A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“I had a gun in my hand,” he wrote, “and when the man went for a gun, I shot him without thinking. He was naked and was grabbing for his pants to cover himself. I don’t know why I thought he was going for a gun. I shot him in the chest and he fell back and I said we have to do something, we have to call somebody. And then S. took the gun from me. He told me to shut up. He told me I had to calm down. He said she’d seen our faces, she could identify us. She was crying and begging, and trying to cover herself with her hands, and I was like No, you can’t do this, and he was ice-cold the way he always was and he just shot her between the breasts and she fell back next to the man. I don’t know if she was alive or dead. And E.S. took the gun and put it back in my hand, and wrapped his own hand around mine, and said, Come on, you have to do this. And I had my finger on the trigger and his finger was over mine, and together we shot her in the forehead. And he took the gun and shot the man one more time, also in the head, to make sure.”

And that was that.

He’d changed it when he recounted it to his sponsor. Shifted the scene from the Village to the Upper West Side, recast the personnel, changing a money guy and his playmate to a drug dealer and his Spanish girlfriend. The most vivid image of all, S. pressing the gun into his hands and making him shoot the girl, somehow never made the final cut.

Some of it had likely been designed to render the event less identifiable, and it had certainly worked; I’d been unable to find a case that fit the account I got from Greg. Beyond that, I had to believe he’d tailored the story to lessen its impact on his sponsor. Jack had wanted to be honest, but he hadn’t been capable of one hundred percent honesty right off the bat. He had to work his way up to it.

It was getting dark out when I left the library. I’d lost all track of the time, and when I checked my watch I saw that it was past five. It wasn’t fully dark, but the sun was down, and a gray day was drawing to a close. Every day the sun disappeared a little earlier than the day before. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that, it happened every year, but there were times when I felt there was a sadness attached to it, that the poor old year was dying a day at a time.

One more day and I’d be a year sober.

I hadn’t even thought of it, not on this particular day, not until this moment, standing on the library steps between the two stone lions, weighed down by the encroaching darkness and by the greater and deeper darkness of what I’d been reading. Gordon Decker Raines, Marcia Anne Cantwell, John Joseph Ellery—all dead. And one man, S. or Steve or Even Steven, who’d put bullets in all three of them. And I was alive and sober, and in another day I’d have a year.

I knew I ought to go to a meeting. I’d been too busy to go at noon, but it’s a rare time of day when Manhattan doesn’t have a meeting on offer somewhere, and there were several in and around midtown in the hours between five and seven, designed to catch the office worker on his way home. I’d been to one called Happy Hour a couple of times, and there was Commuters Special, near Penn Station, and another around the corner from Grand Central. I was at Forty-second and Fifth, just a few blocks west of Grand Central, and there might be another even closer, but I didn’t have my meeting book with me. It’s always in my back pocket, but I’d evidently not transferred it to the pair of pants I had put on this morning, and I didn’t know where the meetings were or exactly what time they started.

I decided I could go home and shower and shave and maybe even go so far as to eat something. And I could put away the manila envelope, which now held some notes I’d made at the library, along with the clipping and Jack’s account of the twelve-year-old killing on Jane Street. And I’d be able to show up at my regular meeting at St. Paul’s, and I could raise my hand and announce that tomorrow would be my anniversary.

Or I could wait until tomorrow, and announce it then.

Either way, people would applaud. They’d clap for me, as if I’d done something remarkable. And maybe I had.

But not yet I hadn’t. The announcement could wait, I decided, until the year was complete.

I was tired, and was all set to hail a cab until I remembered that it was the heart of the rush hour, and the traffic would be impossible. I didn’t want to sit in an unmoving taxi while the lights changed and changed again, but neither was I ready to face the sardine-can crush of the rush-hour subway.

It had rained a little earlier. It felt as though it might rain some more. But maybe it would hold off, at least for as long as it took me to walk home.

I was four or five blocks from my hotel when the rain started. I was just passing a chain drugstore when I felt the first drops, and I thought about stopping for an umbrella, and decided it wasn’t coming down hard enough to justify spending the three or four dollars. I already had four or five of them in my room, and if I bought another I’d have five or six, and I never remembered to take one unless it was already pouring when I left my room.

I walked another block or two and the rain slackened, and I was congratulating myself on my good judgment when the skies opened up. I ducked into a shoe repair shop, and the only umbrellas he had cost ten bucks. I bought one, and by the time I got outside and opened it, the rain had stopped altogether, and not another drop fell all the rest of the way home.

There are days when that sort of thing gets a laugh out of me, or at least a chuckle, but this wasn’t one of those days. I wanted to smash something, perhaps the umbrella, perhaps the man who sold it to me. But I didn’t. I was, after all, a model of sobriety, one day away from my anniversary, and I reminded myself of this as I carried my umbrella into the hotel.

No messages. I went upstairs, walked down the hall to my room. I had my key out, and it seems to me that I felt something, had some sense of foreboding. And maybe I did, maybe I picked up a vibration, maybe without identifying it I caught some scent coming under the door or through the keyhole.

And maybe not. The memory tends to fill in the blanks, furnishing what seems fitting whether or not it ever happened. Maybe I sensed something and maybe I didn’t, but either way I stuck my key in the lock and opened my door.

XXXVIII

AT FIRST I didn’t recognize the smell. It was strong, it hit me in the face the minute I had the door open, and I’m sure it was as unmistakable in its own way as the stench that had permeated Greg Stillman’s apartment. I thought, That’s an awful smell, that’s unhealthy to breathe, I’d better open a window and clear the place. So I recognized the nature of it, but I couldn’t say what it was.

And then in an instant I could. It was booze, it was ethyl alcohol, it was more specifically bourbon.

The whole room reeked of it. Was it really there? Was my mind doing this, conjuring up a smell in response to the stress of my work and the anxiety that precedes an AA anniversary? It was as if the cleaning woman had broken a bottle in my room, but I didn’t keep whiskey in my room, so there was no bottle for her or anyone else to break. And it was Monday, and Saturday was the day she cleaned my room, and she’d have no reason to be there, and neither would anyone else, and I’d left the room locked, and it had been locked just now because I’d needed to turn my key to let myself in, and God, God in Heaven, what was going on?

Then I looked over at my desk. My chair was drawn up next to it, turned just enough toward the door so that it seemed to be inviting me to sit down. And on the desk there was a glass tumbler of the sort they used to call an old-fashioned glass, not because there was anything old-fashioned about it, but because it had been designed to hold that cocktail called an old-fashioned.

Did anybody order old-fashioneds anymore? Had I ever had one myself? It seemed to me that I had, that I must have. It seemed to me that, with just a little effort, I could remember what it tasted like.

I did not own a glass like this. I owned a couple of water tumblers. One had a sort of bell shape to it, of the type in which drugstores sold Coca-Cola when drugstores still had soda fountains. The other wasn’t strictly speaking a glass at all, in that it was made out of plastic, so that it wouldn’t shatter when I dropped it on the bathroom floor.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the glass. I’d had glasses of that size and shape when I lived with Anita and the boys in Syosset. Like every proper suburbanite, I’d had a fully equipped bar in the den, with all the glasses one might be called upon to provide for one’s guests. And, while nobody had ever asked me to mix up a batch of old-fashioneds, that was the glass of choice for serving a drink on the rocks. This wasn’t one of the glasses from that set, which I could only presume were still in the finished basement of the Syosset house, but it was that type.

Yet I could swear I recognized the glass. It was just the sort in which Jimmy Armstrong served drinks on the rocks.

Or a double bourbon, straight up, no ice, if that was your pleasure.

This glass, this glass on my desk, was filled to within perhaps a half inch of its brim with a clear amber liquid. I was able to identify it as a bourbon called Maker’s Mark. There may be gifted human beings who could have made that identification on the basis of the color and aroma alone, but I am not one of them. I did not recognize the brand so much as I deduced it, and I based my deduction on the presence of the bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon that stood on my desk just a few inches from the glass.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look anywhere but where I was looking—at the desk, at the glass and the bottle.

Thoughts rushing at me, one after the other:

It was a hallucination. There was no bottle, no glass, no smell of whiskey.

It was a dream. I’d come home, I’d lain down for a nap, and now I was having an impossibly vivid drunk dream.

It was my sobriety that was the illusion, the hallucination. I’d been chipping around for months, having a drink here and a drink there, telling myself and everyone I knew that I didn’t drink anymore. But it was all a lie, a 364-day lie, and the proof lay before me, because I’d poured a drink before I left my room that morning and there it was, waiting for me on my return.

I blinked, and it was still there. I forced myself to look away, and then looked back, and it was still there. I felt myself drawn toward it. I wanted to approach it, not to pick it up, God no, not to touch it, but to somehow make it go away. I had to make it go away. I couldn’t let it stay there.

I don’t know how long I stood there, neither approaching the desk nor walking away from it. Then finally I wrenched myself away, yanked the door open, slammed it shut, locked the whiskey away behind it. I rushed down the hall, didn’t even ring for the elevator. I dashed down the stairs and out into the street.

XXXIX

DURING MY DRINKING DAYS, there were worse things than hangovers. Blackouts were worse—coming to and realizing there were vast holes in one’s memory, hours when some other part of oneself was running things, steering the car and grinding the gears. Seizures were worse, and waking up in a hospital bed in restraints. And, more subtly, the day-by-day erosion of one’s whole life, that surely was worse than a hangover.

Hangovers were bad enough, however, and some of them were worse than others. But what I remember most vividly in that regard is not so much any particular hangover as the way one of them ended.

I was in my hotel room, and I felt terrible, and knew that the only thing that would ease my pain was a drink. And of course there was nothing in my room to drink. If there had been, I’d have drunk it the night before.

