Out on the Cutting Edge

"Pills."

"Pills?"

"But I couldn't find anything stronger than aspirin." I explained what Sternlicht had found, and the implications of his findings. "I was taught how to search an apartment, and I learned to do it thoroughly. I didn't pry up floorboards or take the furniture apart, but I made a pretty systematic search of the premises. If there was chloral hydrate there, I would have found it."

"Maybe it was his last pill."

"Then there'd be an empty vial somewhere."

"He might have thrown it out."

"It wasn't in his wastebasket. It wasn't in the garbage under the kitchen sink. Where else would he have tossed it?"

"Maybe somebody gave him a single pill, or a couple of pills. 'You can't sleep? Here, take one of these, they work every time.' As far as that goes, you said he was streetwise, didn't you? Not every pill sold in this neighborhood gets dispensed by a pharmacist. You can buy everything else on the street. I wouldn't be surprised if you could buy coral hydrate."

"Chloral hydrate."

"Chloral hydrate, then. Sounds like something a welfare mother would name her kid. 'Chloral, now you leave off pickin' on yo' brother!' What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"You seem moody, though."

"Do I? Maybe I caught it upstairs. And what you said about people living too long. I was thinking last night that I don't want to wind up an old man living alone in a hotel room. And here I am, well on the way."

"Some old man."

I sat there and nursed my mood while she took a shower. When she came out I said, "I must have been looking for more than pills, because what good would it have done me to find them?"

"I was wondering that myself."

"I just wish I knew what he wanted to tell me. He had something on his mind and he was just about ready to unload it, but I told him to take his time, to think it over. I should have sat down with him then and there."

"And then he'd still be alive?"

"No, but-"

"Matt, he didn't die because of what he said or didn't say. He died because he did something stupid and dangerous and his luck ran out."

"I know."

"There was nothing you could have done. And nothing you can do for him now."

"I know. He didn't-"

"Didn't what?"

"Say anything to you?"

"I hardly knew him, Matt. I can't remember the last time I talked to him. I don't know if I ever talked to him, beyond 'How's the weather?' and 'Here's the rent.' "

"He had something on his mind," I said. "I wish to hell I knew what it was."

I dropped into Grogan's in the middle of the afternoon. The dart board wasn't in use and I didn't see Andy Buckley anywhere, but otherwise the crowd was much the same. Tom was behind the stick, and he put a magazine down long enough to draw me a Coke. An old man with a cloth cap was talking about the Mets, lamenting a trade they'd made fifteen years earlier. "They got Jim Fregosi," he said scornfully, "and they gave up Nolan Ryan. Nolan Ryan!"

On the television screen, John Wayne was putting someone in his place. I tried to picture him pushing through the swinging doors of a saloon, bellying up to the bar, telling the barkeep to bring him a Coke and a chloral hydrate.

I nursed my Coke, bided my time. When my glass was almost empty I crooked a finger for Tom. He came over and reached for my glass but I covered it with my palm. He looked at me, expressionless as ever, and I asked if Mickey Ballou had been in.

"There's people in and out," he said. "I wouldn't know their names."

There was a north-of-Ireland edge to his speech. I hadn't noticed it earlier. "You'd know him," I said. "He's the owner, isn't he?"

"It's called Grogan's. Wouldn't it be Grogan that owns it?"

"He's a big man," I said. "Sometimes he wears a butcher's apron."

"I'm off at six. Perhaps he comes here nights."

"Perhaps he does. I'd like to leave word for him."

"Oh?"

"I want to talk to him. Tell him, will you?"

"I don't know him. And I don't know yourself, so what would I tell him?"

"My name is Scudder, Matt Scudder. I want to talk to him about Eddie Dunphy."

"I may not remember," he said, his eyes flat, his voice toneless. "I'm not good with names."

I left, walked around, dropped in again around six-thirty. The crowd was larger, with half a dozen after-work drinkers ranged along the bar. Tom was gone, his place taken by a tall fellow with a lot of curly dark brown hair. He wore an open cowhide vest over a red-and-black flannel shirt.

I asked if Mickey Ballou had been in.

"I haven't seen him," he said. "I just got on myself. Who wants him?"

"Scudder," I said.

"I'll tell him."

I got out of there, had a sandwich by myself at the Flame, and went over to St. Paul's. It was Friday night, which meant a step meeting, and this week we were on the sixth step, in the course of which one becomes ready on some inner level to have one's defects of character removed. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in particular that you do to bring this about. It's just supposed to happen to you. It hasn't happened to me.

I was impatient for the meeting to end but I made myself stay for the whole thing anyway. During the break I took Jim Faber aside and told him I wasn't sure whether or not Eddie had died sober, that the autopsy had found chloral hydrate in his bloodstream.

