A Ticket to the Boneyard (Matthew Scudder #8)

I got there a few minutes late. The speaker had gotten as far as her twelfth birthday, by which time she'd been drinking for two years and had just started smoking marijuana. The story went on to include all the popular chemical mood-changers, not excepting IV heroin and cocaine, along with shoplifting, street prostitution, and the black-market sale of her infant son. It took a while to tell but it hadn't taken all that long to live; she was only nineteen now.

The meeting lasted an hour and I stayed until the end. My attention faded after the speaker finished up, and I didn't contribute anything to the discussion, which was ostensibly on the topic of anger. I tuned in now and then when some speaker's anger was voluble enough to break in on my reverie, but for the most part I just let my mind drift and took emotional sanctuary in the meeting. It was a nasty world outside and I'd been seeking out the nastiest part of it for the past few hours, but in here I was just another alcoholic trying to stay sober, same as everyone else, and that made it a very safe place to be.

Then we all stood and said the prayer, and then I went back out into the goddamned streets.

I slept for around five hours Monday morning and woke up hung over, which didn't seem fair. I'd slopped down quarts of bad coffee and watered Coke and breathed in acres of secondhand smoke, so I don't suppose it was out of the ordinary that I wasn't ready to greet the day like Little Mary Sunshine, but I liked to think I'd given up mornings like this along with the booze. Instead my head ached and my mouth and throat were dry and every minute took three or four minutes to pass.

I swallowed some aspirin, showered and shaved, and went downstairs and around the corner for orange juice and coffee. When the aspirin and coffee kicked in I walked a few blocks and bought a paper. I carried it back to the Flame and ordered solid food. By the time it came all the physical symptoms of the hangover were gone. I still felt a profound weariness of the spirit, but I would just have to learn to live with that.

The paper didn't do a lot to elevate my outlook. The front-page story was a massacre in Jamaica Heights, an entire family of Venezuelans shot and stabbed, four adults and six children dead and the house torched, with the fire spreading to a pair of neighboring dwellings. Various evidence seemed to indicate that the deaths were drug-related, which meant, I suppose, that the general public could feel free to shrug it off and the cops wouldn't have to bust their humps trying to solve it.

The news was no more encouraging in the sports pages, with both of the New York teams losing, the Jets by a lot, the Giants dropping a squeaker to the Eagles. The only good thing about the sports news was that it was trivial; nobody died, and when all was said and done, who really gave a damn who won or lost?

Not I, but then I didn't seem to give a damn about very much. I flipped back to the news pages and read about another drug-related homicide, this one in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn, where someone had used a sawed-off shotgun on a twenty-four-year-old black male with a long record of drug busts. That didn't elate me either, but I have to admit it disheartened me a little less than the loss to Philadelphia, which hadn't torn me up all that much in the first place.

There was a honey of a story on page 7.

A twenty-two-year-old man named Michael Fitzroy had attended mass at St. Malachy's with his girlfriend. She was an actress with a couple of commercials to her credit, and she had an apartment in Manhattan Plaza, the subsidized housing for actors at Forty-second and Ninth. They were on their way to her place, walking hand in hand down Forty-ninth Street, at about the same time that a woman named Antoinette Cleary decided she'd had enough of life as we know it.

She acted on this decision by opening her window and throwing herself out of it. Her apartment, as luck would have it, was twenty-two stories up, and she picked up speed on the way down according to that formula they teach you in high school physics class, the one nobody remembers. In any event, she was going fast enough at the moment of impact to kill herself, and to do the same for Michael Fitzroy, who got to her predestined spot on the pavement just a second before she did. His girlfriend, one Andrea Dautsch, was uninjured, but the story said she became hysterical. It seemed to me she had every right.

I flipped through the rest of the paper. The mayor of Baltimore had recently proposed the legalization of drugs, and I read what Bill Reel had to say on the subject. I read the comics without cracking a smile. Then something made me turn back to page 7, and I read once more about the last moments of Michael Fitzroy.

I don't know why the story moved me as much as it did. The fact that it happened so close to home may have had something to do with it. The Cleary woman had lived at 301 West Forty-ninth, a building I'd walked past hundreds of times. I'd passed it yesterday morning on my way to scout out the Times Square hotels. If I'd slept a little longer I might have been there when it happened.

I thought of Marcus Aurelius, and how everything happened the way it was supposed to. I tried to figure out how this had been true for Michael Fitzroy, as he trudged the road of happy destiny to his girlfriend's apartment. The News reported that the woman who fell on him was thirty-eight years old. It also provided the information that she had taken off all her clothes prior to jumping.

They say God's will is unfathomable, and it certainly looked that way to me. Some celestial force had evidently decided that twenty-two was as old as Michael Fitzroy was supposed to get, and that the highest good of all concerned would be best served by having him struck down in his prime by a rapidly descending, naked lady.

Life, I'd heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don't do much of either.

Early that afternoon I called Tom Havlicek in Massillon and caught him at his desk. "Say, I was meaning to call you," he said. "How's Fun City?"

It had been a while since I'd heard it called that. "About the same," I said.

"How about those Bengals?"

