A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“Whatever he gets,” I said, “I’ll bet it’s not as good as what you’ve got cooking.”

“My lunch,” she said levelly. “Only enough for one.”

Theresa’s would have been a standard New York coffee shop, but the specials were kielbasa and goulash instead of spanakopita and moussaka. Two women shared a booth, having either a late breakfast or a very early lunch, and an old man with a patterned cloth cap sat at the counter stirring a cup of coffee. I suppose he could have been Frankie Dukes, but the odds were against it.

The shop next door was a Korean greengrocer, but next to it was a meat market, and the sign overhead read DUKACS & SON. You could see where a final S had been long since painted out. A man my age or a little older stood at a counter, cutting a rack of lamb into individual rib chops. He was short and stout, a fireplug of a man with a full head of glossy black hair and a luxuriant mustache. There were a couple of gray hairs in the mustache, and in his abundant eyebrows. He wielded his cleaver with an efficiency that made it clear he’d done this before.

When I went in he put down the cleaver and asked what he could get for me this morning. “Beautiful chops here,” he said, and held one up for me to admire. “On special, matter of fact.”

“I’m afraid I’m not here as a customer.”

“Oh?”

“You’re Francis Dukacs?”

“Why?”

I dug out a wallet, flipped it open at random, flipped it shut. He might not be holding the cleaver, but he was standing close enough to it so that I was just as happy to have him assume I was an officer of the law.

“I have a couple of questions,” I said, “about a man named Jack Ellery.”

“Never heard of him.”

“I believe you had a recent visit from him.”

“Did he come to buy meat? That’s the only people come here. Customers.”

“He would have come to make amends, to offer an apology—”

“That son of a bitch!”

I took a step backward. In an instant Dukacs was transformed from a stolid shopkeeper into a wild-eyed madman.

“That fucker! That cocksucker! You know about him, that son of a bitch? You know what he did?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “He walked in here, he waited until my other customers left, then he stuck a gun in my face. ‘Give me all your money or I shoot you.’ ”

“This was some time ago.”

“So? Not so goddamn long I don’t remember it. You got a gun in your face, you remember.”

“Then what happened?”

“I was shaking. My hands, shaking. I tried to open the register. I couldn’t open the fucking thing.”

“And he struck you?”

“With the gun. Back, forth. Split my head open, blood down my face like a curtain. Here, you see the scar? I woke up in the hospital. Stitches, concussion, two teeth out.” He tapped an incisor. “Bridgework,” he said. “All thanks to him. And you know what he got out of it? Nothing! He couldn’t open the cash box either. Fucking thing was jammed. Neither one of us could open it and he gave me a beating for nothing.”

“Did the police—”

He waved a hand, dismissing the question. “Nothing,” he said. “They showed me books full of pictures. I got a headache looking. What did he look like? It’s like I went blank, I couldn’t see his face in my mind. And then I’d go to sleep and I’d see it in my dreams.”

“His face?”

“Perfectly clear in the dreams. Drove me crazy, those fucking dreams. I didn’t want to go to sleep because I’d have the dream, and he’d be there and I’d be trying to open the register and it wouldn’t open and he’d beat me like a drum. Every night, that damn face of his, and I’d wake up, and the face would be gone. I had to go to sleep to see it, and I didn’t want to see it.”

Sleeping pills made it worse, and for a while he couldn’t sleep without them. Then he got off the pills, and eventually the nightmares became a rare event, only returning at times of great stress. A friend’s death, a relative’s illness, and he’d dream of the robbery. And then one day the man who’d starred in the nightmares had the colossal nerve to walk into Dukacs & Son.

“And I’m standing here, and I don’t recognize him. And he starts talking and there’s something about the voice, it’s a voice I recognize but I can’t place it. And he says he owes me something, and he uses a word you used before, that he has to make.”

“Amends.”

“Yeah, that’s the word. And I don’t know what he’s talking about, and then there’s all this shit about how he used to be a drunk, he used to be a drug addict, he used to rob people, and all of a sudden the years fall away and it’s him, that son of a bitch, that bastard. In my store, can you believe it? Standing in front of me, saying he wants to apologize!”

“What did you do?”

“What did I do? What do you think I did? Get the fuck out of here, I tell him. Go fuck yourself, drop dead, take your apology and shove it up your ass!”

“And he left?”

“Not right away. ‘Oh, tell me what I can do to make it right. Can I pay money? Can I do anything?’ Fucking cocksucker. What’s he gonna do, grow me two new teeth? All I wanted was for him to get the hell out of my store. So I picked this up.”

The cleaver. “And he left?”

“This he understood. ‘Easy, easy,’ and he backs away, and he’s out the door, and I can put this down again. And then, when he’s gone, the shakes come.”

“And the nightmares?”

He shook his head. “No, thank God. Not so far.” He looked at me. “Why?”

“Why did he come? Well, as I understand it—”

“No, what do I care why he came? He’s a crazy bastard, he’s a son of a bitch. He beats up a man whose fingers can’t open a cash box? A fucker like that, who cares why he does what he does?”

“Then—”

“You,” he said. “Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

“Ellery was killed,” I said. “I’m investigating his death.”

“Somebody killed him? You’re standing there and telling me the son of a bitch is dead?”

“I’m afraid so, and—”

“Afraid? What’s to be afraid? You couldn’t bring me better news. You know what I say? I say thank God the bastard is dead!” He leaned forward, both hands on the counter. “ ‘Mr. Dukes’—’cause of course he gets the name wrong—‘Mr. Dukes, just tell me what I can do to make it right.’ What can he do? I tell him what he can do is drop dead, that’s what he can do. Just drop fucking dead. And he did!”

“Actually,” I said, “he had help.”

“Huh?”

“Somebody killed him.”

“Yeah? You find him, I’ll buy him a drink. How? Beat him to death, I hope?”

“He was shot.”

“Shot dead.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said flatly. “Good, I’m glad. A man’s dead and I’m glad. Wait a minute. You don’t think I did it, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Somehow I don’t.”

XVIII

IF HE’D KILLED JACK,” I told Greg Stillman, “he’d have called the cops himself and claimed full credit for it. He was so happy to hear Jack was dead I thought I was going to get some free pork chops for being the bearer of good news.”

“ ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’ He must have felt like the Munchkins after Dorothy’s house made that famous crash landing. And you did say he was short, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think you’d mistake him for a Munchkin.” I’d called Greg after I left Dukacs, met him at a coffee shop a few blocks away. “And he’s not the type to burst into song. But I think he felt liberated in about the same way.”

“No more bad dreams.”

“I guess not.” I drank some coffee. “If that’s what you get when you make amends, I may take my time getting to that step.”

“That was Jack’s reaction,” he said. “I had to tell him he was mistaken.”

“Oh?”

“He wasn’t specific. He called me right after he got his apology thrown back in his face. He didn’t tell me who the man was or any of the circumstances, just that he’d been rejected and cursed out and ordered off the premises. He regarded the whole incident as a complete and total failure, and wondered if he could cross the fellow off his list or had to find a way to take it a step further.”

“And?”

“And I told him he’d done it perfectly. That the object of the action wasn’t to be forgiven. That’s just a fringe benefit. He got the point, but he remained troubled. Said he hadn’t realized just how much damage he’d done. Or that you couldn’t entirely undo it.”

I was still thinking that one over when he said, “Unless I’ve miscounted, we’ve only got one name left. And it’s cloaked in John Doe–style anonymity.”

“Robert Williams,” I said.

“Whose name is Legion, or might as well be. Robert Williams, with a cheating wife. What are the odds?”

“That I’ll be able to find him? Or that he’ll turn out to be the killer?”

“Either.”

“Slim and slimmer,” I said.

“That’s as I thought. Matt, are we done?”

I looked at my cup. There was still coffee in it.

“No,” he said, “I mean overall. I think you’ve done what I hired you to do. There were five names on the list, four after you ruled out the one in prison—”

“Piper MacLeish.”

“—and you’ve cleared Sattenstein and Crosby Hart and now Mr. Dukacs, and the object was to see if there was a name on the list that we ought to give to the police. The only name left is Robert Williams, and to give that to the police—”

I nodded, and imagined the conversation with Dennis Redmond. Years ago he had an affair with this guy’s wife, and he may have tried to find him and tell him he was sorry. Yeah, right.

“I don’t know how many hours you’ve put in,” he said, “but it seems to me you’ve more than earned the thousand dollars I gave you. Did you have to pay for information?”

“A few dollars here and there.”

“So you didn’t even clear the thousand. Do I owe you money, Matt?”

I shook my head. “You can pay for the coffee.”

“And that’s all? Are you sure?”

“I made out all right,” I said. “And there’s still a chance I’ll be able to clear Williams. I put the word out and I might hear something. You never know.”

And I guess you never do, because the following night I got home a little before midnight. Jacob was behind the desk, in what I’d come to recognize as a terpin hydrate fog, and he told me I’d had a batch of calls and no messages. “All the same gemmun,” he said, “each time sayin’ he’d try you later, and not once leavin’ a name or a number.”

I went to my room, showered, and was glad my caller hadn’t left a number, because I was exhausted. I’d gone to a meeting, then over to the Flame for coffee, and the conversation had gone on longer than usual. I decided to tell Jacob to hold my calls, and the phone rang even as I was reaching for it. I picked it up, and a voice like thirty miles of bad road said, “Don’t tell me I’m finally talking to Matthew Scudder.”

“Who’s this?”

“You don’t know me, Scudder. Name’s Steffens, like the muckraker. I’ve been trying you all night.”

“I’d have called you back,” I said, “if you’d left a message.”

“Yeah, well, I was on the move. It’s no way to gather moss, so I leave that to the north side of trees. I’m parked now, in a place I understand you know right well.”

“Oh?”

“Right around the corner from you,” he said, “and I thought I’d find you here, which is why I’m here myself. But the fellow behind the stick says you don’t come in so much these days.”

I knew where he was. But I let him tell me.

“Jimmy Armstrong’s Saloon,” he said, “except the guy doesn’t know how to spell saloon. It’s got a star where it oughta have an A.”

S*loon. There was a law still on the books, a piece of inane legislation dating back before Prohibition, that made it illegal to call an establishment a saloon. The law had been designed to placate the Anti-Saloon League, the idea being that, if you couldn’t keep a man from running a saloon, at least you could force him to call it something else. That was why Patrick O’Neal’s joint across from Lincoln Center was called O’Neal’s Baloon; he’d already ordered the signage when someone told him about the law, so he decided to change one letter and be done with it. There was, he’d been known to say, nothing illegal about misspelling balloon.

Jimmy had managed the Baloon before opening his own place five blocks down the avenue, and his way around the law was a star where the A would have been. I could have reported all of this to the mysterious Mr. Steffens, but I had a feeling he already knew it.

“He may be a lousy speller,” he said, “but the son of a bitch pours a decent drink, I’ll say that for him. I just wish he had a jukebox. Any luck at all, Kenny Rogers’d be there to remind me of her name.”

A drunk, calling me late at night. The impulse to hang up was strong. “I’ll help anyone who’s trying to stay sober,” Jim Faber had told me. “Any hour, day or night. But that’s if they call me before they pick up the drink. After that you’re just talking to a glass of booze, and I’ve got no time for that.”

“Lucille,” he said. “How do you like that? Picked it out of the air, with no help from Mr. Kenny Rogers.”

“I’m afraid you lost me.”

“Mrs. Bobby Williams. Isn’t that who you were looking to find? Right around the corner, Scudder, waiting for you to come buy me a drink.”

XIX

WHEN A THWARTED holdup in Washington Heights eased me out of the police department and away from Anita and the boys, I took a room at the Northwestern and decided its Spartan confines suited me well enough, and that’s where I stayed while my drinking got worse and my life went on falling apart.

But it wasn’t much more than a place to sleep when I could and stare out the window when I couldn’t. For a combination living room and office, I ducked around the corner to Jimmy Armstrong’s joint.

I passed a lot of hours there. It was where I saw friends, where I met clients, where I took many of my meals. I had a tab there, and I drank a lot of bourbon there, some of it neat or on the rocks, some of it stirred into strong black coffee.

I was a regular at Armstrong’s, and I knew the other men and women who put in long hours there. Doctors and nurses from Roosevelt Hospital, academic types from Fordham, musicians whose lives centered on Juilliard and Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, and a whole mixed bag of people who just happened to live in the neighborhood. They were all drinkers, and whether some of them were drunks was not for me to say. They’d talk to me when I wanted conversation and leave me alone when I didn’t, and the bartenders and waitresses would keep the drinks coming.

Once in a while I might go home with a nurse or waitress, but none of those last-call cures for loneliness ever turned into a romance. One time one of the waitresses, one I hadn’t ever gone home with, took a dive out a high window, and her sister showed up and couldn’t accept the official verdict of suicide. She’d hired me to look into it, because looking into things for people was what I did after I gave up the gold shield. And it turned out she was right, and her sister had had help getting out that window.

Armstrong’s. When I first got sober I couldn’t see why I couldn’t go there anymore. Whether or not you were drinking, it was a good place to sit, a good place to eat, a good place to meet prospective clients. I heard it said at meetings that one way to avoid a slip was to stay out of slippery places, but on the other hand I kept running into bartenders who’d held on to their jobs after they sobered up. It is, after all, the drink that gets you drunk, not the place where they sell the awful stuff.

I don’t remember anybody at St. Paul’s coming out and telling me to stay away from the joint. I figured it out on my own. The more days I put together away from a drink, the more value I attached to this new condition called sobriety. All those days would vanish the minute I picked up a drink, and each day there was one more of them at risk.

So I found myself less and less comfortable at my old table at Jimmy’s, even if all I was doing was having a hamburger and a Coke and reading the paper. And then one day I picked up my coffee and smelled bourbon. I took it back to the bar and reminded Lucian that I wasn’t drinking these days.

He swore he hadn’t added whiskey, even as he took the cup to the sink and poured it out. “Unless I did it without thinking,” he said. “And if that’s what happened, I wouldn’t remember, would I? So let’s start over.” I watched him select a clean cup and fill it from the coffee pot, took it to my table, and smelled bourbon once again.

I knew the coffee was all right, I’d watched him pour it, but I also knew I couldn’t drink it, and in the hours that followed I realized I needed to stay away from Armstrong’s. It was a week or two later when I told Jim Faber about it, and he nodded and said he’d figured I’d come to that conclusion sooner or later. “I was just hoping it’d happen before you picked up a drink,” he said.

I’d gone back one last time to make sure I didn’t have an outstanding tab, and to leave word that anyone looking for me could try my hotel. But it had been months since I’d crossed the threshold.

At least I could walk by the entrance without a problem. At meetings I heard a woman talk about her attachment to a particular ginmill near her office. She had to pass it twice a day. She’d tried walking on the other side of the street, but that wasn’t enough to keep her from feeling its magnetic pull. “So I get out of the subway and walk a block out of my way, and another block back, and I do the same thing at night. That’s four blocks a day, which is what, a fifth of a mile? All to keep from getting sucked into the door at K-Dee’s, which I don’t honestly think is very likely to happen, but I don’t care. And it burns a few extra calories, and that’s all to the good, isn’t it?”

I didn’t burn many calories. I took the elevator to the lobby, walked out onto Fifty-seventh Street, turned right, and walked a few doors to Ninth Avenue. I turned right again, and Armstrong’s was halfway up the block.

And did I feel a magnetic pull? I don’t know. Maybe. I suppose I was attracted and repelled at the same time, and in about equal measure.

I opened the door, walked in, and one breath told me I was in a place where people drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Two thoughts hit me at the same time—that it smelled awful, and that it smelled like home.

There were ten or a dozen people at the bar, and I recognized most of them. Around a third of the tables were occupied. No large parties, just groups of two or three. The conversation throughout was sufficiently muted so that you could hear the music. Jimmy got rid of the jukebox shortly after he opened the joint, and kept the radio on an FM station that played nothing but classical music.

The walls at Armstrong’s are a collection of incongruities, and the pick of the litter is the mounted elk’s head hanging on the rear wall. Directly beneath it, looking across the room at me through a pair of Buddy Holly–style horn-rimmed glasses, was a stocky guy around my age wearing a suit and a tie and a half smile on his thin lips. He was smoking a cigarette. From the looks of the ashtray, it wasn’t his first.

“ ‘Lucille,’ ” he said. “You know the song, don’t you? Hell, everybody knows it. She picked a fine time to leave him, with their four snot-nose brats and a crop in the field. So the singer decides not to nail her after all, because he feels sorry for the whiny-ass husband. Never happen in real life, not if she was as fine-looking as the song makes out. Sit down, for God’s sake. What do you want to drink?”

The waitress was new to me, a dishwater blonde, tall and slender. She had an air about her that suggested she was easily confused, but she got the drink order right, bringing me a glass of Coca-Cola and Steffens another Scotch. He said, “Vann Steffens. You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Have we met?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I don’t know. But I recognized you the minute you walked in. Of course I was expecting you. Couple of times, you and I were in the same place at the same time. Not this place, but one that’s not too far from here. Or was, until it closed. Morrissey’s, the after-hours. You remember the place?”

“Of course.”

“They performed a humanitarian service, the Brothers Morrissey. Made sure a man didn’t die of thirst just because it was past four in the morning. I was there now and then over the years, and I saw you there at least twice and maybe more’n that. You were with a guy named Devoe, had a piece of a joint on the next block.”

“Skip Devoe. His bar was Miss Kitty’s.”

“Another joint that’s closed. And it seems to me I heard he died. Our age, wasn’t he? How’d he die?”

“Acute pancreatitis,” I said, and that was indeed what it said on Skip’s death certificate. I always figured it was a mix of drink and sadness that took him out.

Steffens shook his head. “Hell of a world,” he said. “You and me, did we ever get introduced at Morrissey’s? I can’t say one way or the other. I was never there before three, four in the morning, and by then I was half in the bag, so there are things happened that I don’t remember, and things I remember that never happened. Anyway, when I heard your name the other day, I knew who they were talking about.”

“How did that happen?”

“A fellow was talking,” he said, “about how you were looking for a fellow named Robert Williams with a wife who maybe had an affair with Jack Ellery, who I understand got himself killed recently.” He lit a cigarette, crumpled the now-empty pack. “You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No.”

“And you’re in here drinking Coca-Cola. I heard you were off the booze these days. Make you uncomfortable, sitting in a joint like this?”

“No,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t see that I owed him the truth. “You said your name’s the same as the muckraker.”

“Joseph Lincoln Steffens, dropped the Joseph in his writings. Wrote The Shame of the Cities, about municipal corruption. Put an end to it, too, as you may have noticed.” He grinned, dragged on his cigarette. “But what he’s most famous for is what he wrote when he came home from a trip to the Soviet Union. ‘I have seen the future and it works.’ Except everyone got the line slightly wrong, because he wrote that he’d been to the future, not that he’d seen it. And he changed his mind about it anyway, decided it wasn’t the future and it didn’t work. Proving you’d better be careful what you say, because people are going to change the words around on you, and go on quoting them long after you stop believing them yourself.”

“Interesting.”

“You’re being polite, Matt. I know enough about him to be a bore on the subject, but that comes of sharing a name. And no, we’re not related. The family name got changed a generation or two back. It used to be Steffansson, like the polar explorer, and no, he’s not a relative either.”

