Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

Mick Ballou at Grogan’s, on our most recent night together. It was what he thought of as a sober night, in that he was passing up the whiskey and staying with beer. The beer in this instance was Guinness, and I could see his big fist wrapped around a pint of the black stuff. The smell of it came to me, dark and rich and grainy.

I got all of this in a rush, one image after another, and each overlaid heavily with scents, singly or in combination. Smell, they say, is the oldest and most primal sense, the sure trigger for memory. It bypasses the thought process and goes straight to the most primitive part of the brain. It doesn’t pass Go, it doesn’t collect its thoughts.

I stood there, letting it all come at me, taking in what I could of it. I don’t want to make too much of this. I was not Saul of Tarsus, knocked off his horse en route to Damascus, nor was I AA’s founder wrapped up in his famous white-light experience. All I did was remember — or imagine, or both — a whole slew of things one right after the other.

It couldn’t have taken much time. Seconds, I would think. Dreams are like that, I understand, extending over far less of the sleeper’s time than it would require to recount them. At the end there was just the candle — the soft glow of it, the smell of the burning wax and wick.

I had to sit down again and think about what I’d just experienced. Then I had to walk around for a while, going over every frame in my memory like an assassination buff poring over the Zapruder film.

I couldn’t blink it away or shrug it off. I knew something I hadn’t known before.

“The first night I went to Whitfield’s place,” I told Elaine. “TJ was over for dinner, we were watching the fights together—”

“In Spanish. I remember.”

“—and Whitfield called. And I went over there and talked with him.”

“And?”

“And I remembered something,” I said, and paused. After a long moment she asked me if I was planning on sharing it with her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m still sorting it out. And trying to think of a way to say it that won’t sound ridiculous.”

“Why worry about that? There’s nobody here but us chickens.”

There could have been. We were in her shop on Ninth Avenue, surrounded by the artwork and furnishings she dealt in. Anyone could have rung the bell and been buzzed in to look at the pictures and perhaps buy something, possibly one of the chairs we were sitting on. But it was a quiet afternoon, and for now we were alone and undisturbed.

I said, “There was no liquor on his breath.”

“Whitfield, you’re talking about.”

“Right.”

“You don’t mean at the end, when he drank the poison and died. You mean the night you first met him.”

“Well, I’d met him before. I’d worked for the man. But yes, I’m talking about the night I went to his apartment. He’d told me on the phone that he’d received a death threat from Will, and I went over there to suggest ways he might go about protecting himself.”

“And there was no liquor on his breath.”

“None. You know how it is with me. I’m a sober alcoholic, I can damn near smell a drink on the other side of a concrete wall. If I’m on a crowded elevator and the little guy in the far corner had a thimbleful of something alcoholic earlier in the day, I smell it as surely as if I just walked into a brewery. It doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t make me wish I were drinking or that the other person weren’t, but I could no more fail to notice it than if somebody turned out the lights.”

“I remember when I had the chocolate.”

“The chocolate... oh, with the liquid center.”

She nodded. “Monica and I were visiting this friend of hers who was recovering from a mastectomy, and she passed around these chocolates someone had given her. And I got piggy, because these were very good chocolates, and I had four of them, and the last one had a cherry-brandy filling. And I had it half swallowed before I realized what it was, and then I swallowed the rest of it, because what was I going to do, spit it out? That’s what you’d have done, you’d have had reason to, but I’m not an alcoholic, I’m just a person who doesn’t drink, so it wouldn’t kill me to swallow it.”

“And it didn’t make you take off all your clothes.”

“It didn’t have any effect whatsoever, as far as I know. There couldn’t have been very much brandy involved. There was a cherry in there, too, so that didn’t leave much room for brandy.” She shrugged. “Then I came home and gave you a kiss and you looked as startled as I’ve ever seen you.”

“It took me by surprise.”

“I thought you were going to sing me a chorus of ‘Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine.’”

“I don’t even know the tune.”

“Do you want me to hum a little? But we’re straying from the subject. The point is you’re super aware of the smell of booze and you didn’t smell it on Adrian Whitfield. Could it be, Holmes, that the man hadn’t been drinking?”

“But he said he had.”

“Oh?”

“It was a funny conversation,” I recalled. “He started out by announcing that he didn’t drink, and that got my attention because he was uncapping the scotch bottle even as he said it. Then he qualified it by saying he didn’t drink the way he used to, and that he pretty much limited himself to one drink a day.”

“That would be enough for anybody,” she said, “if you had a big enough glass.”

“For some of us,” I said, “you’d need a bathtub. Anyway, he went on to say that this particular day had been an exception, what with the letter from Will, and that he’d had a drink when he left the office and another when he got home to his apartment.”

“And you didn’t smell them on his breath.”

“No.”

“If he brushed his teeth—”

“Wouldn’t matter. I’d still smell the alcohol.”

“You’re right, he’d just wind up smelling like crème de menthe. I notice alcohol on people’s breath, too, because I don’t drink. But I’m nowhere near as aware of it as you are.”

“All the years I drank,” I said, “I never once smelled alcohol on anybody’s breath, and it hardly ever occurred to me that anyone could smell it on mine. Jesus, I must have gone around smelling of it all the time.”

“I kind of liked it.”

“Really?”

“But I like it better this way,” she said, and kissed me. After a few minutes she went back to her chair and said, “Whew. If we were not in a semi-public place—”

“I know.”

“Where anyone could ring the bell at any moment, even though no one has in the longest time—” She heaved a sigh. “What do you think it means?”

“I think we’re still hot for each other,” I said, “after all these years.”

“Well, I know that. I mean the booze that wasn’t on Whitfield’s breath, which is uncannily like the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime, isn’t it? What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re sure you noticed it at the time? Noticed the absence of it, I mean, and the contradiction between what he said and what you observed. It wasn’t just something your imagination supplied when you were lighting candles and cursing the darkness?”

“I’m positive,” I said. “I thought of it at the time, and then I just plain forgot about it because there were too many far more important things to think about. Here was a man sentenced to death by a killer who’d built up a pretty impressive track record. He wanted me to help him figure out a way to stay alive. That had more of a claim on my attention than the presence or absence of booze on his breath.”