A Drop of the Hard Stuff

A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF

A MATTHEW SCUDDER NOVEL

LAWRENCE BLOCK

NEW YORK BOSTON LONDON

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Copyright Page

This is for MEGAN and CRAIG

As the governor of North Carolina

said to the governor of South Carolina,

“It’s a long time between drinks.”

Late One Night…

“I’ve often wondered,” Mick Ballou said, “how it would all have gone if I’d taken a different turn.”

We were at Grogan’s Open House, the Hell’s Kitchen saloon he’s owned and operated for years. The gentrification of the neighborhood has had its effect on Grogan’s, although the bar hasn’t changed much inside or out. But the local hard cases have mostly died or moved on, and the crowd these days is a gentler and more refined bunch. There’s Guinness on draft, and a good selection of single-malt Scotches and other premium whiskeys. But it’s the joint’s raffish reputation that draws them. They get to point out the bullet holes in the walls, and tell stories about the notorious past of the bar’s owner. Some of the stories are true.

They were all gone now. The barman had closed up, and the chairs were on top of the tables so they’d be out of the way when the kid came in at daybreak to sweep up and mop the floor. The door was locked, and all the lights out but the leaded-glass fixture over the table where we sat with our Waterford tumblers. There was whiskey in Mick’s, club soda in mine.

Our late nights have grown less frequent in recent years. We’re older, and if we’re not quite inclined to move to Florida and order the Early Bird Special at the nearest family restaurant, neither are we much given to talking the night away and greeting the dawn wide-eyed. We’re both too old for that.

He drinks less these days. A year or so back he got married, to a much younger woman named Kristin Hollander. The union astonished almost everyone—but not my wife, Elaine, who swears she saw it coming—and it could hardly fail to change him, if only because it gave him a reason to go home at the day’s end. He still drinks twelve-year-old Jameson, and drinks it neat, but he doesn’t drink as much of it, and there are days when he doesn’t drink at all. “I still have a taste for it,” he has said, “but for years I had a deep thirst, and the thirst has left me. I couldn’t tell you where it’s gone.”

In earlier years, it was not that unusual for us to sit up all night, talking the hours away and sharing the occasional long silence, each of us drinking his chosen beverage. At dawn he’d don the bloodstained butcher’s apron that had belonged to his father. He’d go to the Butchers’ Mass at St. Bernard’s, in the meatpacking district. Once in a while I’d keep him company.

Things change. The meatpacking district is trendy now, a yuppie bastion, and most of the firms that gave the area its name have gone out of business, their premises converted to restaurants and apartments. St. Bernard’s, long an Irish parish, is the new home of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I can’t remember the last time I saw Mick wearing that apron.

This was one of our rare late nights, and I suppose we both felt the need for it, or we’d have gone home by now. And Mick had turned reflective.

“A different turn,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“There are times,” he said, “when it seems to me that there was nothing for it, that I was destined to follow the one particular course. I lose sight of it these days, because my business interests are all as clean as a hound’s tooth. Why a hound’s tooth, have you ever wondered?”

“No idea.”

“I’ll ask Kristin,” he said, “and she’ll sit down at the computer and pop up with the answer in thirty seconds. That’s if I remember to ask her.” He smiled at a private thought. “What I lose sight of,” he said, “is that I became a career criminal. Now I was hardly a trailblazer in that respect. I lived in a neighborhood where crime was the leading occupation. The surrounding streets were a sort of vocational high school.”

“And you graduated with honors.”

“I did. I might have been valedictorian, if they’d had such a thing on offer for young thieves and hoodlums. But, you know, not every boy on our block wound up leading a life of villainy. My father was respectable. He was—well, I’ll honor his memory enough not to say what he was, but I’ve told you about him.”

“You have.”

“All the same, he was a respectable man. He got up every morning and went to work. And the road my brothers took was a higher one than mine. One a priest—well, that didn’t last, but only because he lost his faith. And John, a great success in business and a pillar of his community. And Dennis, the poor lad, who died in Vietnam. I told you how I went down to Washington just to see his name on that memorial.”

“Yes.”

“I’d have made a terrible priest. I wouldn’t even find a welcome diversion in molesting altar boys. And I can’t imagine myself kissing asses and counting dollars like my brother John. But can you guess the thought I’ve had? That I might have taken the road you took.”

“And become a cop?”

“Is the notion that outlandish?”

“No.”

“When I was a little boy,” he said, “it seemed to me that a cop was a wonderful thing for a man to be. Standing there in a handsome uniform, directing traffic, helping children cross the street safely. Protecting us all from the bad guys.” He grinned. “The bad guys indeed. Little did I know. But there were lads on our block who did put on the blue uniform. One of them, Timothy Lunney was his name, he wasn’t so different from the rest of us. You wouldn’t have found it remarkable to hear he’d taken to robbing banks, or making collections for the shylocks.”

We talked some about what might have been, and just how much choice a person had. That last was something to think about, and we both took a few minutes to think about it, and let the silence stretch. Then he said, “And how about yourself?”

“Me?”

“You didn’t grow up knowing you’d become a cop.”

“No, not at all. I never really planned it. Then I took the entrance exam, which back then I’d have had to be a moron to fail, and then I was in the Academy, and, well, there I was.”

“Could you have gone the other way?”

“And drifted instead into a life of crime?” I thought about it. “I can’t point to any innate nobility of character that would have ruled it out,” I said. “But I have to say I never felt any pull in that direction.”

“No.”

“There was a boy I grew up with in the Bronx,” I remembered, “and we lost track of each other completely when my family moved away. And then I ran into him a couple of times years later.”

“And he’d taken the other path.”

“He had,” I said. “He was no great success at it, but that’s where his life led him. I saw him once through a one-way mirror in a station house, and then lost track of him again. And then we caught up with each other some years later. It was before you and I got to know each other.”

“Were you still drinking?”

“No, but I wasn’t away from it long. Less than a year. Interesting, really, the things that happened to him.”

“Well,” he said, “don’t stop now.”

I

I COULDN’T TELL YOU the first time I saw Jack Ellery, but it would have to have been during the couple of years I spent in the Bronx. We were a class apart at the same grammar school, so I’d have seen him in the halls or outside at recess, or playing stickball or stoopball after school let out. We got to know each other well enough to call each other by our last names, in the curious manner of boys. If you’d asked me then about Jack Ellery, I’d have said he was all right, and I suppose he’d have said the same about me. But that’s as much as either of us would have been likely to say, because that’s as well as we knew each other.

Then my father’s business tailed off and he closed the store and we moved, and I didn’t see Jack Ellery again for more than twenty years. I thought he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him right away. I don’t know whether he would have recognized me, because he didn’t get to see me. I was looking at him through one-way glass.

This would have been in 1970 or ’71. I’d had my gold shield for a couple of years, and I was a detective assigned to the Sixth Precinct in Greenwich Village when the prewar building on Charles Street still served as the station house. It wasn’t long after that they moved us to new quarters on West Tenth, and some enterprising fellow bought our old house and turned it into a co-op or condo, and tipped his hat to history by calling it Le Gendarme.

Years later, when One Police Plaza went up, they did essentially the same thing with the old police headquarters on Centre Street.

But this was on the second floor at the old place on Charles Street, where Jack Ellery was wearing number four in a lineup of five male Caucasians in their late thirties and early forties. They ranged between five-nine and six-one, were dressed alike in jeans and open-necked sport shirts, and stood waiting for a woman they couldn’t see to pick out the one who had held her at gunpoint while his partner emptied the cash register.

She was a stout woman, maybe fifty, and she was badly miscast as the co-owner of a mom-and-pop housewares store. If she’d taught school, all her pupils would have been terrified of her. I was there as a casual spectator, because it wasn’t my case. A plainclothes cop named Lonergan was the arresting officer, and I was standing next to him. There was an assistant DA in the room, next to the woman, and there was a tall skinny kid in a bad suit who pretty much had to be the Legal Aid lawyer.

When I was wearing a uniform in Brooklyn, they had me partnered with an older man named Vince Mahaffey, and one of the few hundred things he taught me was to catch a lineup any time I had the chance. It was, he told me, a much better way to familiarize yourself with the local bad guys than going through books of mug shots. You got to watch their faces and their body language, you got a sense of them that would stick in your mind. Besides, he said, it was a free show, so why not enjoy it?

So I got in the habit of viewing lineups at the Sixth, and this particular afternoon I studied the men in turn while the ADA told the woman to take her time. “No, I know who it is,” she said, and Lonergan looked happy. “It’s Number Three.”

The ADA asked her if she was positive, in a voice that suggested she might want to rethink the whole thing, and the Legal Aid kid cleared his throat, as if preparing to offer an objection.

No need. “I’m a hundred percent positive,” she said. “That’s the son of a bitch who robbed me, and I’ll say so in front of you and God and everybody.”

Lonergan had stopped looking happy as soon as she’d announced her choice. He and I stayed in the room while the others filed out. I asked him what he knew about Number Three.

“He’s an assistant manager at the market on Hudson,” he said. “Hell of a nice guy, always glad to do us a favor, but I’ve got to stop using him in lineups. This is the third time somebody’s picked him out, and he’s the kind of guy, he finds a dime in a pay phone, he puts it back.”

“He’s got a kind of a crooked look to him,” I said.

“I think it’s that bend in his lip. You barely notice it, but it makes his face the least bit asymmetrical, which never inspires confidence. Whatever it is, he’s been in his last lineup.”

“As long as he stays out of trouble,” I said. “So who were you hoping she’d pick?”

“No, you tell me. Who were you leaning toward?”

“Number Four.”

“On the nose. I shoulda had you for my witness, Matt. Is that cop instinct talking, or did you recognize him?”

“I think it was the expression on his face after she made her call. I know they can’t hear anything in there, but he picked up something and knew he was off the hook.”

“I missed that.”

“But I think I’d have picked him anyway. He looked familiar to me, and I can’t think why.”

“Well, he’s got a yellow sheet. Maybe you saw his handsome face in a book of mug shots. High-Low Jack, they call him. Ring a bell?”

It didn’t. I asked his last name, and then repeated it myself—“Jack Ellery, Jack Ellery”—and then something clicked.

“I knew him back when I was a kid,” I said. “Jesus, I haven’t seen him since grade school.”

“Well,” Lonergan said, “I’d say the two of you took different career paths.”

The next time I saw him was years later. In the meantime I had left the NYPD and moved from a split-level house in Syosset to a hotel room just west of Columbus Circle. I didn’t look for a job, but jobs found me, and I wound up functioning as a sort of unlicensed private eye. I didn’t keep track of expenses and I didn’t furnish written reports, and the people who hired me paid me in cash. Some of the cash paid for my hotel room, and a larger portion covered my tab at the bar around the corner, where I took most of my meals, met most of my clients, and spent most of my time. And if there was anything left over, I bought a money order and sent it to Syosset.

Then, after too many blackouts and too many hangovers, after a couple of trips to detox and at least one seizure, the day came when I left a drink untouched on top of a bar and found my way to an AA meeting. I’d been to meetings before, and I’d tried to stay sober, but I guess I hadn’t been ready, and I guess this time I was. “My name’s Matt,” I told a roomful of people, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

I hadn’t said that before, not the whole sentence, and saying it is no guarantee of sobriety. Sobriety’s never guaranteed, it always hangs by a thread, but I left that meeting feeling that something had shifted. I didn’t have a drink that day, or the day after, or the day after that, and I kept going to meetings and stringing the days together, and I must have been somewhere in the middle of my third month of sobriety when I next encountered Jack Ellery. I’d had my last drink on the thirteenth of November, so it would have been the last week of January or the first week of February, something like that.

I know I couldn’t have had three full months yet, because I remember that I raised my hand and gave my day count, and you only do that for the first ninety days. “My name’s Matt,” you say, “and I’m an alcoholic, and today is Day Seventy-seven.” And everybody says, “Hi, Matt,” and then it’s somebody else’s turn.

This was at a three-speaker meeting on East Nineteenth Street, and after the second speaker they had a secretary’s break, when they made announcements and passed the basket. People with anniversaries announced them, and drew applause, and the newbies shared their day counts, and then the third speaker told his story and wrapped it all up by ten o’clock so we could all go home.

I was on my way out the door when I turned at the sound of my name and there was Jack Ellery. My seat was in the front, so I hadn’t noticed him earlier. But I knew him at a glance. He looked older than he had on the other side of the one-way glass, and there was more in his face than the years alone could account for. There’s no charge for the seats in an AA room, but that’s because you pay for them in advance.

“You don’t recognize me,” he said.

“Sure I do. You’re Jack Ellery.”

“Jesus, you’ve got some memory. What were we, twelve, thirteen years old?”

“I think I was twelve and you were thirteen.”

“Your dad had the shoe store,” he said. “And you were a class behind me, and one day I realized I hadn’t seen you in a while, and nobody knew where you went. And the next time I passed the shoe store, it was gone.”

“Like most of his business ventures.”

“He was a nice man, though. I remember that. Mr. Scudder. He impressed the hell out of my mother one time. He had that machine, you stood with your feet in the opening and it gave you some sort of X-ray picture of them. She was all set to spring for a new pair of shoes, and your dad said my feet hadn’t grown enough to need ’em. ‘That’s an honest man, Jackie,’ she said on the way home. ‘He could have taken advantage and he didn’t.’ ”

“One of the secrets of his success.”

“Well, it made an impression. Jesus, old times in the Bronx. And now we’re both of us sober. You got time for a cup of coffee, Matt?”

II

WE SAT ACROSS from each other in a booth in a diner on Twenty-third Street. He took his coffee with a lot of cream and sugar. Mine was black. The only thing I ever put in it was bourbon, and I didn’t do that anymore.

He remarked again on my having recognized him, and I said it worked both ways, he’d recognized me. “Well, you said your name,” he said. “When you gave your day count. You’ll be coming up on ninety pretty soon.”

Ninety days is a sort of probationary period. When you’ve been clean and dry for ninety days, you’re allowed to tell your story at a meeting, and to hold various group offices and service positions. And you can stop raising your hand and telling the world how many days you’ve got.

He’d been sober sixteen months. “That year,” he said. “I had a year the last day of September. I never thought I’d make that year.”

“They say it’s tough right before an anniversary.”

“Oh, it wasn’t any more difficult then. But, see, I more or less took it for granted that a year of sobriety was an impossible accomplishment. That nobody stayed sober that long. Now my sponsor’s sober almost six years, and there’s enough people in my home group with ten, fifteen, twenty years, and it’s not like I pegged them as liars. I just thought I was a different kind of animal, and for me it had to be impossible. Did your old man drink?”

“That was the other secret of his success.”

“Mine too. In fact he died of it. It was just a couple of years ago, and what gets me is he died alone. His liver went on him. My ma was gone already, she had cancer, so he was alone in the world, and I couldn’t be at his bedside where I belonged because I was upstate. So he died in a bed all by himself. Man, that’s gonna be one tough amends to make, you know?”

I didn’t want to think about the amends I’d have to make. Just put that on the shelf, Jim Faber told me more than once. You’ve got two things to do today, and one is go to a meeting and the other is don’t drink. Get both of those things right and all the rest will come along when it’s supposed to.

“You went on the cops, Matt. Or am I mixing you up with somebody else?”

“No, you got it right. That ended a few years ago, though.”

He lifted a hand, mimed knocking back a drink, and I nodded. He said, “I don’t know if you would have heard, but I went the other way.”

“I may have heard something.”

“When I say I was upstate, it was as a guest of the governor. I was at Green Haven. It wasn’t exactly up there with the Brinks Job and the Great Train Robbery. What I did, I picked up a gun and walked into a liquor store. And it’s not like it was the first time.”

I didn’t have a response to that, but he didn’t seem to require one. “I had a decent lawyer,” he said, “and he fixed it so I took a plea to one charge and they dropped the others. You know what was the hardest part? You got to do what they call allocute. You familiar with the term?”

“You have to stand up in court and say what you did.”

“And I hated the idea. Just flat-out hated it. I was looking for a way around it. ‘Can’t I just say guilty and let it go at that?’ But my guy tells me no, you do it the way they want, you say what you did. Well, it’s that or I blow the plea deal, so I’m not completely crazy and I do what I’m supposed to do. And you want to know something? The minute it’s out, I got this rush of relief.”

“Because it was over.”

He shook his head. “Because it was out there. Because I said it, I copped to it. There’s the Fifth Step in a nutshell, Matt. You own up in front of God and everybody and it’s a load off your mind. Oh, it wasn’t the last load, it was just one small part of it, but when the program came along and they told me what I was gonna have to do, it made sense to me right from the jump. I could see how it would work.”

AA’s twelve steps, Jim Faber had told me, weren’t there to keep you sober. Not drinking was what kept you sober. The steps were to make sobriety comfortable enough so that you didn’t feel the need to drink your way out of it, and I’d get to them in due course. So far I had admitted that I was powerless over alcohol, that it made my life unmanageable, and that was the First Step, and I could stay on that one as long as I had to.

And I was in no great rush to get past it. They began most of the meetings I went to with a reading of the steps, and even if they didn’t there’d be a list of them hanging on the wall where you couldn’t help reading it. The Fourth Step was a detailed personal inventory, and you sat down and wrote it out. The Fifth Step was confessional—you shared all that shit with another human being, most likely your sponsor.

Some people, Jim said, stayed sober for decades without ever doing the steps.

I thought about the steps and missed a few beats of what Jack was saying, but when I tuned in he was talking about Green Haven, saying it was probably the best thing that ever happened to him. It had introduced him to the program.

“I went to meetings because it was a chance to sit in a chair and zone out for an hour,” he said. “And it was easier to stay dry inside than it was to drink the awful shit cons brew up for themselves, or buy pills that the screws smuggled in. And, you know, I can’t say I blame alcohol for the turn my life took, because I chose it myself, but going to meetings it began to dawn on me that every time I got my ass in trouble, I was always high. I mean, like, invariably. It was me making the choice to do the crime, and it was me making the choice to take the drink or smoke the joint, but the two went together, you know, and I was seeing it for the first time.”

So he stayed sober in prison. Then they let him out and he came home to New York and got a room in an SRO hotel a couple of blocks from Penn Station, and by the third night he was drinking blended whiskey around the corner in a place called the Terminal Lounge.

“So called because of its location,” he said, “but the name would have fit the place even if it had been in the middle of Jackson Heights. Fucking joint was the end of the line.”

Except of course it wasn’t. The line ran its zigzag course for another couple of years, during which time he stayed out of trouble with the law but couldn’t stay out of the bars. He’d go to meetings and begin to put a little time together, and then he’d have one of those oh-what-the-hell moments, and the next thing he knew he’d be in a bar, or taking a long pull on a bottle. He hit a few detoxes, and his blackouts started lasting longer, and he knew what the future held and didn’t see how he could avoid it.

“You know, Matt,” he said, “when I was a kid, I decided what I was going to be when I grew up. Can you guess what it was? You give up? A cop. I was gonna be a cop. Wear the blue uniform, keep the public safe from crime.” He picked up his coffee but his cup was empty. “I guess you were dreaming the same dream, but you went and did it.”

