Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5 Read online

  "I ought to do some work," I said.

  "On a Sunday?"

  "What's the difference?"

  "Are you really going to be able to accomplish anything on a Sunday afternoon?"

  I hadn't really accomplished anything since I'd started. Was there anything I could do today?

  I got out my notebook, dialed Sunny's number. No answer. I called my hotel. Nothing from Sunny. Nothing from Danny Boy Bell or anyone else I'd seen last night. Well, Danny Boy would still be sleeping at this hour, and so might most of the others.

  There was a message to call Chance. I started dialing his number, then stopped myself. If Jan was going to a meeting, I didn't want to sit around her loft waiting for him to call back. Her sponsor might not approve.

  The meeting was on the second floor of a synagogue on Forsythe Street. You couldn't smoke there. It was an unusual experience being in an AA meeting that wasn't thick with cigarette smoke.

  There were about fifty people there and she seemed to know most of them. She introduced me to several people, all of whose names I promptly forgot. I felt self-conscious, uncomfortable with the attention I was getting. My appearance didn't help, either. While I hadn't slept in my clothes, they looked as though I had, showing the effects of last night's fight in the alley.

  And I was feeling the fight's effects, too. It wasn't until we left her loft that I realized how much I ached. My head was sore where I'd butted him and I had a bruise on one forearm and one shoulder was black and blue and ached. Other muscles hurt when I moved. I hadn't felt anything after the incident but all those aches and pains turn up the next day.

  I got some coffee and cookies and sat through the meeting. It was all right. The speaker qualified very briefly, leaving the rest of the meeting for discussion. You had to raise your hand to get called on.

  Fifteen minutes from the end, Jan raised her hand and said how grateful she was to be sober and how much of a role her sponsor played in her sobriety, how helpful the woman was when she had something bothering her or didn't know what to do. She didn't get more specific than that. I had a feeling she was sending me a message and I wasn't too crazy about that.

  I didn't raise my hand.

  Afterward she was going out with some people for coffee and asked me if I'd like to come along. I didn't want any more coffee and I didn't want company, either. I made an excuse.

  Outside, before we went separate ways, she asked me how I felt. I said I felt all right.

  "Do you still feel like drinking?"

  "No," I said.

  "I'm glad you called last night."

  "So am I."

  "Call anytime, Matthew. Even in the middle of the night if you have to."

  "Let's hope I don't have to."

  "But if you do, call. All right?"

  "Sure."

  "Matthew? Promise me one thing?"

  "What?"

  "Don't have a drink without calling me first."

  "I'm not going to drink today."

  "I know. But if you ever decide to, if you're going to, call me first. Promise?"

  "Okay."

  On the subway heading uptown I thought about the conversation and felt foolish for having made the promise. Well, it had made her happy. What was the harm in it if it made her happy?

  There was another message from Chance. I called from the lobby, told his service I was back at my hotel. I bought a paper and took it upstairs with me to kill the time it took him to call back.

  The lead story was a honey. A family in Queens- father, mother, two kids under five- had gone for a ride in their shiny new Mercedes. Someone pulled up next to them and emptied both barrels of a shotgun into the car, killing all four of them. A police search of their apartment in Jamaica Estates had revealed a large amount of cash and a quantity of uncut cocaine. Police theorized the massacre was drug related.

  No kidding.

  There was nothing about the kid I'd left in the alley. Well, there wouldn't be. The Sunday papers were already on the street when he and I encountered one another. Not that he'd be much likelier to make tomorrow's paper, or the next day's. If I'd killed him he might have earned a paragraph somewhere, but what was the news of a black youth with a pair of broken legs?

  I was pondering that point when someone knocked on my door.

  Funny. The maids have Sunday off, and the few visitors I get call from downstairs. I got my coat off the chair, took the.32 from the pocket. I hadn't gotten rid of it yet, or of the two knives I'd taken from my broken-legged friend. I carried the gun over to the door and asked who it was.

  "Chance."

  I dropped the gun in a pocket, opened the door. "Most people call," I said.

  "The fellow down there was reading. I didn't want to disturb him."

