them to the game or if they simply wanted to go to it and knew that I would be able to root out a source of tickets.
I asked if there were any other home games.
'Thursday. But that's a school night.'
'It's also a lot more possible than Saturday.'
'Well, I hate to see them stay out late on a school night.'
'I could probably get tickets for the Thursday game.'
'Well—'
'I couldn't get tickets for Saturday, but I could probably get something for Thursday. It'll be later in the series, a more important game.'
'Oh, so that's the way you want to do it. If I say no because it's a school night, then I'm the heavy.'
'I think I'll hang up.'
'No, don't do that. All right, Thursday is fine. You'll call if you can get tickets?'
I said I would.
IT was odd—I wanted to be drunk but didn't much want a drink. I sat around the room for a while, then walked over to the park and sat on a bench. A couple of kids ambled rather purposefully to a bench nearby. They sat down and lit cigarettes, and then one of them noticed me and nudged his companion, who looked carefully toward me. They got up and walked off, glancing back periodically to make sure I was not following them. I stayed where I was. I guessed that one of them had been about to sell drugs to the other, and that they had looked at me and decided not to conduct the transaction under the eyes of someone who looked like a policeman.
I don't know how long I sat there. A couple of hours, I suppose. Periodically a panhandler would brace me. Sometimes I'd contribute toward the next bottle of sweet wine. Sometimes I'd tell the bum to fuck off.
By the time I left the park and walked over to Ninth Avenue, St. Paul's was closed for the day. The downstairs was opening up, however. It was too late to pray but just the right hour for bingo.
Armstrong's was open, and it had been a long dry night and day. I told them to forget the coffee.
THE next forty hours or so were pretty much of a blur. I don't know how long I stayed in Armstrong's or where I went after that. Sometime Friday morning I woke up alone in a hotel room in the Forties, a squalid room in the kind of hotel to which Times Square streetwalkers take their johns. I had no memory of a woman and my money was all still there, so it looked as though I had probably checked in alone.
There was a pint bottle of bourbon on the dresser, about two-thirds empty. I killed it and left the hotel and went on drinking, and reality faded in and out, and sometime during that night I must have decided I was done, because I managed to find my way back to my hotel.
Saturday morning the telephone woke me. It seemed to ring for a long time before I roused myself enough to reach for it. I managed to knock it off the little nightstand and onto the floor, and by the time I managed to pick it up and get it to my ear I was reasonably close to consciousness.
It was Guzik.
'You're hard to find,' he said. 'I been trying to reach you since yesterday.
Didn't you get my messages?'
'I didn't stop at the desk.'
'I gotta talk to you.'
'What about?'
'When I see you. I'll be over in ten minutes.'
I told him to give me half an hour. He said he'd meet me in the lobby. I said that would be fine.
I stood under the shower, first hot, then cold. I took a couple of aspirin and drank a lot of water. I had a hangover, which I had certainly earned, but aside from that I felt reasonably good. The drinking had purged me. I would still carry Henry Prager's death around with me—you cannot entirely shrug off such burdens—but I had managed to drown some of the guilt, and it was no longer as oppressive as it had been.
I took the clothes I'd been wearing, wadded them up, and stuffed them into the closet. Eventually I'd decide whether the cleaner could restore them, but for the moment I didn't even want to think about it. I shaved and put on clean clothes and drank two more glasses of tap water. The aspirin had polished off the headache, but I was dehydrated from too many hours of hard drinking, and every cell in my body had an unquenchable thirst.
I got down to the lobby before he arrived. I checked the desk and found that he'd called four times.
There were no other messages, and no mail of any importance. I was reading one of the unimportant letters— an insurance company would give me a leather-covered memorandum book absolutely free if I would tell my date of birth—when Guzik came in. He was wearing a well-tailored suit; you had to look carefully to see he was carrying a gun.
He came over and took a chair next to me. He told me again that I was hard to find. 'Wanted to talk to you after I saw Ethridge,' he said. 'Jesus, she's something, isn't she? She turns the class on and off. One minute you can't believe she was ever a pross, and the next minute you can't believe she was anything else but.'
'She's an odd one, all right.'
'Uh-huh. She's also getting out sometime today.'
'She made bail? I thought they'd book her for Murder One.'
'Not bail. Not booking her for anything, Matt. We got nothing to hold her on.'
