Out on the Cutting Edge

I spent more than seventy-two dollars' worth of mental energy trying to decide what to do with the forty bucks in the Bible and the thirty-two dollars in his wallet. Ultimately I appointed myself his executor and hired myself retroactively to solve his murder, and paid myself seventy-two dollars for my services on his behalf. I dropped the empty wallet in a trash basket, where it no doubt proved a major disappointment for some sharp-eyed scavenger.

Eddie was buried out of Twomey & Sons funeral parlor, on Fourteenth Street next to St. Bernard's.

Mickey Ballou arranged for the service and footed the bill for it.

"At least he'll have a priest reading over him and a decent burial in a proper cemetery," he said, "though you and I'll probably be the only ones

there for him." But I mentioned the event at a meeting, and as it turned out there were about two dozen of us who came to see him off.

Ballou was astonished, and drew me aside. "I thought it'd just be you and me," he said. "If I'd known there'd be all this turnout I'd have laid on something after, a couple of bottles and some food. Do you suppose we could ask them all to come back to Grogan's for a few jars?"

"These people won't want to do that," I said.

"Ah," he said, and looked thoughtfully around the room. "They don't drink."

"Not today."

"And that's where they knew him from. And they're here for him now." He considered this for a moment, then nodded shortly. "I guess he came out of it all right," he said.

"I guess he did."

Not long after Eddie's funeral I got a call from Warren Hoeldtke.

They'd just had a small service for Paula, and I guess his call to me was a part of the mourning process.

"We announced that she'd died in a boating accident," he said. "We talked it over, and that seemed like the best way to handle it. And I suppose it's the truth, if not the whole truth."

He said he and his wife had agreed that I hadn't been paid enough for my services. "I've put a check in the mail to you," he said. I didn't argue with him. I'd been a New York cop long enough not to argue with people who wanted to give me money.

"And if you ever want a car," he said, "you're more than welcome to anything on the lot at actual cost. It would be a genuine plea-sure for me."

"I wouldn't know where to park it."

"I know," he said. "Personally I wouldn't own a car in New York if someone gave it to me. But then I wouldn't care to live there either, with or without a car. Well. You should have that check in a few days."

It took three days, and it was for $1,500. I tried to decide if it bothered me to take it, and I concluded that it didn't. I had earned it, had put in sufficient effort to justify it and had produced sufficient results. I had pushed against the wall, and the wall had moved a little, so I had done real work and deserved real pay for it.

I put the check in the bank and drew some cash and paid some bills. And I took a tenth of the sum in singles and made sure I always had a supply in my pocket, and I went on giving them out haphazardly to some of the people who stood on the street and asked for them.

The same day the check came, I had dinner with Jim Faber and told him the whole story. I needed an ear to pour it all into, and he was decent enough to listen to it. "I figured out how the payment breaks down," I told him. "A thousand dollars for finding out how Paula died and fifteen hundred for lying about it."

"You couldn't tell him the truth."

"I don't see how I could have, no. I told him a truth. I told him that she died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I told him that the person who killed her was dead. Burial at sea sounds a lot more wholesome than getting dumped in a pigpen, but what's the real difference? Either way you're dead, and either way something eats you."

"I suppose."

"Fish or hogs," I said. "What's the difference, when you come right down to it?"

He nodded. "Why did you want Willa to listen in on your conversation with the Hoeldtkes?"

"I wanted to start with the focus on Paula instead of on Eddie, so I could come up on her blind side.

And I wanted her to have the same version they were getting, so she couldn't blurt anything out after she was in police custody." I thought about it. "Maybe I just wanted to lie to her," I said.

"Why?"

"Because I'd already shared a lot of myself with her, before I got Eddie's autopsy results and found the chloral hydrate in her medicine chest. From that point I started drawing away. I never slept with her after that. The one time we went out, I think I encouraged her to drink. I wanted her to pass out, I wanted us to keep our clothes on. I wasn't sure she'd done it, I didn't know everything at that point, but I was afraid of it and I didn't want the intimacy, or the illusion of intimacy."

"You cared about her."

"I was starting to."

"How do you feel now?"

"Not great."