I was up a little before noon, and by one o’clock I had picked up an Avis car and found my way to E-Z Storage. I spent the afternoon there. I talked to the man in charge, one Leon Kramer, who started out wary and turned into Chatty Cathy before he was done.

Elaine rents a storage cubicle in a warehouse a few blocks west of our apartment—she stores artwork and antiques there, the overflow from her shop—but the system at the E-Z facility in New Jersey was different, and a good deal more casual. We have to sign in and out whenever we visit our bin, but E-Z, unattended at night and offering twenty-four-hour access, can’t attempt anything like that level of security. A sign over Kramer’s desk insisted in large print that all storage was entirely at the customer’s risk, and he made the point himself three times in the first five minutes I spent with him.

So there were no records kept of comings and goings, and nothing stronger than the tenant’s own padlock to keep others out of his storage bin.

“They want to be able to come here any hour of the day or night,” Kramer said. “Their brother-in-law needs to store some stuff, they can hand him the key without worrying did they put his name on a list of persons authorized to have access. They don’t want to sign in each time, clip on a security badge, fill out a lot of forms. What we got here is more convenience than security. Nobody’s renting one of our bins to stash the crown jewels. Anything really important or valuable’s gonna go in your safe deposit box at the bank. What we get is your mother’s dining room set and the files from Dad’s old office, before you went and put him in the home. All the stuff you’d keep in the attic, except you sold the house and moved to a garden apartment.”

“Or things you’d just as soon not keep around the house,” I suggested.

“Now that I wouldn’t know about,” he said, “and I wouldn’t want to know. All I need to know’s your check cleared the first of the month.”

“A man’s storage space is his castle.”

He nodded. “With the exception that you can live in a castle, and you can’t live here. There’s a lot of other things you can do. We call it storage, but it’s not all storage. You see that sign, ‘Rooms 4 Rent’? That’s what we’re offering, the extra room your house or apartment hasn’t got. I got tenants’ll store a boat here, boat motor and trailer, ’cause they got no room to garage it where they live. Others, the room’s their workshop. They set up their tools and do woodworking, work on their car, whatever. Only thing you can’t do is move in and live here, and that’s not my rule, it’s the county’s, or the township’s, whatever. No living. Not that people don’t try.”

I’d shown him my business card and explained that I was working for a tenant of his who’d had some goods disappear. He didn’t want to make it a police matter until he’d ruled out the possibility of employee pilferage. That was probably what it was, Kramer said. Somebody who already had a key, went and made himself the boss’s silent partner.

By the time I left him I had a list of the tenants on the side of the building where John Kenny and Barry McCartney had been shot to death. I’d fumbled my way to a pretext—maybe another customer had seen or heard something—and Kramer went along, either to get rid of me or because we were old friends by then. Ballou’s cubicle, I noted, was officially leased to someone named J. D. Reilly, with an address in Middle Village, in Queens.

I had a sandwich and fries at a diner across the road, asked a few questions there, then returned to E-Z Storage and used Mick’s key to have another look at the murder scene. I could still detect all the odors I’d smelled the night before, but they were fainter now.

I’d brought a broom and dustpan, and I swept up the broken glass and dumped the shards into a brown paper bag. There was a reasonably good chance that one of those chunks of glass held an identifiable fingerprint, but so what? Even if it did, and even if I found it, what good would it be to me? A single print will nail a suspect, but it won’t produce a suspect out of thin air. For that you need a full set of fingerprints, and you also need official access to federal records. What I had was useless from an investigative standpoint, and would be useful only when a suspect was in custody and a case was being made against him.

But it wasn’t even good for that. The crime scene had been compromised beyond recognition, with the murders unreported, the bodies spirited away and tucked in an unmarked grave. What I held in my hand was evidence that a bottle had been broken. I knew people who’d call that a crime, but nobody who’d want to run prints to hunt down the man who’d broken it.

I stood inside the doorway, listening to traffic sounds, then lowered the steel door all the way down. I couldn’t hear anything now, but it was hard to say what that proved; the traffic hadn’t been all that loud.

What I was wondering about was the noise of the gunshots. I was assuming the killers had lowered the door before opening fire, but that wouldn’t necessarily render the cubicle soundproof.

Of course they could have used suppressors. If so, that made it a little less likely the incident had been a spur-of-the-moment response to an unexpected opportunity for gain. A couple of resourceful sociopaths could have been on the scene, could have seen all those cases of booze. And they could have been carrying weapons at the time—some people, more than you’d think, never leave home unarmed.