So I got myself dressed and downstairs and around the corner, and it must have been around eleven because Armstrong’s was open but the lunch crowd wasn’t there yet. In fact the place was empty, or the closest thing to it, and Billie Keegan was behind the stick, and he took one look at me and knew not to say a word. Instead he set a glass on the top of the bar, and filled it about halfway full, so that I wouldn’t spill it if my hands happened to shake a little.

I stood there while he poured, and I took a breath, and I felt better. I hadn’t had a chance to get the alcohol to my lips yet, let alone into my bloodstream, but its simple physical proximity made all the difference. It was there, and I was going to be able to drink it, and it would help me feel better again—and because I knew this I felt better already.

I thought of this when, finally, I heard Jim Faber’s voice.

First I had to find a phone that worked. Then I had to dial his number, and wait while it rang, and when his wife answered I had to ask to speak to Jim. She said, “He’s not here, Matt. He’s got a rush job keeping him at the shop. Do you need the number?”

“I have it,” I said. “And I’ve got plenty of quarters too.”

I don’t know what she might have made of that, because I broke the connection before I could find out. I spent one of those abundant quarters, and waited while it rang, and then he answered. And right away I felt better.

“I don’t think you had a hallucination,” he said. “I know that sort of thing can happen, but that’s not what this sounds like to me. I think you’ve got a real glass of bourbon on your desk, and a real bottle keeping it company. You said Maker’s Mark?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you’re determined to hallucinate, you might as well go straight to the top shelf. I only had it a couple of times myself, but it seems to me that Maker’s Mark was pretty decent sippin’ whiskey.”

“I used to know a woman who liked it.”

“You don’t suppose—”

“She’s dead,” I said. “She died a long time ago.”

Carolyn, from the Caroline. Another name for my Eighth Step list, I thought, if I stayed sober long enough to write one.

“You didn’t pour it for yourself, Matt, and you’re not in the middle of a drunk dream either. You went out this morning, and that was waiting for you when you got back. You know what happened.”

“I left the door locked.”

“So?”

“It wouldn’t be that hard to swipe a key from behind the desk. Or to open the door without one.”

“And?”

“And somebody came into my room,” I said, “and brought a bottle with him.”

“And a glass from Armstrong’s.”

“It could have been from anyplace. Half the bars in the city have that kind of rocks glass.”

“So he brought a bottle and a glass.”

“And set the stage,” I said. “Poured a drink. Left the bottle there, with the cap off.”

“Just the one glass. Inconsiderate bastard, wasn’t he? Suppose you had company?”

I said, “Jim, he wanted me to drink.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“You didn’t even want to, did you?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said, “I didn’t. But at the same time I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I felt like a bird hypnotized by a snake.”

“Stands to reason.”

“I found the thought of drinking it terrifying. As if it might jump off the desk and pour itself down my throat. As if it had that power.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was magnetic,” I said. “I didn’t want it, but I was drawn to it anyway.”

“You’re an alcoholic,” he said.

“Well, we knew that.”

“Yeah, and we just got some more evidence, in case we entertained the slightest doubt.”

“I wanted to pour it down the sink,” I said.

“Better than keeping it around.”

“But I was afraid to go near it. I didn’t want to take a step in that direction, let alone pick it up.”

“You were right.”

“I was? Isn’t it crazy, giving the shit that kind of power?”

“It’s already got the power.”

“I guess.”

“The way you give it more power,” he said, “is by picking it up and drinking it. And the first step in picking it up and drinking it is picking it up at all.”

“So I left it there.”

“And locked the door on it. What time is it? Shit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“This isn’t something for you to do all by yourself,” he said. “I’d go with you after the meeting, assuming I can wrap this up in time to go to the meeting, but I don’t like the idea of letting it sit there for the next few hours. Or letting you sit somewhere between now and meeting time, locked out of your room and with no place to go. I’d come over now, but—”

“No, you’ve got work to do.”

“It would be really inconvenient to leave now. You’ve got phone numbers, right? People in the program, people who live nearby?”

“Sure.”

“And you’ve got quarters.”

“And subway tokens,” I said, “though I can’t see how one of those will come in handy right now.”

“You never know. You’re where? Down the block from your hotel?”

“Five blocks away. It took me that long to find a working phone without somebody already using it.”

“Make some calls. Get somebody to keep you company, and call me as soon as you pour out the booze. Will you do that?”

“Sure.”

“Call me from your room. And if you can’t find somebody, don’t go back to your room alone.”

“I won’t.”

“Call me instead. And we’ll figure out something. Matt?”

“What?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Sometimes things get a little crazy right before a person’s anniversary.”

There were a couple of phone numbers I didn’t have to look up. Two of them were Jim’s, of course, at home and at his place of business, and another was Jan’s. I’d already spoken to Jim and I wasn’t about to call Jan.

I’d have called her if I had to. When I was just starting to string sober days together, before we’d begun to become a couple, she’d made me promise to call her before I picked up a drink. In the world we shared, sobriety trumped everything, so even if we had ceased keeping company, either of us could call the other in order to stay sober.

But not now. There were plenty of other people I could call, and they were a lot closer than Lispenard Street.

I was limited, though, to the ones whose numbers were in my wallet. Now and then someone will hand me a card, or a slip of paper, and I’ll find room for it in my wallet until I get a chance to copy it into my book. I have a little memo book, itself about the size of a business card, that I use for AA phone numbers, and that’s where they wind up. I keep the book in my room, next to the phone, so that it’s handy if I want to call someone. I almost never do, the only AA calls I make with any frequency are to Jim, but it’s good to have the book, if only because I can periodically copy down new phone numbers and clear out my wallet.

The point of this is that I now needed to call someone, and I had plenty of phone numbers, but they were all in the book. If I wanted to have someone with me when I returned to my room, I was largely limited to whatever numbers were still in my wallet. There were a few of those, and the first one I came to was Motorcycle Mark. I caught him on his way out the door, and he said that was no problem, he didn’t have anything to do that wouldn’t keep. Where should he meet me?

I said I’d meet him at my hotel, and by the time I’d walked the four or five blocks he was already there, with his bike parked out front. On our way through the lobby he said he’d noticed the hotel hundreds of times, and often wondered what it was like inside. It seemed all right, he said, and I agreed that it wasn’t bad.

The door to my room was locked, as I’d left it, and as I was fitting the key in the lock I had this sudden image of finding the room not as I remembered it but as I’d left it that morning, with no bottle and no glass and no smell of whiskey. And Mark, in his boots and leather jacket and with his helmet under his arm, would nod his head knowingly and talk gently to me in that tone you use with ambulatory psychotics. Calming me down, talking me off the ledge.

The image was so vivid it made me reluctant to open the door. But I did, of course, and it was all still there, the uncapped bottle of Maker’s Mark, the glass filled almost to the brim, the chair positioned to welcome me, and the raw smell of bourbon suffusing the room.

“Fucking Jesus,” Mark said.

“That’s what I walked in on.”

“Man, the smell! It’s like a fucking distillery. That’s not from one drink sitting in a glass.”

“It’s strong, isn’t it?”

He moved past me, walked over to the bed. “Come here, Matt. Look.”

That was what made the smell so strong. My pillow and mattress were soaked. My visitor had upended a bottle of bourbon over my bed.

I turned from it, went to the desk. The open bottle had no more than a couple of ounces missing, less than the glass contained. So he’d come to my room with a glass and two bottles, poured a drink, emptied a bottle on my bed, and left me plenty of bourbon to get good and drunk on.

“Unbelievable, man. Who could pull some shit like this?”

“Steve,” I said.

“You know the guy?”

“Just his name.”

He shook his head, and we both stood there for a moment, taking it all in. Then he said, “First things first, Matt. The bottle and the glass.”

“Right.”

“You want me to—”

“No, let me do it,” I said, and picked up the glass and carried it into the bathroom. I held the thing at arm’s length, as if it were a snake that might whip its head around and bite me, and I upended it over the sink and ran water to wash its contents down the drain. I held the glass under the tap and rinsed it out, and then I dropped it in the wastebasket. It was a perfectly good drinking glass, and perfectly safe now that I’d rinsed the residue of bourbon out of it, but what did I need with it?

I went back for the bottle, and emptied it into the sink, and let the tap water speed its passage through the plumbing. I rinsed out the bottle, too, and Mark handed me the cap, and I held that under the running water before I screwed it back onto the bottle. Then I put the thing in the wastebasket, with the glass.

“That’s better,” he said. “Be hard to drink it now. You’d have to go down into the sewer after it, and the alligators’d beat you to it.”

“A load off my mind,” I said.

“Next we got to do something about that bed. No way you can sleep on it.”

“No.”

“There a porter or somebody who can get it out of here?”

“Not at this hour.”

We stood there thinking about it. Then Mark said, “You know, that mattress is done. You can’t fix a mattress like that. It’ll stink of alcohol forever.”

“I know.”

“The pillow too. Total loss.”

“Right.”

He walked over to the window, opened it as wide as it would open. “Good it’s a single bed,” he said. “Never work with a double.”

“You think?”

“What else, man?”

I let him take charge. He was a good fifteen years younger than I, and I’d been sober a little longer, but he seemed to know what to do and that was more than I could say for myself. We stripped off the bed linen, and Mark had me help him lug the bare mattress over to the window. When we had it balanced half in and half out, he sent me downstairs to make sure no one was underneath the thing when he shoved it out.

I walked past Jacob and out onto the pavement. I looked up, and there was my mattress, hanging out of my window. An older man wearing a suit and a tie had just emerged from McGovern’s, and I waited while he walked toward me with the careful gait of a man who’s drunk and knows it. He looked up to see what was holding my attention, decided it was nothing he had to be concerned about, and walked on by. The sidewalk was clear now, and I called out to Mark, and my mattress came sailing down at me and landed at my feet.

I got hold of it, dragged it over to the curb. I went inside and asked Jacob which rooms were vacant. There was a single on my floor, at the rear of the building. He gave me the key.

