Out on the Cutting Edge

4

My first thought the next morning was that I’d been too abrupt with my mystery caller. He wasn’t much, but what else did I have?

Over breakfast, I reminded myself that I hadn’t really expected to come up with anything. Paula Hoeldtke had dropped out of actressing and waitressing. Then she’d dropped out of Florence Edderling’s house and out of her role as her parents’ daughter. By now she was probably settled into some new life, and she’d surface when she wanted to. Or she was dead, in which case there wasn’t a whole lot I could do for her.

I thought I’d go to a movie, but instead I wound up spending the day talking to theatrical agents, asking the same old questions, passing out pictures. None of them recognized the name or the face. “She probably just went to open auditions,” one of them told me. “Some of them look for an agent right away, others buy the trades and go to the cattle calls and try to get a few credits so they have something to impress an agent with.”

“What’s the best way?”

“The best way? Have an uncle in the business, that’s the best way.”

I got tired of talking to agents and tried the rooming house again. I rang Florence Edderling’s bell and she shook her head as she let me in. “I ought to start collecting rent from you,” she said. “You spend more time here than some of my tenants.”

“I’ve just got a few more people to see.”

“Take all the time you want. Nobody’s complained, and if they don’t mind I sure don’t.”

Of the tenants I hadn’t yet interviewed, only one was on the premises. She’d lived in the building since May and didn’t know Paula Hoeldtke at all. “I wish I could help,” she said, “but she doesn’t even look familiar to me. My neighbor across the hall said she’d talked to you, that this girl disappeared or something?”

“It looks that way.”

She shrugged. “I wish I could help.”

When I was first getting sober I started keeping company with a woman named Jan Keane. I’d known her before, but we’d stopped seeing each other when she joined AA and took up again when I started coming to meetings.

She’s a sculptor, living and working in a loft on Lispenard Street, which is in TriBeCa, just south of Canal Street. We began spending a fair amount of time together, seeing each other three or four nights a week, occasionally getting together during the day. Sometimes we went to meetings together, but we did other things as well. We’d go out to dinner, or she would cook for me. She liked to go to galleries, in SoHo or the East Village. This was something I’d never done much of, and I discovered I enjoyed it. I’d always been a little self-conscious in situations like that, never knowing what to say when confronted by a painting or a piece of sculpture, and from her I’d learned that it was perfectly acceptable not to say anything at all.

I don’t know what went wrong. The relationship escalated slightly, as relationships do, and we reached a point where I was half living on Lispenard Street, with some of my clothes in her closet and my socks and underwear in one of her dresser drawers. We had conversations in which we speculated gingerly on the wisdom of my maintaining my room at the hotel. Wasn’t it a waste to pay rent when I was hardly ever there? On the other hand, was it perhaps valuable as a place to meet clients?

There was a point, I suppose, when it was appropriate for me to give up my room and begin paying my share of the expenses at the loft. And there was a point, too, where we might have gone on to talk about commitment and permanence and, I suppose, marriage.

But we didn’t do any of this, and, having left it undone, it became impossible for things to remain as they had been. We disengaged gradually, in little fits and starts. Our times together were increasingly marked by moods and silences, and our times apart became more frequent. We decided — I honestly forget who suggested it — that we ought to see other people. We did, and subsequently found that made us that much more uncomfortable with each other. And at last, gently, and with a surprising lack of drama, I returned a couple of books she had lent me and retrieved the last of my clothing, and I took a cab uptown, and that was that.

It had dragged on long enough for the ending to be something of a relief, but even so I felt lonely a lot of the time, and possessed of a sense of loss. I’d felt less at the breakup of my marriage some years previously, but of course I was drinking then, so I didn’t really feel anything.

So I went to a lot of meetings, and sometimes I talked about what I was feeling at meetings, and sometimes I kept it to myself. I had tried dating shortly after the breakup, but I didn’t seem to have the heart for it. Now I was beginning to think that it might be time for me to start seeing women again, or a woman. I kept having the thought, but I hadn’t yet reached the point of acting on it.

