Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“He didn’t have it or he said wait until you got an okay from me?”

“He didn’t have it. In fact he specifically said he was sure you would cover the expense, but that he didn’t have any cash to speak of.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Absolutely. Why? What’s the problem?”

“He didn’t say he could let you have some of my dough? Nothing like that?”

“No. As a matter of fact—”

“Yeah? As a matter of fact what?”

“He said you undoubtedly had money around the house, but that he didn’t have access to that. He said something ironic to the effect that you wouldn’t give a junkie the combination to your safe, not even if he was your brother.”

“He said that, huh?”

“I don’t know that he meant you personally,” I said. “The sense of it was that nobody in his right mind would give that information to a drug addict because he couldn’t be trusted.”

“So he was speaking generally.”

“That’s how it seemed to me.”

“It could have been personal,” he said. “And he would have been correct. I wouldn’t trust him with that kind of money. My big brother, I’d probably trust him with my life, but cash running into six figures? No, I wouldn’t do it.”

I didn’t say anything.

He said, “I talked to Petey the other day. He was supposed to come out here. He never showed.”

“Oh.”

“Something else. Day I left he ran me out to the airport. I gave him five thousand dollars. Case he’s got any emergencies. So when you asked him for twenty-seven hundred—”

“Less than that. I spoke to him Saturday afternoon and that was before I needed the thousand for the Cassidy girl. I don’t know what figure I mentioned. Fifteen hundred or two thousand, most likely.”

He shook his head. “Can you make sense out of this? Because I can’t. You call him Saturday and he says I’m not coming back until Monday, but go ahead and lay out the money and you’ll get it back from me. That’s what he says?”

“Yes.”

“Now why would he do that? I can see him not wanting to part with any of my dough if he thinks I might be opposed to it. And rather than turn you down and look like a hard case he’ll just say he doesn’t have it to give. But he’s essentially okaying the expense at the same time that he’s hanging on to the dough. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give the impression that you had plenty of cash?”

“No.”

“Because I could see him figuring if you got it then you can lay it out. But otherwise… Matt, I don’t like to say it but I got a bad feeling about this.”

“So do I.”

“I think he’s using.”

“It sounds like it.”

“He’s keeping his distance, he says he’ll be over and he doesn’t show up, I call him and he’s not there. What does that sound like?”

“I haven’t seen him at a meeting in a week and a half. Now we don’t always go to the same meetings but—”

“But you expect to run into him now and then.”

“Yes.”

“I give him five grand in case something comes up, and the minute something comes up he says he doesn’t have it. What did he spend it on? Or if he’s lying, what’s he saving it for? Two questions and one answer, way it looks to me. Jay-You-En-Kay. What else?”

“There could be another explanation.”

“I’m willing to hear it.” He picked up a phone, dialed a number, and stood there holding himself in check while the phone rang. It must have rung ten times before he gave up. “No answer, but it means nothing. When he used to hole up with a bottle he would go days without answering his phone. I asked him once why he didn’t at least take it off the hook. Then I’d know he was there, he said. He’s a devious bastard, my brother.”

“It’s the disease.”

“The habit, you mean.”

“We generally call it a disease. I guess it amounts to the same thing.”

“He kicked junk, you know. He was hooked bad and he quit it, but then he got into the booze.”

“So he said.”

“How long was he sober? Over a year.”

“A year and a half.”

“You’d think if you could do it that long you could do it forever.”

“A day is the most anybody can do it.”

“Yeah,” he said impatiently. “A day at a time. I know all that, I heard all the slogans. When he was first getting sober Petey was here all the time. Francey and I would sit with him and give him coffee and listen to him run off at the mouth. Everything he heard at a meeting he came back and filled our ears with it, but we didn’t mind because he was starting to put his life back together again. Then one day he told me how he couldn’t hang out with me so much anymore because it could undercut his sobriety. Now he’s somewhere with a bag of dope and a bottle of whiskey and what the hell happened to his sobriety?”

“You don’t know that, Kenan.”

He turned on me. “What else, for Christ’s sake? What’s he doing with five grand, buying lottery tickets? I never should have given him that much money. It’s too much temptation. Whatever happens to him, it’s my fault.”

“No,” I said. “If you gave him a cigar box full of heroin and said ‘Watch this for me until I get back,’ then it’d be your fault. That’s more temptation than anybody should have to handle. But he’s been clean and dry for a year and a half and he knows how to be responsible for his own sobriety. If the money made him nervous he could put it in the bank, or ask somebody in the program to hold it for him. Maybe he went out and maybe he didn’t, we don’t know yet, but whatever he did you didn’t make him do it.”

“I made it easy.”

“It’s never hard. I don’t know what a bag of dope costs these days, but you can still get a drink for a couple of dollars, and one’s all it takes.”

“One wouldn’t hold you for very long, though. Still, five thousand dollars ought to keep him going for a hell of a run. What can you spend on liquor, twenty dollars a day if you drink it at home? Two, three times that if you buy it over the bar? Heroin’s a more expensive proposition, but even so it’s hard to put more than a couple hundred dollars a day in your arm, and it’d take him a while to build his habit back up. Even if he makes a pig of himself, it ought to take him a month to shoot up five grand.”

“He didn’t use a needle.”

“He told you that, huh?”

“It’s not true?”

He shook his head. “He told people that, and there was a period when all he did was snort, but he was a needle junkie for a while there. The lie made the habit sound less serious. Plus he was afraid if women knew he used to shoot dope they’d be afraid to go to bed with him. Not that he’s been knocking them over like dominoes lately, but you don’t want to make it harder on yourself. He figured they’d assume he shared needles and be afraid he was HIV-positive.”

“But he didn’t share needles?”

“Says he didn’t. And he got tested, and he doesn’t have the virus.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, I was just thinking. Maybe he did share needles, maybe he never went for the HIV test. He could lie about that, too.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you use a needle? Or do you just snort?”

“I’m not a junkie.”

“Peter told me you snort a bag of dope about once a month.”

“When was this? On the phone Saturday?”

“A week before. We went to a meeting, then had a meal and hung out together.”

“And he told you that, huh?”

“He said he was here at your house a few days before that and you were high. He said he called you on it and you denied it.”

He lowered his eyes for a moment, lowered his voice, too, when he spoke. “Yeah, it’s true,” he said. “He did call me on it, and I did deny it. I thought he bought it.”