The room had been serviced since the last guest had departed. It was a little smaller than mine, but had the same iron bedstead, and the same size mattress. Mark and I took the mattress, linen and all, and carried it the length of the hall to my room, and placed it on my empty frame.

“Like it’s been there forever,” Mark said. “Just one thing missing.”

I fetched the pillow from the vacant room, and set it on my bed. We took my pillow and my sheets, balled them up, and put them in the service pantry. There was a big trash can there, and it got the contents of my wastebasket, the empty bottle and the glass. I locked the vacant room, and we stopped downstairs at the desk to return the key.

“It’s a funny thing,” I told Jacob, “but there’s no mattress on the bed in that room.”

“There ain’t?”

“No,” I said, “but I’m sure the porter can rustle up a spare from the storeroom first thing in the morning.” A couple of bills moved from my hand to his. “For his trouble,” I said. “And for yours.”

“Don’t see no problem there,” he said.

Outside, Mark looked at my old mattress and nodded his approval. “I always wondered what it would be like to throw one of those out a window.”

“And?”

“One minute it was there,” he said, “and then it wasn’t. It was sort of satisfying, actually. Made more of a noise landing than I thought it would.”

“Nobody on the street seemed to notice.”

“Well, New York,” he said. “That dude at the desk. Jacob? He was pretty cool about the whole thing. He high on something?”

“He has a fondness for cough syrup,” I said.

“Well, shit,” Mark said. “Who doesn’t?”

XL

THERE WAS TIME for a quick bite before the meeting, and Mark suggested a deli on Broadway. “We’ll take the bike,” he said.

It was eight or ten blocks away, and we got there in a hurry. When we were seated and had ordered our pastrami sandwiches, I excused myself and made a phone call.

Jim was still at the shop. “I was supposed to call as soon as I got rid of the booze,” I told him, “and it slipped my mind completely.” I brought him up to date, and he asked me how I felt now. “A lot better,” I said.

He said he might be late for the meeting, but that he’d see me there. I went back to the table and told Mark I’d never been on a motorcycle before. “You’re kidding,” he said. “Never?”

“Not that I remember,” I said, “and I think it’s something I’d remember. Even in a blackout, that’s the sort of thing that would cut through the fog.”

“You should get one, man. Seriously.”

The pastrami was good, the french fries well-done. I liked the place, and wondered how come I’d never happened on it before. It wasn’t that far from my hotel, and I had to have walked past it dozens of times over the years.

Mark told me parts of his story while we ate. There was a lot of heroin in it, and a lot of hectic trips back and forth across the country. He’d spent a lot of time in Oakland and San Francisco, and sometimes he missed it. “I’ll hear California calling,” he said, “but I’ll hear a needle calling, and it’s the same voice, you know? So I figure for now I’ll stay right where I’m at.”

A couple of times over the years I’ve had dreams in which I was capable of flight. I soared over the rooftops, banking and turning effortlessly, reveling in the simple delight of it all. After our meal I got a second ride on the back of Mark’s Harley, from the deli to St. Paul’s, and it had an unreal quality that brought those flying dreams to mind. I had slipped into a zone of unreality when I opened my hotel room door the first time, and in this new world mattresses sailed out of windows and motorcycles tore through the night.

Then we walked into the meeting at St. Paul’s and the world came back into focus.

Jim wasn’t there. I got a cup of coffee and took a seat, and an exchange speaker from Bay Ridge told a story that started at age four, when he circled the living room the morning after a party and polished off the dregs of everybody’s drinks. “Right away,” he said, “I knew what my life was going to be about.”

I raised my hand during the discussion and said I’d had a difficult day, and one that had included a challenge to my sobriety. But I’d stayed sober, and what especially pleased me was that I’d actually gone so far as to ask for help, which was by no means characteristic behavior on my part. I’d received the help I needed, made a friend in the process, and capped the experience with an adventure. Just a little adventure, I said, but that was about as much excitement as I could stand. And, I added, if I just managed to go to bed sober, when I woke up the next morning I’d have a year.

That got some applause. Several people congratulated me during the break, including Jim, who must have come in toward the end of the qualification. Afterward the two of us followed the crowd to the Flame, but instead of joining the big table we took a small one by ourselves. He ordered a full meal—he’d come straight to the meeting from the shop—and I had a cup of coffee.

“You didn’t go into detail,” he said.

“It was a little more drama than I wanted to share. Not that it wouldn’t have made a good story. We wound up throwing the mattress out the window.”

“That must have been fun.”

“I didn’t get to do it. I went downstairs to make sure it didn’t land on anybody. I figured I’ll have enough names on my Eighth Step list as it is.”

“Good thinking.”

“Actually,” I said, “Mark did all the thinking. He took complete charge and showed real executive ability. Though I worked out how to replace the mattress.”

“You swiped one from an empty room.”

“I reassigned it,” I said. “But Jesus, Jim, when I opened the door…”

He let me talk my way through it. When I was done he frowned and said, “It wasn’t a practical joke, was it?”

“It was serious as a heart attack,” I said. “You couldn’t file charges, but what it was is attempted murder.”

“He figured you’d pick up a drink and it would kill you. And it would have, though it might have taken a couple of years.”

“He knew I was getting close,” I said. “And he didn’t want anybody getting close. He killed Jack Ellery because he was convinced he’d wind up in the spotlight as a direct result of Jack’s process of making amends. He killed Mark Sattenstein to keep him quiet, and he killed Greg Stillman to close down my investigation. He didn’t have to do all that, I’d done all I’d signed on to do, but every time he stirred the pot something new floated up and got me into it all over again. So the only way Steve was going to get rid of me was to kill me.”

“You know his name?”

“His first name. They called him Even Steven, as a counterpart to High-Low Jack. Because Jack had mood swings and Steven didn’t, evidently. He was cool as a pistol.”

“Isn’t it—”

“Hot as a pistol, cool as a cucumber. A fellow who knew them both hit on the idea of inverting clichés, and it only took him twenty-five years of daily marijuana use to come up with it.”

“Cannabis, friend to man.”

“If he could get me to drink,” I said, “I probably wouldn’t be able to pursue the investigation any further, and even if I did I’d lack credibility. I’d be another raving drunk with paranoid delusions, and the cops see plenty of those. And if I went on a decent bender, there was a good chance it’d kill me outright, and at the very least it would make me an easy victim. Things happen to people when they’re drunk. They fall down flights of stairs or off subway platforms, they lurch off curbs in front of buses. He’d made Sattenstein’s death look like a mugging and Stillman’s like a suicide, and he could find a way to kill me and make it look like something else.”

“And now?”

“He’ll look for another way.”

“And what will you do?”

“Try to get him,” I said, “before he gets me.”

He thought about it. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I’ll sit around the shop all day, and then at the last minute a job comes in and it has to be done in a rush. I wind up missing dinner with my wife and the first half of my meeting.”

“And that’s what happened tonight.”

“It is,” he said, “and it invariably annoys the bejesus out of me. But nobody pours top-shelf bourbon for me, and nobody’s trying to kill me, so maybe I haven’t got all that much to complain about.”

When we left the Flame he said, “You know, you’re always going out of your way to walk me home. Tomorrow’s your anniversary, and I think it’s time I walked you home for a change.”

And when we reached the Northwestern he said, “All these months and I’ve never had a look at your room.”

“You want to see it?”

“Long as I’m here.”

I said, “Jim, I’m all right.”

“I know that.”

“Mark and I left the room in good shape. There was still a faint odor of bourbon, but we left the window open, so it’ll be gone by now.”

“Probably true.”

“And he wouldn’t have come back. He tried something and it didn’t work, so he’ll try something else.”

“Stands to reason.”

“But you still want to come up.”

“Why not?”

We went upstairs, and I opened my door to a room that was just as I’d left it, if a good deal colder. I closed the window. Jim looked around the room, then walked over to the window himself. “Nice view,” he said.

“It’s something to look out at,” I said, “when I’m in the mood to look out at something.”

“A man couldn’t ask for more. It seems to suit you.”

“I think so.”

“And when you wake up tomorrow,” he said, “you’ll have a year.”

“Sometimes that sounds like a lot,” I said, “and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“You know what else you’ll have tomorrow? One more day to get through. And sometimes that’s a lot.”

“I know.”

“And it’s all a day at a time, and there’s no need to think in long-range terms, but if you keep it up you might wind up with long-term sobriety. You know how to make sure you achieve that elusive distinction?”

“How?”

“Don’t drink,” he said, “and don’t die.”

I told him I’d see what I could do.

When he left I decided I needed more than a shower. I drew a hot bath and soaked in it until the water wasn’t hot anymore. It took the tension out of my muscles and the back of my neck, but what it didn’t do was make me sleepy. I lay in bed with the lights out, and of course the new mattress felt unfamiliar, and so did the pillow. There was nothing really wrong with either of them, and it was clear to me that they weren’t keeping me awake. It was my mind that was keeping me awake.

I got up and turned the light on. Jim had once suggested I read the chapter on Step Seven in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions as a cure for insomnia. “It’ll stop a charging rhino in his tracks,” he said. “Years ago I’d read the first chapter of Swann’s Way, which is as far as I ever got with Monsieur Proust. Put me out every time. But the Seventh Step is almost as good.”

I read the first couple of paragraphs, then put the book back on the shelf and hauled out Jack Ellery’s account of the double homicide on Jane Street. I read it through and set it aside and thought about it, and decided I wasn’t any closer to sleep than I’d been before, and that it felt out of the question, at least for the time being.

I thought about Motorcycle Mark, and how there’d been more to him than I would have suspected. People surprise you that way, especially the sober ones. It had been sheerest happenstance that led me to call him: a phone call from someone else had led me to ask if he’d called, and he’d responded by asking for my number and giving me his, and I’d taken it from him more out of politeness than anything else. And, because I didn’t have my phone book with me, and because I still had his number in my wallet, he’d been the one I’d called. And I couldn’t have made a better choice.