All of which put a curious spin on the business of going door-to-door in a West Side rooming house and making conversation with single women. Most of them were a little young for me, but not all of them were. And there is something about the kind of interview I was conducting that facilitates flirtation. I’d learned this when I was a cop, and a married one at that.

Sometimes, asking my endless questions about the elusive Paula Hoeldtke, I would be aware of a strong attraction to the woman I was questioning. Sometimes I sensed, too, that the current ran in both directions, that the attraction was reciprocal. I wrote little mental scripts, moving us toward emotional intimacy, and from the doorway to the bed.

But I could never bring myself to take the next step. I felt out of sync, and by the time I left the rooming house, having talked to six or ten or a dozen people, my mood had darkened and I felt unutterably alone.

This time all it took was one conversation to bring on the feeling. I went back to my hotel room and sat in front of my TV set until it was time to go to the meeting.

At St. Paul’s that night the speaker was a housewife from Ozone Park. She told us how she used to take the first drink of the day as her husband’s Pontiac was pulling out of the driveway. She kept her vodka under the sink, in a container that had previously held oven cleaner. “The first time I told this story,” she said, “a woman said, ‘Oh, dear Jesus, suppose you grabbed the wrong jar and drank the real oven cleaner.’ ‘Honey,’ I told her, ‘get real, will you? There was no wrong jar. There was no real oven cleaner. I lived in that house for thirteen years and I never cleaned the oven.’ Anyway,” she said, “that was my social drinking.”

Different meetings have different formats. At St. Paul’s the meetings run an hour and a half, and the Friday night meetings are step meetings, centering upon one of the twelve steps of AA’s program of recovery. This particular meeting was on the fifth step, but I don’t remember what the speaker had to say on the subject or what particular words of wisdom I contributed when it was my turn.

At ten o’clock we all stood to say the Lord’s Prayer, except for a woman named Carole who makes a point of not taking part in the prayer. Then I folded my chair and stacked it, dropped my coffee cup in the trash, carried ashtrays up to the front of the room, talked with a couple of fellows, and turned when Eddie Dunphy called my name. “Oh, hello,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”

“I was in the back, I got here a few minutes late. I liked what you had to say.”

“Thanks,” I said, wondering what I’d said. He asked if I wanted to have coffee, and I said a few of us were going over to the Flame, and why didn’t he join us?

We walked a block south on Ninth and wound up at the big corner table with six or seven other people. I had a sandwich and fries and some more coffee. The conversation was mostly about politics. It was less than two months before the election, and people were saying what everybody says every four years, that it was a damned shame there wasn’t anybody more interesting to vote for.

I didn’t say much. I don’t pay any more attention to politics than I have to. There was a woman at our table named Helen who’d been sober about the same length of time I had, and for a while now I’d been toying with the idea of asking her out. Now I placed her under covert surveillance, and I kept coming up with data that got entered in the minus column. Her laugh was grating, she needed some dental work, and every sentence out of her mouth had the phrase you know in it. By the time she was done with her hamburger, our romance had died unborn. I’ll tell you, it’s a great way to operate. You can run through women like wildfire and they never even know it.

A little after eleven I tucked some coins alongside my saucer, said my goodbyes, and carried my check to the counter. Eddie rose when I did, paid his own check and followed me outside. I’d almost forgotten he was there; he’d contributed even less to the conversation than I had.

Now he said, “Beautiful night, isn’t it? When the air’s like this it makes you want to breathe more. You got a minute? You want to walk a few blocks?”

“Sure.”

“I gave you a call earlier. At your hotel.”

“What time?”

“I don’t know, middle of the afternoon. Maybe three o’clock.”

“I never got the message.”

“Oh, I didn’t leave one. It was nothing important, and anyway you couldn’t call me back.”

“That’s right, you don’t have a phone.”

“Oh, I got one. It sits right there on the bedside table. It just don’t work, that’s the only thing wrong with it. Anyway, I just wanted to pass the time of day. What were you doing, looking for the girl some more?”

“Going through the motions, anyway.”

“No luck?”

“Not so far.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get lucky.” He took out a cigarette, tapped it against his thumbnail. “What they were going on about back there,” he said. “Politics. I have to tell you I don’t even know what they were talking about. You gonna vote, Matt?”

