Out on the Cutting Edge

12

I dropped into Grogan’s in the middle of the afternoon. The dart board wasn’t in use and I didn’t see Andy Buckley anywhere, but otherwise the crowd was much the same. Tom was behind the stick, and he put a magazine down long enough to draw me a Coke. An old man with a cloth cap was talking about the Mets, lamenting a trade they’d made fifteen years earlier. “They got Jim Fregosi,” he said scornfully, “and they gave up Nolan Ryan. Nolan Ryan!”

On the television screen, John Wayne was putting someone in his place. I tried to picture him pushing through the swinging doors of a saloon, bellying up to the bar, telling the barkeep to bring him a Coke and a chloral hydrate.

I nursed my Coke, bided my time. When my glass was almost empty I crooked a finger for Tom. He came over and reached for my glass but I covered it with my palm. He looked at me, expressionless as ever, and I asked if Mickey Ballou had been in.

“There’s people in and out,” he said. “I wouldn’t know their names.”

There was a north-of-Ireland edge to his speech. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. “You’d know him,” I said. “He’s the owner, isn’t he?”

“It’s called Grogan’s. Wouldn’t it be Grogan that owns it?”

“He’s a big man,” I said. “Sometimes he wears a butcher’s apron.”

“I’m off at six. Perhaps he comes here nights.”

“Perhaps he does. I’d like to leave word for him.”

“Oh?”

“I want to talk to him. Tell him, will you?”

“I don’t know him. And I don’t know yourself, so what would I tell him?”

“My name is Scudder, Matt Scudder. I want to talk to him about Eddie Dunphy.”

“I may not remember,” he said, his eyes flat, his voice toneless. “I’m not good with names.”

I left, walked around, dropped in again around six-thirty. The crowd was larger, with half a dozen after-work drinkers ranged along the bar. Tom was gone, his place taken by a tall fellow with a lot of curly dark brown hair. He wore an open cowhide vest over a red-and-black flannel shirt.

I asked if Mickey Ballou had been in.

“I haven’t seen him,” he said. “I just got on myself. Who wants him?”

“Scudder,” I said.

“I’ll tell him.”

I got out of there, had a sandwich by myself at the Flame, and went over to St. Paul’s. It was Friday night, which meant a step meeting, and this week we were on the sixth step, in the course of which one becomes ready on some inner level to have one’s defects of character removed. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in particular that you do to bring this about. It’s just supposed to happen to you. It hasn’t happened to me.

I was impatient for the meeting to end but I made myself stay for the whole thing anyway. During the break I took Jim Faber aside and told him I wasn’t sure whether or not Eddie had died sober, that the autopsy had found chloral hydrate in his bloodstream.

“The proverbial Mickey Finn,” he said. “You don’t hear about it much anymore, now that the drug industry has given us so many more advanced little blessings. I only once heard of an alcoholic who used to take chloral hydrate for recreational purposes. She went through a period of controlled solitary drinking; every night she took a dose of chloral, pills or drops, I don’t remember, and drank two beers. Whereupon she passed out and slept for eight or ten hours.”

“What happened to her?”

“Either she lost her taste for chloral hydrate or her source dried up, so she moved on to Jack Daniel’s. When she got up to a quart and a half of it daily, something told her she might have a problem. I wouldn’t make too much of the chloral hydrate Eddie took, Matt. It might not bode well for his long-term sobriety, but where he is now it’s no longer an issue. What’s done is done.”

Afterward I passed up the Flame and went straight to Grogan’s. I spotted Ballou the minute I cleared the threshold. He wasn’t wearing his white apron, but I recognized him without it.

He’d have been hard to miss. He stood well over six feet and carried a lot of flesh on a large frame. His head was like a boulder, massive and monolithic, with planes to it like the stone heads at Easter Island.

He was standing at the bar, one foot on the brass rail, leaning in to talk to the bartender, the same fellow in the unbuttoned leather vest I’d seen a few hours ago. The crowd had thinned out since then. There were a couple of old men in a booth, a pair of solitary drinkers strung out at the far end of the bar. In the back, two men were playing darts. One was Andy Buckley.

