XXII

THEN IT LOOKS as though we’re done,” Greg Stillman said. “They’re all in the clear.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Not exactly. I had a problem and now it’s been resolved, and I’m grateful to you for resolving it. But—”

“But it feels incomplete. Unfinished.”

“Yes, of course. How do you feel, Matt? You’re the one who’s been out there doing the work. All I did was pick up the tab.”

And all I’d done was go through the motions. I was in my hotel room with a cup of coffee from the deli downstairs, looking across the rooftops at some lighted offices all the way downtown. I’d decided I could make my final report over the phone. There was no real need to sit in another coffee shop while I told my client we were out of suspects.

“I feel all right,” I said. “I’d like it better if I’d managed to crack the case, but that’s not what you hired me for. That’s a police matter anyway.”

“But they won’t do anything.”

“We don’t know that. It’ll be an open file, and when some new information comes their way, they’ll pick it up and work it. Greg, you wanted to be sure you weren’t holding out on them. Well, you’re not. Whoever killed your sponsee, it wasn’t one of the five people on his Eighth Step list.”

“The man in prison—”

“Piper MacLeish.”

“Obviously he couldn’t have done it. Unless they give you a weekend pass so that you can even an old score. But couldn’t he pass the word to somebody outside?”

“He’d have had to get the word himself. There’s nothing to indicate that Jack ever visited him, or even wrote to him. And it doesn’t really add up emotionally anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Say you’re in prison, serving a long sentence for something you did. ‘Hi, remember me? Say, I want to apologize because I’m the guy who ratted you out, and you wouldn’t have wound up in the joint if it wasn’t for me.’ ”

“What a marvelous Ninth Step declaration.”

“Well, he might have worded it differently, but that would be the gist of it. And what’s MacLeish’s reaction? ‘That son of a bitch, he did this to me, I’d better call in a favor and have him killed.’ No, we already crossed the Piper off the list, and I think we can leave it that way.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“I was a cop for a lot of years,” I said, “and I wasn’t the NYPD equivalent of a Step Nazi. I learned how to overlook things, and sometimes I profited financially from what I overlooked. But homicide was always different. When somebody got killed and it landed on my desk, I wanted to clear the case.

“That didn’t necessarily mean that anybody wound up going away for it. That was the goal, but it didn’t always work out that way. Sometimes I knew who did it but couldn’t make a case that would stand up. But I’d done what I could, and the case was solved, so my work was done.”

“And in this case?”

“My work’s done,” I said. “Even though the case isn’t solved. So it feels incomplete to me, and yes, maybe a little disappointing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t let go of it. And I will. I pretty much already have.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe it’s just my ego.”

“Because a perfect being like you ought to be able to do something?”

“That’s part of it, Matt. The other part is further confirmation that I’m not really the piece of shit the world revolves around. Remember what I told you? That I got him killed, that I pushed him into the Eighth and Ninth Steps and that’s why he was murdered. But I guess that wasn’t it after all. I guess I’m not the prime mover of the universe. I guess I’m just another drunk.”

At the meeting that night I mentioned that I’d spent an hour or two with a fellow who’d spent the past twenty-plus years quietly stoned on marijuana. “He knew not to offer me any,” I said, “and he didn’t smoke while I was there, but he’d smoked before I got there and I’m sure he fired up a joint the minute I left. The apartment reeked of it.”

A woman named Donna came up to me on the break. She was a semi-regular at St. Paul’s, and had spoken there for her third anniversary a few months ago. Her approach was purposeful, and I assumed she had something to say about marijuana and its effects over time. I didn’t recall a whole lot of pot in her story, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find something there to identify with.

But it wasn’t that at all. Some months ago she’d moved in with her boyfriend, another sober alcoholic. He was still an alcoholic, but he was no longer a sober one, and she wanted out.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said. She had long auburn hair, and kept pushing it out of her eyes, and it kept falling back across her face. “I’d heard his story, for God’s sake. I knew he went out every time he put a couple of years together. But he was sober when I met him, and he had more sober time than I did, and I thought he’d stay sober.”

But he hadn’t. She’d kept her rent-stabilized apartment—“What is it they say? I may be crazy but I’m not stupid”—and that’s where she was staying now, but she had a whole lot of stuff at his place in Cobble Hill, and she hated to leave it but was afraid to go there by herself.

“I don’t think he’d do anything,” she said, “because he’s a very gentle guy. At least when he’s sober. But he does have a history of spousal abuse. I’m not telling tales, it’s in his qualification, he mentions it every time he tells his story. And he always says it only happened when he was drunk. Well, he’s drunk now, isn’t he?”

“You want me to go with you.”

“Would you?” She put her hand on my wrist. “Not as a favor. I mean it would be a favor, a major one, but I’d want to pay you for it. In fact I’d insist on it.”

