Out on the Cutting Edge (Matthew Scudder #7)

"I don't see how. All my findings point to a classic textbook case of autoerotic asphyxiation. I'd guess he took his sleeping pill not too long before he died. Maybe he was planning to go right to sleep, then changed his mind and decided to squeeze in a hand of sexual solitaire. Or he might have been in the habit of taking a pill first, so that he could just slip right off to sleep as soon as he finished his fun and games. Either way, I don't think the chloral would have had any real effect. You know how it works?"

"More or less."

"They do it," he said, "and they get away with it. They have their heightened orgasm and they evidently enjoy it, so they make a regular practice of it. Even when they know about the dangers, their survival seems to prove to them that they know the right way to do it."

He took off his glasses, polished them with the tail of his lab coat. "The thing is," he said, "there is no right way to do it, and sooner or later your luck runs out. You see, a little pressure on the carotid"- he reached across to touch the side of my neck-"and it triggers a reflex that slows the heartbeat way down. That evidently has something to do with boosting the thrill of orgasm, but what it can also do is make you lose consciousness, and you have no control over that. When that happens, gravity tightens the noose, and you can't do anything about it because you're out of it, you don't know what's happening. Trying to be careful doing it is like exercising caution during Rus-sian roulette. No matter how successful you've been in the past, you've got the same chance of blowing it the next time. The only careful way to do it is not to do it at all."

I had taken a cab downtown to see Sternlicht. I took a couple of buses back, and got to Willa's just as she was on her way out.

She was wearing a pair of jeans I hadn't seen before, paint-smeared, ragged at the cuffs. Her hair was pinned up and tucked out of sight behind a beige scarf. She was wearing a man's white button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and her blue tennis shoes were paint-spattered to match the jeans. She carried a gray metal toolbox, rusty around the locks and hinges.

"I must have known you were coming," she said. "That's why I dressed. I've got a plumbing emergency across the street."

"Don't they have a super over there?"

"Sure, and I'm it. I've got three buildings to take care of besides this one. That way I don't just have a place to live, I also have something to live on." She shifted the toolbox from one hand to the other. "I can't stand and chat, they'll have a full-scale flood over there. Do you want to come watch or would you rather make yourself a cup of coffee and wait for me?"

I told her I'd wait, and she walked inside with me and let me into her apartment. I asked her if I could have Eddie's key.

"You want to go up there? What for?"

"Just to look around."

She worked his key off her ring, then gave me one for her apartment as well. "So you can get back in," she said. "It's the top lock, it locks automatically when you pull the door shut. Don't forget to double-lock the door upstairs when you're through."

Eddie's windows had been wide open ever since Andreotti and I had opened them. The smell of death was still in the air, but it had grown faint, and wasn't really unpleasant unless you happened to recognize it for what it was.

It would be easy enough to get rid of the rest of the smell. Once the curtains and bedding were gone, once the furniture and clothing and personal effects were out on the street for the trash pickup, you probably wouldn't be able to smell a thing. Swab down the floors and spray a little Lysol around and the last traces would vanish. People die every day, and landlords clean up after them, and new tenants are in their place by the first of the month.

Life goes on.

I was looking for chloral hydrate, but I didn't know where he kept it. There was no medicine cabinet. The lavatory, in a tiny closet off the bedroom, held a commode and nothing else. His toothbrush hung in a holder above the kitchen sink, and there was half a tube of toothpaste, neatly rolled, on the window ledge nearby. In the cupboard nearest to the sink I found a couple of plastic razors, a can of shaving foam, a bottle of Rexall aspirin, and a pocket tin of Anacin. I opened the aspirin bottle and dumped its contents into my palm, and all I had was a handful of five-grain aspirin tablets. I put them back and tackled the Anacin tin, pressing the rear corners as indicated. Getting it open was enough to give you a headache, but all I found for my troubles were the white tablets the label had promised.

The upended orange crate beside his bed held a stack of AA literature- the Big Book, the Twelve & Twelve, some pamphlets, and a slender paperback called Living Sober. There was a Bible, the Douay Reims version, with a bookplate indicating it had been a first communion gift to Mary Scanlan. On another page, a family tree indicated that Mary Scanlan had been married to Peter John Dunphy, and that a son, Edward Thomas Dunphy, had been born a year and four months after the wedding date.

I flipped through the Bible and it opened to a chapter in Second Chronicles where Eddie had stashed a pair of twenty-dollar bills. I couldn't think what to do with them. I didn't want to take the money, but it felt odd to leave it. I gave the whole question a good forty dollars worth of thought, then returned the bills to the Bible and put the Bible back where I'd found it.

His dresser top held a small tin with a couple of spot Band-Aids left in it, a single shoelace, an empty cigarette pack, forty-three cents in change, and a pair of subway tokens. The dresser's top drawer contained mostly socks, but there was also a pair of gloves, wool with leather palms, a Colt.45 brass belt buckle, and a plush-lined box of the sort cuff-link sets come in. This one held a high school ring with a blue stone, a gold-plated tie bar, and a single cuff link with three small garnets on it. There had been a fourth garnet but it was gone.