I shook my head. “I fell into it,” I said. “What I wanted to be was Joe DiMaggio. And, but for a complete lack of athletic ability, I might have made that dream come true.”

“Well, my handicap was a complete lack of moral fiber, and you know what I fell into.”

He kept drinking, because he couldn’t seem to help it, and he kept coming back to AA, because where the hell else was there for him to go? And then one day after a meeting an unlikely person took him aside and told him some home truths.

“A gay guy, Matt, and I mean gay as a jay. Obvious about it, you know? Grew up in a lah-de-dah suburb, went to an Ivy League college, and now he designs jewelry. Plus he’s more than ten years younger’n I am, and he looks like a wind of more than twenty miles an hour could pick him up and whisk him off to Oz. Just the type I’m gonna turn to for advice, right?

“Well, he sat me down and told me I was using the program like a revolving door, and I’d just keep going out and keep coming back again, only each time I came back I’d have a little less of myself left. And the only way I was ever gonna break the pattern was if I read the Big Book every morning and the Twelve & Twelve every night, and got really serious with the steps. So I looked at him, this wispy little queen, this guy I got less in common with than a fucking Martian, and I asked him something I never asked anybody before. I asked him to be my sponsor. You know what he said?”

“I’d guess he said yes.”

“ ‘I’m willing to sponsor you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know if you’ll be able to stand it.’ Well, fuck, man. Come right down to it, what choice did I have?”

So he went to a meeting every day, and sometimes two, and a three-meeting day wasn’t unheard of. And he called his sponsor every morning and every night, and the first thing he did when he got out of bed was hit his knees and ask God for one more sober day, and the last thing he did at night was get on his knees again and thank God for keeping him sober. And he read the Big Book and the Twelve & Twelve, and he worked his way through the steps with his sponsor, and he made ninety days, not for the first time, but he’d never made six months before, and nine months, and, incredibly, a year.

For his Fourth Step, his sponsor made him write down every wrong thing he’d ever done in his life, and if he didn’t want to include something, that meant it had damn well better be there. “It was like allocuting,” he said, “to every goddamn thing I ever did.”

Then the two of them sat down together and he read aloud what he’d written, with his sponsor interrupting now and then to comment, or ask for amplification. “And when we were done he asked me how I felt, and it’s not exactly an elegant way to put it, but what I told him was that I felt as though I’d just taken the biggest shit in the history of the world.”

And now he had sixteen months, and it was time to start working on the amends. He’d made his Eighth Step list of the people he’d harmed, he’d become willing to take steps to set things right, but now it was Ninth Step time, which meant actually making the amends, and that wasn’t so easy.

“But what choice do I have?” he said. And he shook his head and said, “Jesus, look at the time. You just heard my entire qualification. You sat through three speakers and now you had to listen to me, and I went on almost as long as all three of them put together. But I guess it did something for me, talking to somebody from the old neighborhood. It’s gone, you know. The old neighborhood. They went and ran a fucking expressway through there.”

“I know.”

“It probably means more to me. The neighborhood, I mean. You were there what, two years?”

“Something like that.”

“For me it was my whole childhood. I used to be able to work up a pretty good drunk out of it. ‘Poor me, the house I grew up in is gone, the streets where I played stickball are gone, di dah di dah di dah.’ But my childhood wasn’t about the house and the streets. And it’s not gone. I’m still carrying it around, and I’ve still got to deal with it.” He picked up the check. “And that’s enough out of me, and I’m paying for this, and you can call it amends for talking your ear off.”

When I got home I called Jim Faber, and we agreed that Jack’s sponsor sounded like a real Step Nazi, but that seemed to be just what Jack needed.

Before we parted, Jack had given me his phone number, and I felt obliged to give him mine. I wasn’t much on picking up the phone, and Jim was the only person I called on a fairly regular basis. There was a woman in Tribeca, a sculptor named Jan Keane, with whom I generally spent Saturday night and Sunday morning, and one of us would call the other two or three times a week. Aside from that, I didn’t make many calls, and most of the ones I got were wrong numbers.

I copied Jack Ellery’s number in my book, and figured I’d run into him somewhere down the line. Or not.

III

THE NEXT TIME I saw Jack Ellery was several months later, when I ran into him at a meeting. By then we’d spoken a couple of times on the phone. The first time was a few days after I made my ninety days. I spoke that night at my home group in the basement at St. Paul the Apostle. The church was at Columbus and Sixtieth, a few short blocks from my hotel, and I’d gone there in my drinking days to light votive candles for the dead and, while I was there, enjoy a few moments of quiet. Back then I hadn’t even known there were AA meetings downstairs.

So I sat at the table in front and told my story, or twenty minutes’ worth of it anyway, and everybody congratulated me, and afterward a bunch of us went for coffee at the Flame, and I went home and called Jan, and she congratulated me herself and then reminded me what comes after ninety days. Day Ninety-one.

It must have been Day Ninety-three or -four when Jack Ellery called to offer his own congratulations. “I was a little anxious about calling,” he said, “because I figured you’d make it, but you never know, do you? And how would you feel if you had a slip and here’s this asshole calling to congratulate you on ninety days that you haven’t got? And I said this to my sponsor, and he reminded me I’m not the center of the universe, which never fails to be news to me. And that, if God forbid you did pick up a drink, you’d have more to be upset about than some guy on the other end of the telephone line.”

He called again a week or so later, but it was Saturday and I was downtown at Jan’s loft on Lispenard Street. The following morning we caught an early meeting in SoHo, a favorite of hers. Afterward we went out for brunch, then walked through some galleries on West Broadway, and I had my standing Sunday dinner date with Jim. We always had Chinese food on those evenings, though not always at the same restaurant, and afterward we’d fit in a meeting. So it was late by the time I got back to my hotel and collected my message, and I didn’t return Jack’s call until the following day, and when I called he was out and there was no way to leave a message.

We played telephone tag for a few more days, and then one of us reached the other, and it was one of those awkward calls where neither party has a great deal to say.

I remember he talked again about the problem of making amends. “For instance,” he said, “there was this buddy I ran with. We knocked off a couple of stores together, then hunkered down with a fifth of Johnnie Black and told each other what heroes we were. Then one time, we did this little store in the Village, pots and pans and household shit. I mean, what were we thinking? How much cash were they gonna have, you know?”

I remembered the woman at the lineup.

“And I guess he got drunk and ran his mouth in front of the wrong person, or maybe I did, because who remembers that shit? But I got picked up, and the woman blew the ID, picked out the poor mope standing next to me. And when they went to pick up Arnie, Jesus, he went for his gun, the crazy son of a bitch, and they shot him full of holes, and he was DOA at Beth Israel. Now I didn’t lead him into a life of crime, and I didn’t rat him out, but he wound up dead and I didn’t have to do any time, I didn’t even have to give back the money, and what do I owe him for that? And how do I make it even?”

There was another call later on, and he left a message. He’d be speaking at a meeting on the Upper West Side, and if I wanted to come hear his story maybe we could grab a cup of coffee afterward. I thought about it, but the day came and went. I liked him okay and wished him well, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the two of us to become best friends. The Bronx was a long time ago, and we’d taken very different paths since then, even if we’d managed to wind up in the same place. There wasn’t much chance I’d ever be a cop again, although I sometimes thought about it, but I couldn’t be as sure about Jack. If he stayed sober he’d be all right, but if he didn’t, well, pretty much anything could happen, and I didn’t want to be that close to him if it did.

The next time I saw him was at a meeting of the Sober Today group on Second Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street. I’d never been there before, and went because someone had booked Jan to speak. I had never heard her tell her drinking story, although I’d been around for some of it while it was going on, so we arranged to meet there and go out for dinner afterward. I found the place, got myself a cup of coffee, and on the other side of the room I saw Jack Ellery in conversation with a studious-looking man in his twenties.

I had to look a second time to make sure it was Jack, because he was a mess. He was dressed well enough, in pressed khakis and a long-sleeved sport shirt, but his face was swollen on one side, and he had a black eye. There was a conclusion available, and I went ahead and jumped to it. People who stay sober generally don’t get to look like that unless they’re overmatched prizefighters, and I figured all his focus on the steps hadn’t kept him from tripping over the first one.

It was a shame if he’d had a slip, but that sort of thing happened, and the good news was he was at a meeting now. Still, I was in no rush to go over and talk to him, and purposely chose a seat where he’d be less likely to get a look at me. And then the meeting started.

The format featured a single speaker, followed by a general discussion. First, though, they read “How It Works” and the steps and the traditions and a few other selections from the wisdom of the ages, and I let my mind wander until they were doing day counts and anniversaries. Somewhere along the way I shifted in my seat so that I could get a look at Jack, and sure enough, his hand was raised.

No surprise there, I thought, and waited for him to get called on so he could tell us how many days he had this time around. But they were done with the day counters, they were on anniversaries, as I found out when he said, “My name is Jack, and the day before yesterday by the grace of God and the fellowship of AA, I was able to celebrate two years.”

They applauded, of course, and I joined in as soon as it all registered, beating my hands together and feeling like an idiot. Where did I get off looking at a man and assuming he’d been drinking?

Then the chairman introduced Jan, and she started telling her story, and I sat back and listened. But I leaned forward once or twice and caught another glimpse of Jack. He was sober, and that was all to the good, but why did he look as though someone had beaten the living crap out of him?

I caught up with him during the break. “I thought that was you,” he said. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before.”

“The speaker’s a friend of mine,” I said, “and this is the first chance I’ve had to hear her qualify.”

“Well, that’s worth a trip, isn’t it? I enjoyed hearing her myself, and all I had to do was walk a couple of blocks.”

“We’ve got a dinner date afterward,” I said, and wondered as I said the words why I felt compelled to share that information with him. On the way back to my seat I figured it out. I was cutting him off at the pass, letting him know we wouldn’t be available for coffee.

I hadn’t asked about his face, not feeling it was for me to raise the subject, and he hadn’t chosen to bring it up. I couldn’t avoid wondering about it, though, and thought I’d get my curiosity satisfied when I saw his hand go up during the discussion. It took her a while to call on him, despite my efforts to influence her by force of will, but eventually she did, and he thanked her for her qualification and found something in it to identify with, some common element in their blackouts or hangovers, something that ordinary. Nothing to explain the lumps and bumps he’d taken as he reached the two-year mark in his sobriety.

After we’d closed the meeting with the Serenity Prayer, he and the fellow who’d been sitting next to him were among the ten or a dozen people who went up to shake Jan’s hand and thank her for sharing her story. I hung back, helping with the chairs, and I was still doing that when he and his friend headed for the door.

But he stopped in midstride and came over to me. “Now’s not the time for it,” he said, “but there’s something I’d really like to talk to you about. What’s a good time to call you?”

Jan and I would be having dinner, probably at a German place she’d said she’d like to try. Then I’d see her home, and I’d most likely stay the night on Lispenard Street. She’d want to work in the morning, so I’d clear out after breakfast, and then what would I do? Catch the subway back to my hotel, unless I decided to take my time and walk home, maybe stopping en route at a noon meeting. There’d be one at the Workshop on Perry Street, or I could keep walking and go to the bookshop meeting at St. Francis of Assisi, on Thirtieth Street.

I thought of something, and I guess it showed on my face, because Jack asked me what was so funny.

“I was just thinking,” I said. “Something I’ve heard people say. How the literature tells us sobriety is a bridge back to life, but sometimes it’s just a tunnel to another meeting.”

“Greg says that,” he said, and his friend approached at the sound of his name, and Jack introduced us. I wasn’t surprised to learn that this was Jack’s sponsor. He was wearing an earring, and I’d already decided he had designed it himself.

“Ah, Matt from the Old Neighborhood,” Greg said. “Now long since leveled and paved over, and far better in nostalgic recollection than ever it was in reality. I wish someone would run a highway through my own old neighborhood. Or divert a river through it.”

“Somebody did that,” I seemed to remember, and he said it was Hercules, as a way of cleaning the Augean stables.

“He had Twelve Labors, we have Twelve Steps,” he said. “Who ever said staying sober was easy?”

Jan was heading over, and I was ready to grab her and get out of there. I suggested to Jack that it might be simpler if I called him, but he said he’d probably be out most of the day. I told him I’d probably be back at my hotel in the late morning, and if he missed me then he could try me around two.

New York’s Little Germany was on the Lower East Side until the General Slocum disaster of 1904, when a ship by that name burned and sank on the East River, with thirteen hundred of the neighborhood’s residents on board for an annual excursion. Over a thousand of them died, and that took the heart out of Little Germany. It was the end of the neighborhood, as surely as if you’d run an expressway through it. Or diverted a river.

The residents moved out of Little Germany, and most of them wound up in Yorkville, in the blocks centering around Eighty-sixth and Third. It wasn’t just German, there were Czechs and Hungarians as well, but they’d all begun moving on in recent years, and the rents these days were too high for new immigrants. Yorkville was losing its ethnic character.

You wouldn’t have known that inside Maxl’s, where Jan took a long look at the menu and ordered sauerbraten and red cabbage and potato dumplings, which she called by their German name. The waiter, who looked pretty silly in his lederhosen, approved her choice or her pronunciation, or perhaps both, and beamed when I said I’d have the same. His face registered shock and dismay, though, when he asked what kind of beer we wanted and we said we’d be fine with coffee. Later we’d have coffee, he suggested. Now we would want good German beer to go with good German food.

I had a sudden sense memory of good German beer, Beck’s or St. Pauli Girl or Löwenbräu, strong and rich and full-bodied. I wasn’t going to order it, I didn’t even want it, but the memory was there. I blinked it away, while Jan made it clear that he wasn’t going to sell us any beer that evening.

The ambience was touristy, but the food was good enough to take your mind off it, and we had more coffee afterward and shared a gooey dessert. “I could do this every night,” Jan said, “if I didn’t mind weighing three hundred pounds. That fellow who looked like he took a beating, I think he said his name was Jack?”

“What about him?”

“You were talking to him.”

“I’ve mentioned him.”

“From when you lived in the Bronx. And then you wound up arresting him years later.”

“That’s close,” I said. “I didn’t make the collar, I was just there to view the lineup, and when he went away it was for something else. I never told him about that lineup, incidentally.”

“I asked him what happened to his face. I wouldn’t have said anything, but he brought it up, said he didn’t always look this handsome. You know, making a joke of it, to clear the air.”

“I met George Shearing once,” I recalled.

“The jazz pianist?”

I nodded. “Somebody introduced us, I forget the occasion. And right off the bat he reeled off three or four blind jokes. They weren’t terribly funny, but that wasn’t the point. You meet a blind man and you’re overly aware of his blindness, and he’d learned to get that out of the way by calling attention to it.”

“Well, that’s what Jack was doing, so I went ahead and asked what had happened.”

“And?”

“He said he blamed the whole thing on the steps. He slipped on one of them and landed flat on his face. I guess this meant something to his friend, because he rolled his eyes. I would have asked him which step, but before I could say anything he was thanking me again and making room for the next person in line.”

“Nine,” I said.

“As in Step Nine? Or is that German for no?”

“He’s been making amends. Or trying to.”

“When I did,” she said, “what I mostly got was hugs and forgiveness. Along with a couple of blank stares from people who couldn’t figure out why I was apologizing.”

“Well,” I said, “you and Jack probably associated with a different class of people, and had different things to make amends for.”

“I threw up all over a guy once.”

“And he didn’t punch you in the mouth?”

“He didn’t even remember. At least that’s what he said, but I think he must have been being polite. I mean, how do you forget something like that?”

I reached for the check, as I generally do, but she insisted we split it. Outside she said she was exhausted, and would I be heartbroken if she went home alone? I said it was probably a good idea, that I was tired myself. It was Thursday, so I’d be seeing her in two days. I hailed a cab, and when I held the door for her she said she’d drop me at my hotel, that it was practically on her way. I said I felt like walking off that dessert.

I watched her taxi head south on Second Avenue and tried to remember the last time I’d had German beer. Jimmy Armstrong had Prior Dark on tap, and I found myself remembering the taste of it.

I forced myself to walk two blocks, then caught a cab of my own.

Back in my room, I got out of my clothes and took a shower. I called Jim Faber and said, “What the hell’s the matter with me? She said she was tired, and I was going to be seeing her Saturday.”

“You thought you’d be going home with her tonight. More or less took it for granted.”

“And she asked if I was all right with it, and I said sure, that was fine.”

“But that’s not how you felt.”

“I felt like telling her to forget about Saturday, while she was at it. That way she could get plenty of rest. All the fucking rest she wanted.”

“Nice.”

“And thank you very much, lady, but I’ll get my own cab. But what I said was I felt like walking.”

“Uh-huh. And how do you feel now?”

“Tired. And a little silly.”

“Both appropriate, I’d say. Did you drink?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you want to?”

“No,” I said, and thought about it. “Not consciously. But I probably wanted to, on some level.”

“But you didn’t drink.”

“No.”

“Then you’re okay,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

Not counting our Bronx boyhood, that was the third time I saw Jack Ellery—once through one-way glass, and twice at meetings.

The next time I saw him he was dead.

IV

I WENT OUT for breakfast at the Morning Star Friday morning, and went straight from there to the Donnell Library on West Fifty-third. In the restaurant the night before we’d talked some about the General Slocum disaster, but I’d been uncertain exactly when it had occurred and how many lives had been lost. I found a book that would answer all my questions, including some that hadn’t come to mind until I started reading about it. Just about everyone involved had been grossly negligent, from the owners and line management on down, but the only one who went to jail was the captain, and his sentence struck me as awfully light for the enormity of his actions.

As far as I could tell, nobody bothered to bring a civil suit, and I thought how the world had changed in three-quarters of a century. Nowadays people filed a lawsuit at the drop of a hat, even if it was somebody else’s hat and it hadn’t been dropped within half a block of them. I tried to decide whether the country was better or worse for all that relentless litigation, and I chose to postpone my decision, because something I’d read was leading me to another book on another subject.

That took care of the morning, and I went straight from the Donnell reading room to the Sixty-third Street Y, getting there just in time for the 12:30 meeting. It broke at 1:30, and I stopped at a pizza stand for a slice and a Coke, which would do me fine for lunch, although I didn’t suppose it would bring a smile of delight to the face of a board-certified nutritionist. It was around 2:15 when I got home, and there were two slips in my message box. The first call had come at 10:45, and I’d missed the second one by less than ten minutes. They were both from Jack, and both times he’d said he would try again later.

I went upstairs and called his number on the off chance that he was home now, or that he’d acquired an answering machine. He wasn’t and he hadn’t.

I stayed in the room until it was time to go out to dinner. I had no reason to go anywhere and I had a book to read, so I wasn’t there specifically to wait for his call, but that was probably a factor. The only time the phone rang it was Jan, confirming that we were still on for Saturday night. Then she asked if I’d walked all the way home the previous night, and I took a breath before I answered. “I walked two blocks,” I said, “and then I said the hell with it and flagged a cab.”

We established when and where we’d meet, and I hung up and wondered at my first impulse, which had been to say yes, that I’d walked all the way home from Yorkville. And what else? That my feet were sore and my calves ached? That I’d been mugged and pistol-whipped en route and it was all her fault?

