A Drop of the Hard Stuff (26 page)

Once, back when I still had a gold shield and a wife and a house on Long Island, I sat up late one night in my living room with the business end of a gun in my mouth. I can still remember the metallic taste of it. It seems to me I never had any real intention of going through with it, but I did have my thumb on the trigger, and it wouldn’t have taken much pressure to send a round through the roof of my mouth.

And they wouldn’t have found a note. I’d never even thought about writing out a note.

“Aside from that,” he said, “everything looks right. He had the petechial hemorrhages in the eyes, showing strangulation as cause of death. Chair was right where it ought to be if he stood on it and kicked it over. Place was neat as a pin otherwise, showing no evidence of a struggle, no sign that there was ever another person in the room.”

“Maybe the autopsy will show something.”

“Like blunt force trauma to the head? They’ll look for that, of course. Because somebody could have knocked him out and then hoisted him up there, though it’s not the easiest thing in the world. Plus the killer would have had to strip him to his shorts, because Stillman would have been dressed when he let the guy into his place.” He frowned. “And why fucking bother? Say you’re the guy, you want to kill Stillman, want to make it look like suicide. You get behind him, you conk him over the head, and he’s out cold.”

“So?”

“You’re gonna take the time to undress him? And risk that he’ll come to while you’re doing it? Why not just string him up and be done with it?”

“You’d need the belt,” I said.

“So? You take it and put it to use. You figure his pants’d fall off without it?”

“A lot of people undress before they kill themselves.”

“Or just stay undressed, if he was sitting around his apartment in his shorts. But do you go to the trouble of undressing a guy to make it look more like suicide? I don’t know, I suppose you could, but it sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Maybe.”

“Most things,” he said, “are more trouble than they’re worth. And maybe that’s all it was. Stillman got up, had his morning coffee, watered his plants, and took a long look at his life. And decided it was more trouble than it was worth.”

T
HAT NIGHT
I thought of going to Sober Today, Greg’s regular Thursday night meeting on Second Avenue. As if by going there I might slip into an alternate universe, one in which he was still alive. We’d chat on the break, and after the meeting we’d go out for coffee. Maybe we’d see what kind of pie they had at Theresa’s. And we’d talk about High-Low Jack, and the perils of the Ninth Step, and whatever else came to mind.

I didn’t go to that meeting, or any other. I thought I might go over to St. Paul’s, but didn’t, and then I thought I might catch some of the St. Paul’s crowd at the Flame. But I stayed in my room.

I sat at the window, and at one point I realized I was looking down at the liquor store across the street. It got to be ten o’clock, and I stayed where I was, and sometime between ten and ten thirty they turned off the lights. They would have closed at ten, but if someone showed up while they were still in the store,
someone they’d known for years, they’d open the door and sell him what he needed. But once the lights were off, once the neon sign no longer glowed with promise, then they were well and truly shut for the night.

Of course the bars were still open. The bars would be open for hours yet, some of them until the legal closing hour of four a.m. And there were after-hours joints, any number of them, if you knew where to go. The Morrissey Brothers were out of business, but that didn’t mean a man with a thirst couldn’t find someone to sell him a drink after hours.

Now and then I glanced at the phone. I thought of calling Greg’s number, and I thought of calling Mark Sattenstein’s number, but those were just passing thoughts and I didn’t feel the need to make the calls. I also thought of other calls I might make, to living people—Jim Faber, for example, or Jan Keane. But I never picked up the phone.

If it rang, would I answer it? It seemed to me that I might, but it seemed just as possible that I might not. I envisioned myself sitting there while the telephone rang and rang and rang. Wondering who it might be, and yet unwilling to find out.

At twenty minutes of twelve I thought of the midnight meeting. All I had to do was go downstairs and flag a cab. I’d get there in plenty of time. They drew a raffish crowd, with active drunks apt to put in an appearance, and it wasn’t unheard-of for a punch or a chair to be thrown, but there was plenty of sobriety in the room all the same, and there had been times when it had helped me get through a bad night.

And maybe Buddha would be there. Maybe he’d explain to me that it was my dissatisfaction with what is that was the cause of all my unhappiness.

Right. I stayed where I was.

I
HAD TO FORCE
myself to go out and eat breakfast. I’d skipped dinner, and couldn’t remember if I’d had lunch. It seemed to me that I hadn’t.

Don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.
The acronym is HALT, and it’s standard advice for beginners, and remains applicable no matter how long you’ve been sober. Ignore it and your mind begins working against you, and the next thing you know you’ve got a glass in your hand.

I’d been all those things the previous night, hungry and angry and lonely and tired, but I’d managed to get through the night in spite of myself. I had a plate of bacon and eggs with toast and home fries, and once I got the first bite down my appetite returned, and I cleaned my plate and drank three cups of coffee. I’d bought the
Times
on the way to the Morning Star, and someone had read and abandoned the
Daily News,
and I read each paper carefully, looking for stories of violent death. There were
plenty of them, there always are, but for a change none of the newly dead were people I knew.

Back in my room, I looked up phone numbers and made calls. I rang Dukacs & Son, and recognized the proprietor’s voice when he answered. But I made sure: “Mr. Dukacs?”

“Yes?”

I broke the connection, called Crosby Hart at his office. He picked up the phone and said, “Hal Hart.”

“Wrong number,” I said, and rang off.

I made a third call to Scooter Williams. The phone rang and rang, and I wondered if a quick trip down to Ludlow Street would be overreacting. Then he picked up. He was out of breath, and something made me ask if he was all right.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “I just got out of the shower, I had to run to the phone. Uh, who is this?”

I gave my name.

He said, “Matthew Scudder. Matthew Scudder. Oh, right! Jack’s friend.”

