Out on the Cutting Edge

"Serendipity. Don't you like the coffee? Is it too strong?"

"There is no such thing. And it's fine."

"You're not drinking it."

"I'm sipping it. I've had gallons of coffee already today, it's been that kind of a day. But I'm enjoying it."

"I guess I don't have too much confidence in it," she said. "After all those months of instant decaf."

"Well, this is a big improvement."

"I'm glad. So you didn't learn anything more about Eddie? And what was on his mind?"

"No," I said. "But then I didn't really expect to."

"Oh."

"Because I already knew."

"I don't follow you."

"Don't you?" I got to my feet. "I already knew what was on Eddie's mind, and what happened to him. Mrs. Hoeldtke just now told me that she knew all along that her daughter was dead, that the knowledge had to have existed on some level. I knew about Eddie on a more conscious level than the one she was talking about, but I didn't want to know about it. I tried to shut out the knowledge, and I went out there hoping I'd learn something that would prove me wrong."

"Wrong about what?"

"Wrong about what was eating at him. Wrong about how he got killed."

"I thought it was autoerotic asphyxiation." She frowned. "Or are you saying that it was actually suicide? That he really had the intention of killing himself?"

" 'Your mother is on the roof.' " She looked at me. "I can't break it gently, Willa. I know what happened and I know why. You killed him."

"It was the chloral hydrate," I said. "And the funny thing is it wouldn't have flagged anybody's attention but mine. He only had a very small dose of chloral in him, not enough to have any pronounced effect on him. Certainly not enough to kill him.

"But he was a sober alcoholic, and that meant he shouldn't have any chloral hydrate in him. As far as Eddie was concerned, sobriety was unequivocal. It meant no alcohol and no mood-changing or sedative drugs. He'd tried dicking around with marijuana shortly after he came into the program and he knew that didn't work. He wouldn't take something to help him sleep, not even one of those over-the-counter preparations, let alone a real drug like chloral hydrate. If he couldn't sleep he'd have stayed awake. Nobody ever died from lack of sleep. That's what they tell you when you first get sober, and God knows I heard it enough myself. 'Nobody ever died from lack of sleep.' Sometimes I wanted to throw a chair at the person who said it, but it turned out they were right."

She was standing with her back to the refrigerator, one hand pressed palm-first against the white surface.

"I'd wanted to find out if he died sober," I went on. "It seemed important to me, maybe because it would have been his one victory in a life that had been nothing but a chain of small defeats. And when I learned about the chloral I couldn't let go of it. I went up to his apartment and I gave it a pretty decent search. If he'd had any pills there, I think I would have found them. Then I came downstairs and found a bottle of chloral hydrate in your medicine cabinet."

"He said he couldn't sleep, that he was going nuts. He wouldn't take a drink or a bottle of beer so I gave him a couple of drops in a cup of coffee."

"That's no good, Willa. I gave you a chance to tell me that after I searched his place."

"Well, you made such a big deal out of it. You made it sound as though giving a sedative to an alcoholic was like giving apples with razor blades in them to Halloween trick-or-treaters. I sort of hinted at it. I said he might have bought a pill on the street, or somebody might have given him one."

"Coral hydrate."

She looked at me.

"That's what you called it. We had a conversation about it, and you were very good about getting the name of the drug wrong, as though this were the first time you were hearing about it. That was a nice touch, casual as could be, but the timing wasn't so good. Because I was hearing it all just a few minutes after seeing a bottle of liquid chloral in your medicine chest."

"I just knew it was something to take to go to sleep. I didn't know the name of it."

"It was typed right on the label."

"Maybe I never read it properly in the first place. Maybe it never registered, maybe I haven't got a mind for that kind of detail."

"You? The woman who knew what Paris green was? The woman who would know how to poison a municipal water system if the word came down from the party leadership?"

"Then maybe it was just a slip of the tongue."

"Just a slip of the tongue. And then, the next time I looked, the bottle was gone from the medicine cabinet."

She sighed. "I can explain. It's going to make me sound stupid, but I can explain."

"Let's hear it."

"I gave him the chloral hydrate. I didn't know any reason not to, for God's sake. He came in to talk and he wasn't going to have any coffee because he told me he was having a terrible time sleeping. I guess there was something on his mind, the same thing he was going to tell you about, but he didn't give any indication what it was."

"And?"

"I told him decaf wouldn't keep him awake, and that this particular brand seemed to help people to sleep, at least it had that effect on me. And then I put a couple of drops of the chloral hydrate in his cup but didn't let him know what I was doing. And he drank it right down and went up to bed, and the next time I saw him was when I walked in there with you and he was dead."