Funny how it works.

I decided I ought to have his number in my book, and that the task of copying it, along with the other cards and slips of paper in my wallet, was just the right sort of task for my current state of mind. I sorted everything, put a batch of receipts in the cigar box where I stow them when I remember, and found a fine-point pen to copy Mark’s number and the others I’d accumulated since I last forced myself to perform this particular task.

Halfway through, something brought me up short. I stared at the card in my hand, copied the number into my book, stared at the card some more, and returned it to my wallet.

I picked up Jack’s confession, read it through one more time, and noticed something I’d missed the first time through. “I will call him S.,” he wrote of his partner, and so he did, S. for Steve. And then when he described the killing itself, he called the man E.S. For Even Steven, obviously.

Maker’s Mark, I thought. There was Mark Sattenstein, and there was Motorcycle Mark, and now there was Maker’s Mark.

Why had he picked that brand?

It wasn’t a very popular bourbon. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it advertised—but then I tried not to pay much attention to liquor ads these days. It was expensive, but less so than Dickel or Wild Turkey, and it didn’t have their reputation. Nor was it a brand I ordered often.

At bars I didn’t always specify the brand. I might just order bourbon, or I might look at the bottles on the back bar and name whatever label caught my eye. Old Crow, Old Forester, Jim Beam. Jack Daniel’s. There were bourbons I’d try because I liked the sound of their name, or the look of the bottle they came in. And when I went across the street for a bottle I generally came back with Early Times or Ancient Age, or maybe J. W. Dant—something modestly priced and serviceable, smooth enough to go down easy, strong enough to do the job.

It was Carolyn Cheatham who had a fondness for Maker’s Mark. She was Tommy Tillary’s girlfriend, and one night she turned up at Armstrong’s without him. She lived nearby on Fifty-seventh Street, just a few doors west of Ninth Avenue, in an Art Deco building with a sunken living room and high ceilings, and that night the two of us began consoling each other and wound up sharing her bed, along with a fifth of Maker’s Mark.

She killed herself in that apartment, shot herself with a gun Tommy had given her. She called me first, and I got there too late, but in plenty of time to commit a felony of my own, and so arranged things that Tommy Tillary, who’d gotten away with killing his wife, wound up going to prison for killing his girlfriend.

I thought about all of this, and while I was thinking I was getting dressed—undershorts, shirt, pants, socks, shoes. I grabbed a jacket and went out of my room and down to the street. I turned right and walked to the corner and turned right again.

I got as far as the Pioneer—or Piomeer, as you prefer. The dingy little market was still open, and so of course was the ginmill next door to it. I could go in and belly up to the bar, and the fellow standing behind it would probably be able to answer the question I’d come to ask him.

And who could say what else I might ask? Whatever it was, he’d have the answer.

XLI

BUT I TURNED around and went home instead. It was late enough for the newsstand at the corner of Eighth and Fifty-seventh to have the early edition of the Times, but when I got to my hotel I let my feet do the smart thing for a change and take me inside. I went upstairs and got undressed again and pulled the chair over to the window and sat for a little while looking at nothing in particular.

I’d headed for Armstrong’s because I had a question to ask. And I’d turned back because I’d just spent a day that had put me physically closer to a drink than I’d been in the past year, and I was one day away from the one-year anniversary of my last drink. I didn’t want a drink now, I didn’t feel like drinking, but enough had sunk in during the previous 364 days to make me realize just how vulnerable I was and just how dangerous that room was for me now.

Oh, I could have called someone, some sober friend to keep me company while I asked my question. But I didn’t have to do that either. I could just go home and get to bed. My question would still be there in the morning.

I didn’t know if I’d be able to sleep. I got in bed, turned off the light, stretched out on the unfamiliar mattress, settled my head on the unfamiliar pillow.

The next thing I knew it was morning.

The first thing I did after breakfast was call Dennis Redmond. I got him at the station house, and he was on his way out when I reached him. I told him I was pretty sure I had something. He said, “On Ellery? Because it’s gonna take a lot to make Stillman look like anything but suicide.”

“Try G. Decker Raines,” I said. “And Marcy Cantwell.”

“Now why are those names familiar?”

“A few years back,” I said. “A double homicide on Jane Street in the West Village. A Bohemian love nest, according to the Post, and—”

“I remember the case. Still unsolved to this day, if I’m not mistaken. Why? You’re saying you know who did it? Well, who was it?”

“Jack Ellery.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“He confessed to it. In writing.”

“And you’ve seen this confession.”

“I have it in hand.”

He thought about it. He said, “I don’t suppose he did it all by his lonesome.”

“He had a partner.”

“And Ellery got religion, or whatever you want to call it, and the partner was afraid he’d talk. Hell, I’ve got to get out of here. You remember that place I met you before? The Minstrel Boy? Say two this afternoon? And Matt? Bring that confession, will you?”

I hung up and the phone rang almost immediately. It was Jan, calling to wish me a happy anniversary. It was a curious conversation, because the things we weren’t saying drowned out the things we said. She said how happy she was for me, and how hard I’d worked for that year, and I told her how grateful I was for the unwavering support she’d given me from the very beginning, and when she was off the line I wanted to call her right back. But what would I say to her?

I had a couple of other calls to make, but the phone rang right away and this time it was Jim. He asked me gruffly if I was still sober, and I said that I was, miraculously enough, and he said damn right it was a miracle, and I should never forget that. And he congratulated me, and told me the first year was the hardest. “Except for all the ones that come after it,” he said.

“After you left last night,” I said, “I had trouble falling asleep.”

“So you took three Seconal and washed them down with a pint of vodka.”

“I put my clothes on and walked over to Armstrong’s.”

“Seriously?”

“I had a question I wanted to ask the bartender.”

“And?”

“I decided it would keep, and that probably wasn’t a good place for me to be. The point is, I’m going over there now, on the chance that the day-shift barman will be able to answer my question. And if he can’t I’ll be dropping by again this evening.”

“You could call around, find someone to keep you company.”

I said I’d think about it.

* * *

Armstrong’s generally opened around eleven, and it was twenty or thirty minutes past that by the time I got there. I’d put in some time on the phone and managed a quick visit to the squad room at Midtown North. What I didn’t do was call someone to back me up when I went around the corner, so I was by myself when I walked into a room that smelled not unpleasantly of beer and tobacco smoke.

Two tables were occupied, and there was a fellow at the end of the bar, nursing a beer while he worked his way through the Daily News. Lucian was behind the stick, assembling a Bloody Mary, and he paused in midpour at my approach. He was surprised to see me, and trying to hide it.

“It looks beautiful,” I said of his handiwork, “but it’s not what I’m here for. I just stopped by to ask you a question.”

“Go right ahead, Matt. If I don’t know the answer I’ll make something up.”

“I was just wondering if anybody came around recently asking questions about me.”

“Questions. I don’t think so. What kind of questions?”

“What I used to drink.”

“Why would anybody ask that? But you know, there was an old friend of yours in here the other day.”

“Oh?”

“He sat here, had a couple. Paid for his drink when he got it, waved away the change. ‘That’s good, have one yourself.’ So, you know, guy’s like that, you fill the glass a little fuller on his next round.”

“Sure.”

“Same story the second time around. ‘That’s good, have something for yourself.’ And he says how this is a nice place, and an old buddy of his used to come here.”

“And he mentioned me by name.”

He nodded. By now he’d finished putting the Bloody Mary together and strained it into a stemmed glass. I’d assumed it was for a customer, but he took a sip of it himself. “Long night,” he explained. “Got to get the heart started.”

“Sound policy.”

He took another sip. “The impression I got,” he said, “was you were cops together.”

“He was a cop?”

“Used to be, would be my guess.”

“I don’t suppose you got his name.”

“No, and I don’t think he got mine either. We never got that far.”

“What did he look like?”

He frowned. “You know,” he said, “I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. Middle-aged, not fat, not skinny. Sort of average. He was drinking Scotch, I remember that much, and I think it was Johnnie Red, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

“And he talked about me.”

“Just did I ever see you, and did you ever get here now that you weren’t drinking anymore, and how you used to be a bourbon drinker.”

“He remembered that.”

“But what he couldn’t remember,” he said, “was what your favorite bourbon used to be.”

“Ah. What did you tell him?”

“I don’t think you had a favorite. But he wanted an answer. Say it was a special occasion. What was that bourbon you would order then? Like he used to know, and he wanted his memory refreshed.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I don’t know if I ever poured it for you,” he said, “and what difference did it make what you used to drink, since you’re not drinking it now? But he had to have an answer, Mr. Have Something for Yourself, and I remember somebody else was going on about how one particular brand of poison was the best in the world, and I think it was Turkey, but it might have been Evan Williams, and you named another bourbon and said it was as good as either of them. You remember the conversation?”

I shook my head.

“No reason why you should. This was years ago. But it stuck in my mind, and a day or two later I had a taste of it myself, and I decided you were right. Can you guess the label?”

“You tell me.”

For answer he reached and drew down the bottle from the top shelf. Maker’s Mark.

And he hesitated for a second or two, it couldn’t have been any longer than that, and then he replaced the bottle on the shelf.

“So that’s what I told him,” he said. “You know the guy, Matt?”

“I had an idea who it was,” I said, “and your description nailed it down.”

“Yeah, I’m hopeless at describing people. He was wearing glasses, if that helps. Was it okay what I told him?”

“Sure.”

He hesitated, then said, “You know, it’s funny. Just now, when I had the bottle in my hand, I had the feeling you were going to ask me to pour you one.”

“Really.”

“Just for a second. How long has it been?”

“Just about a year.”

“No kidding? That long?”

“A year today, as a matter of fact.”