But who routinely carries a silencer? No one I’d ever known.

I raised the door, stepped outside and looked around. Half a dozen units away, a man was shifting cartons from the back of a Plymouth Voyager, stowing them in his cubicle. A woman in khaki shorts and a green halter top was leaning against the side of the van and watching him work. Their car radio was playing, but so faintly that all I could tell was that it was music. I couldn’t make it out.

Aside from my Ford, theirs was the only vehicle on that side of the building.

I decided the killers probably hadn’t needed to muffle their gunfire. The odds were there hadn’t been anyone around to hear it. And how remarkable would a few loud noises be? With the steel door shut, anyone within earshot would write off four or five shots as hammer blows, somebody assembling or disassembling a packing case, say. This was suburbia, after all, not a housing project in Red Hook. You didn’t expect gunfire, didn’t throw yourself on the pavement every time a truck backfired.

Still, why shoot them?

 

“Names and addresses,” TJ said, and frowned. “These be the dudes renting alongside where the two dudes got shot.”

“According to the storage company’s records.”

“Somebody’s bad enough to shoot two dudes and steal a truckload of liquor, you figure he’d put his real name down when he rents storage space?”

“Probably not,” I said, “although stranger things have happened. There was a fellow a couple of months ago who robbed a bank, and his note to the teller was written on one of his own printed deposit slips.”

“Stupid goes clear down to the bone, don’t it?”

“It seems to,” I agreed. “But if the shooters used a false name, that’s a help. Because if one of the names on our list turns out to be phony—”

“Yeah, I get it. So we lookin’ for one of two things. Somebody’s got a record, or somebody that don’t exist at all.”

“Neither one necessarily proves anything,” I said. “But it would give us a place to start.”

He nodded and settled in at the keyboard, tapping keys, using the mouse. I’d bought him the computer for Christmas, at the same time installing it—and him—in my old room at the Northwestern. When Elaine and I moved in together I’d kept my hotel room across the street as a combination den and office, a place to go when I wanted to be alone, sitting at the window and thinking long thoughts.

I’d met TJ on Forty-second Street long before they prettied up the Deuce, and early on he appointed himself my assistant. He turned out to be not merely street-smart but resourceful. When Elaine opened her shop on Ninth Avenue, he took to hanging out there, filling in for her on occasion and revealing a talent for retail sales. I don’t know where he lived before he took over my old room—the only address we ever had for him was his beeper number—but I guess he always found a place to sleep. You learn a lot of survival skills in the street. You’d better.

He’d since then learned computer skills as well. While I leafed through Macworld magazine, trying to find something written in a language I could understand, he tapped keys and frowned and whistled and jotted down notes on the sheet of paper I’d given him. Within an hour he’d established that all the names Leon Kramer had supplied belonged to living human beings, and he was able to furnish telephone numbers for all but two of them.

“This don’t necessarily mean that all the information’s straight dope,” he pointed out. “Could be somebody rented a bin and put down a real name and address, only it’s a name and address belongs to somebody else.”

“Unlikely,” I said.

“Whole deal’s unlikely. I’m at my storage locker, and I happen to see you got all this liquor in your storage locker, and there I am with a gun in my pocket and a truck parked alongside?”

“The first part’s plausible enough,” I said. “You’re there and you spot the whiskey. But why shoot me?”

“On account of you might not care to stand idly by while I load your booze onto my truck and drive off with it.”

“Why not wait?”

“Come back later, you mean.”

“Why not? I’ve got a station wagon, I’m not going to haul off more than a few cases. The rest’ll be there when you come back with a truck and somebody to help with the heavy lifting. You can even do it at night, when it’s less likely anybody’ll see what you’re doing.”

“You go away and come back, you got the padlock to contend with.”

“So? You drill it out or hacksaw it. Or spray it with Freon and take a hammer to it. What do you figure is trickier, getting past a padlock or taking out two men?”

He tapped the sheet of paper. “Sounds like we wastin’ our time on these here.”

“Unless somebody on the list happened to see or hear something.”

“Long odds against that.”

“Long odds against most things in life.”

He looked at the list of names and numbers, shook his head. “Guess I got some calls to make.”

“I’ll make them.”

“No, I’ll make them. They mostly in Jersey. You make them, they go on your phone bill. I make them, they be free.”

