A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“Robert Williams,” I said.

“Whose name is Legion, or might as well be. Robert Williams, with a cheating wife. What are the odds?”

“That I’ll be able to find him? Or that he’ll turn out to be the killer?”

“Either.”

“Slim and slimmer,” I said.

“That’s as I thought. Matt, are we done?”

I looked at my cup. There was still coffee in it.

“No,” he said, “I mean overall. I think you’ve done what I hired you to do. There were five names on the list, four after you ruled out the one in prison—”

“Piper MacLeish.”

“—and you’ve cleared Sattenstein and Crosby Hart and now Mr. Dukacs, and the object was to see if there was a name on the list that we ought to give to the police. The only name left is Robert Williams, and to give that to the police—”

I nodded, and imagined the conversation with Dennis Redmond. Years ago he had an affair with this guy’s wife, and he may have tried to find him and tell him he was sorry. Yeah, right.

“I don’t know how many hours you’ve put in,” he said, “but it seems to me you’ve more than earned the thousand dollars I gave you. Did you have to pay for information?”

“A few dollars here and there.”

“So you didn’t even clear the thousand. Do I owe you money, Matt?”

I shook my head. “You can pay for the coffee.”

“And that’s all? Are you sure?”

“I made out all right,” I said. “And there’s still a chance I’ll be able to clear Williams. I put the word out and I might hear something. You never know.”

And I guess you never do, because the following night I got home a little before midnight. Jacob was behind the desk, in what I’d come to recognize as a terpin hydrate fog, and he told me I’d had a batch of calls and no messages. “All the same gemmun,” he said, “each time sayin’ he’d try you later, and not once leavin’ a name or a number.”

I went to my room, showered, and was glad my caller hadn’t left a number, because I was exhausted. I’d gone to a meeting, then over to the Flame for coffee, and the conversation had gone on longer than usual. I decided to tell Jacob to hold my calls, and the phone rang even as I was reaching for it. I picked it up, and a voice like thirty miles of bad road said, “Don’t tell me I’m finally talking to Matthew Scudder.”

“Who’s this?”

“You don’t know me, Scudder. Name’s Steffens, like the muckraker. I’ve been trying you all night.”

“I’d have called you back,” I said, “if you’d left a message.”

“Yeah, well, I was on the move. It’s no way to gather moss, so I leave that to the north side of trees. I’m parked now, in a place I understand you know right well.”

“Oh?”

“Right around the corner from you,” he said, “and I thought I’d find you here, which is why I’m here myself. But the fellow behind the stick says you don’t come in so much these days.”

I knew where he was. But I let him tell me.

“Jimmy Armstrong’s Saloon,” he said, “except the guy doesn’t know how to spell saloon. It’s got a star where it oughta have an A.”

S*loon. There was a law still on the books, a piece of inane legislation dating back before Prohibition, that made it illegal to call an establishment a saloon. The law had been designed to placate the Anti-Saloon League, the idea being that, if you couldn’t keep a man from running a saloon, at least you could force him to call it something else. That was why Patrick O’Neal’s joint across from Lincoln Center was called O’Neal’s Baloon; he’d already ordered the signage when someone told him about the law, so he decided to change one letter and be done with it. There was, he’d been known to say, nothing illegal about misspelling balloon.

Jimmy had managed the Baloon before opening his own place five blocks down the avenue, and his way around the law was a star where the A would have been. I could have reported all of this to the mysterious Mr. Steffens, but I had a feeling he already knew it.

“He may be a lousy speller,” he said, “but the son of a bitch pours a decent drink, I’ll say that for him. I just wish he had a jukebox. Any luck at all, Kenny Rogers’d be there to remind me of her name.”

A drunk, calling me late at night. The impulse to hang up was strong. “I’ll help anyone who’s trying to stay sober,” Jim Faber had told me. “Any hour, day or night. But that’s if they call me before they pick up the drink. After that you’re just talking to a glass of booze, and I’ve got no time for that.”

“Lucille,” he said. “How do you like that? Picked it out of the air, with no help from Mr. Kenny Rogers.”

“I’m afraid you lost me.”

“Mrs. Bobby Williams. Isn’t that who you were looking to find? Right around the corner, Scudder, waiting for you to come buy me a drink.”

XIX

WHEN A THWARTED holdup in Washington Heights eased me out of the police department and away from Anita and the boys, I took a room at the Northwestern and decided its Spartan confines suited me well enough, and that’s where I stayed while my drinking got worse and my life went on falling apart.

But it wasn’t much more than a place to sleep when I could and stare out the window when I couldn’t. For a