“And your first name is Vann?”

“Evander,” he said. “But I’ve forgiven my mother for that one, God rest her soul. I chopped it down to Van, and then I tagged an extra N onto it because people thought that was my last name, Van Steffens, like Van Dyke and Van Rensselaer.”

“And they’re not your relatives, either.”

“You begin to see the pattern, huh?” He patted his breast pocket, remembered he’d just finished the pack. “I need a cigarette,” he announced. “Where’s the machine?”

I shook my head. “No machine. There’s a little food market next door, the Pioneer. They sell cigarettes.”

“And this place doesn’t? Why the hell not?”

“Jimmy’s against smoking.”

“There’s an ashtray on every table. Half the people in here are smoking.”

“He’s not going to prohibit it. He just doesn’t want to encourage it.”

“Jesus. Next door?”

“Out the door and turn left.”

“Jesus. It’s a good thing he’s not against drinking. Place would have a tough time making ends meet.”

XX

WHILE HE WAS GONE, the waitress came over and emptied the ashtray. I thought about the Morrissey Brothers and the after-hours they used to own and operate, one flight up from an Irish off-Broadway theater. I thought about Skip Devoe, and I thought about Jack Ellery, and I thought about the Scotch and melting ice cubes in Vann Steffens’s glass.

There was a pay phone on the wall at the far end of the bar, and just as I looked at it a fellow with a goatee and a crew cut hung up, checked to see if his quarter had come back, and headed for the men’s room.

I called my sponsor. “I’m in a bar,” I said, “meeting an informant, or at least I think that’s what he’s going to turn out to be. I didn’t want to be here but I felt I had to.”

“And you’re all right?”

“I’ve been drinking a Coke. He left the table, and his Scotch is sitting there, and I figured I’d spend a quarter and wake you up.”

“I was awake. The Scotch look good to you?”

“It started fucking with my head,” I said. “I’m at Armstrong’s.”

“Ah.”

“And old times managed to get into the conversation. I never met the guy, but I guess we must have traveled in similar circles.”

Through the window, I saw Steffens emerge from the market. He stopped on the sidewalk to open his pack of Luckies. “There’s my guy,” I told Jim. “I’ll get off now. I’m okay, I just thought I ought to call.”

“And you’ve got plenty of quarters.”

“Always,” I said.

“Best seat in the house,” Steffens said. “You know why?”

“I bet you’ll tell me.”

“Anywhere else and you’re staring at the fucking moose. Sit right under it and you don’t have to look at it.”

“I believe it’s an elk.”

“I stand corrected. And, while we’re correcting each other, it’s not the Pioneer. It’s the Pio- meer. The idiots spelled it wrong.”

“It used to be part of a chain. Then the affiliation ended, and they had to change the name.”

“So they changed one letter.”

“Cheaper that way, I guess. Everybody still calls it the Pioneer.”

“Pioneer with an M, Saloon with no A, and a smoke-filled room where they won’t sell you cigarettes. You okay with the cola?”

“I’m fine. You were starting to tell me about Mr. Williams and his wife.”

“I was, and it won’t take long, either. I already told you her name was Lucille. Fine-looking woman, and what you could call free with her favors. I got lucky myself one night, and it never happened again but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember her fondly. I’ll say this much, I’ve never been worried that her old man’s gonna kill me for it.”

“That would be Robert Williams, but I think you called him Bobby.”

“I did, but there’s as many Bobby Williamses and Bob Williamses as there are Roberts, and what I and pretty much everybody else called him was Scooter.”

“Scooter Williams.”

“On account of he had one of those whatchacallits, like a motorcycle but dinky.”

“A motor scooter.”

“Well, duh, obviously, but I was going for the brand. A Vespa? I think that’s it. So they could have called him Vespa Williams, but nobody did. Scooter. I don’t think he kept the thing that long anyway. Rode around on it long enough to get a nickname, then sold it or it got stolen.”

Scooter was an NYU dropout from somewhere in the Midwest. Got himself a cheap apartment on a bad block on the Lower East Side, met Lucille and married her, and got through the days by smoking a lot of grass and selling enough to pay for what he smoked. He worked now and then for a couple of moving companies, drove a gypsy cab now and then, and did gofer work for the neighborhood Democratic club.

“Sounds like your guy,” Steffens said. “The wife, plus he knew Whatshisname.”

“Jack Ellery.”

“Uh-huh. Ellery worked for some of the movers now and then. Funny thing—he’d move somebody, and a week or two down the line they’d have a break-in, lose their good stuff.”

“And you knew Ellery?”

“I knew who he was, knew him to say hello to. That was about it.”

“And you’re a newspaperman?”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

“I don’t know. I must have figured you were following in the footsteps of your famous nonancestor.”

“Raking muck,” he said. “Hell, I’m on the other side of that one. I don’t rake the muck, I make it. The Shame of the Cities. That’s me, Matt. I’m in local politics across the river. Wipe out municipal corruption, and I’d have to get an honest job.”

He took out a slim black calfskin card case, handed me a card. Vann Steffens, I read. Your Friend in Jersey City. No address, but a phone number with a 201 prefix.

“Everybody needs a friend,” he said. “Especially in Jersey City. You have a card?”

My sponsor’s a job printer, and I’ll never lack for business cards. I dug one out for him.

“And here I thought mine was minimalist,” he said. “Nothing but your name and your number, and I already had ’em both.” He tucked the card away. “But I’ll keep it. A man gives you his card, you keep it. Be bad manners not to. But wait a minute, give me my card back, will you?”

I did, and he uncapped a pen and printed SCOOTER WILLIAMS on the back of the card in tiny block capitals, then consulted a little memo book and added an address and phone number. The book was bound in black calf, and matched the card case.

“There you go,” he said. “You see him, won’t take you ten minutes to rule him out.”

I thanked him, glanced at what he’d written. The address was on Ludlow Street, so Scooter still had his cheap apartment in a bad neighborhood. I looked across at Steffens, and wondered what he expected in return.

He answered the question before I could ask it. “You can pay for my drinks,” he said, “and that’ll do me fine. I’m a machine pol in fucking Jersey City, for Chrissake. Doing favors for people is part of my job description, right up there with pigging out at the public trough. Someday you’ll do me a favor back.”

“I don’t know what it might be, Vann. They won’t let me vote in Jersey City.”

He laughed. “Oh, don’t you be so sure of that, my friend. You come see me on Election Day, and I’ll guarantee you get to vote at least once in every precinct. I’ll tell you what. I’ll have one more drink on your tab, and you can tell me why you give a damn who put the two bullets in Jack Ellery.”

I told him more than I’d planned. He was a good listener, nodding in the right places, stirring the pot with a question or an observation now and then. He’d seemed like a blowhard at first, but I warmed to him over the course of the hour or so we spent together. Maybe his manner softened when he felt less need to impress me. Maybe I became more at ease in Armstrong’s—which might or might not be a good thing.

I took care of the check, and on the way out I remembered something. “You know everything,” I said. “Maybe you’ll know this.”

“If it’s a state capital, forget it. I’m lousy on state capitals.”

“High-Low Jack,” I said. “You happen to know why they called him that?”

“I didn’t even know that they called him that. High-Low Jack? It’s a new one on me.”

“Not important,” I said. “I just thought you might know.”

“Damn, I hate to disappoint a new friend.” He snapped his fingers. “You know, I just might know after all. I bet it’s because Scooter was already taken.”

XXI

HEY, MAN!” Big smile, showing teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a while. “You’re the guy who called, right? You told me your name but that doesn’t mean I can remember it.”

“Matthew Scudder.”

“Right, right. Well, come on in, Matthew. Sorry about the place. The cleaning girl’s coming first thing tomorrow morning.”

Magazines were heaped on a floral-patterned armchair. He scooped them up, motioned for me to take their place. He stacked the magazines on a low table made from a door and pulled up a folding chair for himself.

“I was joking about the cleaning girl,” he said. “Around here, I’m the closest I’ve got to household help. The good news is I don’t cost much.”

The apartment wasn’t really that messy, and for a pot-smoker’s Lower East Side premises it probably ranked within a few points of the top. As far as I could tell, it was clean enough underneath the clutter.

I’d called him the morning after my late night with Vann Steffens. Before I dialed the number I checked the white pages, and there he was, Williams, Robt P., with the same phone number and same Ludlow Street address Vann had given me. He could have saved himself all that meticulous printing and told me to look in the book, but he’d said favors were his stock-in-trade, and that one was easily performed.

The phone rang a few times, and when Williams picked up he was out of breath, as if he’d hurried to pick up before the machine could take the call. I gave my name and said I’d like to talk to him about Jack Ellery, and he repeated Jack’s name a couple of times, and then he said, “Oh, fuck, I heard about that. What a terrible thing, huh? First I heard he killed himself, and that didn’t make sense. I mean people do it all the time and it never makes sense, but he wasn’t the type. Did you know him, man?”

“A long time ago.”

“Yeah, me too. But what I heard next was someone killed him, and that didn’t make sense either, because why in the hell would anybody want to kill Jack? Wha’d they do, shoot him?”

I said someone did just that, and he said that was what somebody had said, and it was amazing, just amazing. I asked if I could come over and talk to him, and he said sure, why not, he’d be hanging around the place all day. When did I want to come? Sometime in the afternoon?

I had breakfast first, and caught a noon meeting at Fireside, and took the F Train to its last stop in Manhattan. I’d checked a map first, and was thus able to walk directly to Ludlow Street, and by 2:30 I was sitting in that armchair. The arms showed wear and the springs were shot, but it was holding me as comfortably as it had held the magazines.

The cooking smells in the building’s halls and stairwell had been a mix of Latin and Asian, but the smell in Scooter Williams’s apartment was predominantly herbal. A lot of marijuana had been smoked in those three little rooms, and its aroma had seeped into the walls and floorboards, even as it had taken Scooter’s life and put it permanently on Hold.

He had to be somewhere in his middle forties, but managed to look both older and younger than his years. His full head of dark brown hair was shaggy, and looked as though he might have cut it himself. He had a droopy mustache, irregularly trimmed, and hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

He wore a maroon solid-color sport shirt with long sleeves and long collar points, and over that he wore one of those khaki vests with twenty pockets. Photographers’ vests, I think they call them, although how anybody could remember which pocket he’d put his film in was beyond me. His blue jeans had bell-bottoms, which you didn’t see much anymore, and they were frayed at the cuffs and worn through at the knees.

He talked for a while about something he’d seen on television, some science-fiction program that impressed him from a philosophical standpoint. I didn’t pay much attention, just let him ramble, then tuned in again when he said Jack’s name.

“Out of the blue,” he said. “Hadn’t heard from him in years, hadn’t thought of him in years, and the phone rings and it’s Jack. Can he come over? Well, sure. I’m in the same place. I been here since, wow, since I ditched college. Moved in and never moved out, and can you believe it’s more’n twenty years?”

“And he came over?”

“Couple hours after he phones, the bell rings and it’s him. You know what I figured, don’t you? Can you guess? I figured he was looking to cop.”

“To buy, uh—”

“Herb,” he said. “Kills me when I hear people call it a gateway drug. Man, I never got out of the gate. Started NYU in September, and before the month was done my roomie turned me on with what was probably a pretty lame joint, but I took a deep drag and you know what happened?”

“What?”

“Nothing whatsoever. I smoked the whole thing and nothing, zip, zero. But I felt the tiniest little bit hungry, you know, so I got this jar of peanut butter from my desk and started eating it off a spoon. And it was the most amazing taste, like I’m suddenly noticing all the subtleties of the peanut butter, the total mystical dimension of the taste of it, and it dawns on me that I’m stoned out of my fucking mind.”

He finished the jar of peanut butter, and long before it was gone he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to spend it feeling just like that.

“For a while,” he said, “you chase higher highs, but eventually you tip to the sheer futility of it. And you don’t have to get higher and higher. Just high is high enough, you know?”

He never had any interest in other drugs—uppers, downers, psychedelics. He tried mushrooms once and mescaline once and acid twice, just to know what they were about, but as far as he was concerned there was nothing like good dope. He smoked every day, and he sold enough so it didn’t cost him, and maybe he even came out a few dollars ahead.

“Never been busted,” he said, “which is probably a record, or close to it. But I only sell to people I know, and the cops around here know me and know what I do, and they know I’m not hurting anybody, or doing any kind of volume, so I don’t get hassled. I always get by, and I always stay high, and there’s a song lyric hiding in there somewhere, can you dig it?”

“But Jack wasn’t looking to cop,” I said.

“Oh, wow. Got a ways off track, didn’t we? No, he wasn’t. I offered, you know, like did he want a taste? And before I could finish the sentence he’s telling me how he’s an alcoholic, except he doesn’t drink, and that means he can’t do anything. Dope, pills, anything at all; if it does anything good for your head, he can’t have any part of it. I couldn’t figure out why at first, but he put it so I could understand it.”

“ ‘You can’t be high and sober at the same time,’ ” I said.

“That’s it! His words exactly, and when he put it that way I could dig it. So I didn’t offer him anything except an orange soda, which I’ve been meaning to offer you, because I figure you and him were in the same club. I’m gonna have one, and can I bring you one?”

We drank our orange sodas out of the can. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had one, and decided I was willing to go that long before I had another.

“You’re an orange soda guy, you know what he came for.”

“I think so.”

“Amends, he called it. He was going through his life, trying to make up for everything bad he ever did. You do that yourself?”

“Not yet.”

“Man, I was never a drinker, you know? Day I graduated Pembroke High I hit all the parties and came home shit-faced drunk. Fell into bed with my clothes on, and the room started spinning. Leaned over, puked on the carpet, and passed out. Woke up and said I’m never doing that again, and I never did.”

Until he got to the last four words, his story was one I’d heard more times than I could count.

“Amends,” he said, in something approaching wonder. “What did he ever do to me that he’s got to make amends? Me and Jack, we knew each other for a few years there. Worked a few moving jobs together, smoked a little dope together, hung out some. Only thing came to mind, he tried to get me to tip him to some people who’d be good pickings. You know, people I moved, and they had good stuff, and I’d get a cut of what he got from ripping them off.”

“But you weren’t interested.”

“No way, man!” He shook his head. “Man, run a little scam on the Welfare Department, get a check I got no right to? Go up to Klein’s, boost some socks and a shirt? Okay, why not? I’m no saint, I’m cool with shit like that. But stealing from human beings? People I met, people who paid me to take good care of their stuff, people who gave me tips? Not my scene.” He took a long drink of soda. “But where’s the amends come in? I, like, turned him down flat on that one. Never even tempted. Didn’t judge the man, just said no, not my scene. Matter of fact—”

“What?”

“Well, just thinking about it now, maybe I was the one owed him an amends. ’Cause what I did, a couple of the moving companies I worked for, I sort of told them not to hire him no more. Didn’t say why. Just, like, he’s not the most reliable cat to work with, he don’t pull his weight, he slacks off. Nothing to get him banned or give him a bad name, just enough so he’s the last one hired. Here I’m his friend and I’m keeping him from getting work, so maybe…”

His voice trailed off, and I could see him running the question in his mind. He looked to be capable of devoting the next hour to its philosophical implications.

I said, “But that wasn’t what was on his mind.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, nothing like that. It was loose.”

“How’s that?”

“Loosey-goosey. Luce. Lucille, man. My old lady.” He looked off to the side, smiled at a memory. “Years back, this was. Not my old lady anymore. Been a few of them since her. My experience, they tend to come and go. You know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“They’re always around the same age. The ones that move all the way in, I mean. A chick who’s in my life for, like, fifteen minutes, she could be any age. But the ones who move in and park their shoes under the bed, they’re always twenty-four, twenty-five years old. When I was nineteen I had an old lady six years older’n me, and now I’m what, forty-seven? And the last old lady I had, like she moved out a year ago, and she was twenty years younger’n me. Man, Picture of Dorian Gray? Can you dig it?” He frowned. “Except not exactly Dorian Gray, but you see what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

“Lucille,” I said.

“Oh, right. Man, she was choice. Out of her fucking mind, but sweet. Had some fucked-up childhood.” He moved a hand to wave the past away. “Jack comes here, tells me how he was balling her. Him and Lucille, going at it like, I don’t know, mink? Man, he thinks he has to make amends to me for that?”

“You already knew about it?”

“I took it for fucking granted, man! Lucille, she was balling everybody. It didn’t take us more than a couple of months to get way past the whole fidelity number. We went to a few parties where everybody just did anybody who was handy. Man, after you watch your woman getting fucked by a stranger, you either let go of jealousy or you put her clothes in a box and set it out by the curb. I told him, I said, Jack, if this is keeping you up nights, man, let go of it. ‘But you were my friend and I betrayed you.’ By fucking Lucille? You want to make amends for that, go get in line, and it’s a long line.”

“Wasn’t there something about a child?”

“Oh, right. He thought he knocked her up. Well, somebody did. She was pregnant a couple of times while we were together. First time she had an abortion and the second time she waited too long and decided she’d have the baby. Then she winds up having a miscarriage, which was like good news and bad news, you know?” He looked off to the side again. “Makes you wonder.”

“Oh?”

“Say she had the kid. I mean, is that gonna keep us together? She could have had triplets and we’re still gonna split the blanket when the time comes. You can start thinking, Oh, we have a kid, I go to work for IBM, we get ourselves a split-level in Tarrytown, but none of that’s gonna happen. If she had a kid all it woulda meant is she’d have had one more thing to carry when she took off. Or she’d have left me with the kid, and what am I gonna do? Wrap it up and leave it outside a convent?”

I had this sudden unbidden image: my sons, Mike and Andy, standing at a locked iron gate, waiting to be taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor. I took a deep breath and blinked it away.

“I wonder where she is now,” he was saying. “Last I heard she was in San Francisco. She could have a kid or two by now. Not mine, though. Not Jack’s either.” He had that faraway look again. “I might have a kid out there somewhere. That I had with somebody else, that I never knew about.”

XXII

THEN IT LOOKS as though we’re done,” Greg Stillman said. “They’re all in the clear.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Not exactly. I had a problem and now it’s been resolved, and I’m grateful to you for resolving it. But—”

“But it feels incomplete. Unfinished.”

“Yes, of course. How do you feel, Matt? You’re the one who’s been out there doing the work. All I did was pick up the tab.”

And all I’d done was go through the motions. I was in my hotel room with a cup of coffee from the deli downstairs, looking across the rooftops at some lighted offices all the way downtown. I’d decided I could make my final report over the phone. There was no real need to sit in another coffee shop while I told my client we were out of suspects.

“I feel all right,” I said. “I’d like it better if I’d managed to crack the case, but that’s not what you hired me for. That’s a police matter anyway.”

“But they won’t do anything.”

“We don’t know that. It’ll be an open file, and when some new information comes their way, they’ll pick it up and work it. Greg, you wanted to be sure you weren’t holding out on them. Well, you’re not. Whoever killed your sponsee, it wasn’t one of the five people on his Eighth Step list.”

“The man in prison—”

“Piper MacLeish.”

“Obviously he couldn’t have done it. Unless they give you a weekend pass so that you can even an old score. But couldn’t he pass the word to somebody outside?”