  "That was considerate."

  "That's my trademark." His eyes were taking me in, appraising me. They left me to scan my room. "Nice place," he said.

  The words were ironic but the tone of voice was not. I closed the door, pointed to a chair. He remained standing. "It seems to suit me," I said.

  "I can see that. Spartan, uncluttered."

  He was wearing a navy blazer and gray flannel slacks. No topcoat. Well, it was a little warmer today and he had a car to get around in.

  He walked over to my window, looked out of it. "Tried you last night," he said.

  "I know."

  "You didn't call back."

  "I didn't get the message until a little while ago and I wasn't where I could be reached."

  "Didn't sleep here last night?"

  "No."

  He nodded. He had turned to face me and his expression was guarded and hard to read. I hadn't seen that look on his face before.

  He said, "You speak to all my girls?"

  "All but Sunny."

  "Yeah. You didn't see her yet, huh?"

  "No. I tried her a few times last night and again around noon today. I didn't get any answer."

  "You didn't."

  "No. I had a message from her last night, but when I called back she wasn't there."

  "She called you last night."

  "That's right."

  "What time?"

  I tried to remember. "I left the hotel around eight and got back a little after ten. The message was waiting for me. I don't know what time it came in. They're supposed to put the time on the message slip but they don't always bother. Anyway, I probably threw away the slip."

  "No reason to hang onto it."

  "No. What difference does it make when she called?"

  He looked at me for a long moment. I saw the gold flecks in the deep brown eyes. He said, "Shit, I don't know what to do. I'm not used to that. Most of the time I at least think I know what to do."

  I didn't say anything.

  "You're my man, like you're working for me. But I don't know as I'm sure what that means."

  "I don't know what you're getting at, Chance."

  "Shit," he said. "Question is, how much can I trust you? What I keep coming back to is whether I can or not. I do trust you. I mean, I took you to my house, man. I never took anybody else to my house. Why'd I do that?"

  "I don't know."

  "I mean, was I showing off? Was I saying something along the lines of, Look at the class this here nigger has got? Or was I inviting you inside for a look at my soul? Either way, shit, I got to believe I trust you. But am I right to do it?"

  "I can't decide that for you."

  "No," he said, "you can't." He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. "I called her last night. Sunny. Couple of times, same as you, didn't get no answer. Well, okay, that's cool. No machine, but that's cool, too, 'cause sometimes she'll forget to put it on. Then I called again, one-thirty, two o'clock maybe, and again no answer, so what I did, I drove over there. Naturally I got a key. It's my apartment. Why shouldn't I have a key?"

  By now I knew where this was going. But I let him tell it himself.

  "Well, she was there," he said. "She's still there. See, what s
he is, she's dead."

  Chapter 22

  She was dead, all right. She lay on her back, nude, one arm flung back over her head and her face turned to that side, the other arm bent at the elbow with the hand resting on her rib cage just below her breast. She was on the floor a few feet from her unmade bed, her auburn hair spread out above and behind her head, and alongside her lipsticked mouth an ellipse of vomit floated on the ivory carpet like scum on a pond. Between her well-muscled white thighs, the carpet was dark with urine.

  There were bruises on her face and forehead, another on her shoulder. I touched her wrist automatically, groping for a pulse, but her flesh was far too cold to have any life left in it.

  Her eye was open, rolled up into her head. I wanted to coax the eyelid shut with a fingertip. I left it alone.

  I said, "You move her?"

  "No way. I didn't touch a thing."

  "Don't lie to me. You tossed Kim's apartment after she was dead. You must have looked around."

  "I opened a couple of drawers. I didn't take anything."

  "What were you looking for?"

  "I don't know, man. Just anything I ought to know about. I found some money, couple hundred dollars. I left it there. I found a bankbook. I left it, too."

  "What did she have in the bank?"

  "Under a thousand. No big deal. What I found, she had a ton of pills. That's how she did this here."