But instead I’d paused for breath and told her the unremarkable truth, and she’d passed up the chance to remind me I could have saved a couple of bucks by sharing her cab. I suppose you could say we were both making progress.

Friday night I went to St. Paul’s. I saw Jim there but he complained of a headache and went home at the break. I joined a few others for coffee afterward, where the chief topic of conversation was a member who’d just come out as a lesbian. “I knew Pegeen was gay,” a man named Marty said. “I figured it out about ten minutes after I met her. I was just hoping I could get lucky before she figured it out.”

“While visions of threesomes danced in your head,” somebody said.

“No, I’m an uncomplicated guy. I just wanted to nail her a couple of times before she turned into a pumpkin.”

“But your Higher Power had other ideas.”

“My Higher Power,” Marty said, “was clueless. My Higher Power was asleep at the fucking switch.”

There was a message waiting for me at the hotel desk, the same message: Jack had called and would call again later. It didn’t say to call him, and I decided not to because it was late. Then I changed my mind and called him after all, and there was no answer.

Saturday started out cold and rainy. I skipped breakfast and wound up ordering an early lunch from the deli down the block. The kid who delivered it bore an unsettling resemblance to a drowned rat, and it earned him a bigger tip than usual.

I spent the afternoon in front of the TV, switching back and forth between a couple of college football games. I didn’t pay much attention to what I was looking at, but it was better than being out in the rain, and I figured I’d be in one place long enough for Jack to get hold of me.

But the phone never rang. I picked it up myself a couple of times and tried his number. No answer. It was frustrating in a curious way, because I didn’t really have a burning desire to talk to him, but neither did I want to be haunted by an endless stream of message slips.

So I sat there in my room, and when I wasn’t looking at the TV I was looking out the window at the rain.

Jan and I had arranged to meet at a restaurant at Mulberry and Hester, in Little Italy. We’d been there a couple of times together and liked the food and the atmosphere. I was a few minutes early, and they couldn’t find our reservation but had a table for us, and Jan showed up ten minutes late. The food was fine, the service was fine, and I could have flavored the conversation by pointing out a stocky gentleman at the bar whom I’d arrested ten or a dozen years earlier.

We might have walked around after dinner, but it was still drizzling and there was a chill in the air, so we went straight to Lispenard Street and she made a pot of coffee and put some records on—Sarah Vaughan, Ella, Eydie Gormé. It should have been just the ticket for a rainy October night, domestic and romantic at the same time, but there’d been a stiffness at dinner, a distance between us, and it didn’t go away.

I thought, Is this it? Is this how I’ll spend every Saturday night for the rest of my life?

We went to bed sometime after midnight, with an all-night jazz station on the radio, and lying together in the dark, we did each other some good. And afterward I felt something lurking in the shadows out there on the edge of thought. I turned away from it, and sleep descended like a fast curtain.

Some months ago I had taken to keeping some clothes at Jan’s place. She’d turned over one of the dresser drawers to me, along with a couple of hangers in the closet. So I had clean socks and underwear to put on after my morning shower, and a clean shirt, and I left what I’d been wearing for her to wash.

“You’re coming up on a year,” she said at breakfast. “What is it, a month away?”

“Five, six weeks. Somewhere in there.”

I thought she’d have more to say about that, but if she did she decided to leave it unsaid.

That night I met Jim Faber at a Chinese restaurant on Ninth Avenue. Neither of us had been there before, and we decided it was all right, but nothing special. I told him about my evening with Jan, and he took it in and thought about it, and then he reminded me that I was coming up on a year sober.

“She said the same thing,” I said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

He shrugged, waiting for me to answer my own question.

“ ‘Don’t make any major changes in the first year.’ Isn’t that the conventional wisdom?”

“It’s what they say.”

“In other words, I’ve got five or six weeks, whatever the hell it is, to decide what to do about my relationship with Jan.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You’ve got five or six weeks,” he said, “not to decide.”

“Oh.”

“You get the distinction?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t have to make a change when the year’s up. You don’t have to come to a decision. You’re under no obligation to do anything. The important thing is not to take any action before then.”

“Got it.”

“On the other hand,” he said, “what we’re talking about here is your agenda. She may have one of her own. You’re sober a year, it’s time for you to shit or get off the pot. That sound about right?”

“Maybe.”

“You know,” he said, “that business about waiting a year, that’s just a general rule. Some people, they’re best advised not to make any major changes for the first five years.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Or even ten,” he said.

We took in a meeting at St. Clare’s Hospital. Most of those attending were from the detox ward, and their attendance was compulsory. It was hard to get them to stay awake, and almost impossible to get them to say anything. Jim and I had been there a few times; you rarely heard anything insightful, but it served as a good object lesson.

I walked him home, and at one point he said, “Something to bear in mind. Something Buddha said, as it happens. ‘It is your dissatisfaction with what is that is the source of all your unhappiness.’ ”

I said, “Buddha said that?”

“So I’m told, though I have to admit I wasn’t there to hear him. You seem surprised.”

“Well,” I said, “I never thought he had that much depth to him.”

“Buddha.”

“That’s what everybody calls him. And what he calls himself, as far as that goes. Big guy, must stand six-six, shaves his head, belly out to here. He’s a regular at the midnight meeting at the Moravian church, but he turns up other places as well. I think he’s a former outlaw biker, and my guess is he’s done time, but—”

The look on his face stopped me. He shook his head and said, “The Buddha. Sitting under the Bodhi tree? Waiting for enlightenment?”

“I thought it was an apple tree and he invented gravity.”

“That was Isaac Newton.”

“If it was Newton, it should have been a fig tree. Buddha, huh? Listen, it was a natural mistake. The only Buddha I know is the one at the Moravian church. Works the doors at one of those rough bars on West Street, if I’m not mistaken. You want to run that by me again? The source of all unhappiness?”

After I’d seen him home I went home myself. I’d stopped at the hotel earlier, surprised that there were no messages, and I didn’t see anything in my box this time, either. I asked the fellow behind the desk and he said that there’d been one person who’d called a couple of times but hadn’t given his name or left any kind of a message. All he could tell me was that the caller had been a man.

Jack, I thought, and he’d given up leaving messages because they didn’t do any good. I went upstairs, and I was hanging up my jacket when the phone rang.

A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Matt? This is Gregory Stillman.”

“I don’t think—”

“We met the other night at Sober Today. Jack Ellery introduced us.”

“I remember.” Jack’s sponsor, the jewelry designer, with one of his creations dangling from his ear. “I don’t think we got as far as last names.”

“No,” he said, and drew an audible breath. “Matt, I have some very bad news.”

V

THE MEMORIAL SERVICE for John Joseph Ellery was held Monday afternoon in the same church basement where I’d heard Jan tell her story on Thursday evening. There was no AA meeting scheduled, but Greg had been able to make arrangements with the church for the use of the room. As far as I could tell, all of the thirty or so in attendance had known Jack in AA.

All but two, a pair of men in suits who might as well have been wearing blue uniforms. Cops, following the long-established routine of attending a service to see who showed up. I’d done that myself a few times, and couldn’t remember ever learning anything useful in the process. But that didn’t mean it never paid off.

The service was nonreligious, and there was no clergyman in attendance. When I arrived there was a tape playing quietly, something classical that I recognized but couldn’t identify, and when it faded out Greg Stillman got up in front of the group. He was wearing a dark suit, and had left the earring home.

He introduced himself as Jack’s friend and sponsor, and spoke for five minutes or so, telling a couple of stories. There was a moment when he seemed on the verge of being overcome by emotion, but he stopped talking and waited and the moment passed, and he was able to go on.

Then people stood up in turn and shared something about Jack. It was like an AA meeting except you didn’t wait to be called on, you just took your turn. And all of the sharing was about Jack. Aside from the anecdotes, the gist of it was that Jack had had a rough life and a bad drinking story, but that he’d found real hope and comfort in the program, and was genuinely reborn through the twelve steps. And, by the grace of God, he’d died sober.

There’s a comfort.

The service concluded with a song. An ethereal young woman with big eyes and see-through skin stood up in front of the room and said that her name was Elizabeth and that she was an alcoholic. She hadn’t known Jack very well, she said, but she had sobriety in common with him, if nothing else, and Greg had asked her to sing, and she was glad to do it. She gave an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace,” including one verse I couldn’t recall having heard before. Not long before I got sober, I’d heard Judy Collins sing the song on a record they played at a whore’s funeral. That would have been hard to improve on, but this version came close.

There was a coffee urn—it was, after all, an AA crowd—and people gathered around it afterward. I turned to look for the cops, thinking I could see if they wanted coffee. I figured they wouldn’t take it without an invitation. But they had slipped out, and I headed for the door myself until I heard my name called.

It was Greg. He took my arm and asked me if I had a minute. “A few minutes,” he said. “There’s a conversation we ought to have, and then I’ve got a favor to ask you.”

The next time I saw Jack Ellery he was dead.

And that was at the viewing room at the morgue, where Greg and I looked for a long moment at the mortal remains of a man we’d both known. Then he said, “Yes, that’s him. That’s Jack Ellery.” And I nodded in affirmation, and they let us out of there.

Outside he turned up his collar against the chill and wondered if we’d get more rain. I said I’d missed the forecast, and he said he never knew what the forecasts meant. “They used to tell you what it was going to do,” he said, “and even if they were wrong a lot of the time, at least they gave you a clear-cut answer. Now it’s all percentages. What on earth is a fifty percent chance of rain? How do you respond to that, carry half of an umbrella?”

“This way they’re never wrong.”

“That’s it exactly. ‘Well, we said only a ten percent chance of rain and it poured all day, so all that means is a long shot came in.’ Just because you’re a meteorologist doesn’t mean you don’t feel the need to cover your ass.” He took a breath. “I never asked you this, but do you prefer Matt or Matthew?”

Either’s fine with me, but it only confuses people to tell them that. “Matt’s good,” I said.

“Matt, why do they insist on a formal identification? He was in prison, he has a police record, they’d already identified him from fingerprints. Suppose there was nobody around who could do it. They’d get along without it, wouldn’t they?”

“Sure.”

“I really didn’t want to see him like that. My father’s funeral was open-casket, and there he was, like something from a road-company Madame Tussauds, and that’s the image I was left with, this lifeless waxen effigy. We had our problems, God knows. I was not the son he’d had in mind, as he made all too clear. But we made it up during his last illness, and there was love and mutual respect there at the end, and then that final hideous glimpse of him eclipsed the strong and vigorous man I wanted to remember. I knew that would happen, I dreaded it, but at the same time I couldn’t not look. Do you know what I mean?”

“How long ago was this?”

“A little over a year. Why?”

“Because time will probably change that,” I said. “The earlier memory will supplant the other.”

“That’s already begun to happen. I didn’t know whether I could trust it, whether it was real. Or just some form of wishful thinking.”

“Wishful thinking may have something to do with it,” I said, “but it’s still real. We wind up remembering people the way they were, or at least the way we knew them. I had an aunt with Alzheimer’s, she spent the last ten years of her life institutionalized, while the disease ate her mind and her personality and everything that made her human. And that’s how I knew her, and how I remembered her.”

“God.”

“And that all faded out after she was gone, and the real Aunt Peg came back.”

Over coffee he said, “I barely looked at him just now. All I really saw were the wounds.”

He’d been shot in the mouth and the forehead. They’d shown the corpse with a sheet covering him from the neck down, so if there were other wounds we wouldn’t have seen them.

“I hope you’re right,” he said. “About the image fading. It can’t fade too soon for me. Thank you for that. More than that, thanks for making the trip.”

I hadn’t much wanted to keep him company, but it was a hard request to say no to.

“I didn’t want to go at all,” he said, “and I certainly didn’t want to go by myself. I could have found someone else to come, some AA friend of Jack’s, but you felt like the right choice. Thank you.”

We’d headed north on First Avenue when we left the morgue, and stopped at a coffee shop called Mykonos just past Forty-second Street. When he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, I realized it had been a while since I’d eaten, and said I’d have the same.

“Besides,” he said, “there’s something else I want to talk about.”

“Oh?”

“The two men at the back of the room. They were police officers.”

“Somehow I sensed as much.”

“Well, I didn’t need radar, because I saw their badges when they interviewed me. In fact they were the ones who asked me to make the formal ID. I asked them if they were close to solving the case, and they said something noncommittal.”

“That’s no surprise.”

“Do you think they’ll solve it?”

“It’s possible they’ve solved it already,” I said, “in the sense that they may know who did it. Of course that’s not the same as having sufficient evidence to bring a case to trial.”

“Could you find out?”

“Whether or not they know who did it?” He nodded. “I suppose I could ask around. An ordinary citizen wouldn’t get a straight answer, but I still know a few people in the department. Why?”

“I have a reason.”

One he evidently preferred to keep to himself. I let it go.

I said, “I’ll see if anybody wants to tell me anything. But I can make an educated guess right now as to who killed Jack.”

“You can?”

“Not by name,” I said. “Maybe it’s more accurate to say I can guess why he was killed. Somebody wanted to shut him up.”

“He was shot in the mouth.”

“At very close range. Essentially, somebody stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, and this would have been after the forehead shot killed him. Put that together with the Ninth Step work Jack kept talking about and the message is pretty clear.”

“I was afraid of that,” he said.

“Oh?”

He looked at his hands, then raised his eyes to meet mine. “I got him killed,” he said.

VI

DENNIS REDMOND WAS a detective attached to the Nineteenth Precinct, on East Sixty-seventh Street. I reached him at his desk, and let him pick a time and a place to meet.

“I got a few calls to make,” he said, “and then I can get out of here. You know the Minstrel Boy?”

“I know the song.”

“On Lexington,” he said, “right around the corner from us. Say two o’clock?”

The minstrel boy to the war has goneIn the ranks of death you will find him…

It was, not surprisingly, an Irish tavern, and I got there a few minutes early and took a booth on the side, sitting where I could see him come in. I walked over to the jukebox while I waited for the waiter to bring me my club soda. There were a lot of Irish selections, and among them was “The Minstrel Boy,” the Thomas Moore song, with “The Rose of Tralee” on the flip side, both of them performed by John McCormack. I spent a quarter and listened to that great tenor voice from the past singing about a war that was before my time or his.

The record ended and I sipped my club soda and glanced now and then at my watch, and wondered how McCormack would do with “The Rose of Tralee” and thought about spending another quarter to find out, and then at 2:12 Redmond came through the door. I recognized him right away from Jack’s memorial service, and he may even have been wearing the same suit. He took a moment to scan the bar and tables—there wasn’t much of a crowd—and came right over.

“Dennis Redmond,” he said. “And you’re Matt Scudder, and you didn’t happen to mention you were at the service yesterday.”

“I saw you there,” I said, “with another fellow—”

“That’d be Rich Bikelski.”

“—but I didn’t know it was you, not until you walked in just now.”

“No, how would you?” He shook his head. “Been a long day. I can use something. What’s that you got there, vodka tonic?”

“Club soda.”

He straightened up. “I don’t think I’m gonna follow your lead on that one,” he said, and went over to the bar. He came back with a tall glass of pale amber liquid over ice. Whiskey and water, from the look of it, and I found myself wondering what kind of whiskey it was, and which brand.

He sat down, raised his glass to me, and took a sip. He was a bulky man with a beefy face and a whiskey drinker’s ruddy complexion, but a look at his eyes let you know there was a working brain in there. “Joe Durkin called to put in a word for you,” he said. “Says you’re all right. You were on the job, had a gold shield. That how you came to know Joe?”

I shook my head. “We didn’t meet until a little over a year ago. I was a few years off the force by then.”

“Working private.”

“That’s right.”

“But I guess the two of you got along. That what you’re doing now? Working private?”

“When something comes my way,” I said. “But my interest in Ellery is personal.”

“Oh?” He frowned in concentration. “You were at the Six, and it seems to me he took a bust down there once. Nothing came of it, but was that your case? Years ago, that would have been.”

I told him that was a good guess, that it hadn’t been my case but that I’d been present as a spectator when the witness blew the ID. “We went back a little further than that,” I said, and explained how I’d known Jack briefly in the Bronx.

“Boys together,” he said. “One turns bad, the other goes on the cops. Years pass and they’re facing each other down in a darkened alley. A shot rings out. I think I saw the movie.”

“You probably did. Barry Fitzgerald played the priest.”

He took a hit of his drink, and I got enough of a whiff of it to identify it as Scotch. He said, “Then you lose touch, and he goes off to the joint for something else, and he gets out and gets himself killed, and a couple dozen people from AA hold a service for him, and here you sit drinking club soda. Is it any wonder they made me a detective?”

“I’m surprised they didn’t name you commissioner.”

“Just a question of time,” he said. “So it’s the same movie, but now the cop and the crook meet up again in the same AA room, and instead of Barry Fitzgerald you’ve got Queen for the Day running the show. What’s his name, Spellman? No, Jesus, that was the cardinal. This was the gym. Stillman.”

“He said you talked to him.”

“Couple of times. Took the whole thing pretty hard, but you get the sense that he’s got some toughness to him, under all the glitter. He was Ellery’s sponsor, whatever that amounts to. Is that anything like having a rabbi in the department?”

“That’s close.”

“Somebody who pulls your coat, steers you right.”

“There you go.”

“You got a sponsor yourself?” I nodded. “It’s not Stillman, is it?”

“No.”

“And I don’t suppose you’re Stillman’s sponsor.”

“I haven’t been sober long enough to start telling other people how to do it.”

“How long? Or isn’t that something I’m supposed to ask?”

“I don’t know what anybody’s supposed to do or not do. I’m coming up on a year the middle of next month.”

“And Ellery—”

“Just celebrated two years.”

“Just in time to get shot. You know who shot him?”

“Somebody who wanted him to keep quiet.”

“Yeah, that’s our thinking on the subject. ‘Here’s a little something for that big mouth of yours. Bang!’ Far as who that somebody might be, I’d say your guess is as good as mine, but what I’m hoping is it’s better. You got anything?”

“No.”

“My position, where would you go with this, Matt? You made detective, and I understand you were good at it. Who would you look at?”

“People he ran with. Guys he jailed with.”

“Uh-huh. And when that didn’t go anywhere?”

“I’d probably wait for somebody who knew something to use it as a bargaining chip.”

“A Get Out of Jail Free card.”

“Right.”

“Other words, wait for the case to clear itself. Something to be said for that. You got a high-profile case, prominent and affluent victim, that’s another story. Then you have to look like you’re doing something, so you take action whether or not there’s much point to it. Ask you something, Matt? The vic here, you knew him way back when, and you knew him again this past year, with both of you sober.”

“So?”

“I was just wondering how close you were with him.”

“Close enough to show up at the funeral.”

“But no closer?”

“Not really. I’m here now because someone asked me to see what I could find out.”

“Somebody with an earring would be my guess. Why I ask, I don’t want to say anything’s gonna rub you the wrong way. But what it comes down to, nobody’s gonna stay up all night sweating this one out. What do they say about speaking ill of the dead?”

“They say not to.”

“Well, sometimes you can’t help it. This was a low-life criminal for all but two years of his life, when he suddenly decided to get off the booze and find God. Is that what happens? You find God?”

“Some people seem to.”

