Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

The upended orange crate beside his bed held a stack of AA literature — the Big Book, the Twelve & Twelve, some pamphlets, and a slender paperback called Living Sober . There was a Bible, the Douay Reims version, with a bookplate indicating it had been a first communion gift to Mary Scanlan. On another page, a family tree indicated that Mary Scanlan had been married to Peter John Dunphy, and that a son, Edward Thomas Dunphy, had been born a year and four months after the wedding date.

I flipped through the Bible and it opened to a chapter in Second Chronicles where Eddie had stashed a pair of twenty-dollar bills. I couldn’t think what to do with them. I didn’t want to take the money, but it felt odd to leave it. I gave the whole question a good forty dollars worth of thought, then returned the bills to the Bible and put the Bible back where I’d found it.

His dresser top held a small tin with a couple of spot Band-Aids left in it, a single shoelace, an empty cigarette pack, forty-three cents in change, and a pair of subway tokens. The dresser’s top drawer contained mostly socks, but there was also a pair of gloves, wool with leather palms, a Colt.45 brass belt buckle, and a plush-lined box of the sort cuff-link sets come in. This one held a high school ring with a blue stone, a gold-plated tie bar, and a single cuff link with three small garnets on it. There had been a fourth garnet but it was gone.

The underwear drawer contained, along with shorts and T-shirts, a Gruen wristwatch with half its strap missing.

The erotic magazines were gone. I guessed they’d been bagged and tagged and taken along as evidence, and they’d probably spend eternity in a warehouse somewhere. I didn’t come across any other erotica, or any sex aids, either.

I found his wallet in his trousers pocket. It held thirty-two dollars in cash, a foil-wrapped condom, and one of those all-purpose identification cards they sell in schlock shops around Times Square. They’re usually bought by people who want fake ID, although they wouldn’t fool anyone. Eddie had filled his out legitimately with his correct name and address and the same date of birth as the one in the family Bible, along with height and weight and hair and eye color. It seemed to be the only ID he had. No driver’s license, and no Social Security card. If they gave him one at Green Haven, he hadn’t troubled to hang on to it.

I went through the other drawers in the dresser, I checked the refrigerator. There was some milk that was starting to turn and I poured it out. I left a loaf of Roman Meal bread, jars of peanut butter and jelly. I stood on a chair and checked the closet shelf. I found old newspapers, a baseball glove that must have been his when he was a kid, and an unopened box of votive candles in small clear glass holders. I didn’t find anything in the pockets of the clothes in the closet, or in the two pairs of shoes or the rubber overshoes on the closet floor.

After a while I took a plastic grocery bag and put in the Bible and the AA books and his wallet. I left everything else and let myself out of there.

I was locking the door when I heard a noise, someone behind me clearing her throat. I turned to see a woman standing at the head of the stairs. She was a tiny thing with wispy gray hair and eyes huge behind thick cataract lenses. She wanted to know who I was. I told her my name, and that I was a detective.

“For poor Dr. Dunphy,” she said. “That I knew all his days, and his parents before him.” She had groceries in a bag like the one I was carrying. She set her bag down, rummaged in her purse for her key. “They killed him,” she said, dolefully.

“They?”

“Ach, they’ll kill us all. Poor Mrs. Grod on the floor above, that they crept in off the fire escape and cut her ould throat.”

“When did this happen?”

“And Mr. White,” she said. “Dead of the cancer, and him so wasted and yellow at the end you’d take him for a Chinaman. We’ll all be dead and gone soon enough,” she said, wringing her hands with horror or with relish. “Every last one of us.”

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.”