Out on the Cutting Edge

When Willa returned I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. She let herself in, put down her toolbox, and said, "Don't kiss me, I'm a mess. God, that's filthy work. I had to open up the bathroom ceiling, and all kinds of crap comes down on you when you do that."

"How did you learn plumbing?"

"I didn't, really. I'm good at fixing things and I picked up a lot of different skills over the years. I'm not a

plumber, but I know how to shut a system down and find a leak, and I can patch it, and sometimes the patch holds. For a while, anyway."

She opened the refrigerator and got herself a bottle of Beck's.

"Thirsty work. That plaster dust gets in your throat. I'm sure it's carcinogenic."

"Almost everything is."

She uncapped the beer, took a long swallow straight from the bottle, then got a glass from the drainboard and filled it. She said, "I need a shower, but first I need to sit down for a minute. Were you waiting long?"

"Just a few minutes."

"You must have spent a long time upstairs."

"I guess I must have. And then I spent a minute or two in a strange conversation." I recounted my meeting with the little wispy-haired woman and she nodded in recognition.

"That's Mrs. Mangan," she said. " 'Shure, an' we'll all be molderin'

in our graves, an' the wee banshees howlin' at our heels.' "

"You do a good Mrs. Mangan impression."

"It's a less useful talent than fixing leaky pipes. She's our resident crepe-hanger. She's been here forever, I think she may have been born in the building, and she has to be over eighty, wouldn't you say?"

"I'm not a good judge."

"Well, would you ask her for proof of age if she was trying to get the senior citizen rate at the movies?

She knows everybody in the neighborhood, all the old people anyway, and that means she's always got a funeral to go to." She drained her glass, poured the rest of the bottle into it. "I'll tell you something,"

she said. "I don't want to live forever."

"Forever's a long way off."

"I mean it, Matt. There's such a thing as living too long. It's tragic when somebody Eddie Dunphy's age dies. Or your Paula, with her whole life ahead of her. But when you get to be Mrs. Mangan's age, and living alone, with all her old friends gone—"

"How did Mrs. Grod die?"

"I'm trying to remember when that was. Over a year ago, I think, because it was in warm weather. A burglar killed her, he came in through the window. The apartments have window gates, but not all the tenants use them."

"There was a gate on Eddie's bedroom window, the one that opens into the fire escape. But it wasn't in use."

"People leave them open because it's harder to open and close the windows otherwise. Evidently someone went over the roofs and down the fire escape and got into Mrs. Grod's apartment that way.

She was in bed and must have awakened and surprised him. And he stabbed her." She sipped her beer.

"Did you find what you were looking for? For that matter, what were you looking for?"

"Pills."

"Pills?"

"But I couldn't find anything stronger than aspirin." I explained what Sternlicht had found, and the implications of his findings. "I was taught how to search an apartment, and I learned to do it thoroughly. I didn't pry up floorboards or take the furniture apart, but I made a pretty systematic search of the premises. If there was chloral hydrate there, I would have found it."

"Maybe it was his last pill."

"Then there'd be an empty vial somewhere."

"He might have thrown it out."

"It wasn't in his wastebasket. It wasn't in the garbage under the kitchen sink. Where else would he have tossed it?"

"Maybe somebody gave him a single pill, or a couple of pills. 'You can't sleep? Here, take one of these, they work every time.' As far as that goes, you said he was streetwise, didn't you? Not every pill sold in this neighborhood gets dispensed by a pharmacist. You can buy everything else on the street. I wouldn't be surprised if you could buy coral hydrate."

"Chloral hydrate."

"Chloral hydrate, then. Sounds like something a welfare mother would name her kid. 'Chloral, now you leave off pickin' on yo' brother!'

What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"You seem moody, though."

"Do I? Maybe I caught it upstairs. And what you said about people living too long. I was thinking last night that I don't want to wind up an old man living alone in a hotel room. And here I am, well on the way."

"Some old man."

I sat there and nursed my mood while she took a shower. When she came out I said, "I must have been

looking for more than pills, because what good would it have done me to find them?"

"I was wondering that myself."

"I just wish I knew what he wanted to tell me. He had something on his mind and he was just about ready to unload it, but I told him to take his time, to think it over. I should have sat down with him then and there."

"And then he'd still be alive?"

"No, but—"

"Matt, he didn't die because of what he said or didn't say. He died because he did something stupid and dangerous and his luck ran out."

"I know."