He thought about it, finished his drink, put down the empty glass. “More power to them,” he said. “Would I like to clear this one? Of course I would. I’d like to clear all my cases and watch all the bad guys get convicted and go away. But what are the odds? Words of one syllable, your friend was a bum, and after his dry spell what’s he gonna do but pick up a drink and point a gun at somebody? Happens all the time.”

Not all the time, I thought. Often, though. I had to give him that. But not all the time.

“So I’d like to clear it,” he said, “because it’s on my plate, and my mother raised me to finish everything.” He patted his stomach. “A lesson I learned all too well. But on the dinner plate of crime, my friend, Jack Ellery is the Brussels sprouts.”

VII

MOST PEOPLE OVERCOOK them,” Greg Stillman said. “If you don’t, there’s nothing wrong with Brussels sprouts.”

“Next time I see Redmond,” I said, “I’ll be sure to tell him that.”

“Sautéed in coconut oil, just long enough to ensure that they’re cooked through, but still crisp. And a little curry powder makes all the difference.”

“I’ll bet it does.”

“But if you boil them into mush, of course they’re awful. That’s true of all the members of the cabbage family. Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower. The smell when they’re overcooked—oh, you’re making a face. I take it you’re no fan of the cabbage family?”

“There’s a smell you get in tenements,” I said. “Mice and cabbage. If poverty has a smell, I guess that’s it.”

“And who cooks cabbage—and cooks it to death, more often than not?”

“Poor people.”

“Poor Irish people,” he said. “And poor Polish people. Poor people from northern and eastern Europe. But times have changed and they’ve all clambered up into the middle class. So what would be the smell of poverty now, do you suppose?” He gave the matter some thought. “Wet dog with garlic,” he decided.

It was Thursday night, and I’d gone back to Second Avenue and Sober Today, where the speaker was a balding fellow from the Ridgewood section of Queens who’d held the same job as a bank teller for over thirty years. He never moved out of the house he grew up in, conveniently located three blocks from his place of employment. It was a two-family house, and his parents rented out the upper flat until their son got married, at which time he and his bride moved in upstairs.

“The girl next door,” Greg whispered. “Who else would he marry?”

It was as boring a story as I’d ever heard in or out of an AA meeting, and he recounted it in an affectless monotone. His father died, and then a few years later his mother died, and he and his bride and their only child moved down to the first floor, whereupon he installed a young couple as upstairs tenants.

“With such an exciting life,” Greg murmured, “why would he feel the need to drink?”

The story got more interesting, to listen to if not to live through, when he started making the hospital wards and the detoxes. There was this bar he’d pass on the way home from work, and he got in the habit of stopping in every day for a beer, and sometimes two. And he’d go back a couple of evenings a week to watch sports on the big screen, and of course he’d have a couple of beers in the course of an evening. He didn’t get falling-down drunk, he didn’t have blackouts, and his occasional hangovers never amounted to more than a parched feeling and a slight headache; all it took to put him right was a big glass of water and an aspirin.

The progression of his alcoholism was achingly slow, but what did the man have besides time? The bank cut him loose, his wife told him to move out, and it got so he never had a day when he felt anywhere near all right. A counselor at one of the detoxes got through to him and managed to get him in an outpatient program, and he went to so many meetings that they finally started making some sense to him, and he was back with his wife again, and they were taking him back at the bank.

“A true AA success story,” Greg said when the applause died down. “It’s too bad Milton already used the titles.”

“Milton?”

“Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Do you know what Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost?”

“I bet you’ll tell me.”

“He said no one ever wished it longer, which rather fits what we just heard, wouldn’t you say?”

Afterward each of us admitted we were hoping the other would suggest leaving on the break, but neither of us took the initiative, and the meeting picked up during the second half and I got to hear some good things. We stayed through the Serenity Prayer, picked up chairs and emptied ashtrays, and headed up Second Avenue discussing something somebody said. When that ran out we walked a block or two in an easy silence.

I’d given him the gist of my conversation with Redmond over the phone, and it must have been on both our minds. He broke the silence by saying, “I guess they’re not going to do anything about it,” and the antecedents of the two pronouns were self-evident.

I explained that they would go on working the case, putting the word out like a fisherman chumming the water. When you worked a case hard, I said, sometimes all you were doing was trying to push the river. And when it broke, your efforts had precious little to do with it. Some guy with a resentment dropped a dime.

“The awesome power of resentments,” he said. “Who knew they could turn out to be a good thing? But you would still work the case.”

“When there was something to work.”

“It’s all very Third Step, isn’t it? Taking the action and turning over the result. I had a sponsee who couldn’t get a job, the man had a real Swiss cheese résumé, holes in it you could drive a van through. I had him send in job applications at the rate of one a day, and he did that for three weeks. And he didn’t get an offer from a single one of the firms he applied to.”

“And?”

“And what he did get, during the fourth week, was an offer out of the blue from a firm he hadn’t applied to, for a job he didn’t even know about. A good one, too. Would it have come his way if he hadn’t been sending out those applications? You couldn’t prove it one way or the other, but my own belief is that the result wouldn’t have come about without the action.”

“Do you sponsor many people?”

“Just a few. I get asked with some frequency, but before I say yes or no I’ll spend an hour over coffee with the person, and more often than not we’ll conclude that it wouldn’t really work too well. Or we decide to give it a try, and after a month or two one of us fires the other. I’m what they call a Step Nazi, and even when someone thinks that’s what he wants in a sponsor, the reality’s not always what he thought it would be. We keep walking past coffee shops.”

“I know.”

“I’m not hungry myself. Are you?”

“I filled up on cookies at the meeting.”

“Precisely why I’m no longer hungry. I don’t know who brings those boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip, but I wish he’d stop. I can’t stay away from them, and I may have to put them on my First Step list and cut them out altogether. And just thinking about it makes me shudder, which suggests it’s something I have to do.” He grinned, his face lighting up. “But not today,” he said.

“Like St. Augustine.”

“Exactly! ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’ I wonder if he actually said that. Matt, since we’ve established that we’re not hungry, do you want to come up to my place? I’ve got something there that I probably ought to show you. And I promise you I make better coffee than the Greeks.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Greg refer to himself as a Step Nazi. He’d used the term after the funeral, when he told me he’d gotten Jack killed. He’d been pushing him through the steps, working him hard, and Jack had given himself over wholeheartedly to the process, rushing headlong into the amends called for in the Ninth Step. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, the step read, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Or oneself, I thought. But I couldn’t remember any warning to that effect in the literature.

Greg’s apartment was on East Ninety-ninth between First and Second, three blocks above the unofficial boundary between Yorkville and East Harlem. Irish and Italian Harlem, it used to be, but the Irish and Italians had long since moved a little closer to the American dream. There was still an Italian restaurant whose customers found it worth a special trip, and there were a few Irish bars left on Second Avenue. Well, bars with Irish names, anyway. The clientele looked to be largely Hispanic and West Indian, and it was Red Stripe and not Guinness advertised in neon in the window of the Emerald Star.

I hadn’t been here in years, and I could see that the neighborhood was changing once again. Between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth, we passed a couple of five-story brick buildings undergoing renovation, with Dumpsters at the curb piled high with plaster and lath and flooring. And across the street they were throwing up one of those needle high-rises, a twenty-story glass-and-steel building on the site of a tenement.

I said it wasn’t what you expected to find in Harlem, and Greg reminded me that they were calling it Carnegie Hill now, the latest invention of the Realtors who’d thought up Clinton as a new name for my own part of town. Until then we’d been happy enough calling it Hell’s Kitchen.

He reminded me of Thoreau’s observation. “ ‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ And of neighborhoods that feel the need to change their names.”

The city kept reinventing itself, creating more and more places for its prosperous citizens. There’s nothing new about this, the process has been going on for more than a century, but when I looked at the buildings getting a gut rehab, I wondered what had become of the people who lived there before somebody got rid of their walls and floors.

I told myself to think about something else. Sure, an inner voice said. Forget the poor bastards. The city’ll take care of them, find ’em a nice Dumpster to live in.

What was it Jim had told me? It is your dissatisfaction with what is that is the cause of all your unhappiness. The wisdom of the Buddha, if not the one from the midnight meeting. Something to think about, on my way to Greg Stillman’s apartment.

“Mice,” he said, and sniffed the air. “But no cabbage. No wet dog with garlic either. Indeterminate cooking smells. Not too bad, all in all.”

Not as bad as the stairs themselves. The building code calls for an elevator in any structure of seven or more stories, and as a result there are a lot of six-story buildings in New York. This was one of them, and he lived on the top floor.

“I don’t actually mind the stairs,” he said. “I’ve been here long enough to take them for granted. When I came to New York I had a share on Eighty-fifth and Third, but I wanted my own place, and after a few months I moved in here. I got sober in this apartment, after having spent several years getting drunk in it. When I think of navigating those stairs drunk and stoned, I remember how they say God protects drunks and fools. I qualified on both counts.”

The apartment was small but well-appointed. I think it must have started life as a three-room railroad flat, but he’d removed the nonbearing walls to create one long room. He’d stripped the exterior walls to the brick, which he’d rendered glossy with some sort of lacquer. He’d painted the mortar black, and here and there among the red bricks was one he’d painted white or blue or yellow. There weren’t that many of those, just enough to provide an accent.

The chairs and tables were different styles, but somehow went together. Except for a couple of thrift-shop finds, he said with some pride, everything had been salvaged from the streets. In New York, he said, you found finer goods and furnishings out on the curb for trash pickup than other cities displayed in their shops.

An abstract painting, all vivid colors and sharp angles, hung on one wall. It was the gift of the artist, a friend he’d lost touch with. Another oil, a pastoral scene of barefoot nymphs and satyrs in an elaborate carved frame, he’d acquired by trading jewelry he’d made.

By the time he’d finished pointing things out, the coffee was ready, and it was as perfectly done as his apartment, even better than what Jan made on Lispenard Street. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he ground the beans himself.

He said, “Matt, I have an ethical dilemma. May I ask where you are on the steps?”

“I’m concentrating on the first one,” I said. “And thinking some about the second and third.”

“You haven’t done a formal Fourth Step.”

“My sponsor says I shouldn’t be in a rush. He says there’s a natural progression of a step a year, and I’m in my first year, so my focus should stay on that first step.”

“That’s one school of thought,” he said. “And there’s something to the step-a-year principle, in that it takes a year for a step to really sink in. But the people who started all this back in the thirties and forties, they’d haul prospects out of hospital beds and get them on their knees, proclaiming their powerlessness over alcohol and their faith in a Higher Power and all the rest of it. They didn’t even wait for the poor sons of bitches to stop shaking. They were the original Step Nazis, decades before anybody came up with the term.”

“So you’re not the first.”

“I’m afraid not. And, as I’ve said, I’m not the sponsor everybody’s looking for. But I wouldn’t have made it in this program if I didn’t have a sponsor who was every bit the hard-liner I’ve turned into. He made me write everything out, which I hated, and he made me pray on my knees, which I considered demeaning, and likely to interfere with the buddy relationship I’d been hoping to have with God. Two reasonable men, you know, working things out on an even footing. Lord, what an arrogant little prick I was!”

He shook his head at the memory.

“Up until the day he died,” he went on, “I’d have told you I was the right sponsor for Jack. We had next to nothing in common—he was almost twenty years older, he had a much rougher life, he was straight and even a little homophobic. But he wanted what I had and he liked the message I carried, and I could tell that the only way he was going to stay sober was if he was forced to do the program the way they laid it out. Prayer every morning, prayer every night, a minimum of a meeting a day, and you do the steps in order and in writing. Can you see my dilemma?”

“He wrote it all down.”

“Everything he told me, and everything he wrote out, was in strictest confidence. I’m not a priest and the seal of the confessional wouldn’t protect me in a courtroom, but that’s how I’d regard it, irrespective of the law. But now…”

“Now he’s dead.”

“Now he’s dead, and what he wrote might point the police in the right direction. So where does my responsibility lie? Does his death release me from the obligation to keep silent? I know it’s generally considered okay to identify a deceased person as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. To paraphrase a syrupy book and film, death means never having to maintain your anonymity. But this is a little different, wouldn’t you say?”

“In some ways.”

“And not in others?” He sighed. “You know what I miss about drinking? The many opportunities it gave you to just say, ‘Oh, what the hell.’ Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass to think things through.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Jack has a lot of people on his Eighth Step list. He didn’t just write down the names of the people he’d harmed during his drinking years. He wrote a paragraph about each person, what he’d done and what effect it had had and what action he could possibly take to make things right. Some of the people on the list had died, and it bothered him that there was no way to make amends to a dead person.”

“He told me about his father.”

“How he hadn’t been there when the old man died. I suggested some things he could do. He could go someplace quiet—a church sanctuary, a park. The old neighborhood in the Bronx might have been a good choice if they hadn’t run an expressway through it. The venue’s not important. He could go there and think about his father and talk to him.”

“Talk to him?”

“And tell him all the things he wished he’d been able to tell him on his deathbed. And let the old man know he was sober now, and what that meant to him, and—well, you know, I wasn’t going to compose a speech for him. He’d think of plenty of things to say.”

“And who’s to say if the message would get through?”

“For all I know,” he said, “the old fellow’s off on a cloud somewhere, and he’s got ears that can hear a dog whistle.” He frowned. “I mean one of those whistles only dogs can hear.”

“I knew what you meant.”

“It could have meant, you know, a dog whistling. Not even the dead can hear that.”

“So far as we know.”

He gave me a look. “There’s more coffee,” he said. “Can I get you another cup?”

VIII

JACK WAS SITTING in your chair when he took the Fifth Step. He’d written out his Fourth Step, spent several weeks on it, making sure he got it all down. Then he sat there, and I sat where I am now, and he read it out loud. His voice broke a few times. It was hard going.”

I could imagine.

“I would stop him now and then, you know. For amplification. But mostly he read and I took it in, or tried to. It wasn’t easy.”

“Heavy going?”

“Very much so. Matt, my own Fourth Step had no end of things of which I was deeply ashamed. And in program terms what matters is how your deeds weigh on your conscience, not how far down they rank on some consensus of morality. But I felt like a lightweight sinner, a positive dilettante of turpitude. My only crimes were jaywalking and cheating on my taxes. Oh, and sneaking under subway turnstiles a couple of times. You won’t report me, will you?”

“I’ll let it go this time.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. I did things that weren’t crimes, but that were morally reprehensible, and that I don’t feel the need to mention now. But, you know, I never robbed anyone, I never hit anyone with a club. I never, Christ, I never killed anyone.”

“And Jack did?”

His silence was answer enough.

After a long moment he said, “I don’t feel comfortable sharing what he told me. And his character defects and his resentments didn’t get him killed, and neither did his bad actions, so my feeling is they can go to the grave with him.”

“That seems reasonable.”

“Except there won’t be a grave to go to. I’ve made arrangements to have him cremated, as soon as they’re able to release the body. My thought is to scatter the ashes at sea. There are people who’ll take you out in a boat, and you just empty the container of remains overboard.” He rolled his eyes. “Or cremains, as the insiders would say. If I had a copy of his Fourth Step inventory it could go to the oven with him, if not the grave. And into the water, and—”

He’d been speaking almost cheerfully, and then it all caught up with him and choked him up. I watched him set his jaw and blink back the tears, and when he resumed speaking, his voice was steady and strong.

“My dilemma,” he said, “is with his Eighth Step. I think I said it was detailed.”

“A paragraph about each person.”

“And some of them were long paragraphs. I would think that the person who killed him would almost have to be on that list.”

“And you have a copy.”

“Did I already mention that?”

“No, but you wouldn’t have much of a dilemma without it. You’ve got his Eighth Step list and you have to decide what to do with it.”

“If the police had leads, if they knew who did it whether or not they could make a case, then I wouldn’t have a problem. I’d destroy his list and that would be the end of it. But they don’t, and they very likely won’t, and won’t try very hard. So I’m in possession of information that might help them, and it’s my duty as a citizen to make it available to them.”

“But?”

“But there are around two dozen names on that list, Matt! That doesn’t mean there are that many suspects, because he’s got his dead father on the list, and a couple of other dead folks, and he’s got a high school girlfriend whose pants he lied his way into, and other people who’d be unlikely to respond with a couple of bullets if he turned up and said he was sorry. But that still leaves a third or more with mean lives and criminal histories, and only one of them could have killed him, and how can I chance getting all the others in trouble?”

“And if his purpose all along was to make it up to these individuals—”

“Exactly! One minute he turns up and says he’s sorry, it was the drink that made him do it, and here’s that ten bucks I never paid you, or a new lamp to replace the one I knocked off the table. And the next minute he’s dead, and the cops are knocking on the door.”

“And the men on the list aren’t the sort who welcome the attention of men in blue uniforms.”

“Or Robert Hall suits. Although Mr. Redmond was quite nicely dressed, as a matter of fact.”

“He’s a detective.”

“Oh, do they dress better than the others? I never knew that.”

Two days after I got my gold shield, Eddie Koehler took me to a Fifth Avenue men’s shop called Finchley’s. The building’s facade looked like a Norman castle, and I walked out feeling like a lord, having just bought a suit for three times what I normally spent.

I’d bought the suit to impress the public, because I’d been assured that I was a detective now, and had an image to protect. But there were other benefits; my wife had admired that suit, and so had my girlfriend.

There had been other suits, of course, but that was the one I remembered—two-button, single-breasted, the medium-blue glen-plaid fabric almost silky to the touch. (“A nice hand,” the salesman had said.) Uncuffed pants. (“I don’t believe we want cuffs, do we?”)

I wonder what happened to that suit. Far as that goes, I wonder what happened to Finchley’s. The last time I happened to look, it was gone. The crenellated building had a new tenant, with a window full of fake ivory and Orientalia for the tourist trade.

Something’s there and then it’s not.

Greg’s problem was clear enough. If he turned Jack’s Eighth Step list over to the surprisingly well-dressed Dennis Redmond, he’d be making trouble for people who’d had nothing to do with the murder. If he didn’t, he’d be helping a killer go free.

I asked him if he’d talked it over with his sponsor.

“I wish I could,” he said. “Do you know about the gay cancer? Kaposi’s sarcoma, it’s called, although I may be mispronouncing it. It’s extremely rare, or at least it used to be, but now every gay man starts the day checking himself for purple blotches. Adrian got very sick, and we were afraid he was going to die of it, because there’s no cure. But what actually killed him was pneumonia. A very rare form of pneumonia, except it’s not that rare anymore either, not if you’re a homosexual male.”

I’d heard a little about it. There’d been a death in my home group at St. Paul’s, and another member had been hospitalized several times with persistent fevers that they didn’t know how to treat.

“No one knows what causes it,” he said. “A friend of mine thinks it has something to do with the synergistic effect of leather and quiche. We may all die of it, Matt, but we’ll have some laughs along the way.”

His sponsor, Adrian, had died just over a month ago, and he hadn’t picked a replacement. “I’ve been holding silent auditions,” he said, “trying people out without letting them know about it. It’ll have to be someone older than I, and with longer sobriety, but someone who still goes to meetings on a daily basis, or close to it. I don’t want a gay man because I don’t want to go through this again, and I don’t want a straight man because I just don’t. Lately I’ve been thinking I should get a female sponsor, but do I want a straight woman or a lesbian?”