I went over to the bar. Three stools separated me from Ballou. I was watching him in the mirrored back bar when he turned and looked directly at me. He studied me for a moment, then turned to say something to the bartender.

I walked toward him, and his head swung around at my approach. His face was pitted like weathered granite, and there were patches of broken blood vessels on his cheekbones, and across the bridge of his nose. His eyes were a surprising green, and there was a lot of scar tissue around them.

“You’re Scudder,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know you, but I’ve seen you. And you’ve seen me.”

“Yes.”

“You were asking for me. And now you’re here.” He had thin lips, and they curled in what might have been a smile. He said, “What will you drink, man?”

He had a bottle of Jameson on the bar in front of him, the twelve-year-old. In a glass beside it, two small ice cubes bobbed in an amber sea. I said I’d have coffee, if they happened to have any made. Ballou looked at the bartender, who shook his head.

“The draught Guinness is as good as you’ll get this side of the ocean,” Ballou said. “I wouldn’t carry the bottled stuff, it’s thick as syrup.”

“I’ll have a Coke.”

“You don’t drink,” he said.

“Not today.”

“You don’t drink at all, or you don’t drink with me?”

“I don’t drink at all.”

“And how is that?” he asked. “Not drinking at all.”

“It’s all right.”

“Is it hard?”

“Sometimes. But sometimes drinking was hard.”

“Ah,” he said. “That’s the fucking truth.” He looked at the bartender, who responded by drawing a Coke for me. He put it in front of me and moved off out of hearing range.

Ballou picked up his glass and looked at me over the top of it. He said, “Back when the Morrisseys had their place around the corner. Their after-hours. I used to see you there.”

“I remember.”

“You drank with both hands, those days.”

“That was then.”

“And this is now, eh?” He put his glass down, looked at his hand, wiped it across his shirtfront, and extended it toward me. There was something oddly solemn about our handshake. His hand was large, his grip firm but not aggressively so. We shook hands, and then he took up his whiskey and I reached for my Coke.

He said, “Is that what ties you to Eddie Dunphy?” He lifted his glass, looked into it. “Hell of a thing when the booze turns on you. Eddie, though, I’d say he never could handle it, the poor bastard. Did you know him when he drank?”

“No.”

“He never had the head for it. Then I heard he stopped drinking. And now he’s gone and hanged himself.”

“A day or so before he did it,” I said, “we had a talk.”

“Did you now?”

“There was something eating him, something he wanted to get off his chest but was afraid to tell me.”

“What was it?”

“I was hoping you might be able to answer that.”

“I don’t take your meaning.”

“What did he know that was dangerous knowledge? What did he ever do that would weigh on his conscience?”

The big head swung from side to side. “He was a neighborhood boy. He was a thief, he had a mouth on him when he drank, he raised a little hell. That’s all he ever did.”

“He said he used to spend a lot of time here.”

“Here? In Grogan’s?” He shrugged. “It’s a public house. All sorts of people come in, drink their beer or whiskey, pass the time, go on their way. Some have a glass of wine. Or a Coca-Cola, if it comes to that.”

“Eddie said this was where he used to hang out. We were walking one night, and he crossed the street to avoid walking past this place.”

The green eyes widened. “He did? Why?”

“Because it was so much a part of his drinking life. I guess he was afraid it would pull him in if he got too close.”

“My God,” he said. He uncapped the bottle, topped up his drink. The two ice cubes had melted but he didn’t seem bothered by their absence. He picked up the glass. Staring into it he said, “Eddie was my brother’s friend. Did you know my brother Dennis?”

“No.”

“Very different from me, Dennis was. He had our mother’s looks. She was Irish. The old man was French, he came from a fishing village half an hour from Marseilles. I went there once, a couple of years ago, just to see what it looked like. I could see why he left. There was nothing there.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit one, blew out smoke. “I look just like the old man,” he said. “Except for the eyes. Dennis and I both got our mother’s eyes.”

