A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“I picked up the phone and passed on the word about the vic’s famous uncle Selig. Which was news to all concerned, and my guy there showed his appreciation by mentioning the bandaged hand. A little quid for the old pro quo. I’d say one hand washes the other, but the bandage would get in the way.”

So Sattenstein’s sitting home and brooding over the woman who decided she was a lesbian, and the walls are closing in on him and he forgot to pick up a six-pack earlier, so if he wants a beer he has to leave the house. And why not walk a few blocks and drink it in the good company a saloon can provide? And who knows, maybe he’ll get lucky. You never know.

And there he is, drinking with his left hand because his right hand’s still bandaged. And somebody spots him, tags him when he leaves. Hits him too hard.

Why not?

Because I really wanted that to be how it played out. That way it was sheer coincidence. Fate, kismet, karma. Dumb luck. And if it was any of those things, then it wasn’t my fault.

I sat in my room and looked up his telephone number and tried to decide if it looked familiar, if it had been written on the message slip I’d crumpled and tossed. If it looked familiar, it wasn’t because I’d seen it written out, but because I’d dialed it several times when I was first trying to reach the man.

I dialed it now, and the machine picked up. I listened to a dead man’s voice. I hung up, wondering how long it would be before someone unplugged the machine, how long before the telephone company cut off the phone service.

You don’t die all at once. Not anymore. These days you die a little at a time.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually the thought came to me that I ought to go to a meeting, and I looked at my watch and saw I was too late for any of the noon meetings. It was past two already, and I hadn’t been to a meeting or eaten anything since breakfast.

Call your sponsor, a little voice murmured, and I picked up the phone, and when I had the number half dialed I realized I was calling his home number, and he’d be at his shop. I tried his work number and got it wrong, some woman answered, and I apologized and looked up the number, and got a busy signal.

I called Jan. The phone rang twice, and I rang off before she could answer.

I called Greg. The machine picked up, and I rang off. I’d left him enough messages.

But something made me dial the number again, and this time when the machine picked up I let the message play through to the end. After he’d invited me to leave a message after the beep, a mechanical voice cut in to inform me that the message tape was full.

Well, that explained why he hadn’t returned my calls. He hadn’t returned anybody’s calls. Out of town, most likely, and not checking his messages, and—

I rushed out of there. When I got to the street, there was an eastbound cab discharging a passenger in front of the big apartment building across the street. I yelled out, ran across the street, dodged traffic.

“You could get killed like that,” the driver said. “What’s the big hurry?”

I didn’t remember his address. I knew he was on Ninety-ninth between First and Second, and on the uptown side of the street near the middle of the block. There were four houses in a row that looked about the same, and it could have been any of them, but the first one I tried was the second from the right, and I spotted his name on one of the buttons. I pushed it and didn’t get a response, but then I hadn’t been expecting one.

There was a button at the bottom of the column marked Sput, which suggested that the building had a dyslexic superintendent. I rang it, and when nothing happened I rang it again. No response.

I rang a couple of apartments on the third floor, and eventually somebody answered and wanted to know who I was and what I wanted. I remembered the smell of mice. “Exterminator,” I said, and the buzzer let me in.

I climbed the stairs. The mouse smell was faint, and I doubt I’d have noticed it if I hadn’t remembered our conversation. Mice, cabbage, wet dog with garlic. At the third-floor landing a woman stood in a doorway, frowning at me. If I was an exterminator, why was I empty-handed? Where were my work clothes?

Before she could say anything, I drew out my wallet, flipped it open. I extended a forefinger, pointed upstairs. She shrugged, sighed, returned to her apartment, and I heard the bolt shoot home as she locked her door.

I climbed three more flights of stairs and went to Greg’s door. I rang the bell and heard the chimes sound within, and when all was still I knocked on the door. As if that would accomplish anything.

I tried the knob. The door was locked. Well, of course it would be locked. It was too late in the year for him to be at Fire Island, but there were enough other places for a week’s vacation, Key West or South Beach or some modest but genteel resort in the Caymans or the Bahamas. And he’d certainly lock up before he left, and what was I doing here anyway? I hadn’t returned a telephone call, which may have been from some other Mark and not the one who’d been killed in a street mugging, and to compensate I’d rushed uptown and flimflammed my way into his building, and wasn’t it time for me to turn around and go home?

I tried a credit card on the lock. If it wasn’t bolted, if the spring lock was all that was keeping me out, I might be able to loid my way in. I spent a couple of minutes establishing that such was not the case. The door was locked, and I couldn’t open it, short of kicking it in.

It seemed to me that I could sense something. It seemed to me that I could feel it.

I got down on one knee, lowered my face to floor level. There was a space of perhaps a quarter of an inch beneath the bottom of the door. Enough to show light, if there’d been a light on within the apartment.

I didn’t smell mice, or cabbage. Or wet dog with garlic. What I did smell sent me out of the building and down the street, looking for a working pay phone.

XXXI

YOU SEE SOMETHING like that,” Redmond said, “you want to cut him down. It’s heartless, somehow, leaving him like that. But you do the humane thing and you catch hell from the crime lab crew. Just opening a window pisses them off, but that’s just too fucking bad.”

He’d opened all the windows, and that was a help. The odor I’d caught a whiff of in the hallway hit us in the face when the super opened the door for us, and we walked into a stench that made me grateful I’d skipped lunch.

Aside from the smell, the living room was as I remembered it, and in perfect order. The kitchen was immaculate, but for a half-finished cup of coffee in its matching saucer.