Out on the Cutting Edge (19 page)

I stood on a chair and checked the closet shelf. I found old newspapers, a baseball glove that must have been his when he was a kid, and an unopened box of votive candles in small clear glass holders. I didn't find anything in the pockets of the clothes in the closet, or in the two pairs of shoes or the rubber

overshoes on the closet floor.

After a while I took a plastic grocery bag and put in the Bible and the AA books and his wallet. I left everything else and let myself out of there.

I was locking the door when I heard a noise, someone behind me clearing her throat. I turned to see a woman standing at the head of the stairs. She was a tiny thing with wispy gray hair and eyes huge behind thick cataract lenses. She wanted to know who I was. I told her my name, and that I was a detective.

"For poor Dr. Dunphy," she said. "That I knew all his days, and his parents before him." She had groceries in a bag like the one I was carrying. She set her bag down, rummaged in her purse for her key.

"They killed him," she said, dolefully.

"They?"

"Ach, they'll kill us all. Poor Mrs. Grod on the floor above, that they crept in off the fire escape and cut her ould throat."

"When did this happen?"

"And Mr. White," she said. "Dead of the cancer, and him so wasted and yellow at the end you'd take him for a Chinaman. We'll all be dead and gone soon enough," she said, wringing her hands with horror or with relish. "Every last one of us."

When Willa returned I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. She let herself in, put down her toolbox, and said, "Don't kiss me, I'm a mess. God, that's filthy work. I had to open up the bathroom ceiling, and all kinds of crap comes down on you when you do that."

"How did you learn plumbing?"

"I didn't, really. I'm good at fixing things and I picked up a lot of different skills over the years. I'm not a

plumber, but I know how to shut a system down and find a leak, and I can patch it, and sometimes the patch holds. For a while, anyway."

She opened the refrigerator and got herself a bottle of Beck's.

"Thirsty work. That plaster dust gets in your throat. I'm sure it's carcinogenic."

"Almost everything is."

She uncapped the beer, took a long swallow straight from the bottle, then got a glass from the drainboard and filled it. She said, "I need a shower, but first I need to sit down for a minute. Were you waiting long?"

"Just a few minutes."

"You must have spent a long time upstairs."

"I guess I must have. And then I spent a minute or two in a strange conversation." I recounted my meeting with the little wispy-haired woman and she nodded in recognition.

"That's Mrs. Mangan," she said. " 'Shure, an' we'll all be molderin'

in our graves, an' the wee banshees howlin' at our heels.' "

"You do a good Mrs. Mangan impression."

"It's a less useful talent than fixing leaky pipes. She's our resident crepe-hanger. She's been here forever, I think she may have been born in the building, and she has to be over eighty, wouldn't you say?"

"I'm not a good judge."

"Well, would you ask her for proof of age if she was trying to get the senior citizen rate at the movies?

She knows everybody in the neighborhood, all the old people anyway, and that means she's always got a funeral to go to." She drained her glass, poured the rest of the bottle into it. "I'll tell you something,"

she said. "I don't want to live forever."

"Forever's a long way off."

"I mean it, Matt. There's such a thing as living too long. It's tragic when somebody Eddie Dunphy's age dies. Or your Paula, with her whole life ahead of her. But when you get to be Mrs. Mangan's age, and living alone, with all her old friends gone--"

"How did Mrs. Grod die?"

"I'm trying to remember when that was. Over a year ago, I think, because it was in warm weather. A burglar killed her, he came in through the window. The apartments have window gates, but not all the tenants use them."

"There was a gate on Eddie's bedroom window, the one that opens into the fire escape. But it wasn't in use."

"People leave them open because it's harder to open and close the windows otherwise. Evidently someone went over the roofs and down the fire escape and got into Mrs. Grod's apartment that way.

She was in bed and must have awakened and surprised him. And he stabbed her." She sipped her beer.

"Did you find what you were looking for? For that matter, what were you looking for?"

"Pills."

"Pills?"

"But I couldn't find anything stronger than aspirin." I explained what Sternlicht had found, and the implications of his findings. "I was taught how to search an apartment, and I learned to do it thoroughly. I didn't pry up floorboards or take the furniture apart, but I made a pretty systematic search of the premises. If there was chloral hydrate there, I would have found it."

"Maybe it was his last pill."

"Then there'd be an empty vial somewhere."

"He might have thrown it out."

"It wasn't in his wastebasket. It wasn't in the garbage under the kitchen sink. Where else would he have tossed it?"

"Maybe somebody gave him a single pill, or a couple of pills. 'You can't sleep? Here, take one of these, they work every time.' As far as that goes, you said he was streetwise, didn't you? Not every pill sold in this neighborhood gets dispensed by a pharmacist. You can buy everything else on the street. I wouldn't be surprised if you could buy coral hydrate."

"Chloral hydrate."

"Chloral hydrate, then. Sounds like something a welfare mother would name her kid. 'Chloral, now you leave off pickin' on yo' brother!'

What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"You seem moody, though."

"Do I? Maybe I caught it upstairs. And what you said about people living too long. I was thinking last night that I don't want to wind up an old man living alone in a hotel room. And here I am, well on the way."

"Some old man."

I sat there and nursed my mood while she took a shower. When she came out I said, "I must have been

looking for more than pills, because what good would it have done me to find them?"

"I was wondering that myself."

"I just wish I knew what he wanted to tell me. He had something on his mind and he was just about ready to unload it, but I told him to take his time, to think it over. I should have sat down with him then and there."

"And then he'd still be alive?"

"No, but--"

"Matt, he didn't die because of what he said or didn't say. He died because he did something stupid and dangerous and his luck ran out."

"I know."

"There was nothing you could have done. And nothing you can do for him now."

"I know. He didn't--"

"Didn't what?"

"Say anything to you?"

"I hardly knew him, Matt. I can't remember the last time I talked to him. I don't know if I ever talked to him, beyond 'How's the weather?'

and 'Here's the rent.' "

"He had something on his mind," I said. "I wish to hell I knew what it was."

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.