Even the Wicked (15 page)

Our drinks came. He picked up the shot and tossed it off, took a small sip of the beer. “Anyway, that’s my theory, take it or leave it, and it’s got nothing to do with Will’s letter, anyway. He got the zip code wrong.”

“He put an oh for a zero?”

“No, no, no. He wrote down the wrong number entirely. The right address, 450 West Thirty-third Street, but for some goddam reason he put one-oh-oh-
one
-one instead of one-oh-oh-
oh
-one. One-oh-oh-eleven’s the zip for Chelsea and part of the West Village.”

“I see,” I said, but I didn’t. “But what difference does it make? He did get the street number right, and you’re the New York Daily News, for God’s sake. You shouldn’t be that hard to find.”

“You would think that,” he said, “and I take back what I said before, because it’s all of a piece with people saying zero instead of oh, and having to get the keystrokes right. It’s fucking technology getting in everybody’s face is what it is.”

I waited for him to explain.

“It delayed the letter,” he said, “if you can believe it. I’d hate to guess how many pieces of mail a day get sent to the News, most of them written in crayon. So you’d think the dorks who sort the mail could figure out where we were, especially since it’s no more than a long five-iron shot from the main post office. But all you have to do is put a one where an oh ought to be, pardon me all to hell, I mean a zero, and they’re lost. They’re fucking stymied.”

“There must have been a postmark,” I said.

“More than one,” he said. “There was the original one, when it went through the machine at the intake station before it got shipped uptown to the Old Chelsea station on West Eighteenth, which is where they ship the mail for delivery to the one-oh-oh-one-one zips. Then it went out in somebody’s route bag and came back again, and then it picked up a second postmark when they bounced it from Old Chelsea to the Parley building on Eighth Avenue, which is where the one-oh-oh-
oh
-one mail gets delivered out of. The second one was handwritten, which probably makes it a collector’s item in this day and age, but what you’re interested in, what anybody’d be interested in, is the first postmark.”

“Yes.”

He knocked back his glass of beer. “I wish I had it to show it to you,” he said, “but of course the cops took it. It tells you two things, the zip for the intake station and the date it went through the stamping machine. The zip was one-oh-oh-thirty-eight, indicating the station was Peck Slip.”

“And the date?”

“Same night Whitfield was killed.”

“What time?”

He shook his head. “Just the date. Which escapes me at the moment, but it was that night, the night he died.”

“Thursday night.”

“Was it a Thursday? Yeah, of course it was, and we were on the street with it Friday morning.”

“But the postmark was Thursday.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“I just want to make sure I’ve got this right,” I said. “It went through the stamping machine before midnight, and as a result it had Thursday’s date on it and not Friday’s.”

“You’ve got it right.” He pointed to my glass. “What’s that, Coca-Cola? You want a refill?” I shook my head. “Well, I damn well do,” he said, and got Darlene’s attention and signaled for another round.

I said, “Whitfield died around eleven that night, and the first news flash was on New York One just before midnight. Unless I’m missing something, the letter went in the mail before Whitfield was dead.”

“Probably true.”

“Just probably?”

“Well, you’re assuming the post office did everything right,” he said, “and you already know how long it took them to deliver the fucking letter, so why should they be letter-perfect in any other area of operations? Meaning it’s entirely possible somebody neglected to advance the date on the postmark at the stroke of midnight. But I’d certainly say it’s odds-on that Adrian Whitfield still had a pulse when Will mailed the letter.”

“Peck Slip,” I said. “That’s down by the Fulton Fish Market, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. But the post office serves the whole three-eight zip code, and that includes a big chunk of downtown. One Police Plaza, City Hall—”

“And the Criminal Courts Building,” I said. “He could have been in court that afternoon, watching while Adrian entered a guilty plea for Irwin Atkins. He’s already poisoned the whiskey and written the letter, and now he drops it in the mail. Why doesn’t he wait?”

“We already know he’s cocky.”

“But not half-cocked. He’s mailing the letter before his victim’s dead. Suppose Adrian goes out and drinks a bottle of wine with dinner and doesn’t want to mix the grape and the grain when he gets home? Suppose Adrian’s still alive and kicking when Will’s letter turns up on your desk? Then what?”