“He’d have had to get the word himself. There’s nothing to indicate that Jack ever visited him, or even wrote to him. And it doesn’t really add up emotionally anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Say you’re in prison, serving a long sentence for something you did. ‘Hi, remember me? Say, I want to apologize because I’m the guy who ratted you out, and you wouldn’t have wound up in the joint if it wasn’t for me.’ ”

“What a marvelous Ninth Step declaration.”

“Well, he might have worded it differently, but that would be the gist of it. And what’s MacLeish’s reaction? ‘That son of a bitch, he did this to me, I’d better call in a favor and have him killed.’ No, we already crossed the Piper off the list, and I think we can leave it that way.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“I was a cop for a lot of years,” I said, “and I wasn’t the NYPD equivalent of a Step Nazi. I learned how to overlook things, and sometimes I profited financially from what I overlooked. But homicide was always different. When somebody got killed and it landed on my desk, I wanted to clear the case.

“That didn’t necessarily mean that anybody wound up going away for it. That was the goal, but it didn’t always work out that way. Sometimes I knew who did it but couldn’t make a case that would stand up. But I’d done what I could, and the case was solved, so my work was done.”

“And in this case?”

“My work’s done,” I said. “Even though the case isn’t solved. So it feels incomplete to me, and yes, maybe a little disappointing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t let go of it. And I will. I pretty much already have.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe it’s just my ego.”

“Because a perfect being like you ought to be able to do something?”

“That’s part of it, Matt. The other part is further confirmation that I’m not really the piece of shit the world revolves around. Remember what I told you? That I got him killed, that I pushed him into the Eighth and Ninth Steps and that’s why he was murdered. But I guess that wasn’t it after all. I guess I’m not the prime mover of the universe. I guess I’m just another drunk.”

At the meeting that night I mentioned that I’d spent an hour or two with a fellow who’d spent the past twenty-plus years quietly stoned on marijuana. “He knew not to offer me any,” I said, “and he didn’t smoke while I was there, but he’d smoked before I got there and I’m sure he fired up a joint the minute I left. The apartment reeked of it.”

A woman named Donna came up to me on the break. She was a semi-regular at St. Paul’s, and had spoken there for her third anniversary a few months ago. Her approach was purposeful, and I assumed she had something to say about marijuana and its effects over time. I didn’t recall a whole lot of pot in her story, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find something there to identify with.

But it wasn’t that at all. Some months ago she’d moved in with her boyfriend, another sober alcoholic. He was still an alcoholic, but he was no longer a sober one, and she wanted out.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said. She had long auburn hair, and kept pushing it out of her eyes, and it kept falling back across her face. “I’d heard his story, for God’s sake. I knew he went out every time he put a couple of years together. But he was sober when I met him, and he had more sober time than I did, and I thought he’d stay sober.”

But he hadn’t. She’d kept her rent-stabilized apartment—“What is it they say? I may be crazy but I’m not stupid”—and that’s where she was staying now, but she had a whole lot of stuff at his place in Cobble Hill, and she hated to leave it but was afraid to go there by herself.

“I don’t think he’d do anything,” she said, “because he’s a very gentle guy. At least when he’s sober. But he does have a history of spousal abuse. I’m not telling tales, it’s in his qualification, he mentions it every time he tells his story. And he always says it only happened when he was drunk. Well, he’s drunk now, isn’t he?”

“You want me to go with you.”

“Would you?” She put her hand on my wrist. “Not as a favor. I mean it would be a favor, a major one, but I’d want to pay you for it. In fact I’d insist on it.”

“You’re a friend,” I said, “and it’s the sort of thing friends do for each other. I don’t think—”

“No,” she said firmly. “My sponsor was the one who suggested this. And she was very clear that I had to pay you.”

She had the time picked—Saturday afternoon—and had arranged our transportation. Did I know Richard Lassiter? Bald Richard, gay Richard, speed freak Richard? He had a car, and everything of hers in Cobble Hill would fit easily in the trunk and backseat. He was going to pick her up at Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam at three sharp, and they could stop for me on the way to Brooklyn. I said it would be simpler if I met the two of them uptown, and that three o’clock would be fine.

“I’m paying Richard too,” she said. “He put up an argument but I insisted.”

“Sponsor’s orders.”

“Yes, but I think I’d have insisted anyway. He says he’ll come upstairs with me, in case Vinnie is there. I left a message on his machine, I’m coming Saturday afternoon, please don’t be there, di dah di dah di dah. But what do they call it when you take a sleeping pill and it keeps you awake?”

“A slip,” I said.

“Ha! Very good. No, I remember now, they call it a paradoxical effect. Very common with alcoholics. I think my phone message could have a paradoxical effect on Vinnie. ‘Stay away? The fuck I’ll stay away. Whose place is it, you toxic bitch?’ ”

“If Vinnie’s from Bensonhurst, you do a good imitation.”

“He is, as a matter of fact, and thank you. But if he’s there, well, Richard’s a sweetheart, but his is not the world’s most intimidating presence.”

“For that you want a thug like me.”

“An ex-cop,” she said, “and a man who can take care of himself on the mean streets of New York.”

“Including Brooklyn.”

“Including Brooklyn.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “A thug indeed,” she said. “Hardly that, my dear. Hardly that.”

After the meeting I joined the crowd at the Flame, and at one point the conversation centered on my share. “Do a lot of any substance,” a fellow named Brent said, “and something happens. If you drink, sooner or later you fall down a lot, you have accidents, you pick up DUIs, you crash cars, you wreck your liver—I could go on, but you get the point. If you do enough cocaine, your septum rots away and your nose caves in, and you damage your heart and God knows what else. Shoot speed, and it finds a variety of ways to kill you. Drop enough acid, and you go on a trip and can’t find your way back from it. Everything you do, it’s always got a price tag on it.”

Someone quoted the oil-filter commercial. “ ‘You can pay me now,’ ” she murmured, “ ‘or you can pay me later.’ ”

“With marijuana, what happens is subtler than that. What happens when you smoke enough marijuana is nothing happens. Your whole life just stays where it is, treading water.”

They batted that around a bit, and I said, “Yeah, that’s him, all right. The women in his life even stay the same age. His first girlfriend was twenty-five and they’ve all been twenty-five ever since. He’s living in the same apartment—”

“Well, that’s New York, Matt. Who moves out of a rent-controlled place?”

“Granted, but he’s using plastic milk crates for bookcases, and I’ll bet he’s had them performing that service for twenty years. On the other hand…”

“What?”

“Well,” I said, “I know the folly of comparing my inside to somebody else’s outside. And I know people have good days and bad days, and maybe I just caught him on a good day. And God knows this isn’t the life his parents had in mind for him when they paid his tuition at NYU. And if you check the dictionary you’ll find his picture next to arrested development.”

“But?”

“But I have to say the son of a bitch seems happy.”

I would have called Jan when I got in, but it was late and I decided to let it go until morning. I was up early, and when I came back from breakfast I called.

“I was just about to call you,” she said.

“But I beat you to it.”

“You did.”

“I want to confirm our date for Saturday,” I said. “But with the proviso that I may be late getting to the SoHo meeting. I’ve got a few hours of work, doing my impersonation of a thug.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I outlined my task in a couple of sentences. “So we’re leaving for Brooklyn at three,” I said, “and we can probably get there in half an hour, and get her things packed and loaded in the car in another hour, and a half hour to get home would put me under the shower around five o’clock. But.”

“But it could take a lot longer.”

“We might not even get going until three thirty or later. And Richard could easily get lost on the way to Cobble Hill, or hit heavy traffic. And there might not be a hassle with the drunken boyfriend, but if the possibility didn’t exist she wouldn’t need to bring me along. And the longer it all takes, the more I’ll need that shower.”

I waited for her to say something, and she didn’t. If I hadn’t heard her radio playing in the background I’d have thought we’d been disconnected.

“Well, that’s what I wanted to call you about,” she said.

“About Donna and Vinnie?”

“No, about Saturday night. I have to break our date.”

“Oh?”

“I’m getting together with my sponsor.”

“On Saturday night.”

“That’s right. Dinner and a meeting and a long talk that we really have to have.”

“Well,” I said. “I guess it’s not going to matter how long it takes me to get back from Cobble Hill.”

“Are you upset?”

“No,” I said. “Why should I be upset? You do what you have to do.”

XXIII

AROUND NOON I walked over to the Y on West Sixty-third where Fireside meets. They have two meetings going at once, and I’d generally gone to the beginners meeting. This didn’t mean that it was reserved for people who were still using training wheels, but that members were encouraged to keep the discussion focused on basic topics—i.e., staying away from a drink a day at a time. This rule, such as it was, was often honored in the breach, but in the main the sharing was about alcohol, and the art of getting through the hours without it.

Sometimes I went to the other meeting, generally making my decision on the basis of which room was less crowded, or whether I felt like climbing an extra flight of stairs. On this particular day I noticed that the woman in the speaker’s chair at the beginners meeting was one I’d heard elsewhere within the past week, so I went upstairs. It was Thursday, so the upstairs meeting was a step meeting, and they were on the Eighth Step. If that was a coincidence it wasn’t an extraordinary one; there are only twelve of those particular pearls of wisdom, and two of them have to do with amends, so that made it, what, a five-to-one shot?

Still, it struck me as the right step at the right time. I grabbed some coffee and a couple of Nutter Butter cookies and took a seat on the right, and heard the speaker explain how his perception of the step had changed over time. The first time he made his Eighth Step list, he said, there were just a couple of names on it—the wife who’d stayed with him despite what his drinking had done to their marriage, the kids he’d neglected. Most of all he’d harmed himself through his drinking, wrecking his health and costing himself jobs, and he figured he’d make sufficient amends to himself and to his family just by staying sober.

But with time, he said, he began to see how his drinking and his alcoholism had undermined every relationship he’d ever had, and how his actions or inaction had made him an emotional loose cannon, caroming around the deck of the pitching ship that was his life, smashing into everything nearby.

I tuned out for a moment, thinking about the metaphor; until he’d explained it, I hadn’t understood what was so dangerous about a loose cannon. I’d always pictured an artillery piece in France, say, during one of the wars, raining shells on the enemy position. Was the aim off if the cannon was loose? But an unmoored cannon on a warship—well, sure, I could see how that could be a problem.

You show up at these meetings to stay sober and you walk out with a fucking education.

After the meeting, I decided that the coffee and the Nutter Butter cookies covered enough of the four basic food groups to add up to lunch. I went back to my room and tried to find something on TV, but nothing held my interest. I’d already read the paper at breakfast.

So I sat down and started making a list. All the people I’d harmed. I wrote down a few names—Estrellita Rivera, obviously, and my ex-wife, obviously, and Michael and Andrew, obviously—and then I stopped.

It’s not that I’d run out of names, just that I didn’t feel like writing them down. Or looking at the ones I’d already written, thank you very much. I turned over the piece of paper with the four names on it, but that wasn’t enough, so I tore it in half and in half again, and kept going until I’d created a small handful of confetti. If I’d had matches handy I might have burned the scraps, but I decided the wastebasket would do.

I called Jim and told him what I’d just done.

“You know,” he said, “there’s a reason they gave each of the steps a number. It’s so that a person can do them in order.”

“I know.”

“Which doesn’t mean that you can’t think about them when they come to mind. And that’s what you were doing, thinking about Step Eight. So you wrote down some names and realized you’re not ready for the step yet, and that’s fine.”

“If you say so.”

“I do,” he said, “but if you’d rather see this as further evidence that you’re a rank or two below pond scum on the evolutionary continuum, be my guest. The choice is yours.”

“Thanks. Jan broke our date for Saturday.”

“Oh?”

“She made a dinner date with her sponsor.”

“So you weighed your two options of drinking and suicide, and—”

“I felt two things at the same time, and they don’t go together.”

“Relief was one of them, and the other was what? Betrayal?”

“Something like that. I didn’t know whether I wanted to thank her or kill her.”

“Probably both.”

“Maybe.”

He stayed on the phone with me for a few minutes more, and afterward I took my emotional temperature and decided it was close enough to normal. Another thing I decided was that I didn’t feel like going to a movie, or taking a walk in the park, or reading any of the books on the shelf. So I picked up Jack Ellery’s Eighth Step list and took another shot at it.

I wound up taking a walk in the park after all. Somewhere between five and six I entered Central Park at its southwest corner, at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, and walked where my feet led me, trying to hew to a generally northeast course. I overshot a little, emerging at Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street. I walked across Eighty-sixth all the way to Second Avenue, looked at my watch, and decided I ought to fit in a proper dinner before the Sober Today meeting. The first thing that popped into my mind was the smell of whatever the woman superintendent at Frankie Dukacs’s apartment building had been cooking. But there was no point going there. She’d had her chance to invite me for a meal, and she passed it up.

I kept going to First Avenue and walked down to Seventy-eighth, where Theresa’s held the promise of a meal along the same lines. Two doors down, Dukacs & Son had closed for the day.

I went into Theresa’s, half expecting to see Dukacs at the counter, but he wasn’t there. I settled into a booth and ordered a bowl of that day’s soup, a hearty affair thick with mushrooms and barley, and followed it with a plate of assorted pierogi. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had the little Polish dumplings. Theresa’s served them with applesauce and boiled cabbage on the side, and stuffed them variously with meat, mushrooms, potatoes, or cheese.

I cleaned my plate, which made the waitress happy. And would I like some pie? They had pecan, they had apple, they had strawberry-rhubarb. I was tempted, but I had a meeting to get to.

The guest speaker was a fellow I’d heard before at a downtown meeting. As far as I could tell, he didn’t say a single thing this time that he hadn’t said before.

I’d looked around for Greg Stillman while I was helping myself to coffee, and again shortly after the start of the meeting, but I didn’t see him. During the break I got in line for some more coffee, and was trying to decide if I wanted a cookie. It seemed to me that it wasn’t the sort of thing a person ought to have to decide, that either you took a cookie or you didn’t, and while I was mulling it over there was a tap on my shoulder, and it was Greg.

“You couldn’t stay away,” he said. “The siren song of Sober Today pulled you all the way from Columbus Circle.”

“That or the pierogi,” I said.

“Pierogi?”

“Theresa’s,” I said. “Seventy-eighth and First.”

“Oh, Lord, I haven’t been there in a coon’s age. Can you still say that? It’s not racist, is it?” He didn’t wait for an answer, which was good, because I didn’t have one. “I should go there,” he said. “They have the most wonderful pies.”

That settled it. I passed on the cookies.

XXIV

SO THAT’S FRANKIE DUKES’S butcher shop,” Greg said. “And look at the sign, will you? Dukacs and Son, formerly Dukacs and Sons. There’s a whole human drama lurking in that painted-out S.”

“I was thinking that myself.”

“And the most likely explanation,” he said, “is that the sign painter made a mistake, possibly but not necessarily a result of the use and abuse of drugs or alcohol, and whoever finally noticed did an amateur’s job of correcting it. Of course, I’d much rather think the second son decided chopping up dead animals wasn’t for him, and he ran off and became a ballet dancer instead.”

“And made his father proud.”

“No doubt. And here’s Theresa’s, and let’s hope they’ve got two pieces of strawberry-rhubarb pie left, or none at all.”

“If there’s just one,” I said, “we could split it.”

“I want a whole piece,” he said, “and so do you. But we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.”

There were two pieces of the pie, and thus no bridge to jump off. I ate half of mine and said, “Hell.”

“What’s wrong? Did you get a bad strawberry?”

“I read Jack’s Eighth Step again,” I said, “and I meant to bring it along.”

“Don’t tell me you found something.”

“Nothing new. But I thought you’d want it back.”

“Whatever for?”

“I don’t know.”

“I only kept a copy,” he said, “so I’d be able to follow along if and when he wanted to report progress on the Ninth Step. I certainly don’t have any use for it now.”

“So I should just throw it out?”

“That’s what I did with mine. What?”

I told him I’d taken a preliminary run at the step myself, and all I’d done to obliterate my own embryonic list.

“All the king’s horses,” he said, “and all the king’s men. It’s hard to do the Eighth before you’ve done the Fourth.”

“My sponsor said something along those lines.”

“And yet most of us take a stab at it. If we don’t write anything down, at the very least we run names through our minds. It’s hard to be aware of the step without wondering who belongs on your own list.” He took a forkful of pie, a sip of tea. “Jack kept adding to his list, writing down new names as fast as he could check off the old ones. I wonder what his most recent version looked like.”

“You mean the one you gave me—”

“Isn’t the last word on the subject? I’m afraid not, but that doesn’t mean we missed a clue that would have pointed at his murderer. The ones he mentioned to me were all from his boyhood days. Family, friends, neighbors, and most of them were dead and he’d long since lost track of the others.” He put down his fork. “You’re not letting go of this, are you?”

“I’ve let go of it.”

“Really?”

“When I was on the job,” I said, “it was said of me that I was like a dog with a bone. Just because I’ve let go of something doesn’t mean I can keep from thinking about it.”

“I suppose there are different definitions of letting go.”

“What I can’t stay away from,” I said, “is the thought that his murder somehow ties in to the amends process. Those five names from the list are all in the clear, and when I reread the list this afternoon I couldn’t find anyone who’d make a plausible suspect. But it has to be related.”

“That was my original thought, Matt. That’s why I got all this started.”

“He was running around making amends,” I said, “and one guy punched him out and wound up hugging him and weeping in his arms, and another guy told him to take his amends and shove them up his ass—”

“And one said beating me on a coke deal was doing me a favor, and the other said hey, everybody fucked my wife. What was her name again?”

“Lucille. And the other one’s locked up, and there’s no way Jack could have reached him to make amends, and even if he did, well, it doesn’t matter, because he didn’t. Five names and they’re all clear, but that doesn’t mean there’s no connection. It just means we haven’t found it.”

“What you mean we, Kemo Sabe?”

I sighed, nodded. “Point taken, Greg. It’s not on your plate, and it’s not on mine either.”

“But it’s on your mind. Don’t apologize, for God’s sake. It’s on my mind too. How could it not be?”

“I keep thinking of that second bullet.”

“The one in the mouth.”

I nodded. “To send a message, though why you’d kill a man first and then send the message is something I’ve often wondered. A message to whom?”

“Like killing someone to teach him a lesson. He’s dead, so how can he possibly learn the lesson?”

Something was trying to get through. Greg was saying something, but I tuned him out and let the thought take form, then held up a hand to stop him in midsentence. “It wasn’t retribution,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“The shooting. It wasn’t some aggrieved person on or off his list trying to get even. It was to keep him from talking.”

“Not Don’t talk to me but Don’t talk to anybody.”

“Has to be. There was no anger in the killing.”

“No anger in putting two bullets into a man?”

“There was a lot more anger in the beating Sattenstein gave him. That was anger, hitting a man in the face until you turn your own hand into hamburger. This was just quick efficient homicide.”

“With a purpose.”

“I’d say so, yes.”

“To keep him from talking.”

“It wasn’t something he’d said. It was something he might say.”

“And this clearly would keep him from saying it. But…”

“The Ninth Step,” I said. “How does it go?”

He looked at me, puzzled. “How does it work? You take your Eighth Step list—”

“No, I know how it works, how you do it. How does it go? The language of the step, I’ve heard it before every meeting, it’s in the chart that’s always hanging on the wall. How is it worded?”

“Watch me get a word wrong, now that I’m called upon to perform. ‘Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.’ I think that’s word for word, but—”

“Who would it injure?”

