Eight Million Ways to Die (Matthew Scudder #5)

I wondered if he was praying. I wondered what prayer was like, and what people got out of it. Sometimes, in one church or another, it occurs to me to say a prayer, but I wouldn't know how to go about it.

If there'd been candles to light I would have lit one, but the church was Episcopalian and there weren't.

I went to the meeting that night at St. Paul's but couldn't keep my mind on the qualification. I kept drifting off. During the discussion the kid from the noon meeting told how he'd reached his ninety days, and once again he got a round of applause. The speaker said, "You know what comes after your ninetieth day? Your ninety-first day."

I said, "My name is Matt. I'll pass."

I made it an early night. I fell asleep easily but kept waking up out of dreams. They withdrew from the edge of thought as I tried to catch hold of them.

I got up finally, went out for breakfast, bought a paper and brought it back to the room. There's a Sunday noon meeting within walking distance. I'd never been to it but I had seen it listed in the meeting book. By the time I thought of going, it was already half over. I stayed in my room and finished the paper.

Drinking used to fill up the hours. I used to be able to sit in Armstrong's for hours, drinking coffee with bourbon in it, not getting loaded, just sipping one cup after another while the hours went by. You try and do the same thing without the booze and it doesn't work. It just doesn't work.

Around three I thought of Kim. I reached for the phone to call her and had to stop myself. We'd gone to bed because that was the sort of gift she knew how to bestow and one I didn't know how to reject, but that didn't make us lovers. It didn't make us anything to one another, and whatever business we'd had with each other was finished.

I remembered her hair and Jan Keane's Medusa and thought of calling Jan. And what would the conversation be like?

I could tell her I was halfway through my seventh sober day. I hadn't had any contact with her since she started going to meetings herself. They'd told her to stay away from people, places and things associated with drink, and I was in that category as far as she was concerned. I wasn't drinking today and I could tell her that, but so what? It didn't mean she would want to see me. For that matter, it didn't mean I would want to see her.

We'd had a couple evenings when we had a good time drinking together. Maybe we could have the same kind of enjoyment sober. But maybe it would be like sitting in Armstrong's for five hours with no bourbon in the coffee.

I got as far as looking up her number but never made the call.

The speaker at St. Paul's told a really low-bottom story. He'd been a heroin addict for several years, kicked that, then drank his way down to the Bowery. He looked as though he'd seen hell and remembered what it looked like.

During the break, Jim cornered me by the coffee urn and asked me how it was going. I told him it was going okay. He asked how long I'd been sober now.

"Today's my seventh day," I said.

"Jesus, that's great," he said. "That's really great, Matt."

During the discussion I thought maybe I'd speak up when it was my turn. I didn't know that I'd say I was an alcoholic because I didn't know that I was, but I could say something about it being my seventh day, or just that I was glad to be there, or something. But when it got to me I said what I always say.

After the meeting Jim came up to me while I was carrying my folded chair to where they stack them. He said, "You know, a bunch of us generally stop over to the Cobb's Corner for coffee after the meeting. Just to hang out and shoot the breeze. Why don't you come along?"

"Gee, I'd like to," I said, "but I can't tonight."

"Some other night, then."

"Sure," I said. "Sounds good, Jim."

I could have gone. I didn't have anything else to do. Instead I went to Armstrong's and ate a hamburger and a piece of cheesecake and drank a cup of coffee. I could have had the identical meal at Cobb's Corner.

Well, I always like Armstrong's on a Sunday night. You get a light crowd then, just the regulars. After I was done with my meal I carried my coffee cup over to the bar and chatted for awhile with a CBS technician named Manny and a musician named Gordon. I didn't even feel like drinking.

I went home and went to bed. I got up in the morning with a sense of dread and wrote it off as the residue of an unremembered dream. I showered and shaved and it was still there. I got dressed, went downstairs, dropped a bag of dirty clothes at the laundry and left a suit and a pair of pants at the dry cleaners. I ate breakfast and read the Daily News. One of their columnists had interviewed the husband of the woman who'd caught the shotgun blast in Gravesend. They'd just moved into that house, it was their dream house, their chance for a decent life in a decent neighborhood. And then these two gangsters, running for their lives, had picked that particular house to run to. "It was as if the finger of God had pointed to Clair Ryzcek," the columnist wrote.

In the "Metro Briefs" section, I learned that two Bowery derelicts had fought over a shirt one of them had found in a trash can in the Astor Place BMT subway station. One had stabbed the other dead with an eight-inch folding knife. The dead man was fifty-two, his killer thirty-three. I wondered if the item would have made the paper if it hadn't taken place belowground. When they kill each other in Bowery flop-houses, it's not news.

I kept thumbing through the paper as if I expected to find something, and the vague feeling of foreboding persisted. I felt faintly hungover and I had to remind myself I'd had nothing to drink the night before. This was my eighth sober day.

