Out on the Cutting Edge (16 page)

I told her she was good with the chopsticks.

"It's easy," she said. "It just takes practice. Here. Try."

I made an effort, but my fingers were clumsy. The sticks kept crossing and I couldn't get any food to my mouth. "This would be good for someone on a diet," I said. "You'd think somewhere along the way they could have invented the fork. They invented everything else, pasta, ice cream, gunpowder."

"And baseball."

"I thought that was the Russians."

We finished everything, just as she'd predicted. She cleared the table, opened a second bottle of Beck's.

"I'll have to learn the ground rules," she said. "I feel a little funny about drinking in front of you."

"Do I make you uncomfortable?"

"No, but I'm afraid I'll make you uncomfortable. I didn't know if it was all right to talk about how great beer is with Chinese food because, oh, I don't know. Is is all right to talk about booze that way?"

"What do you think we do at meetings? We talk about booze all the time. Some of us spend more time talking about it than we used to spend drinking it."

"But don't you tell yourselves how terrible it was?"

"Sometimes. And sometimes we tell each other how wonderful it was."

"I never would have guessed that."

"That didn't surprise me as much as the laughter. People tell about the damnedest things that happened to them, and everybody breaks up."

"I wouldn't think they'd talk about it, let alone laugh. I guess I thought it would be like mentioning rope in

the house of the hanged."

"In the house of the hanged," I said, "that's probably the chief topic of conversation."

* * *

Later she said, "I keep wanting to bring the flowers in here. That's crazy, there's no room for them.

They're better in the kitchen."

"They'll still be there in the morning."

"I'm like a kid, aren't I? Can I tell you something?"

"Sure."

"God. I don't know if I should tell you this. Well, with that preamble, I guess I have to, don't I? Nobody ever gave me flowers before."

"That's pretty hard to believe."

"Why is it so hard to believe? I spent twenty years devoting myself heart and soul to revolutionary politics. Radical activists don't give each other flowers. I mean, talk about your bourgeois sentimentality, your late capitalist decadence. Mao said let a thousand flowers bloom, but that didn't mean you were supposed to pluck a handful and take them home to your sweetie. You weren't even supposed to have a sweetie. If a relationship didn't serve the party, you had no business in it."

"But you got out of there a few years ago. You were married."

"To an old hippie. Long hair and fringed buckskin and love beads.

He should have had a 1967 calendar

on his wall. He was locked in the sixties, he never knew they'd ended." She shook her head. "He never brought home flowers.

Flowering tops, yes, but not flowers."

"Flowering tops?"

"The most potent part of the marijuana plant. Cannabis sativa, if you want to be formal. Do you smoke?"

"No."

"I haven't in years, because I'm afraid it would lead me right back to cigarettes. That's funny, isn't it?

They try to scare you that it'll lead to heroin, and I'm afraid it might lead to tobacco. But I never liked it that much. I never liked feeling out of control."

The flowers were still there in the morning.

I hadn't intended to stay the night, but then I hadn't planned on dropping in on her in the first place. The hours just slipped away from us. We talked, we shared silences, we listened to music, and to the rain.

I awoke before she did. I had a drunk dream. They're not uncommon, but I hadn't had one in a while.

The details were gone by the time I got my eyes open, but in the dream someone had offered me a beer and I had taken it without thinking. By the time I realized I couldn't do that, I'd already drunk half of it.

I woke up not sure if it was a dream and not entirely certain where I was. It was six in the morning and I wouldn't have wanted to go back to sleep even if I could, for fear of slipping back into the dream. I got up and dressed, not showering to keep from waking her. I was tying my shoes when I felt that I was being watched, and I turned to see her looking at me.

"It's early," I said. "Go back to sleep. I'll call you later."

I went back to my hotel. There was a message for me. Jim Faber had called, but it was far too early to call him back. I went upstairs and showered and shaved, then stretched out on the bed for a minute and surprised myself by dozing off. I hadn't even felt tired, but I wound up sleeping for three hours and woke up groggy.

I took another shower and shook off the grogginess. I called Jim at his shop.

"I missed you last night," he said. "I was just wondering how you were doing."

"I'm fine."

"I'm glad to hear it. You missed a great qualification."

"Oh?"

"Guy from Midtown Group. Very funny stuff. He went through a period where he kept trying to kill himself and couldn't get it right. He couldn't swim a stroke, so he rented a flat-bottom rowboat and rowed for miles. Finally, he stood up, said. 'Goodbye, cruel world,' and threw himself over the side."

"And?"

"And he was on a sandbar. He was in two feet of water."

"Sometimes you can't do a single thing right."

"Yeah, everybody has days like that."

"I had a drunk dream last night," I said.

"Oh?"

"I drank half a beer before I realized what I was doing. Then I realized, and I felt horrible, and I drank the rest of it."

"Where was this?"

"I don't remember the details."

"No, where was it you spent the night?"

"Nosy bastard, aren't you? I stayed over with Willa."

"That's her name? The super?"

"That's right."

"Was she drinking?"

"Not enough to matter."

"Not enough to matter to whom?"

"Jesus Christ," I said. "I was with her for about eight hours, not counting the time we slept, and in all that time she had two beers, one with dinner and one after. Does that make her an alcoholic?"

"That's not the question. The question is does it make you uncomfortable."

"I can't remember when I last spent a more comfortable night."

"What brand of beer was she drinking?"

"Beck's. What's the difference?"

"What did you drink in your dream?"

"I don't remember."

"What did it taste like?"

"I don't remember the taste. I wasn't aware of it."

"That's a hell of a note. If you're going to drink in your dreams, at least you ought to be able to taste it and enjoy it. You want to get together for lunch?"

