Teacher's and poured about two ounces into a Flintstones jelly glass. She sat down at the table with the bottle and the glass in front of her. She picked up the glass, looked at it, then drank off half the whiskey in a single swallow. She coughed, shuddered, heaved a sigh.
'That's better,' she said.
I could believe it.
The kettle whistled and she fixed my coffee, if you could call it that. I stirred it and left the spoon sitting in the cup. It's supposed to cool faster that way. I wonder if it really does.
She said, 'I can't even offer you milk.'
'I drink it black.'
'There's sugar, though. I'm positive of that.'
'I don't use any.'
'Because you don't want to mask the true flavor of the instant decaf.'
'Something like that.'
She drank the rest of her scotch. She said, 'You recognized the smell right away. That's how you knew what you would find.'
'It's not a smell you forget.'
'I don't expect to forget it. I suppose you walked into a lot of apartments like that when you were a cop.'
'If you mean apartments with dead bodies in them, yes, I'm afraid I did.'
'I guess you get used to it.'
'I don't know if you ever get used to it. You generally learn to mask your feelings, from others and from yourself.'
'That's interesting. How do you do that?'
'Well, drinking helps.'
'Are you sure you won't—'
'No, I'm positive. How else do you stop yourself from feeling anything? Some cops get angry at the deceased, or express contempt for him. When they bring the body downstairs, more often than not they drag the bag so the body bounces down the steps. You don't want to see that when the guy in the body bag was a friend of yours, but for the cops or the morgue crew, it's a way to dehumanize the corpse. If you treat him like garbage, you won't agonize as much over what happened to him, or have to look at the fact that it could happen to you someday.'
'God,' she said. She added whiskey to her glass. It showed Fred Flintstone with a goofy grin on his face. She capped the bottle, took a drink.
'How long since you were a cop, Matt?'
'A few years.'
'What do you do now? You're too young to be retired.'
'I'm a sort of private detective.'
'Sort of?'
'I don't have a license. Or an office, or a listing in the Yellow Pages. Or much of a business, as far as that goes, but people turn up from time to time wanting me to handle something for them.'
'And you handle it.'
'If I can. Right now I'm working for a man from Indiana whose daughter came to New York to be an actress. She lived in a rooming house a few blocks from here, and a couple of months ago she disappeared.'
'What happened to her?'
'That's what I'm supposed to be trying to find out. I don't know a hell of a lot more than I did when I started.'
'Is that why you wanted to see Eddie Dunphy? Was he involved with her?'
'No, there was no connection.'
'Well, there goes my theory. I had a flash just now that he'd gotten her to pose for one of those magazines, and the next thing you knew she was in a snuff film, and you can take it from there. Do they really exist?'
'Snuff films? Probably, from what I hear. The only ones I ever came into contact with were pretty obvious fakes.'
'Would you watch a real one? If someone had a print and invited you to watch it.'
'Not unless I had a reason.'
'Curiosity wouldn't be enough of a reason?'
'I don't think so. I don't think I'd have that much curiosity on the subject.'
'I wonder what I would do. Probably watch it and then wish I hadn't. Or not and wish I had. What's her name?'
'The girl who disappeared? Paula Hoeldtke.'
'And there was no connection between her and Eddie Dunphy?' I said there wasn't. 'Then why did you want to
