Read Online Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) by Elizabeth Zelvin - Free Book Online

York Jewish pronunciation. Rhymes with pudding, not with fudge. “After your boss kicked me out I hung around the corridors watching all the little worker bees going to and fro. The job that looked the most fun was pushing a cart filled with vials of blood up and down the halls, like a Good Humor man for vampires. And that’s setting the bar very, very low.”
    “Glad to hear you didn’t like the pharmacy best.”
    “I’m not stupid. I know ‘people, places, and things’ are out.” If I meant to stick with this recovery thing, a job involving access to pharmaceuticals would be a lot more fun than I could afford to risk.
    “What about a desk job? You can do computers, and you have plenty of office experience. Human Resources? Billing? Medical records?”
    I put my head in my hands, clutched a couple of fistfuls of hair, and groaned. “You mean I do have to die of boredom to stay sober? I’ve done that kind of job as a temp, but full time? Permanent? I did consider it. For about ten seconds. I took one look around that Human Resources office and my heart sank like the
Titanic
.”
    Barbara shot Jimmy a conspiratorial look. Jimmy raised his eyebrows, tilted back in his chair, and flung up his hands in an I-give-up gesture.
    “Speaking of not getting bored,” she said, “we were thinking—”
    “We, white man?” Jimmy said. But he sounded resigned.
    “No, seriously, Bruce. We were talking about your friend. I know you liked him. And I know you’re upset.”
    “You think I need closure?” From the buildup, it sounded like Jimmy hadn’t told Barbara I’d already said I wanted us to look into God’s death. This way, he kept the leverage of magnanimously supporting her desire to snoop.
    “Yes, I do,” Barbara said.
    “Gee, Barbara, I don’t know. It’s not really our business. And we’re not experts.” Then I relented. I might joke about what Barbara would call the process. But I had liked the guy. It had shaken me to watch him die. Especially not taking the edge off it with booze or drugs. And something about it felt wrong. “I thought you’d never ask.”
    Before I left that night, the three of us talked it through as far as we could without further information.
    God had come back to the detox on time and apparently clean. He’d given in his urine without any stalling or kvetching, as Barbara put it. He might have OD’d, but I couldn’t see how. God had eaten whatever they’d served for dinner, along with me and everybody else.
    “It’s not as if the cook was out in the woods picking poison mushrooms that afternoon,” Barbara said.
    “So whatever killed him was something he took or got hold of while he was out,” Jimmy said.
    “Seems so,” I said.
    “Remind me again,” said Jimmy, “I keep forgetting. Why is it our job to figure it out?”
    “Because if we don’t,” said Barbara, “no one will. Doctor Bones will have signed the death certificate, and that’ll be it.” His name wasn’t Doctor Bones. But that’s what they’d been calling the docs in detox since 1967.
    “It’s still none of our business.” Jimmy made a stern face that didn’t impress either of us. “Bruce, your job right now is to stay clean and sober. And Barbara, yours is to live my life—I mean your own life.”
    “Good one, Jimmy.” I grinned.
    “Very funny,” Barbara said. “Anyhow, we already agreed doing this will help Bruce stay clean and sober. Oops.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. She did that a lot. Jimmy called it her Tenth Step Twitch. Step Ten is “When we were wrong, promptly admitted it.”
    “Ohhhhh,” I drawled, “this is my therapy. But you weren’t going to tell me. ‘Don’t drink, go to meetings, and investigate a murder.’”
    Having made her amends, Barbara moved right on. As we all knew, she’d say anything.
    “The best reason you might actually make it this time is that you have real feelings about this. You cared about God, and it hurt you when he died.”
    “So