“I don’t know.”

“You gotta wonder why anybody wants to be president. You want to know something? I never voted for nobody in my life. Wait a minute, I just told a lie. You want to know who I voted for? Abe Beame.”

“That was a while ago.”

“Gimme a minute and I’ll tell you the year. That was ’73. You remember him? He was a little shrimp of a guy, he ran for mayor and he won. You remember?”

“Sure.”

He laughed. “I must of voted twelve times for Abe Beame. More. Maybe fifteen.”

“It sounds as though you were highly impressed with him.”

“Yeah, his message really moved me. What it was, some guys from the local clubhouse got hold of a school bus and ran a bunch of us all over the West Side. Every precinct we went to I answered to a different name and they had a voter registration card for me in that name, and I went in the booth and did my civic duty like a little soldier. It was easy, I just voted the straight Democratic ticket like I was told.”

He stopped to light his cigarette. “I forget what they paid us,” he said. “I was gonna say fifty bucks, but it could have been less than that. This was fifteen years ago and I was just a kid, so it wouldn’t take much. Besides, they sprung for a meal, and of course there was free booze for the bunch of us the whole day long.”

“Magic words.”

“Ain’t that the truth? Booze was God’s gift even when you had to pay for it, and when it was free, Jesus, there was nothing better.”

“There was something about it that defied all logic,” I said. “There was a place in Washington Heights where I didn’t have to pay for my drinks. I remember taking a cab there from way the hell out in Brooklyn. It cost me twenty dollars, and I drank maybe ten or twelve dollars worth of booze, and then I took a cab home and thought I really put one over on the world. And I didn’t just do this once, either.”

“It made sense at the time.”

“Perfect sense.”

He drew on the cigarette. “I forget who it was ran against Beame,” he said. “It’s funny what you remember and what you forget. This poor bastard, I voted against him fifteen times and I don’t remember his name. Here’s another thing that’s funny. After the first two, three times I voted, I couldn’t go in a booth without getting this urge to cross ’em up. You know, vote the other way, take their money and vote Republican.”

“Why?”

“Who knows why? I had a couple of belts in me by then and maybe that made it seem like a good idea. And I figured nobody’d know. Secret ballot, right? Only I thought, yeah, there’s supposed to be a secret ballot, but there’s lots of shit that’s supposed to be, and if they can take and vote us fifteen times all over town, maybe they can tell how we’re voting. So I did what I was supposed to do.”

“The straight ticket.”

“You got it. Anyway, that was the first I ever voted. I coulda the year before, I was old enough, but I didn’t, and then I voted fifteen times for Abe Beame, and I guess I got it out of my system, because I never done it since.”

The light changed and we walked across Fifty-seventh. A blue-and-white patrol car headed north on Ninth with the siren screaming. We turned to follow it with our eyes until it was out of sight. You could still hear it, though, whining faintly over the other traffic noises.

He said, “Somebody must of done something bad.”

“Or it’s just a couple of cops in a hurry.”

“Yeah. Matt, what they were talking about at the meeting. The fifth step?”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe I’m afraid of it.”

The steps are designed to enable recovering alcoholics to change, to grow spiritually. The founders of AA discovered that people who were willing to grow along spiritual lines tended to stay sober, while those who fought change tended to go back to drinking sooner or later. The fifth step calls for an admission to God, to oneself, and to another human being of the exact nature of one’s wrongs.

I quoted the language of the step to Eddie and he frowned. He said, “Yeah, but what does that boil down to? You sit down with somebody and tell him every bad thing you ever done?”

“More or less. Everything that bothers you, everything that weighs on your mind. The idea is that you might drink over it otherwise.”

He thought about it. “I don’t know if I could do that,” he said.

“Well, there’s no rush. You’re not sober all that long, you don’t have to be in a hurry.”

“I guess.”

“There’s a lot of people will tell you that the steps are a load of crap, anyway. ‘Don’t drink and go to meetings and all the rest is conversation.’ You’ve heard people say that.”