I went to the bank, put some of my five-hundred-dollar fee in my account, changed the rest into tens and twenties. I went to St. Paul's to get rid of fifty bucks but there was a mass going on. I went to the Sixty-third Street Y instead and listened to the most boring qualification I'd heard yet. I think the speaker mentioned every drink he'd had from the age of eleven on. He droned on in a monotone for forty solid minutes.

I sat in the park afterward, bought a hot dog from a vendor, ate it. I got back to the hotel around three, took a nap, went out again around four-thirty. I picked up a Post and took it around the corner to Armstrong's. I must have looked at the headline when I bought the paper but somehow it didn't register. I sat down and ordered coffee and looked at the front page and there it was.

call girl slashed to ribbons, it said.

I knew the odds and I also knew that the odds didn't matter. I sat for a moment with my eyes closed and the paper clenched in my fists, trying to alter the story by sheer force of will. Color, the very blue of her northern eyes, flashed behind my closed eyelids. My chest was tight and I could feel that pulse of pain again at the back of my throat.

I turned the goddamned page and there it was on page three just the way I knew it would be. She was dead. The bastard had killed her.

Chapter 6

Kim Dakkinen had died in a room on the seventeenth floor of the Galaxy Downtowner, one of the new high-rise hotels on Sixth Avenue in the Fifties. The room had been rented to a Mr. Charles Owen Jones of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who had paid cash in advance for a one-night stay upon checking in at 9:15 p.m. Sunday, after having phoned ahead for a room half an hour earlier. Since a preliminary check revealed no one of Mr. Jones's name in Fort Wayne, and since the street address he'd entered on the registration card did not seem to exist, he was presumed to have given a false name.

Mr. Jones had made no calls from his room, nor had he billed any charges to his hotel account. After an indeterminable number of hours he had left, and he'd done so without bothering to drop off his key at the desk. Indeed, he'd hung the do not disturb sign on the door of his room, and the housekeeping staff had scrupulously honored it until shortly after the 11:00 a.m. checkout time Monday morning. At that time one of the maids put through a call to the room. When the phone went unanswered she knocked on the door; when that brought no response she opened it with her passkey.

She walked in on what the Post reporter called "a scene of indescribable horror." A nude woman lay on the carpet at the foot of the unmade bed. Bed and carpet were soaked with her blood. The woman had died of multiple wounds, having been stabbed and slashed innumerable times with what a deputy medical examiner guessed might have been a bayonet or machete. Her killer had hacked her face into "an unrecognizable mess," but a photograph retrieved by an enterprising reporter from Miss Dakkinen's "luxurious Murray Hill apartment" showed what he'd had to work with. Kim's blonde hair was quite different in the photograph, flowing down over her shoulders with one single braid wrapped around the crown like a tiara. She was clear-eyed and radiant in the photo, and looked like a grown-up Heidi.

Identification had been made on the basis of the woman's purse, found at the scene. A sum of cash in the purse had enabled police investigators to rule out money as a motive in the slaying.

No kidding.

I put down the paper. I noticed without much surprise that my hands were shaking. I was even shakier on the inside. I caught Evelyn's eye, and when she came over I asked her to bring me a double shot of bourbon.

She said, "Are you sure, Matt?"

"Why not?"

"Well, you haven't been drinking. Are you sure you want to start?"

I thought, What's it to you, kid? I took a breath and let it out and said, "Maybe you're right."

"How about some more coffee?"

"Sure."

I went back to the story. A preliminary examination fixed the time of death some time around midnight. I tried to think what I'd been doing when he killed her. I'd come to Armstrong's after the meeting, but what time had it been when I'd left? I made it a fairly early night, but even so it had probably been close to midnight by the time I packed it in. Of course the time of death was approximate, so I might have been already asleep when he started to chop her life away.

I sat there and I kept drinking coffee and I read the story over and over and over.

From Armstrong's I went to St. Paul's. I sat in a rear pew and tried to think. Images kept bouncing back and forth, flashes of my two meetings with Kim intercut with my conversation with Chance.

I put fifty futile dollars in the poor box. I lit a candle and stared at it as if I expected to see something dancing in its flame.

I went back and sat down again. I was still sitting there when a soft-spoken young priest came over and told me apologetically that they would be closing for the night. I nodded, got to my feet.

"You seem disturbed," he offered. "Could I help you in any way?"

"I don't think so."

"I've seen you come in here from time to time. Sometimes it helps to talk to someone."

Does it? I said, "I'm not even Catholic, Father."

"That's not a requirement. If there's something troubling you-"

"Just some hard news, Father. The unexpected death of a friend."

"That's always difficult."

I was afraid he'd hand me something about God's mysterious plan, but he seemed to be waiting for me to say more. I managed to get out of there and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, wondering where to go next.

It was around six-thirty. The meeting wasn't for another two hours. You could get there an hour early and sit around and have coffee and talk to people, but I never did. I had two hours to kill and I didn't know how.