“Jack’s amends? Only Jack, unless you want to count Mark Sattenstein’s hand. No, I understand, Matt. It’s not amends to any of the people we’ve been looking at. If it’s something else he did, it might not even be on the list we’re looking at.”

“Didn’t you tell me he killed somebody?”

“It was during a robbery. But I think there’s a special term for it. When you rob people in their own home?”

“A home invasion.”

“Yes, that’s right. It’s a term I’ve only heard recently. The news stories give the impression that it’s happening more lately. Part of the continuing decline of everything and everybody.”

“Do you remember the details?”

“I don’t think I heard them.” He frowned, as if to bring the memory into sharper focus. “He wrote about it in his Fourth Step, and I learned about it and everything else when I heard his Fifth Step.”

He thought about it while I signaled the waitress for more coffee. After she’d filled our cups he said, “What I heard was vague. He didn’t read that part aloud. He read a sentence or two, then looked up from the page and summarized. So I just heard a condensed version.”

“And?”

“The person he robbed was another criminal. A drug dealer, I think. They broke in and—”

“They?”

“Jack had a partner. The two of them went into this home, I think it was somewhere on the Upper West Side, and held the man up, and he went for his gun and they shot him.”

“Jack did the shooting?”

“I can’t remember. I’m not sure he told me. Matt, I didn’t really want to hear this part. I wanted him to go through it, but I didn’t want to take in the information. He was a sponsee, he was a friend, he was someone I was trying to help, and I didn’t want to deal with the fact that he was also a killer.”

“Just tell me what you remember.”

“The man’s death didn’t bother him that much,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I can’t say whether it was Jack or his partner who did it.”

“It didn’t bother him?”

“There was a woman present. The dealer’s wife or girlfriend, I’m not sure which, and again I don’t know that Jack was specific.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No.” He drew a breath. “She was there, she’d seen their faces. The partner shot her.”

“Not Jack.”

“He said he couldn’t pull the trigger. She was begging in Spanish. He didn’t understand the words but she was pleading for her life, and he had the gun in his hand and couldn’t shoot her.”

“So his buddy did it.”

“Matt, it’s strange, but I think he felt guilty twice over.”

“For each victim?”

“No, I’m just talking about the woman. For not being able to pull the trigger, and for the fact that she wound up dead. And he thought it was his fault the man went for a gun, that if he’d done something differently it wouldn’t have happened.”

I knew how that worked. I remembered running out of that ginmill after the two holdup men, remembered emptying my gun at them. If I’d just done any of that the slightest bit differently, if I’d fired one bullet fewer, a little girl might have had a chance to grow up. Oh, I knew exactly how that worked, with the mind throwing up no end of alternate scenarios, but remaining unable to rewrite the past.

I said, “They never got arrested.”

“No.”

“Not him, not his partner.”

“No.”

“I didn’t see anything about this on his Eighth Step list.”

“It may have made it into a later version. Or stayed in his mind, whether or not he wrote it down, because we’d talked about how one could make amends to the dead.”

Someday I’d get to have that conversation with Jim.

I said, “The partner.”

“All I know about him is that he shot the woman. I’m pretty certain Jack never said his name. He went out of his way to use pronouns or just refer to him as his partner. As if he were protecting his anonymity.” He looked up. “Is that who killed him? His partner?”

“For all we know,” I said, “this mysterious partner is long dead, or locked up tight in a cell upstate. But it might be good to know who he is.”

“Would he have a motive? After all these years?”

“There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

“So he wouldn’t want Jack talking about it.”

“No.”

“And we know he’s capable of murder. Whichever of them shot the man, it was the partner who shot the woman.”

“While she was begging for her life,” I said. “Because she’d seen him, and could identify him. What else did Jack have to say about this paragon of virtue?”

But if he’d said anything else, Greg couldn’t remember it. I went home. There was a note in my box, and my first thought was that Jan had called to tell me our date was on after all. But the caller had been someone named Mark, who’d provided a phone number, along with an initial in lieu of a surname. An AA acquaintance, it would appear, and I wondered if it was Stuttering Mark or Motorcycle Mark.

I went upstairs, looked at the message again, then crumpled the slip and tossed it in the wastebasket. Whoever he was, it was too late to call and find out more. And by now he’d found someone else to hear his problems and tell him not to drink, and by morning he’d have forgotten why he called me in the first place.

XXV

I PICKED UP the Times in the morning and read it while I had my breakfast. In Woodside, a family of Colombian immigrants had been murdered in what police believed to be a home invasion. Three adults dead, and four children, with the bodies mutilated. Authorities seemed uncertain as to whether the motive was robbery or revenge, and I decided it sounded like a little of both. Somebody in the drug world had cheated someone else, or constituted unacceptable competition. So why not kill him? And why not walk off with his cash and inventory while you were at it? And, of course, kill his family, because that was the way you did business.

The first thing I thought of was Bill Lonergan. The Times story didn’t provide a street address, so I didn’t know how close he lived to the scene of the crime, but Woodside isn’t that large. I wondered how closely he followed the local crime scene, and decided he’d have trouble overlooking this one. Seven people murdered in their home, four of them children. It’d be on the TV news, at least until the police ran out of leads and some other horror displaced it from the public consciousness.

After that, of course, I thought of Jack Ellery and his partner.

I called Greg Stillman, who began the conversation by telling me he’d been trying to remember more about the partner. “But it seems to me he was trying to avoid saying anything that would make him identifiable,” he said. “I don’t know if they worked together more than that one time.”

“Do you know when it happened?”

“The killing? It was before he went to prison. And after he’d started committing crimes, but I guess that’s pretty obvious. There were a lot of years in there, but there was nothing chronological about his Fourth Step. If I had to guess, I’d say ten or twelve years ago.”

“And all you know is it was uptown?”

“And on the West Side. When I picture it I see an address on Riverside Drive, but I don’t know why.”

“Did he say something about looking out at the Hudson after the other guy shot the woman?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Was it a house? An apartment building?”

“No idea. Matt?”

“Because I can’t help being interested.”

“Nice. You answered the question before I could ask it.”

“Well, it’s one I’ve been asking myself. But there’s nowhere to go with this, is there? A man and a woman shot to death in their home somewhere north and west of Times Square.”

“I seem to have the impression it was quite a ways uptown.”

“Fine. Somewhere north and west of Central Park.”

“Not much easier that way, is it?”

“I don’t suppose he mentioned their names. The victims.”

“No.”

“Or anything to set them apart.”

“Those kinds of details might have been in his Fourth Step, Matt.”

“But he kept them to himself.”

“Or if he told me, it sailed right by. I told you I was trying not to dwell on what I was hearing.”

“Yes.”

“A fine time to play Second Monkey.”

“How’s that?”

“You know, Hear No Evil. If I’d been paying closer attention—”

“You don’t want to go there, Greg.”

“No.”

“It’s a shame you don’t have a copy of his Fourth Step.”

“I never read it. I just got to hear it, or to hear the parts he read to me.”

“I know. Then what did he do with it?”

“I told him to throw it out.”

“Toss it in the garbage?”

“Well, tear it up first.”

As I’d done with my own half-assed attempt at Step Eight.

“That’s what I tell my sponsees,” he was saying. “ ‘You got all of that out of your system, and you shared it with God and with another person—’ ”

“How do you share it with God?”

“I’ve often wondered. I guess you just assume he’s listening when you share it with your sponsor. Where was I? Oh, right. ‘You shared it with another person, and now it’s time to let go of it.’ ”

“And they take it home and burn it. Or shred it, or whatever. Is that what you did with yours?”

“What else?”

Shortly before noon I decided I could stand a change from Fireside, and that it was a nice enough day for a longer walk. I went to a group called Renaissance, on Forty-eighth off Fifth Avenue. The midtown location drew a lot of commuters whose offices were nearby and who would go home to the suburbs after work. That made for more suits and better grooming than was the norm at my meetings, but there was certainly no dress code, and the unshaven guy seated next to me had the air of having spent the night sleeping in a cardboard box.

Afterward I called one of my cop friends. I told him I was looking for an unsolved home invasion, the double murder of a drug dealer and his wife or girlfriend. Both shot dead, and it would have taken place on the Upper West Side sometime in the early ’70s.

He said, “My first thought is there’s been hundreds, but you got two people dead, both of gunshots, and the case is still open. That narrows it down. I’ll see if it rings a bell for anybody.”

I had essentially the same conversation with two other old friends, and hung up fairly certain that I wasn’t going to get anywhere that way. I walked a few blocks down Fifth to the main library, where I spent an hour with bound volumes of the New York Times Index and another couple of hours in the microfiche room, hunting for a needle in a pasture full of haystacks.

Pointless.

At St. Paul’s that night a woman named Josie asked if I wasn’t getting pretty close to my one-year anniversary. Pretty soon, I said. She said she was sure it would be the first of many, and advised me to remember that it was a day at a time.

Stuttering Mark wasn’t there, I was more apt to run into him at Fireside, but I caught up with Motorcycle Mark at the coffee urn and asked if he’d called the night before. He said he hadn’t, that he didn’t even have my number. I said it must have been someone else, and he said that since I’d brought up the subject, could I let him have my number? I gave him one of my minimalist cards and he found a home for it in his shirt pocket. Then he borrowed a pen and wrote out his own name and number on a scrap of paper. It seemed only polite to thank him and tuck it away in my wallet.

Donna was there, and her clothes suggested she’d come straight from the office. Her hair was pinned back, and not falling over her eyes. She confirmed that I’d be able to show up as scheduled.

“Three tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam.”

She reached out, gave my arm a squeeze.

Maybe it was the habit she had of touching my arm, or maybe it was more the result of how she looked in the well-tailored skirt and jacket. The last conversation I’d had with Jan may have had something to do with it, too. Whatever it was, I spent the second half of the meeting wondering if she’d join the crowd at the post-meeting meeting, which is what some people had taken to calling the gathering afterward at the Flame.

She didn’t show up, which was hardly surprising. I couldn’t recall that I’d ever seen her there in the past. I didn’t stay long myself. I had coffee and a sandwich—I’d managed to skip dinner—and said my good-byes and went home.

No messages, but I wasn’t in my room for ten minutes before the phone rang. I thought first of Jan, then Donna, and finally Mark—Motorcycle Mark, making use of my number, or the Mark who’d called before.

I settled the matter by picking up the phone, and it was Greg.

Without preamble he said, “I gave a false impression before. I’ve written out several Fourth Step inventories in the course of my sobriety. I still have copies of two of them.”

“You know,” I said, “I think that’s between you and your Higher Power.” I’d almost said sponsor, but remembered in time that his sponsor was filling a chair in the Big Meeting in the Sky.

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is? Oh.”

“You see, don’t you? If I didn’t destroy my own Fourth Step…”

“Then who’s to say that Jack didn’t hang on to his?”

“My thought exactly. I’ll check his room tomorrow. Or do you suppose they’ve sealed it with that yellow Crime Scene tape?”

“I’m sure they have,” I said, “but they’ll have long since unsealed it by now. Once the crime lab crew is finished, there’s no real reason to maintain a seal. He had a furnished room, didn’t he? Did he pay his rent weekly or by the month?”

“By the week.”

“Then the odds are it’s been rented by now.”

“And if he left his Fourth Step behind, some other tenant’s reading it even as we speak. But won’t they pack up his possessions? Isn’t that what they do when somebody dies?”

I said that sounded about right. “And they give it to the heirs, or the next of kin,” I said. “I don’t suppose Jack had a will.”

“Just the sort every alcoholic has, along with a whim of iron. A Last Will and Testament? No, hardly. I don’t think he had anything to pass on, or anybody to leave it to.”

“My guess is the super’ll wait a decent interval, then keep what he wants and throw the rest out.”

“That’s what I thought. So what I’m going to do is go over there tomorrow and tell them I’m his cousin and I’ve come to collect his effects. There shouldn’t be a problem, should there?”

“I can’t see why. A box of old clothes and personal papers? He’ll be glad to see the last of it.”

“I can give the clothes to the Goodwill or the Sally. And if there’s, you know, some sort of personal item like a pocketknife, I’ll take it for a keepsake.” He was silent for a moment, perhaps recalling other dead friends and other souvenirs. “And if there’s a Fourth Step,” he said, “I’ll call you.”

“Good.”

“Matt? You wouldn’t want to keep me company, would you?”

“What time?”

“It would have to be in the afternoon.”

That saved me from having to invent a reason I couldn’t go. Donna had already supplied me with a perfectly good one. “I can’t,” I said. “I have to go to Brooklyn.”

“Really? Were you a bad boy? Are you being punished?”

“It’s work,” I said. “I have to help a member of my group move her stuff out of her boyfriend’s apartment.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “That takes you off the hook, but at what price? You’ve got a worse day ahead of you than I do. Matt, if I find anything interesting I’ll call you.”

Won’t they pack up his possessions? Isn’t that what they do when somebody dies?

Well, it depends who it is, and how and where he dies. If he’s a respectable member of society, and is considerate enough to leave a detailed will, his property is apportioned as specified therein. (Of course that’s after the in-home nurse pockets a few things that she just knows the deceased wanted her to have.) Then the relatives get to fight over the small stuff, and siblings get to drag out and act on every grudge and resentment left over from childhood.

If there’s no will, they get to fight over the big stuff too.

But if the deceased takes his last breath in a Bowery flophouse or an SRO welfare hotel, if the cops zip him into a body bag and cart him down a couple of flights of stairs, then anything worth the taking is pretty sure to get taken. The little stash of emergency cash, the couple of bucks left over from the most recent government check, the folded ten-dollar bill in the shoe—if a relative does turn up, it will have long since disappeared. The cops take it.

I always did. I learned from a partner, who explained the ethics of the situation. The ethical thing, he told me, was to divvy up with your partner.

And so I robbed the dead. It didn’t keep me up nights, or lead me to drink a drop more bourbon than I’d have had anyway. I can’t imagine it amounted to much over the years. Usually it was five dollars, ten dollars, certainly well under a hundred dollars. But one time I got to share $972 with my partner du jour. I remember the amount, remember how precisely we split it down the middle, remember what a nice windfall the $486 made, and how it left me with a feeling of gratitude and respect toward the derelict who’d unintentionally bestowed it upon me. (He’d gotten drunk, fell in his bathroom, gashed his head open, and bled out before recovering consciousness. We were ready to hate him for the mess he’d created, but the money he left us changed our attitude. Of course you don’t have to be on the Bowery to die like that; the actor William Holden managed it just about a year before I had my last drink.)

More names for my list, if I ever actually took the Eighth Step. How did you make amends to men whose names you had managed to forget as soon as you’d written up the report? I wasn’t even sure I’d been wrong to take the money. If my partner and I left it, that just meant somebody else would pocket it. And who was legally supposed to get it? The State of New York? What the hell did some bureau in Albany need with five dollars here and ten dollars there, or even a princely $972?

On the other hand, it wasn’t my money.

A lot of John Does and Richard Roes for my list, plus a couple of Mary Moes. Because women died too, of causes natural and unnatural, and you had to look in their purses for ID, didn’t you? And you’d always find a couple of dollars.

I was partnered with one prince of the city who took a pair of hoop earrings from the ears of a dead hooker. “These look like eighteen karat,” he said. “What does the poor darling need with gold earrings in potter’s field?”

I told him to keep them. Was I sure? Yes, I said, I was sure. Be a shame to split the pair, I said.

Noble of me. Maybe that’d be enough to get me into Heaven. What did I ever do that was good? Well, St. Peter, one time I could have stolen the gold from a dead whore’s ears. But I restrained myself.

XXVI

I ALMOST DIDN’T recognize you,” I said.

Donna grinned, fluffed her hair. “Is it that different?”

The long auburn hair that had flowed down over her shoulders, and occasionally drifted into her eyes, had been cropped boyishly short and permed into a tight cap of curls. Richard, behind the wheel, said, “Isn’t it fabulous? And positively transformative—or do I want to say transformational?”

Nobody offered an opinion on that one.

“Well,” he said, “whichever the word is, that’s it. What a metamorphosis! From Brenda Starr to Little Orphan Annie.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” she said. “I always liked Brenda Starr.”

“What have you got against Annie?”

“Nothing, but I never much wanted to look like her.” She was in the front of the car, next to Richard, and she had an arm hooked over her seat back so that she could look at me. “Well, Matthew S.? What’s your verdict?”

“It looked nice long,” I said, “and it looks nice short. One thing it does, it shows off your face better.”

“It used to get lost in all that hair,” Richard said. “Now it pops.”

“I look like Little Orphan Annie and my face pops,” she said.

“These are good things, sweetie. Trust me.”

“All I know,” she said, “is it’s done. The boy who does my hair couldn’t believe it when I went in there this morning and told him what I wanted.”

“Like, ‘Oooh, how can you possibly want me to do that to you?’ ”

“Not at all,” she told him. “He’s been wanting to cut my hair forever. ‘I finally talked you into it!’ But it wasn’t his doing.”

“The occasion,” I guessed. “Washing that man right out of your hair.”

Richard said he always loved Mary Martin. Donna said, “Sort of, but not exactly. I called him last night.”

“Vinnie,” I said.

“Which was probably a mistake, because I didn’t want to hear his voice, or for him to hear mine. But I thought I should remind him that I was coming for my things this afternoon, and that it would help if he could contrive to be elsewhere.”

“And?”

“I don’t know if he was able to take in the information. He started going on and on about my hair, my beautiful long hair, and how he wanted to see it spread out on his pillow and, well, other things I’d just as soon not repeat.”

“We’ll use our overheated imaginations,” Richard said.

“I’m sure you will. And I thought, You know, buster, if you like my hair that much, there must be something wrong with it. And whether there is or not, you’ve seen it for the last time. And I got up this morning and rushed straight to the beauty parlor, and Hervé was able to fit me in, and the rest is history.”

“It’s not history, sweetie, it’s art appreciation. Just fabulous.”

“Thank you, Richard.”

“But Hervé? Honestly?”

“I think it used to be Harvey.”

“Ooh la la,” said Richard. “How continental.”

Vincent Cutrone’s apartment was in a six-story brick building on a street corner in Cobble Hill. A dry cleaner and a deli shared the ground floor, with half a dozen small apartments on each of the upper floors. Richard, who’d found the place with no trouble, was able to park right in front, and the three of us entered the building together. Donna had her key out, but pushed the button for 4-C anyway, and sighed deeply when the intercom made that throat-clearing noise it makes when someone’s about to respond.

“Yo,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m coming up,” she said. “I’ve got people with me.”

He didn’t say anything, nor did he buzz us in. She used her key, and we were getting on the elevator when we finally heard the buzzer sound.

“Yo,” Donna said, and rolled her eyes again. “Why did I ever think—never mind.”

He must have been waiting at the door, because it opened inward as Donna was extending the key. Vinnie loomed in the doorway, his eyes taking in all three of us, then doing a pronounced double take. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “What the fuck did you do to your hair?”

“I had it cut,” she said.

“By a fuckin’ butcher?” He looked past her at me and Richard. “You believe this, guys? Best thing the woman had goin’ for her and she chops it off. Hell of a thing. I’m the one who drinks and she’s the one who goes nuts.”

