Boerum Hill Inn is a tavern on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt, a polished, late-night setting threaded into the working life of L&L. Its changing clientele and closing-time rides place it between Frank Minna’s old neighborhood network and the cleaner car service that emerges after his death.

Setting and clientele

The Inn is described as an elegantly renovated tavern, with a gleaming antique inlaid-mirror bar and a CD jukebox weighted toward Blue Note and Stax. Its regulars are professional singles whom the narrator characterizes as Manhattanized: people who consider television-bar crowds, subway rides, and L&L beneath them. They flirt and talk there through the week until two in the morning, then return to expensive apartments or Midtown offices. Their polished nightlife sits alongside the neighborhood’s less polished routines, often leaving them unaware of the local realities around them.

Frank Minna had his own dismissive taxonomy for the customers: he joked that anyone drinking at the Inn was somebody else’s assistant, whether a district attorney’s, an editor’s, or a video artist’s. The joke makes the tavern a marker of social distinction, but also reveals how the Men viewed its patrons—as outsiders to their own version of Brooklyn.

Bartenders and L&L

The Inn’s bartenders, Siobhain and Welcome, are both from Brooklyn and, according to Minna, Irish to their ancient souls. Siobhain is properly named; Welcome carries a name Minna attributes to her parents’ hippie ideals. They share a Park Slope apartment, may be lovers according to Minna, and tend bar while working through graduate school. Because the owner will not schedule both of them after midnight, one bartender is left to close each night.

The closing shift creates a recurring connection between the tavern and L&L. If the agency’s men are not occupied with surveillance, they drive the bartender on duty home. They also sometimes take Inn patrons who have stayed too late: a woman alone or a newly formed couple too drunk to be left to chance. Most of the time, however, the men claim they have no cars. The rides are selective favors rather than a dependable public service, part of the informal neighborhood conduct Minna’s crew maintains around its nominal car business.

A meeting point after Minna

After Minna’s death, the Inn becomes a backdrop to the unsettled relations inside L&L. Welcome comes to the office door, and Danny Fantl takes her out to the Cadillac. Unlike a typical passenger, she sits in the front seat. As they leave, Tony Vermonte searches through the drawers behind the counter, hurriedly spreading papers across it. The narrator reads the simultaneous actions as a sign that Tony does not trust Danny with everything. The scene makes the ride home more than a routine favor: the Inn’s closing shift coincides with a private division of information within the agency.

The Inn remains part of L&L’s daily geography after the business is reorganized. Once the agency is clean and also operates as a real car service, its cars make regular runs between the Inn and stylish apartment buildings along Prospect Park West and Joralemon Street. What had once been an occasional ride offered when the men had time becomes one stop in an ordinary service route.

Closing-time returns

In a later scene, the Inn has just closed, and Siobhain stands at the door, dark-circled and worn down from turning out a persistent crowd. Gilbert Coney offers to drive her home, first placing his poker hand on the table. The narrator suspects Gilbert has developed a crush on her—or has finally allowed an older one to show now that Minna is no longer there to tease him about her supposed preference for women. The suspicion remains the narrator’s reading, not a confirmed relationship.

That closing image gathers the Inn’s recurring functions into one small exchange: it is a workplace that leaves its staff with a late journey home, a neighborhood destination served by L&L, and a setting where the men’s private attachments become visible in everyday gestures. Its place in the reorganized route also quietly registers the change in the agency: the rides continue, but no longer depend solely on favors and pretense.