“You’re a friend,” I said, “and it’s the sort of thing friends do for each other. I don’t think—”

“No,” she said firmly. “My sponsor was the one who suggested this. And she was very clear that I had to pay you.”

She had the time picked—Saturday afternoon—and had arranged our transportation. Did I know Richard Lassiter? Bald Richard, gay Richard, speed freak Richard? He had a car, and everything of hers in Cobble Hill would fit easily in the trunk and backseat. He was going to pick her up at Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam at three sharp, and they could stop for me on the way to Brooklyn. I said it would be simpler if I met the two of them uptown, and that three o’clock would be fine.

“I’m paying Richard too,” she said. “He put up an argument but I insisted.”

“Sponsor’s orders.”

“Yes, but I think I’d have insisted anyway. He says he’ll come upstairs with me, in case Vinnie is there. I left a message on his machine, I’m coming Saturday afternoon, please don’t be there, di dah di dah di dah. But what do they call it when you take a sleeping pill and it keeps you awake?”

“A slip,” I said.

“Ha! Very good. No, I remember now, they call it a paradoxical effect. Very common with alcoholics. I think my phone message could have a paradoxical effect on Vinnie. ‘Stay away? The fuck I’ll stay away. Whose place is it, you toxic bitch?’ ”

“If Vinnie’s from Bensonhurst, you do a good imitation.”

“He is, as a matter of fact, and thank you. But if he’s there, well, Richard’s a sweetheart, but his is not the world’s most intimidating presence.”

“For that you want a thug like me.”

“An ex-cop,” she said, “and a man who can take care of himself on the mean streets of New York.”

“Including Brooklyn.”

“Including Brooklyn.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “A thug indeed,” she said. “Hardly that, my dear. Hardly that.”

After the meeting I joined the crowd at the Flame, and at one point the conversation centered on my share. “Do a lot of any substance,” a fellow named Brent said, “and something happens. If you drink, sooner or later you fall down a lot, you have accidents, you pick up DUIs, you crash cars, you wreck your liver—I could go on, but you get the point. If you do enough cocaine, your septum rots away and your nose caves in, and you damage your heart and God knows what else. Shoot speed, and it finds a variety of ways to kill you. Drop enough acid, and you go on a trip and can’t find your way back from it. Everything you do, it’s always got a price tag on it.”

Someone quoted the oil-filter commercial. “ ‘You can pay me now,’ ” she murmured, “ ‘or you can pay me later.’ ”

“With marijuana, what happens is subtler than that. What happens when you smoke enough marijuana is nothing happens. Your whole life just stays where it is, treading water.”

They batted that around a bit, and I said, “Yeah, that’s him, all right. The women in his life even stay the same age. His first girlfriend was twenty-five and they’ve all been twenty-five ever since. He’s living in the same apartment—”

“Well, that’s New York, Matt. Who moves out of a rent-controlled place?”

“Granted, but he’s using plastic milk crates for bookcases, and I’ll bet he’s had them performing that service for twenty years. On the other hand…”

“What?”

“Well,” I said, “I know the folly of comparing my inside to somebody else’s outside. And I know people have good days and bad days, and maybe I just caught him on a good day. And God knows this isn’t the life his parents had in mind for him when they paid his tuition at NYU. And if you check the dictionary you’ll find his picture next to arrested development.”

“But?”

“But I have to say the son of a bitch seems happy.”

I would have called Jan when I got in, but it was late and I decided to let it go until morning. I was up early, and when I came back from breakfast I called.

“I was just about to call you,” she said.

“But I beat you to it.”

“You did.”

“I want to confirm our date for Saturday,” I said. “But with the proviso that I may be late getting to the SoHo meeting. I’ve got a few hours of work, doing my impersonation of a thug.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I outlined my task in a couple of sentences. “So we’re leaving for Brooklyn at three,” I said, “and we can probably get there in half an hour, and get her things packed and loaded in the car in another hour, and a half hour to get home would put me under the shower around five o’clock. But.”

“But it could take a lot longer.”

“We might not even get going until three thirty or later. And Richard could easily get lost on the way to Cobble Hill, or hit heavy traffic. And there might not be a hassle with the drunken boyfriend, but if the possibility didn’t exist she wouldn’t need to bring me along. And the longer it all takes, the more I’ll need that shower.”

I waited for her to say something, and she didn’t. If I hadn’t heard her radio playing in the background I’d have thought we’d been disconnected.

“Well, that’s what I wanted to call you about,” she said.

“About Donna and Vinnie?”

“No, about Saturday night. I have to break our date.”

“Oh?”

“I’m getting together with my sponsor.”

“On Saturday night.”

“That’s right. Dinner and a meeting and a long talk that we really have to have.”

“Well,” I said. “I guess it’s not going to matter how long it takes me to get back from Cobble Hill.”

“Are you upset?”

“No,” I said. “Why should I be upset? You do what you have to do.”