Out on the Cutting Edge

I woke up not sure if it was a dream and not entirely certain where I was. It was six in the morning and I wouldn't have wanted to go back to sleep even if I could, for fear of slipping back into the dream. I got up and dressed, not showering to keep from waking her. I was tying my shoes when I felt that I was being watched, and I turned to see her looking at me.

"It's early," I said. "Go back to sleep. I'll call you later."

I went back to my hotel. There was a message for me. Jim Faber had called, but it was far too early to call him back. I went upstairs and showered and shaved, then stretched out on the bed for a minute and surprised myself by dozing off. I hadn't even felt tired, but I wound up sleeping for three hours and woke up groggy.

I took another shower and shook off the grogginess. I called Jim at his shop.

"I missed you last night," he said. "I was just wondering how you were doing."

"I'm fine."

"I'm glad to hear it. You missed a great qualification."

"Oh?"

"Guy from Midtown Group. Very funny stuff. He went through a period where he kept trying to kill himself and couldn't get it right. He couldn't swim a stroke, so he rented a flat-bottom rowboat and rowed for miles. Finally, he stood up, said. 'Goodbye, cruel world,' and threw himself over the side."

"And?"

"And he was on a sandbar. He was in two feet of water."

"Sometimes you can't do a single thing right."

"Yeah, everybody has days like that."

"I had a drunk dream last night," I said.

"Oh?"

"I drank half a beer before I realized what I was doing. Then I realized, and I felt horrible, and I drank the rest of it."

"Where was this?"

"I don't remember the details."

"No, where was it you spent the night?"

"Nosy bastard, aren't you? I stayed over with Willa."

"That's her name? The super?"

"That's right."

"Was she drinking?"

"Not enough to matter."

"Not enough to matter to whom?"

"Jesus Christ," I said. "I was with her for about eight hours, not counting the time we slept, and in all that time she had two beers, one with dinner and one after. Does that make her an alcoholic?"

"That's not the question. The question is does it make you uncomfortable."

"I can't remember when I last spent a more comfortable night."

"What brand of beer was she drinking?"

"Beck's. What's the difference?"

"What did you drink in your dream?"

"I don't remember."

"What did it taste like?"

"I don't remember the taste. I wasn't aware of it."

"That's a hell of a note. If you're going to drink in your dreams, at least you ought to be able to taste it and enjoy it. You want to get together for lunch?"

"I can't. I've got some things I have to do."

"Maybe I'll see you tonight, then."

"Maybe."

I hung up, irritated. I felt as though I was being treated like a child, and my response was to turn childishly irritable. What difference did it make what kind of beer I drank in my dream?

Andreotti wasn't on duty when I got over to the precinct house. He was downtown, testifying before a grand jury. The guy he'd been partnered with, Bill Bellamy, couldn't understand what I wanted with the medical examiner's report.

"You were there," he said. "It's open and shut. Time of death was sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, that's according to the preliminary report from the man on the scene. All evidence on the scene supports a finding of accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation.

Everything— the pornography, the position of the body, the nudity, everything. We see these all the time, Scudder."

"I know."

"Then you probably know it's the best-kept secret in America, because what paper's going to print that the deceased died jerking off with a rope around his neck? And it's not just kids. We had one last year, this was a married guy and his wife found him. Decent people, beautiful apartment on West End Avenue.

Married fifteen years! Poor woman didn't understand, couldn't understand. She couldn't even believe that he masturbated, let alone that he liked to strangle hisself while he did it."

"I understand how it works."

"Then what's your interest? You got some kind of an insurance angle, your client can't collect if you get a suicide verdict?"

"I haven't got a client. And I doubt he had any insurance."

"Because I remember we had an insurance investigator come up in connection with the gentleman from West End Avenue. He had a whole lot of coverage, too. Might have been as much as a million dollars."

"And they didn't want to pay it?"

"They were going to have to pay something. Suicide'll only nullify a policy for a certain amount of time after it's taken out, to prevent you from signing up when you've already decided to kill yourself. This case, he'd had the policy long enough so suicide didn't cancel it. So what was the hook?" He frowned, then brightened. "Oh, right. He had that double indemnity clause where they pay you twice as much for accidental death. I have to say I never saw the logic to that. I mean, dead is dead.