“Right,” I said, figuring that was close enough.

“Yeah, I remember. I was gonna call you, man.”

“Oh?”

“Can’t remember why. It came to me, you know, and then it went away. Something you asked me, but don’t ask me what it was. Oh, wow. You asked me but don’t ask me?”

“You can’t remember.”

“Hey, if it came to me once it’ll come to me again. Like swallows to Capistrano, you know? You want to give me your number again? You gave it to me, but I don’t know what I did with it.”

I gave it to him again. He said, “Matthew Scudder. Okay, got it. Hey, you know what? You’re Scudder and I’m Scooter.”

“And to think some people doubt the existence of God.”

“Huh? Oh, right. Years since anybody called me that, though. Ages. Hey, it’ll come to me and I’ll call you.”

“That’s great,” I said, and finally managed to hang up.

So they were alive, all three of them.

I got to the noon meeting at Fireside. There was a message in my box when I got back.
Red Man,
it said, and there was a number. It took me a minute, but I figured out that it was Dennis Redmond, and made the call from my room.

“I figured Monday for the autopsy results,” he said, “but either they’ve got a light load over there or Stillman jumped the queue. No sign of blunt force trauma to the head. Or to any other part of him, as far as that goes.”

“So it looks like he did it himself.”

“It always did,” he said. “Of course somebody could have drugged him and strung him up. But that didn’t happen either. No drugs in his system, no blood alcohol.”

So he’d died sober.

“In fact,” he said, “all the physical evidence supports a verdict of suicide. Strangulation’s the cause of death. There ought to be a law.”

“Against suicide? I think there already is.”

“Against belts,” he said. “Where do they get off making them strong enough to support a man’s weight? You might as well be putting a loaded gun in the hands of a child.”

“How else are people going to keep their pants up?”

“What the hell’s wrong with suspenders? Or you could do like they do with fishing line. A certain amount of pressure and it snaps, gives the fish a sporting chance. Why not do the same with belts? A weight of more than a hundred pounds and it breaks. Think of the lives that would be saved.”

“And what about children?”

“Never thought of it,” he said. “But you’re right, it’d just trigger an epidemic of juvenile suicide. I guess there’s only one answer.”

“And that would be?”

“Warning labels. Works with cigarettes. Matt, I just thought you’d want to know. Your friend killed himself. Though I don’t suppose it makes you happy to hear that.”

“No,” I said. “How could it? But at least it saves me having to figure out what to do next.”

I was watching television when the phone rang. ESPN was showing a Gaelic football game, or a match, whatever they call it, and I sat there while a lot of young men in shorts and long-sleeved jerseys showed enormous energy doing something entirely incomprehensible. There was running and passing and kicking involved, and the score kept changing, in what struck me as a wholly arbitrary way.

I hit the Mute button and picked up the phone, and it was Jan. She said, “I think we should talk.”

T
IFFANY’S IS THE FAMOUS
Fifth Avenue jewelry store, and if I’d told a friend I was off to meet my girlfriend at Tiffany’s, he’d probably assume we’d be shopping for rings. But Tiffany’s is also the name of a coffee shop on Sheridan Square, open twenty-four hours a day, and Jan had picked it as a meeting place because it was midway between her neighborhood and mine.

I took my time walking to the subway, but even so I had to wait for her, and she showed up with a companion, a sharp-featured woman in her fifties with unconvincingly black hair. They came to my booth, each carrying a shopping bag, and Jan introduced the woman as Mary Elizabeth. We nodded at each other, and I motioned for them to sit down, and Jan looked at Mary Elizabeth, who shook her head.

“We won’t stay,” Jan said. She put her shopping bag on the table, and Mary Elizabeth placed hers alongside it. “I think this is everything,” Jan said.

I nodded, lost in thought, and then when nobody moved or said anything I remembered my assigned role in the proceedings. I reached into my pocket and took out a ring of keys. I put them on the table, and they just sat there for a beat, and then Jan reached for them, picked them up, weighed them in her hand, put them in her purse.

She turned to go, and Mary Elizabeth turned with her, and then Jan turned back to face me again. All in a rush she said, “I really hate this, and what I hate most of all is the timing. Right before your anniversary.”

“In a couple of days.”

“Tuesday, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“I was going to wait until afterward,” she said, “but I thought maybe that would be worse, and—”

“Let it go,” I said.

“I just—”

“Let it go.”

She looked on the point of tears. Mary Elizabeth said, “Jan,” and she turned and walked after her, to the door and out.

I stayed where I was. Two shopping bags shared the top of my table with the cup of coffee I’d ordered but so far hadn’t touched. One shopping bag was from a department store, the other from a company that sold art supplies. Each was a little more than half full, and Jan could have managed both of them herself. Mary Elizabeth, I decided, was there for moral support.

I went to St. Paul’s for the evening meeting. Afterward I followed the crowd to the Flame and sat there until everybody went home. I walked down Ninth to Fifty-seventh, then walked on past my hotel and all the way across town to Lexington Avenue.
I turned on Lexington and walked down to Thirtieth Street and got there just in time to help set up chairs for the midnight meeting.

There were a few familiar faces in the room but nobody I really knew. They didn’t have a speaker, and the chairperson asked me if I had ninety days clean and sober. I said I’d spoken recently, and didn’t feel up to it. She found somebody else. They can always find somebody.

I sat there for an hour and drank a couple of cups of bad coffee and ate a few cookies. I didn’t pay much attention to the speaker and didn’t raise my hand during the discussion. At the end I thought about finding someone to go out for coffee with, and decided the hell with it. I walked up to Forty-second Street and caught a cab the rest of the way home.