Out on the Cutting Edge

I walked north on Broadway, shaking off bums before they could launch their spiel. If I was part of a real detective agency, I thought, maybe I could give clients better value for their money, maybe I could operate effectively and efficiently instead of fumbling around like some trench-coated refugee from a 1940's film. If it occurred to me, say, that Paula Hoeldtke might have left the country, I could interface with a Washington-based agency and find out if she'd applied for a passport. I could hire as many operatives as her father's budget could stand and check airline manifests for the couple of weeks around the date of her probable disappearance. I could—

Hell, there were lots of things I could do.

Maybe nothing would work. Maybe any further effort to track down Paula was just a waste of time and money. If so, I could drop the case and pick up something else.

The way things stood, I was holding on to the damn thing because I didn't have anything better to do.

Durkin had said I was like a dog with a bone, and he was right, but there was more to it than that. I was a dog who didn't have but one bone, and when I put it down I had no choice but to pick it back up again.

Stupid way to go through life. Sifting through thin air, trying to find a girl who'd disappeared into it.

Troubling the final sleep of a dead friend, trying to establish that he'd been in a sober state of grace when he died, probably because I hadn't been able to do anything for him while he was alive.

And, when I wasn't doing one of those two things, I could go hide out at a meeting.

The program, they told you, was supposed to be a bridge back to life. And maybe it was for some people. For me it was turning out to be a tunnel, with another meeting at the end of it.

They said you couldn't go to too many meetings. They said the more meetings you went to, the faster and more comfortably you recovered.

But that was for newcomers. Most people reduced their attendance at meetings after a couple of years of sobriety. Some of us lived in meetings at the beginning, going to four or five a day, but nobody went on like that forever. People had lives to get on with, and they set about getting on with them.

For Christ's sake, what was I going to hear at a meeting that I hadn't already heard? I'd been coming for more than three years. I'd heard the same things over and over until the whole rap was coming out of my ears. If I had a life of my own, if I was ever going to have one, it was time to get on with it.

I could have said all of this to Jim, but it was too late to call him.

Besides, all I'd get in response would be the party line. Easy does it.

Keep it simple. One day at a time. Let go and let God. Live and let live.

The fucking wisdom of the ages.

I could have popped off at the meeting. That's what the meetings are there for. And I'm sure all those twenty-year-old junkies would have had lots of useful advice for me.

Jesus, I'd do as well talking to house plants.

Instead, I walked up Broadway and said it all to myself.

At Fiftieth Street, waiting for the light to change, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what Grogan's was like at night. It wasn't one yet. I could go over and have a Coke before they closed.

The hell, I was always a guy who felt at home in a saloon. I didn't have to drink to enjoy the atmosphere.

Why not?

"Zero blood alcohol," Bellamy said. "I didn't know anybody in this town ever had zero blood alcohol."

I could have introduced him to hundreds, starting with myself. Of course I might have had to start with someone else if I'd acted on impulse and gone to Grogan's. The inner voice urging me there had been perfectly reasonable and logical, and I hadn't tried to argue with it. I'd just kept walking north, keeping my options open, and I took a left at Fifty-seventh, and when I got to my hotel I went in and up to bed. I was brushing my teeth when he called in the morning to tell me about Eddie's blood alcohol, or lack

thereof.

I asked what else was in the report, and one item caught my attention. I asked him to repeat it, and then I asked a couple of other questions, and an hour later I was sitting in a hospital cafeteria in the East Twenties, sipping a cup of coffee that was better than Willa's, but just barely.

Michael Sternlicht, the assistant medical examiner who had performed the autopsy, was about Eddie's age. He had a round face, and the shape was echoed by the circular lenses of his heavy horn-rimmed glasses to give him a faintly owlish look. He was balding, and called attention to it by combing his remaining hair over the bald spot.

"He didn't have a lot of chloral in him," he told me. "I'd have to say it was insignificant."

"He was a sober alcoholic."