She said, “I came for my things, Vincent. I thought—”

“Oh, now it’s Vincent. All the time it was ‘Oh, Vinnie, nobody ever made me feel like you made me feel. Oh, Vinnie, I love it when you—’ ”

I’d seen him before. At meetings, here and there around town. I never heard his story, never knew his name, couldn’t recall ever seeing him with Donna. But I recognized the face.

He was an inch or two shorter than I, and a few pounds heavier. His hair was dark brown and shaggy, and a little longer than the new Donna’s. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and he smelled the way you do when the alcohol is working its way out of your pores. He was wearing a soiled white undershirt, the kind that leaves the shoulders uncovered, and a pair of cutoff jeans. His feet were bare.

“You said you’d stay away from the apartment while I collected my things.”

“No, Donna, you’re the one who said that. But you moved out, right? It’s my apartment now, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So it’s my apartment, who’s got a better right to be here? You want to kick me out of it? Hey, I wanted to, I could kick you out of it.”

“Vinnie—”

“Ah, we’re back to Vinnie. I feel all warm and fuzzy now.” He reached out a hand, rubbed her hair. “You know what you look like? You look like Raggedy fuckin’ Ann.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“ ‘Don’t touch me.’ A different tune these days, Donna. Hey, don’t worry. I’m not gonna kick you out of my apartment.” He stood aside, motioned her in. “Esta es su casa,” he said. “You know what that means?”

“I know what it means.”

“It’s Spanish, it means this is your house. Except it’s mine.”

I said, “Vinnie, maybe it’d be a good idea if you gave us an hour.”

He looked at me. Before, he’d regarded me as an audience, but now I had a speaking part, and he responded accordingly. “I know you,” he said. “Matt, am I right? Used to be a cop before they kicked you off the force for bein’ an asshole. You the new boyfriend?”

“Matt and Richard are helping me move,” Donna said.

“They’re just what you need,” he said. “Matt can beat me up and Richard here can blow me. Between the two of ’em I got no fuckin’ chance.”

It was a long afternoon in Cobble Hill. Vinnie had been drinking around the clock for days now, and he got to show all his emotions in turn, from self-pity to belligerence. He said he wished that Donna hadn’t cut her hair, and that he’d like to wrap it around her neck and strangle her with it. He walked out of the room, turned up the volume on the TV, came back with a beer, wandered off again.

The apartment must have been nice before he picked up a drink. Now it was all empty bottles and beer cans and pizza boxes, half-eaten containers of Chinese food, and copies of Hustler and Penthouse. There was a page torn from Screw, hooker ads with their photos and phone numbers, taped alongside the wall phone in the kitchen. Some of the ads were circled in Magic Marker.

“This one,” he announced, pointing to one of the photos, “could give you cards and spades, Donna. Could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose. I dunno, though. Bet you could do the same, huh, Richard?”

Nobody answered him, but this didn’t seem to bother him. I’m not sure he noticed.

A long afternoon in Cobble Hill.

XXVII

WE WERE ACROSS the bridge and back in Manhattan when she said, “Raggedy Ann, for God’s sake. Little Orphan Annie and Raggedy Ann.”

“You are fabulously glamorous,” Richard said. “So will you please stop that shit?”

“Okay.”

“I meant Little Orphan Annie in the nicest possible way. And you have big eyes, the same as she does, except yours are this gorgeous light brown. And they really pop now that your hair’s not falling in front of them.”

“So now I’m pop-eyed? I’m sorry, I’ll stop.”

“And you don’t look at all like Raggedy Ann,” he said. “The man is a drunken imbecile.”

There was a long silence. Then she said, “He’s not a bad fellow, you know. When he’s sober.”

“He’s not sober, though, is he?”

“No.”

“And drunk or sober, he was never right for you. And deep down you always knew that.”

“Oh, God, Richard. You’re absolutely right.”

“Well, of course,” he said.

Her belongings filled the trunk and shared the backseat with me. When we got back where we started, Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam, Richard circled the block and couldn’t find a parking spot. I told him to park next to the fire hydrant, and handed him a card to put on the dashboard.

“Detectives’ Endowment Association,” he read aloud. “And this means I won’t get a ticket?”

“It improves the odds.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d take my chances on a ticket, but what if they tow it?”

Donna said, “Honey, you’ll feel a lot more comfortable staying with the car. Matt and I can manage the stuff. We’ll just make an extra trip.”

She lived on the fifth floor of a brownstone. It was a fine building in excellent condition, and the only smell in the stairwell was a faint hint of furniture polish. But it was a walk-up, and it took us three trips, and by the time I’d climbed those four flights of stairs for the third time I was winded.

“Sit down,” she said, “before you fall down. Those stairs keep me in shape, but they’re killers if you’re not used to them. Plus you were carrying three times as much as I was. Can I get you a glass of water? Or maybe a Coke?”

“A Coke would be great.”

“Except it’s Pepsi.”

“Pepsi’s fine.”

“Here you go. I’ll just tell Richard we’re all set now.”

She parked me in a Queen Anne wing chair in the living room, in front of a fireplace with a marble surround. Over it she’d hung a nineteenth-century landscape in a fancy frame, and a thick Chinese rug was centered on the dark hardwood floor. It was a very pleasing room, richer and more formal than I’d have expected, and a better match to the business attire she’d worn last night than to this afternoon’s jeans and sweater.

I wondered what the apartment’s other rooms looked like. The kitchen, the bedroom. I stayed where I was and imagined them, and then I heard her footsteps on the stairs.

“Now just let me catch my breath,” she said upon entering, and dropped onto the medallion-back love seat. “Richard said to give you his love, and tell you to have a happy anniversary, if he doesn’t see you before then. You’re coming up on a year, aren’t you?”

“Pretty soon.”

“Another Coke? Pepsi, I mean. Can I get you another?”

“One’s my limit.”

“Ha! I like that. Oh, before I forget—”

She came over and passed me a pair of hundred-dollar bills. We argued about it. I told her it was too much, and she said that’s what she’d given Richard and that was what she was giving me. I said I’d have been happy to do what I’d done for free, out of friendship, so at the very least why didn’t we split the difference? And I handed her one of the bills, and she pushed it back at me.

“I’d have happily paid four hundred,” she said, “or even more, so we’re already splitting the difference. And if you’ll put the money away we won’t have to discuss it anymore, and won’t that be a pleasure?”

I agreed that she had a point there, and put the bills in my wallet. Without planning to, I said, “Well, let me spend some of this on dinner. Will you keep me company?”

Her eyes widened. “What a lovely idea. But it’s Saturday, and don’t you have a standing date with—is it Jane?”

“Jan.”

“I was close.”

“And she decided she’d rather spend this particular Saturday having dinner with her sponsor.”

“Oh.”

“I guess the two of them have something they feel it’s important to discuss. Me, most likely.”

“Oh,” she said. She was on her feet, and I stood up myself, and our eyes locked. I felt as if I were on the brink of a decision, and then I realized the decision had already been made.

She took a step forward. “You’re a lovely man,” she said, and put her hand on my arm.

Her bedroom was frilly and Victorian, with a canopy bed. Afterward I lay there beside her and listened to my heart. I found myself wondering, not for the first time, just how many beats it had left.

Beside me, Donna lay on her back. She raised her hands over her head and stretched, then touched her armpit with one hand and brought her fingers to her face.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I stink.”

“I know. It was all I could do to bring myself to touch you.”

She had a good laugh, rich and just the least bit naughty. “I noticed,” she said, “how much trouble you had overcoming your natural repugnance.” She laid a hand on my thigh. “But I could have had a shower.”

“I thought of having one myself,” I said, “but we’d have had to wait.”

“And that might have given one of us time to think things through.”

“In which case we might not have wound up here.”

“Oh, we’d have wound up here,” she said. “Sooner or later.”

“Written in the stars?”

“Written on the subway walls,” she said, “and tenement halls. I love that song.”

“I haven’t heard it in ages.”

“Hang on,” she said, and slipped out of bed. I must have drifted off for a moment, because the next thing I knew she was curled up at my side while Simon & Garfunkel crooned softly in close harmony.

“In my fantasies,” she said, “I never imagined we’d be all sweaty.”

“You had fantasies?”

“You bet. And in all of them I came to you fresh out of the shower, with a little dab of perfume here and there—”

“Where and where?”

“Stop that. You’re distracting me. Where was I?”

“Here and there,” I said.

“You have the gentlest touch, Matthew S. Oh, my. Fresh out of the shower, subtly scented, with my long hair flowing. Well, the scent’s none too subtle, and the long hair’s no more than a memory.”

“In my fantasies,” I said, “the long hair didn’t really enter into it.”

“Hang on,” she said. “You had fantasies? About me?”

“That surprises you?”

“I never got any kind of vibe from you,” she said. “That’s one thing that made it so safe to have fantasies about you. You weren’t interested in me, and you were already taken.”

“I guess I started getting ideas when you put your hand on my arm.”

“You mean like this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That was just, you know, friendship.”

“I see.”

“I did it unconsciously.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe it wasn’t entirely unconscious,” she said, and thought it over. “Maybe it was just the tiniest bit sexual.”

“Well, don’t apologize for it, Donna.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. What kind of fantasies did you have, that my hair wasn’t a part of?”

“Well, what we just did.”

“Oh.”

“And a couple of other things,” I said, “that we haven’t done yet.”

“None of them involving long hair.”

“Look, I always admired your hair.”

“And you wish I hadn’t cut it.”

“No,” I said. “I actually think I like it better now. But I liked it fine before.”

“Men all think they like long hair,” she said, “but it’s a pain in the ass to take care of, and you know what else?”

“What?”

“It gets in your mouth when you fuck. Those things we haven’t done yet. Should we shower first?”

I showered later, once I’d returned to my hotel. After our second session she’d announced that she was too tired to go anywhere, but that we ought to eat something, and what if she made us some sandwiches? I said that sounded fine, and she came back with a couple of sandwiches, liverwurst on dark rye, and a bag of corn chips made from organically grown blue corn.

“I’m starting to fade,” she said. “It’s been a busy day.”

“I’ll say.”

“You’re welcome to stay over.”

But I knew better. I got dressed and she walked me to the door. “You’re a sweet man,” she said. “I’m glad we did this.”

It was cooler out, and I thought I’d take a bus straight down Columbus. But I got itchy standing around waiting for the bus to come, and I started walking, and was halfway home by the time a bus came along. I could have caught it, but I let it go and walked the rest of the way home. Sometimes walking is a good way to get some thinking done, but at other times it’s a handy alternative to thinking, and as long as I kept putting one foot in front of the other I didn’t have to turn over any rocks and see what was under them.

There were messages at the hotel desk, as I thought there would be. Two calls, Jan and Greg. I looked at my watch and decided it was too late to call either of them. I went upstairs, and when I got out of the shower I picked up the phone and called Greg.

“No luck,” he said.

“He’d thrown out Jack’s things?”

“No, he bundled them up, just the way he was supposed to. Then just the other day a policeman showed up to collect them. Is that usual?”

Not when they’ve essentially decided to sign off on the case. “Maybe they’ve got a lead,” I said. “Whoever picked it up would have signed for it. Was it Redmond?”

“It never occurred to me to ask.”

“I don’t suppose it matters,” I said. “Maybe I’ll give him a call and see what I can find out.”

I rang off, got in bed. Maybe I’d call Redmond, I thought, and maybe I wouldn’t. I couldn’t see that it made much difference either way.

XXVIII

THEY HAD A STORY in the paper the other day,” Jim said. “There’s this new Chinatown out in Flushing. You take the Shea Stadium train clear to the end of the line. Main Street, Flushing—that’s the name of the stop. And there’s blocks of Chinese restaurants with different cuisines from the different sections of China. Stuff you wouldn’t get here.”

“Stir-fried panda,” I suggested.

“Including parts of the panda it would never occur to you to eat. So I was thinking we really ought to get out there, just walk into the first restaurant that looks good and see what they serve us.”

“Good idea.”

He refilled our tea cups. “And then I thought, Hell, who am I kidding? The old established Chinatown’s ten minutes away on the A Train, and we never get there, so why would we chase out to Flushing?”

“We’re creatures of habit.”

“They wrote up this Taiwanese restaurant, not two blocks from the subway stop. It sounded pretty good, I have to say. And yet we’ll never get there.” He took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “Creatures of habit,” he said. “You’re in the habit of getting laid on Saturday night, and if one woman disappears you just go find yourself another.”

“I didn’t think of it that way.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did. Donna, huh? Fine-looking woman.”

“She cut her hair.”

“So you said. But you didn’t let that stop you, did you?”

We were two of the seven customers at the Lucky Peony, a recent arrival on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Until I walked over there to meet Jim, I hadn’t left my room all day, and the sesame noodles were my first nourishment since last night’s liverwurst sandwich.

And Jim, when he called to pick a time and place for our Sunday dinner, was the first person I spoke to. I didn’t say much, but those few words were the only ones that passed my lips.

I never made a conscious decision to spend the day walled off from the world. I kept thinking I’d go out for breakfast in a few minutes, and held on to the thought after I’d changed the meal’s name to lunch.

Jan and I generally went to a Sunday morning meeting in SoHo, and I knew I wasn’t going to show up there, but there were plenty of other meetings available, all over the city and all through the day, and I thought I’d drop in on one of them. I checked my meeting book, and worked out a plan that would let me fit in a couple of meetings, or even three if I pushed it.

And didn’t go to any of them.

Instead I stayed in my room. I had the television set on more often than not, switching back and forth between a football game and a golf tournament, sometimes caught up in what I was watching, sometimes not.

I thought of phone calls I could make, and didn’t make them. At one point I remembered the mysterious Mark who’d called a couple of days ago and left a number, which I’d wound up tossing in the wastebasket. I wondered who it was, since I’d determined it wasn’t Motorcycle Mark, and I looked in the basket, but it was gone. As one of the hotel’s permanent residents, I get weekly maid service—my bed made with clean linen, my bathroom cleaned, my carpet vacuumed, my wastebasket emptied. My room got this treatment every Saturday, so I was a day late as far as Mark’s number was concerned, but that was all right, because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have called him anyway.

My phone rang a couple of times. But the calls came after I’d already spoken with Jim, and there was nobody I wanted to talk to, so I let it ring. If it was important they’d leave messages, and I could collect them on my way to dinner. If I remembered to check.

“Afterward,” I said, “I walked all the way home.”

“Whistling a happy tune?”

“You know what ran through my mind? Jesus, am I going to have this woman around my neck for the rest of my life?”

“Because how could she possibly let a fine fellow like you get away?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Here’s what happened,” he said. “Just so you know. Donna just got out of a relationship she never should have gotten into in the first place. So she did two things to prove she was done with it. She got her hair cut and she got herself laid. And, to make sure she didn’t wind up back where she started, she picked somebody unavailable.”

“Because of Jan. But nothing would have happened if Jan hadn’t broken our date. That’s when Donna got interested.”

“Before that she was just grabbing your arm out of friendship.”

I had to think about that.

“Look,” he said, “she liked you. She wanted to go to bed with you. Then she gave you a sandwich and sent you home.”

“She said I could stay.”

“ ‘Darling, please stay, and in the morning we’ll go out for brunch, and then we’ll come back here and make love some more.’ Is that how she put it?”

“Not exactly.”

“The message you got, and the one she intended to give, was you could stay if you wanted, but she’d just as soon you didn’t. Does that sound about right?”

“She was probably thinking, Am I gonna have this guy hanging around for the rest of my life?”

“Well, she’s an alcoholic, the same way you are. And she just got away from the Pride of Bensonhurst, so yeah, I suspect she was thinking something along those lines. But brighten up, will you? Here’s this great-looking woman with a nice apartment, and you’re the one she picked to share her canopy bed.”

“How’d you know it was a canopy bed?”

“Jesus, who are you, Lieutenant Columbo? You described it.”

“Oh.”

“And the Oriental rug, and the portrait over the marble fireplace.”

“It was a landscape.”

“Thanks for clearing that up. She didn’t have to pick you, you know. She could have dragged Richard upstairs.”

“Richard’s gay.”

“You think that would have stopped her?”

“Jim—”

“All right, I’ll grant that you’re a little more available than Richard, and a little more suitable. You’re not in love with her, are you?”

“With Donna? No. I like her, but—”

“No fantasies about moving in?”

“No.”

“Good, because that’s not what she wants either. Donna’s got a good job, makes decent money. She works downtown somewhere, doesn’t she?”

“She’s at an investment bank. I don’t know exactly what she does there.”

“Whatever it is, it pays well. And the next man she hooks up with, and it’s not going to be anytime soon, won’t be a guy like Vinnie, a knockaround guy from South Brooklyn who stays sober between drunks. And you know who else he won’t be?”

“An unlicensed private eye living in a hotel room.”

“There you go. You had a good time, and you didn’t have to spend Saturday night alone.”

“Right.”

“And you came out of it two hundred dollars to the good. What’s the matter?”

“Is that what the money was for?”

“No, of course not. The money was so that she wasn’t sleeping with you to pay you back for helping her out. Merry Christmas, kiddo.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t know the joke? Mailman brings the mail to this one house and the wife invites him in, gives him a fresh-baked brownie and a cup of coffee. Next thing he knows she’s taking him upstairs to the bedroom. Afterward she hands him a dollar.

“And he says, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ And he tries to hand it back, but she won’t take it. ‘It’s for you,’ she says. ‘It was my husband’s idea.’ ‘Your husband’s idea?’ ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I asked him what should we do for the mailman for Christmas, and he said, Fuck him, give him a dollar. The brownie and coffee were my idea.’ ”

We went to the meeting at St. Clare’s, and afterward I walked him back to his place. On my way home I remembered that I’d walked right past the desk earlier without seeing if any of my callers had left messages. This time I checked, and there was nothing. I went upstairs, picked up the phone, put it down without dialing anybody’s number, and went to bed.

XXIX

MONDAY MORNING I called Greg Stillman first thing after breakfast. There was no answer, so I left a message on his machine. I knew better than to call Donna, and I wasn’t ready to call Jan. I found the number for Dennis Redmond, and someone else at the precinct answered his phone. I left my name and number.

Redmond and I played phone tag for a day and a half. I was never in my room when he called, and he was never at his desk when I called him back. I went to Fireside for the Monday noon meeting, and to St. Paul’s that night. I thought I might run into Donna, but wasn’t surprised when I didn’t.

Jim wasn’t there either, but I found some other people to have coffee with, and it was past eleven when I got home from the Flame. No messages, but Jacob informed me that I’d had a call. “But he didn’t leave no name,” he said, “nor no number neither.”

Nohow, I thought.

I was surprised Greg hadn’t returned my call, and decided it wasn’t too late to call him. I got the machine again, so either he was out wolfing down strawberry-rhubarb pie or he’d turned in for the night. I hung up without leaving another message and went to bed.

Tuesday afternoon my phone finally rang when I was there to answer it. It was Jan, just calling to say hello. We had a curiously hollow conversation, where what didn’t get said was more significant than what did. Neither of us said anything about the past Saturday night, or about the coming one. I didn’t say any of the several things I had on my mind, and I don’t think she did either.

So it wasn’t much of a phone call, but it broke the logjam, because after I got off the phone with her I called Redmond, and this time he was there to answer.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get back to you. I did call a couple of times.”

“I’ve been hard to reach myself,” I said. “I was just wondering if it was you who picked up Jack Ellery’s possessions.”

He didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained that someone had collected Ellery’s belongings from the super, and thought it might be him.

“Jesus,” he said. “Why would I do that?”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

“The super said it was me?”

“I never talked to him,” I said. “Gregory Stillman went over there, and he got the impression some police officer had picked up the stuff.”

“What stuff? The long-lost loot from the Brinks Job?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Stillman thought there might be some notebooks, some AA keepsakes.”

“You ever been to his room?”

“Ellery’s? No.”

“Well, I was, because it was where he was killed. Outside of a razor and a toothbrush and a clock radio, he didn’t own a whole hell of a lot. Some old clothes, an extra pair of shoes. Maybe half a dozen books. Some of them were AA books. Is that what you were looking for?”

“I wasn’t looking for anything. Stillman—”

“Right, Stillman. There was a brass coin about the size of a half-dollar. Maybe a little larger. Had what I guess is the AA symbol on it. Two As in a circle or a triangle, I forget which.”

“Both.”

“Huh?”

“Two As in a triangle, with the triangle enclosed in a circle.”

“I’m glad you cleared that up for me. Whatever it was, it’d be hard to buy a drink with it.”

Some groups give them out for members’ anniversaries. There’s a Roman numeral on one side, for however many years you’re celebrating. I didn’t feel Redmond needed to be burdened with this information.

“Anyway,” he said, “the poor sonofabitch didn’t have much, and I didn’t need to see any of it a second time. So whoever picked up his things, it wasn’t me. Hang on a second.”

I waited, and he returned to report that nobody else knew anything about Ellery’s leavings. I said maybe the super had kept them and made up a story. More likely he threw everything out, Redmond said, because there was nothing there to keep. He tossed it, and to avoid getting bawled out he blamed it on the cops.

“Which we ought to be used to,” he said. “You know, I was hoping you had something better than a question.”

“Like what?”

“I figured maybe your conscience was troubling you and you wanted to tell me how you shot your old childhood pal.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I just said. Because your conscience—”

“Why would I shoot him?”

“How do I know? You’re the one with the guilty conscience. Maybe he stole a baseball card from you a hundred years ago in the Bronx, and you just realized it was the one that’s worth a fortune. I forget who’s on it.”

“I can’t help you there.”

“Honus Wagner. So who needs your help? You didn’t do it, huh?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Just my luck. Hey, you’re not fucking around with the case, are you? Playing detective?”

“No.”

“You want to say that a little more convincingly? Never mind. I’d caution you about getting in our way, but the caseload we’ve got, your pal Ellery’s not getting a lot of our time. You run across anything, you know where to bring it.”

That was Tuesday. Thursday morning I was reading the paper while I had my breakfast. There was a back-page item I barely registered, a man killed on the street near Gramercy Park, apparently during a mugging. I was several pages past the story when something clicked, and I went back and looked at the victim’s name, and right away I knew which Mark it was who’d been trying to call me.

XXX

MARK SATTENSTEIN,” Joe Durkin said. “Killed shortly after midnight within three blocks of his home, death the result of multiple blows to the head. Went out for a couple of drinks at a bar with an Irish name, if you can believe such a place exists. They know him there, not a regular, not a heavy drinker, but he’ll come in now and then for a beer. Well, not anymore, he won’t. Not the first mugging in that neighborhood, not even the first this month, and it’s still early in the month. Wallet gone, watch gone, pockets turned inside out—what’s it sound like to you, Matt?”

“Robbery with violence.”

“It does sound like robbery, and there’s no question about the violence. Which leaves me with two questions. How’s this anything other than what it looks like? And, while I’m at it, what’s it to you?”

“I knew him.”

“Yeah? Old friend?”

No, I thought. That was the other dead guy. I said, “I only met him once. I was looking into a matter for a friend, and I had some questions for Sattenstein. I went to his apartment, talked with him for an hour tops.”

“Learn anything?”

“Enough to rule him out.”

“Out of what?”

“Out of the picture,” I said. “I don’t want to go into detail here, but he was one direction I could go, and after I talked to him I realized that would be a dead end.”

He looked at me, thought about it. “And this was recent?”

“Within the past couple of weeks.”

“And now he’s dead, and you figure it can’t be a coincidence.”

“No,” I said, “I figure it’s almost certainly a coincidence. But I figure it’s worth the price of a hat to rule out the possibility that it’s not.”

A hat, in police parlance, is twenty-five dollars. A coat is a hundred. I have no idea what a hat actually costs these days, I can’t remember the last time I went out and bought one, but argot outlasts its origins. A pound is five dollars, and once upon a time that’s what a British pound sterling was worth in American money. I don’t suppose you can get much of a hat for five pounds.

And a hat was what I’d be buying Joe Durkin. He was a detective at Midtown North, on West Fifty-fourth, and Gramercy Park was well out of his range, but I didn’t know anybody in the precinct where Sattenstein had lived and died, and didn’t want to draw attention by making myself known to whoever had caught the case. Easier to ring Joe and get him to make a couple of phone calls.

Which had led to my sitting across a Formica-topped table from him in a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue. He was there because he was doing me a favor, but we both knew it was the sort of favor a person got paid for.

“For the sake of argument,” he said, “let’s say it wasn’t a coincidence, and whoever killed him had a reason. What would that reason be?”

To keep him from telling me something, I thought. Which he might have been ready to do, if I’d had the brains to call him back.

I said, “No idea, Joe.”

“None at all?”

“Well, he had a history. I don’t know if he’s got a yellow sheet, and my guess is he doesn’t, but for a period of time he was a receiver.”

“Not on the Jets, I don’t suppose.”

“I don’t know if you’re familiar with a man named Selig Wolf, but—”

“Jesus, of course I am. A wide receiver if there ever was one.”

“Well, Mark’s uncle Selig taught him the business.”

“Selig was his uncle?”

“His mother’s brother. Younger or older, I forget which.”

“Woman’s got a brother, he would pretty much have to be younger or older.”

“He could be a twin.”

“One’s born first, even with twins. Why are we even having this conversation? Jesus, Selig Wolf. You couldn’t want a better teacher.”

“So I gather. He followed in his uncle’s footsteps for a few years, he got wiped out in a burglary, and the whole mess had the effect of scaring him straight.”

“And at the time of his death he was teaching mentally challenged children how to tie their shoes. A tough way to make a living, but a noble calling indeed.”

“No, he was working as a bookkeeper for a couple of small firms.”

“And cooking the books for them.”

“Maybe a little.”

“You gotta love this city. You really do. He told you all this in an hour?”

“So? I just told you the whole thing in about ten minutes.”

“But that he went and opened up about it.” He shrugged. “So maybe you’re not bad at what you do. You know, if he never took a bust, odds are there’s nobody in the One-Three that knows he was a fencing master. I might feel obliged to pass the word.”

“You wouldn’t have to say where you heard it.”

“A snitch,” he said. “A generally reliable source.”

“That’s me, all right.” I passed him the two bills I’d palmed earlier, a five and a twenty. “I appreciate this, Joe. And you could use a new hat.”

“Hats I got a whole rack of. What I could use is a coat. Oh, man, the look on your face! Worth the price of admission right there. I’m glad to have the hat, my friend, and glad for the chance to sit down with you for a couple of minutes. Things working out for you?”

“I get by.”

“All we can ask,” he said. “All anybody can ask.”

I was back in my room, running it through my mind, when the phone rang. It was Joe, resuming our conversation as if it had never ended. “This Sattenstein,” he said. “Perp might have sized him up as a soft target. On account of he had a bandaged hand.”

“It was like that when I saw him.”

“You spot a man with a bandaged hand, you’re not worried he’ll fight back. But how’d he hurt the hand? Maybe he hit somebody. So maybe he’s a man with a short fuse, type who’d be apt to take a swing at a guy tries to hold him up.”

“With his other hand.”

“Whatever. So the perp slams him with whatever he brought along to hit people with. Your traditional blunt instrument.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “You just thought this up?”

“I picked up the phone and passed on the word about the vic’s famous uncle Selig. Which was news to all concerned, and my guy there showed his appreciation by mentioning the bandaged hand. A little quid for the old pro quo. I’d say one hand washes the other, but the bandage would get in the way.”

So Sattenstein’s sitting home and brooding over the woman who decided she was a lesbian, and the walls are closing in on him and he forgot to pick up a six-pack earlier, so if he wants a beer he has to leave the house. And why not walk a few blocks and drink it in the good company a saloon can provide? And who knows, maybe he’ll get lucky. You never know.

And there he is, drinking with his left hand because his right hand’s still bandaged. And somebody spots him, tags him when he leaves. Hits him too hard.

Why not?

Because I really wanted that to be how it played out. That way it was sheer coincidence. Fate, kismet, karma. Dumb luck. And if it was any of those things, then it wasn’t my fault.

I sat in my room and looked up his telephone number and tried to decide if it looked familiar, if it had been written on the message slip I’d crumpled and tossed. If it looked familiar, it wasn’t because I’d seen it written out, but because I’d dialed it several times when I was first trying to reach the man.

I dialed it now, and the machine picked up. I listened to a dead man’s voice. I hung up, wondering how long it would be before someone unplugged the machine, how long before the telephone company cut off the phone service.

You don’t die all at once. Not anymore. These days you die a little at a time.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually the thought came to me that I ought to go to a meeting, and I looked at my watch and saw I was too late for any of the noon meetings. It was past two already, and I hadn’t been to a meeting or eaten anything since breakfast.

Call your sponsor, a little voice murmured, and I picked up the phone, and when I had the number half dialed I realized I was calling his home number, and he’d be at his shop. I tried his work number and got it wrong, some woman answered, and I apologized and looked up the number, and got a busy signal.

I called Jan. The phone rang twice, and I rang off before she could answer.

I called Greg. The machine picked up, and I rang off. I’d left him enough messages.

But something made me dial the number again, and this time when the machine picked up I let the message play through to the end. After he’d invited me to leave a message after the beep, a mechanical voice cut in to inform me that the message tape was full.

Well, that explained why he hadn’t returned my calls. He hadn’t returned anybody’s calls. Out of town, most likely, and not checking his messages, and—

I rushed out of there. When I got to the street, there was an eastbound cab discharging a passenger in front of the big apartment building across the street. I yelled out, ran across the street, dodged traffic.

“You could get killed like that,” the driver said. “What’s the big hurry?”

I didn’t remember his address. I knew he was on Ninety-ninth between First and Second, and on the uptown side of the street near the middle of the block. There were four houses in a row that looked about the same, and it could have been any of them, but the first one I tried was the second from the right, and I spotted his name on one of the buttons. I pushed it and didn’t get a response, but then I hadn’t been expecting one.

There was a button at the bottom of the column marked Sput, which suggested that the building had a dyslexic superintendent. I rang it, and when nothing happened I rang it again. No response.

I rang a couple of apartments on the third floor, and eventually somebody answered and wanted to know who I was and what I wanted. I remembered the smell of mice. “Exterminator,” I said, and the buzzer let me in.

I climbed the stairs. The mouse smell was faint, and I doubt I’d have noticed it if I hadn’t remembered our conversation. Mice, cabbage, wet dog with garlic. At the third-floor landing a woman stood in a doorway, frowning at me. If I was an exterminator, why was I empty-handed? Where were my work clothes?

Before she could say anything, I drew out my wallet, flipped it open. I extended a forefinger, pointed upstairs. She shrugged, sighed, returned to her apartment, and I heard the bolt shoot home as she locked her door.

I climbed three more flights of stairs and went to Greg’s door. I rang the bell and heard the chimes sound within, and when all was still I knocked on the door. As if that would accomplish anything.

I tried the knob. The door was locked. Well, of course it would be locked. It was too late in the year for him to be at Fire Island, but there were enough other places for a week’s vacation, Key West or South Beach or some modest but genteel resort in the Caymans or the Bahamas. And he’d certainly lock up before he left, and what was I doing here anyway? I hadn’t returned a telephone call, which may have been from some other Mark and not the one who’d been killed in a street mugging, and to compensate I’d rushed uptown and flimflammed my way into his building, and wasn’t it time for me to turn around and go home?

I tried a credit card on the lock. If it wasn’t bolted, if the spring lock was all that was keeping me out, I might be able to loid my way in. I spent a couple of minutes establishing that such was not the case. The door was locked, and I couldn’t open it, short of kicking it in.

It seemed to me that I could sense something. It seemed to me that I could feel it.

I got down on one knee, lowered my face to floor level. There was a space of perhaps a quarter of an inch beneath the bottom of the door. Enough to show light, if there’d been a light on within the apartment.

I didn’t smell mice, or cabbage. Or wet dog with garlic. What I did smell sent me out of the building and down the street, looking for a working pay phone.

XXXI

YOU SEE SOMETHING like that,” Redmond said, “you want to cut him down. It’s heartless, somehow, leaving him like that. But you do the humane thing and you catch hell from the crime lab crew. Just opening a window pisses them off, but that’s just too fucking bad.”

He’d opened all the windows, and that was a help. The odor I’d caught a whiff of in the hallway hit us in the face when the super opened the door for us, and we walked into a stench that made me grateful I’d skipped lunch.

Aside from the smell, the living room was as I remembered it, and in perfect order. The kitchen was immaculate, but for a half-finished cup of coffee in its matching saucer.

In the bedroom, wearing nothing but a pair of blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts, Greg Stillman had a black leather belt looped around his neck, the wide brass buckle mostly hidden by his swollen throat. The other end of the belt disappeared over the top of the closet door, which had been closed to anchor it there. A folding step stool lay on its side, where it would have landed when he kicked it away.

“Nobody would ever do this,” Redmond said, “if they had the faintest fucking idea what they’d wind up looking like. Or what they’d smell like.”

The head swells, the neck stretches, the face blackens. The bowels and bladder empty themselves. Noxious gases form in the internal organs and find their way out. Flesh rots.

“The poor son of a bitch,” Redmond said. “You hate to leave him hanging there. But a fat lot of good it’d do him to cut him down.”

The man from the medical examiner’s office thought it was a very bad way to kill yourself. “Because you’re a long time dying,” he said. “And you’re conscious. You flop around like a trout on a line, and it’s too late to change your mind. Look here, on the door. Scuff marks from kicking. There’s pills you can take, you just go to sleep and you don’t wake up. And if you have second thoughts after you swallow them, well, you’ve generally got time to get over to the emergency room and have your stomach pumped.”

“Or you eat your gun and at least it’s quick.”

“Makes a goddam mess, though,” the ME told him. “But you’re not the one has to clean it up, so what do you care?”

“Me?” Redmond said. “Let’s leave me out of it, huh? I’m not about to eat my gun.”

He said, “You don’t smoke, do you? I quit years ago, but whenever I walk in on something like that, I wish I still smoked and I wish I had a cigar. One about a foot long and an inch thick. Something to smell instead of what we had to smell in there.”

We were in the Emerald Star, a Second Avenue bar I’d noticed on my first visit to Greg’s apartment. The bartender was a gaunt Hispanic with long sideburns and a pencil-line mustache. Redmond, who’d had whiskey and water when I met him at the Minstrel Boy, said he’d have a double Cutty Sark, neat, no ice.

I thought that sounded like a very sensible choice. But what I ordered was a Coke.

“My first partner,” I said, “was addicted to those little Italian cigars that look like pieces of twisted rope. They came in a little cardboard box, five or six to the box. I think the brand was De Nobili, but Mahaffey always called them guinea stinkers.”

“Nowadays they’d write him up for uttering an ethnic slur.”

“They might, and he wouldn’t care. I hated the smell of the things, but when we walked in on something like just now, he’d light one up and he’d give me one, and I’d light it and smoke it.”

“And be glad for it, I’ll bet.”

“It helped,” I said.

He picked up his glass, looked through it at the overhead light. I wondered why he did that. I’d done it often enough myself, and never knew why.

“No note,” he said.

“No.”

“My impression of him was that he’d be the type to leave a note. You knew him better than I did.”

“My impression,” I said, “was he wasn’t the type to kill himself.”

“Everybody’s the type,” he said. “The miracle is there’s so many of us who never get around to it.”

“Maybe.”

“My father killed himself. You know what that means?” I did, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “Means my odds aren’t good. I forget the numbers, but the sons of suicides are thus and so many times as likely to kill themselves as the rest of the world.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice.”

“No,” he said, and took a drink. “I have a choice. But have I got a choice what choice I make?” He grinned. “Run that little question through your mind a few times, and see where it gets you. So let’s run some other questions instead. When’s the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t remember,” I said, “but the last time I spoke to him was Saturday.”

“I played his messages. The tape starts on Monday morning. The ME said what, a couple of days?”

“I think so.”

“A person could go nuts listening to those messages. You must have heard them, you were standing a few feet away.”

“AA friends of his, mostly.”

“And some woman describing a piece of jewelry she wanted him to repair. Unbelievable. She goes on and on about it, the size, the materials, this, that, and the other, and then she says how she’ll bring it over so he can have a look at it. ‘So I don’t know why I’m describing it in such detail,’ she says. I felt like calling her up, telling her I don’t know either.”

“I more or less tuned her out.”

“I kept waiting for her to say something significant. Then there were the ones telling him they weren’t going to drink. Today, they said. Meaning they might drink tomorrow?”

“The idea is, you can’t know about tomorrow until it comes. But all you have to deal with is today.”

“Makes sense. Why tell him? Or were they just telling themselves?”

“A little of both,” I said. “I think they were probably his sponsees.”

“What’s that, the opposite of a sponsor?”

“They used to call them pigeons,” I said, “and some of the old-timers still do. But the consensus seems to be that the word pigeon is demeaning.”

“Because a pigeon’s a dirty bird that squawks and flies around and shits on your head.”

“That must be it.”

“No note,” he said again. “Other hand, the door was locked. When Rafael—was that his name?”

“I think so.”

“When he opened up for us, he turned the key twice, first to draw the bolt, then to snick the catch back. So if somebody helped him on his way, they didn’t walk out the door and just pull it shut after them.”

“They’d have had to use a key.”

“Which they could have done, and how would we know? How can we rule it in or out?”

“There was another lock,” I said. “The Fox, the big police lock. Plate in the floor, bar fits into it and braces against the door.”

“Keeps the whole world on the other side of the door,” he said. “If he really wants to avoid being disturbed, why not engage the police lock? Other hand, he doesn’t want to keep people away forever. Just long enough for him to do the deed and be done with it.”

With it and everything else.

He said, “Say he did it, because right now I don’t see anything that says he didn’t. Why would he do it? Aside from he’s an alcoholic and he’s gay, which are both pretty decent reasons, but can you come up with anything more specific?”

“He blamed himself for Jack Ellery’s death.”

“How?”

I furnished a very sketchy explanation of the amends process. “Jack was poking around in the past,” I said, “and as far as I can tell all that got him was a punch in the nose—”

“Yeah, he’d taken some lumps a week or more prior to his death. That was in the medical report. Tell me something. Why is this the first I’m hearing about any of this? Whose idea was it to withhold evidence, yours or Stillman’s?”

“There was no evidence for either of us to withhold. That’s what he hired me for, to look for evidence. And turn it over to you if I found anything.”

“But you came up empty?”

I’d already said more than I’d wanted to. But a couple of people were dead. Maybe one got mugged and the other killed himself, but maybe not.

“Jack had a list of people he’d harmed,” I said. “People to whom he intended to make amends. I went through the list and managed to rule them all out.”