“Another dilemma,” I said.

He nodded. “And one that will solve itself in the fullness of time. As opposed to my other dilemma, which requires action. Matt, you were a policeman. Are you likely to go back to that?”

“Get reinstated?” I’d thought about it early on, talked it over with Jim Faber. “No,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.”

“So now you’re a private detective.”

“Not exactly. Private investigators are licensed. After I left the department, I started working privately for people, but in a very unofficial off-the-books kind of way. I would be doing favors, and they’d be giving me money as an expression of gratitude.”

“And now?”

“I’m looking for a job the way you’re looking for a sponsor,” I said. “Someone suggested a free program, EPRA, I forget what the initials stand for—”

“Employment Program for Recovering Alcoholics. Jack started going, but he wasn’t able to stick with it. He got by delivering lunches for a deli. Not exactly a career, but a pretty good get-sober job.”

“Well, my get-sober job seems to be the one I had when I came in. In the past eleven months I’ve had enough work come my way so that the rent keeps getting paid and I don’t miss any meals.”

“You do favors for people, and they show their gratitude.”

“Right.”

“Well,” he said, “I’d like you to do me a favor.”

IX

IT WAS WELL past midnight by the time I got home. There were no messages waiting for me, just the usual run of junk mail. I tossed it when I got to my room, but I kept the 9x12 manila envelope addressed to Gregory Stillman, with the hand-stamped return address of a firm in Wichita, Kansas. It had once held a catalog of jewelers’ supplies, but now it contained Jack Ellery’s Eighth Step, the list of people he had allegedly harmed, among whose number one might well expect to find the name of his killer.

I’d glanced at the first page of the list, just to make sure I’d be able to read Jack’s handwriting, and had then watched Greg slip it into the envelope and fasten the metal clasp. Now I put it on my dresser unopened and got out of my clothes and under the shower.

The envelope was still there when I got out of the shower. I opened it and drew out a sheaf of unruled pages held together by a paper clip. The pages were numbered, and there were nine of them, all covered with Jack’s compact but legible handwriting, dark blue ink on white paper.

The first name at the top of the first page was Raymond Ellery, who turned out to be Jack’s late father. I read a couple of sentences and felt a wave of tiredness wash over me. This could wait, all of it. I put the pages back in the envelope, refastened the clasp, and got into bed.

I remembered that I hadn’t prayed. I didn’t see the point of it, it wasn’t really my style, but I’d spent almost a year now doing things that weren’t my style and that I only occasionally saw the point of. So I kept it simple, starting the day by asking for another day of sobriety, ending it with thanks for another sober day.

But only when I remembered. I remembered now, but I was in bed with the light out, and I didn’t really feel like getting out of bed and down on my knees—which wasn’t really my style either.

“Thank you,” I said to whatever might be listening. And let it go at that.

“He gave me a thousand dollars,” I told Jim. “Ten hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t have to count them, he had them set aside in his wallet, so I don’t guess he was making things up as he went along.”

“I trust you remembered your police training.”

“I put it in my pocket.”

Another thing Vince Mahaffey had told me, years ago in Brooklyn. That’s what you did when somebody handed you money.

“You don’t sound happy,” Jim said, “for somebody with a thousand dollars in his pocket.”

“Most of it’s gone. I paid the next month’s rent, and I sent Anita a money order. I put a couple of bucks in the bank, and what’s left is in my wallet.”

“All of it? Or did you give up a tenth of your crop as a burnt offering to the gods?”

“Well,” I said.

Some years ago I’d gotten in the habit of tithing, slipping ten percent of what money I received into the first church collection box I came to. Jim found this an amusing eccentricity, and one he assumed would fade away in sobriety. Meanwhile the Catholics got most of my money, if only because their sanctuaries were more likely to be open, and on my way home I’d detoured to pay my respects to the poor box at St. Paul the Apostle. And while I was there I lit a couple of candles, one of them for Jack Ellery.

“You’re still a few dollars ahead of where you were yesterday,” Jim pointed out, “and you still don’t sound very happy.”

“I took the money,” I said. “Now I have to earn it.”

“By finding out who killed your friend.”

“By finding out if there’s a name here I feel comfortable passing on to Redmond. I suppose that amounts to the same thing.”

“Can’t you just eliminate the ones who couldn’t have done it and give him whoever’s left?”

“Stillman could have done that himself,” I said. “The idea is to avoid creating a problem for someone who’s innocent of Jack’s murder, even though he may not be innocent of much else.”

“Some nasty people on that list?”

“I don’t know who’s on it,” I said, “except for Jack’s father, and he’s been dead for a few years now.”

“Which would constitute exculpatory evidence, wouldn’t it? You haven’t read the list?”

“I was too tired last night, and this morning I found other things to do. I guess I’ll go read it now.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” my sponsor said.

But it still wasn’t something I wanted to do, and I went back to the room entertaining the fantasy that the manila envelope would have disappeared during my absence. The maid—whose weekly visit was a day away—would have come early, changing my sheets and emptying my wastebasket and consigning Jack’s Eighth Step to the incinerator. Or a burglar would have broken in and, annoyed at having found nothing worth stealing, would have walked off with it. Or spontaneous combustion, or a flash flood, or—

It was there. I sat down and read it.

By the time I was done I’d skipped lunch, and the sun was down. I went out and had something to eat before my regular Friday night step meeting at St. Paul’s. I had the urge to leave at the break but made myself stay for the whole meeting.

“I’m going to pass on coffee tonight,” I told Jim. “I think I’ll go to a bar instead.”

“You know, there’s been many a time I’ve had that thought myself.”

“I read that fucking list,” I said, “and it took forever, because I kept stopping and staring out the window.”

“At the liquor store across the street?”

“At the Trade Center towers, I suppose, but I wasn’t really looking at anything. Just gazing off into the distance. It was hard going, Jim. I got more of a peek than I wanted into the guy’s heart and soul.”

“So what else would you want to do but go to a bar?”

I gave him a look. “I’ve got a slip of paper with five names on it, and there’s a guy I want to run them past.”

“And the bar’s where you have to meet him.”

“It’s where he’ll be. The Top Knot or Poogan’s Pub. He switches back and forth.”

“A man wouldn’t want to get stuck in a rut,” he said. “You think it might be a good idea to take someone with you?”

“I’m not going to drink.”

“No,” he said, “you’re not, but you might be more comfortable with a sober friend along.”

I thought about it, weighed that against the inhibiting effect of a stranger at the table. “Not this time,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Whichever bar you’ll find him in, I’m sure they’ll have a pay phone. And you’ve got plenty of quarters, don’t you?”

“Quarters and subway tokens. Although I won’t need a token. I’ll be on West Seventy-second, I’ll walk there and back.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “The exercise’ll do you good.”

I walked up to the corner of Seventy-second and Columbus. Poogan’s was half a block one way and the Top Knot was about as far in the other direction, and I felt like the donkey standing midway between two bales of hay. Either you made an arbitrary choice or you starved to death. I flipped a mental coin and went to the Top Knot, and of course he was at Poogan’s, sitting at a table with an iced bottle of Stoli in a wood-grained plastic bucket.

The man at the table was holding a Rubik’s Cube, not manipulating it, just frowning at it. I walked over and said, “Hello, Danny Boy,” and without raising his eyes he said, “Matthew, have you ever seen one of these things?”

“I’ve seen them. I’ve never actually played with one of them.”

“Somebody gave this to me,” he said. “The idea is to wind up with solid colors on all six sides, though why anyone would want to go to the trouble is beyond me. Do you want this?”

“No, but thanks.”

He put the device on the table, looked up at me, smiled broadly. “Sit down,” he said. “It’s good to see you. Maybe I’ll leave this toy for the waitress. I get the feeling she’s easily amused. You’re looking well, Matthew. Something to drink?”

“Maybe a Coke,” I said, “but there’s no hurry. We can wait until she shows up to collect her Rubik’s Cube.”

“That’s what it’s called. I was thinking Kubek, but I knew that was wrong. Remember Tony Kubek?”

The Yankee infielder, and I did indeed remember him, and we talked baseball for a few minutes. Then the waitress came by and I ordered a Coke, and Danny Boy took a drink of vodka and let her top up his glass.

Danny Boy Bell is a diminutive albino Negro, always superbly dressed by the boys’ departments at Saks and Paul Stuart. His albinism has made him a creature of the night, but I think he’d keep vampire’s hours regardless of his skin’s sensitivity to sunlight. The world needs two things, I’ve heard him say, a dimmer switch and a volume control, both of them dialed way down. Dark rooms and soft music are his natural preference, all washed down with vodka, with the occasional company of some pretty young woman unburdened by much in the way of brainpower.

When I was working out of the Sixth, Danny Boy was my best snitch, and one of only a few whose company didn’t make me feel like I needed a shower. He wasn’t looking to beat a criminal charge, or even a score, or feel important. He was in fact not so much a snitch as a broker in information, and every night he put in his hours at Poogan’s or the Knot, and people on every side of the law pulled up a chair at his table to ask him things or tell him things or both. He lived within a few blocks of both of his hangouts, and he rarely went anywhere else unless it was to watch a fight at the Garden or catch a set at a jazz club. Mostly he sat in his chair and drank his vodka, and it might have been water for all the visible effect it had on him.

My Coke came, and I took a sip and wondered what visible effect it had on me.

I said, “There’s a fellow who got himself killed a week ago. Lived in a furnished room in the East Nineties, made ends meet by delivering lunches for a delicatessen in the neighborhood.”

“The ends couldn’t have been too far apart,” he said, “if that brought in enough to make them meet. What was his name?”

“John Joseph Ellery, but everyone called him Jack.”

He shook his head. “Didn’t hear about the murder, and I can’t say the name rings a bell. What did he do before he decided to give UPS some competition?”

“A little of this and a little of that.”

“Ah, a useful trade. And was he still doing a little of both when he wasn’t helping them out at the deli?”

“He went straight,” I said, and brandished my glass of Coke. “And found a new way of life.”

“A drier path, so to speak. A path I see you’re still pursuing yourself, Matthew. It’s been a while now, hasn’t it?”

“A year next month.”

“That’s great,” he said, and it was clear he meant it, which pleased me. Not everyone I used to drink with was all that enthusiastic about the road I’d taken, and Jim said their reaction said more about them and their own drinking than it did about me and my sobriety. Some felt threatened, he said, while others assumed I’d disapprove of them and wanted to beat me to the punch.

All the subject of drinking did for Danny Boy was remind him that he had a full glass in front of him, and in response he drank some of it. He said, “John Ellery, better known as Jack. Jack Ellery. Where’d he get killed?”

“At home.”

“In his furnished room. How?”

“Two bullets. One in the forehead, one in the mouth.”

“ ‘Keep your mouth shut’?”

“Most likely.”

“As opposed to ‘You shoulda kept your mouth shut, you fucking rat bastard,’ with the penis severed and stuffed into the mouth, or sometimes halfway down the throat. Are the Italians the only ones who employ that particular calling card, Matthew, or is it in wider use?”

I had no idea.

“A little of this, and a little of that. I hate to press for details, but—”

“Armed robbery, mostly. That’s what he went away for. Liquor stores, mom-and-pop groceries, walk in, show a gun, walk out with what he could grab out of the register. It’s not surprising if you never heard of him, because he was very small-time, and it’s no surprise you didn’t hear about the homicide. If there was anything in the papers, I didn’t see it myself.”

He was frowning in concentration. “Jack, Jack, Jack. Did he have a sobriquet?”

“Come again?”

“A nickname, for Christ’s sake. And don’t tell me you didn’t know the word.”

“I knew it,” I said. “I’ve come across it in print, but I’m not sure I ever heard anyone say it before. I certainly never heard anyone say it in Poogan’s.”

“It’s a perfectly fine word. And it’s not exactly the same as a nickname. Take Charles Lindbergh. His nickname was Lindy—”

“As in hop,” I suggested.

“—and his sobriquet was the Lone Eagle. George Herman Ruth, nickname was Babe, sobriquet was the Sultan of Swat. Al Capone—”

“I get the idea.”

“I just wanted to keep on saying it, Matthew. Sobriquet. I know it from reading, and I don’t think I ever heard it before, and I know for certain I never said it before. I wonder if I’m pronouncing it correctly.”

“I’m the wrong person to ask.”

“I’ll look it up,” he said, and he picked up his glass and put it down without drinking. “High-Low Jack,” he said. “Wasn’t that his fucking sobriquet? Isn’t that what they called him?”

X

HIGH-LOW JACK,” Greg Stillman said.

“They didn’t call him that in the rooms?”

“They just called him Jack, which is what he called himself. Oh, and Jailhouse Jack or Jack the Jailbird, but not to his face.”

One result of anonymity is that we mostly know each other by our first names, so we come up with handles to distinguish one Jack from another. At St. Paul’s, we’ve got Tall Jim and Jim the Runner and my own sponsor, Army Jacket Jim, because of the beat-up garment he’s rarely seen without.

If I’ve got a nickname—or a sobriquet, if you prefer—I don’t know what it might be. Matt the Cop? Gumshoe Matt? I’m the only Matt at St. Paul’s, so they probably haven’t needed to come up with a name for me.

“There was no insult implied,” Greg added. “Jack’s prison experience figured in a lot of his shares. How he got what he deserved, and how he’d never have wound up in prison if he hadn’t been drinking. So if you were looking for something to call him, it was a logical choice. But High-Low Jack. What does it even mean?”

“I don’t know. I heard the phrase from a cop at the Sixth when I was on the job myself, and I never heard it since until this evening.”

“From—?”

“A source,” I said, and wondered if Danny Boy was a nickname or a sobriquet. I’d never heard him called anything else, and for all I knew you’d find Danny Boy Bell right there on his birth certificate.

“And this source knew Jack?”

“Never met him, and didn’t know very much about him.”

“But he knew what people called him, or used to call him, which is more than I knew. It wasn’t in his Fourth Step, and I think I’d remember the phrase if I’d ever heard it before.”

“Was he a gambler? A cardplayer?”

“Jack? I don’t think so. He did mention a day he’d spent at a racetrack some years ago, but more in the context of drinking than gambling. Something about how he couldn’t ever seem to get to the window in time to get his bet down, because he’d hang around at the bar and have one more drink.”

“In other words, drinking saved him money.”

“So it wasn’t all bad.”

They did have a pay phone in Poogan’s Pub, and I know it was in working order because I’d seen people talking on it while I sat watching Danny Boy drink enough Stolichnaya vodka to restore the Soviet economy. It was free when I was ready to leave, but instead I walked to the corner. The first phone I tried was out of order, but there was a working one across the street, and the first call I made was to my sponsor.

“No, it’s not too late,” he assured me. “I hear the squeal of brakes, not the cries of the inebriated, so my guess is you’re calling me from the street.”

“You’re the one who should have been a detective. What do the words High-Low Jack mean to you?”

“There’s a card game,” he said, “the name of which is Spit in the Ocean, if I remember correctly. Or just Spit for short. I forget how you play it, but there are four things you get points for—high, low, jack, and the game. That’s the phrase, as I recall. ‘High, Low, Jack, and the Game.’ That help?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t see how it would,” he said. “High-Low Jack. High-low in poker is what you call it when the best and worst hands split the pot. I don’t know how Jack enters into the equation.”

“Jacks or better,” I suggested.

“Which brings to mind another game, a form of draw poker. You need a pair of jacks to open—”

“Right.”

“—but if nobody has jacks or better, then the hand turns into lowball, and the low hand takes the pot. That would be five-four-three-deuce-ace, or six-four-three-deuce-ace, or even seven-five-four-three-deuce, depending on the house rules.”

“I didn’t know you were a poker player.”

“Just buck-limit games, mostly printers, we played in the back room of a shop on Hudson Street. I lost my enthusiasm for the pastime when I came out of a blackout in the middle of a hand with no idea why I’d been betting it so hard. Jacks and Back, that’s what we called that particular variant. But that can’t be any help either. It go all right this evening?”

“It went okay,” I said. “It was good to see Danny Boy, and I put some things in motion.”

“And you didn’t pick up a drink.”

“No, I didn’t. When I left, Danny had just given the waitress a Rubik’s Cube and you’d have thought it was the Hope Diamond.”

“Isn’t that the one with the curse?”

“Well, unless she’s the one with the curse, I’d say he’s going to get lucky tonight.”

“I teed that one up for you, didn’t I? You can thank me another time. High-Low Jack. You hit ’em high and I’ll hit ’em low. Or is it the other way around?”

After he’d agreed to sponsor me, one of the first things Jim did was give me a little red leather change purse as a present. There was a quarter in it, and a subway token.

“That’s a starter,” he’d said. “Make sure you’ve always got a dozen quarters in there, and half a dozen tokens. So you can always make a phone call and you can always hop on a bus or a subway home.”

“Like a mob guy,” I said, and explained that every wiseguy we brought in always had a ten-dollar roll of quarters in his pocket. They’d learned to avoid wiretaps by making all their calls from pay phones, and a roll of quarters came in handy other times as well; wrap your fist around it, and you could punch a whole lot harder.

I hadn’t felt the need to hit anybody since I got sober, nor was I worried that someone was tapping my phone. But I never left my room without my supply of quarters and tokens, and I spent a second quarter on a call to my client, and learned as little from him as he did from me. He seemed pleased that I was working the case and putting things in motion, but I got the sense that he wasn’t hugely concerned about how my investigation was going.

Walking home, I figured out why. He’d had a dilemma—what to do?—and he’d resolved it by passing the ball to me. What happened now didn’t matter all that much to him. He’d done what he needed to do, and now he could turn it over.

It was very much in the spirit of the Third Step: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.

I’d heard the words no end of times—in specific discussions of the step, and in “How It Works,” the Big Book selection read at the beginning of most meetings. I liked the idea of it, but I didn’t have a clue how to do it. There was something in the literature about using the key of willingness, and sooner or later it would open the lock; that was nicely poetic, but I still didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

The Third Step doesn’t mean God will do the laundry and walk the dog. That was another of the things I’d heard people say. In other words, what? Turn it over and do it all yourself? That didn’t sound right.

Don’t drink, Jim told me. Don’t drink, and go to meetings. That’s all you need to know for now.

There was a message from Jan at the desk. Call anytime before midnight, it said, but it was well past the hour. We hadn’t confirmed our standing date, and I’d have to remember to do that in the morning. Or I could invent a reason to skip it this week, but wasn’t it too late to do that? It seemed to me that Saturday morning was too late to break a Saturday night date, and I’m sure it’s all explained logically in the Big Book and the Twelve & Twelve, with the proverbial key of willingness playing a starring role.

I remembered, for a change, and hit my knees before I got into bed. “Thank you for another sober day,” I said, feeling righteous and stupid at the same time. It’s remarkable how often the two feelings coincide.

XI

I READ THE TIMES with my breakfast, then went back to my room and called Jan. We agreed we’d go to the SoHo meeting at St. Anthony’s, and I said I’d rather have dinner after than before, if that was all right with her. She said that was fine, she’d have a late lunch.

