour later. They said, ‘Hey, you with the hat on.’ I did nine years for manslaughter.”
    Now he sat beside Oscar, who tried to ignore him. Sam was one of the many customers, like Reuben and all the Eritrean and Namibian refugees, Oscar didn’t like. But he left them alone when they came in to see me. Oscar wouldn’t fire me, even though he didn’t like me either. He believed in the pre-eminence of the bartender, having been one himself, so he was afraid he’d lose all of the customers if I left.
    This