Out on the Cutting Edge

"Meaning he wouldn't take any mood-altering drugs? Not even a sleeping pill?" He sipped his coffee, made a face. "Maybe he wasn't that strict about it. I can assure you he couldn't have taken it to get high, not with the very low level in his bloodstream. Chloral hydrate doesn't much lend itself to abuse anyway, unlike the barbiturates and minor tranquilizers. There are people who take heavy doses of barbiturates and force themselves to stay awake, and the drug has a paradoxical effect of energizing and exhilarating them. If you take a lot of chloral, all that happens is you fall down and pass out."

"But he didn't take enough for that?"

"Nowhere near enough. His blood levels suggest he took in the neighborhood of a thousand milligrams, which is a normal dose to bring on sleep. It would make it a little easier for him to get drowsy and nod off, and it would aid him in sleeping through the night if he was prone to restlessness."

"Could it have been a factor in his death?"

"I don't see how. All my findings point to a classic textbook case of autoerotic asphyxiation. I'd guess he took his sleeping pill not too long before he died. Maybe he was planning to go right to sleep, then changed his mind and decided to squeeze in a hand of sexual solitaire.

Or he might have been in the habit

of taking a pill first, so that he could just slip right off to sleep as soon as he finished his fun and games.

Either way, I don't think the chloral would have had any real effect. You know how it works?"

"More or less."

"They do it," he said, "and they get away with it. They have their heightened orgasm and they evidently enjoy it, so they make a regular practice of it. Even when they know about the dangers, their survival seems to prove to them that they know the right way to do it."

He took off his glasses, polished them with the tail of his lab coat.

"The thing is," he said, "there is no right way to do it, and sooner or later your luck runs out. You see, a little pressure on the carotid"— he reached across to touch the side of my neck—"and it triggers a reflex that slows the heartbeat way down. That evidently has something to do with boosting the thrill of orgasm, but what it can also do is make you lose consciousness, and you have no control over that. When that happens, gravity tightens the noose, and you can't do anything about it because you're out of it, you don't know what's happening.

Trying to be careful doing it is like exercising caution during Rus-sian roulette. No matter how successful you've been in the past, you've got the same chance of blowing it the next time. The only careful way to do it is not to do it at all."

I had taken a cab downtown to see Sternlicht. I took a couple of buses back, and got to Willa's just as she was on her way out.

She was wearing a pair of jeans I hadn't seen before, paint-smeared, ragged at the cuffs. Her hair was pinned up and tucked out of sight behind a beige scarf. She was wearing a man's white button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and her blue tennis shoes were paint-spattered to match the jeans. She carried a gray metal toolbox, rusty around the locks and hinges.

"I must have known you were coming," she said. "That's why I dressed. I've got a plumbing emergency across the street."

"Don't they have a super over there?"

"Sure, and I'm it. I've got three buildings to take care of besides this one. That way I don't just have a place to live, I also have something to live on." She shifted the toolbox from one hand to the other. "I can't stand and chat, they'll have a full-scale flood over there. Do you want to come watch or would you

rather make yourself a cup of coffee and wait for me?"

I told her I'd wait, and she walked inside with me and let me into her apartment. I asked her if I could have Eddie's key.

"You want to go up there? What for?"

"Just to look around."

She worked his key off her ring, then gave me one for her apartment as well. "So you can get back in,"

she said. "It's the top lock, it locks automatically when you pull the door shut. Don't forget to double-lock the door upstairs when you're through."

Eddie's windows had been wide open ever since Andreotti and I had opened them. The smell of death was still in the air, but it had grown faint, and wasn't really unpleasant unless you happened to recognize it for what it was.

It would be easy enough to get rid of the rest of the smell. Once the curtains and bedding were gone, once the furniture and clothing and personal effects were out on the street for the trash pickup, you probably wouldn't be able to smell a thing. Swab down the floors and spray a little Lysol around and the last traces would vanish. People die every day, and landlords clean up after them, and new tenants are in their place by the first of the month.

Life goes on.

I was looking for chloral hydrate, but I didn't know where he kept it. There was no medicine cabinet.