“I’d have called last night,” I said, “but it was too late by the time I got home. I had to see a fellow, a dedicated night-owl type.”

“It sounds like you’re working.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m not sure there’s much point to it, but I’m getting paid.”

“Isn’t that point enough?”

“It may have to be. There are some people I want to see, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to, but I’m going to spend the day trying. That’s why I’d like to wait and have dinner afterward.”

Why was I explaining? Why did I always feel I had to explain everything? We weren’t married, for Christ’s sake, and even if we were—

“So I’ll see you at SoHo,” she said, cheerfully oblivious to the silent argument we were having, “and afterward we can go to one of those Eyetie places on Thompson Street, and you can tell me all about your case.”

Besides Jack Ellery’s, I’d had five names to try on Danny Boy. He’d scanned the list, then tapped one name with his forefinger. “Alan MacLeish,” he said. “Or Piper MacLeish, as I’ve heard him called.”

“Because he’s Scottish?”

“That may have been a factor, but I think it had less to do with bagpipes than the kind you hit people over the head with.”

“That was his weapon of choice?”

“So far as I know,” Danny Boy said, “he only used it once, but he did time for it, and the name stuck. You know the story about poor Pierre the Bridge Builder.”

“Sure.”

“ ‘Ah, monsieur, I, Pierre, built zat bridge. I have built dozens of bridges. But do zey call me Pierre ze Bridge Builder? Zey do not.’ ”

“That’s the one.”

“ ‘But suck one cock.’ Jesus, the old jokes are the best jokes. That’s why they lasted.” He picked up the Rubik’s Cube, gave it a look, put it down again. “I’m pretty sure Piper’s back inside. He was middlemanning a heroin transaction and the Rockefeller drug laws got him a long sentence. That was a few years ago, but I’d be surprised if he got out yet.”

The next two names didn’t register at all. “Crosby Hart. I don’t recall ever hearing about anybody with Crosby for a first name. Seems to me I’d remember if I had. On the other hand, this next one goes to the other extreme. Robert Williams? How many folks do you suppose answer to that one?”

“I’m not even sure he was a crook,” I said. “He was a friend of Jack’s, and Jack screwed his wife, and thought he might have fathered a child.”

“In other words, start looking for a Robert Williams with a wife who fucks around. Narrows it down.”

There were two more names, and Danny Boy recognized them but didn’t know what they’d been up to or where to find them. “There was a Sattenstein, an uptown fellow. Cabrini Boulevard? Somewhere up there. A small-time fence, if I’ve got the right person, and then he fell off the radar. Frankie Dukes, now there’s a name I know, though I can’t think why. Is Dukes a surname or did they call him that because he was handy with his fists?”

Not too handy, I thought. Gave him a bad beating, Jack had noted on his list. Broke his nose and two ribs.

“Well, somebody will probably know something,” Danny Boy said, “or they’ll know somebody who does. You know how it works.”

I knew how it worked. In my hotel room I looked at my list of names and crossed off Alan MacLeish. Got him in trouble, Jack had noted after his name, and if he’d been responsible for getting him sent away, I’d have to call that an understatement. But he’d also noted the difficulty in making things right with the man, and a closer reading showed that the Piper was indeed behind stone walls, and that Jack had known as much. Have to be on visitors’ list, have to be approved correspondent. How?

How indeed?

That left Crosby Hart, Mark Sattenstein, Frankie Dukes, and the cuckolded Robert Williams. I opened the Manhattan phone book and let my fingers do the walking. There were Harts but no Crosby, Dukeses but no Frank. There was a single Mark Sattenstein, with an address on East Seventeenth Street.

Easy choice. I dialed the listed number. It rang four times, and then an answering machine picked up and a male voice invited me to leave a message, sounding as though he didn’t much care if I did or not.

I hung up and copied down Sattenstein’s address and phone number. Then I let my feet do the walking as far as Columbus Circle, where I caught the subway downtown.

Up until recently I’d have made another phone call, one to Eddie Koehler, who’d been my rabbi in the NYPD and had a lot to do with my assignment to the Sixth, where he headed the detectives squad. He’d have helped me out over the phone, thus saving me a trip downtown, and while he was at it he’d go through the motions and urge me to apply for reinstatement as a cop.

I put in my papers not long after a stray bullet of mine killed a young girl in Washington Heights. That incident didn’t cause my resignation from the department any more than it caused the end of my marriage, but it would be accurate to say it precipitated both of those events, and left me with something to spend the next several years drinking about.

As far as the NYPD was concerned, it was a righteous shooting. I’d been chasing two holdup men who’d already killed a bartender, and my bullets killed one of them and brought down the other, which is pretty good when it’s night and your targets are moving. The bullet that struck the child did so on the hop, ricocheting wildly and to chilling effect. Her death was a tragedy, but I didn’t get a reprimand because I hadn’t done anything wrong. What I got was a commendation.

I never felt it was justified. I discharged my service revolver and a child died, and it’s not as though the two phenomena were unconnected. When I write out my own Eighth Step list, Estrellita Rivera’s name will be up there near the top, though what I can ever do in the way of amends is beyond me.

But all that is beside the point. When I got sober, Jim and I had one of those talks about the future, and one question that came up was what I was going to do to earn a living. Resuming my career as a cop was one option we discussed, and I talked about it with Jan as well, and then Eddie Koehler, who’d already stayed in harness a couple of years past retirement age, put in his papers, and sold his house and moved to Florida.

I suppose I still had the option of applying for reinstatement, but a day at a time I left that road untaken, and it began to seem less and less realistic. I’d been away long enough so that some strings would have to be pulled to get me back in, and Eddie wasn’t around to pull them, and what friends I had in the department didn’t have his clout.

And, on occasions like this one, I had to use the subway instead of the phone.

I could picture the cop with whom I’d watched Jack Ellery’s lineup, saw the high forehead and the bright blue eyes and the bulldog jaw, but I couldn’t remember his name. I got to within a block of the station house on West Tenth before it came to me. Lonergan—but I still couldn’t come up with his first name. I asked the desk sergeant for Detective Lonergan, and his face clouded.

“That’d be Bill Lonergan,” he said, and told me he’d retired back in March or April. He gave me a phone number, and I was heading for the door when he called me back and told me I could use the phone. “Save you the price of a call,” he said, “and the six-block hike looking for one that actually works.”

I made the call and a woman answered on the second ring. She put him on the line, and I recognized the voice. I told him who I was and he repeated my name and said he couldn’t place me. I told him I was looking into the death of Jack Ellery, and that name didn’t seem to ring much of a bell, either.

“It was a case of yours,” I said, “but this was some years ago.”

“It’ll come to me,” he said. “Listen, why don’t you come out here? I’ll remember you once I get a look at you, and this Ellery too, most likely.”

“High-Low Jack, you called him.”

“Now that’s familiar,” he allowed. “Time you get here, I’ll see if I can’t get my memory working.”

He lived in the Woodside section of Queens, in one of a row of small single-family houses with tiny front lawns and asphalt siding. The ride took the better part of an hour, I had to take two trains to get there, and on the way I considered the fact that he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than I, which made him young for retirement. And I remembered how the desk sergeant’s face had darkened when I mentioned Lonergan’s name.

I put that in the hopper, along with the sergeant’s quickness to supply a phone number and even to provide a phone, and I tossed in Lonergan’s willingness, even eagerness, to have me visit. There was really only one way all those elements added up, and so I wasn’t much surprised when Mrs. Lonergan opened the door to my knock and led me in to meet her husband. He was wearing a robe and pajamas, and he was sitting in an easy chair watching a TV with the sound turned off, and his face was gaunt and his complexion jaundiced, and he was dying.

Because I was prepared, I don’t think my face showed much in the way of shock, but Lonergan was a detective, so he probably got a reading. But all he said was “Yeah, sure, Matt Scudder. Came to me the minute I got off the phone. I don’t recall that we ever worked a case together, but there was a time or two we went out and had a few. What was that joint on Sheridan Square? Not the Lion’s Head but the place next door to it.”

“The Fifty-five.”

“That’s it. Jesus, that was a good place for serious drinking. You didn’t go there to sip a fucking white wine spritzer. Speaking of which, what’ll you have? There’s Scotch and Scotch. Or, unless someone grabbed it, there’s a stray can of Ballantine’s Ale in the icebox.”

“I think I’ll pass,” I said. And added, quite uncharacteristically, “I quit drinking a while back, Bill. I joined AA, went the whole way.”

“Did you. When was this?”

“It’s almost a year now.”

“Let me look at you,” he said, and did. “You look all right. I hope you stopped in time. Would you drink a ginger ale?”

“Sure, if it’s no trouble.”

He assured me it wasn’t, called out to summon his wife. “Edna, sweetie, could you bring the two of us a couple of ginger ales? They’re cold already, don’t bother with ice. In fact right out of the can is fine.”

But she brought in highball glasses, with a few ice cubes in each. He thanked her, and when she’d left he said, “The doc gave me the green light, said drink if I want to, that at this point it doesn’t make any difference. If you were drinking I’d keep you company. But the booze doesn’t sit well on my stomach these days.” He held his glass to the light. “Looks enough like booze,” he said. “Little dark for Scotch, but it could be bourbon and soda.” He took a sip, said, “Nope, ginger ale. Isn’t that a relief and a disappointment? You’re too much of a gentleman to ask, so I’ll tell you, and then we can put it on the shelf. It’s cirrhosis, with a side order of liver cancer. So it doesn’t matter if I drink but it feels better if I don’t. End of story.”

He said, “Jack Ellery. You say somebody killed him? You told me that a year ago, I’d have said something along the lines of good riddance. Still, your perspective changes when you’re staring at it yourself. Lately I’m not so quick to wish death on anybody, you know?”

“Sure.”

“But the guy was a lowlife. No way around it. You’re working this on a private ticket?”

Not quite, in that I didn’t have a license. But that was close enough, and I nodded.

“So you got a client. Somebody who cares enough to pay money to find out who put him away.”

“A friend of his.”

He thought about it. “He’s a guy who could have a friend or two,” he allowed, “though he wouldn’t hang on to them for long. Kind of guy who’d be a friend of his, assuming he’d want to know who killed him, is he gonna go to an ex-cop to find out?”

He was still a pretty good detective. “The friend’s straight,” I said, wondering how long it had been since anyone had applied that adjective to Gregory Stillman.

“It’s not a girlfriend, or you’d have said so.” He looked at me. “AA.”

“Good catch, Bill.”

“I never thought of Ellery as a drunk,” he said. “I mean, he drank, but who the hell didn’t? You drank, I drank—” He broke off, shook his head. “Well, there you go, huh? Look at us now. Anyway, I can’t say I ever got to know the son of a bitch. All I wanted to do was put him away, and the case fell apart, and at that point I lost interest.”

“The two of you never bellied up to the bar at the Fifty-five.”

He shook his head. “You ever drink with him yourself?”

“When I knew him in the Bronx, we were both drinking chocolate milk. By the time I met him again we were both sober.”

“He actually quit drinking?”

“He was sober two years when he died.”

I told him a little more about Jack’s death—how he’d shown the effects of a beating, then took two bullets not long afterward. I ran my five names past him and explained where they came from.

He said, “Making amends, did you call it? All of your crowd does that?”

“It’s recommended.”

He shook his head. “Maybe it’s just as well I never tried that route. A list like that, Christ, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

XII

WHEN I WAS ready to leave, Lonergan insisted on walking out onto the front stoop with me. “This neighborhood was all Irish,” he said. “Now you’ve got South Americans moving in. Colombians and Venezuelans mostly, and I forget what else. Maybe Ecuador. Some of the old joints have closed. Houlihan’s, used to be on the corner, now it’s a travel agency for the new arrivals.” He shrugged. “I guess they’re all right, the new people. They can’t be that much worse than we were.”

I stopped at one of the new places a block before the subway entrance. It was a luncheonette, and I took a stool at the counter and ordered a café con leche. They used evaporated milk from a can, and it was sweet and not bad, but I didn’t like it enough to order it again.

I thought about Bill Lonergan, and decided I hadn’t known him well enough to tell how the prospect of death had changed him. We’d gotten all the conversational mileage we could out of Jack Ellery, which wasn’t much. He didn’t recognize any of the names on Jack’s Eighth Step list, but one of them reminded him of someone else entirely, and that sent the conversation off on a diverting tangent. We told our war stories, and talked about colleagues from the Sixth, and I stayed longer than I would have because he seemed to want the company.

The lunch counter had a pay phone, and I used it to call Mark Sattenstein. I got the answering machine, and that was response enough to keep the phone from returning my quarter.

No problem. I had a change purse full of them.

The train I caught in Woodside was headed for Times Square, but at Grand Central I transferred to the Lexington line. I got off at Fourteenth Street and tried another quarter in another phone, but this time I rang off the instant the machine picked up, and the phone gave me back my quarter. I seemed to be getting the hang of it.

I walked three blocks up and two blocks east until I came to a five-story redbrick building on the uptown side of the street, a fire escape centered on the facade. The house number was the one I’d written down for Sattenstein, and in the vestibule I found his name on the buzzer for Apartment 3-A.

I positioned my forefinger over the button, then drew it back. There were four apartments to a floor, and the A line was likely to be in front, and on the left. That wasn’t carved in stone, a building’s owner could number his apartments as he preferred, even as he could call his building whatever struck his fancy. The original owner of this particular structure had called it the Guinevere, and I knew this because it was indeed carved in stone, just above the front door.

Outside, I stood on the sidewalk and found what ought to be 3-A’s front window. There was a light on inside, but even if it was the right apartment it didn’t necessarily prove anything. I returned to the vestibule and buzzed him, and I’d given up and started for the door when the intercom cleared its mechanical throat. I stayed put, and whatever somebody said in 3-A was completely garbled by the time it worked its way downstairs. I couldn’t make out a word of it.

I answered in kind, making some noises that weren’t designed to be understood, and there was a long silence. Then, with what I could only assume was some reluctance, he buzzed me in.

I guess the neighborhood hadn’t changed too much, because I picked up the scent of mice and cabbage in the stairwell. Three-A was where I’d thought it would be, and I approached the door quietly and was standing well to the side when I knocked. I didn’t really expect him to shoot through the door, but Jack probably hadn’t expected to catch two bullets in the head either.

I heard footsteps not much louder than my own, and the sound of a peephole being drawn back. A judas, they sometimes call it, though I’ve never known why. Betrayal? Thirty pieces of silver?

I was standing where I couldn’t be shot, and hence couldn’t be seen either. I had my wallet out, open to an old card proclaiming my membership in the Fraternal Order of Police. Its only use, as far as I know, is to induce an impressionable officer to cut an errant motorist some slack. I said my name, Matthew Scudder, and held the card to the peephole. “Like to talk to you about Jack Ellery,” I said, and I had my wallet back in my pocket well before he’d managed to get the door open.

He was tall, six-two or six-three, big in the shoulders, small in the waist and hips. He had a rough-hewn face, but the big brown eyes could have belonged to Bambi; he looked not so much like a knockaround guy as like an actor who kept getting cast in that kind of role. He was holding the door with his left hand, and a look at his elaborately bandaged right hand explained why it had taken him so long to open it.

He looked at once frightened and relieved, and that fit his opening words: “I’ve been expecting you.”

But how? I hadn’t left a message. I said something to that effect, and he said, “Well, you or someone like you. A police officer.”

He waited for me to say something, and I didn’t, and he said, “Ever since I heard about Jack.”

I looked at him, his face, his bandaged hand, and I got it. I said, “You’re the guy who beat him up.”

XIII

BEFORE HE COULD tell me any more, I undid the work of the FOP card I’d flashed at him. I’d never said I was a cop, and there were times when I was willing to let someone retain that impression, but we were past the point where I felt comfortable sailing under the blue flag. I told him I was a former police officer now working privately, that I’d known Jack Ellery when we were boys together in the Bronx. “So you’re under no obligation to talk to me,” I said.

That last would have been just as true if I’d been the commissioner himself. And it was safe to say, because I could tell he was ready to talk. Eager, even.

First, though, he wanted me to come in and make myself comfortable. His apartment was the before version of Greg Stillman’s place in Carnegie Hill—before the exterior wall was taken down to the bare brick, before the floor was stripped and sanded and refinished, before the three small rooms were combined into one. Instead they remained coupled together like railroad cars. The door led into the little kitchen, with the living room at one end overlooking East Seventeenth Street, and the bedroom at the other. The furniture could have been gathered from thrift shops and the street, but the mismatched pieces didn’t clash enough to be labeled eclectic.

He took me to the living room and pointed me toward an upholstered chair. He was going to make himself a cup of tea, he said, and would that suit me? Or there was beer, if I’d prefer that. I said tea would be fine.

There were two posters on the wall, both from shows at the Whitney, both artists even I could recognize—Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper. I studied them in turn, and I was still going back and forth between them when he put a cup of tea on the table beside me. He said it was Earl Grey and I said that was fine. The posters, he said, belonged to a woman who’d lived with him for just about two years.

“Then out of the blue she decided she was a lesbian. I mean, she was no kid. Younger’n me, but well up in her thirties, you know? How can you get to be that old and all along you’re a lesbian and you haven’t got a clue? How does that happen?”

“I gather it happens a lot.”

“Does it happen to guys?”

“I think everything happens to everybody,” I said, “but it seems to happen more often with women.”

He thought about it, shrugged. “Well, she left the posters here,” he said. “ ‘I’m done with ’em, Mark. You don’t want ’em, toss ’em.’ Why would I do that? They look okay. I’m used to them. That tea okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“You ever bust your hand? Just about everything you do becomes complicated. I still can’t tie my shoes. Thank God for loafers, huh?”

“Where did it happen, Mark?”

“Right here. He called me on the phone, said he’s got something to tell me, can he come over? I tried to get him to tell me over the phone, because it’s like he’s from a past life, you know? And I don’t remember him or that life with a whole lot of affection, so I’d just as soon hear whatever he’s got to say and be done with him. But no, this has to be face-to-face. I tell him I’m busy and he says okay, pick a time that works, just about any time at all will work for him. And I’m this close to telling him fuck off, leave me alone, whatever it is I don’t want to hear about it. This close.”

“But you told him to come over.”

“There was something made me think he’d be harder to shake than a summer cold, and I’m better off seeing him and getting it over and done with. And after I got off the phone with him I’m thinking, Hey, we used to be friends, and just because I’m living a different life these days, and there’s probably no place in it for a guy like High-Low Jack, that doesn’t mean I can’t be civil to him.”

High-Low Jack.

“So he comes in, and there’s something different about him, some light in his eyes. Makes me a little uneasy. But it’s been years, you know? Come in, good to see you, take a load off, have a beer. Of course he wouldn’t have a beer. You know about that?”

“He’d stopped drinking,” I said.

“Said he was an alcoholic, which I could believe, the way he used to put it away. But then we all did back then, you know? We were kids, we partied hard, we got in trouble. Crazy shit. You grow up and it changes.” He considered. “Or you don’t and it doesn’t. Whatever. So okay, you don’t want a beer, how about a cup of tea? But he doesn’t want anything, he just wants to get down to business. To make things right, except there was another word he kept using.”

“Amends.”