"And the reason you didn't say anything-"

"Was because I thought I'd killed him! I thought the dose I gave him made him drowsy, and then as a result he lost consciousness while he was half strangling himself, and that was why he died. And by this time you and I were sleeping together, and I was terrified you'd hold it against me, I knew what a fanatic you are about sobriety, and I couldn't see what purpose it would serve to admit that I'd done something that might have contributed to his death." She held her hands at her sides. "That may make me guilty of something, Matt. But it doesn't mean I killed him."

"Jesus," I said.

"Do you see, darling? Do you see what-"

"What I'm beginning to see is how good you are at improvisation. I suppose you had good training, living under false colors for all those years, putting up one front after another for your neighbors and co-workers. It must have been a great education."

"You're talking about the lies I told earlier. I'm not proud of that but I guess it's true. I guess I've learned to lie as a reflex. And now I have to learn a new way of behavior, now that I'm involved with someone who's really important to me. It's a different ball game now, isn't it, and I-"

"Cut the shit, Willa."

She recoiled as if from a blow. "It won't work," I told her. "You didn't just slip him a Mickey. You knotted the clothesline around the neck and hanged him from the pipe. It wouldn't have been hard for you to do. You're a big strong woman and he was a little guy, and he wouldn't have put up a fight once you'd knocked him out with the chloral. You set the stage nicely, you stripped him, you put a couple of bondage magazines where they'd tell a good story. Where did you buy the magazines? Times Square?"

"I didn't buy the magazines. I didn't do any of the things you just said."

"One of the clerks down there might remember you. You're a striking woman, and they don't get that many female customers in the first place. I don't suppose it would take a whole lot of legwork to turn up a clerk who remembers you."

"Matt, if you could hear yourself. The awful things you're accusing me of. I know you're tired, I know the kind of day you've had, but-"

"I told you to cut the crap. I know you killed him, Willa. You closed the windows to hold the smell in a little longer, to make the medical evidence a little less precise. Then you waited for someone to notice the stench and report it, to you or to the cops. You were in no hurry. You didn't really care how long it took before the body was discovered. What mattered was that he was dead. That way his secret could die with him."

"What secret?"

"The one he had trouble living with. The one you didn't dare let him tell me. About all the other people you killed."

I said, "Poor Mrs. Mangan. All her old friends are dying while she sits around waiting for her own death. And the ones who don't die are moving away. There was a landlord around the corner who moved junkies into the building so that they would terrorize his rent-controlled tenants. He got fined for it. He should have gone to jail, the son of a bitch."

She looked right at me. It was hard to read her face, hard to guess what was going on behind it.

"But a lot of people have been moving out of the neighborhood willingly," I went on. "Their landlords buy them out, offer them five or ten or twenty thousand dollars to give up their apartments. It must confuse the hell out of them, to get offered more to vacate an apartment than they've paid all their lives to live in it. Of course, once they take the money, they can't find a place they can afford to live in."

"That's the system."

"It's a funny system. You pay steady rent on a couple of rooms for twenty or thirty years and the guy who owns the building pays a small fortune to get rid of you. You'd think he'd want to hang on to a good steady tenant, but then the same kind of thing happens in business. Companies pay their best employees big bonuses to take early retirement and get the hell out. That way they can replace them with young kids who'll work for lower salaries. You wouldn't think it would work that way, but it does."

"I don't know what you're getting at."

"Don't you? I managed to get hold of the autopsy report on Gertrude Grod. She had the apartment directly above Eddie's, and she died right around the time he was starting to get sober. She had just about as much chloral hydrate in her as Eddie did. And her physician never prescribed the drug for her, and neither did anyone on staff at Roosevelt or St. Clare's. I figure you knocked on her door and got her to invite you in for a cup of tea, and when she was looking the other way you dosed her cup. On your way out you could have made sure the window gates were unlocked, so that Eddie could slip in a few hours later with a knife."

"Why would he do this for me?"

"My guess is you had a sexual hold on him, but it could have been anything. He was just starting to get sober and he wasn't a model of mental health at the time. And you're pretty good at getting people to do what you want them to do. You probably convinced Eddie he'd be doing the old lady a favor. I've heard you rap on the subject, how nobody should have to grow old that way. And she'd never know what happened to her, the drug would keep her from waking up, and so she'd never feel a thing. All he had to do was go out his window, climb up a flight, and stick a knife into a sleeping woman."

"Why wouldn't I just knife her myself? If I was already in her apartment and I got her to drink a dose of chloral."

"You wanted it to go in the books as a burglary. Eddie could make it a lot more convincing. He could lock her door from the inside and put the chain latch on before he went back out the window. I saw the police report. They had to break the door down. That was a nice touch, made it look a lot less like a possible inside job."