“Eddie said Dennis was killed in Vietnam.”

He turned the green eyes on me. “I don’t know why the hell he went. It would have been nothing at all to get him out of it. I told him, I said, ‘Dennis, for Christ’s sake, all I have to do is pick up a phone.’ He wouldn’t have it.” He took the cigarette and ground it out in an ashtray. “So he went over there,” he said, “and they shot his ass off for him, the dumb bastard.”

I didn’t say anything, and we let the silence stretch. For a moment I had the thought that the room was filling up with dead people — Eddie, Dennis, Ballou’s parents, and a few ghosts of my own, all the people who’d passed on but still lingered on the edge of consciousness. If I turned my head quickly, I thought, I might see my aunt Peg, or my own dead parents.

“Dennis was gentle,” he said. “Maybe that was why he went, to prove a hardness he didn’t have. He was Eddie’s friend, and Eddie came to the service for him. After that he would come around sometimes. I never had much for him to do.”

“He told me he watched you beat a man to death one night.”

He looked at me. Surprise showed in his eyes. I didn’t know if it was surprise that Eddie had told me this or that I was repeating it. He said, “He told you that, did he?”

“In a basement somewhere around here, he said it was. He said you were in a furnace room and you had some guy tied to a post with a length of clothesline, and you beat him to death with a baseball bat.”

“Who was it?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And when did it happen?”

“Some years ago. He didn’t get any more specific than that.”

“And was he there?”

“So he said.”

“Or do you suppose he just put himself into the story?” He picked up his glass but didn’t drink from it. “Though I don’t think much of it as a story, do you? One man beats another with a ball bat. It’s nasty, but it doesn’t make much of a story. You couldn’t dine out on a story like that.”

“There was a better story going around a couple of years ago.”

“Oh?”

“A fellow disappeared, a man named Farrelly.”

“Paddy Farrelly,” he said. “A difficult man.”

“They said he gave you trouble, and then he disappeared.”

“Is that what they said?”

“And they said you went into half the saloons on Ninth and Tenth Avenues carrying a bowling bag, and you would open the bag and show everybody Farrelly’s head.”

He drank some whiskey. “The stories they tell,” he said.

“Was Eddie around when that happened?”

He looked at me. There was no one anywhere near us now. The bartender was all the way down at the end of the bar, and the men who’d been closest had left. “It’s godawful warm in here,” he said. “What do you need that suit jacket for?”

He was wearing a jacket himself, tweed, heavier than mine. “I’m comfortable,” I said.

“Take it off.”

I looked at him, took off the jacket. I hung it over the back of the stool next to me.

“The shirt, too,” he said.

I took it off, and the T-shirt after it. “Good man,” he said. “God’s sake, put your clothes back on before you catch cold. You got to be careful, a bastard’ll come in and start talking about old times, and the next thing you know it’s all recorded, he’s wearing a fucking wire. Paddy Farrelly’s head? My mother’s father was from Sligo, he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find a man alive in Dublin that wasn’t in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out. Well, it’s that hard to find a son of a bitch on Tenth Avenue who didn’t see me showing round the bloody head of poor Farrelly.”

“Are you saying it didn’t happen?”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “What happened and what didn’t? Maybe I never opened the fucking bowling bag. Maybe a fucking bowling ball was all it ever contained. They all love a story, you know. They love to hear it, they love to tell it, they love the little shiver it puts between their shoulder blades. The Irish are the worst that way. Especially in this fucking neighborhood.” He drank, set the glass down. “It’s rich soil around here, you know. Plant a seed and a story grows like weeds.”

“What happened to Farrelly?”

“Why should I know? Maybe he’s in Tahiti, drinking the milk of coconuts and fucking little brown-skinned girls. Did anyone ever find his body? Or the legendary fucking head?”

“What did Eddie know that made him dangerous?”

“Nothing. He didn’t know a damn thing. He was no danger to me.”

“Who could he have been a danger to?”