“Right, amends. I don’t think I ever heard anybody use that word outside of the context of, you know, an amendment to the Constitution. Amends. You know what he did? You know what this was all about?”

“Something about a burglary,” I said. “He sold something to you and stole it back again, something along those lines.”

He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. Then he said, “What I was, I was a receiver. I never went away for it, I never even got arrested for it. You needed to sell something, I’d buy it for cash. You were looking to buy something, if I had it you’d be getting a bargain. But cash, no receipts, and don’t ask where it came from. Like, you know, stolen goods.”

“Not usually a young man’s business.”

“Well, I had someone to teach me the ropes. You ever know a man named Selig Wolf? My uncle, my mother’s younger brother. Uncle Selig had a new car every year, always dressed nice, money in his pocket. Used to slip me a couple of bucks whenever he saw me. ‘Here, Marky, you don’t want to walk around with empty pockets.’ I’m out of school, I’m drifting from one dead-end job to another, and I team up with Jack and we do a snatch-and-grab at this credit jeweler’s on Queens Boulevard. Now what do we do with this shit we stole? So I take it to Uncle Selig, and first he gives me hell, and then he gives me a decent price for what I brought him, and finally he gives me advice. ‘Marky, you can kick in doors or hold people up, and have empty pockets most of the time, and sooner or later you get shot or do time, and what kind of life is that for my sister’s boy?’ Or I could buy and sell, the way he did, and he sat me down and showed me how.”

“And that’s what you did.”

“And that’s what I did, and I was no genius, but I did all right at it. I had this three-bedroom river-view apartment on Haven Avenue up in Washington Heights, and two of the bedrooms were my store. And the word got around. Next time I run into Jack, I tell him I’m in a different part of the business. So a couple of times he brings me stuff, and I take it off his hands. And another time he shows up, and have I got a nice fur? Because there’s a girl who let him know that’s what she wants. It happens I do, and he buys it from me.

“And then I come home one night, I’ve been out celebrating one thing or another, and I’m cleaned out. No damage to the locks, so I always figured somebody had copies of my keys. And I was right, because when he was making his whatchacallit, his fucking amends, he told me right off. He swiped a set of my keys, had copies made, then got my keys back where I kept them. And waited until he knew I was out, and came back with a partner, and cleaned me out. Even knew where I kept my cash.”

“And you suspected Jack?”

“I had a feeling. A couple of names came to mind, and he was on the top of the list. I went to him, not to confront him but just to see, you know? And he was full of plans, what I got to do to get the stuff back. There’s this saying about junkies, that first they steal your wallet and then they help you look for it. It was like that with him. He stole my wallet, and now he was helping me look for it.”

“So you were out a lot of money.”

“I was out of the business, man, and for a while there I was out of town, because I’d just bought a ton of jewelry and financed the deal by borrowing money from the shies. They don’t know from excuses. ‘Sorry for your troubles, it’s a hell of a world, and by the way you owe us money.’ And it’s not like I can call my insurance agent, put in a claim. Everything’s gone and I’m on the hook for it.” He shook his head at the memory. “Uncle Selig helped me work it out. Pointed me in another direction, said I was good with numbers, had me learn bookkeeping. Been doing it ever since. A couple of clients, I keep two sets of books for them, and if that ever came to light I could probably get in trouble. But aside from that I’ve been completely legit for years.”

“So Jack showed up—”

“And copped to what he’d done. ‘You were my friend and I stole from you.’ And this rage came over me. Like, not just how could you do such a thing, but how can you stand here and tell me about it? And smile while you do it?”

“So you hit him?”

“ ‘Mark, tell me what I can do to make it right with you.’ I said I ought to punch his lights out. ‘Mark, go ahead, if that’s what you want.’ And he stands in front of me with his face hanging out, like he’s fucking daring me to throw a punch at him. You ever hit anybody in the face?”

“Not recently.”

“First time for me. Oh, kids on a playground, you know. I gave somebody a bloody nose once, got one myself a time or two. Nine, ten years old. Never since then, until I hit Jack.”

His face darkened at the memory. “He just stood there,” he said. “Maybe took a half step back but that’s all. I split his lip and there was a little trickle of blood, but it didn’t stop the crazy bastard from smiling. I asked him if that was what he wanted, words to that effect, and he said I could keep going. ‘All you want, Mark. Whatever it takes to make it right.’

“And I fucking lost it. I hauled off and hit him again, and he kept standing there and I kept swinging. I don’t know how many times I hit him.” He looked at his bandaged hand. “Each time with the right hand. Three, four, five times? I don’t know. I beat the shit out of my hand but I never felt a thing at the time. Later on, Jesus, whole other story.”

He stopped, and I might have spoken if I could have thought of something to say. I heard a clock ticking. I hadn’t noticed it before.

He said, “The last time I hit him he came close to falling down. His knees buckled anyway. I looked at him and there was something different in his face, and all I could think was he looked like Jesus Christ. I’m Jewish, so what the hell do I know about Jesus? Crazy what goes through your mind.

“And he looks at me with these fucking Jesus eyes and says, ‘Mark, I’m sorry.’ Just that. And his face is all bloody and I’m thinking, Shit, what am I doing? What have I done? And I just—this is hard to talk about.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I just started crying, okay? And then we’re both crying, and we’re standing in the middle of the room hugging each other like brothers and crying like fucking babies. And I can’t stand to look at him and see what I’ve done to him, because his face is a mess. It probably looked worse later, with swelling and discoloration and all. But it was pretty bad then.

“He wouldn’t let me take him to the hospital. Insisted he’d be all right, and he’d take care of it himself. And he wanted to know how much it had cost me, what he’d done. How much money I was out, so he could start reimbursing me, so many dollars a month, whatever he could afford for as long as it took. I told him he didn’t owe me anything, it was all money I never should have had in the first place. And if I hadn’t lost it I’d have had no reason to get out of the business, and eventually I’d have gone away for it, which happened a couple of times to Uncle Selig, who was smarter and better at it than I’d ever be. So you could say he did me a favor, which is something I never thought of before then and probably never would have, if I hadn’t just spent ten minutes smashing my hand against this man’s face.

“Did I mention he wouldn’t let me take him to the hospital? A couple of hours later I went myself, walked over to Cabrini and had my hand looked at. It took that long before I realized how badly I’d hurt myself. I didn’t tell Jack, for fear that he’d decide he owed me another amends. I didn’t figure either of us could stand another amends.”

“You saw him again?”

“No. He called once, I think it was the next day or the day after. Just making sure everything was okay, and I was positive I didn’t want any of the money back. I never heard from him again, and then I found out he was dead. Shot to death, I think it was.”

“That’s right.”

He nodded to himself. “When I had the business uptown,” he said, “I owned a gun. It came to me as part of a deal, and I kept it because a person in that line of work needs protection, right? It disappeared in the burglary along with everything else. I never had a gun in my hands before or since. Never fired one in my life.”

I started to say something but he held up the unbandaged hand to stop me. “If,” he said. “If I’d still had that gun, or any gun, when Jack came in with his amends, I wouldn’t have thought twice. Pick it up, point it, pull the trigger. I guess that’s what somebody else did.”

“It was at his apartment.”

“Jack’s apartment?”

“Someone came to his place,” I said, “and brought a gun along. He was shot twice at close range, once in the forehead and once in the mouth.”

“I didn’t know that. It sounds cold.”

“And purposeful,” I said. “ ‘You talk too much.’ ”

“Maybe.” He looked at me with Bambi’s big soft eyes. “He was just trying to make things right with everybody, and it doesn’t make any more sense to me now than it did then. What’s done is done, you know? Leave the past alone. But the point is he was trying to accomplish something, and all it did was get him killed.”

XIV

THERE WAS A message in my box at the Northwestern, a call logged an hour earlier from Greg Stillman. I called him from my room, and he said he thought I might have been trying to reach him. His answering machine had been able to tell him that there had been several calls from someone who hadn’t left a message.

“So who else could it be?”

“You know,” he said, “I think there’s a country song along those lines. ‘If nobody answers, it’s me.’ It wasn’t you, though, was it?”

“I did hang up on an answering machine,” I said. “A couple of times. But it wasn’t your machine.” And I filled him in on my meeting with Mark Sattenstein.

“So you found out who gave Jack the beating. But he didn’t shoot him.”

“No.”

“You don’t think he could be lying about it?”

“Not a chance.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “I’d more or less assumed that one person was responsible for both the beating and the shooting. ‘Oh, that’s not enough to get rid of you? All right, in that case bang. And while we’re on the subject, bang again.’ ”

“By the time Sattenstein finished hitting him, there was no anger left.”

“And his take now is that our Jack rescued him from a life of crime. It’s a shame he didn’t show up at the service. He could have told that story and had everybody in tears.”

“He referred to him once as High-Low Jack,” I said. “I didn’t want to interrupt him at the time, and then I forgot. I was halfway out the door before I asked him about it.”

“And?”

“And he didn’t even remember that he’d used the sobriquet, but—”

“He said sobriquet?”

“No, of course not. Nickname, he must have said. He didn’t recall using it today, but he could have, because he’d been familiar with it in the days when the two of them did business together. But he had no idea how Jack came by the name, or what it meant.”

“That’s helpful, isn’t it?”

“Not terribly,” I agreed, “but somehow I don’t think Jack’s sobriquet—”

“You just like using the word, don’t you?”

“—is going to point the way to his killer.”

“Will anything?”

“I don’t know. If you’re losing heart for this—”

“No, not at all! I think it’s remarkable that we’re seeing results already. You’ve told me two things just now, and they’re both important. We know who beat him up, and we know that someone else shot him. I can see right now I was right to enlist your help.”

“Oh?”

“If I’d gone to the police, they’d have been the ones to show up on Mark Sattenstein’s doorstep. Somehow I think he’s better off for its having been you instead.”

“They’d have given him a hassle,” I said.

“That may be an understatement.”

“It might. They’d like him for the murder. Once you’ve got a suspect in hand, you don’t want to knock yourself out looking for another one. I don’t think they’d have made any kind of a case against him, but he’d still be the worse off for having attracted their attention.”

We talked some more, and then he said, “You know, it scarcely matters if we find out who did the shooting. We’re taking the appropriate action, and it will work out the way it’s supposed to.”

“It will?”

“Of course,” he said. “Everything always does.”

Did everything always work out the way it was supposed to? I had that to think about, and I kept turning it around in my mind through most of the evening meeting. SoHo group meets at St. Anthony of Padua’s, a big redbrick church on the corner of Houston and Sullivan with a predominantly Italian congregation. I was a few minutes late getting there, and the first thing I saw upon entering was Jan, looking my way and waving an arm to indicate she’d saved me a seat.

I immediately wished she hadn’t. There were plenty of empty seats, as there always were in that oversized room. I could have been trusted to find a seat of my own. We’d be going out for dinner, and then spending the night together, so why did we have to sit side by side while somebody with a beatific smile on his broad face told us how he used to pee in empty bottles and pour them out the window because he couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way down the hall to the bathroom? Couldn’t we share that experience just as well sitting ten or twenty yards apart?

I kept this to myself, and sat down next to her, right where I was supposed to, and within a few minutes realized I’d have resented it at least as much if she hadn’t saved a seat for me. That gave me something else to think about, along with everything working out the way it’s supposed to.

That particular meeting had a format I hadn’t yet encountered elsewhere. After the speaker’s qualification and the secretary’s break, the group broke up into mini-groups of eight to ten, seated at round tables. Someone at each table would suggest a topic, and the ensuing round-robin discussion would fill the remaining half hour. Jan and I automatically headed for different tables, and the topic where I wound up turned out to be acceptance. I found myself wishing it was something else, and then realizing how ironically appropriate that was.

And the topic hardly mattered, because this was Downtown AA, and when it was your turn you said whatever you pleased. I would have happily passed, but there were only eight of us and it was easy enough for me to find something to say. I just tossed out Jim’s line—well, Buddha’s, I guess—about dissatisfaction being the cause of unhappiness. Then it was somebody else’s turn.

The restaurant on Thompson Street was old-fashioned Greenwich Village Italian—red checkered tablecloths, straw-covered Chianti bottles as candleholders, a Sinatra record for background music. The waiter remembered us, approved our appetizer and entrée choices, and didn’t try to coax us into ordering wine. The food was good, and we took our time over the meal, and I talked about Jack Ellery and my attempts to find out who’d killed him.

“Or who didn’t,” I said, “which is turning out to be my real mission here. If I can clear the names on his Eighth Step list, his sponsor can let it go with a clear conscience. No need to share anything with the cops if you’re sure what you’ve got isn’t worth sharing.”

“Is that what it says in the penal code?”

“You’re joking, but as far as the law’s concerned, he doesn’t have to report it even if he knows for a fact who did the shooting. He’s not an officer of the court. He’s a private citizen. That doesn’t give him the right to lie to a police officer, but he can keep things to himself.”

“So all you have to do is clear the rest of the names on the list. That’s simpler than finding a killer, isn’t it?”

“Well, not if the killer’s on the list. In that case it’ll be tricky to clear him.”

We batted that around a little, and she asked how I’d feel about walking away from the case once I’d cleared them all. I said I’d feel as though I’d earned a thousand dollars.

“Would you, Matt? Oh, I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t have earned your money. But wouldn’t you feel as though you’d left part of the job undone?”

“Why?”

“Because Jack’s killer would be walking around free.”

“He’d hardly lack for company.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there are a lot of killers walking around free. It used to make me crazy when we brought in a perpetrator and watched the case fall apart. Either the DA’s office fucked it up or the evidence just wasn’t there or twelve dimwits on a jury couldn’t bring themselves to do the right thing, and all our work was for nothing. I’m not sure I ever got over it completely, because it’s natural to have an emotional investment in a case. But you get used to it.”

We moved on to some stray observations on the meeting. “I can see peeing in empty bottles,” I said. “You’re in a rooming house and the bathroom’s at the end of the hall and somebody’s probably using it anyway. And here’s an empty bottle, and if you’re a guy you’ve got something to aim with—”

“Which is probably good for nothing else at that point.”

“—so you make use of what you’ve been given. Just cap it afterward so you don’t spill it all over the floor.”

“Gross.”

“But what I don’t get,” I said, “is why it would strike him as a good idea to pour the bottles out the window. Just set them aside until you can get it together to empty them in the toilet. What’s so hard about that?”

“I can see one advantage in pouring your pee out the window.”

“Entertainment?”

“Well, I suppose, but that’s more of a fringe benefit. The main thing is, then you don’t have to worry about drinking it by mistake. Ha! Got you with that one, didn’t I? The little lady wins the gross-out contest.”

We both agreed it was nice enough to walk the half mile home, and she took my arm crossing Houston Street and didn’t let go when we reached the curb. We’d finished the meal with espresso, and the waiter had come over with a pair of cordial glasses, the house’s standard lagniappe for customers they hoped to see again. As he reached our table he remembered we were the ones who’d passed on the wine. “You no want,” he said tentatively, and we agreed that we didn’t, and walking home Jan wondered what we’d turned down.

“Probably anisette,” I said, “or something anise-flavored.”

“Not Sambuca?”

“It could have been Sambuca.”

“They wouldn’t pass it out,” she said, “because most people can’t stand the taste of it, but you know what I used to like? Fernet-Branca.”

“You liked that stuff?”

“It’s pretty horrible,” she admitted, “but nothing beat it on a bad morning. The bitter taste, I think it did something for your stomach.”

“All it ever did for mine,” I said, “was turn it. The only cordial I developed a fondness for was Strega.”

“Oh, Jesus, Strega! I haven’t even thought of that in years. I hope that’s not what he had for us.”

“What difference does it make? Since we didn’t drink it anyway—”

“It was definitely anisette,” she said. “Some cheapo anisette with a nasty perfumy taste.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“You know what Strega means? In Italian?”

“Witch, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Witch.” We walked along in a pensive silence, and then she said, “You know, here I am remembering the taste, and if they perfected some kind of faux Strega, exactly the same but with no alcohol in it—”

“You wouldn’t want it.”

“Wouldn’t touch it with a stick.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “Don’t let this get around,” she confided, “but I just might be an alcoholic.”

By the time we got close to Canal Street, the acknowledged boundary between SoHo and Tribeca, I could scarcely remember how I’d felt earlier—resenting her for presuming to save me a seat, chafing under the obligation of having to spend yet another Saturday night in her company. Why on earth would I want to spend the night differently?

For a moment it seemed to me that I’d been given a glimpse of the future. We’d go on like this, growing ever closer to one another, and sometime after my one-year anniversary I’d spend all my nights on Lispenard Street. I might keep the room at the Northwestern as an office, at least for a while, but it wasn’t really a place to meet clients, and what other need did I have for an office?

So we’d live together, and after a year of that, or less if it felt right, I’d put a ring on her finger.

Would she want kids? I had two sons, and sooner or later Jan would have to meet them, and I figured they’d all get along as well as they had to. But she was two years younger than I, and had been sober two years longer, and she was still young enough to have children, although that biological clock was ticking away. So how would she feel on the subject? For that matter, how would I feel?

Stay in the moment, I told myself. It’s a beautiful night and you’re going home with a fine-looking woman. What more do you need to know?

XV

I DON’T KNOW what the hell happened,” I told Jim. “We were the cute little couple on top of the wedding cake, and then we crossed Canal Street and everything turned to shit.”

It was Sunday night and Jim and I were in a Chinese restaurant. Hot-and-sour soup, sesame noodles, orange beef, and a chicken dish named for a Chinese general, all as ritualized in its own way as my Saturday evening.

“We got to her door,” I said, “and she was fumbling in her purse, so I took out my key and unlocked the door.”

“You have keys to her place.”

“For months now. It’s a convenience. Her building’s an old factory converted to artists’ lofts, and it doesn’t have an intercom, although there’s been some talk about putting one in. What I would have to do was phone her when I was a block or so away, and then she’d wait at the window until she saw me and throw down a set of keys, and I’d pick them up off the sidewalk and let myself in. It didn’t take too long for both of us to get tired of that system.”

“No, it would get old fast. So you unlocked the door and she bristled.”

“Exactly.”

“She say anything?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

“What was I going to say? ‘Hey, why give me a key if I’m not supposed to use it?’ ”

“So you waited for it to blow over, and it didn’t.”

“We went upstairs, and she made some coffee, which I don’t think either of us really needed at this point. And she put the radio on, and we’d picked up the Sunday Times on the way home, and we each settled in with a section of the paper.”

“The old folks at home,” he said. “This chicken’s good.”

“It’s always good.”

“I know, but somehow it always exceeds my expectations. So, domestic bliss. Unless you had a fight over the Arts and Leisure section.”

I shook my head. “But I didn’t want to be there. And she didn’t want me there, either. And there was no way either of us could say anything or do anything, so we were stuck with each other until morning.”

“And a few minutes earlier you’d been thinking of names for your kids.”

“Well, not exactly. But close enough. Still, it was quiet.”

“Duke Ellington working away in the background.”

“Among others. The jazz station. Except for what was going on in both our minds, everything was fine.”

“Not that you knew what was going on in any mind other than your own.”

“Well, I picked up vibes.”

“Ah, vibes. And who was playing them? Lionel Hampton or Milt Jackson?”

