“Let me look at you,” he said, and did. “You look all right. I hope you stopped in time. Would you drink a ginger ale?”
“Sure, if it’s no trouble.”
He assured me it wasn’t, called out to summon his wife. “Edna, sweetie, could you bring the two of us a couple of ginger ales? They’re cold already, don’t bother with ice. In fact right out of the can is fine.”
But she brought in highball glasses, with a few ice cubes in each. He thanked her, and when she’d left he said, “The doc gave me the green light, said drink if I want to, that at this point it doesn’t make any difference. If you were drinking I’d keep you company. But the booze doesn’t sit well on my stomach these days.” He held his glass to the light. “Looks enough like booze,” he said. “Little dark for Scotch, but it could be bourbon and soda.” He took a sip, said, “Nope, ginger ale. Isn’t that a relief and a disappointment? You’re too much of a gentleman to ask, so I’ll tell you, and then we can put it on the shelf. It’s cirrhosis, with a side order of liver cancer. So it doesn’t matter if I drink but it feels better if I don’t. End of story.”
He said, “Jack Ellery. You say somebody killed him? You told me that a year ago, I’d have said something along the lines of good riddance. Still, your perspective changes when you’re staring at it yourself. Lately I’m not so quick to wish death on anybody, you know?”
“Sure.”
“But the guy was a lowlife. No way around it. You’re working this on a private ticket?”
Not quite, in that I didn’t have a license. But that was close enough, and I nodded.
“So you got a client. Somebody who cares enough to pay money to find out who put him away.”
“A friend of his.”
He thought about it. “He’s a guy who could have a friend or two,” he allowed, “though he wouldn’t hang on to them for long. Kind of guy who’d be a friend of his, assuming he’d want to know who killed him, is he gonna go to an ex-cop to find out?”
He was still a pretty good detective. “The friend’s straight,” I said, wondering how long it had been since anyone had applied that adjective to Gregory Stillman.
“It’s not a girlfriend, or you’d have said so.” He looked at me. “AA.”
“Good catch, Bill.”
“I never thought of Ellery as a drunk,” he said. “I mean, he drank, but who the hell didn’t? You drank, I drank—” He broke off, shook his head. “Well, there you go, huh? Look at us now. Anyway, I can’t say I ever got to know the son of a bitch. All I wanted to do was put him away, and the case fell apart, and at that point I lost interest.”
“The two of you never bellied up to the bar at the Fifty-five.”
He shook his head. “You ever drink with him yourself?”
“When I knew him in the Bronx, we were both drinking chocolate milk. By the time I met him again we were both sober.”
“He actually quit drinking?”
“He was sober two years when he died.”
I told him a little more about Jack’s death—how he’d shown the effects of a beating, then took two bullets not long afterward. I ran my five names past him and explained where they came from.
He said, “Making amends, did you call it? All of your crowd does that?”
“It’s recommended.”
He shook his head. “Maybe it’s just as well I never tried that route. A list like that, Christ, I wouldn’t know where to start.”
XII
WHEN I WAS ready to leave, Lonergan insisted on walking out onto the front stoop with me. “This neighborhood was all Irish,” he said. “Now you’ve got South Americans moving in. Colombians and Venezuelans mostly, and I forget what else. Maybe Ecuador. Some of the old joints have closed. Houlihan’s, used to be on the corner, now it’s a travel agency for the new arrivals.” He shrugged. “I guess they’re all right, the new people. They can’t be that much worse than we were.”
I stopped at one of the new places a block before the subway entrance. It was a luncheonette, and I took a stool at the counter and ordered a cafe con leche. They used evaporated milk from a can, and it was sweet and not bad, but I didn’t like it enough to order it again.
I thought about Bill Lonergan, and decided I hadn’t known him well enough to tell how the prospect of death had changed him. We’d gotten all the conversational mileage we could out of Jack Ellery, which wasn’t much. He didn’t recognize any of the names on Jack’s Eighth Step list, but one of them reminded him of someone else entirely, and that sent the conversation off on a diverting tangent. We told our war stories, and talked about colleagues from the Sixth, and I stayed longer than I would have because he seemed to want the company.
The lunch counter had a pay phone, and I used it to call Mark Sattenstein. I got the answering machine, and that was response enough to keep the phone from returning my quarter.
No problem. I had a change purse full of them.
The train I caught in Woodside was headed for Times Square, but at Grand Central I transferred to the Lexington line. I got off at Fourteenth Street and tried another quarter in another phone, but this time I rang off the instant the machine picked up, and the phone gave me back my quarter. I seemed to be getting the hang of it.
I walked three blocks up and two blocks east until I came to a five-story redbrick building on the uptown side of the street, a fire escape centered on the facade. The house number was the one I’d written down for Sattenstein, and in the vestibule I found his name on the buzzer for Apartment 3-A.
I positioned my forefinger over the button, then drew it back. There were four apartments to a floor, and the A line was likely to be in front, and on the left. That wasn’t carved in stone, a building’s owner could number his apartments as he preferred, even as he could call his building whatever struck his fancy. The original owner of this particular structure had called it the Guinevere, and I knew this because it was indeed carved in stone, just above the front door.
Outside, I stood on the sidewalk and found what ought to be 3-A’s front window. There was a light on inside,
