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

it’s deerstalker hats for three,” Jimmy said.
    “He needs closure,” Barbara said.
    “And here I thought you were motivated by sheer unholy curiosity.”
    “I was,” said Barbara with her usual devastating frankness. “But Bruce hasn’t let himself feel anything for years. If finding out why God died keeps him interested in staying sober, we have no choice. Or rather, we have choices—we always have choices—and we choose to take this to the limit if I have anything to say about it.”
    “Thank you for sharing,” I said. “Why don’t you just cut me open and display my bleeding heart?” But she was right.
    “Okay, okay,” Jimmy said, “I’m for truth and justice and Bruce having feelings too. But I’m still not sure why we think God was murdered when the professionals don’t.”
    “Think about it,” Barbara said. “It’s not an English country house weekend in a murder mystery. Everybody expects drunks on the Bowery to die. No one will go looking for evidence of murder, and if they did, they wouldn’t run around like Lord Peter Wimsey hunting down appropriate suspects. They could lose the paperwork. They could lose the corpse, for that matter. You know what the city bureaucracy is like. Or if you don’t, I do. I’ve worked in city hospitals. I have stories that could curl your hair.”
    “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” Jimmy said. “Bruce needs closure. You need to make sure he doesn’t shut down emotionally.”
    “Also, I’m the only one who can get back into detox. I’ve been thinking about that, and I have a great idea. I’m going to call and ask for some per diem work—they always need counselors, and I can do a couple of night shifts at least. It’ll be a great chance to snoop through the records.”
    “Great, so now we’re raiding confidential records.”
    “You’re not,” said Barbara, “and I’m inside the confidentiality loop if I go back to work there as a counselor, even temporarily.”
    “Okay, that’s why you’re in. And I get why Bruce is in. But what about me? How come I’m involved in this?”
    “Elementary, my dear Watson,” said Barbara. “We’ll need the Internet.”

Chapter Ten
    Barbara emerged from the subway into the dark. She paused at the top of the stairs to catch her breath. The steps at Broadway-Lafayette had to be the steepest in the city. Even climbing them every day as an intern had never improved her wind. Waiting for the green light so she could cross the broad expanse of Houston Street, she clutched her handbag, tucked up under her armpit in streetwise New Yorker style, and glanced from side to side. She had never feared the streets of New York or its subways at night, though common sense demanded that she remain alert and cautious. The flutter at the pit of her stomach came not from dangers without but from doubts within.
    She had always had the habit of self-scrutiny. On first reading the Twelve Steps, she had been alienated, if not horrified, by what she still thought of as the God stuff, but had thought the searching and fearless moral inventory sounded like fun. “No problem,” she had told first Jimmy and then her skeptical sponsor. “I’ve been making lists of what’s wrong with me my whole life.” She had learned a lot since then. Recovery had taken her a lot farther than the Bowery from her nice Jewish upbringing. Her mother, a strong personality and always a point of reference, had never said a prayer in a church basement or hugged a nun. Barbara grinned, thinking of tough little Sister Angel and crisp Sister Perseverance. Don’t be so impressed with your own broadmindedness, she told herself. She wished that as she moved through her life, she could refrain completely from thinking, Look, Ma! as she met the people, took the actions, thought the thoughts, and felt the feelings that went so far beyond the compass of her upbringing.
    “Progress, not perfection,” she muttered. Her mother would have derided