“You cleared them.”

“Yes.”

“The people on his list.” He looked off into the distance. “You know, I’m sure your detective powers are fucking legendary, but why didn’t you bring me the list and let all the resources of the New York Police Department determine whether or not those suspects ought to be cleared?”

“That’s not why I was hired.”

“And you didn’t want to lose a fee.”

“I put in a lot more work than the fee was worth. And if I’d told him to bring it to you, you’d have done one of two things. Either you’d have shined him on and stuck the list in a file—”

“That wouldn’t have happened.”

“It might. Some bum’s AA sponsor, some faggot with an earring, has a list of people the dead guy may have done a bad turn a hundred years ago? Would that keep you up nights?”

“Scudder, you’ve got no fucking idea what keeps me up nights.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But if you took action, what would it be? You’d focus a lot of official attention on people with reasons of their own to stay out of the spotlight.”

“If they’re clean they’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Really? You cheat on your taxes?”

“Huh? Where did that come from?”

“Do you?”

“Of course not. My income’s all from the City of New York, so I couldn’t hide anything if I wanted to. And I file on the short form. It’s all a hundred percent straightforward.”

“So you’d have nothing to worry about in that area.”

“Absolutely not. If you’d like to pick a better example, one that might apply to me—”

“Which is to say that it wouldn’t bother you much if you got a notice from the IRS that they were doing a line audit of your returns for the past three years.”

“They’d have no reason. I just told you—”

“Strictly random,” I said, “and just the luck of the draw. Make you happy?”

“All right,” he said at length. “I get the point.”

“These were men,” I said, “who got on the list for one reason only. Somewhere along the way, Jack fucked them over. He burned one in a drug deal, he set one up for a burglary, he beat up the owner in the course of a store holdup, and he went to bed with another guy’s wife.”

“Nice guy we’re talking about.”

“He was turning into a nice guy,” I said, “or at least he was trying to. I don’t know that it would have worked, I’m not sure to what extent anybody’s capable of changing, but I’d be hard put to argue that he was wasting his time.”

“On paper,” he said, “you’ve got a guy who looked for all the world like a total rat bastard. And yet there were an awful lot of people who showed up for his funeral, and they weren’t there just to make sure he was dead.”

“The only thing missing,” Redmond said, “is the note. And the fact of the matter is, you can kill yourself in this world without writing one. It’s not an absolute requirement.”

Once, back when I still had a gold shield and a wife and a house on Long Island, I sat up late one night in my living room with the business end of a gun in my mouth. I can still remember the metallic taste of it. It seems to me I never had any real intention of going through with it, but I did have my thumb on the trigger, and it wouldn’t have taken much pressure to send a round through the roof of my mouth.

And they wouldn’t have found a note. I’d never even thought about writing out a note.

“Aside from that,” he said, “everything looks right. He had the petechial hemorrhages in the eyes, showing strangulation as cause of death. Chair was right where it ought to be if he stood on it and kicked it over. Place was neat as a pin otherwise, showing no evidence of a struggle, no sign that there was ever another person in the room.”

“Maybe the autopsy will show something.”

“Like blunt force trauma to the head? They’ll look for that, of course. Because somebody could have knocked him out and then hoisted him up there, though it’s not the easiest thing in the world. Plus the killer would have had to strip him to his shorts, because Stillman would have been dressed when he let the guy into his place.” He frowned. “And why fucking bother? Say you’re the guy, you want to kill Stillman, want to make it look like suicide. You get behind him, you conk him over the head, and he’s out cold.”

“So?”

“You’re gonna take the time to undress him? And risk that he’ll come to while you’re doing it? Why not just string him up and be done with it?”

“You’d need the belt,” I said.

“So? You take it and put it to use. You figure his pants’d fall off without it?”

“A lot of people undress before they kill themselves.”

“Or just stay undressed, if he was sitting around his apartment in his shorts. But do you go to the trouble of undressing a guy to make it look more like suicide? I don’t know, I suppose you could, but it sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Maybe.”

“Most things,” he said, “are more trouble than they’re worth. And maybe that’s all it was. Stillman got up, had his morning coffee, watered his plants, and took a long look at his life. And decided it was more trouble than it was worth.”

XXXII

THAT NIGHT I thought of going to Sober Today, Greg’s regular Thursday night meeting on Second Avenue. As if by going there I might slip into an alternate universe, one in which he was still alive. We’d chat on the break, and after the meeting we’d go out for coffee. Maybe we’d see what kind of pie they had at Theresa’s. And we’d talk about High-Low Jack, and the perils of the Ninth Step, and whatever else came to mind.

I didn’t go to that meeting, or any other. I thought I might go over to St. Paul’s, but didn’t, and then I thought I might catch some of the St. Paul’s crowd at the Flame. But I stayed in my room.

I sat at the window, and at one point I realized I was looking down at the liquor store across the street. It got to be ten o’clock, and I stayed where I was, and sometime between ten and ten thirty they turned off the lights. They would have closed at ten, but if someone showed up while they were still in the store, someone they’d known for years, they’d open the door and sell him what he needed. But once the lights were off, once the neon sign no longer glowed with promise, then they were well and truly shut for the night.

Of course the bars were still open. The bars would be open for hours yet, some of them until the legal closing hour of four a.m. And there were after-hours joints, any number of them, if you knew where to go. The Morrissey Brothers were out of business, but that didn’t mean a man with a thirst couldn’t find someone to sell him a drink after hours.

Now and then I glanced at the phone. I thought of calling Greg’s number, and I thought of calling Mark Sattenstein’s number, but those were just passing thoughts and I didn’t feel the need to make the calls. I also thought of other calls I might make, to living people—Jim Faber, for example, or Jan Keane. But I never picked up the phone.

If it rang, would I answer it? It seemed to me that I might, but it seemed just as possible that I might not. I envisioned myself sitting there while the telephone rang and rang and rang. Wondering who it might be, and yet unwilling to find out.

At twenty minutes of twelve I thought of the midnight meeting. All I had to do was go downstairs and flag a cab. I’d get there in plenty of time. They drew a raffish crowd, with active drunks apt to put in an appearance, and it wasn’t unheard-of for a punch or a chair to be thrown, but there was plenty of sobriety in the room all the same, and there had been times when it had helped me get through a bad night.

And maybe Buddha would be there. Maybe he’d explain to me that it was my dissatisfaction with what is that was the cause of all my unhappiness.

Right. I stayed where I was.

XXXIII

I HAD TO FORCE myself to go out and eat breakfast. I’d skipped dinner, and couldn’t remember if I’d had lunch. It seemed to me that I hadn’t.

Don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. The acronym is HALT, and it’s standard advice for beginners, and remains applicable no matter how long you’ve been sober. Ignore it and your mind begins working against you, and the next thing you know you’ve got a glass in your hand.

I’d been all those things the previous night, hungry and angry and lonely and tired, but I’d managed to get through the night in spite of myself. I had a plate of bacon and eggs with toast and home fries, and once I got the first bite down my appetite returned, and I cleaned my plate and drank three cups of coffee. I’d bought the Times on the way to the Morning Star, and someone had read and abandoned the Daily News, and I read each paper carefully, looking for stories of violent death. There were plenty of them, there always are, but for a change none of the newly dead were people I knew.

Back in my room, I looked up phone numbers and made calls. I rang Dukacs & Son, and recognized the proprietor’s voice when he answered. But I made sure: “Mr. Dukacs?”

“Yes?”

I broke the connection, called Crosby Hart at his office. He picked up the phone and said, “Hal Hart.”

“Wrong number,” I said, and rang off.

I made a third call to Scooter Williams. The phone rang and rang, and I wondered if a quick trip down to Ludlow Street would be overreacting. Then he picked up. He was out of breath, and something made me ask if he was all right.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “I just got out of the shower, I had to run to the phone. Uh, who is this?”

I gave my name.

He said, “Matthew Scudder. Matthew Scudder. Oh, right! Jack’s friend.”

“Right,” I said, figuring that was close enough.

“Yeah, I remember. I was gonna call you, man.”

“Oh?”

“Can’t remember why. It came to me, you know, and then it went away. Something you asked me, but don’t ask me what it was. Oh, wow. You asked me but don’t ask me?”

“You can’t remember.”

“Hey, if it came to me once it’ll come to me again. Like swallows to Capistrano, you know? You want to give me your number again? You gave it to me, but I don’t know what I did with it.”

I gave it to him again. He said, “Matthew Scudder. Okay, got it. Hey, you know what? You’re Scudder and I’m Scooter.”

“And to think some people doubt the existence of God.”

“Huh? Oh, right. Years since anybody called me that, though. Ages. Hey, it’ll come to me and I’ll call you.”

“That’s great,” I said, and finally managed to hang up.

So they were alive, all three of them.

I got to the noon meeting at Fireside. There was a message in my box when I got back. Red Man, it said, and there was a number. It took me a minute, but I figured out that it was Dennis Redmond, and made the call from my room.

“I figured Monday for the autopsy results,” he said, “but either they’ve got a light load over there or Stillman jumped the queue. No sign of blunt force trauma to the head. Or to any other part of him, as far as that goes.”

“So it looks like he did it himself.”

“It always did,” he said. “Of course somebody could have drugged him and strung him up. But that didn’t happen either. No drugs in his system, no blood alcohol.”

So he’d died sober.

“In fact,” he said, “all the physical evidence supports a verdict of suicide. Strangulation’s the cause of death. There ought to be a law.”

“Against suicide? I think there already is.”

“Against belts,” he said. “Where do they get off making them strong enough to support a man’s weight? You might as well be putting a loaded gun in the hands of a child.”

“How else are people going to keep their pants up?”

“What the hell’s wrong with suspenders? Or you could do like they do with fishing line. A certain amount of pressure and it snaps, gives the fish a sporting chance. Why not do the same with belts? A weight of more than a hundred pounds and it breaks. Think of the lives that would be saved.”

“And what about children?”

“Never thought of it,” he said. “But you’re right, it’d just trigger an epidemic of juvenile suicide. I guess there’s only one answer.”

“And that would be?”

“Warning labels. Works with cigarettes. Matt, I just thought you’d want to know. Your friend killed himself. Though I don’t suppose it makes you happy to hear that.”

“No,” I said. “How could it? But at least it saves me having to figure out what to do next.”

I was watching television when the phone rang. ESPN was showing a Gaelic football game, or a match, whatever they call it, and I sat there while a lot of young men in shorts and long-sleeved jerseys showed enormous energy doing something entirely incomprehensible. There was running and passing and kicking involved, and the score kept changing, in what struck me as a wholly arbitrary way.

I hit the Mute button and picked up the phone, and it was Jan. She said, “I think we should talk.”

XXXIV

TIFFANY’S IS THE FAMOUS Fifth Avenue jewelry store, and if I’d told a friend I was off to meet my girlfriend at Tiffany’s, he’d probably assume we’d be shopping for rings. But Tiffany’s is also the name of a coffee shop on Sheridan Square, open twenty-four hours a day, and Jan had picked it as a meeting place because it was midway between her neighborhood and mine.

I took my time walking to the subway, but even so I had to wait for her, and she showed up with a companion, a sharp-featured woman in her fifties with unconvincingly black hair. They came to my booth, each carrying a shopping bag, and Jan introduced the woman as Mary Elizabeth. We nodded at each other, and I motioned for them to sit down, and Jan looked at Mary Elizabeth, who shook her head.

“We won’t stay,” Jan said. She put her shopping bag on the table, and Mary Elizabeth placed hers alongside it. “I think this is everything,” Jan said.

I nodded, lost in thought, and then when nobody moved or said anything I remembered my assigned role in the proceedings. I reached into my pocket and took out a ring of keys. I put them on the table, and they just sat there for a beat, and then Jan reached for them, picked them up, weighed them in her hand, put them in her purse.

She turned to go, and Mary Elizabeth turned with her, and then Jan turned back to face me again. All in a rush she said, “I really hate this, and what I hate most of all is the timing. Right before your anniversary.”

“In a couple of days.”

“Tuesday, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“I was going to wait until afterward,” she said, “but I thought maybe that would be worse, and—”

“Let it go,” I said.

“I just—”

“Let it go.”

She looked on the point of tears. Mary Elizabeth said, “Jan,” and she turned and walked after her, to the door and out.

I stayed where I was. Two shopping bags shared the top of my table with the cup of coffee I’d ordered but so far hadn’t touched. One shopping bag was from a department store, the other from a company that sold art supplies. Each was a little more than half full, and Jan could have managed both of them herself. Mary Elizabeth, I decided, was there for moral support.

I went to St. Paul’s for the evening meeting. Afterward I followed the crowd to the Flame and sat there until everybody went home. I walked down Ninth to Fifty-seventh, then walked on past my hotel and all the way across town to Lexington Avenue. I turned on Lexington and walked down to Thirtieth Street and got there just in time to help set up chairs for the midnight meeting.

There were a few familiar faces in the room but nobody I really knew. They didn’t have a speaker, and the chairperson asked me if I had ninety days clean and sober. I said I’d spoken recently, and didn’t feel up to it. She found somebody else. They can always find somebody.

I sat there for an hour and drank a couple of cups of bad coffee and ate a few cookies. I didn’t pay much attention to the speaker and didn’t raise my hand during the discussion. At the end I thought about finding someone to go out for coffee with, and decided the hell with it. I walked up to Forty-second Street and caught a cab the rest of the way home.

My two shopping bags were as I’d left them, unpacked, standing side by side on the floor next to the bed. I went to bed, and they were still there the next morning. When I came back from breakfast, the maid had serviced my room, making my bed with clean sheets, emptying my wastebasket. And the shopping bags remained right where I’d left them.

I picked up the phone, called Jim. “I’ve got two shopping bags on my floor,” I said, “and I can’t seem to figure out what to do with them.”

“Empty shopping bags?”

“About half full.” He waited, and I said, “Clothes of mine. That I’d left at Jan’s place.”

“What I like about you,” he said, “is you always come right to the point.”

So I talked and he listened, and I waited for him to ask me why I’d waited the better part of a day before telling him what was going on, but he never said a word about my silence. He waited until I’d run out of words, and then he said, “You knew it was coming.”

“I suppose so.”

“That make it easier?”

“Not especially.”

“No, I didn’t think so. How do you feel?”

“Devastated.”

“And?”

“Relieved.”

“That sounds about right.”

I thought for a moment. Then I said, “I keep thinking that I made this happen.”

“By going to bed with Donna.”

“Right.”

“You realize, of course, that just because you keep thinking it doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Think about it, Matt.”

“She didn’t know about Donna.”

“No.”

“She didn’t even pick it up subliminally, because we haven’t spent any time together since then. We’ve barely even talked on the phone.”

“Right.”

“I’m just looking for a way for it to be my fault.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I went to the midnight meeting last night.”

“Probably didn’t hurt you.”

“Probably not. I think I’ll spend most of the weekend in meetings.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“SoHo meets tonight. I think I’ll go somewhere else.”

“Good thinking.”

“Jim? I’m not going to drink.”

“Neither am I,” he said. “Isn’t that great?”

I went to meetings throughout the weekend, but I was in my room Saturday afternoon just long enough to get a phone call.

It was Joe Durkin. “I don’t even know if this is worth passing on,” he said, “but you were brooding about that mugging in Gramercy, and I thought you’d like to know it was just what it looked like. A mugger who didn’t know his own strength.”

“They got the guy?”

“In the act,” he said. “Well, not in the act of hitting your guy. Saperstein?”

“Sattenstein.”

“Close enough. He wasn’t the first person mugged in that part of town, just the first who died from it, so they used a decoy from Street Crimes, put him in plain clothes, poured some booze on him, and had him walk around looking like he was half in the bag.”

“I don’t know why I never got assignments like that.”

“It must have been a treat,” he said, “to see the look on the skell’s face when the perfect victim showed him a badge and a gun. What I hear, they’re about to clear ten or a dozen cases. Guy’s confessing to everything they’ve got.”

“Including Sattenstein?”

“ ‘Oh, the poor man who was killed? No, that one I didn’t do.’ But he’ll cop to it too, by the time he gets to court. His lawyer’ll see to that. Get everything listed in the plea agreement so there’s nothing left to come back at you later on.”

Sometimes things were just what they appeared to be. Gregory Stillman hanged himself, Mark Sattenstein got killed by a mugger.

I got out of there and headed off to another meeting.

Sunday afternoon I went to a meeting in a synagogue on Seventy-sixth Street a few doors west of Broadway. I’d never been there before, and when I walked in my first impulse was to turn around and walk out again, because Donna was there. I stayed, and we were cordial to each other, and she thanked me again for helping her out the previous Saturday, and I said I’d been happy to help, and it was as if we’d never been to bed together.

I met Jim for our usual if-it’s-Sunday-this-must-be-Shanghai dinner, and we didn’t talk about Jan or Donna or the state of my sobriety. Instead he did almost all of the talking, telling stories from his own drinking days, and back before his first drink, back in his childhood. I got caught up in what he had to say, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he’d purposely avoided discussing what was going on in my life these days. I couldn’t decide whether he was giving me a break or just trying to spare himself, but whatever it was, I was grateful.

We went to St. Clare’s, and then I walked him home and went home myself. Jacob was behind the desk, looking confused. I asked him what was the matter.

“Your brother called,” he said.

“My brother?”

“Or maybe it was your cousin.”

“My cousin,” I said. I was an only child. I had a couple of cousins, but we’d long since lost touch with one another. I couldn’t think of one who was likely to call.

“It was a man,” he said. “Have to be, if it was your brother, wouldn’t it?”

“What exactly did he say?”

“Says he calling Mr. Scudder. I ask would he like to leave his name. Scudder, he says. Yessir, I know it’s Mr. Scudder you calling, but what would your name be? So he say it again, Scudder, and I’m feeling like them two guys.”

“Which two guys?”

“You know. Them two guys.”

“Abbott and Costello.”

“Yeah, them two. So I say, lemme see now, you’re also Mr. Scudder. And he say, I am the Scudder.”

“ ‘I am the Scudder.’ ”

“Yeah, just like that. So I say, then you and Mr. Scudder be brothers. And he say how all men be brothers, and at this point it’s getting way too weird for me.”

“Gee, I can’t imagine why.”

“Say what?”

“Nothing. He leave a number?”

“Say you have it.”

“I have his number.”

“What he say.”

“All men are brothers, and he’s the Scudder, and I have his number.”

He nodded. “I tried to get it right,” he said, “but man like that don’t make it easy.”

“You did fine,” I told him.

XXXV

I RODE UP in the elevator, feeling pleased with myself. I’d managed to figure out who my caller had to be, and that was the first detecting I’d done in longer than I cared to remember.

I looked up his number, dialed it, and when he answered I said, “If you’re ever in the neighborhood, stop in and apologize to my desk clerk. You had the poor guy caught up in an Abbott and Costello routine.”

The silence stretched until I started wondering if my detection had gone awry. Then he said, “Who’s this, man?”

“Scudder.”

“Oh, wow,” he said. “When I called, you know, I thought that’d be you answering your phone. But you’re at some kind of hotel.”

“Well, it’s not the Waldorf.”

“And this cat I was talking to, he’s the desk clerk?”

“That’s right. His name is Jacob.”