“Then I call the cops and they run over to Whitfield’s apartment and grab the scotch bottle before he can take a drink from it.”

“Does he ever say anything about the scotch?” I’d clipped the piece from the News and I got it out now and scanned it. Our own drinks had come by this time, with Darlene setting them down and removing their predecessors without interrupting us. She didn’t have to collect any money. Joints like that used to make you pay when they served you, but that was back before everyone paid for everything with a credit card. Now they run a tab, just like everybody else. “There’s a reference to poison,” I said, “and he talks about the security setup at Whitfield’s apartment. He doesn’t specifically say the poison’s in the whiskey.”

“Still, once he mentions poison and talks about the Park Avenue apartment—”

“They’d search everything until they found cyanide in the scotch.”

“And Will winds up looking like a horse’s ass.”

“So why take the chance? What’s the big hurry that he has to get the letter in the mail?”

“Maybe he’s leaving town.”

“Leaving town?”

“Take another look at the clipping,” he suggested. “He’s announcing his retirement. There won’t be any more killing because he’s done. He’s saying goodbye. Isn’t that what a fellow might do on his way to catch a slow boat to China?”

I thought about it.

“Matter of fact,” McGraw said, “why else announce his retirement? He’s got enough news for one letter, claiming credit for Whitfield. He could save the rest for another time. But not if he’s pulling up stakes and relocating in Dallas or Dublin or, I don’t know, Dakar? If he had a plane to catch, that’d be a good reason to put all the news in one letter and send it off right away.”

“And if it gets there before Whitfield takes the drink, then what?”

“Given that the son of a bitch is nuts,” he said, “I’d be hard put to say just what he’d do, but I suppose he’d deal with it one way or the other. Either he’d come back and figure out some other way to get the job done or he’d decide fate had let Adrian off the hook. And maybe he’d write me one more letter about it and maybe he wouldn’t.” He reached to tap the newspaper clipping. “What I think,” he said, “is there’s no question in his mind that Whitfield’s gonna go straight home and swallow the scotch. You read what he wrote, he’s talking about a
fait accompli
. Far as he’s concerned, it’s a done deal. Whitfield’s already dead. If there’s a word or phrase in his letter that suggests for a moment that the outcome’s still up in the air, I sure as hell missed it.”

“No, you’re right,” I said. “He writes about it as though it already happened. But we’re sure it didn’t?”

“It’s possible Whitfield was dead before this letter picked up its postmark. Barely possible. But the letter probably got dropped in a mailbox, and in order for it to get picked up and trucked to the Peck Slip post office and go through the machine that stamped it with a postmark—”

I scanned the clipping one more time. “What I asked you over the phone,” I said, “was whether there was anything in the letter that absolutely ruled out the possibility of suicide.”

“That’s why I suggested a meeting. That’s why we’re sitting here. The letter doesn’t rule out suicide, except for the fact that Will says he did it, and he’s never lied to us in the past. But the postmark rules it out.”

“Because it was mailed before the death happened.”

“You got it. He might have decided to claim credit for Whitfield’s suicide. But, good as he is, he couldn’t read Whitfield’s mind and know ahead of time that he was going to kill himself.”

It took me awhile to get away from Marty McGraw. He looked around for the waitress, but she must have been on her break. He shrugged and walked over to the bar and came back with two bottles of Rolling Rock, announcing that he’d had enough whiskey for the time being. He drank from one of the bottles, then pointed at the other. “That’s for you if you want it,” he said. I told him I’d pass, and he said he’d figured as much.

“I’ve been there,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“Been there, done that. The rooms. The church basements. I went to a meeting every day for four months and didn’t touch a drop all that time. It’s a long fucking time to go without a drink, I’ll tell you that much.”

“I guess it is.”

“I was having a bad time of it,” he said, “and I thought it was the booze. So I cut out the booze and you know something? That made it worse.”

“Sometimes it works that way.”

“So I straightened out some things in my life,” he said, “and then I picked up a drink, and guess what? Everything’s fine.”

