Even the Wicked

She told them she'd seen no one in the apartment while she cleaned it, no one except for the man who'd let her in and out, and who'd sat watching talk shows on television all the time she was there. She could not recall seeing him anywhere near where the bottles of liquor were kept, although she couldn't say what he'd done when she was in one of the other rooms. For her part, she had been at the bar, and might even have touched the bottle while dusting it and its fellows. Had she by any chance sampled it, or any of the other bottles, while she was dusting?

The very suggestion outraged her, and they'd been a while calming her down to the point where they could resume questioning her.

The only fingerprints on the bottle were Whitfield's. All that suggested was that the killer had wiped the bottle off after adding the cyanide, and one could hardly have assumed otherwise. It also implied that no one but Whitfield had touched the bottle after its contents were poisoned, but, as far as anyone knew, no one but Whitfield had laid a hand on that particular bottle since it had come into the house.

It had been delivered two weeks before Will mailed his threat against Whitfield to Marty McGraw. A liquor store on Lexington Avenue had delivered the order, consisting in all of two fifths of Glen Farquhar single-malt scotch, one quart of Finlandia vodka, and a pint of Ronrico rum. The rum and vodka remained unopened, and Whitfield had worked his way through one bottle of the scotch and was a third of the way into the second bottle when he drank the drink that killed him.

"You don't drink," he'd said to me. "Neither do I." He'd been enough of a drinker to order two bottles of his regular tipple at a time, but a light enough hitter that it had taken him over a month to drink as much as he had. A fifth holds twenty-six ounces, or something like eighteen drinks if you figure he poured approximately an ounce and a half of scotch over his two ice cubes. Eighteen drinks from the bottle he'd finished, another six or so from bottle #2—I decided the math worked out right. There were nights when he had his drink before he came home, and other nights when he evidently didn't drink at all.

* * *

That night Elaine and I walked over to Armstrong's for dinner. She had a big salad. I had a bowl of chili and stirred a large side order of minced Scotch bonnet peppers into it. It must have been hot enough to blister paint, but you couldn't have proved it by me. I was barely aware of what I was eating.

She talked some about her day at her shop, and about what TJ had said when he dropped by to jive with her. I talked about my day. And then we both fell silent. Classical music played over the sound system, barely audible through the buzz of conversations around us. Our waiter came around to find out if we wanted more Perrier. I said we didn't, but he could bring me a cup of black coffee when he had a moment. Elaine said she'd have herb tea. "Any kind," she said. "Surprise me."

He brought her Red Zinger. "What a surprise," she said.

I tried my coffee, and something must have shown in my face, because Elaine's eyebrows went up a

notch.

"For an instant there," I said, "I could taste booze in the coffee."

"But it's not really there."

"No. Good coffee, but only coffee."

"What they call a sense-memory, I guess."

"I guess."

You could say I came by it honestly. Years ago, before Jimmy lost his lease and relocated a long block to the west, Armstrong's had been situated on Ninth Avenue around the corner from my hotel, and it had functioned for me almost as an extension of my personal living space. I socialized there, I isolated there, I met clients there. I put in long hours of maintenance drinking there, and sometimes I did more than maintain and got good and drunk at the bar or at my table in the back. My usual drink was bourbon, and when I didn't drink it neat, the way God made it, I would stir it into a mug of coffee. Each flavor, it seemed to me then, complemented and enhanced the other, even as the caffeine and alcohol balanced one another, the one keeping you awake while the other softened the edges of consciousness.

I have known people who, when quitting smoking, have had to give up coffee temporarily because they so strongly associate the two. I had problems of my own getting sober, but coffee was not one of them, and I have been able to go on drinking it with pleasure, and apparently with impunity, at an age when most of my contemporaries have found it advisable to switch to decaf. I like the stuff, especially when it's good, the way Elaine makes it at home (although she hardly ever has a cup herself) or the way they brew it in the Seattle-style coffee bars that have sprouted up all over town. The coffee's always been good at Armstrong's, rich and full-bodied and aromatic, and I took a sip now, savoring it, and wondered why I'd tasted bourbon.

"There was nothing you could have done," Elaine said. "Was there?"

"No."

"You told him he ought to leave the country."