“Nobody I can think of. What did he ever do? He did some thieving. He went along with some boys who took a load of furs out of a loft on Twenty-seventh Street. That’s the biggest thing I can think of that he was a part of, and there’d be no stink coming off that one. It was all arranged, the owner let them have the key. He wanted the insurance. And it was years ago, years ago. Who was he a danger to? Jesus, didn’t he hang himself? Wasn’t it himself he was a danger to?”

Something happened between us, something that I find hard to explain, or even to understand. We were silent for a few minutes, having run out of things to say about Eddie Dunphy. Then he told a story about his brother Dennis, how he’d taken the blame for something Dennis had done when they were children. Then I told a couple of cop stories from when I was attached to the Sixth Precinct in the Village.

Somehow or other something bonded us. At one point he walked all the way to the back end of the bar and came around behind it. He filled two glasses with ice cubes, then ran them both full of Coca-Cola and passed them over the bar to me. He took a fresh fifth of the twelve-year-old Jameson from the back bar, put a couple of ice cubes in a clean glass, and came around the bar again, leading me to a booth in the corner. I put my two Cokes on the table in front of me, and he cracked the seal on the whiskey bottle and filled his glass, and we sat there for the next hour or so, telling stories, sharing silences.

It didn’t happen all that often in the drinking days and it hasn’t happened often since. I don’t think you could say that we became friends. Friendship is something different. It was as if some inner barrier that each of us ordinarily maintained was, for the moment, dissolved. Some internal truce had been declared, with hostilities suspended for the holidays. For an hour we were easier with each other than old friends, than brothers. It was not the sort of thing that could last much longer than an hour, but that made it no less real.

At length he said, “By God, I wish you drank.”

“Sometimes I wish it myself. But most of the time I’m glad I don’t.”

“You must miss it.”

“Now and then.”

“I’d miss it like fury. I don’t know if I could live without it.”

“I had more trouble living with it,” I said. “The last time I drank I wound up with a grand mal seizure. I fell down in the street and woke up in the hospital with no idea of where I was or how I got there.”

“Christ,” he said, and shook his head. “But until then,” he said, “you had a good long run at it.”

“That I did.”

“Then you can’t complain,” he said. “We can’t any of us complain, can we?”

Around midnight it began to wear thin. I was starting to have the feeling that I’d stayed too long at the dance. I stood up and told Ballou I had to get on home.

“Are you all right to walk? Do you want me to call a car for you?” He caught himself and laughed. He said, “Jesus, all you’ve been drinking is Coca-Cola. Why shouldn’t you be all right to get home under your own power?”

“I’m fine.”

He hauled himself to his feet. “Now that you know where we are,” he said, “come back and see us again.”

“I’ll do that.”

“I enjoyed this, Scudder.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “You’re all right.”

“You’re all right yourself.”

“It’s a damn shame about Eddie. Did he have any family at all? Will there be a wake for him, do you know?”

“I don’t know. The city’s holding the body for the time being.”

“Hell of a way to end up.” He sighed, then straightened up. “We’ll talk again, you and I.”

“I’d like that.”

“I’m here most nights, off and on. Or they know how to reach me.”

“Your early-shift bartender wouldn’t even admit he knew who you were.”

He laughed. “That’s Tom. He’s a close one, isn’t he? But he gave me your message, and so did Neil. Whoever’s behind the bar here can get word to me.”

I reached into my pocket, got out a card. “I’m at the Northwestern Hotel,” I said. “Here’s the number. I’m not there much, but they’ll take messages.”

“What’s this?”

“My number.”

“This,” he said. I looked, and he had the card turned and was looking at the picture of Paula Hoeldtke. “The girl,” he said. “Who is she?”

“Her name’s Paula Hoeldtke. She’s from Indiana, and she disappeared over the summer. She lived in the neighborhood, she worked at a few restaurants nearby. Her father hired me to find her.”

“Why give me her picture?”

“It’s the only thing I’ve got with my name and number on it. Why? Do you know her?”

He studied her picture, then raised his green eyes to meet mine. “No,” he said. “I never saw her.”