“No shit. Jesus, you know what I almost said? ‘That calls for a drink.’ But I guess it doesn’t, does it?”

I caught the noon meeting at Fireside. I got the usual round of applause at the beginning when I announced my anniversary.

I sat there drinking coffee and listening to somebody’s drinking story, and I remembered that moment when Lucian had brandished the long-necked bottle of bourbon. Oh, what the hell, said a voice in my head. Let’s see if it tastes as good as I remember.

XLII

THE FIRST TIME I’d met him at the Minstrel Boy I got there first, and I played John McCormack’s version of the bar’s theme song while I waited for him. This time I was a few minutes early, and I played the flip side of the record:

She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summerYet ’twas not her beauty alone that won me.Oh no, ’twas the truth in her eyes ever dawningThat made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee…

Redmond came in during the final chorus, stopped at the bar for a drink, came over and sat down. He was respectfully silent until the record ended. “Hell of a voice,” he said. “How long you figure he’s been dead?”

“No idea.”

“I know he was long gone before I ever heard of him. My mother had all his records. Well, a bunch of them, anyway. Seventy-eights, in an album. I can picture it on a shelf in our living room. Don’t ask me what became of them, but he’s still here on the jukebox, and the voice is still as clear as a bell, all these years later.”

He took a drink, put the glass on the table. I had a Coke in front of me, and no great urge to drink any of it. He said, “Well, what have you got?”

“Hell of a document,” he said. He rolled Jack’s confession into a scroll, tapped it against the top of his now-empty glass. He’d read it through twice, and we’d talked for a while, and now he’d read it through again. “I suppose we could establish that he’s the one who wrote it. There must be samples of his handwriting around for comparison purposes. Of course there’s always going to be an expert witness for the defense swearing up and down it couldn’t possibly be his handwriting, because look at the little loops on the Ds. And that’s assuming you could get the document admitted as evidence, which is no sure thing. You found it in his room?”

“Taped to the bottom of a drawer.”

“Where we’d have spotted it if we’d had any reason to look for it, but we didn’t. How’d you know to look?”

“Stillman went to collect Jack’s effects from the super. But somebody’d already been there.”

“You thought it was me.”

“I thought it might be.”

“And it could have been me,” he said, “if we’d given the case a higher priority. But I’d already looked at everything in the room, and there wasn’t much.”

“No.”

“So it wasn’t me,” he said, “or my partner, or anybody else with a badge. It was whoever killed him, looking to see if there’d been anything in the room that he’d missed.”

“Right.”

“And was there?”

“I think there was a copy of Jack’s Fourth Step.”

“Which you said he’d talked over with Stillman.”

“And that was when he told Stillman he’d killed someone,” I said, “but without saying who or when. It seemed likely to me that he’d written out a more detailed version for his own benefit, and that’s what I went to his room hoping to find.”

“It would have been better,” he said, “if I had found it.”

“Well, you didn’t know to look for it, and—”

“If you’d come to me,” he said, “and we’d gone over there together, and made the discovery, that would have been better. But instead we’ve got you bribing the super to look the other way, and being on premises where you’ve got no legal right to be, and bringing back something you say you found in a particular place at a particular time. Which I don’t for a moment doubt you did, but I don’t get to decide what’s admissible and what isn’t.”

“I know.”

“So from an evidentiary standpoint—”

“I know.”

“Not that it would prove anything anyway, beyond the fact that the dead man who wrote it claims he and a partner killed a couple of people. He doesn’t even name the partner.”

“No.”

“Even Steven. So it’s some guy named Steve.”

“I had a friend check a couple of files full of aliases and nicknames. He couldn’t come up with anything.”

“It might be on a list somewhere,” he said, “but that’s right up there with saying the cash or the dope or the stolen jewelry is in an evidence locker somewhere. That doesn’t mean anybody’s ever going to see it again. Even Steven.” He shook his head. “But you know who he is.”

He studied the business card. “Says he’s your friend in Jersey City.”

“Half of that’s true.”

“The Jersey City part?”

“I spoke to a journalist who knows him. He hangs around the courthouse, does favors, arranges things.”

“Lot of guys like that,” Redmond said. “Hardly an endangered species on that side of the river. Vann, it says. How’d that turn into Steve?”

“His mother named him Evander,” I said, “and he knocked that down to one syllable, and put a second N on it to make it clear that it was his first name.”

“Could be Dutch otherwise. Van Steffens.”

“I can’t be sure of this,” I said, “but I think it dropped down to two syllables before one of them disappeared. From Evander to Evan.”

“Evan Steffens.” He nodded slowly. “Which doesn’t have far to go to become Even Steven.”

“When Jack wrote about it,” I said, “he started out by saying he’d call his partner S. And he did, just using the single initial all the way through. Toward the end, though, he referred to him as E.S.”

“Which could stand for Even Steven.”

“But who uses initials for a nickname? Once I thought of that—”

“Yeah, I can see how you got there. Okay, let me get another drink, because the one is barely a memory at this point. And then you can lay the whole thing out for me.”

By the time I was done his second drink was mostly gone. I’d switched from Coke to coffee, and my cup was empty, too.

“Ellery gets sober,” Redmond said, “and he wants to get right with God. What’s he gonna do, turn himself in for the Love Nest Murders?”

“Not necessarily. He hasn’t even gotten specific with his sponsor. But he wants to find some way to make amends for what he did that night.”

“How does Steffens find out?”

“They’re both in a world where word gets around,” I said. “ ‘Hey, you hear about High-Low Jack? He’s going up to all the assholes he gave a screwing to years ago, looking to make things up to them.’ Or he could have gone to Steffens himself. ‘I just wanted to tell you that something may come out about what we did on Jane Street, but you’ve got nothing to worry about, because I’ll be sure to keep your name out of it.’ ”

“If I’m Steffens, I don’t know that I find that tremendously reassuring.”

“No, of course not. If Jack ever tells anybody with a badge what he did, how long before they get the rest out of him?”

“Or even if he doesn’t, Matt. If it lands on my desk, first thing I do is look at his known associates. Maybe Steffens’s name comes up, maybe it doesn’t, but if you’re Steffens, how can you know it won’t?”

“One way to make sure.”

“And it would have worked if it hadn’t been for Stillman. Down-and-out ex-con living in a furnished room—you know how those get solved. Someone gets drunk and talks too much. Steffens never talked about Jane Street, so why should he talk about High-Low Jack?”

“He wouldn’t.”

“No, he’d have gotten away with it, and I’m not happy about it, but the fact is a lot of people get away with a lot of murders. Including the ones that don’t make it into the book as murders, which I guess is the case with Gregory Stillman. But the other one came first, didn’t it? Sattenstein?”

“And that’s a murder,” I said, “but it’ll wind up on somebody else’s tab.”

“The guy they grabbed for the other muggings. But you say he claims Sattenstein wasn’t his work. Well, they’ve got him cold on the others, and by the time he gets out of prison he’ll be too old to mug anybody, so it hardly matters. As far as the cops downtown are concerned, he did Sattenstein along with the others, and that case is closed.”

“Sattenstein called me,” I said. “The last thing I’d asked him was where the name High-Low Jack came from, and he didn’t know.”

“And then he remembered?”

“I’ll never know, because I didn’t get back to him in time. My guess is he didn’t, but he thought of someone who’d know.”

“Steffens.”

“Sattenstein was a fence,” I said. “If he knew Jack, he probably knew some of the people he worked with. ‘Hey, where’d Jack get that nickname? I figured you’d know, seeing as how they used to call you Even Steven.’ ”

“Not too hard for Steffens to set up a meeting in Sattenstein’s neighborhood. Not too hard to get into Stillman’s place either. ‘Hello, Gregory? I’m a police officer investigating the murder of a friend of yours. I collected some belongings of his from his super, and there are a couple of articles here that I’d like to turn over to you.’ Or ‘He had this notebook, and there’s something he wrote that I’d like to discuss with you.’ Stillman would have let him in.”

“No question.”

“And then a choke hold? That would work, and it wouldn’t show up, not after the poor bastard spent a few hours hanging with a belt around his neck. And then to top everything off the son of a bitch tried to buy you a drink.”

“Shows you the depths a person can sink to,” I said, “once he starts off with a simple act of murder.”

“Maker’s Mark, you said?”

“He probably bought it at the liquor store right across the street from my hotel. If he did, there was probably a little gummed tag stuck to the back of the bottle, the store’s address and phone number. They used to put one of those on every bottle they sold, to remind you where you got it in the hope that you’d come back for more.”

“You didn’t look for a tag.”

“No. I poured it out without looking at it, and I dumped it and the glass in the wastebasket, and it all went in the big trash can next to the service elevator. The porter empties it a couple of times a day. I’m sure it’s gone by now.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No. What would it prove? That somebody bought a bottle of bourbon across the street? He probably bought two bottles, one to leave for me and the other to pour over my bed, and I wonder how often the place across the street sells two bottles of Maker’s Mark to anybody. They’ll remember him, but so what? He’s over twenty-one. He can buy all the booze he wants.”

“Ellery’s super met him,” Redmond said. “When he passed himself off as a cop. That’s a crime, but it’s a hard case to make if all he did was flip his wallet open and let the man draw his own conclusions.” He gave me a look. “A lot of people do that.”

“He didn’t flash his leather at Armstrong’s,” I said, “but the day bartender had the impression he was a cop, or used to be. He went there to ask him what I liked to drink. But that’s not a crime either.”

“No. Here you’ve got a guy who’s shaping up as a one-man crime wave. He killed two people years ago in the Village, and the one man who could put him on that one is dead. Dead because our boy shot him, but we’ve got no evidence and no witnesses for that one, or for the two men he killed to cover up the Ellery killing. As far as I can see, we can’t prove he did a thing.”

“He committed an act of vandalism,” I said, “by dowsing a perfectly good mattress with a perfectly good bottle of whiskey.”

