'Did you find what you were looking for? For that matter, what were you looking for?'
'Pills.'
'Pills?'
'But I couldn't find anything stronger than aspirin.' I explained what Sternlicht had found, and the implications of his findings. 'I was taught how to search an apartment, and I learned to do it thoroughly. I didn't pry up floorboards or take the furniture apart, but I made a pretty systematic search of the premises. If there was chloral hydrate there, I would have found it.'
'Maybe it was his last pill.'
'Then there'd be an empty vial somewhere.'
'He might have thrown it out.'
'It wasn't in his wastebasket. It wasn't in the garbage under the kitchen sink. Where else would he have tossed it?'
'Maybe somebody gave him a single pill, or a couple of pills. 'You can't sleep? Here, take one of these, they work every time.' As far as that goes, you said he was streetwise, didn't you? Not every pill sold in this neighborhood gets dispensed by a pharmacist. You can buy everything else on the street. I wouldn't be surprised if you could buy coral hydrate.'
'Chloral hydrate.'
'Chloral hydrate, then. Sounds like something a welfare mother would name her kid. 'Chloral, now you leave off pickin' on yo' brother!'
What's the matter?'
'Nothing.'
'You seem moody, though.'
'Do I? Maybe I caught it upstairs. And what you said about people living too long. I was thinking last night that I don't want to wind up an old man living alone in a hotel room. And here I am, well on the way.'
'Some old man.'
I sat there and nursed my mood while she took a shower. When she came out I said, 'I must have been
looking for more than pills, because what good would it have done me to find them?'
'I was wondering that myself.'
'I just wish I knew what he wanted to tell me. He had something on his mind and he was just about ready to unload it, but I told him to take his time, to think it over. I should have sat down with him then and there.'
'And then he'd still be alive?'
'No, but—'
'Matt, he didn't die because of what he said or didn't say. He died because he did something stupid and dangerous and his luck ran out.'
'I know.'
'There was nothing you could have done. And nothing you can do for him now.'
'I know. He didn't—'
'Didn't what?'
'Say anything to you?'
'I hardly knew him, Matt. I can't remember the last time I talked to him. I don't know if I ever talked to him, beyond 'How's the weather?'
and 'Here's the rent.' '
'He had something on his mind,' I said. 'I wish to hell I knew what it was.'
I dropped into Grogan's in the middle of the afternoon. The dart board wasn't in use and I didn't see Andy Buckley anywhere, but otherwise the crowd was much the same. Tom was behind the stick, and he put a magazine down long enough to draw me a Coke. An old man with a cloth cap was talking about the Mets, lamenting a trade they'd made fifteen years earlier. 'They got Jim Fregosi,' he said scornfully,
'and they gave up Nolan Ryan. Nolan Ryan!'
On the television screen, John Wayne was putting someone in his place. I tried to picture him pushing through the swinging doors of a saloon, bellying up to the bar, telling the barkeep to bring him a Coke and a chloral hydrate.
I nursed my Coke, bided my time. When my glass was almost empty I crooked a finger for Tom. He came over and reached for my glass but I covered it with my palm. He looked at me, expressionless as ever, and I asked if Mickey Ballou had been in.
'There's people in and out,' he said. 'I wouldn't know their names.'
There was a north-of-Ireland edge to his speech. I hadn't noticed it earlier. 'You'd know him,' I said.
'He's the owner, isn't he?'
'It's called Grogan's. Wouldn't it be Grogan that owns it?'
'He's a big man,' I said. 'Sometimes he wears a butcher's apron.'
