Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge

“I think I can see where this is going.”

“Of course, because I led off with the punch line. He goes on a business trip and he gets another phone call from his wife, and he says hello, how are you, what’s new, and she says, ‘Your mother is on the roof.’ “

“I guess that’s what I was doing. Telling him his daughter was on the roof. Were you able to follow the whole thing by hearing one side of the conversation?”

“I think so. How did you find all this out? I thought you went looking for a crook who used to know Eddie.”

“I did.”

“How did that lead to Paula?”

“Luck. He didn’t know anything about Eddie, but he knew people who took off the pirates in a dope deal. He put me on to somebody, and I asked the right questions, and I learned what I had to learn.”

“Pirates on the open sea,” she said. “It sounds like something out of an old movie.”

“That’s what Hoeldtke said.”

“Serendipity.”

“How’s that?”

“Serendipity. Isn’t that what you call it when you look for one thing and find something else?”

“It happens all the time in the kind of work I do. But I didn’t know there was a word for it.”

“Well, there is. What about all that business with her phone and answering machine? And all her clothes and things moved out, but the bed linens left.”

“None of it amounted to anything. My guess is she took a lot of her clothes along on the weekend, and probably had other things stowed at an apartment her boyfriend was maintaining. When Flo Edderling went into her room, it looked empty to her, with nothing much visible except for the bedclothing. Then, while the room was open, one of the other tenants probably appropriated whatever was left, thinking that Paula had left it behind on purpose. The answering machine was left on because she thought she was coming back. None of it turned out to be a clue to anything, but it kept me playing with the case, and then I lucked out and found the solution almost by accident. Or whatever you called it.”

“Serendipity. Don’t you like the coffee? Is it too strong?”

“There is no such thing. And it’s fine.”

“You’re not drinking it.”

“I’m sipping it. I’ve had gallons of coffee already today, it’s been that kind of a day. But I’m enjoying it.”

“I guess I don’t have too much confidence in it,” she said. “After all those months of instant decaf.”

“Well, this is a big improvement.”

“I’m glad. So you didn’t learn anything more about Eddie? And what was on his mind?”

“No,” I said. “But then I didn’t really expect to.”

“Oh.”

“Because I already knew.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Don’t you?” I got to my feet. “I already knew what was on Eddie’s mind, and what happened to him. Mrs. Hoeldtke just now told me that she knew all along that her daughter was dead, that the knowledge had to have existed on some level. I knew about Eddie on a more conscious level than the one she was talking about, but I didn’t want to know about it. I tried to shut out the knowledge, and I went out there hoping I’d learn something that would prove me wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“Wrong about what was eating at him. Wrong about how he got killed.”

“I thought it was autoerotic asphyxiation.” She frowned. “Or are you saying that it was actually suicide? That he really had the intention of killing himself?”

“ ‘Your mother is on the roof.’ “ She looked at me. “I can’t break it gently, Willa. I know what happened and I know why. You killed him.”

“It was the chloral hydrate,” I said. “And the funny thing is it wouldn’t have flagged anybody’s attention but mine. He only had a very small dose of chloral in him, not enough to have any pronounced effect on him. Certainly not enough to kill him.

“But he was a sober alcoholic, and that meant he shouldn’t have any chloral hydrate in him. As far as Eddie was concerned, sobriety was unequivocal. It meant no alcohol and no mood-changing or sedative drugs. He’d tried dicking around with marijuana shortly after he came into the program and he knew that didn’t work. He wouldn’t take something to help him sleep, not even one of those over-the-counter preparations, let alone a real drug like chloral hydrate. If he couldn’t sleep he’d have stayed awake. Nobody ever died from lack of sleep. That’s what they tell you when you first get sober, and God knows I heard it enough myself. ‘Nobody ever died from lack of sleep.’ Sometimes I wanted to throw a chair at the person who said it, but it turned out they were right.”

She was standing with her back to the refrigerator, one hand pressed palm-first against the white surface.

“I’d wanted to find out if he died sober,” I went on. “It seemed important to me, maybe because it would have been his one victory in a life that had been nothing but a chain of small defeats. And when I learned about the chloral I couldn’t let go of it. I went up to his apartment and I gave it a pretty decent search. If he’d had any pills there, I think I would have found them. Then I came downstairs and found a bottle of chloral hydrate in your medicine cabinet.”

“He said he couldn’t sleep, that he was going nuts. He wouldn’t take a drink or a bottle of beer so I gave him a couple of drops in a cup of coffee.”

“That’s no good, Willa. I gave you a chance to tell me that after I searched his place.”

“Well, you made such a big deal out of it. You made it sound as though giving a sedative to an alcoholic was like giving apples with razor blades in them to Halloween trick-or-treaters. I sort of hinted at it. I said he might have bought a pill on the street, or somebody might have given him one.”

“Coral hydrate.”

She looked at me.

“That’s what you called it. We had a conversation about it, and you were very good about getting the name of the drug wrong, as though this were the first time you were hearing about it. That was a nice touch, casual as could be, but the timing wasn’t so good. Because I was hearing it all just a few minutes after seeing a bottle of liquid chloral in your medicine chest.”

“I just knew it was something to take to go to sleep. I didn’t know the name of it.”

“It was typed right on the label.”

“Maybe I never read it properly in the first place. Maybe it never registered, maybe I haven’t got a mind for that kind of detail.”

“You? The woman who knew what Paris green was? The woman who would know how to poison a municipal water system if the word came down from the party leadership?”

“Then maybe it was just a slip of the tongue.”

“Just a slip of the tongue. And then, the next time I looked, the bottle was gone from the medicine cabinet.”

She sighed. “I can explain. It’s going to make me sound stupid, but I can explain.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I gave him the chloral hydrate. I didn’t know any reason not to, for God’s sake. He came in to talk and he wasn’t going to have any coffee because he told me he was having a terrible time sleeping. I guess there was something on his mind, the same thing he was going to tell you about, but he didn’t give any indication what it was.”

“And?”

“I told him decaf wouldn’t keep him awake, and that this particular brand seemed to help people to sleep, at least it had that effect on me. And then I put a couple of drops of the chloral hydrate in his cup but didn’t let him know what I was doing. And he drank it right down and went up to bed, and the next time I saw him was when I walked in there with you and he was dead.”