"Leaving town?"
"Take another look at the clipping," he suggested. "He's announcing his retirement. There won't be any more killing because he's done. He's saying goodbye. Isn't that what a fellow might do on his way to catch a slow boat to China?"
I thought about it.
"Matter of fact," McGraw said, "why else announce his retirement? He's got enough news for one letter, claiming credit for Whitfield. He could save the rest for another time. But not if he's pulling up stakes and relocating in Dallas or Dublin or, I don't know, Dakar? If he had a plane to catch, that'd be a good reason to put all the news in one letter and send it off right away."
"And if it gets there before Whitfield takes the drink, then what?"
"Given that the son of a bitch is nuts," he said, "I'd be hard put to say just what he'd do, but I suppose he'd deal with it one way or the other. Either he'd come back and figure out some other way to get the job done or he'd decide fate had let Adrian off the hook. And maybe he'd write me one more letter about it and maybe he wouldn't." He reached to tap the newspaper clipping. "What I think," he said, "is there's no question in his mind that Whitfield's gonna go straight home and swallow the scotch. You read what he wrote, he's talking about a fait accompli. Far as he's concerned, it's a done deal. Whitfield's already dead. If there's a word or phrase in his letter that suggests for a moment that the outcome's still up in the air, I sure as hell missed it."
"No, you're right," I said. "He writes about it as though it already happened. But we're sure it didn't?"
"It's possible Whitfield was dead before this letter picked up its postmark. Barely possible. But the letter probably got dropped in a mailbox, and in order for it to get picked up and trucked to the Peck Slip post office and go through the machine that stamped it with a postmark-"
I scanned the clipping one more time. "What I asked you over the phone," I said, "was whether there was anything in the letter that absolutely ruled out the possibility of suicide."
"That's why I suggested a meeting. That's why we're sitting here. The letter doesn't rule out suicide, except for the fact that Will says he did it, and he's never lied to us in the past. But the postmark rules it out."
"Because it was mailed before the death happened."
"You got it. He might have decided to claim credit for Whitfield's suicide. But, good as he is, he couldn't read Whitfield's mind and know ahead of time that he was going to kill himself."
10
It took me awhile to get away from Marty McGraw. He looked around for the waitress, but she must have been on her break. He shrugged and walked over to the bar and came back with two bottles of Rolling Rock, announcing that he'd had enough whiskey for the time being. He drank from one of the bottles, then pointed at the other. "That's for you if you want it," he said. I told him I'd pass, and he said he'd figured as much.
"I've been there," he said.
"How's that?"
"Been there, done that. The rooms. The church basements. I went to a meeting every day for four months and didn't touch a drop all that time. It's a long fucking time to go without a drink, I'll tell you that much."
"I guess it is."
"I was having a bad time of it," he said, "and I thought it was the booze. So I cut out the booze and you know something? That made it worse."
"Sometimes it works that way."
"So I straightened out some things in my life," he said, "and then I picked up a drink, and guess what? Everything's fine."
"That's great," I said.
He narrowed his eyes. "Sanctimonious prick," he said. "You got no right to patronize me."
"You're absolutely right, Marty. My apologies."
"Fuck you and your apology. Fuck you and the apology you rode in on, or should that be the Appaloosa you rode in on? Sit down, for Christ's sake. Where the hell do you think you're going?"
"Catch some air."
"The air's not going anyplace, you don't have to be in a rush to catch it. Jesus, don't tell me I insulted you."
"I've got a busy day," I said. "That's all."
"Busy day my ass. I'm a little drunk and it makes you uncomfortable. Admit it."
"I admit it."
"Well," he said, and frowned, as if the admission was the last thing he'd expected from me. "That case I apologize. That all right?"
"Of course."
"You accept my apology?"
"You don't need to apologize," I said, "but yes, of course I accept it."
"So we're okay then, you and me."
"Absolutely."
"You know what I wish? I wish you'd drink a fucking beer."
"Not today, Marty."
" 'Not today.' Listen, I know the jargon, all right? 'Not today.' You just do it a day at a time, don't you?"
"Like everything else."
He frowned. "I don't mean to bait you. It's the booze talking, you know that."
"Yes."
"It's not me wants you to drink, it's the drink wants you to drink. You know what I'm saying?"
"Sure."
"What I found out, I learned it helps me more than it hurts me. It does more for me than it does to me. You know who else said that? Winston Churchill. A great man, wouldn't you say?"
"I'd say so, yes."
"Fucking Limey drunk. No friend to the Irish either, the son of a bitch. More for me than to me, he was right about that though, you got to give him that much. I got the story of the year, you realize that?"
"I guess you do."
