I got there early and found out they didn't have coffee- some groups do, some don't. I went to the bodega across the street and ran into two others on the same mission, one of whom I recognized from a lunchtime meeting I go to sometimes at the West Side Y. We trooped back across the street with our coffee and took seats around a couple of refectory tables, and by half-past five a handful of others had straggled in and the meeting got under way.
There were just a dozen of us- it was a new group, and if I'd had my meeting book with me I'd never have found it, because it wasn't listed yet. A woman named Margaret, sober a little over a year, told her story and took most of the hour getting through it. She was about my age, the daughter and granddaughter of alcoholics, and she'd been careful to keep alcohol at bay for years, limiting herself to a single cocktail or glass of wine at social occasions. Then her husband died of an esophageal hemorrhage- she'd married an alcoholic, of course- and in her midforties she turned to drink, and it was as if it had been waiting for her all her life. It embraced her and wouldn't let go, and the progression of her alcoholism was quick and sudden and nasty. In no time at all she'd lost everything but her rent-controlled apartment and the Social Security check that enabled her to pay the rent.
"I was rooting around in garbage cans," she said. "I was waking up in strange places, and not always alone. And I was a well brought-up Irish Catholic girl who never slept with anybody but my husband. I remember coming out of a blackout one time, and I won't tell you what I was doing or who I was doing it to, but all I could think was, 'Oh, Peggy, the nuns would not be proud of you now!' "
After she was done we passed the basket and went around the room. When it was my turn I found myself talking about how I'd gone looking for a security guard and found he'd been dismissed for drinking. "I had a strong sense of identification," I said. "My own drinking picked up after I left the police force. If I'd kept on drinking any longer than I did I'd have gone after jobs like this man's, and I'd have drunk my way out of them, too. I don't really know anything about him or what his life's like, but thinking about him has given me an idea of what my own life could have been like if I hadn't found this program. I'm just glad to be here, glad to be sober."
I went out for coffee after the meeting with a couple of the others and we continued informally the sharing we'd done at the meeting. I tried Shorter's number when we arrived at the coffee shop and tried it again fifteen minutes later. I tried it a third time on my way out, which must have been a few minutes after seven. When my quarter came back once again I used it to call Elaine.
There were no messages for me, she said, and the mail had held nothing of interest. I told her what I was up to, and that I might be out most of the evening. "If he had an answering machine," I said, "I'd leave a message on it and call him again in a day or two if I didn't hear from him. But he doesn't, and I'm in the neighborhood, and it's not a neighborhood I get to often."
"You don't have to explain it to me."
"I'm explaining it to myself. And it's not as though he's likely to have any answers. Any question I've got, the Forest Hills cops already asked. So how could he have anything for me?"
"Maybe you've got something for him."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing really. Well, there's a lecture and slide show at the French church. I might go to that, and if Monica wants to go with me maybe we'll have a Girls' Night Out afterward. You'll be having a late night, won't you?"
"I might."
"Because you were going to drop in on Mick, weren't you? Just so you're home in time for Marilyn's Chamber tomorrow night."
"You still want to go?"
"After the time we had last night?" I could picture the expression on her face. "Now more than ever. You're pretty hot stuff, Mr. Scudder, sir."
"Now cut that out."
" 'Now cut that out.' You know who you sound like? Jack Benny."
"I was trying to sound like Jack Benny."
"Well, in that case, it wasn't a very good imitation."
"You just said-"
"I know what I said. I love you, you old bear. What have you got to say about that?"
North of Eighty-sixth Street, the landscape on the Upper East Side is one of a neighborhood in transition, neither Yorkville nor East Harlem but reminiscent of both. Luxury condos rise across the street from low-income public-housing projects, the walls of both impartially scarred by unreadable graffiti. The upwardly mobile stride along with briefcases and grocery bags from D'Agostino's; others, no less mobile but headed in the opposite direction, shake paper cups of change and drink forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor, or suck on crack pipes that glow like fireflies.
Shorter's building turned out to be a six-story brick tenement on Ninety-fourth between Second and Third. In the vestibule I counted over fifty doorbells, each with a slot beside it for the tenant's name. More than half the slots were empty, and none had Shorter's name on it.
Originally the building would have had four rooms to a floor, but over the years they'd been partitioned and the apartment house turned into a rooming house. I'd been in and out of hundreds of such places over the years, and if each was different they were still somehow all the same. The cooking smells in the halls and stairwells changed with the ethnic origin of the inhabitants, but the other smells were a constant throughout the city and through the years. The reek of urine, the odor of mice, the unventilated stench of neglect. Now and then a room in one of those rabbit warrens would turn out to be bright and airy, clean and trim, but the buildings themselves were always dark and sorry and sordid.
Something like that would have been my next stop after the hotel. If I hadn't stopped drinking, the day would have come when I couldn't make the rent or talk them into carrying me until I caught a break. Or I'd have reached a point where, money or no, I no longer had the self-esteem to walk past the desk each day, and would have looked for something more in keeping with my station.
I asked a man on his way out of the building if he knew a James Shorter. He didn't even slow down, just shook his head no and kept walking. I asked the same question of a little gray-haired woman who was on her way into the building, walking with a cane and carrying her groceries in one of those mesh bags. She said she didn't know anyone in the building but that they all seemed to be very nice people. Her breath smelled of mint and booze- peppermint schnapps, I suppose, or a beaker of gin with a breath mint for a chaser.
I walked to Second Avenue and tried Shorter's number from a pay phone on the corner. No answer. It struck me that if he wasn't working he might very well be somewhere having a drink, and the neighborhood afforded plenty of opportunities. There were half a dozen taverns on Second within two blocks of Ninety-fourth Street. I worked my way through them, asking bartenders for James Shorter. Was he in? Had he been in earlier? Nobody knew him, at least not by name, but the bearded fellow behind the stick at O'Bannion's said he'd heard precious few last names over the years, and not that many first names, either. "He could be one of these lads, for all I know," he said.
I considered calling out his name. "James Shorter? Is James Shorter here?" But then I'd have had to repeat the process in the saloons I'd already covered, and I didn't feel like it. I'd had enough of their boozy ambience.
And how about the gin joints on First Avenue? Shouldn't I go ask for the elusive Mr. Shorter there?
I might have, but first I tried his number again, and this time he answered.
I told him my name, said I'd got his from the police and his address and phone from Mr. Banszak at Queensboro-Corona. "I know you've been over this plenty of times," I said, "but I'd appreciate a few minutes of your time. I'm in your neighborhood right now, as it happens, so if I could come by and see you-"
"Oh, let's meet somewhere," he suggested. "There's a nice place around the corner on First Avenue, the Blue Canoe. It's a good place to talk. Say ten minutes?"