“Oh, sure. ‘If you don’t drink you can’t get drunk.’ I remember the first time I heard somebody say that. I thought it was the most brilliant remark I ever heard in my life.”

“You can’t fault it for truth.”

He started to say something, but stopped when a woman stepped out of a doorway into our path. She was a haggard, wild-eyed thing, all wrapped in a shawl, her hair stringy and matted. She was holding an infant in one arm, and she had a small child standing next to her, clutching her shawl. She extended one hand, palm up, wordless.

She looked as though she belonged in Calcutta, not New York. I’d seen her before during the past few weeks, and each time I’d given her money. I gave her a dollar now, and she drew back wordlessly into the shadows.

He said, “You hate to see a woman on the street like that. And when she’s got her kids with her, Jesus, that’s a hell of a thing to see.”

“I know.”

“Matt, did you ever do it? Take the fifth step?”

“I did, yes.”

“You didn’t hold nothing back?”

“I tried not to. I said everything I could think of.”

He thought about it. “Of course you were a cop,” he said. “You couldn’t of done anything that bad.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I did a lot of things I’m not proud of, and some of them were acts a person could go to jail for. I was on the force for a lot of years and I took money almost from the beginning. I never lived on what I drew as salary.”

“Everybody does that.”

“No,” I said, “everybody doesn’t. Some cops are clean and some are dirty, and I was dirty. I always told myself I felt all right about it, and I justified it with the argument that it was clean dirt. I didn’t actually shake people down and I didn’t overlook homicides, but I took money, and that’s not what they hired me to do. I was illegal. It was crooked.”

“I suppose.”

“And I did other things. For Christ’s sake, I was a thief. I stole. One time I was investigating a break-in and there was a cigar box next to the cash register that the burglar had somehow missed, and there was close to a thousand dollars in it. I took it and put it in my pocket. I figured the owner’d be covered by insurance, or else it was money he was skimming, in which case I was just stealing from a thief. I had it rationalized, but you can’t get around the fact that I was taking money that wasn’t mine.”

“Cops do that kind of shit all the time.”

“They rob the dead, too, and I did that for years. Say you come on a stiff in an SRO hotel or an apartment, and he’s got fifty or a hundred dollars on him, and you and your partner divide it up before you zip him into the body bag. What the hell, otherwise it just gets lost in the bureaucratic mill. Even if there’s an heir it’ll most likely never get to him, and why not just save time and trouble and put it in your pocket? Except that it’s stealing.”

He started to say something but I wasn’t done yet. “And I did other things. I got guys sent away for things they didn’t do. I don’t mean I framed any choirboys. Anybody I ever hung anything on was bad to start with. I’d know a guy did a certain job, and I’d know I couldn’t touch him for it, but then I might find some eyewitnesses suggestible enough to ID him for something he hadn’t done, and that was enough to put him away. Case closed.”

“There’s a lot of guys in the joint who didn’t do what they went away for,” he allowed. “Not all of them. I mean, three out of four cons’ll swear they were innocent of what they’re doing time for, but you can’t believe ’em. Cons’ll con you. I mean, they lie.” He shrugged. “But sometimes it’s the truth.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m not sure I regret putting the right people away for the wrong reason. It got them off the street, and they were people who didn’t do the street a whole lot of good. But that didn’t necessarily make it the right thing for me to do, so I figured it belonged in my fifth step.”

“So you told somebody about it.”

“And more. Things that weren’t against the law, but that bothered me more than other things that were. Like running around on my wife while I was married. Like not having time for my kids, like walking out on them around the time I left the department. Like not being there for people in general. One time an aunt of mine was dying of thyroid cancer. She was my mother’s younger sister, she was all the family I had left, and I kept promising myself I would go and see her in the hospital, and I kept putting it off and putting it off, and the woman died. I felt so bad about not getting to the hospital that I didn’t get to the funeral, either. I sent flowers, though, and I went to some fucking church and lit a fucking candle, all of which must have been a hell of a comfort to the dead woman.”

We walked in silence for a few minutes, heading west on one of the streets in the low Fifties, then taking a left on Tenth Avenue. We passed a lowdown saloon with the door open and that stale beer smell rolled out at us, sickening and inviting all at once. He asked if I’d ever been in the place.