"The story of the year. Locally, I mean. Overall scheme of things, what's Will in comparison to Bosnia, huh? You want to weigh 'em in the balance, Will's lighter than air. But who do you know that gives two shits about Bosnia? Will you tell me that? The only way Bosnia sells a newspaper's if you can manage to get 'rape' in the headline." He picked up the second bottle of Rolling Rock and took a sip. "The story of the year," he said.
* * *
After I finally got away from him, what I probably should have done was go to a meeting. When I first got sober I had found it unsettling to be around people who were drinking, but as I grew more comfortable with my own sobriety I gradually became less uneasy in the presence of drink. Many of my friends these days are sober, but quite a few are not, and some like Mick Ballou and Danny Boy Bell are heavy daily drinkers. Their drinking never seems to bother me. Now and then Mick and I make a night of it, sitting up until dawn in his saloon at Fiftieth and Tenth, sharing stories and silences. Never on those occasions do I find myself wishing that I were drinking, or that he were not.
But Marty McGraw was the kind of edgy drunk who made me uncomfortable. I can't say I wanted a drink by the time I got out of there, but neither did I much want to go on feeling the way I felt, as if I'd been up for days and had drunk far too much coffee.
I stopped at a diner for a hamburger and a piece of pie, then just started walking without paying too much attention to where I was headed. My mind was playing with what I'd learned about Will's letter and when it had been mailed, and I worried this piece of information like a dog with a bone, running it through my mind, then thinking of something else, then coming back to it and turning the thoughts this way and that, as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and I could fit them into place if I just held them at the right angle.
I was headed uptown when I started, and I suppose if I'd picked up a tailwind I might have walked clear to the Cloisters. But I didn't get that far. When I came out of my reverie I was only a block from my apartment. But it was a long block, a crosstown block, and it put me at a location that was significant in and of itself. I was at the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, standing directly in front of Jimmy Armstrong's saloon.
Why? It wasn't because I wanted a drink, was it? Because I certainly didn't think I wanted a drink, nor did I feel as though I wanted a drink. There is, to be sure, a part of me deep within my being that will always thirst for the ignorant bliss that is alcohol's promise. Some of us call that part of ourselves "the disease," and tend to personify it. "My disease is talking to me," you'll hear them say at meetings. "My disease wants me to drink. My disease is trying to destroy me." Alcoholism, I once heard a woman explain, is like a monster sleeping inside you. Sometimes the monster begins to stir, and that's why we have to go to meetings. The meetings bore the monster and it dozes off again.
Still, I couldn't attribute my presence in front of Armstrong's to a talkative disease or a restless monster. As far as I knew, I'd never had a drink of anything stronger than cranberry juice on the northwest corner of Fifty-seventh and Tenth. I had stopped drinking by the time Jimmy moved from his original Ninth Avenue location. There had been other gin mills at Tenth and Fifty-seventh before his, including one I could remember called The Falling Rock. (It got the name when a neighborhood guy bought it and started remodeling the facade. While he was working on a ladder, a chunk of stone flaked off and fell, conking him on the head and almost knocking him cold. He figured it would be good luck to name the joint after the incident, but the luck didn't hold; a little while later he did something that irritated a couple of the Westies, and they hit him harder and more permanently than the rock had. The next owner changed the name to something else.)
I didn't want a drink, and I wasn't hungry, either. I shrugged it off and turned around, looking across the intersection at what I suppose I'll always think of as Lisa Holtzmann's building. Was that what I wanted? An hour or so with the Widow Holtzmann, sweeter than whiskey and easier on the liver, and almost as certain a source of temporary oblivion?
No longer an option. Lisa, when I last spoke to her, had told me that she was seeing someone, that it looked serious, that she thought the relationship might have a future. I'd been surprised to discover that the news came as less of a blow than a relief. We agreed that we'd stay away from each other and give her new romance a chance to flower.
For all I knew it had gone to seed by now. The new man was by no means the first she'd dated since her husband's death. She'd grown up with a father who came to her bed at night, thrilling and disturbing her at once, always stopping short of intercourse because "it wouldn't be right," and she would be awhile working her way out of the residue of those years. I didn't need a shrink to tell me that I was a component of that process. It was not always clear, though, whether I was part of the problem or part of the solution.
In any case, Lisa's relationships did not tend to last, and there was no reason to believe the latest was still viable. I could without difficulty imagine her sitting by the phone now, wishing it would ring, hoping it would be me on the other end of it. I could make the call and find out if what I imagined was true. It was easy enough to check. I had a quarter handy, and I didn't need to look up the number.
I didn't make the call. Elaine has made it clear that she does not expect me to be strictly faithful. Her own professional experience has led her to believe that men are not monogamous by nature, and that extracurricular activity need not be either a cause or a symptom of marital disharmony.
