they fall in love with what they're doing, and why they're after doing it scarcely matters.' He looked off into the distance. 'It's a terrible thing,' he said, 'when a man develops a taste for killing.'
'You have a taste for it.'
'I have found joy in it,' he allowed. 'It's like drink, you know. It stirs the blood and quickens the heart.
Before you know it you're dancing.'
'That's an interesting way to put it.'
'I have schooled myself,' he said deliberately, 'not to take life without good reason.'
'Will has his reasons.'
'He had them at the start. By now he may be caught up in the dance.'
'He says he's through.'
'Does he.'
'You don't believe him?'
He thought about it. 'I can't say,' he said at length, 'for not knowing him, or what drives him.'
'Maybe he's worked his way to the end of his list.'
'Or he's tired of the game. The work takes its toll. But if he's got a taste for it…'
'He may not be able to quit.'
'Ah,' he said. 'We'll see, won't we?'
* * *
I spent the rest of the week and most of the next one just getting through the days and enjoying the fall season. One offer of work came in, a negligence lawyer who needed someone to chase down witnesses to an accident, but I passed on it, pleading a heavy caseload. I didn't have a heavy caseload, I didn't have any kind of a caseload at all, and for the time being I wanted to keep it that way.
I read the paper every morning and went to a noon meeting every day, and an evening meeting too, more often than not. My attendance at AA wanes and waxes with the tides in my life. I go less often when I'm busier with other things, and seem to add meetings automatically in response to the prompting of stress, which I may or may not consciously feel.
Something evidently had me wanting to go to more meetings, and I didn't argue with it. The thought did come to me that I'd been sober for too many years to need so many meetings, and I told the thought to go to hell. The fucking disease almost killed me, and the last thing I ever want to do is give it another chance.
When I wasn't at a meeting I was walking around town, or at a concert or a museum with Elaine, or sitting in the park or in a coffee shop with TJ. I spent a certain amount of time thinking about Will and the people he'd killed, but there was nothing in the news to add fresh fuel to that particular fire, so it burned less brightly with every passing day. The tabloids did what they could to keep the story prominent, but there was only so much they could do, and yet another indiscretion in the British royal family helped nudge Will off the front page.
One afternoon I went into a church. Years ago, when I turned in my shield and left my wife and kids, I found myself dropping into churches all the time, though almost never when there was a service going on.
I guess I found some measure of peace there. If nothing else I found silence, often an elusive commodity in New York. I got in the habit of lighting candles for people who'd died, and once you start that you're stuck, because it's a growth industry. People keep dying.
I got in another habit, too. I began tithing, giving a tenth of whatever money came my way to whatever poor box I saw next. I was ecumenical about it, but the Catholics got most of my trade because they worked longer hours. Their churches were more apt to be open when I was looking for a beneficiary for my largesse.
I've thought about it, and I can't say for sure what the tithing was all about. During those years I didn't keep records or pay taxes, or even file a return, so it's possible I thought of my tithe as a voluntary tax. It couldn't have amounted to very much, anyway, because I went long stretches without working, and when I worked I never made a great deal of money. My rent always got paid on time and my tab at Armstrong's got settled sooner or later, and when I could manage it I sent money to Anita and the boys.
But the sums involved were small, and you wouldn't see any priests riding around in Lincolns on ten percent of my gross.
When I got sober I began spending my time not in the sanctuaries of churches but in their basements,
where my contribution when they passed the basket was limited by tradition to a dollar. I rarely lit a candle, and I stopped tithing altogether, though I could no more tell you why than I could explain having begun the practice in the first place.
'You cleared up a little,' my sponsor suggested, 'and you realized you had more use for the money than the church did.'
I don't know that that's it. For a while I gave away a lot of money on the street, hi essence tithing to the homeless population of New York.
(Maybe I was just cutting out the middleman, making a collective poor box of all those empty coffee cups and outstretched hands.) That habit, too, ran its course, perhaps because I was daunted by the ever-increasing profusion of cups and hands. Compassion fatigue set in.
Unable to stuff a dollar bill into every beseeching cup or hand, I stopped it altogether; like most of my fellow New Yorkers, I got so I didn't even notice them anymore.
Things change. Sober, I found I had to do many of the chickenshit things that everybody else has to do.
I had to keep records, had to pay taxes. For years I charged clients arbitrary flat fees and saved myself the aggravation of itemizing my expenses, but you can't work that way for attorneys, and now that I have a PI license much of my work comes from attorneys. I still work the old way for clients who are as casual as I am, but more
