'They do it,' he said, 'and they get away with it. They have their heightened orgasm and they evidently enjoy it, so they make a regular practice of it. Even when they know about the dangers, their survival seems to prove to them that they know the right way to do it.'
He took off his glasses, polished them with the tail of his lab coat.
'The thing is,' he said, 'there is no right way to do it, and sooner or later your luck runs out. You see, a little pressure on the carotid'— he reached across to touch the side of my neck—'and it triggers a reflex that slows the heartbeat way down. That evidently has something to do with boosting the thrill of orgasm, but what it can also do is make you lose consciousness, and you have no control over that. When that happens, gravity tightens the noose, and you can't do anything about it because you're out of it, you don't know what's happening.
Trying to be careful doing it is like exercising caution during Rus-sian roulette. No matter how successful you've been in the past, you've got the same chance of blowing it the next time. The only careful way to do it is not to do it at all.'
I had taken a cab downtown to see Sternlicht. I took a couple of buses back, and got to Willa's just as she was on her way out.
She was wearing a pair of jeans I hadn't seen before, paint-smeared, ragged at the cuffs. Her hair was pinned up and tucked out of sight behind a beige scarf. She was wearing a man's white button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and her blue tennis shoes were paint-spattered to match the jeans. She carried a gray metal toolbox, rusty around the locks and hinges.
'I must have known you were coming,' she said. 'That's why I dressed. I've got a plumbing emergency across the street.'
'Don't they have a super over there?'
'Sure, and I'm it. I've got three buildings to take care of besides this one. That way I don't just have a place to live, I also have something to live on.' She shifted the toolbox from one hand to the other. 'I can't stand and chat, they'll have a full-scale flood over there. Do you want to come watch or would you
rather make yourself a cup of coffee and wait for me?'
I told her I'd wait, and she walked inside with me and let me into her apartment. I asked her if I could have Eddie's key.
'You want to go up there? What for?'
'Just to look around.'
She worked his key off her ring, then gave me one for her apartment as well. 'So you can get back in,'
she said. 'It's the top lock, it locks automatically when you pull the door shut. Don't forget to double-lock the door upstairs when you're through.'
Eddie's windows had been wide open ever since Andreotti and I had opened them. The smell of death was still in the air, but it had grown faint, and wasn't really unpleasant unless you happened to recognize it for what it was.
It would be easy enough to get rid of the rest of the smell. Once the curtains and bedding were gone, once the furniture and clothing and personal effects were out on the street for the trash pickup, you probably wouldn't be able to smell a thing. Swab down the floors and spray a little Lysol around and the last traces would vanish. People die every day, and landlords clean up after them, and new tenants are in their place by the first of the month.
Life goes on.
I was looking for chloral hydrate, but I didn't know where he kept it. There was no medicine cabinet.
The lavatory, in a tiny closet off the bedroom, held a commode and nothing else. His toothbrush hung in a holder above the kitchen sink, and there was half a tube of toothpaste, neatly rolled, on the window ledge nearby. In the cupboard nearest to the sink I found a couple of plastic razors, a can of shaving foam, a bottle of Rexall aspirin, and a pocket tin of Anacin. I opened the aspirin bottle and dumped its contents into my palm, and all I had was a handful of five-grain aspirin tablets. I put them back and tackled the Anacin tin, pressing the rear corners as indicated.
Getting it open was enough to give you a headache, but all I found for my troubles were the white tablets the label had promised.
The upended orange crate beside his bed held a stack of AA literature— the Big Book, the Twelve & Twelve, some pamphlets, and a slender paperback called Living Sober. There was a Bible, the Douay Reims version, with a bookplate indicating it had been a first communion gift to Mary Scanlan. On another page, a family tree indicated that Mary Scanlan had been married to Peter John Dunphy, and that a son, Edward Thomas Dunphy, had been born a year and four months after the wedding date.
I flipped through the Bible and it opened to a chapter in Second Chronicles where Eddie had stashed a pair of twenty-dollar bills. I couldn't think what to do with them. I didn't want to take the money, but it felt odd to leave it. I gave the whole question a good forty dollars worth of thought, then returned the bills to the Bible and put the Bible back where I'd found it.
His dresser top held a small tin with a couple of spot Band-Aids left in it, a single shoelace, an empty cigarette pack, forty-three cents in change, and a pair of subway tokens. The dresser's top drawer contained mostly socks, but there was also a pair of gloves, wool with leather palms, a Colt .45 brass belt buckle, and a plush-lined box of the sort cuff-link sets come in. This one held a high school ring with a blue stone, a gold-plated tie bar, and a single cuff link with three small garnets on it. There had been a fourth garnet but it was gone.
The underwear drawer contained, along with shorts and T-shirts, a Gruen wristwatch with half its strap missing.
The erotic magazines were gone. I guessed they'd been bagged and tagged and taken along as evidence, and they'd probably spend eternity in a warehouse somewhere. I didn't come across any other erotica, or any sex aids, either.
I found his wallet in his trousers pocket. It held thirty-two dollars in cash, a foil-wrapped condom, and one of those all-purpose identification cards they sell in schlock shops around Times Square.
They're usually bought by people who want fake ID, although they wouldn't fool anyone. Eddie had filled his out legitimately with his correct name and address and the same date of birth as the one in the family Bible, along with
