“Reassuring,” Nudger said, standing up from the uncomfortable chair. The smoke was thicker nearer the ceiling; he stifled a cough. “Thanks for your help, Jack.” He moved toward the door and fresh air.
Hammersmith’s voice stopped him. “Keep me tapped in on this one, Nudge. If there’s a chance to collar whoever killed either of those alkies, I want to know.”
“You’ll be the first I’ll tell,” Nudger promised.
Hammersmith smiled and exhaled a greenish thundercloud. “You feel okay? You look a little sickly.”
“Oh, that’s probably because my lungs are collapsing,” Nudger said, opening the door and pointing his nose toward the sweet, breathable air of the booking area.
“So who invited you here?” Hammersmith said behind him.
Nudger didn’t recall inviting anyone to drop by at four A.M. at his apartment on Sutton, but there seemed to be someone in the hall, pounding on his door with a sledgehammer. He sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes, trying to convince himself this was a dream and he wouldn’t have to cope and could go back to sleep.
The pounding continued. Even the walls were shaking.
“Nudge?...”
Nudger recognized the voice filtering in through the locked door. Danny.
“Hey, Nudge!”
Nudger’s stomach came belatedly awake and gave him a swift mulelike kick that helped to propel him out of bed. Soon the neighbors would be on the phone, in the hall, shouting, threatening to call the landlord or the police, meaning it all. The muscle-bound drug-head down the hall in 4-C might get violent; he’d almost killed a meter reader last month.
“Damn!” Nudger stubbed his toe on the nightstand. He managed to switch on the reading lamp, which provided enough light for him to find his way out of the bedroom and into the living room. Switching on another lamp, he made it to the door and unlocked it.
It was like opening the door to a distillery. Danny was slouched against the wall in the hall. He staggered back with a dumb grin on his long face, almost losing his balance, and stared at Nudger. “You ain’t got nothin’ on, Nudge. You’re naked.”
Which was true, Nudger suddenly realized, coming one hundred percent awake just in time to see the door across the hall open and old Mrs. Hobson peer out above her gold-rimmed spectacles. The Hobson door quickly closed, then opened again a fraction of an inch.
“Shut up down there or let me join the party!” a deep voice yelled from the landing upstairs.
Nudger quickly grabbed Danny and yanked him inside, then shut and relocked the door. He went back into the bedroom and put on a robe and the leather slippers his true love Claudia Bettencourt had given him on an expensive whim, then he returned to the living room. Danny was now slumped in Nudger’s favorite armchair, his head lolling. He had vomited on the chair and on the carpet. He looked as pale and sick as Nudger had ever seen him.
“What happened, Danny?” But Nudger knew what had happened.
“Smallish drink,” Danny said, his voice slurred.
“How many?” Nudger asked.
“Thousands.”
“Stay there,” Nudger said. He went into the kitchen and got Mr. Coffee going. When he came back, he saw that Danny had passed out.
“The hell with this,” Nudger said. He would let Danny sleep. He got some wet towels, cleaned up Danny, cleaned the armchair and the carpet. Then he wrestled the limp Danny until he’d removed his shirt and shoes and dumped him onto the sofa.
“Doughnuts,” Danny said, snuggling in.
“What?”
“Remember when you caught that old guy in my shop and chased him, thought he had a bag of the day’s receipts. But all he had was doughnuts. He was hungry, was all. Two dozen glazed doughnuts. His name was Masterson, gray guy about ninety years old. Bum with a hole in his shoe with newspaper sticking out of it. Hell, we let him have the doughnuts. What did I care; I was drunk at the time. That’s when I was drinkin’ heavy, Nudge.”
Nudger thought back. “That’s been over seven years ago, Danny.”
“Eight at least,” Danny said, his voice still thick.
“How come you remembered that?” Nudger asked.
Danny ignored him. “He’d have got sick if he’d eaten all them doughnuts,” he said. He would never have said that if he’d been sober. Fiercely proud of his weighty cuisine, was Danny. Soft snoring began to drift up from the sofa.
Nudger poured himself a cup of coffee and let Danny sleep.
He sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and thinking, until almost dawn. Then he went back to bed and tried to sleep for a while, but that didn’t work. At eight in the morning, he felt almost as bad as Danny looked.
Danny probably felt even worse than he looked. He sat on the edge of the sofa, holding his head with both hands as if it were fragile crystal. “Fell off the wagon,” he said sheepishly, when he’d managed to free his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
“Why?” Nudger asked.
Danny shrugged, wincing. “Got to thinking about Akron and Perry. It ain’t right, how they stayed dry so long and then wound up booze-soaked and dead. It ain’t fair.”
“Life isn’t renowned for its evenhandedness.”
“Don’t I know it, Nudge.” Danny brought off a smile. Brave man, risking having his cheeks shatter. “You know it, too, what with people pounding on your door in the middle of the night.”
“What made you think of the old bum with the doughnuts?” Nudger asked.
Danny looked bewildered. “Huh? What old bum?”
“Take a shower,” Nudger said. “I’ll get us some breakfast.”
“Nothing to eat for me, Nudge,” Danny said, making it to his feet. “Just black coffee and a gallon of orange juice.” He stumbled bleary-eyed into the bathroom. Nudger listened to the tap water run as Danny drank glass after glass of water from the washbasin faucet before climbing into the shower.
Over his third glass of orange juice, Danny said, “I ain’t been that far gone in over six years, Nudge, except for when Uncle Benj died and didn’t leave me any money. He got to be a mean old bastard, a dry drunk who wouldn’t drink or admit his problem. They’re the worst kind of alcoholic.”
Maybe, Nudger thought, but Uncle Benj’s liver might have disagreed.
After breakfast, Danny looked, and seemed to feel, reasonably human. While Nudger listened, he phoned someone named Ernie, an AA buddy and confidant who promised to meet him that morning. Then, assuring Nudger that he was all right and would stay sober, he left to open the doughnut shop.
Nudger picked up the phone and made a ten o’clock appointment with Dr. Abe Addleman, a reformed alcoholic and the head physician at the Pickering Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, who knew more about alcoholism firsthand and textbook than anyone else in the city.
Mays was still in town, registered under his own name at the Mayfair, a classy old downtown hotel with acres of carpeting and wood paneling. Hammersmith’s check of major hotels had located him within an hour. The age of the computer. Nudger elevatored to the hotel’s fifth floor, chomping antacid tablets as he rose. In the hall, he adjusted his clothing and buttoned his sport coat.
He knocked on Mays’s door, heard movement inside the room, and within a few seconds the door opened. Jack Mays, older and heavier than the grinning, towheaded sailor Danny had pointed out in the Kelso crew photograph, stood staring blankly at Nudger.
“I was expecting Room Service.”
“Sorry,” Nudger said. “I’m a friend of a friend of Artie Akron and Mack Perry. Can I come in so we can talk?”
“Talk about what?”
“Old times. I’ll talk, and you interrupt me if I’m wrong about something. Though I suspect I’ve got everything pretty well figured out.”