“Not lately,” I said.

“It’s a real bucket of blood,” he said. “Matt? You ever kill anybody?”

“Twice in the line of duty. And once accidentally, and that was line of duty, too. A bullet of mine ricocheted and killed a child.”

“You mentioned that last night.”

“Did I? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Once after I left the department a guy jumped me on the street in connection with a case I was working on. I threw him and he landed wrong and died of a broken neck. And another time, Christ, I was all of a week sober, and this crazy Colombian charged me with a machete and I emptied a gun into him. So the answer is yes, I’ve killed four people, five if you count the kid.

“And, except for the kid, I don’t think I ever lost a night’s sleep over any of them. And I never agonized over the assholes I sent up for something they didn’t do. I think it was wrong to do it, I wouldn’t do it that way now, but none of that stuff bothers me anywhere near as much as not visiting Aunt Peg when she was dying. But that’s an alcoholic for you. The big stuff is easy. It’s the little shit that drives us crazy.”

“Sometimes it’s the big stuff, too.”

“Something eating you, Eddie?”

“Oh, shit, I don’t know. I’m a neighborhood guy, Matt. I grew up in these streets. You grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, the one thing you learned was not to tell nothing to nobody. ‘Don’t tell your business to strangers.’ My mother was an honest woman, Matt. She found a dime in a pay phone, she’d look around for somebody to give it back to, but I must of heard her say it a thousand times. ‘Don’t tell nobody your business.’ And she walked the walk, God bless her. Two, three times a week till the day he died, the old man’d come home half in the bag and slap her around. And she kept it to herself. Anybody asked her, oh, she was clumsy, she walked into a door, she lost her balance, she fell down a flight of stairs. But most people knew not to ask. If you lived in the Kitchen, you knew what not to ask.”

I started to say something but he took my arm and urged me to the curb. “Let’s cross the street,” he said. “I don’t like to walk past that place if I don’t have to.”

The place in question was Grogan’s Open House. Green neon in the window offered Harp lager and Guinness stout. “I used to hang out there a lot,” he explained. “I like to steer clear of it now.”

I knew the feeling. There was a time when I drank away the days and nights at Armstrong’s, and when I first got sober I’d go out of my way to avoid passing the place. When I had to walk past it I would avert my eyes and speed up my pace, as if I might otherwise be drawn in against my will, like iron filings to a magnet. Then Jimmy lost his lease and relocated a block west at Tenth and Fifty-seventh, and a Chinese restaurant moved into his old spot, and I had one less problem in my life.

“You know who owns that joint, Matt?”

“Somebody named Grogan?”

“Not in years. That’s Mickey Ballou’s place.”

“The Butcher Boy?”

“You know Mickey?”

“Only by sight. By sight and by reputation.”

“Well, he’s a sight and he’s got a reputation. You won’t find his name on the license, but it’s his store. When I was a kid I was tight with his brother Dennis. Then he got killed in Vietnam. Were you in the service, Matt?”

I shook my head. “They weren’t drafting cops.”

“I had TB when I was a kid. I never knew it at the time, but there was something showed up on the X ray, kept me out of the service.” He threw his cigarette in the gutter. “Another reason to quit these things. But not today, huh?”

“You’ve got time.”

“Yeah. He was okay, Dennis. Then after he died I did some things with Mick. You heard the stories about him?”

“I’ve heard some stories.”

“You heard about him and the bowling bag? And what he had in it?”

“I never knew whether to believe it or not.”

