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ill-fitting clothes, there were remarkably soft and friendly eyes in there. As I entered the bar, Edie raised her glass an extra inch in the air by way of greeting and soundlessly said my name before returning her gaze to the TV.
    A soap opera was on. Ken and Barbie knockoffs were snarling at each other up on the screen. I slid onto a stool and asked Frank to draw me a Guinness. I glanced back up at the television and the pretty couple were already kissing. Man, they move fast on TV.
    “Who’d you bury today, Hitchcock?” Tony asked. He stopped taking his drink’s temperature and puckered a sip. “I saw you leaving for the cemetery. Didn’t seem like much of a crowd.”
    “It was only about a half dozen. A young woman. Suicide.”
    He shook his head sadly. “They didn’t want the pipes, huh?”
    “They barely wanted the casket. This was a real nobody, Tony. No friends. No family.”
    Tony grimaced. “God, that’s terrible.”
    I glanced back up at the television. The Barbie was crying now and her boyfriend was looking very uneasy. Frank dropped a coaster in front of me.
    “Thank you, Frank,” I said. A low rumble sounded from somewhere in the back of the barkeep’s throat. “Did Julia tell you that we’re going to be in another play together over at the Gypsy?” I said with excessive cheer, just for counterpoint. “They’re doing
Our Town.”
    Frank clawed the towel off his shoulder and swatted at a fly on the bar.
    “Whore.”
    Uh-oh, he was in
that
mood. It was a lost battle, but I gave it a volley anyway.
    “You shouldn’t judge her so harshly, Frank. Julia’s a free spirit. It takes all kinds to make a world.”
    Frank was unimpressed with my defense of his daughter, as I knew he would be. I guess it’s hard for some fathers to watch their daughters develop into comely devils.
    “Who is Julia seeing now?” Tony asked. Frank turned to him and counted off silently on his long bony fingers—one, two, three, four—then he looked over at me with his watery eyes. He
was
interested in the answer.
    “Actually, I don’t know,” I said. “She told me that she’s seeing a real nice fellow, but wouldn’t tell me his name.”
    “You should have held on to that woman, Hitchcock,” Tony said.
    “Try holding on to the tail of a tornado,” I said. It’s possible that Edie smiled at this, though her large glass was obscuring her tiny face. Frank set my Guinness in front of me. I took a sip. It was warm and perfect. God love the Irish.
    Silence fell over the bar, except for the TV set. The guy up there was slamming the door behind him. The girl took a quivering close-up as the screen went blank. A commercial for Jell-O came on. Edie skidded her glass across the bar for a refill.
    I switched to bourbon after my second Guinness and found myself once more thinking about the woman I had just buried. She was out there this very minute, already being forgotten by the handful of people who had bothered showing up to pay her their last respects. Normally I would be detaching at this point, throwing the ropes onto the deck and letting the little craft drift off and away. But it wasn’t happening. The fake Carolyn James—Lady X—had slipped one of those ropes around my ankle, and I was being pulled into the drink. I looked up at the mirror behind the bar and imagined that I saw her there. I imagined her sliding onto the stool next to mine, gesturing toward my drink, telling Frank she’d have what I was having. I imagined her turning towards me on her stool, lifting the glass to her lips, shooting me again with her eyes.
Well…?
    I ordered another bourbon from Frank and glared straight ahead at the mirror. I was aware by then that the bourbon was doing a lot of the thinking for me. Of course that was the whole idea.

CHAPTER 6
     
    T he next day, nursing a hard-cotton head from the previous day’s meditations at the Oyster, I drove my Chevy Nothing over to Carolyn James’s apartment building. She had lived