I hadn't even noticed whether they'd won or lost. "Really something," I said.

"You bet. How's it going at your end?"

"He's in New York. I keep cutting his trail, but it's a big city. He threatened a woman yesterday, an old friend of Connie Sturdevant's."

"Nice."

"Yeah, he's a sweetheart. I was wondering if you heard anything from Cleveland."

"You mean from the lab work." He cleared his throat. "We got a blood type on the semen."

"That's great."

"I don't know how great it is, Matt. It's A-positive, and that's the same type as the husband. If it's your guy who left the tracks, well, that wouldn't be too much of a coincidence. That's the most common blood type. In fact all three kids were A-positive, which means we couldn't tell whose blood Sturdevant had on him when he died, if some of it was theirs or if it was all his from the shotgun wound."

"Can't they do a DNA profile on the semen?"

"They maybe could have," he said, "if they got the job right away instead of waiting over a week for it. Way it stands, all you can prove is that your suspect didn't leave sperm in the woman. If he's something other than A-positive, he's off the hook."

"For sodomy. Not necessarily for homicide."

"Well, I guess. Anyway, that's all the lab evidence does. It might get him off the hook, depending on his blood type, but it sure don't get him on it."

"I see," I said. "Well, that's disappointing, but I'll find out what Motley's blood type is. His prison records ought to have it. Oh, by the way, I sent you something Express Mail this morning, you ought to get it tomorrow. It's an artist's sketch of Motley along with an alias he used in New York a few months ago. Something for you to use when you run a check on hotels and airports."

There was a silence. Then he said, "Well, Matt, I don't know that we'll be doing that."

"Oh?"

"The way it shapes up from here, we don't have any grounds to reopen the case. Even if the semen wasn't the husband's, what does that prove? Maybe she's having an affair, maybe she's got a boyfriend waits tables at a Greek restaurant, maybe her husband found out about it and that's what set him off. Point is, we haven't got a reason in the world to invest manpower in a case that still looks open-and-shut."

We batted it around some. If he could just get a warrant issued, I said, the New York cops could pull Motley off the street before he killed somebody else. He'd love to oblige, he told me, but his chief would never go for it, and even if he did a judge might not agree that they had grounds for a warrant.

"You say he threatened somebody," he said. "Can't you get her to sign a complaint?"

"It's possible. He didn't speak to her directly. He left a message on her answering machine."

"So much the better. You got evidence. Unless she went and erased it."

"No, I kept the tape. But I don't know what it's evidence of. It's a threat, but the language is veiled. And you'd be hard put to prove it's his voice. He whispered."

"So it would sound spookier? Or to keep her from recognizing his voice?"

"Not that. He wanted her to know who it was. I think he was being careful about voiceprints. Damn it, he was careless and stupid twelve years ago. Prison turned him crafty."

"It'll do that," he said. "It may not rehabilitate them, but it sure will make better criminals out of them."

Around three it started raining. I bought a five-dollar umbrella on the street and it blew inside out before I got back to the hotel. I left it in a trash basket and took shelter under a canopy until the storm leveled off some, then walked the remaining few blocks home. I got out of my wet clothes and made a few phone calls, then stretched out and took a nap.

It was eight o'clock when I opened my eyes, and just past eight-thirty when I entered the basement meeting room at St. Paul's. The speaker had just been introduced. I got a cup of coffee and found a seat and listened to a good old-fashioned low-bottom drinking story. Jobs lost, relationships ruined, dozens of trips to detox, panhandling in a bottle gang, innumerable exposures to AA. Then one day something clicked, and now the son of a bitch was standing there in a suit and tie with his face shaved and his hair combed, looking nothing like the story he was telling.

The discussion was round-robin at that particular meeting, and they started in the back of the room, so it got to be my turn early on. I was going to pass, but he'd talked a lot about hangovers, and how if all sobriety meant was a permanent respite from hangovers, it was worth it.

I said, "My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic, and my hangovers used to be bad, too. I figured I was done with them in sobriety, so I felt a little resentful when I woke up with one this morning. It didn't seem fair, and I started off the day with a pretty good resentment. Then I reminded myself that I used to feel that way every morning of my life, and that I took it for granted, I didn't even object to it very strongly. My God, a normal person who woke up feeling like that would have gone to a hospital, and I would just pull up my socks and go work."

A few other people spoke, and then it was the turn of a woman named Carole. "I never woke up with a hangover since I've been sober," she said, "but I identify with what Matt said in another sense. Because I like to believe that everything works out for us once we stop drinking, that bad things don't happen to us anymore. And that's not true. The miracle of sobriety isn't that our lives get better, but that we stay sober even when they get bad. But it still tears me up when bad things happen. When Cody got AIDS I couldn't believe how unfair it was. Sober people aren't supposed to get AIDS! But the thing is they do, and when they do they die, just like everybody else. And sober people don't commit suicide. My God, all the times I tried to kill myself when I was drinking, and I don't do that anymore, and I thought nobody did, not sober. And then today I learned how Toni committed suicide, and I thought, that's not supposed to happen. But anything can happen, and I still can't pick up a drink."