Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

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.”

“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. The lavatory, in a tiny closet off the bedroom, held a commode and nothing else. His toothbrush hung in a holder above the kitchen sink, and there was half a tube of toothpaste, neatly rolled, on the window ledge nearby. In the cupboard nearest to the sink I found a couple of plastic razors, a can of shaving foam, a bottle of Rexall aspirin, and a pocket tin of Anacin. I opened the aspirin bottle and dumped its contents into my palm, and all I had was a handful of five-grain aspirin tablets. I put them back and tackled the Anacin tin, pressing the rear corners as indicated. Getting it open was enough to give you a headache, but all I found for my troubles were the white tablets the label had promised.