“A misdemeanor,” he said, “and he had to commit unlawful entry in order to accomplish it, which might up the ante to a low-grade felony. I’d have to take a run at the penal code, but I don’t think I’m going to, because even there we’ve got no evidence.”

“I know.”

“It’s annoying,” he said, “because I’d like nothing better than to get this son of a bitch. I’d like to get him for Ellery, just on general principles, and I’d like even more to get him for Stillman, who struck me as a pretty decent guy.”

“He was.”

“And one who’d still have a pulse, if he’d had the sense to leave well enough alone. But yeah, I’d like to get Steffens for Stillman. And I can’t tell you what a treat it would be to nail him for the man and woman in the Village. A case that was that hot and then went bitter cold for so long—Jesus, wouldn’t it be satisfying to close that one?”

“As far as I can tell,” I said, “he never got arrested for anything.”

“He hasn’t got a sheet? Hard to believe. He was running with Ellery, so he must have been pulling some of the same crap, but he never got tagged with it.” He tapped the table with Ellery’s scrolled confession. “If this is the way it went down, and there’s no reason for Ellery to embroider it—”

“No, it figures to be straight.”

“Then Steffens’s ice-cold reaction was to kill the woman. And to force Ellery to fire one of the shots. Does that sound to you like the act of a man who never did this before?”

“Probably not his first kill.”

“And we know it wasn’t his last. But how many do you figure he ran up in between? It’s how he solves problems. How many problems you figure he encountered over the years?”

That hung in the air. You couldn’t answer it and it wouldn’t go away. I said, “Do you see any way at all? To get him for anything?”

He thought about it. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t. And neither do you, and you couldn’t have expected more. So why are we here, Matt? Why did you call me?”

“I figure he’s not done.”

“Not done killing? He’ll never be done, if that’s how he solves his problems. But you’d think he’d be out of problems for the time being. Who’s left?”

“Well,” I said, “there’s always me.”

XLIII

I GOT TO my regular meeting at St. Paul’s that night, and it was good that I did, as I’d signed up a while back to speak for my anniversary. I sat down thinking I’d tell my story, the way I usually did, but I wound up starting with that last drink, the one I took but didn’t take, the one I ordered and left on the bar. And I went on from there, and spent close to half an hour talking about the past year, my first year of sobriety.

It doesn’t really matter what you say. One morning I’d gone to a meeting called Bookshop at Noon, on West Thirtieth Street. They introduced the speaker and he said his name and that he was an alcoholic, and then he just looked at the twenty or thirty of us who were waiting for him to say something. He smiled and said, “It’s your meeting,” and opened it up for discussion.

Nobody criticized him for shirking his duty, and in fact a couple of people complimented him on keeping it simple. Later I reported the incident to Jim, and we considered the possibilities—that he’d told his story so often recently that he couldn’t face repeating himself, that he was a drama queen looking to do something memorable, or that he’d had a slip within the past three months and thus felt unqualified to lead a meeting, but wasn’t ready to own up to it in public. We conjured up a few more scenarios, all of them plausible enough, and concluded that it didn’t matter. The meeting had gone on, and it had done me no harm. I was still sober, wasn’t I?

And I was still sober now, when the meeting began and when it ended.

“It’s hard to know what to do,” Dennis Redmond had said earlier. “There’s not going to be any evidence, hard or soft. I’ll go through the files, see if they ever even looked at him or Ellery in connection with Jane Street. Though I can’t see what difference it would make. You know what you could do?”

“What?”

“What’s he drink? Not Maker’s Mark.”

“Scotch. Johnnie Walker, I think it was. Why?”

“Get the brand right,” he said, “and send him a bottle a day for the next year or two. As long as it takes.”

“As long as what takes?”

“As long as it takes for him to become an alcoholic. Then he can join that club of yours, and he can climb up those famous steps, and when he writes out his confession we can fall on him like a ton of bricks.”

“How’ll we know?”

“You can be his rabbi, except that’s not what you call it.”

“His sponsor.”

“Right on the tip of my tongue. His sponsor. You can be his sponsor, and you can rat him out. But a sponsor wouldn’t do that, would he?”

“It’s not part of the job description.”

“I was afraid of that. Well, in that case I’m out of ideas. Of course we could put a wire on you, but that wouldn’t work, would it?”

“He’d never say anything we could use.”

“No, and even if he did it might not be admissible. You know he’ll lawyer up the minute he gets pulled in for anything, and if he’s hooked into the Jersey City machine he’ll know what lawyer to call. Well, he got away with two murders for what, a dozen years? He’s about to get away with two or three more. Can you live with that?”

“I guess I’ll have to.”

“And so will I. When you’re on the job a few years you find out you can live with almost anything.” His eyes narrowed. “But you resigned, didn’t you? Had a gold shield and gave it back. So I guess you found something you couldn’t live with.”

“But it wasn’t the job,” I said. “I’d have told you it was at the time. That’s what I thought. There’s an element in a lot of stories you hear in AA, it’s called a geographical solution. Guy moves to California because New York is the problem. Then he moves to Alaska because California’s the problem. But he’s the problem himself, and wherever he goes, there he is.”

“So you were the problem.” He thought about it. “Well, now you’re Even Steven’s problem, aren’t you? And we know how he solves his problems, and geography hasn’t got a lot to do with it. How are we gonna keep you alive?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself.”

“I can’t even offer you police protection at this stage, and that’d be a joke anyway, wouldn’t it? We assign some cops to guard you, and they do, and nothing happens, and we reassign them, and you’re right where you are now, because he’s smart and he’s patient. He can wait as long as he needs to. You have a gun?”

“No.”

“If you had, you know, an unregistered weapon—”

“I don’t.”

“Well, if you should happen to get your hands on one, it might not be a bad idea to carry it. As a matter of fact…”

His voice trailed off. I looked at him, raised my eyebrows in anticipation.

“I want to keep this hypothetical, not that anybody but the two of us is gonna hear it. If someone’s out to kill me, and I know it, and I also know there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, well, then there’s one thing I can do about it. If you get my drift.”

“I’d thought of that myself.”

“One thing you ought to know,” he said, looking off to the side, “is if something happened to our friend, and if they were looking at you in connection with it, I wouldn’t have any recollection of this conversation. In fact I wouldn’t remember any of the conversations we had.” His eyes met mine. “Just something for you to think about,” he said.

I didn’t have a gun, registered or not. Acquiring one didn’t strike me as the most challenging task in the world, and I thought about it, but it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

After the meeting, after an hour at the Flame, after some private time with Jim, I was back in my room with my thoughts for company. He was out there somewhere, and if his thoughts weren’t of me, well, in a day or a week or a month they would be.

I was a problem for him. And I knew what solution he’d look for. When your only tool is a hammer, they say, then every problem looks like a nail.

I lay there in the darkness and wondered if I was afraid. I decided I was, but not of dying, not exactly. If I’d died a year ago, if I’d died drunk, that would have been as awful an ending as my life could have had. But I’d stayed sober for a year, and if I didn’t feel like celebrating, that didn’t mean I didn’t cherish the accomplishment. And if I died now, well, nobody could take that away from me. Cold comfort, I suppose, but better than no comfort at all.

What I was afraid of, I realized, was that there was something I could do about this, and that I wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

When I woke up the sun was shining and someone was playing the radio in the room next to mine. I couldn’t make out the words, but the announcer’s enthusiasm came through all the same. I showered and shaved and got dressed, and somewhere along the way my neighbor turned off his radio. The sun was still shining. I decided it wasn’t a bad day, and that I knew how to spend it.

I wanted breakfast, but first I found Vann Steffens’s card and dialed his number. I was surprised when he answered; I’d expected to get a machine and leave a message. He said hello, and I said, “You probably know who this is.”

“I might.”

“You bought me a drink the other day,” I said, “and I never got the chance to thank you for it.”

“I seem to recognize the voice,” he said, “but I can’t say I’ve got any idea what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t always know myself. I think we should talk face-to-face.”

“Oh?”

“To clear the air.”

“Never a bad idea. Breathing’s easier when the air’s clear. And you probably think I got that from a fortune cookie, but I’m proud to say I made it up myself.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Which is not to say Confucius wouldn’t have said it if he’d thought of it first. You want to meet? Where and when?”

We met at three in the afternoon in the Museum of Natural History. I got there early and waited beside the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur, and he showed up right on time, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a topcoat over his arm. His glasses were steamed up, and he handed me the coat to hold while he cleaned the lenses with his pocket handkerchief.

The coat would have felt heavier, I decided, if there’d been a gun in the pocket. But I hadn’t expected him to come armed. He’d suspect a trap, and if he brought a gun he might have to explain it to somebody.

He put his glasses on, blinked at me through them, and took his coat back. “Thanks,” he said. He walked over to the nearest dinosaur and said, “Hi there, buddy. All these years and you haven’t changed a bit.”

“An old friend?”

“My daughter loved these guys,” he said. “Don’t ask me why. I’d bring her here every other Sunday to see the dinosaurs and the other divorced daddies. But that was a while ago.”

“I guess she outgrew them.”

“She would have,” he said, “but her mother took her along to the Caribbean for a winter break. There’s this island called Saba. You know it?”

I didn’t.

“You get there by taking a small plane from another island. I forget which one. Saba’s this volcanic island, so basically it’s a mountain with a beach at the base of it, and every once in a while one of the small planes that go there crashes into the side of the mountain.”

Was there something for me to say to that? I couldn’t think what it might be.

“The divorce hadn’t become final yet,” he said, “so officially I’m a widower. With a dead kid too, but I don’t think there’s a word for that. And if you look at it a certain way it’s heartbreaking, but you don’t want to get all choked up about it. Because it was just about time for her to be getting too old for dinosaurs, and what was stretching ahead of us was a fucking lifetime of not having much of anything to say to each other. So she was spared that, and so was I.”

