Stragglers

The Blue Hour closed every night at two, and every night for nineteen years it had taken Sol Mariani until at least half past to actually get anyone out the door. Jazz clubs gather a particular kind of straggler. The music ends and they keep sitting there, holding the last inch of a drink, as though leaving would make the night officially over and they were not ready for the night to be officially over. On the last night the club would ever open, there were six of them, and Sol did not have the heart to rush a single one. He stood behind the bar at ten past two with a cloth in his hand, not really wiping anything, and he looked at the room he was about to lose. The lease was gone; the building had been sold out from under him to people who would put something brighter and louder in its place. He had not told the stragglers that tonight was the end. He had not been able to make the words come out, all evening, and so the six of them sat in his closing club not knowing it was closing, and Sol found a strange comfort in that, in being the only one who knew the size of the moment. There was the trumpet player, Lena, who had played the last set and was now nursing a whiskey at the end of the bar with the particular stillness of a musician who has just played well and does not want to spoil it with talking. There was the young couple at table four who had been not-quite-arguing since midnight, their voices low and their faces lower. There was the regular everyone called the Professor, who came three nights a week, drank exactly two glasses of red, and had never once told anyone his name. There was a man in a good coat by the door whom Sol did not know, which was rare, and who had been watching the room more than the music all night. And there was Sol's own bartender, Marcus, cashing out the till with the slow care of someone who did not want to go home either. Six people. Sol counted them the way he counted them every night, a headcount that was half affection and half arithmetic, and then he set down the cloth and said, because the words finally came, "Folks. I'm going to need to tell you something, and I'd be glad if you'd let me pour you one more while I do it." That was the last thing Sol Mariani ever said to a room. What happened next, every one of the six would later describe, and no two of the descriptions would agree. The lights, some said, flickered. There was a sound, some said, from the back, by the cellar door. The young woman at table four would swear the front door opened and closed; the man in the good coat, who was nearest the front door, would swear with equal certainty that it did not. For a stretch of perhaps ninety seconds the Blue Hour was a room full of people each privately occupied with the end of a long night, and not one of them was watching the bar. And at the end of those ninety seconds, Marcus the bartender turned back from the till with a question on his face, and the question never got asked, because Sol Mariani was no longer standing behind his bar. He was on the floor behind it, and the night's takings sat untouched in the open drawer beside him, and he was, past any doubt, past any pouring of one more, dead. Six people had been inside a locked club. The takings were not the motive; the money was right there, counted, ignored. And by the time the first patrol car nosed into the wet street outside, every one of the six had already had time to do the same quiet, deliberate thing. Every one of them had decided what they were not going to say.