'I made it easy.'
'It's never hard. I don't know what a bag of dope costs these days, but you can still get a drink for a couple of dollars, and one's all it takes.'
'One wouldn't hold you for very long, though. Still, five thousand dollars ought to keep him going for a hell of a run. What can you spend on liquor, twenty dollars a day if you drink it at home? Two, three times that if you buy it over the bar? Heroin's a more expensive proposition, but even so it's hard to put more than a couple hundred dollars a day in your arm, and it'd take him a while to build his habit back up. Even if he makes a pig of himself, it ought to take him a month to shoot up five grand.'
'He didn't use a needle.'
'He told you that, huh?'
'It's not true?'
He shook his head. 'He told people that, and there was a period when all he did was snort, but he was a needle junkie for a while there.
The lie made the habit sound less serious. Plus he was afraid if women knew he used to shoot dope they'd be afraid to go to bed with him. Not that he's been knocking them over like dominoes lately, but you don't want to make it harder on yourself. He figured they'd assume he shared needles and be afraid he was HIV-positive.'
'But he didn't share needles?'
'Says he didn't. And he got tested, and he doesn't have the virus.'
'What's the matter?'
'Well, I was just thinking. Maybe he did share needles, maybe he never went for the HIV test. He could lie about that, too.'
'What about you?'
'What about me?'
'Do you use a needle? Or do you just snort?'
'I'm not a junkie.'
'Peter told me you snort a bag of dope about once a month.'
'When was this? On the phone Saturday?'
'A week before. We went to a meeting, then had a meal and hung out together.'
'And he told you that, huh?'
'He said he was here at your house a few days before that and you were high. He said he called you on it and you denied it.'
He lowered his eyes for a moment, lowered his voice, too, when he spoke. 'Yeah, it's true,' he said.
'He did call me on it, and I did deny it. I thought he bought it.'
'He didn't.'
'No, I guess not. It bothered me to lie about it. It didn't bother me that I did up the dope. I wouldn't do it in front of him and I wouldn't have done it just then if I'd known he was coming over, but it don't hurt anybody, least of all me, if I do up a bag of dope once in a blue moon.'
'Whatever you say.'
'He said once a month? To tell you the truth, I doubt if it's that much. My guess would be seven, eight, ten times a year. It's never been more than that. I shouldn't have lied to him. I should have said, 'Yeah, I been feeling like shit, so I got off, and so what?' Because I can do it a few times a year and it never comes to more than that, and if he has one little taste he's got the whole habit back and they're stealing his shoes when he nods out in the subway. That happened to him, he woke up on the D train in his socks.'
'It's happened to a lot of people.'
'Including you?'
'No, but it could have.'
'You're an alcoholic, right? I had a drink before you came over here. If you asked me I'd say so, I wouldn't lie about it. Why did I lie about it to my brother?'
'He's your brother.'
'Yeah, that's part of it. Oh, shit, man. I'm worried about him.'
'Nothing you can do at this point.'
'No, what am I gonna do, drive through the streets looking for him? We'll go together. You look out one side of the car for the fuckers who killed my wife and I'll look out the other side for my brother. How's that for a plan?' He made a face. 'In the meantime I owe you money.
What did we say, twenty-seven hundred?' He had a roll of hundreds in his pocket and counted out twenty- seven of them, which pretty much depleted the roll. He handed the money to me and I found a place to put it. He said, 'What now?'
'I'll stay with it,' I said. 'Some of what I try will depend on where the police investigation leads, but—'
'No,' he cut in, 'that's not what I mean. What do you do now? You got a date for dinner, you got something doing in the city, what?'
'Oh.' I had to think. 'I'll probably go back to my room. I've been on my feet all day, I want to take a shower