“I didn’t know what she was thinking,” I said, “but I had a pretty good idea. And I thought, All right, the thing to do is make the best of it, and there’s not really anything wrong, and it’ll work itself out. And when I was done with the sports section I went to take a shower, figuring that maybe she’d like me a little better if I smelled nice when we made love.”

“Which you always do on Saturday night?”

“Pretty much. And I thought, you know, that it might help things work out.”

“Because sometimes sex has that effect.”

“Sometimes it does.”

“And even if it doesn’t,” he said, “at least you wind up getting laid. But somehow I gather the physical manifestation of your mutual affection wasn’t a great success.”

“I went to bed,” I said, “and she said she’d be along in a few minutes. She went to the kitchen first, to wash the coffee cups. Usually she leaves them until morning.”

“The detective speaks.”

“And she was a long time in the shower, and a long time in the bathroom after the shower stopped running. And lying there waiting for her, I thought of pretending to be asleep.”

“So that you wouldn’t have to have sex.”

“And then she came in, quiet as a mouse, and she asked me if I was awake. In a whisper, too low to rouse me if I wasn’t paying attention. And I knew she was hoping I was asleep, so she wouldn’t have to have sex.”

“The cute little couple on the wedding cake, as I recall.”

“So I rolled over,” I said, “and made room for her beside me, and we worked our way into this slow and gentle lovemaking, and eventually she either had an orgasm or faked one, but either way I was grateful. It took me forever to fall asleep.”

Sunday morning she said she didn’t feel much like brunch, and I said I ought to skip the morning meeting and see if I could get some work done. She made coffee and we each had a cup and accompanied it with sections of the paper we hadn’t gotten to the night before. Then we kissed good-bye and I got out of there.

I wound up walking all the way uptown to my hotel. I kept thinking I’d catch a meeting or a subway, but I just kept on walking, stopping once for coffee and another time for a sausage roll. By the time I got home I was ready to lie down, and I napped for an hour until it was time to watch the Giants lose to the Packers. There was snow on the field in Green Bay, which surprised me. It was still sport jacket weather in New York, except on those days when the wind had an edge to it.

The phone never rang. I had some calls to make, but first I watched the game through to the bitter end, and then I pulled my chair over to the window and watched the sky darken. When I finally picked up the phone it was to call Jim, so he could decide where we’d have our sesame noodles.

Now he said, “You’re coming up on a year.”

“No kidding.”

“Generally a tense time, immediately before and after an anniversary.”

“So they tell me.”

“Not that the rest of the time’s a piece of cake, but anniversaries seem to polarize things for us. You know, you got involved way too soon.”

“I know.”

“But maybe you didn’t have much choice.”

I’d known Jan before I ever saw the inside of an AA room. There’d been a string of murders, a guy using an ice pick on women, and a few years after I left the force they got the guy. Except there was one killing he wouldn’t cop to, and it turned out he couldn’t have done it, he was inside at the time. It was an ice-cold case as far as the police department was concerned, and they certainly weren’t going to waste time on it, so a cop who knew me steered the victim’s father in my direction, and he hired me.

The investigation led me to Jan’s loft on Lispenard Street, among other places, and we liked each other’s looks enough to get drunk and go to bed together.

That worked out pretty well, and it looked as though I had a girlfriend, and a drinking buddy in the bargain. And I did, until she started going to meetings. That meant she was no longer a drinking buddy, and the people she met in church basements convinced her that she couldn’t be a girlfriend either, not of a man with a powerful thirst. I wished her the very best of luck and went off to get something to drink.

And some time went by, and she got sober and stayed that way, and I went on living my life. Then, when it got bad enough, I started going to meetings myself. I was in and out, I’d stay sober for a while and then I wouldn’t. Jim began to take an interest in me, and talked to me when he saw me, or tried to anyway. Pretty much everybody else left me alone. My name’s Matt. I’ll pass. Right.

Over the months I’d called Jan once in a while, when I was drunk enough to think it was a good idea. She was always polite, but knew better than to spend time talking to a drunk. Then I called her when I was trying to stay sober. I had to talk to someone and I couldn’t think of anybody else to call.

And we started keeping company of a sort. And one day I ordered a drink I didn’t really want, which was nothing new, and left it untouched on a bar, which was. And since then I’d been sober, and we were a couple. More or less.

Jim said he’d have to pass on St. Clare’s. There was something on PBS Beverly wanted to watch, and he’d agreed to keep her company. Did I want to join the two of them? I knew I didn’t, and headed for the meeting instead. I left at the break and went home.

No calls. I went to bed.

XVI

THAT WAS SUNDAY. A week and a half later, on Wednesday, I cleared the last suspect. I didn’t put in long hours and I can’t say I made any brilliant deductions, but I used the phone and the subway to good avail, and that turned out to be enough. By the time I was done I still didn’t know who’d killed Jack Ellery, but I knew five people who hadn’t, and that was all I’d signed on for.

I’d spent Monday renewing my acquaintance with some cops I’d known over the years. There was a guy I’d worked with a long time back in Brooklyn, and just a few blocks from me at Midtown North there was Joe Durkin; we’d had dealings right around the time I first started trying to get sober, and since then he’d earned a couple of extralegal dollars by steering a case or two my way.

Neither of them had anything for me, but they made a few phone calls and set up other cops for me to see. A guy from a downtown precinct knew the name Crosby Hart. He wasn’t a hood, he was a Wall Street guy, but he’d developed a fondness for cocaine that led him to embezzle from his employers. Which added up: Screwed him on a coke deal was next to his name on Jack’s Eighth Step list.

“Skinny guy in a suit, skinny tie, all the time tapping his long bony fingers, bobbing his head. Could not sit still. Cocaine, the miracle drug. We hauled him in, airtight case, but the firm changed their mind, insisted on dropping the charges. Restitution, treatment, never do it again, di dah di dah di dah. Which is fine, because once the coke’s out of the picture you’ve got a respectable guy leading a respectable life. Isn’t he better off with the wife and kids in Dobbs Ferry than a few miles further up the river in Ossining?”

“Is that where he lived? Dobbs Ferry?”

“Someplace like that. He was a commuter, took the train in from Westchester every morning. Of course when he was on a coke run he might not make it home that night. Dobbs Ferry, Hastings, Tuckahoe—one of those places. And Crosby’s his middle name, if you’re looking for him in the phone book.” And what was his first name? “He just used the initial. H. Crosby Hart, and everybody called him Crosby. Far as what the H stood for, I have to admit I got no fucking idea. I must have known at one time, because it would have been on his sheet. You book a guy, his first name gets written out. Unless he’s F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

“Or E. Howard Hunt?”

“Howard,” he said. “That’s it. Sonofabitch, how’d you manage that? Howard Crosby Hart. That’s his name.”

Except it wasn’t. It was Harold, not Howard, as I learned from Sheila Hart, who had not yet gotten around to changing the listing in the phone book for Lower Westchester County. He no longer lived there, and his current residence had an unlisted number. I sensed that she had it, but wasn’t about to give it out. I could try him at his place of business, she told me.

And where was that? She turned suspicious, and questioned my need to know. She hadn’t caught my name, and wondered just what sort of business I had with her former husband.

I gave my name, and said I was with Calder, Jennings & Skoog, reeling off the name as if it were one she ought to recognize and not one I’d invented on the spot. I said I understood her husband to be a nephew of the recently deceased Kelton Hart of Fort Myers, Florida, and—

Who was she to stand in the way of a legacy, especially if some of it might find its way to her? She told me what I needed to know, and I reached him at his desk a couple of hours later. I said my name but left out the imaginary Mr. Calder and his partners and said I’d like to meet with him. He didn’t even ask what it was about, which suggested he’d heard my name before, and not all that long ago.

He offered to meet me after work at the Cattle Baron, at the corner of William and Platt, just around the corner from his Wall Street firm. Say 5:30? I said 5:30 was fine, and put on a suit jacket and a tie before I left my hotel room. I was done playing the part of a lawyer hunting missing heirs, but he didn’t know that, and was expecting a lawyer to show up. So I figured I might as well look like one.

I don’t know that I did. I tend to look like a cop irrespective of what I wear.

The Cattle Baron was new to me, but pretty much what the name and location had led me to expect. It was a steak house, all dark wood and red leather and polished brass, with Bass Ale and three German beers on tap and a good selection of single-malt Scotch on the back bar. The clientele were all men and they all wore suits, and most of them spoke in loud voices. I stood in the doorway looking for a skinny guy with a skinny tie, and my eyes kept passing over one fellow until it registered that he was looking right at me.

I approached him, and he said, “Mr. Scudder? Hal Hart. If you weren’t with a law firm I’d guess you might be with the investment house. Very reputable line of mutual funds. But I don’t suppose there’s any connection.”

“Nor with the Scudder Falls Bridge.”

“Well, I’d be more worried that you might try to sell me mutual funds. I’ve already bought my quota of bridges.”

His tie had narrow diagonal stripes of red and navy, and it wasn’t skinny, and neither was anything else about him. He’d replaced the cocaine with food and drink—beef and beer, by the look of him, and plenty of both. His face was round and red, and there was a Rorschach of broken capillaries in both cheeks.

I sat at his invitation, and when the waiter appeared I ordered club soda. Hart’s glass stein was still half full of dark beer, but he tapped it with a forefinger and gave the waiter a nod. “Dos Equis,” he told me. “Best legal substance ever to come out of Mexico. Sure you won’t have one?”

“Not right now,” I said.

I could have crossed him off the list then and there, because there was no way this hearty stockbroker had put two holes in Jack Ellery. But that was the subject at hand, and I might as well get to it. The room was noisy, and the place smelled of booze and cigars and avarice, and I didn’t want to stay in it any longer than I had to.

We talked sports until the drinks came. He too had watched the Giants lose to Green Bay, and had stronger feelings than I about the coaching. He was draining his glass just as the waiter arrived with a replacement, along with my club soda in a matching glass stein of its own. Hart beamed at both our drinks, picked up his, and said, “Mr. Scudder, I hope I’m wrong, but if I ever had an Uncle Kelvin this is the first I heard of him.”

“I think I said Kelton,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, because he never existed. And I’m not an attorney.”

“Oh?”

“I’m an investigator,” I said, “looking into a recent homicide.”

“Well, Jesus Christ. Who got killed, if it wasn’t my long-lost uncle Kelvin?”

“A man named Jack Ellery.”

He was slightly pop-eyed, but I hadn’t really noticed it until I said the name. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You can just go ahead and fuck me with a stick. Why in the hell would anybody kill Jack Ellery?”

“Uh—”

“If that crazy bastard doesn’t wind up giving me a stroke,” he said, “it’s not for lack of trying. He’s surprised the shit out of me twice in the past month. First by turning up alive, and then by turning up dead. How’d he die?”

“He was shot to death.”

“And they ruled out suicide?”

“Two bullets,” I said. “One in the forehead, the other in the mouth.”

“If that’s suicide,” he said, “it shows remarkably strong will. Jesus Christ.” He drank some beer. “I never expected him to turn up. Never gave him a thought in God knows how many years. Then one night I get home from the office and my doorman points to a guy sitting in the lobby, says he’s waiting for me. I turn and look, and he stands up and says, ‘Crosby?’

“So it has to be somebody from way back when, because it’s that long since anybody called me Crosby. That’s my middle name. I never liked Harold, which is what everybody called me all through high school, and as for Harry, well, forget it. So when I got to Colgate I met my freshman roommate and stuck out my hand. ‘H. Crosby Hart,’ I announced, ‘and everybody calls me Crosby.’ And from then on, everybody did.” His eyes sought mine. “Until I got into a little trouble. You know about that, right?”

I nodded.

“I was lucky enough to get out of it,” he said, “because I had a clean record, and because I was a white middle-class guy with a house in the suburbs. I got a fresh start, and I decided I ought to have a new name to go with it, and what’s funny is I already had one, because my wife had been calling me Hal all along. You know, Prince Hal? Shakespeare?” He shook his head. “These days it’s Harold, as in Harold-you’re-late-with-the-child-support.”

“But this guy in the lobby called you Crosby.”

He grinned. “Bringing me back on track, aren’t you? Very nicely done, and I can see why they named that bridge after you. Across the Delaware, isn’t it?”

“I believe so.”

“Guy in my lobby, and he calls me by a name I never hear anymore. I can’t place him right away. He looks vaguely familiar, and he also looks, you know, a little bit seedy, a little bit down on his luck. Somebody I used to know who maybe didn’t do so good for himself in the years since. He’s dead, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a shame,” he said, and took a moment to think about it. “So he tells me his name, which doesn’t register at all, not right away. And he’d like to talk to me, and could we maybe go somewhere private?

“So here’s a guy, clean shirt but the collar’s frayed, his shoes are polished but they’re down at the heels and scuffed under the polish, he shaved that morning but he’s overdue for a haircut—you get the picture?”

“Respectable but broke.”

“Exactly. So this has to be a touch, right? Old time’s sake, gotta be good for a couple of bucks. I figure fifty, maybe a hundred, and then he’ll stay away from me until he’s in a position to pay it back, which means forever, and you’d have to call it a bargain. Fine, but I don’t need him inside my apartment. Right here’s private enough, I tell him, and I take him over to the corner, where there’s two sofas at right angles to each other. And we sit down, and I find out it’s not a touch after all, because what he says is he owes me an apology. And maybe something more than that, he says.”

He tilted his head, looked me over. “You know about this, right? You’re an investigator, which I guess means private, and you’re looking into his death, and you’re sitting there drinking club soda. I can’t help connecting the dots.”

“You’re not a bad investigator yourself.”

“Well, two plus two, you know? He owes me an apology, he wants to make amends. He used to be an alcoholic, but he’s not drinking anymore, and part of staying sober is what he’s doing now. There was an expression he used, something about cleaning up the mess he made—”

“The wreckage of the past.”

“That’s it.” He drank some beer. “The hell, I know a little about addiction. Fucking blow took me down big-time. And right about this time I place the guy. If I ever knew his last name I long since forgot it, but I’m listening to him and he’s talking about a coke deal, how he beat me for a couple of grand, and of course, Jesus, he’s High-Low Jack.”

“That’s what you used to call him?”

“Well, I don’t know that I ever called him that. I called him Jack. Or man, we all called each other man all the time. Hey, man. Where’s it at, man? But if somebody wanted to know which Jack I was talking about—”

“High-Low Jack.”

“Right. And I remembered the deal. Not the numbers, whether it was two grand or five or whatever it was, but I was making this quantity buy and I was no rube, I checked it out first, laid out a line and had a taste, and it was very good and righteous coke.”

“And you got it home and it wasn’t.”

“It magically turned into baby laxative,” he said, “somewhere between Googie’s men’s room and my apartment. Not the first time I got burned, and not the last, either. I was mad as hell, believe it, but at the same time I had to admire how slick he’d been. And now here he is, parked in my lobby, perched on the edge of this sectional sofa, asking if I remember the amount because he wants to make arrangements to pay me back. Just so much a month, but for as long as it takes to make it right.”

I hadn’t seen him signal the waiter, who appeared magically with another Dos Equis. I had barely touched my soda.

He said, “Cheers,” and took a sip. “You can probably guess what I told him. I said he didn’t owe me a thing. Whatever he beat me out of would have gone straight up my nose. And the money wasn’t mine in the first place. It was my firm’s, and it was a drop in the bucket I siphoned out of that place. I had to make restitution, and I did, but you never pay back everything you took, because they didn’t know just how bad I hurt them and neither did I. Whatever my debt was, they’d marked it paid in full, and that’s how I felt about whatever Jack thought he owed me.”

“And that’s what you told him.”

“Yes, and I had to spell it out, because he didn’t want to get off the hook that easily. What I didn’t say, but I have to admit it was going through my mind, was what did I want with a guy in a thrift-shop overcoat showing up once a week to slip me a ten-dollar bill? Makes you feel better, I said, find a charity you like and give them a few bucks. But as far as you and I are concerned, I said, we’re square.”

“And he accepted that.”

“Finally. He said he guessed he could cross me off his list. I guess I wasn’t the only person he burned.”

“One way or another,” I said, “there were quite a few people he felt he needed to make amends to.”

“And everybody in your crowd goes through something like that?” He didn’t wait for an answer, brandished his stein of beer. “Might find out for myself,” he said. “One of these days.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Except I pretty much stick to beer these days. Cocaine was my problem, you know. I got one noseful of blow, and nothing was ever gonna be the same. But I stopped, and I never had a taste since. And I got to tell you it’s all over the place. There’s a guy at the bar, I’m not gonna point him out, but all I’d have to do is tip him a wink and go to the can, and he’d follow me there and sell me whatever I want. And he’s here all the time, and wherever you go there’s somebody just like him.

“So these days just about the only thing I allow myself from south of the border is this here, and maybe a small glass of brandy after a big meal. Can’t turn into an alcoholic that way, can you?”

“It’s not what you drink,” I said, as I’d heard others say. “It’s what it does to you.”

“That the party line on the subject? Well, who knows where I’ll end up. But that doesn’t mean I’m asking you to save me a seat.”

Lord, make me sober. But not yet.

XVII

FRANCIS PAUL DUKACS was easy to find, once I had that name to work with. By then I’d called every Dukes in the Manhattan book, and every Duke, too; there weren’t all that many of either, and it seemed reasonable that one of them might be related to Frankie Dukes, or at least know of him. But plural or singular, nobody could help me out.

Then I got home from St. Paul’s one night and there was a message to call Mr. Bell. I dialed the number on the slip and they answered at the Top Knot and called Danny Boy to the phone. “You could stop by,” he said, “and I was going to suggest that, but it’s easier to pass this on over the phone. Unless you feel the need to compare the Top Knot’s Coca-Cola with Poogan’s, in which case I’d welcome your company.”

I told him I was just about ready to call it a night.

“Then write this down, Matthew. Francis Paul Doo-kosh, except that’s not how it’s spelled.” He spelled it out for me. “It’s Hungarian, I think, or maybe Czech. One of those countries that get in the papers whenever the Russians send in their tanks.”

“Frankie Dukes.”

“The man himself. And that is all I know about him, though I could probably find out more. But that may be all you need to track him down.”

And indeed it was. I opened the book as soon as I got off the phone, and there he was, with a listed phone and an address all the way east on Seventy-eighth Street. That put him south and east of the furnished room where Jack had been shot to death, but not more than ten minutes away. It would have been easy enough for Jack to find him, I thought. Or for him to find Jack.

I called a couple of times the following morning and couldn’t even reach an answering machine, so I took a bus across Seventy-ninth and found his address in the middle of a row of brownstones. I pushed the buzzer for Dukacs, got no answer, and a framed note on the wall led me next door, where I was able to find the super. She lived in a basement apartment, and I don’t know what she had on the stove, but I wanted some. It smelled terrific.

I told her I was looking for one of her tenants, a Mr. Dukacs. I must have pronounced it correctly, because her face registered approval. In good but accented English she told me I would probably find him at his shop on First Avenue, Dukacs & Son. He was the son. Dukacs, God rest his soul, was his father. If the younger Dukacs wasn’t there, he was most likely taking a break next door at Theresa’s. He had all his meals there.