“Then the odds are it’s been rented by now.”
“And if he left his Fourth Step behind, some other tenant’s reading it even as we speak. But won’t they pack up his possessions? Isn’t that what they do when somebody dies?”
I said that sounded about right. “And they give it to the heirs, or the next of kin,” I said. “I don’t suppose Jack had a will.”
“Just the sort every alcoholic has, along with a whim of iron. A Last Will and Testament? No, hardly. I don’t think he had anything to pass on, or anybody to leave it to.”
“My guess is the super’ll wait a decent interval, then keep what he wants and throw the rest out.”
“That’s what I thought. So what I’m going to do is go over there tomorrow and tell them I’m his cousin and I’ve come to collect his effects. There shouldn’t be a problem, should there?”
“I can’t see why. A box of old clothes and personal papers? He’ll be glad to see the last of it.”
“I can give the clothes to the Goodwill or the Sally. And if there’s, you know, some sort of personal item like a pocketknife, I’ll take it for a keepsake.” He was silent for a moment, perhaps recalling other dead friends and other souvenirs. “And if there’s a Fourth Step,” he said, “I’ll call you.”
“Good.”
“Matt? You wouldn’t want to keep me company, would you?”
“What time?”
“It would have to be in the afternoon.”
That saved me from having to invent a reason I couldn’t go. Donna had already supplied me with a perfectly good one. “I can’t,” I said. “I have to go to Brooklyn.”
“Really? Were you a bad boy? Are you being punished?”
“It’s work,” I said. “I have to help a member of my group move her stuff out of her boyfriend’s apartment.”
“Oh, God,” he said. “That takes you off the hook, but at what price? You’ve got a worse day ahead of you than I do. Matt, if I find anything interesting I’ll call you.”
Well, it depends who it is, and how and where he dies. If he’s a respectable member of society, and is considerate enough to leave a detailed will, his property is apportioned as specified therein. (Of course that’s after the in-home nurse pockets a few things that she just knows the deceased wanted her to have.) Then the relatives get to fight over the small stuff, and siblings get to drag out and act on every grudge and resentment left over from childhood.
If there’s no will, they get to fight over the big stuff too.
But if the deceased takes his last breath in a Bowery flophouse or an SRO welfare hotel, if the cops zip him into a body bag and cart him down a couple of flights of stairs, then anything worth the taking is pretty sure to get taken. The little stash of emergency cash, the couple of bucks left over from the most recent government check, the folded ten-dollar bill in the shoe—if a relative does turn up, it will have long since disappeared. The cops take it.
I always did. I learned from a partner, who explained the ethics of the situation. The ethical thing, he told me, was to divvy up with your partner.
And so I robbed the dead. It didn’t keep me up nights, or lead me to drink a drop more bourbon than I’d have had anyway. I can’t imagine it amounted to much over the years. Usually it was five dollars, ten dollars, certainly well under a hundred dollars. But one time I got to share $972 with my partner du jour. I remember the amount, remember how precisely we split it down the middle, remember what a nice windfall the $486 made, and how it left me with a feeling of gratitude and respect toward the derelict who’d unintentionally bestowed it upon me. (He’d gotten drunk, fell in his bathroom, gashed his head open, and bled out before recovering consciousness. We were ready to hate him for the mess he’d created, but the money he left us changed our attitude. Of course you don’t have to be on the Bowery to die like that; the actor William Holden managed it just about a year before I had my last drink.)
More names for my list, if I ever actually took the Eighth Step. How did you make amends to men whose names you had managed to forget as soon as you’d written up the report? I wasn’t even sure I’d been wrong to take the money. If my partner and I left it, that just meant somebody else would pocket it. And who was legally supposed to get it? The State of New York? What the hell did some bureau in Albany need with five dollars here and ten dollars there, or even a princely $972?
On the other hand, it wasn’t my money.
A lot of John Does and Richard Roes for my list, plus a couple of Mary Moes. Because women died too, of causes natural and unnatural, and you had to look in their purses for ID, didn’t you? And you’d always find a couple of dollars.
I was partnered with one prince of the city who took a pair of hoop earrings from the ears of a dead hooker. “These look like eighteen karat,” he said. “What does the poor darling need with gold earrings in potter’s field?”
I told him to keep them. Was I sure? Yes, I said, I was sure. Be a shame to split the pair, I said.
Noble of me. Maybe that’d be enough to get me into Heaven.
XXVI
I ALMOST DIDN’T recognize you,” I said.
Donna grinned, fluffed her hair. “Is it that different?”
The long auburn hair that had flowed down over her shoulders, and occasionally drifted into her eyes, had been cropped boyishly short and permed into a tight cap of curls. Richard, behind the wheel, said, “Isn’t it fabulous? And positively transformative—or do I want to say transformational?”
