Mimi's Bar, Jane Halpern, Page 9

Danny Simon still managed to make an impression on Mimi during even her most personal and reflective moments - though how is certainly a mystery.

And Marty ... Marty was an employee.

This had happened sometime around the late fall of 1995, when Mimi started to become seriously short-handed on weekends. Marty started coming over to bartend and stuck around after the bar closed to do odd jobs, nail down a floorboard that was coming up, fix a bulb that was flickering, wash the dishes. He was only too glad to be doing these odd jobs for Mimi, and they joked and sometimes even sang along to the music of the jukebox when they did it. Marty was, of course, still in love with Mimi, but it had settled into a sort of Bogart and Bacall-ish banter between them, and Marty could even joke about it once in a while. He didn't come anywhere close to Mimi's heart, though, and deep down he probably knew that. It was painful, but he was beginning to learn to live with it and even be reasonably happy. When she offered him a job at the bar, he took it because he liked the work and liked Mimi. Now he tended bar three nights a week and did the cooking the other four, as well as various odd jobs.

"Marty, I need the ignitor on the stove fixed," Mimi would call to him after the last customer had left, and the chair jammed underneath the inside doorknob. (Mimi never got a proper lock put on the door.) Marty would come out from the hall where he had been rearranging the fish packages in the meat freezer to get ready for a shipment coming in tomorrow, wiping his icy hands on his sweatshirt front.

"Which one?" he asked, leaning over the cast-iron stovetop.

"Back right," Mimi said, pointing from her stool behind the bar, where she was balancing the books. "It's been misfiring all evening."

"Right," Marty said, lifted the burner ring, and reached inside with one finger. "Oh, what's this? There's your problem," turning around to face Mimi with the finger lifted high in the air and a piece of burnt something stuck on it. "You had a whole hash brown down there."

Mimi looked at the hash brown. "It must have fallen in when I made breakfast."

Marty popped the hash brown in his mouth, trying not to cringe at the taste. "Mmmm, good."

"Don't come crying to me when you get carbon poisoning."

He laughed and found a garbage bin to spit the little blackened bit of potato into. Then he lifted Mimi off the stool from behind. "C'mon, we'll find a whole feast in the stove if only we look! An entire land of milk and honey awaits us!"

Mimi shrieked and laughed, and Marty swung her around in circles on the dance floor. The jukebox sprung to life as they passed by and started wildly spinning out some totally terrific Cajun waltz music. Its button had been pushed, so to speak.

One night in late October of 1997, Jackie Wallace showed up at Mimi's. It was a cool night and the leaves were blowing off the trees and swirling around above the water, coming to rest on the heads of alligators that had come up for a breather. Mimi was working behind the bar that night, polishing the glasses with a white cloth she kept tucked in her belt. She was maintaining a conversation with Karen, who was down at the end of the bar nursing a beer and enjoying the warmth after a long day of hunting. Marty was flipping steaks on the grill with a long spatula and tossing jokes and wisecracks over his shoulder. The dance floor was full, but not too full for free movement, and a nice song was playing on the jukebox. I think it was "Elementary Things" by Clyde Owens and the Ocelots.

When Jackie Wallace opened the door, Marty heard the familiar squeak of the door hinges, and looked up with a friendly expression to see who it was. Mimi stopped drying glasses and her face slowly registered shock as she saw what was happening.

Jackie lunged for Leia, who was sitting quiet as a mouse about midway down the bar and whom no one had noticed until now. Mimi was over the counter and jumping on Jackie. Karen's face made an "o" and her drink went crashing down on the floor, sending glass fragments speeding and skipping along the beams. Marty yanked the towel off his shoulder and dashed around the counter. And Leia howled out and bit Jackie. And then Mimi and Karen and Marty were all heaving at him at once, pulling him off her and out the door, his hands pinned behind him. As they were moving him to the door, Leia regained herself, grabbed the nearest heavy object - a napkin dispenser from one of the tables right next to her - and threw it at Jackie's head, which towered above all three of the people holding him.

Jackie collapsed with a sound like a steer hitting the ground, and everyone stood still for a moment. He had literally shaken the building. Mimi was the first to recover.

"Okay, boys," she said, wiping her hands together. "We're going to take his feet."