“That’s great,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes. “Sanctimonious prick,” he said. “You got no right to patronize me.”

“You’re absolutely right, Marty. My apologies.”

“Fuck you and your apology. Fuck you and the apology you rode in on, or should that be the Appaloosa you rode in on? Sit down, for Christ’s sake. Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Catch some air.”

“The air’s not going anyplace, you don’t have to be in a rush to catch it. Jesus, don’t tell me I insulted you.”

“I’ve got a busy day,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Busy day my ass. I’m a little drunk and it makes you uncomfortable. Admit it.”

“I admit it.”

“Well,” he said, and frowned, as if the admission was the last thing he’d expected from me. “That case I apologize. That all right?”

“Of course.”

“You accept my apology?”

“You don’t need to apologize,” I said, “but yes, of course I accept it.”

“So we’re okay then, you and me.”

“Absolutely.”

“You know what I wish? I wish you’d drink a fucking beer.”

“Not today, Marty.”

“‘Not today.’ Listen, I know the jargon, all right? ‘Not today.’ You just do it a day at a time, don’t you?”

“Like everything else.”

He frowned. “I don’t mean to bait you. It’s the booze talking, you know that.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not me wants you to drink, it’s the drink wants you to drink. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“What I found out, I learned it helps me more than it hurts me. It does more for me than it does to me. You know who else said that? Winston Churchill. A great man, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

“Fucking Limey drunk. No friend to the Irish either, the son of a bitch. More for me than to me, he was right about that though, you got to give him that much. I got the story of the year, you realize that?”

“I guess you do.”

“The story of the year. Locally, I mean. Overall scheme of things, what’s Will in comparison to Bosnia, huh? You want to weigh ’em in the balance, Will’s lighter than air. But who do you know that gives two shits about Bosnia? Will you tell me that? The only way Bosnia sells a newspaper’s if you can manage to get ‘rape’ in the headline.” He picked up the second bottle of Rolling Rock and took a sip. “The story of the year,” he said.

After I finally got away from him, what I probably should have done was go to a meeting. When I first got sober I had found it unsettling to be around people who were drinking, but as I grew more comfortable with my own sobriety I gradually became less uneasy in the presence of drink. Many of my friends these days are sober, but quite a few are not, and some like Mick Ballou and Danny Boy Bell are heavy daily drinkers. Their drinking never seems to bother me. Now and then Mick and I make a night of it, sitting up until dawn in his saloon at Fiftieth and Tenth, sharing stories and silences. Never on those occasions do I find myself wishing that I were drinking, or that he were not.

But Marty McGraw was the kind of edgy drunk who made me uncomfortable. I can’t say I wanted a drink by the time I got out of there, but neither did I much want to go on feeling the way I felt, as if I’d been up for days and had drunk far too much coffee.

I stopped at a diner for a hamburger and a piece of pie, then just started walking without paying too much attention to where I was headed. My mind was playing with what I’d learned about Will’s letter and when it had been mailed, and I worried this piece of information like a dog with a bone, running it through my mind, then thinking of something else, then coming back to it and turning the thoughts this way and that, as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and I could fit them into place if I just held them at the right angle.

I was headed uptown when I started, and I suppose if I’d picked up a tailwind I might have walked clear to the Cloisters. But I didn’t get that far. When I came out of my reverie I was only a block from my apartment. But it was a long block, a crosstown block, and it put me at a location that was significant in and of itself. I was at the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, standing directly in front of Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon.

Why? It wasn’t because I wanted a drink, was it? Because I certainly didn’t think I wanted a drink, nor did I feel as though I wanted a drink. There is, to be sure, a part of me deep within my being that will always thirst for the ignorant bliss that is alcohol’s promise. Some of us call that part of ourselves “the disease,” and tend to personify it. “My disease is talking to me,” you’ll hear them say at meetings. “My disease wants me to drink. My disease is trying to destroy me.” Alcoholism, I once heard a woman explain, is like a monster sleeping inside you. Sometimes the monster begins to stir, and that’s why we have to go to meetings. The meetings bore the monster and it dozes off again.