I didn't get there.
Walking wasn't as much of an effort as it had been the day before.
I was still stiff, and my body was holding on to a considerable amount of pain, but my muscles weren't as tight and I didn't tire as quickly.
And it was warmer today, with less of a breeze blowing and not so much dampness in the air. Good football weather, I suppose you'd call it.
A little too warm for the raccoon coat, but brisk enough to make you appreciate the flask on your hip, or the flat pint of rye in your overcoat pocket.
I ambled over to Eighth Avenue and turned south instead of north.
I walked downtown as far as Toni Cleary's building and stood looking at her landing site, then up at the window he'd thrown her out of. A voice in my head kept telling me it was my fault she was dead.
It seemed to me the voice was right.
I circled the block and wound up right back where I'd started, which seemed to be my current role in life. I gazed up at Toni's window again and wondered if she'd had a clue what was happening to her, or why. Maybe he'd told her that she was being punished for being one of my women. If so, he'd very likely referred to me by my last name. That was what he called me.
Had she even known my last name? I hadn't known hers. She'd been killed because of her association with me, and she might well have died without knowing who her killer was talking about.
Not that it mattered. She'd have been in the twin grip of pain and terror, and an understanding of her killer's motivations would have been fairly far down on her list of emotional priorities.
And Elizabeth Scudder? Had she died wondering about her long-lost cousin Matthew? I might have gone over and stared at her building if it hadn't been a mile and a half to the south of me and clear across town. Her building couldn't have told me anything, but Toni's wasn't giving me much, either.
I looked at my watch and saw that I'd missed the meeting. It was still going on but it would be all but over by the time I got there. That was fine, I decided, because I didn't really want to go anyway.
I bought a hot dog from one street vendor and a knish from another and ate about half of each. I got a cardboard container of coffee from a deli and stood on the corner with it, blowing on it between sips, finishing most of it before I got impatient and spilled the rest in the gutter. I held on to the cup until I got to a trash basket. They're sometimes hard to find. Suburbanites steal them, and they wind up in backyards in Westchester. They make efficient and durable trash burners, enabling their new owners to contribute what they can to air pollution in their local communities.
But I was public-spirited, your ideal solid citizen. I wouldn't litter, or pollute the air, or do anything to lower the quality of life for my fellow New Yorkers. I'd just go through life a day at a time while the bodies piled up around me.
Great.
I never set out to look for a liquor store. But here I was, standing in front of one. They had their Thanksgiving window display installed, with cardboard figures of a Pilgrim and a turkey, and a lot of autumn leaves and Indian corn placed appropriately.
And a few decanters, seasonal and otherwise. And a lot of bottles.
I stood there looking at the bottles.
This had happened before. I'd be walking along with nothing much in mind, certainly not thinking about drinking, and I'd come out of some sort of reverie and find myself looking at the bottles in a liquor-store window, admiring their shapes, nodding at various wines and deciding what foods they'd go with. It was what I'd heard people call a drink signal, a message from my unconscious that something was troubling me, that I was not at that particular moment quite as comfortable with my sobriety as I might think.
A drink signal wasn't necessarily cause for alarm. You didn't have to rush to a meeting or call your sponsor or read a chapter of the Big Book, although it might not hurt. It was mostly just something to pay attention to, a blinking yellow light on sobriety's happy highway.
Go home, I told myself.
I opened the door and went in.
No alarms went off, no sirens sounded. The balding clerk who glanced my way looked me over as he might have looked at any prospective customer, his chief concern being that I wasn't about to show him a gun and demand that he empty the till. Nothing in his eyes suggested any suspicion on his part that I had no business in his store.
I found the bourbon section and looked at the bottles. Jim Beam, J.
W. Dant, Old Taylor, Old Forester, Old Fitzgerald, Maker's Mark, Wild Turkey.
Each name rang a bell. I can walk past saloons all over town and remember what I drank there. I may be less clear on what brought me there or whom I drank with, but I'll recall what was in my glass, and what bottle it came from.
Antique Age. Old Grand Dad. Old Crow. Early Times.
I liked the names, and especially the last. Early Times. It sounded like a toast. "Well, here's to crime."
"Absent friends." "Early Times."
Early Times indeed. They got better the more of a distance you looked back at them from. But what didn't?
"Help you?"
"Early Times," I said.
"A fifth?"
"A pint'll be enough," I said.
He slipped the bottle into a brown paper bag, twisted the top, handed it over the counter to me. I dropped it into a pocket of my topcoat and dug a bill out of my wallet. He rang the sale, counted out change.
One drink's too many, they say, and a thousand's not enough. But a pint would do. For starters, anyway.
There's a liquor store right across the street from my hotel, and I couldn't guess how many times I went
in and out of it during the drinking years. This store, though, was a few blocks away on Eighth Avenue, and the walk back to the Northwestern seemed endless. I felt as though people were staring at me on the street. Maybe they were. Maybe the expression on my face was the sort to draw stares.
I went straight up to my room and bolted the door once I was inside it. I took the pint of bourbon from my coat pocket and laid it down on the top of my dresser. I hung my coat in the closet, draped my suit jacket over the back of a chair. I went over to the dresser and picked up the bottle and felt its familiar shape through the brown paper wrapping, and weighed it in my hands. I put it back down, still unwrapped, and went over to look out the window. Downstairs, across Fifty-seventh Street, a man in a topcoat like mine was entering the liquor store. Maybe he'd come out with a pint of Early Times and take it back to his room, and look out his window.
I didn't have to unwrap the damn thing. I could open the window and pitch it out. Maybe I could take aim, and try to drop it on someone who looked as though he just got out of church.
Jesus.
I put the TV on, looked at it without seeing it, turned it off. I walked over to the dresser and took the bottle out of the paper bag. I put it back on the dresser but I stood it upright this time, then crumpled the paper bag and dropped it in the wastebasket. I returned to my chair and sat down again. From where I was sitting I couldn't see the bottle on top of the dresser.
Back when I was first getting sober I'd made Jan a promise.
"Promise me you won't take that first drink without calling me," she said, and I'd promised.
Funny the things you think of.
Well, I couldn't call her now. She was out of town, and I'd ordered her not to tell anyone where she'd gone. Not even me.
Unless she hadn't left. I'd had a call from her the day before, but what did that prove? The connection, now that I thought about it, had been crystal clear. She might have been in the next room from the sound of it.
Failing that, she could have been on Lispenard Street.
Would she do that? Convinced that the danger was largely in my mind, would she have stayed in her loft and lied to me about it?
No, I decided, she wouldn't do that. Still, there was no reason I could think of not to call her.
I dialed, got her machine. Was there anyone left in the world who didn't have one of those damned things? I listened to the same message she'd had on there for years, and when it ended I said, "Jan, it's Matt.