'You're a friend of Guzik's?'
'We never liked each other much but he can tell you I'm straight. I told Chance she wanted out and he said it was fine with him. He saw her the next day and told her the same thing. Then last night somebody killed her. You still have the time of death figured as midnight?'
'Yeah, but that's approximate. It was twelve hours later that they found her. And the condition of the corpse, you know, the ME probably wanted to move on to something else.'
'Bad.'
'The one I feel sorry for is that poor little chambermaid. She's from Ecuador, I think she's an illegal, barely speaks a word of English, and she had to walk in on that.' He snorted. 'You want to look at the body, give us a positive make? You'll see something'll stick in your memory.'
'Don't you have an identification?'
'Oh, yeah,' he said. 'We got fingerprints. She was arrested once a few years back in Long Island City.
Loitering with intent, fifteen days suspended. No arrests since then.'
'She worked in a house after that,' I said. 'And then Chance put her in the apartment on Thirty-eighth Street.'
'A real New York odyssey. What else have you got, Scudder? And how do I get hold of you if I need you?'
I didn't have anything else. I gave him my address and phone. We said a few more polite things to each other and I hung up and the phone rang. I owed forty-five cents for going over the three minutes my dime had bought me. I broke another dollar at the bar, put the money in the slot, and returned to the bar to order another drink. Early Times, straight up, water back.
This one tasted better. And after it hit bottom I felt something loosen up inside me.
At the meetings they tell you it's the first drink that gets you drunk.
You have one and it triggers an irresistible compulsion and without meaning it you have another and another and you wind up drunk again. Well, maybe I wasn't an alcoholic because that wasn't what was happening. I'd had two drinks and I felt a whole lot better than I did before I'd had them and I certainly didn't feel any need to drink anymore.
I gave myself a chance, though. I stood there for a few minutes and thought about having a third drink.
No. No, I really didn't want it. I was fine the way I was.
I left a buck on the bar, scooped the rest of my change, and headed for home. I walked past Armstrong's and didn't feel like stopping in. I certainly didn't have the urge to stop for a drink.
The early News would be out by now. Did I want to walk down to the corner for it?
No, the hell with it.
I stopped at the desk. No messages. Jacob was on duty, riding a gentle codeine buzz, filling in the squares of a crossword puzzle.
I said, 'Say, Jacob, I want to thank you for what you did the other night. Making that phone call.'
'Oh, well,' he said.
'No, that was terrific,' I said. 'I really appreciate it.'
I went upstairs and got ready for bed. I was tired and felt out of breath. For a moment, just before sleep came, I experienced again that odd sensation of having lost something. But what could I have lost?
I thought, Seven days. You had seven sober days and most of an eighth, and you lost them. They're gone.
Chapter 8
I bought the News the next morning. A new atrocity had already driven Kim Dakkinen off the front page. Up in Washington Heights a young surgeon, a resident at Columbia Presbyterian, had been shot dead in a robbery attempt on Riverside Drive. He hadn't resisted his assailant, who had shot him for no apparent reason. The victim's widow was expecting their first child in early February.
The call-girl slashing was on an inside page. I didn't learn anything I hadn't heard the previous night from Durkin.
I walked around a lot. At noon I dropped over to the Y but got restless and left during the qualification.
I had a pastrami sandwich at a Broadway deli and drank a bottle of Prior Dark with it. I had another beer around dinnertime. At eight-thirty I went over to St. Paul's, walked once around the block and returned to my hotel without entering the basement meeting room. I made myself stay in my room. I felt like a drink, but I'd had two beers and I decided that two drinks a day would be my ration. As long as I didn't exceed that quota I didn't see how I could get in trouble. It didn't matter whether I had them first thing in the morning or last thing at night, in my room or at a bar, alone or in company.
The following day, Wednesday, I slept late and ate a late breakfast at Armstrong's. I walked to the main library and spent a couple hours there, then sat in Bryant Park until the drug dealers got on my nerves.
They've so completely taken over the parks that they assume only a potential customer would bother coming there, so you can't read a paper without being constantly offered uppers and downers and pot and acid and God knows what else.
I went to the eight-thirty meeting that night. Mildred, one of the regulars, got a round of applause when she announced that it was her anniversary, eleven years since her last drink. She said she didn't have any secret, she just did it a day at a time.
I thought that if I went to bed sober I'd have one day. I decided, what the hell, I'd do that. After the meeting I
