“High-Low Jack,” I said. “You happen to know why they called him that?”

“I didn’t even know that they called him that. High-Low Jack? It’s a new one on me.”

“Not important,” I said. “I just thought you might know.”

“Damn, I hate to disappoint a new friend.” He snapped his fingers. “You know, I just might know after all. I bet it’s because Scooter was already taken.”

XXI

HEY, MAN!” Big smile, showing teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a while. “You’re the guy who called, right? You told me your name but that doesn’t mean I can remember it.”

“Matthew Scudder.”

“Right, right. Well, come on in, Matthew. Sorry about the place. The cleaning girl’s coming first thing tomorrow morning.”

Magazines were heaped on a floral-patterned armchair. He scooped them up, motioned for me to take their place. He stacked the magazines on a low table made from a door and pulled up a folding chair for himself.

“I was joking about the cleaning girl,” he said. “Around here, I’m the closest I’ve got to household help. The good news is I don’t cost much.”

The apartment wasn’t really that messy, and for a pot-smoker’s Lower East Side premises it probably ranked within a few points of the top. As far as I could tell, it was clean enough underneath the clutter.

I’d called him the morning after my late night with Vann Steffens. Before I dialed the number I checked the white pages, and there he was, Williams, Robt P., with the same phone number and same Ludlow Street address Vann had given me. He could have saved himself all that meticulous printing and told me to look in the book, but he’d said favors were his stock-in-trade, and that one was easily performed.

The phone rang a few times, and when Williams picked up he was out of breath, as if he’d hurried to pick up before the machine could take the call. I gave my name and said I’d like to talk to him about Jack Ellery, and he repeated Jack’s name a couple of times, and then he said, “Oh, fuck, I heard about that. What a terrible thing, huh? First I heard he killed himself, and that didn’t make sense. I mean people do it all the time and it never makes sense, but he wasn’t the type. Did you know him, man?”

“A long time ago.”

“Yeah, me too. But what I heard next was someone killed him, and that didn’t make sense either, because why in the hell would anybody want to kill Jack? Wha’d they do, shoot him?”

I said someone did just that, and he said that was what somebody had said, and it was amazing, just amazing. I asked if I could come over and talk to him, and he said sure, why not, he’d be hanging around the place all day. When did I want to come? Sometime in the afternoon?

I had breakfast first, and caught a noon meeting at Fireside, and took the F Train to its last stop in Manhattan. I’d checked a map first, and was thus able to walk directly to Ludlow Street, and by 2:30 I was sitting in that armchair. The arms showed wear and the springs were shot, but it was holding me as comfortably as it had held the magazines.

The cooking smells in the building’s halls and stairwell had been a mix of Latin and Asian, but the smell in Scooter Williams’s apartment was predominantly herbal. A lot of marijuana had been smoked in those three little rooms, and its aroma had seeped into the walls and floorboards, even as it had taken Scooter’s life and put it permanently on Hold.

He had to be somewhere in his middle forties, but managed to look both older and younger than his years. His full head of dark brown hair was shaggy, and looked as though he might have cut it himself. He had a droopy mustache, irregularly trimmed, and hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

He wore a maroon solid-color sport shirt with long sleeves and long collar points, and over that he wore one of those khaki vests with twenty pockets. Photographers’ vests, I think they call them, although how anybody could remember which pocket he’d put his film in was beyond me. His blue jeans had bell-bottoms, which you didn’t see much anymore, and they were frayed at the cuffs and worn through at the knees.

He talked for a while about something he’d seen on television, some science-fiction program that impressed him from a philosophical standpoint. I didn’t pay much attention, just let him ramble, then tuned in again when he said Jack’s name.

“Out of the blue,” he said. “Hadn’t heard from him in years, hadn’t thought of him in years, and the phone rings and it’s Jack. Can he come over? Well, sure. I’m in the same place. I been here since, wow, since I ditched college. Moved in and never moved out, and can you believe it’s more’n twenty years?”

“And he came over?”

“Couple hours after he phones, the bell rings and it’s him. You know what I figured, don’t you? Can you guess? I figured he was looking to cop.”

“To buy, uh—”

“Herb,” he said. “Kills me when I hear people call it a gateway drug. Man, I never got out of the gate. Started NYU in September, and before the month was done my roomie turned me on with what was probably a pretty lame joint, but I took a deep drag and you know what happened?”

“What?”

“Nothing whatsoever. I smoked the whole thing and nothing, zip, zero. But I felt the tiniest little bit hungry, you know, so I got this jar of peanut butter from my desk and started eating it off a spoon. And it was the most amazing taste, like I’m suddenly noticing all the subtleties of the peanut butter, the total mystical dimension of the taste of it, and it dawns on me that I’m stoned out of my fucking mind.”

He finished the jar of peanut butter, and long before it was gone he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to spend it feeling just like that.

“For a while,” he said, “you chase higher highs, but eventually you tip to the sheer futility of it. And you don’t have to get higher and higher. Just high is high enough, you know?”

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