"I can't. I've got some things I have to do."

"Maybe I'll see you tonight, then."

"Maybe."

I hung up, irritated. I felt as though I was being treated like a child, and my response was to turn childishly irritable. What difference did it make what kind of beer I drank in my dream?

Andreotti wasn't on duty when I got over to the precinct house. He was downtown, testifying before a grand jury. The guy he'd been partnered with, Bill Bellamy, couldn't understand what I wanted with the medical examiner's report.

"You were there," he said. "It's open and shut. Time of death was sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, that's according to the preliminary report from the man on the scene. All evidence on the scene supports a finding of accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation.

Everything-- the pornography, the position of the body, the nudity, everything. We see these all the time, Scudder."

"I know."

"Then you probably know it's the best-kept secret in America, because what paper's going to print that the deceased died jerking off with a rope around his neck? And it's not just kids. We had one last year, this was a married guy and his wife found him. Decent people, beautiful apartment on West End Avenue.

Married fifteen years! Poor woman didn't understand, couldn't understand. She couldn't even believe that he masturbated, let alone that he liked to strangle hisself while he did it."

"I understand how it works."

"Then what's your interest? You got some kind of an insurance angle, your client can't collect if you get a suicide verdict?"

"I haven't got a client. And I doubt he had any insurance."

"Because I remember we had an insurance investigator come up in connection with the gentleman from West End Avenue. He had a whole lot of coverage, too. Might have been as much as a million dollars."

"And they didn't want to pay it?"

"They were going to have to pay something. Suicide'll only nullify a policy for a certain amount of time after it's taken out, to prevent you from signing up when you've already decided to kill yourself. This case, he'd had the policy long enough so suicide didn't cancel it. So what was the hook?" He frowned, then brightened. "Oh, right. He had that double indemnity clause where they pay you twice as much for accidental death. I have to say I never saw the logic to that. I mean, dead is dead.

What's the difference if you have a heart attack or wreck your car? Your wife's got the same living expenses, your kid's college is gonna cost the same. I never understood it."

"The insurer didn't want to accept a claim of accidental death?"

"You got it. Said a man puts a rope around his neck and hangs hisself, that's suicide. The wife got herself a good lawyer and they had to pay the whole amount. Man had the intention of hanging hisself, but he did not have the intention of killing hisself, and that made it an accident and not a suicide." He smiled, liking the justice of it, then remembered the matter at hand. "But you're not here about insurance."

"No, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have any. He was a friend of mine."

"Interesting friend for you to have. Turns out he had a sheet on him longer than his dick."

"Mostly small-time, wasn't it?"

"According to what he got collared for. Far as what he got away with, how could you say? Maybe he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby and went scot-free."

"I think it was a little before his time. I have a fair idea of the kind of life he used to lead, although I don't know the details. But for the past year he's been staying sober."

"You're saying he was an alcoholic."

"A sober one."

"And?"

"I want to know if he died sober."

"What difference does it make?"

"It's hard to explain."

"I got an uncle used to be a terrible alcoholic. He quit drinking and now he's a different person."

"It works that way sometimes."

"Used to be you didn't want to know the man, and now he's a fine human being. Goes to church, holds a job, acts right with people. Your friend, it didn't look like he'd been drinking. There was no bottles laying around."

"No, but he might have done some drinking elsewhere. Or he could have taken other drugs."

"You mean like heroin?"

"I would doubt it."

"Because I didn't see no tracks. Still, there's more than you think that'll snort it."

"Any drugs," I said. "They're doing a complete autopsy, aren't they?"

"They got to. The law requires it."

"Well, could I see the results when you get them?"

"Just so you'll know if he died sober?" He sighed. "I guess. But what does it matter? They got some rule, he's got to be sober when he dies or they won't bury him in the good section of the cemetery?"

"I don't know if I can explain it."

"Try."

"He didn't have much of a life," I said, "and he didn't have much of a death, either. For the past year he's been trying to stay sober a day at a time. He had a lot of trouble at the beginning and it never got to be what you could call easy for him, but he stayed with it. Nothing else ever worked for him. I just wanted to know if he made it."

"Give me your number," Bellamy said. "That report comes in, I'll call you."

I heard an Australian qualify once at a meeting down in the Village. "My head didn't get me sober," he said. "All my head ever did was get me into trouble. It was my feet got me sober. They kept taking me to meetings and my poor head had no choice but to follow. What I've got, I've got smart feet."

My feet took me to Grogan's. I was walking around, up one street and down another, thinking about Eddie Dunphy and Paula Hoeldtke and not paying much attention to where I was going. Then I looked up, and I was at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, right across from Grogan's Open House.

Eddie had crossed the street to avoid the place. I crossed the street and went in.

It wasn't fancy. A bar, on the left as you entered, ran the length of the room. There were dark wooden booths on the right, and a row of three or four tables between them. There was an old-fashioned tile floor, a stamped tin ceiling that needed minor repairs.

The clientele was all male. Two old men sat in silence in the front booth, letting their beers go flat. Two booths back there was a young man wearing a ski sweater and reading a newspaper. There was a dart board on the back wall, and a fellow wearing a T-shirt and a baseball cap was playing by himself.

At the front end of the bar, two men sat near a television set, neither paying attention to the picture.

There was an empty stool between them. Toward the back, the bartender was leafing through a tabloid, one of the ones that tell you Elvis and Hitler are still alive, and a potato chip diet cures cancer.

I walked over to the bar and put my foot on the brass rail. The bartender looked me over for a long moment before he approached. I ordered a Coke. He gave me another careful look, his blue eyes unreadable, his face expressionless. He had a narrow triangular face, so pale he might have lived all his life indoors.