“Well, I wasn’t there. One time, though, and this was some years ago, I was in a basement two, three blocks from where we’re standing now. They had a guy, I forget what he done. Ratted somebody out, it must of been. They’re in the furnace room and they got him tied to a post with a clothesline, and a gag in his mouth, and Mickey puts on this long white butcher’s apron, covers you from your shoulders down to your feet. The apron’s pure white except for the stains on it. And Mickey picks up a ball bat and starts wailing on the guy, and the blood sprays all over the place. Next time I see Mickey he’s in the Open House with the apron on. He likes to wear it, like he’s a butcher just off work, ducked in for a quick one. ‘See that?’ he says, pointing to a fresh stain. ‘Know what that is? That’s rat blood.’ “

We had reached the corner a block south of Grogan’s Open House, and now we crossed Tenth Avenue again. He said, “I was never no Al Capone, but I done stuff. I mean, shit, voting for Abe Beame’s the closest I ever came to an honest day’s work. I’m thirty-seven years old and the only time I ever had a Social Security card was in Green Haven. They had me working in the laundry there for whatever it was. Thirty cents an hour? Something ridiculous like that, and they had to take out taxes and Social Security, so you had to get a Social Security card. Up to then I never had one, and after that I never used it.”

“You’re working now, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “Little get-well jobs. Sweeping out a couple of joints after closing, Dan Kelly’s and Pete’s All-American. You know the All-American?”

“Talk about a bucket of blood. I would duck in there for a quick one, but I never stayed any length of time.”

“Like making a pit stop. I used to love that, walk into a bar, have a quick pop, then out again to face the world. Anyway, I go into those two joints late at night or early in the morning, sweep the place out, take out the empties, put the chairs back around the tables. And there’s a moving company down in the Village gives me a day’s work now and then. Everything’s off the books, you don’t need no Social Security card for those jobs. I get by.”

“Sure.”

“My rent’s cheap, and I don’t eat much, I never ate much, and what am I gonna spend my dough on? Night-clubs? Fancy clothes? Fuel for my yacht?”

“Sounds as though you’re doing all right.”

He stopped walking, turned to face me. “Yeah, but I’m just shooting the shit, Matt.” He put his hands in his pockets and stood looking down at the pavement. “The point is I done stuff I don’t know if I want to tell anybody about. Admitting it to myself, all right, like I already know it, right? So it’s just a matter of getting honest and facing up to it. And admitting it to God, well, man, if there’s no God it don’t make no difference, and if there is a God He already knows everything you done, so that part’s easy. But coming clean with another person, shit, I don’t know, Matt. I done certain things that you could go away for, and in some cases there’s other people involved, and I just don’t know how I feel about all that.”

“A lot of people take the step with a priest.”

“You mean like confession?”

“I think it’s a little different. You’re not seeking formal absolution as much as you’re attempting to unburden yourself. You don’t have to be a Catholic, and you don’t have to go through it in a church. You can even find a priest who’s sober in AA and understands what the program’s all about. But even if he’s not he’d be bound by the seal of the confessional, so you wouldn’t have to worry about him saying anything to anybody.”

“I couldn’t tell you the last time I was in a church. Wait a minute, did you hear what I just said? Christ, I was in a church an hour ago. I been going into church basements once or twice a day for months. But the last time I went to mass, well, I went to a couple weddings over the years, Catholic weddings, but I didn’t take communion. I’m sure it’s more than twenty years since I made confession.”

“It doesn’t have to be with a priest. But if you’re worried about confidentiality—”

“Is that how you did it? With a priest?”

“I took it with another person from the program. You know him. Jim Faber.”

“I don’t think I know him.”

“Sure you do. He comes to St. Paul’s all the time, he was there tonight. He’s a few years older than I am. Hair’s mostly gray, wears a beat-up army jacket most of the time. You’d know him if you saw him.”

“He wasn’t at the Flame, was he?”

“Not tonight.”

“What is he, a cop or a detective or something?”

“No, he’s a printer, he’s got his own shop over on Eleventh Avenue.”

“Oh, Jim the Printer,” he said. “Been sober a long time.”

“He’s coming up on nine years.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a long time.”

“He would tell you he just did it a day at a time.”

“Yeah, that’s what they all tell you. It’s still nine fucking years, isn’t it? No matter how you slice it, divide it into hours and minutes if you want, it still comes to nine years.”

“That’s the truth.”

He took out another cigarette, changed his mind, returned it to the pack. “Is he your sponsor?”

“Not formally. I’ve never had a sponsor in any formal way. I’ve never been very good at doing things the way you’re supposed to. Jim’s the person I call when I want to talk about something. If I call anybody.”