A couple of years ago I’d used the talents of a pair of high school computer hackers, and in gratitude they’d given me an unrequested perk. By doing some backing and filling within the phone company’s labyrinthine computer system, they had so arranged things that all my long-distance calls were free. By leaving their handiwork in place, I was technically guilty of theft of services, but somehow I couldn’t get too worked up about it. I wasn’t even sure which long-distance carrier I was defrauding, and hadn’t a clue how to go about straightening it out.

The free calls went with the hotel room, so TJ inherited them when he moved in. He’d installed a second line for the computer modem, so he could talk and tap keys at the same time.

That’s the future, and I guess it works. I’m old-fashioned, and take perverse comfort in telling myself I’m too old to change. All I know how to do is knock on doors and ask a lot of questions.

“Use your Brooks Brothers accent,” I said.

“Oh, you think, Dink? What I was figuring was I’d try to sound like a dude with a ‘tude.” He rolled his eyes. In the voice of an NPR announcer he said, “Let me assure you, sir, that neither asphalt nor Africa will register in my speech.”

“I love it when you talk like that,” I told him. “It’s like watching a dog walk on his hind legs.”

“That a compliment or an insult?”

“Probably a little of both,” I said. “One thing, though. Remember you’re talking to people from Jersey. If you speak too clearly, they won’t be able to understand you.”

 

Elaine and I went out for dinner and a movie, and I wound up telling her what I’d been doing. “I don’t think TJ’s going to learn anything,” I said. “It’s not too likely any of the other tenants were around yesterday when the shit hit the fan. If they were, I’d be surprised if they saw or heard anything.”

“Where do you go from here?”

“I probably give him his money back, or as much of it as I can get him to take. The money’s the least of it. I think he’s afraid.”

“Mick? It’s hard to imagine him afraid of anything.”

“Most tough guys are afraid a lot of the time,” I said. “That’s why they take the trouble to be tough. At the very least, I’d say he’s anxious, and he’s got reason to be. Somebody executed two of his men for no good reason. They didn’t have to shoot anybody.”

“They were sending him a message?”

“It looks that way.”

“But not a very clear one, if he doesn’t know what to make of it. What happens next?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t tell me much and I didn’t ask. Maybe he’s in a pissing contest with somebody. Maybe there’ll be a certain amount of pushing and shoving before things sort themselves out.”

“Gangsters fighting over territory? That kind of thing?”

“Something like that.”

“It’s not really your fight.”

“No, it’s not.”

“You’re not going to get involved, are you?”

I shook my head. “He’s my friend,” I said. “You like to talk about past lives and karmic ties, and I don’t know how much of that I believe in, but I don’t rule it out. Mick and I are connected on some sort of deep level, that much is clear.”

“But your lives are different.”

“Utterly. He’s a criminal. I mean, that’s what he does. I’m hardly a candidate for canonization, but essentially he and I are on opposite sides of the law.” I thought about that. “That’s if the law is something with only two sides to it, and I’m not sure it is. The job I did for Ray Gruliow last month was designed to help him get a client acquitted, and I know for a fact the son of a bitch was guilty as charged. So my job in that particular case was to see that justice wasn’t done. And when I was a cop I gave perjured testimony more times than I can remember. The men I testified against had done what they were accused of doing, or else they’d done something else that we couldn’t pin on them. I never framed an innocent man, or one who didn’t damn well belong in prison, but what side of the law was I on when I lied to put him there?”

“Deep thoughts,” she said.

“Yes, and I’m the Old Philosopher. But no, I’m not going to get involved in Mick’s problem. He’ll have to get through it on his own. And he probably will, whatever it is.”

“I hope so,” she said. “But I’m glad you’re out of it.”

 

That was on Thursday. There was a message from TJ when we got home, but it was late and I didn’t call him until the following morning, when I learned that he’d reached everybody on the list, including the two whose phone numbers he’d been previously unable to obtain.

“Computer gives you the world’s longest arms,” he said. “You like Plastic Man, you can reach out and touch someone and pick their pockets while you at it. But what good’s it do you if their pockets is empty?”

And in fact his report was that he had nothing to report. Only one of the people on our list had paid a visit to E-Z Storage on the day in question, and she hadn’t seen or heard anything memorable, let alone suspicious. If there’d been a truck there with men loading boxes onto it, she hadn’t noticed. If there’d been gunshots, or loud noises of any kind, she hadn’t heard them.

