I’d heard a little about it. There’d been a death in my home group at St. Paul’s, and another member had been hospitalized several times with persistent fevers that they didn’t know how to treat.
“No one knows what causes it,” he said. “A friend of mine thinks it has something to do with the synergistic effect of leather and quiche. We may all die of it, Matt, but we’ll have some laughs along the way.”
His sponsor, Adrian, had died just over a month ago, and he hadn’t picked a replacement. “I’ve been holding silent auditions,” he said, “trying people out without letting them know about it. It’ll have to be someone older than I, and with longer sobriety, but someone who still goes to meetings on a daily basis, or close to it. I don’t want a gay man because I don’t want to go through this again, and I don’t want a straight man because I just don’t. Lately I’ve been thinking I should get a female sponsor, but do I want a straight woman or a lesbian?”
“Another dilemma,” I said.
He nodded. “And one that will solve itself in the fullness of time. As opposed to my other dilemma, which requires action. Matt, you were a policeman. Are you likely to go back to that?”
“Get reinstated?” I’d thought about it early on, talked it over with Jim Faber. “No,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“So now you’re a private detective.”
“Not exactly. Private investigators are licensed. After I left the department, I started working privately for people, but in a very unofficial off-the-books kind of way. I would be doing favors, and they’d be giving me money as an expression of gratitude.”
“And now?”
“I’m looking for a job the way you’re looking for a sponsor,” I said. “Someone suggested a free program, EPRA, I forget what the initials stand for—”
“Employment Program for Recovering Alcoholics. Jack started going, but he wasn’t able to stick with it. He got by delivering lunches for a deli. Not exactly a career, but a pretty good get-sober job.”
“Well, my get-sober job seems to be the one I had when I came in. In the past eleven months I’ve had enough work come my way so that the rent keeps getting paid and I don’t miss any meals.”
“You do favors for people, and they show their gratitude.”
“Right.”
“Well,” he said, “I’d like you to do me a favor.”
IX
IT WAS WELL past midnight by the time I got home. There were no messages waiting for me, just the usual run of junk mail. I tossed it when I got to my room, but I kept the 9x12 manila envelope addressed to Gregory Stillman, with the hand-stamped return address of a firm in Wichita, Kansas. It had once held a catalog of jewelers’ supplies, but now it contained Jack Ellery’s Eighth Step, the list of people he had allegedly harmed, among whose number one might well expect to find the name of his killer.
I’d glanced at the first page of the list, just to make sure I’d be able to read Jack’s handwriting, and had then watched Greg slip it into the envelope and fasten the metal clasp. Now I put it on my dresser unopened and got out of my clothes and under the shower.
The envelope was still there when I got out of the shower. I opened it and drew out a sheaf of unruled pages held together by a paper clip. The pages were numbered, and there were nine of them, all covered with Jack’s compact but legible handwriting, dark blue ink on white paper.
The first name at the top of the first page was Raymond Ellery, who turned out to be Jack’s late father. I read a couple of sentences and felt a wave of tiredness wash over me. This could wait, all of it. I put the pages back in the envelope, refastened the clasp, and got into bed.
I remembered that I hadn’t prayed. I didn’t see the point of it, it wasn’t really my style, but I’d spent almost a year now doing things that weren’t my style and that I only occasionally saw the point of. So I kept it simple, starting the day by asking for another day of sobriety, ending it with thanks for another sober day.
But only when I remembered. I remembered now, but I was in bed with the light out, and I didn’t really feel like getting out of bed and down on my knees—which wasn’t really my style either.
“Thank you,” I said to whatever might be listening. And let it go at that.
“He gave me a thousand dollars,” I told Jim. “Ten hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t have to count them, he had them set aside in his wallet, so I don’t guess he was making things up as he went along.”
“I trust you remembered your police training.”
“I put it in my pocket.”
Another thing Vince Mahaffey had told me, years ago in Brooklyn. That’s what you did when somebody handed you money.
“You don’t sound happy,” Jim said, “for somebody with a thousand dollars in his pocket.”
“Most of it’s gone. I paid the next month’s rent, and I sent Anita a money order. I put a couple of bucks in the bank, and what’s left is in my wallet.”
“All of it? Or did you give up a tenth of your crop as a burnt offering to the gods?”
“Well,” I said.
Some years ago I’d gotten in the habit of tithing, slipping ten percent of what money I received into the first church collection box I came to. Jim found this an amusing eccentricity, and one he assumed would fade away in sobriety. Meanwhile the Catholics got most of my money, if only because their sanctuaries were more likely to be open, and on my way home I’d detoured to pay my respects to the poor box at St. Paul the Apostle. And while I was there I lit a couple of candles, one of them for Jack Ellery.
“You’re still a few dollars ahead of where you were yesterday,” Jim pointed out, “and you still don’t sound very happy.”
“I took the money,” I said. “Now I have to earn it.”