“I got a sponsor when I was about two days out of detox. I got his number next to my phone. The phone doesn’t work and I’ve never called him anyway. We go to different meetings, so I never see him, either.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dave. I don’t know his last name, and I have to say I’m beginning to forget what he looks like, it’s so long since I saw him. But I’ve never yet thrown his number away, so I guess he’s still my sponsor. I mean, I could call him if I had to, right?”

“Sure.”

“I could even take the step with him.”

“If you felt comfortable with him.”

“I don’t even know him. Do you have anybody that you sponsor, Matt?”

“No.”

“You ever hear anybody’s fifth step?”

“No.”

There was a bottle cap on the sidewalk and he kicked at it. “Because I guess that’s what I’m leading up to. I can’t believe it, a crook looking to confess to a cop. Of course you’re not with the department no more, but would you still, you know, be bound to report anything I said?”

“No. I wouldn’t have the legal right to withhold information, the way a priest or a lawyer might, but that’s how I’d treat it. As privileged information.”

“Would you be willing? It’d be a whole load of shit once I got started, you might not want to sit through it.”

“I’ll force myself.”

“I feel funny asking.”

“I know. I felt the same way.”

“If it was just me involved,” he began, then broke off the sentence. He said, “What I want to do, I want to take a couple of days, sort things out in my mind, think some things through. Then if you’re still willing we can get together and I can talk some. If that’s all right with you.”

“There’s no hurry,” I told him. “Wait until you’re ready.”

He shook his head. “If I wait till I’m ready I’ll never do it. Gimme the weekend to sort it out and then we’ll sit down and do it.”

“Sorting it out is part of it. Take all the time you need.”

“I been doing that,” he said. He grinned, put a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks, Matt. That’s my block coming up and I think I’ll say good night.”

“ ‘Night, Eddie.”

“Have a good weekend.”

“You too. Maybe I’ll run into you at a meeting.”

“St. Paul’s is just Monday through Friday, right? I’ll probably get there Monday night, anyway. Matt? Thanks again.”

He headed for his building. I walked up a block on Tenth, walked east on one of the cross streets. A few doors from the corner of Ninth Avenue, three young men in a doorway went silent at my approach. Their eyes followed me all the way to the corner, and I could feel their stares like darts between my shoulder blades.

Halfway home a hooker asked me if I felt like partying. She looked young and fresh, but they mostly do these days; drugs and viruses keep them from lasting long enough to fade.

I told her we’d have to make it some other time. Her smile, at least as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s, stayed with me all the way home. At Fifty-sixth Street a black man, bare to the waist, asked me for spare change. Half a block farther, a woman stepped out of the shadows and made the same request. She had lank blond hair and the face of an Okie out of one of those Depression photographs. They each got a dollar from me.

There were no messages at the hotel desk. I went up to my room and took a shower and got into bed.

Some years back three brothers named Morrissey owned a small four-story brick building on West Fifty-first half a block from the river. They lived in the top two stories, rented out the ground floor to an Irish amateur theater, and sold beer and whiskey after hours on the second floor. There was a time when I went there a lot, and there may have been half a dozen occasions when Mickey Ballou and I were there at the same time. I don’t know that we ever exchanged a word, but I remember seeing him there, and knowing who he was.

My friend Skip Devoe had said of Ballou that, if he had ten brothers and they all stood around in a circle, you’d think you were at Stonehenge. Ballou had that megalithic quality, and he had too an air of wild menace just held in check. There was a man named Aronow, a manufacturer of women’s dresses, who one night spilled a drink on Ballou. Aronow’s apology was immediate and profuse, and Ballou mopped himself up and told Aronow to forget it, and Aronow left town and didn’t come back for a month. He didn’t even go home and pack, he took a cab straight to the airport and was on a flight within the hour. He was, we all agreed, a cautious man, but not overly cautious.

Lying there, waiting for sleep to come, I wondered what was on Eddie’s mind and what it might have to do with the Butcher Boy. I didn’t stay up late worrying about it, though. I figured I’d find out soon enough.