“That’s an interesting way to look at it.”

“Is it? If you’re wearing a wire, you can transcribe that touching little story and show it to the shrinks. God knows what they’ll make of it.”

“I’m not wearing a wire.”

“No? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, and if you were younger and better-looking I’d pat you down. If you were a girl, that is. Nothing queer about old Vann.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“But what good would it do me? What would it prove? The cloak-and-dagger boys keep coming out with newer and better gadgets. Ballpoint pens with microphones in them, and just the other day I heard about a recording device the size of an aspirin tablet. You swallow it, and along with all the intestinal gurgles it picks up any conversation within a twenty-yard radius. Of course you wind up having to pick through your own crap, but those clowns are doing that metaphorically anyway, aren’t they? Come on, let’s get out of here. We can’t really talk here, and they don’t allow you to smoke. Like it’s gonna bother the bronto-fucking-saurus.”

XLIV

HE LIT UP as soon as we were out the door. We crossed Central Park West and walked a few hundred yards into the park. Steffens considered three benches and rejected them all for unspecified reasons. Then he found one he liked and wiped the seat with the handkerchief he’d used earlier to clean his glasses. He sat down, and I sat beside him without bothering to wipe the seat.

“It’s your meeting,” he said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say. I’m just gonna sit here and take it all in.”

I took three sheets of paper from my jacket pocket, unfolded them, handed them to him.

I’d reached the age where reading was more comfortable with glasses, especially if the print was small or the light dim. Steffens was the opposite, he wore glasses all day long and took them off to read. He’d removed them when I handed him Jack’s confession, and when he was done he didn’t put them on again right away. Instead he sat looking off into the distance.

There were trees across the way, their leaves mostly gone now. Bare ruined choirs, a poet had written, but I couldn’t remember his name or anything else from the poem.

He said, “This is a Xerox copy.”

“That’s right.”

“There an original?”

“In a safe place. And there’s another photocopy.”

“In another safe place, I’ll bet.”

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet bird sang. That was the whole line, but what came before or after it, and who was it who’d written it?

I noticed that he’d put his glasses back on. For a moment I thought he was going to return Jack’s account, but instead he folded the papers and put them in his pocket, then got a fresh cigarette going.

Bare ruined choirs. Was it bird or birds? It made sense either way. And was sweet right?

“You have to wonder,” he said, “how much of it is true.”

“Hard to say.”

“Hard? Try impossible. The writing’s good, though. I’d have to say that. The choice of words, I mean. The phrasing. The narrative flow. I’m not talking about the penmanship.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“Because outside of the nuns, who gives a rat’s ass about penmanship? It has a flow to it. It’s easy to follow. But you have to ask yourself, where does memory leave off and imagination take over?”

“That’s always hard to know.”

Birds, I decided. It had to be. If a single swallow didn’t make a summer, then it certainly took more than one bird for a choir.

“This fellow he calls S. Does he even exist? He could be a figment of the writer’s imagination.”

“Could be.”

“Suppose S stands for self? It’s his own self that decides the woman has to die, because she’s a witness. The whole thing with S. wrapping his hands around the writer’s hands, that’s a perfect example of a psychotic break. The guy becomes two people at once, and the bad part makes the good part do something he’s ashamed of.”

Bare ruined choirs. Was it Keats? I’d have to look it up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Two minutes with Bartlett’s and I’d know the poet and the poem, and then I’d spend another two hours skipping around, reading no end of other fragments that I’d half remember on other occasions.

Jan had a copy of Bartlett’s, and sometimes I’d turn to it when she was busy in the kitchen, or fitting in a little work on the current sculpture-in-progress.

Maybe I’d go to the Strand and pick up a copy of my own. That was probably simpler than searching for another girlfriend who already had the book on her shelf.

“But if there is an S.,” he said, “he doesn’t strike me as a guy with a whole lot to worry about. It might be different if the writer was around to back up what he wrote, but the document all by itself, well, I don’t see it as enough to put a man in jail, do you?”

“No,” I said. “But that’s if the document’s all by itself, and it isn’t.”

“Oh?”

“There’s what you might call an interpretation. A few pages identifying Mr. S. and telling us what else he’s been up to since those days.”

“Written by somebody else.”

I nodded.

“Handwritten? Copies made?”

“The penmanship’s not as nice as in the specimen you saw,” I said. “But as you said, who cares about penmanship?”

“Only the nuns.”

“Right.”

“And damn few of them. Still, you say the penmanship’s not so hot, and the content has to be mostly conjecture. If the writer could prove it, he wouldn’t have to go through all this crap.”

“And S. would be in a cell in the Tombs.”

“Assuming there’s an S.”

“Right.”

He lit another cigarette, smoked for a few minutes, blew the smoke at the trees across the way. Maybe he had the same line rattling around in his head. Bare ruined choirs. Maybe he knew the rest of the poem, and the name of the poet. Who knows what’s going on in somebody else’s head?

“What do you want, Matt?”

“To go on living.”

“So? Who’s gonna stop you?”

“S. might try.”

“And if he did, those two documents, similar in theme but differing in penmanship, would find their way to parties who might take an official interest. Does that sound about right?”

“It does.”

“But if nothing happens to you—”

“Then nothing happens with the documents, and S. gets to go on living his life.”

“It’s not a bad life.”

“Neither is mine.”

“That’s all fine,” he said, “but nobody lives forever.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“I’m not wishing it on you, God knows, but you could die of natural causes.”

“I hope to, eventually.”

“And if that should happen—”

“It’d be exactly the same as if somebody shot me in the mouth and the forehead,” I said. “The two documents would get delivered. But the odds are you’d have nothing to worry about by then.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, you’re three years older than I am. You’re carrying more weight, and how much do you smoke? Three packs a day?”

He’d just taken a cigarette from his pack, and he put it back. “I’ve been thinking about cutting down.”

“Ever try cutting down in the past?”

“Maybe a couple of times.”

“Have much luck with it?”

He returned the pack to his pocket. “You never know,” he said. “What’s your point exactly?”

“You’re overweight and you smoke. You drink, too.”

“Not that much.”

“A lot more than I do. What’s my point? My point is you’ll probably die before I do, in which case you’ve got nothing to worry about. And if you wind up outliving me, well, that’ll be time enough to worry about some charges that nobody could make stand up in court anyway.”

“Jesus,” he said, and frowned. “What happens if you start drinking again?”

“It would be better for both of us,” I said, “if I don’t. So the next time you get the urge to pick up a bottle or two of Maker’s Mark, make sure you drink it yourself.”

“I knew that fucking bourbon was a bad idea. I got carried away with the beauty of it all. You know, you walk in, there’s the glass, there’s the bottle. I figured it would have an impact.”

“Well, you were right about that.”

“What effect did it have? Were you tempted?”

“You have any fear of heights?”

“Heights? What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

“I just wondered.”

“I don’t mind airplanes. I’m closed in, I’ve got nothing to worry about. But, like, being out on a ledge, or near a cliff—”

“That’s different?”

“Very.”

“I’m the same way. You know what the fear is? That I’ll want to jump. I don’t want to jump, but I’m afraid I’ll suddenly get the urge.”

He took this in, nodded.

“I didn’t want to drink. But it was there, and I was afraid that I would want to. That I’d be struck by an impulse I couldn’t resist.”

“But you weren’t.”

“No.”

“As I said, the minute I got out of there and thought about it I knew it was a bad idea. But we’re both here, aren’t we? We both survived. You know, the Mexicans have a word for it.”

“Oh?”

“For our situation. But I don’t know how you say it in English. The fucking Mexicans would call it un standoff.”

He took out his pack of cigarettes, shook one loose, put it between his lips. “Fuck cutting down,” he said. “Why would I want to do that?”

When I told Jim about it he took it all in and thought it over and said, “Then it’s over.”

“It looks that way.”

“You don’t have to worry about this fellow anymore? You’ve left him with no reason to kill you?”

“And every reason not to.”

“So it all works out.”

“I suppose it does,” I said, “if you overlook the fact that the son of a bitch killed five of his fellow citizens and gets away with it.”

“If anybody ever gets away with anything.”

“I don’t think his conscience will be troubling him. I don’t think he has one. But I suppose there’s always karma.”

“So they say.” He reached for the teapot, refilled both our cups. “Jasmine,” he said. “The first sip’s a nice surprise, and by the third cup you wish they’d just give you the usual green tea. Matt, whatever keeps this guy at a distance looks good to me. I just hope you’re satisfied with how it turned out.”

“Satisfied,” I said. “I’d like it better if he went away for it. Or if he made a move and got killed trying. But I guess I’m satisfied. And that reminds me.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said, “and I think the Buddha’s full of crap. It is our dissatisfaction with what is that separates us from the beasts of the field.”

“And when did this revelation come to you?”

“While I was shaving.”

“You nicked yourself and—”

“No, that’s just it. I didn’t nick myself. Because the razor’s this new twin-blade number that shaves you closer and smoother. It’s like some sort of tag team, one blade holds the whisker down while the other cuts it.”

“You sound like a commercial.”

“And I have to say it was better than the last razor I had, and that was better than the one before. And I thought about watching my father shave. He used a safety razor, though it must have been a fairly primitive one. But his father would have used a straight razor. And why do you suppose the razors keep getting better every couple of years? And the cars, and all the other little conveniences of modern life?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“Dissatisfaction,” I said. “Every once in a while somebody throws his razor down in the middle of a shave and says there’s got to be a better way. And he looks for it and finds it.”

“So dissatisfaction turns out to be the mother of invention. And here I always thought it was necessity.”

I shook my head. “Nobody needs a double-bladed razor. Nobody needs to go sixty miles an hour in a car, or fly through the air in a plane.”

“There’s probably something wrong with your reasoning,” he said, “but I’m not dissatisfied enough to figure out what it is. But the next time I run into the Buddha, I’ll set him straight.”