"The proverbial Mickey Finn," he said. "You don't hear about it much anymore, now that the drug industry has given us so many more advanced little blessings. I only once heard of an alcoholic who used to take chloral hydrate for recreational purposes. She went through a period of controlled solitary drinking; every night she took a dose of chloral, pills or drops, I don't remember, and drank two beers. Whereupon she passed out and slept for eight or ten hours."

"What happened to her?"

"Either she lost her taste for chloral hydrate or her source dried up, so she moved on to Jack Daniel's. When she got up to a quart and a half of it daily, something told her she might have a problem. I wouldn't make too much of the chloral hydrate Eddie took, Matt. It might not bode well for his long-term sobriety, but where he is now it's no longer an issue. What's done is done."

Afterward I passed up the Flame and went straight to Grogan's. I spotted Ballou the minute I cleared the threshold. He wasn't wearing his white apron, but I recognized him without it.

He'd have been hard to miss. He stood well over six feet and carried a lot of flesh on a large frame. His head was like a boulder, massive and monolithic, with planes to it like the stone heads at Easter Island.

He was standing at the bar, one foot on the brass rail, leaning in to talk to the bartender, the same fellow in the unbuttoned leather vest I'd seen a few hours ago. The crowd had thinned out since then. There were a couple of old men in a booth, a pair of solitary drinkers strung out at the far end of the bar. In the back, two men were playing darts. One was Andy Buckley.

I went over to the bar. Three stools separated me from Ballou. I was watching him in the mirrored back bar when he turned and looked directly at me. He studied me for a moment, then turned to say something to the bartender.

I walked toward him, and his head swung around at my approach. His face was pitted like weathered granite, and there were patches of broken blood vessels on his cheekbones, and across the bridge of his nose. His eyes were a surprising green, and there was a lot of scar tissue around them.

"You're Scudder," he said.

"Yes."

"I don't know you, but I've seen you. And you've seen me."

"Yes."

"You were asking for me. And now you're here." He had thin lips, and they curled in what might have been a smile. He said, "What will you drink, man?"

He had a bottle of Jameson on the bar in front of him, the twelve-year-old. In a glass beside it, two small ice cubes bobbed in an amber sea. I said I'd have coffee, if they happened to have any made. Ballou looked at the bartender, who shook his head.

"The draught Guinness is as good as you'll get this side of the ocean," Ballou said. "I wouldn't carry the bottled stuff, it's thick as syrup."

"I'll have a Coke."

"You don't drink," he said.

"Not today."

"You don't drink at all, or you don't drink with me?"

"I don't drink at all."

"And how is that?" he asked. "Not drinking at all."

"It's all right."

"Is it hard?"

"Sometimes. But sometimes drinking was hard."

"Ah," he said. "That's the fucking truth." He looked at the bartender, who responded by drawing a Coke for me. He put it in front of me and moved off out of hearing range.

Ballou picked up his glass and looked at me over the top of it. He said, "Back when the Morrisseys had their place around the corner. Their after-hours. I used to see you there."

"I remember."

"You drank with both hands, those days."

"That was then."

"And this is now, eh?" He put his glass down, looked at his hand, wiped it across his shirtfront, and extended it toward me. There was something oddly solemn about our handshake. His hand was large, his grip firm but not aggressively so. We shook hands, and then he took up his whiskey and I reached for my Coke.

He said, "Is that what ties you to Eddie Dunphy?" He lifted his glass, looked into it. "Hell of a thing when the booze turns on you. Eddie, though, I'd say he never could handle it, the poor bastard. Did you know him when he drank?"

"No."

"He never had the head for it. Then I heard he stopped drinking. And now he's gone and hanged himself."

"A day or so before he did it," I said, "we had a talk."

"Did you now?"

"There was something eating him, something he wanted to get off his chest but was afraid to tell me."

"What was it?"

"I was hoping you might be able to answer that."

"I don't take your meaning."

"What did he know that was dangerous knowledge? What did he ever do that would weigh on his conscience?"

The big head swung from side to side. "He was a neighborhood boy. He was a thief, he had a mouth on him when he drank, he raised a little hell. That's all he ever did."

"He said he used to spend a lot of time here."

"Here? In Grogan's?" He shrugged. "It's a public house. All sorts of people come in, drink their beer or whiskey, pass the time, go on their way. Some have a glass of wine. Or a Coca-Cola, if it comes to that."

"Eddie said this was where he used to hang out. We were walking one night, and he crossed the street to avoid walking past this place."

The green eyes widened. "He did? Why?"

"Because it was so much a part of his drinking life. I guess he was afraid it would pull him in if he got too close."

"My God," he said. He uncapped the bottle, topped up his drink. The two ice cubes had melted but he didn't seem bothered by their absence. He picked up the glass. Staring into it he said, "Eddie was my brother's friend. Did you know my brother Dennis?"