“Jacob,” he said. “Jay. Cub. Great name, man. You don’t meet many Jacobs.”

“I guess not.”

“Though you probably meet this particular one just about every day. I was goofing with him, you know? On account of the man’s got a little bit of an accent. He from the Indies?”

“Somewhere down there.”

“Yeah, well, I asked for you, and he repeated your name, like to take the message? Except the vowel sound came out more oo than uh. Like Scooder, you know?”

“Sure.”

“So he asks my name, and I may have been, you know, the least bit high at the time.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Under the righteous influence of a benevolent herb, if you can dig it. And I thought, Right, I’m the Scooter calling for Mr. Scooder. And, well, you can see how we sort of went around in circles from there.”

“I figured it was something like that.”

“Abbott and Costello,” he said. “ ‘Who’s on first?’ Them the cats you mean?”

“The very gentlemen.”

“Can’t keep ’em straight, though. Abbott and Costello. Which one had the mustache?”

“Neither one.”

“Neither one? You sure about that?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “Uh, Scooter—”

“You’re wondering why I called.”

“I guess I am.”

“High-Low Jack,” he said. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Because you didn’t say anything for a minute there. That was what you asked me when you were over here, right? After we talked about Lucille?”

“Right.”

“You wanted to know about his name. What it meant, where it came from. Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, there’s that thing from the card game. High, Low, Jack, and the Game. But why call him that? There’s Smiling Jack, there’s One-Eyed Jack, there’s Toledo Jack. Why High-Low Jack for Jack Ellery?”

Sooner or later he’d get to it.

“Mood swing,” he said.

“Mood swing?”

“Very changeable guy. He’s up, he’s down. He’s laid-back, he’s jumpy as a cat. He’ll hug you or he’ll slug you. Hey!”

“Hey?”

“Rhymes,” he said. “Hug you, slug you. Anyway, High-Low Jack. Now, wasn’t for the card game, wouldn’t have stuck. Like if his name was Ted, you wouldn’t call him High-Low Ted, because it wouldn’t mean anything. Or say his name was Johnny instead of Jack, which it could have been, they’re both short forms of John, right? High-Low Johnny? I don’t think so.”

“High-Low Jack,” I said.

“Right. Mood swing. Up one minute, down the next.”

Well, that was at least slightly interesting. Maybe it even made sense. One thing it didn’t do was shed any light on the question of who killed him, or why.

“He like that as a little kid?”

“How’s that?”

“You knew him when you were kids, right? Was he like that then, up one minute and down the next?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Maybe he was manic-depressive,” Scooter said. “I don’t know, everybody’s got good days and bad days, don’t they? Shrinks want to hang a label on everybody.”

I was beginning to tire of the conversation. The bottom line seemed to be that Jack was a moody guy, and I didn’t see that leading me anywhere. Whatever moods the man had had, one could only assume they ended at the grave.

“The world’s a heartless place,” I said, and Scooter said he couldn’t agree with me more. I had that right, he assured me.

“High-Low Jack,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it the first time you asked. Seems so obvious now.”

“Now that you think what a moody fellow he was.”

“Yeah, that’s a fact. One minute he’s cool as a cucumber, next minute he’s hot as a pistol. Wow!”

“Wow?”

“Just thinking, man. It came to me just like that.”

“What did?”

“Expressions, man. How you can turn ’em around and have fun with ’em. Like you could say cool as a pistol, you know?”

“I guess you could.”

“Or hot as a cucumber. Oh, man, can you dig it? ‘That chick is hot as a cucumber.’ I mean, wow.”

“Wow.”

“Just switching things around, you know? Or think how everybody always says they searched every little nook and cranny. Turn it around—every little cranny and nook. Makes just as much sense that way, and yet you never hear it.”

“Remarkable.”

“You said it, man. Why does it always have to be lo and behold? From now on I’m gonna make a point of saying behold and lo! instead. Can you dig it?”

“Right,” I said.

“Right as a whip. Smart as rain.”

“Uh—”

“Even Jack. High-Low Steven.”

I was hanging up when the last phrase came through. I brought the receiver back to my ear. “Say that again,” I said.

“What?”

“What you just said. About Jack.”

“Oh, just more switching, man. Like you say High-Low Jack and Even Steven, and I switched ’em around.”

“Oh, just expressions.”

“Right, having to do with Jack and his buddy.”

“His buddy.”

“Yeah, Steve.”

“Steve.”

“You’re like an echo, man. Scooder and Scooter, and there’s another echo right there.”

“Tell me about Steve,” I said.

He couldn’t tell me much.

Jack had this running buddy, and if Jack was a creature of changeable temperament, Steve was just the opposite, always steady, always calm and cool. Hence Even Steven, as opposed to High-Low Jack.

He didn’t even know how close the two had been, or what common interest might have bound them in friendship. It was the coincidence of their names that linked them as much as anything else.

“Like with Jack,” he said, “and calling him High-Low Jack, because there’s already the expression from the card game. But you wouldn’t call him High-Low Ted.”

“So you said.”

“And the same with Steve. If it doesn’t rhyme, you don’t pin the label on him. Even Steven, but not, like, Even Ted.”

“Steady Teddy,” I suggested.

“Oh, wow!”

That sent him zooming off on a tangent, but it wasn’t too hard to get him back on course. He didn’t know Steve’s last name, and didn’t know that it was a matter of memory, as he had the sense that he’d never known Steve’s last name. Lucille, who’d very likely been to bed with Steve, probably hadn’t known his last name, either, and might or might not remember him, and anyway it was all academic, since Lucille had long since vanished somewhere out west.

And if it hadn’t been for Jack, nobody’d call his buddy Even Steven. The two names seemed to go together. It was funny with names, he said.

“Like I had a Vespa for about ten minutes,” he said. “Little motor scooter? And that was enough, and to some people I’ve been Scooter Williams ever since. I mean, people who never even knew me when I had the bike.”

“Like Jacob.”

“Jacob,” he said. “Oh, your Jacob! Scooter and Scooder!”

“Right.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Like Jacob. Funny, isn’t it?”

I agreed that it was. And, he wondered, was this helpful, any of it? About Jack’s name and where it came from, and Even Steven?

I said we’d have to see.

I called Poogan’s, and Danny Boy came to the phone. “One quick question,” I said. “Even Steven.”

“That’s not a question, Matthew.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not. Does the name Even Steven—”

“Mean anything to me?”

“That’s the question.”

“Not out of context. Is there a context?”

I told him what I knew.

“An old pal of Jack Ellery’s,” he said. “High-Low Jack and Even Steven. You know, the fact that a man’s unflappable, that he doesn’t have to take Librium to keep from bouncing off walls, that’s not the kind of trait that makes him instantly identifiable.”

“I know.”

“What it is, it’s the absence of a trait. It’s sort of like ‘Oh, you know who I mean. He’s the guy who hasn’t got a wooden leg.’ ”

“Well, if you happen to hear anything.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “I gather you’re still on that case.”

“Sort of.”

“Well, if the client’s still footing the bill—”

“My client’s dead.”

“Oh.”

“He killed himself.”

“Oh.”

“Hanged himself with his belt. I liked him too.”

Danny Boy didn’t say anything for a long moment, and I’d already said more than I’d intended. Eventually he said he’d let me know if he came up with anything, and I told him not to worry if he didn’t, and that’s where we left it.

XXXVI

IN THE MORNING I made a couple of phone calls before I went out for breakfast, then worked the phones some more after I’d eaten and read the paper. I had a name to try on people—Even Steven—and I bounced it off everybody I could think of, including Bill Lonergan in Woodside and Vann Steffens in Jersey City. Could anybody come up with a fellow named Steve who’d hung out with Jack Ellery? Did anybody get any kind of a hit off the name Even Steven? I kept busy, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.

And why was I even bothering? I didn’t have a case, and my client was dead. He’d hanged himself. The only way someone else could have strung him up was by knocking him out first, and that hadn’t happened.

Unless—

Unless he had a visitor, a calm and credible fellow with a good cover story. Someone who might even pass for a cop, someone who might have turned up at Jack Ellery’s rooming house and convinced the fellow in charge to hand over whatever remained of Ellery’s belongings.

Someone who inspired confidence. Someone who could get behind Greg Stillman and get him in a choke hold, cutting off the flow of blood to the brain, inducing unconsciousness. Not choking him enough to strangle him, just enough to put him under, just enough to render him helpless while he staged the suicide. Stripped to his shorts, the belt around his neck, its end secured by the closet door.

And then what? Drop him and let him hang? Or wait until he began to come out of it, and then let him go, so you could watch him thrash around, kicking at the closed door, struggling for breath, for life.

The choke hold might leave marks, some form of physical evidence. But the belt would cover up all of that.

Even Steven.

The super at Jack’s rooming house was named Ferdie Pardo. Short for Ferdinand, I suppose. He wore a dark blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a pack of Kools in his shirt pocket and a pencil behind his ear, and he looked like a man who didn’t expect the day to turn out well.

“There was a guy showed up maybe a week ago,” he said. “Asking the same question. What did I do with Ellery’s stuff?”

“And what did you tell him?”

“Same thing I’m telling you. Guy showed up and I gave it to him.”

“He sign for it?”

He shook his head. “There was nothing,” he said. “Just crap, you know? Imagine you live your whole life and when you’re gone you leave some old clothes and a couple of books.”

“That’s all?”

“Pair of shoes, a notebook, some papers. I didn’t think anybody was gonna come for it. I had it down in the basement, all packed up in this duffel bag, and I have to say the duffel bag was worth more than everything inside it put together. And it was a worn-out old duffel bag that wasn’t worth anything much to begin with.”

“So you didn’t think a signature was required.”

“Another week,” he said, “and I’d of put it out for the garbage pickup, and I wouldn’t make them sign for it, either. He was a cop, he had some reason to collect it, so I gave it to him.”

“You say he was a cop.”

He frowned. “He wasn’t a cop?”

“I’m the one asking.”

“Well, now I’m asking you.” Maybe so, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “I think he said he was a cop. He definitely gave that impression.”

“Did he show ID?”

“Like a badge?” He frowned. “I had any sense, I’d just say yes, absolutely, showed me a badge, showed me his ID, Patrolman Joe Blow, Detective Joe Blow, whatever.”

“But as luck would have it you’re an honest man.”

“Shit,” he said. “What I am, I’m a man who thinks of things a couple of seconds too late. What I think he did, and even so I can’t swear to it, is he took out his wallet and flashed it at me. Like, I’m a cop and I can’t be bothered wasting my time showing some asshole like you my ID. Like that.”

“But the impression you got was police.”

“Yeah. He looked like a cop.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Jesus,” he said. “I wish you’d ask me to describe the other one that showed up. Skinny fag with an earring. That’d be easier. He sure as shit didn’t look like a cop.”

One more flattering obituary notice for Greg. I said, “Take a shot at describing the cop, why don’t you.”

“Oh, so he’s a cop after all? Okay, fuck it. About your height and weight.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know. What are you?”

“Forty-five.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“So he’s about forty-five.”

“Well, forty, fifty, somewhere in there. Split the difference and you got forty-five.”

“Maybe it was me,” I suggested.

“Huh?”

“My age, my height, my weight—”

“Maybe he was a little heavier,” he said grudgingly. “Sort of a blocky-type body, thicker through the middle.”

“What about his face?”

“What about it?”

“Can you describe it?”

“It was a face, you know? Two eyes, a nose, a mouth—”

“Oh, a face.”

“Huh?”

“If you saw him again, would you know him?”

“Sure, but what are the odds? What are there, a couple of million people in New York? When am I gonna see him again?”

“How was he dressed?”

“He was dressed okay.”

Jesus. “You recall what he was wearing?”

“A suit. Suit and tie.”

“Like a cop might wear.”

“Yeah, I guess. And glasses. He was wearing glasses.”

“And he took Ellery’s duffel bag and left.”

“Right.”

“Never told you his name, that you remember, and I don’t suppose he gave you a business card.”

“No, nothing like that. Why give me a business card? What business am I gonna give him? Call him up, tell him the shitter in Room Four-oh-nine won’t flush? Let him know one of my deadbeats moved out in the middle of the night, and if he comes real quick he can have the room?”

“And everything Ellery left,” I said, “was in the duffel bag.”

“Except for the suit they buried him in.”

They didn’t bury him, they cremated him, but that was more than my new friend needed to know.

“And you rented his room.”

“The man’s dead,” he said, “and I cleaned all his crap outta there, and he’s not coming back, so what do you think I did with it? There’s a guy in there right now.”

“Even as we speak?”

“Huh?”

“Is the new tenant home?”

“He’s not a new tenant,” he said. “He moved to Ellery’s room because it’s a little bigger than the one he was in. He’s been living here, oh, maybe three years at this point.”

“What I was asking—”

“And no, he’s not home. This hour he’s at OTB, two blocks down on Second Avenue. That’s where you’ll find him, all day every day.”

“Good,” I said. “You can show me his room.”

“Huh? I told you, it’s rented. Somebody’s already living there.”

“And he’s welcome to it,” I said. “I just want a few minutes to look around.”

“Hey, I can’t let you do that.”

I took out my wallet.

“What, you’re gonna show me ID? I still can’t let you in there no matter how many badges you show me.”

“I can do better than that,” I said.

Pardo thought he should be in the room with me while I searched it. I told him he’d be better positioned in the hall, in case the current tenant made a sudden reappearance.

“I told you,” he said. “He’s gone for the day. Long as those betting windows are open, he’s there.”

“Even so.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I should be here to keep an eye, you know?”

“Because I might be running an elaborate scam,” I said, “where I go around paying fifty dollars to gain access to rooms of people who don’t own anything.”

He wasn’t happy, but he went out into the hall and I closed the door, and used the hook-and-eye gadget to keep him out. Then I got to work looking for anything Jack might have tucked away where it wouldn’t be easy to find.

A piece of carpeting covered most of the floor. It was a bound remnant, and it hadn’t been tacked down, so it was easy enough to roll it up after I’d moved a couple of pieces of furniture. And it was almost as easy to replace everything after I’d established that the carpet hadn’t been hiding anything.

The next place I looked was the dresser, a dark wood chest of drawers, its top scarred by neglected cigarettes. I took out each drawer in turn, stacking its contents on the floor, turning over the empty drawer to check its bottom, then putting everything back. One drawer, the wood warped with age, didn’t want to come out, but I coaxed it, and had no more luck with it than with the one before it, but the next drawer, just one up from the bottom, was the charm. There was a 9×12 manila envelope Scotch-taped to its underside. An envelope just like it had held Jack’s Eighth Step.

I picked at the tape, freed the envelope. One wing of the metal clasp broke while I was opening it. If the contents turned out to be the new tenant’s can’t-miss formula for picking winners, I’d be hard put to leave it as I found it. But I wasn’t really worried on that score.

The envelope held three sheets of unlined notebook paper, covered in what I was able to recognize as Jack’s careful handwriting. There was a newspaper clipping as well, and I took a look at it before I read what Jack had written.

It was from the Post, and it ran to the better part of a full page. I read it all the way through, although I could have stopped after the first paragraph.

I remembered the case.

When I’d finished the clipping I read the first paragraph of what Jack had written, then decided the rest could wait. I put the dresser drawer back, then returned everything to the envelope, fastened it with what remained of the clasp, and tucked the envelope inside my shirt. I can’t say it improved the fit of that garment, but with the shirt buttoned over it there wasn’t much chance anyone would take notice. And I could leave Jack’s old room as empty-handed as I’d entered it.

I let myself out. Pardo was a few steps down the hall.

“Nothing,” I told him.

“What did I tell you? These people had anything, they’d live somewhere else.”

XXXVII

I WALKED DOWNTOWN, looking for someplace to have a cup of coffee while I read what Jack had written. I wound up at Theresa’s. I skirted the counter, where Frankie Dukacs was giving his full attention to a bowl of soup, and took a booth where all he’d see of me was the back of my head.

I didn’t want a meal, but I remembered the last time I’d been here and ordered a piece of pie with my coffee. They didn’t have strawberry-rhubarb, but they had pecan, and I decided that would do just fine.

The newspaper clipping told of a man and woman who’d been shot dead in what the Post called a “Bohemian love nest” on Jane Street. It was Bohemian because it was not only in the Village, but in a back house, a onetime carriage house located to the rear of the Federal-period town house that fronted on the street. And it was a love nest because the two victims were nude, and in bed, and the man was married to somebody else.

He was a big player in the financial world. His name was G. Decker Raines, with the G standing for Gordon, and his name got in the papers a lot in connection with corporate takeovers and leveraged buyouts. Her name was Marcy Cantwell, and she’d come to New York to be an actress. What she’d become instead was a waitress, but she’d taken some classes and had a turn in some showcase and workshop productions.

One night she waited on Raines’s table, and caught his eye, and he was back the next evening all by himself. He was still there at closing time, and walked her back to where she was staying at the Evangeline House, a residence for young women on West Thirteenth Street. Male guests weren’t allowed upstairs, but they were able to sit together in the parlor.

A week later she was living in the Jane Street back house, and she wasn’t waiting tables anymore.

A few months later she was dead, and so was he.

I didn’t get all of this from the clipping, or from Jack’s account of the incident. I read through everything a couple of times, then got myself down to the microfilm room at the library, where I read everything the Times had. The story had stayed alive a long time. It couldn’t really miss. She was a beauty and he was a rich guy, and his wife was socially prominent and his kids went to private schools, and best of all the case never got solved. That meant it might be just what it looked like, a home invasion that turned violent, but it might be something else—a contract killing arranged by a business rival of Raines’s, or something spawned by jealousy, either the wife’s or that of a prior boyfriend of Marcy’s. She’d had a couple, including a bartender with a history of violence toward women, and the cops knocked on a lot of doors and asked a lot of questions, but they never caught a break.

Or maybe I should say we and not they, because I was still with the NYPD when it happened, and in fact still attached to the Sixth Precinct. Our house caught the case, but I was never assigned to it, and we didn’t have it long before all the publicity led the Major Case Squad to take it away from us.

A while ago, this was. Before the bullet that killed Estrellita Rivera swept me along in its wake, out of my job and marriage and into a room at the Northwestern. Before Jack Ellery got tagged for something else, and went away for it, and came out and got sober. A full dozen years ago, and more than enough time for the case to go very cold. There were cold cases where you knew who did it, even though you couldn’t do anything about it. And there were cases where you didn’t know a thing, and this was one of those.

But I knew. Jack did it. Jack and Steve.

“I’m writing this out separately,” Jack’s account started out. “This is part of my Fourth Step, and I’ll discuss this in my Fourth Step and talk about it with G. when I do my Fifth Step. But there is someone else involved, so I am going to write this out now just for myself. And of course for my Higher Power, who might be reading over my shoulder, or listening to my thoughts.”

Then there was some speculation on the nature of that Higher Power, or God. It was interesting enough, but nothing special, and really just Jack thinking some thoughts of his own on paper.

After a couple of paragraphs of that, he got back to the matter at hand. He told how an acquaintance, whom he neither named nor identified, had pointed out Marcy Cantwell as a former actress-waitress who now had plenty of time for auditions and acting classes, because she’d found a sugar daddy with a fat wallet. And how he’d shared this information with a friend. “I will call him S.,” he added, and that’s what he called him for the rest of the document, never revealing any personal information about him, never describing or identifying him.