“Well, if you’re looking for him,” I said, “you’ll generally find him at the midnight meeting at the Moravian church.”

Early One Morning…

“A Mexican standoff,” Mick Ballou said. “I’ve often wondered why they call it that. Have you any idea?”

“No.”

“If Kristin were here,” he said, “she’d take out her iPhone and consult her Google and provide a full explanation in the wink of an eye. The world is a strange place and growing stranger by the day. There was no Google twenty-five years ago, and no iPhones either. But men have always told stories, and that was a good one. Did he ever make trouble again?”

“Steffens? As far as I know, he stayed on his side of the river. There was a state or federal task force that took on the courthouse gang in Hudson County, and a batch of Jersey City politicians went to jail, but I didn’t see his name in the papers. Then sometime after that, it must have been a dozen years ago, I got an unsigned card one Christmas. Santa Claus looking down at a plate of milk and cookies and taking a belt from a hip flask. It had a Jersey postmark, and I had the feeling it might have been from him.”

“Is he still alive?”

I shook my head. “He’s been gone, oh, getting on for ten years now. A one-car accident on the Garden State. Three o’clock in the morning, and he hit a bridge abutment head-on at something like seventy miles an hour. No skid marks, so he never tried to stop. And he went through the windshield, so he couldn’t have been wearing a seat belt.”

“Suicide, do you suppose?”

“Be hard to rule it out. He’d had emphysema for a couple of years, and had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. He would have had a gun around the house, and he certainly knew how to use it, but maybe he just went for a ride and made his move on the spur of the moment. Put the gas pedal down, take a hard left, and let the cops clean up after you.”

Somewhere along the way he’d returned his bottle to the back bar and came back with a liter of Evian water. And there we sat, two old men up past our bedtime, talking and drinking water.

“You think ’twill come out even,” he said. “With the ends trimmed, and tied in a bow. The murderer found out, and dealt with in a satisfying manner.”

“Like a television program.”

“Even there,” he said, “they’ll surprise you now and again. The villain goes free. But your man was found out, wasn’t he? Do you suppose he had occasion to kill anyone else? In Jersey City?”

“No way to know.”

“And who’s to say we’re not better off in our ignorance? What dark things did he do in the years after he killed the man and woman in the Village? He moved across the river and found a new life in politics, but did he have a use for the gun in that new life?”

“We’ll never know,” I said, “but when the time came to pick it up he remembered how to use it.”

He drank some water. “All those years,” he said. “Where do they go?”

“Might as well ask where they come from.”

“But we never question that, do we? Tomorrow’s always there, just over the horizon. Until the tomorrows run out. The people you spoke about, some of them are gone.”

“Yes.”

“Jim Faber. Shot dead, wasn’t he?”

“By a man who mistook him for me.”

“Oh, that was a bad time. There were a lot killed in this very room around that time.”

“There were.”

“Did you blame yourself for his death?”

“Probably. What helped was his voice in my head, telling me to cut the crap.”

“Ah. The woman, the one who cut her auburn hair. Did the two of you ever get together again?”

“Twice, maybe three times. After Jan and I were finally done with each other, and before I reconnected with Elaine. Donna and I would get to talking, and there’d be a current in the air, and we’d wind up in her canopy bed for an hour or two. Then she got married and moved away, and I think I heard that she got divorced.”

“And Jan is gone.”

“Yes.”

“I remember she wanted you to get her a gun. Did she ever use it?”

“No,” I said. “She let the cancer run its course. But she found it a comfort to have the gun, in case she decided to take that way out.”

“You were the one she turned to. But you’d long since broken things off.”

“She brought me my clothes,” I said, “and I gave her back my set of keys, but it turned out we weren’t quite done with each other. That took a while longer. We really cared for each other, so we kept trying to make it work, until it was just too obvious that it wouldn’t.”

“Ah.”

“Who else? I got together with Dennis Redmond now and then, for a meal or a cup of coffee. I called him a couple of times when I had a case I thought he might be able to help me with. But then we lost track of each other. I figure he must be retired by now.”

“Like the other one.”

“Joe Durkin. We became close over the years, but he was on the job and I wasn’t, and that puts a limit on just how close you can get. He’s working security for a Wall Street firm now, and between that and his city pension he’s doing okay.”

“But you don’t see much of him.”

“Not too much, no. That bar Redmond liked, the Minstrel Boy? Last time I looked it was gone.”

“Places come and go.”

“They do, and the leaves fall from the trees. Bare ruined choirs—that was Shakespeare’s line, from one of the sonnets.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t know where I got the idea it was Keats. Jimmy Armstrong’s dead. He lost his lease and moved a block west, and then he died, and somebody else took over and changed the name. The new place had a dish I liked, an Irish break fast they served at all hours, but then they changed the menu, so that’s gone too. Theresa’s is gone, in case you were hoping for a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. Same with Dukacs and Son. There’s a chain drugstore filling the space where both of them used to be, Duane Reade or CVC, I forget which. I don’t know what became of Frankie Dukacs, whether he died or just lost his lease.”

“He moved to Nova Scotia,” he suggested, “and became a vegetarian.”

“I suppose it could happen. After Billie Keegan quit tending bar for Jimmy, he moved to California and started making candles. And Motorcycle Mark married a Gujarati girl from Jackson Heights and moved somewhere upstate. Putnam County, I think it was, and the two of them are running a day-care center. He stayed sober, he shows up at St. Paul’s every couple of months. He’s still got the Harley, but these days his regular ride is an SUV.”

“And the other one with the bike?”

“The other—oh, Scooter Williams? Last I heard, he was still living on Ludlow Street and enjoying the sixties. It’s become a very desirable neighborhood now, believe it or not. Piper MacLeish got out of prison a couple of years ago. They let him out early, sent him home to die. No idea if Crosby Hart is alive or dead, but Google could probably find him, after it tells us why they call it a Mexican standoff. What else? Tiffany’s has been gone for years. The coffee shop on Sheridan Square, not the jewelry store. That’ll be doing just fine as long as there are Japanese tourists to shop there.”

“And the Museum of Natural History? Where you met with himself? It’s still in business, is it not?”

“Last I checked. Why?”

“Because,” he said, “there ought to be a place for a couple of old dinosaurs.” And he picked up his glass. There was nothing in it but water, but all the same he held it aloft and gazed through it at the light.

Table of Contents

Front Cover Image

Welcome

Dedication

Epigraph

Late One Night…

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

Early One Morning…

About the Author

Also by Lawrence Block

Copyright

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lawrence Block published his first novel in 1958 and has been chronicling the adventures of Matthew Scudder since 1975. He has been designated a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and has received Lifetime Achievement awards from the Crime Writers’ Association (UK), the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. He has won the Nero, Philip Marlowe, Societe 813, and Anthony awards, and is a multiple recipient of the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon awards. He and his wife, Lynne, are devout New Yorkers and relentless world travelers.

ALSO BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

THE MATTHEW SCUDDER NOVELS

The Sins of the Fathers • Time to Murder and Create • In the Midst of Death • A Stab in the Dark • Eight Million Ways to Die When the Sacred Ginmill Closes • Out on the Cutting Edge A Ticket to the Boneyard • A Dance at the Slaughterhouse • A Walk among the Tombstones • The Devil Knows You’re Dead • A Long Line of Dead Men • Even the Wicked • Everybody Dies Hope to Die • All the Flowers Are Dying

KELLER’S GREATEST HITS

Hit Man • Hit List • Hit Parade • Hit and Run

THE BERNIE RHODENBARR MYSTERIES

Burglars Can’t Be Choosers • The Burglar in the Closet • The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling • The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza • The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian • The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart • The Burglar in the Library The Burglar in the Rye • The Burglar on the Prowl

THE ADVENTURES OF EVAN TANNER

The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep • The Canceled Czech • Tanner’s Twelve Swingers • Two for Tanner • Tanner’s Tiger • Here Comes a Hero Me Tanner, You Jane • Tanner on Ice

THE AFFAIRS OF CHIP HARRISON

No Score • Chip Harrison Scores Again • Make Out with Murder The Topless Tulip Caper

OTHER NOVELS

A Diet of Treacle • After the First Death • Ariel • Campus Tramp Cinderella Sims • Coward’s Kiss • Deadly Honeymoon • The Girl with the Long Green Heart • Grifter’s Game • Killing Castro • Lucky at Cards Not Comin’ Home to You • Random Walk • Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man • Small Town • The Specialists • Such Men Are Dangerous The Triumph of Evil • You Could Call It Murder

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

Sometimes They Bite • Like a Lamb to Slaughter • Some Days You Get the Bear • Ehrengraf for the Defense • One Night Stands • The Lost Cases of Ed London • Enough Rope

BOOKS FOR WRITERS

Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print • Telling Lies for Fun and Profit Spider, Spin Me a Web • Write for Your Life

WRITTEN FOR PERFORMANCE

Tilt (episodic television) • How Far? (one-act play) My Blueberry Nights (film)

MEMOIR

Step by Step

ANTHOLOGIES EDITED

Death Cruise • Master’s Choice • Opening Shots • Master’s Choice, Volume 2 • Speaking of Lust • Opening Shots, Volume 2 • Speaking of Greed • Blood on Their Hands • Gangsters, Swindlers, Killers, and Thieves • Manhattan Noir • Manhattan Noir, Volume 2

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 by Lawrence Block

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

www.twitter.com/littlebrown

First eBook Edition: May 2011

Mulholland Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Mulholland Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-13273-2

Table of Contents

Front Cover Image

Welcome

Dedication

Epigraph

Late One Night…

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

Early One Morning…

About the Author

Also by Lawrence Block

Copyright

Table of Contents

Front Cover Image

Welcome

Dedication

Epigraph

Late One Night…

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

Early One Morning…

About the Author

Also by Lawrence Block

Copyright