I called Mick at Grogan’s and left word for him to call me. I tried the other numbers I had for him and nobody answered. He has a few apartments around the city, places he can go when he wants to sleep, or drink in private. I’d been to one of them once, an anonymous one-bedroom apartment in a postwar building up in Inwood, the furnishings minimal, a change of clothes in the closet, a small TV set with a rabbit ears antenna, a few bottles of Jameson on a shelf in the kitchen. And, almost certainly, someone else’s name on the lease.

I’m not sure why I bothered trying those phone numbers, and I hung up not much concerned that I’d been unable to reach him. All I had to report, really, was that I didn’t have anything to report. Nothing terribly urgent about that. It would keep.

 

When I stopped drinking and started going to AA meetings, I heard a lot of people say a lot of different things about how to stay sober. Ultimately I learned that there are no rules—it’s a lot like life itself in that respect—and you follow the suggestions to whatever extent you choose.

Early on I stayed out of bars, but when Mick and I became friends I found myself spending occasional long nights with him in his saloon, drinking Coke or coffee and watching him put away the twelve-year-old Irish. That’s not generally recommended—I certainly wouldn’t recommend it—but so far it hasn’t felt dangerous to me, or inappropriate.

I’ve followed the conventional wisdom in some respects and ignored it in others. I’ve paid some attention to the program’s Twelve Steps, but I can’t say they’ve been in the forefront of my consciousness in recent years, and I’ve never been much good at prayer or meditation.

There are two areas, however, in which I’ve never strayed. A day at a time, I don’t pick up the first drink. And, after all these years, I still go to meetings.

I don’t go as often as I once did. In the beginning I damn near lived in meetings, and there was a time when I wondered if I might be abusing the privilege, attending too frequently, taking up a seat somebody else might need. I asked Jim Faber—this was before I asked him to be my sponsor—and he told me not to worry about it.

These days it’s a rare week when I don’t get to at least one meeting, and I generally manage to fit in two or three. The one I’m most regular at attending—I’m almost always there unless we go out of town for the weekend—is the Friday night step meeting at my home group. We meet at St. Paul the Apostle, three blocks from home at Ninth and Sixtieth. In the old drinking days I lit candles in that church, and stuffed spiritual hush money into the poor box. Now I sit in the basement on a folding chair, drinking sacramental coffee out of a Styrofoam chalice and dropping a dollar in the basket.

In the early days I could scarcely believe the things I heard at meetings. The stories themselves were extraordinary enough, but more remarkable to me was the willingness people demonstrated day after day to tell their most intimate secrets to a roomful of strangers. I was even more surprised a few months later to find myself equally candid. I’ve since learned to take that stunning candor for granted, but it still impresses me when I stop to think about it, and I’ve always enjoyed listening to the stories.

After the meeting I joined Jim Faber for coffee at the Flame. He’s been my sponsor for all these years, and we still have a standing dinner date on Sunday nights. One or the other of us has to cancel occasionally, but we get together more often than not, meeting at one of the neighborhood’s Chinese restaurants and talking from the hot and sour soup straight through to the fortune cookies. Nowadays we’re as apt to discuss his problems as mine—his marriage has had its ups and downs, and his printing business almost went belly-up a few years ago. And we always have the problems of the world to solve if we’re ever fresh out of problems of our own.

We drank our coffee and paid our separate checks. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll walk you home.”

“I’m not going home,” I said, “although I’ll pass the place. I’ve got a call to make and you won’t want to go there.”

“Some gin joint, would be my guess.”

“Grogan’s. I did a day’s work for Ballou, and I’ve got to drop by and tell him what I found out.”

“That what you were talking about earlier?”

During the meeting I’d shared about my occasional difficulties in setting boundaries. I’d been referring to the business at hand, although I’d avoided saying anything at all specific.

“It’s hard to do the right thing,” I told Jim, “when you’re not sure what it is.”

“That’s the great advantage the religious fanatics have,” he said. “They always know.”

“Puts them way ahead of me.”

“Me too,” he said, “and the gap is ever widening. Every year there’s a few more things I’m not sure of. I’ve decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.”

“Then I must be growing up,” I said, “and it’s about time. Are we on for Sunday night?”

He said we were. At the corner of Fifty-seventh we shook hands and said goodnight, and he turned right while I crossed the street. I started to turn automatically toward the Parc Vendôme’s entrance, caught myself, then came close to going on in anyway. I was tired, and could call Ballou and tell him what I had to tell him over the phone.