Three men stepped forward silently.

"That's good. Now you take his feet. You take his head. Careful, that's it. You take the right arm, Marty you take the left, and I'll get the middle. Now one, two, three, lift!"

They all hoisted at once, and the figure of Jackie Wallace was raised silently and all at once to shoulder level.

At that moment Jackie stirred and groaned, and Marty looked up in a wide-eyed panic at Mimi. Mimi looked down at Jackie, then over at the beer bottle Marty had hooked by its lip underneath the string of his apron where he could grab it easily when he wanted a drink. Marty looked down at the bottle too, then slowly up at Mimi. She nodded at him, and held out her hand, waggling her fingers once, then twice, in a "give it here" motion. Marty unhooked the bottle and handed it wordlessly to Mimi. She took a moment getting her sweaty hand attuned to the grip of the neck, then raised it above her head and brought it down in one sharp smack against the side of Jackie's head. Jackie went limp. Mimi passed the bottle to the guy crouching next to her, and he did the same. Then the next guy, and the next, each passing the bottle off the whoever sat next to them and sitting quietly, looking down. None of them wanted to do it more than once. When the bottle got back to Marty it was clear Jackie was already dead. Marty stood up and flung the bottle, giving it a nice horizontal spin that rid it of all its liquid, off the railing side of the walkway. Then he came back and crouched again, silently, near the head of the body.

No one spoke. They all listened attentively. Their ears were more or less as bad as Mimi's, but they were attuned that night and heard every whisper and chuckle and grunt of snake and coon and gator. Nothing. No spinning cop lights, no flashlights coming. Nothing. Mimi heard an owl, and felt at that moment about as low as any human being can feel.

They waited. There was no sound, and he did not move again. Marty, Marty the ever-squeamish, reached forward and put his fingers on the dead man's neck, right below the jaw. He then looked up at Mimi and she nodded.

"Let's do it," she said. The other men scrambled to their feet and bent to pick up their pieces of Jackie. One hauled Jackie's arm over his neck, then thought better of it and held onto the arm as one holds the arm of a little sister one is preparing to throw into the water of the lake during summer vacation.

One, two, three, heave-ho. Jackie floated downward and Mimi cursed herself for not remembering he would later float. But, one by one, the alligators were coming through the water to save her.

There was a full investigation of Jackie Wallace's disappearance. The judges and the sheriff's office wanted blood. No one had approved of Jackie's drunken conduct, but they all missed his stories. They went on television and waved his picture, angrily demanding that anyone who knew anything step forward. No one did. Leia was arrested as procedure (one judge was heard to mumble on his way into his corridors, "I never liked that bitch"), but they could find no evidence to connect her to the crime. She had an airtight alibi - more than sixty people had seen her that night at Mimi's bar, and all of them swore up and down that nothing, absolutely nothing, out of the ordinary happened that night. Jackie had no known enemies, unless you counted Leia's parents, but they had been dead for over two years. ("Dead of shame," one officer was heard to mutter.) Leia was kept in jail for sixty days during the investigation and then released.

Mimi, on the other hand, was interrogated quite heavily about what she saw the night Jackie disappeared, and what she saw in the days and weeks immediately following. Mimi's status as the single (and divorced) female owner and manager of a bar she purported to have built herself did not fit in with the officers' idea of a credible witness. These factors combined with the fact that she had previously and on several occasions made known statements indicating an unnatural hatred of and ill will towards wife-beaters made her a prime suspect, in the officers' opinions. But they could find nothing to pin her down with.

Marty claimed he had had his nose in a steak all evening.

Karen told them to fuck off and slammed the door in their faces, at which point a large husky dog came running out from under the porch and attacked the deputies.

All the patrons of Mimi's claimed to have seen less than nothing, which one deputy pointed out was mathematically impossible. He was a young deputy with a fresh face who had an interest in mathematics and in the intricacies of the universe above and beyond the disappearance of Jackie Wallace. His supervisor frowned at him in front of the person they were questioning and told him to concentrate on the case at hand. But the young deputy tipped his hat quite nicely to the witness when they left, smiled, and said "Sorry to have bothered you, ma'am". The witness, a woman who'd never been called "ma'am" before in her life, smiled after him long after he'd gone.

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