Even the Wicked

I wouldn't have wasted a quarter on an electric flame. But this church had the real thing, with three or four little candles lit. I looked at them, and my mind summoned up an image of Adrian Whitfield. I couldn't think what good it could do him to burn a candle on his behalf, but I found myself recalling Elaine's words. What could it hoit? So I slipped a dollar bill in the slot, lit one candle from the flame of another, and let myself think about the man.

I got a funny montage of images.

First I was seeing Adrian Whitfield at his apartment a few hours after he'd learned about Will's letter. He was pouring a drink even as he proclaimed himself a nondrinker, then explaining, talking about the drinks he'd had already that day.

Then I saw him sprawled on the carpet with Kevin Dahlgren hunkered down beside him, picking up the glass he'd dropped, sniffing at it. I hadn't been there to see it, had only heard Dahlgren's account of the moment, but the image came to me as clearly as if I'd witnessed it myself. I could even smell what Dahlgren had smelled, the odor of bitter almonds superimposed upon the aroma of good malt whiskey.

I'd never smelled that combination in my life, but my imagination was inventive enough to furnish it quite vividly.

The next flash I got was of Marty McGraw. He was sitting in the topless joint where I'd met him, a shot

glass clutched in one hand, a beer glass in the other. There was a belligerent expression on his face, and he was saying something but I couldn't make it out. The reek of cheap whiskey trailed up at me from the shot glass, the reek of stale beer from the other, and the two were united on his breath.

Adrian again, talking into a telephone. "I'm going to let the genie out," he said. "First one today."

Mick Ballou at Grogan's, on our most recent night together. It was what he thought of as a sober night, in that he was passing up the whiskey and staying with beer. The beer in this instance was Guinness, and I could see his big fist wrapped around a pint of the black stuff. The smell of it came to me, dark and rich and grainy.

I got all of this in a rush, one image after another, and each overlaid heavily with scents, singly or in combination. Smell, they say, is the oldest and most primal sense, the sure trigger for memory. It bypasses the thought process and goes straight to the most primitive part of the brain. It doesn't pass Go, it doesn't collect its thoughts.

I stood there, letting it all come at me, taking in what I could of it. I don't want to make too much of this.

I was not Saul of Tarsus, knocked off his horse en route to Damascus, nor was I AA's founder wrapped up in his famous white-light experience. All I did was remember—or imagine, or both—a whole slew of things one right after the other.

It couldn't have taken much time. Seconds, I would think. Dreams are like that, I understand, extending over far less of the sleeper's time than it would require to recount them. At the end there was just the candle—the soft glow of it, the smell of the burning wax and wick.

I had to sit down again and think about what I'd just experienced.

Then I had to walk around for a while, going over every frame in my memory like an assassination buff poring over the Zapruder film.

I couldn't blink it away or shrug it off. I knew something I hadn't known before.

11

"The first night I went to Whitfield's place," I told Elaine. "TJ was over for dinner, we were watching the fights together—"

"In Spanish. I remember."

"—and Whitfield called. And I went over there and talked with him."

"And?"

"And I remembered something," I said, and paused. After a long moment she asked me if I was planning on sharing it with her.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I guess I'm still sorting it out. And trying to think of a way to say it that won't sound ridiculous."

"Why worry about that? There's nobody here but us chickens."

There could have been. We were in her shop on Ninth Avenue, surrounded by the artwork and furnishings she dealt in. Anyone could have rung the bell and been buzzed in to look at the pictures and perhaps buy something, possibly one of the chairs we were sitting on. But it was a quiet afternoon, and for now we were alone and undisturbed.

I said, "There was no liquor on his breath."

"Whitfield, you're talking about."

"Right."

"You don't mean at the end, when he drank the poison and died.

You mean the night you first met him."

"Well, I'd met him before. I'd worked for the man. But yes, I'm talking about the night I went to his apartment. He'd told me on the phone that he'd received a death threat from Will, and I went over there to suggest ways he might go about protecting himself."

"And there was no liquor on his breath."