Then you wipe your prints from the gun, press it into his hand, and let it drop to the carpet. You arrange the hotel letterhead and the pen on the desk, pick up the phone, and announce your impending death. Back in your own room, you make another call to report a gunshot.
Easy enough.
A paraffin test would very likely suggest that the dead man had not fired a gun recently, but how much lab work would the police allot to an open-and-shut suicide? The officer I talked to couldn't find any record of a test, but said that didn't prove anything. After all, he said, it all happened eighteen years ago, so it was a wonder that he'd been able to lay his hands on the file.
I could have called his widow.
I took the trouble to trace her, which wasn't difficult, given that she hadn't been trying to disappear. She had remarried, divorced, and been married a third time, and now she was living in Niles, Michigan, and I suppose I could have called her and asked her if her first husband, Ned Bayliss, had been despondent before his fateful trip to Atlanta. Was he drinking a lot, ma'am? Did he have any kind of a drug history?
I decided to let her be.
I'd called Atlanta from my room in the Northwestern, and when I hung up the phone for the day something kept me right there in the little room. I pulled a chair over to the window and looked out at the city.
I don't know how long I sat there. I started off thinking about the case I was working on, the club of thirty-one. I thought how their ranks had thinned over the past three decades, and before I knew it I was thinking of my own life over the same span of years, and the awful toll those years had taken. I thought of the people I'd lost, some to death, some because our lives had slipped off in different directions. My ex-wife, Anita, long since remarried. The last time I'd spoken to her was to offer condolences for her mother's death. The last time I'd seen her- I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her.
My sons, Michael and Andrew, both of them grown, both of them strangers to me. Michael was living in northern California, a sales rep for a company that supplied components to manufacturers of computers. In the four years since he graduated from college I'd spoken to him ten times at the outside. Two years ago he got married to a girl named June, and he'd sent me their wedding picture. She is Chinese, very short and slender, her expression in the photograph utterly serious. Mike started putting on weight in college, and now he looks like a bluff, hearty salesman, fat and jolly, posed incongruously next to this inscrutable daughter of the Orient.
"We'll have to get together," he says when we speak on the phone. "Next time I get to New York I'll let you know. We'll have dinner, maybe catch a Knicks game."
"Maybe I could get out to the Coast," I suggested the last time I talked to him. There was just the slightest pause, and then he was quick to assure me that would be great, really great, but right now wasn't a good time. A very busy time at work these days, and he was traveling a lot, and-
He and June live in a condominium near San Jose. I have spoken to her on the phone, this daughter-in-law whom I have never met. Soon I suppose they'll start a family, and then I'll have grandchildren I've never met.
And Andy? The last time I heard from him he was in Seattle, and talking about heading on up to Vancouver. It sounded as though he was calling from a bar, and his voice was thickened with drink. He doesn't call often, and when he does it's always from someplace new, and he always sounds as though he's been drinking. "I'm having fun," he told me. "One of these days I guess I'll settle down, but in the meantime I'm gathering no moss."
Fifty-five years old, and what moss had I gathered? What had I done with those years? And what had they done to me?
And how many did I have left? And, when they'd slipped away like the rest, what would I have to show for them? What did anybody ever have to show for the years that were gone?
There's a liquor store right across the street. From where I sat I could see the customers enter and leave. As I watched them, it came to me that I could look up the store's number in the phone book and have them send up a bottle.
That was as far as I allowed the thought to go. Sometimes I'll let myself consider what type of liquor I'd order, and what brand. This time I shook the thought off early on and breathed deeply several times, willing myself to let it go.
Then I reached for the phone and dialed a number I didn't have to look up.
It rang twice, three times. I had my finger poised to break the connection, not wanting to talk to a machine, but then she picked up.
"This is Matt," I said.
She said, "That's funny. I was just this minute thinking of you."
"And I of you. Would you like company?"
"Would I?" She took a moment to consider the question. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I would."
8
When I first moved to my hotel, Jimmy Armstrong had a saloon right around the corner on Ninth Avenue, and that was where I spent most of my waking hours. After I got sober Jimmy lost his lease and reopened a long block west, at the corner of Tenth and Fifty-seventh. In AA they tell you to avoid the people and places and things that might make you want to drink, and for several years I stayed away from Jimmy's joint. These days I get there now and then. Elaine likes the place on Sunday afternoons, when they have chamber music, and it's always been a good choice for a late supper.
I walked west on Fifty-seventh, but instead of paying a call on Jimmy I went to the high-rise apartment building diagonally across the street. The doorman had been told I was coming; when I gave him my name he said I was expected and pointed to the elevator. I rode up to the twenty-eighth floor and her door opened even as I knocked on it.
"I really was," she said. "Thinking of you just before you called. You look tired. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"It's probably the humidity. This is going to be some summer if it's like this in June. I just put the air on. This place cools off pretty quickly."
"How are you, Lisa?"
She turned aside. "I'm all right," she said. "Do you want some coffee? Or would you rather have something cold? There's Pepsi, there's iced tea…"
"No, thanks."
She spun around to face me. She said, "I'm glad you're here, but I don't think I want to do anything. Is that all right?"
"Of course."
"We could sit and talk."
"Whatever you say."
She walked to the window. Her apartment faces west, and there are no tall buildings to block her view. I moved up behind her and watched a couple of sailboats on the Hudson.
She was wearing perfume, the musky scent she always wore.
She said, "Oh, who am I kidding?"
She turned to face me once again. I circled her waist and linked my hands, and she leaned back and looked up at me. Her forehead was shining and there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. "Oh!" she said, as if something had startled her, and I drew her close and kissed her, and at first she trembled in my arms and then she threw her own arms around me and we clung together. I felt her body against me, I felt her breasts, I felt the heat of her loins.
I kissed her mouth. I kissed her throat and breathed in her scent.
"Oh!" she cried.
We went to the bedroom and got our clothes off, interrupting the process to kiss, to clutch each other. We fell together onto the bed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh, oh…"
Her name was Lisa Holtzmann, and it would not be inaccurate to describe her as young enough to be my daughter, although she had in fact been born almost ten years before my elder son. When I first met her she'd been married to a lawyer named Glenn Holtzmann, and pregnant with his child. She lost the baby early in the third trimester, and not long after that she'd lost her husband; he'd been shot to death while using a pay phone just a couple of blocks away on Eleventh Avenue.