In the bedroom, wearing nothing but a pair of blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts, Greg Stillman had a black leather belt looped around his neck, the wide brass buckle mostly hidden by his swollen throat. The other end of the belt disappeared over the top of the closet door, which had been closed to anchor it there. A folding step stool lay on its side, where it would have landed when he kicked it away.
“Nobody would ever do this,” Redmond said, “if they had the faintest fucking idea what they’d wind up looking like. Or what they’d smell like.”
The head swells, the neck stretches, the face blackens. The bowels and bladder empty themselves. Noxious gases form in the internal organs and find their way out. Flesh rots.
“The poor son of a bitch,” Redmond said. “You hate to leave him hanging there. But a fat lot of good it’d do him to cut him down.”
The man from the medical examiner’s office thought it was a very bad way to kill yourself. “Because you’re a long time dying,” he said. “And you’re conscious. You flop around like a trout on a line, and it’s too late to change your mind. Look here, on the door. Scuff marks from kicking. There’s pills you can take, you just go to sleep and you don’t wake up. And if you have second thoughts after you swallow them, well, you’ve generally got time to get over to the emergency room and have your stomach pumped.”
“Or you eat your gun and at least it’s quick.”
“Makes a goddam mess, though,” the ME told him. “But you’re not the one has to clean it up, so what do you care?”
“Me?” Redmond said. “Let’s leave me out of it, huh? I’m not about to eat my gun.”
He said, “You don’t smoke, do you? I quit years ago, but whenever I walk in on something like that, I wish I still smoked and I wish I had a cigar. One about a foot long and an inch thick. Something to smell instead of what we had to smell in there.”
We were in the Emerald Star, a Second Avenue bar I’d noticed on my first visit to Greg’s apartment. The bartender was a gaunt Hispanic with long sideburns and a pencil-line mustache. Redmond, who’d had whiskey and water when I met him at the Minstrel Boy, said he’d have a double Cutty Sark, neat, no ice.
I thought that sounded like a very sensible choice. But what I ordered was a Coke.
“My first partner,” I said, “was addicted to those little Italian cigars that look like pieces of twisted rope. They came in a little cardboard box, five or six to the box. I think the brand was De Nobili, but Mahaffey always called them guinea stinkers.”
“Nowadays they’d write him up for uttering an ethnic slur.”
“They might, and he wouldn’t care. I hated the smell of the things, but when we walked in on something like just now, he’d light one up and he’d give me one, and I’d light it and smoke it.”
“And be glad for it, I’ll bet.”
“It helped,” I said.
He picked up his glass, looked through it at the overhead light. I wondered why he did that. I’d done it often enough myself, and never knew why.
“No note,” he said.
“No.”
“My impression of him was that he’d be the type to leave a note. You knew him better than I did.”
“My impression,” I said, “was he wasn’t the type to kill himself.”
“Everybody’s the type,” he said. “The miracle is there’s so many of us who never get around to it.”
“Maybe.”
“My father killed himself. You know what that means?” I did, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “Means my odds aren’t good. I forget the numbers, but the sons of suicides are thus and so many times as likely to kill themselves as the rest of the world.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice.”
“No,” he said, and took a drink. “I have a choice. But have I got a choice what choice I make?” He grinned. “Run that little question through your mind a few times, and see where it gets you. So let’s run some other questions instead. When’s the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t remember,” I said, “but the last time I spoke to him was Saturday.”
“I played his messages. The tape starts on Monday morning. The ME said what, a couple of days?”
“I think so.”
“A person could go nuts listening to those messages. You must have heard them, you were standing a few feet away.”
“AA friends of his, mostly.”
“And some woman describing a piece of jewelry she wanted him to repair. Unbelievable. She goes on and on about it, the size, the materials, this, that, and the other, and then she says how she’ll bring it over so he can have a look at it. ‘So I don’t know why I’m describing it in such detail,’ she says. I felt like calling her up, telling her I don’t know either.”
“I more or less tuned her out.”
“I kept waiting for her to say something significant. Then there were the ones telling him they weren’t going to drink. Today, they said. Meaning they might drink tomorrow?”
“The idea is, you can’t know about tomorrow until it comes. But all you have to deal with is today.”
“Makes sense. Why tell him? Or were they just telling themselves?”
“A little of both,” I said. “I think they were probably his sponsees.”
