A Long Line of Dead Men

"I was rooting around in garbage cans," she said. "I was waking up in strange places, and not always alone. And I was a well brought-up Irish Catholic girl who never slept with anybody but my husband. I remember coming out of a blackout one time, and I won't tell you what I was doing or who I was doing it to, but all I could think was, 'Oh, Peggy, the nuns would not be proud of you now!' "

After she was done we passed the basket and went around the room. When it was my turn I found myself talking about how I'd gone looking for a security guard and found he'd been dismissed for drinking. "I had a strong sense of identification," I said. "My own drinking picked up after I left the police force. If I'd kept on drinking any longer than I did I'd have gone after jobs like this man's, and I'd have drunk my way out of them, too. I don't really know anything about him or what his life's like, but thinking about him has given me an idea of what my own life could have been like if I hadn't found this program. I'm just glad to be here, glad to be sober."

I went out for coffee after the meeting with a couple of the others and we continued informally the sharing we'd done at the meeting. I tried Shorter's number when we arrived at the coffee shop and tried it again fifteen minutes later. I tried it a third time on my way out, which must have been a few minutes after seven. When my quarter came back once again I used it to call Elaine.

There were no messages for me, she said, and the mail had held nothing of interest. I told her what I was up to, and that I might be out most of the evening. "If he had an answering machine," I said, "I'd leave a message on it and call him again in a day or two if I didn't hear from him. But he doesn't, and I'm in the neighborhood, and it's not a neighborhood I get to often."

"You don't have to explain it to me."

"I'm explaining it to myself. And it's not as though he's likely to have any answers. Any question I've got, the Forest Hills cops already asked. So how could he have anything for me?"

"Maybe you've got something for him."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing really. Well, there's a lecture and slide show at the French church. I might go to that, and if Monica wants to go with me maybe we'll have a Girls' Night Out afterward. You'll be having a late night, won't you?"

"I might."

"Because you were going to drop in on Mick, weren't you? Just so you're home in time for Marilyn's Chamber tomorrow night."

"You still want to go?"

"After the time we had last night?" I could picture the expression on her face. "Now more than ever. You're pretty hot stuff, Mr. Scudder, sir."

"Now cut that out."

" 'Now cut that out.' You know who you sound like? Jack Benny."

"I was trying to sound like Jack Benny."

"Well, in that case, it wasn't a very good imitation."

"You just said-"

"I know what I said. I love you, you old bear. What have you got to say about that?"

North of Eighty-sixth Street, the landscape on the Upper East Side is one of a neighborhood in transition, neither Yorkville nor East Harlem but reminiscent of both. Luxury condos rise across the street from low-income public-housing projects, the walls of both impartially scarred by unreadable graffiti. The upwardly mobile stride along with briefcases and grocery bags from D'Agostino's; others, no less mobile but headed in the opposite direction, shake paper cups of change and drink forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor, or suck on crack pipes that glow like fireflies.

Shorter's building turned out to be a six-story brick tenement on Ninety-fourth between Second and Third. In the vestibule I counted over fifty doorbells, each with a slot beside it for the tenant's name. More than half the slots were empty, and none had Shorter's name on it.

Originally the building would have had four rooms to a floor, but over the years they'd been partitioned and the apartment house turned into a rooming house. I'd been in and out of hundreds of such places over the years, and if each was different they were still somehow all the same. The cooking smells in the halls and stairwells changed with the ethnic origin of the inhabitants, but the other smells were a constant throughout the city and through the years. The reek of urine, the odor of mice, the unventilated stench of neglect. Now and then a room in one of those rabbit warrens would turn out to be bright and airy, clean and trim, but the buildings themselves were always dark and sorry and sordid.

Something like that would have been my next stop after the hotel. If I hadn't stopped drinking, the day would have come when I couldn't make the rent or talk them into carrying me until I caught a break. Or I'd have reached a point where, money or no, I no longer had the self-esteem to walk past the desk each day, and would have looked for something more in keeping with my station.