A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“Not that the rest of the time’s a piece of cake, but anniversaries seem to polarize things for us. You know, you got involved way too soon.”

“I know.”

“But maybe you didn’t have much choice.”

I’d known Jan before I ever saw the inside of an AA room. There’d been a string of murders, a guy using an ice pick on women, and a few years after I left the force they got the guy. Except there was one killing he wouldn’t cop to, and it turned out he couldn’t have done it, he was inside at the time. It was an ice-cold case as far as the police department was concerned, and they certainly weren’t going to waste time on it, so a cop who knew me steered the victim’s father in my direction, and he hired me.

The investigation led me to Jan’s loft on Lispenard Street, among other places, and we liked each other’s looks enough to get drunk and go to bed together.

That worked out pretty well, and it looked as though I had a girlfriend, and a drinking buddy in the bargain. And I did, until she started going to meetings. That meant she was no longer a drinking buddy, and the people she met in church basements convinced her that she couldn’t be a girlfriend either, not of a man with a powerful thirst. I wished her the very best of luck and went off to get something to drink.

And some time went by, and she got sober and stayed that way, and I went on living my life. Then, when it got bad enough, I started going to meetings myself. I was in and out, I’d stay sober for a while and then I wouldn’t. Jim began to take an interest in me, and talked to me when he saw me, or tried to anyway. Pretty much everybody else left me alone. My name’s Matt. I’ll pass. Right.

Over the months I’d called Jan once in a while, when I was drunk enough to think it was a good idea. She was always polite, but knew better than to spend time talking to a drunk. Then I called her when I was trying to stay sober. I had to talk to someone and I couldn’t think of anybody else to call.

And we started keeping company of a sort. And one day I ordered a drink I didn’t really want, which was nothing new, and left it untouched on a bar, which was. And since then I’d been sober, and we were a couple. More or less.

Jim said he’d have to pass on St. Clare’s. There was something on PBS Beverly wanted to watch, and he’d agreed to keep her company. Did I want to join the two of them? I knew I didn’t, and headed for the meeting instead. I left at the break and went home.

No calls. I went to bed.

XVI

THAT WAS SUNDAY. A week and a half later, on Wednesday, I cleared the last suspect. I didn’t put in long hours and I can’t say I made any brilliant deductions, but I used the phone and the subway to good avail, and that turned out to be enough. By the time I was done I still didn’t know who’d killed Jack Ellery, but I knew five people who hadn’t, and that was all I’d signed on for.

I’d spent Monday renewing my acquaintance with some cops I’d known over the years. There was a guy I’d worked with a long time back in Brooklyn, and just a few blocks from me at Midtown North there was Joe Durkin; we’d had dealings right around the time I first started trying to get sober, and since then he’d earned a couple of extralegal dollars by steering a case or two my way.

Neither of them had anything for me, but they made a few phone calls and set up other cops for me to see. A guy from a downtown precinct knew the name Crosby Hart. He wasn’t a hood, he was a Wall Street guy, but he’d developed a fondness for cocaine that led him to embezzle from his employers. Which added up: Screwed him on a coke deal was next to his name on Jack’s Eighth Step list.

“Skinny guy in a suit, skinny tie, all the time tapping his long bony fingers, bobbing his head. Could not sit still. Cocaine, the miracle drug. We hauled him in, airtight case, but the firm changed their mind, insisted on dropping the charges. Restitution, treatment, never do it again, di dah di dah di dah. Which is fine, because once the coke’s out of the picture you’ve got a respectable guy leading a respectable life. Isn’t he better off with the wife and kids in Dobbs Ferry than a few miles further up the river in Ossining?”

“Is that where he lived? Dobbs Ferry?”

“Someplace like that. He was a commuter, took the train in from Westchester every morning. Of course when he was on a coke run he might not make it home that night. Dobbs Ferry, Hastings, Tuckahoe—one of those places. And Crosby’s his middle name, if you’re looking for him in the phone book.” And what was his first name? “He just used the initial. H. Crosby Hart, and everybody called him Crosby. Far as what the H stood for, I have to admit I got no fucking idea. I must have known at one time, because it would have been on his sheet. You book a guy, his first name gets written out. Unless he’s F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

“Or E. Howard Hunt?”

“Howard,” he said. “That’s it. Sonofabitch, how’d you manage that? Howard Crosby Hart. That’s his name.”

Except it wasn’t. It was Harold, not Howard, as I learned from Sheila Hart, who had not yet gotten around to changing the listing in the phone book for Lower Westchester County. He no longer lived there, and his current residence had an unlisted number. I sensed that she had it, but wasn’t about to give it out. I could try him at his place of business, she told me.

And where was that? She turned suspicious, and questioned my need to know. She hadn’t caught my name, and wondered just what sort of business I had with her former husband.

I gave my name, and said I was with Calder, Jennings & Skoog, reeling off the name as if it were one she ought to recognize and not one I’d invented on the spot. I said I understood her husband to be a nephew of the recently deceased Kelton Hart of Fort Myers, Florida, and—

Who was she to stand in the way of a legacy, especially if some of it might find its way to her? She told me what I needed to know, and I reached him at his desk a couple of hours later. I said my name but left out the imaginary Mr. Calder and his partners and said I’d like to meet with him. He didn’t even ask what it was about, which suggested he’d heard my name before, and not all that long ago.

He offered to meet me after work at the Cattle Baron, at the corner of William and Platt, just around the corner from his Wall Street firm. Say 5:30? I said 5:30 was fine, and put on a suit jacket and a tie before I left my hotel room. I was done playing the part of a lawyer hunting missing heirs, but he didn’t know that, and was expecting a lawyer to show up. So I figured I might as well look like one.

I don’t know that I did. I tend to look like a cop irrespective of what I wear.

The Cattle Baron was new to me, but pretty much what the name and location had led me to expect. It was a steak house, all dark wood and red leather and polished brass, with Bass Ale and three German beers on tap and a good selection of single-malt Scotch on the back bar. The clientele were all men and they all wore suits, and most of them spoke in loud voices. I stood in the doorway looking for a skinny guy with a skinny tie, and my eyes kept passing over one fellow until it registered that he was looking right at me.