But instead I stayed with the original plan and skirted the building, heading downtown on Ninth Avenue. I walked three blocks, passing Elaine’s shop, then crossed to the west side of Ninth when the light turned and walked another block. I was just stepping off the curb at Fifty-third Street when a stocky guy with dark hair plastered down across his scalp popped up smack in front of me and stuck a gun in my face.

My first reaction was chagrin. Where had he come from, and how had I managed to be wholly unaware of his approach? The crime rate’s down these days and the streets feel a lot safer, but you still have to pay attention. I’d been paying attention all my life, and what was the matter with me now?

“Scudder,” he said.

I heard my name and felt better. At least I wasn’t a random patsy, sufficiently oblivious to blunder into the role of mugging victim. That was reassuring, but it didn’t do anything to improve the short-term outlook.

“This way,” he said, and pointed with the gun. We moved onto the sidewalk and into the shadows on the side street. He stayed in front of me and kept the gun in my face, while a second man, behind me throughout, was behind me still. I hadn’t had a look at him yet, but I could sense his presence and smell his beer-and-tobacco breath.

“You ought to quit sticking your nose into storage sheds in Jersey,” the one with the gun said.

“All right.”

“Huh?”

“I said all right. You want me out of it and I want out myself. No problem.”

“You trying to be smart?”

“I’m trying to stay alive,” I said, “and to save us all a headache. Especially me. I took a job that’s not going anywhere and I was just on my way to tell the man to find himself another boy. I’m a married man and I’m not a kid anymore and I don’t need the aggravation.”

His nostrils flared and his eyebrows went up a notch. “They said you were a tough customer,” he said.

“Years ago. See how tough you are when you get to be my age.”

“And you’re ready to forget the whole thing? Jersey, the cases of hooch, the two Irish guys?”

“What Irish guys?”

He looked at me.

I said, “See? It’s forgotten.”

He gave me a long look, and I read disappointment in his features. “Well,” he said. “Turns out you’re easier than you figured to be, but I still got to do what I got to do.” I had an idea what that meant, and I knew I was right when the man behind me took hold of my upper arms and held on tight. The one in front tucked his gun under his belt and made his right hand into a fist.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told him.

“Call it a convincer.”

He hit me right at the belt line, putting some muscle behind the blow. I had time to tense my stomach muscles, and that helped some, but he threw a good punch, getting his shoulder into it.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just a couple more, huh?”

The hell with that. I didn’t want to take a couple more. I set myself, visualizing my move before I made it, and he drew back his fist, and I shifted a foot and bore down full force on the instep of the son of a bitch who had my arms pinned. I felt bones snap. He cried and let go, and I stepped forward and threw a quick right, hitting the other son of a bitch a glancing blow on the side of the face.

I guess he didn’t care for boxing when his opponent could hit back. He stepped back himself and tugged at the gun wedged under his belt, and I moved in on him, feinted with my right, and put everything I had into a left hook aimed at his right side just under his rib cage.

I hit what I aimed at, and it worked the way it was supposed to. I’ve seen boxers go down and stay down from a single blow to the liver. I don’t hit as hard as they do, but I wasn’t wearing gloves to cushion the blow, either. He dropped as if he’d been cut off at the knees and rolled on the sidewalk, clutching his middle and moaning.

The gun hit the sidewalk. I snatched it up and whirled around in time to catch the second man, the one whose foot I’d stomped, bearing down on me. He pulled up short when he saw the gun.

“Beat it,” I said. “Come on, move! Get the hell out!”

His face was in the shadows and I couldn’t read it. He looked at me, weighing the odds, and my finger tightened on the trigger. Maybe he noticed, maybe that made his decision for him. He drew back, deeper into the shadows, and scuttled around the corner and out of sight. He was limping a little, favoring the foot I’d damaged but moving quickly all the same. He had sneakers on, I noticed, while I was wearing a pair of regular leather shoes. If it had been the other way around, I might not have been able to break his hold on my arms.

The other guy, the one with the plastered-down hair, was still on the ground, still moaning. I pointed the gun at him. It had looked much larger when it had been aimed at me than it felt now in my hand. I stuffed his into my own waistband, wincing at the soreness where his opening shot had landed. My middle was tender already, and it would be ten times worse in the morning.

He didn’t have to hit me, the son of a bitch.

My anger flared, and I looked down at him and caught him looking back up at me. I drew back a foot to kick him in the head. Kick his fucking head in, the son of a bitch.

But I overruled myself and held back. I didn’t kick him.

My mistake.