The underwear drawer contained, along with shorts and T-shirts, a Gruen wristwatch with half its strap missing.

The erotic magazines were gone. I guessed they'd been bagged and tagged and taken along as evidence, and they'd probably spend eternity in a warehouse somewhere. I didn't come across any other erotica, or any sex aids, either.

I found his wallet in his trousers pocket. It held thirty-two dollars in cash, a foil-wrapped condom, and one of those all-purpose identification cards they sell in schlock shops around Times Square. They're usually bought by people who want fake ID, although they wouldn't fool anyone. Eddie had filled his out legitimately with his correct name and address and the same date of birth as the one in the family Bible, along with height and weight and hair and eye color. It seemed to be the only ID he had. No driver's license, and no Social Security card. If they gave him one at Green Haven, he hadn't troubled to hang on to it.

I went through the other drawers in the dresser, I checked the refrigerator. There was some milk that was starting to turn and I poured it out. I left a loaf of Roman Meal bread, jars of peanut butter and jelly. I stood on a chair and checked the closet shelf. I found old newspapers, a baseball glove that must have been his when he was a kid, and an unopened box of votive candles in small clear glass holders. I didn't find anything in the pockets of the clothes in the closet, or in the two pairs of shoes or the rubber overshoes on the closet floor.

After a while I took a plastic grocery bag and put in the Bible and the AA books and his wallet. I left everything else and let myself out of there.

I was locking the door when I heard a noise, someone behind me clearing her throat. I turned to see a woman standing at the head of the stairs. She was a tiny thing with wispy gray hair and eyes huge behind thick cataract lenses. She wanted to know who I was. I told her my name, and that I was a detective.

"For poor Dr. Dunphy," she said. "That I knew all his days, and his parents before him." She had groceries in a bag like the one I was carrying. She set her bag down, rummaged in her purse for her key. "They killed him," she said, dolefully.

"They?"

"Ach, they'll kill us all. Poor Mrs. Grod on the floor above, that they crept in off the fire escape and cut her ould throat."

"When did this happen?"

"And Mr. White," she said. "Dead of the cancer, and him so wasted and yellow at the end you'd take him for a Chinaman. We'll all be dead and gone soon enough," she said, wringing her hands with horror or with relish. "Every last one of us."

When Willa returned I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. She let herself in, put down her toolbox, and said, "Don't kiss me, I'm a mess. God, that's filthy work. I had to open up the bathroom ceiling, and all kinds of crap comes down on you when you do that."

"How did you learn plumbing?"

"I didn't, really. I'm good at fixing things and I picked up a lot of different skills over the years. I'm not a plumber, but I know how to shut a system down and find a leak, and I can patch it, and sometimes the patch holds. For a while, anyway." She opened the refrigerator and got herself a bottle of Beck's. "Thirsty work. That plaster dust gets in your throat. I'm sure it's carcinogenic."

"Almost everything is."

She uncapped the beer, took a long swallow straight from the bottle, then got a glass from the drainboard and filled it. She said, "I need a shower, but first I need to sit down for a minute. Were you waiting long?"

"Just a few minutes."

"You must have spent a long time upstairs."

"I guess I must have. And then I spent a minute or two in a strange conversation." I recounted my meeting with the little wispy-haired woman and she nodded in recognition.

"That's Mrs. Mangan," she said. " 'Shure, an' we'll all be molderin' in our graves, an' the wee banshees howlin' at our heels.' "

"You do a good Mrs. Mangan impression."

"It's a less useful talent than fixing leaky pipes. She's our resident crepe-hanger. She's been here forever, I think she may have been born in the building, and she has to be over eighty, wouldn't you say?"

"I'm not a good judge."

"Well, would you ask her for proof of age if she was trying to get the senior citizen rate at the movies? She knows everybody in the neighborhood, all the old people anyway, and that means she's always got a funeral to go to." She drained her glass, poured the rest of the bottle into it. "I'll tell you something," she said. "I don't want to live forever."

"Forever's a long way off."

"I mean it, Matt. There's such a thing as living too long. It's tragic when somebody Eddie Dunphy's age dies. Or your Paula, with her whole life ahead of her. But when you get to be Mrs. Mangan's age, and living alone, with all her old friends gone-"

"How did Mrs. Grod die?"

"I'm trying to remember when that was. Over a year ago, I think, because it was in warm weather. A burglar killed her, he came in through the window. The apartments have window gates, but not all the tenants use them."

"There was a gate on Eddie's bedroom window, the one that opens into the fire escape. But it wasn't in use."

"People leave them open because it's harder to open and close the windows otherwise. Evidently someone went over the roofs and down the fire escape and got into Mrs. Grod's apartment that way. She was in bed and must have awakened and surprised him. And he stabbed her." She sipped her beer. "Did you find what you were looking for? For that matter, what were you looking for?"