  He pointed to a mirrored vanity across the room from the corpse. There, among innumerable jars and bottles of makeup and scent, were two empty plastic vials containing prescription labels. The patient's name on both was S. Hendryx, although the prescriptions had been written by different physicians and filled at different pharmacies, both nearby. One prescription had been for Valium, the other for Seconal.

  "I always looked in her medicine chest," he was saying. "Just automatically, you know? And all she ever had was this antihistamine stuff for her hay fever. Then I open this drawer last night and it's a regular drugstore in there. All prescription stuff."

  "What kind of stuff?"

  "I didn't read every label. Didn't want to leave any prints where they shouldn't be. From what I saw, it's mostly downs. A lot of tranks. Valium, Librium, Elavil. Sleeping pills like the Seconal here. A couple things of ups, like whatchacallit, Ritalin. But mostly downs." He shook his head. "There's things I never heard of. You'd need a doctor to tell you what everything was."

  "You didn't know she took pills?"

  "Had no idea. Come here, look at this." He opened a dresser drawer carefully so as not to leave prints. "Look," he said, pointing. At one side of the drawer, beside a stack of folded sweaters, stood perhaps two dozen pill bottles.

  "That's somebody who's into this shit pretty heavy," he said. "Somebody who's scared to run out. And I didn't know about it. That gets to me, Matt. You read that note?"

  The note was on the vanity, anchored with a bottle of Norell cologne. I nudged the bottle aside with the back of my hand and carried the note over to the window. She'd written it in brown ink on beige notepaper and I wanted to read it in decent light.

  I read:

  Kim, you were lucky. You found someone to do it for you, I have to do it myself.

  If I had the guts I would use the window. I could change my mind halfway down and laugh the rest of the way. But I haven't got the guts and the razor blade didn't work.

  I hope I took enough this time.

  It's no use. The good times are all used up. Chance, I'm sorry. You showed me good times but they're gone. The crowds went home in the eighth inning. All the cheering stopped. Nobody's even keeping score anymore.

  There's no way off the merry-go-round. She grabbed the brass ring and it turned her finger green.

  Nobody's going to buy me emeralds. Nobody's going to give me babies. Nobody's going to save my life.

  I'm sick of smiling. I'm tired of trying to catch up and catch on. All the good times are gone.

  I looked out the window across the Hudson at the Jersey skyline. Sunny had lived and died on the thirty-second floor of a high-rise apartment complex called Lincoln View Gardens, though I hadn't seen any trace of garden beyond the potted palms in the lobby.

  "That's Lincoln Center down there," Chance said.

  I nodded.

  "I should have put Mary Lou here. She likes concerts, she could just walk over. Thing is, she used to live on the West Side. So I wanted to move her to the East Side. You want to do that, you know. Make a big change in their lives right away."

  I didn't much care about the philosophy of pimping. I said, "She do this before?"

  "Kill herself?"

  "Try to. She wrote 'I hope I took enough this time.' Was there a time she didn't take enough?"

  "Not since I've known her. And that's a couple years."

  "What does she mean when she says the razor blade didn't work?"

  "I don't know."

  I went to her, examined the wrist of the arm stretched out above her head. There was a clearly perceptible horizontal scar. I found an identical scar on her other wrist. I stood up, read the note again.

  "What happens now, man?"

  I got out my notebook and copied what she'd written word for word. I used a Kleenex to remove what prints I'd left on it, then put it back where I'd found it and anchored it again with the cologne bottle.

  I said, "Tell me again what you did last night."

  "Just what I already told you. I called her and I got a feeling, I don't know why, and I came here."

  "What time?"

  "After two. I didn't notice the exact time."

  "You came right upstairs?"

  "That's right."

  "The doorman see you?"

  "We sort of nodded at each other. He knows me, thinks I live here."

  "Will he remember you?"

  "Man, I don't know what he remembers and what he forgets."

  "He just work weekends or was he on Friday as well?"

  "I don't know. What's the difference?"

  "If he's been on every night he might remember he saw you but not remember when. If he just works Saturdays-"

  "I get you."

  In the small kitchen a bottle of Georgi vodka stood on the sink board with an inch's depth of liquor left in it. Beside it was an empty cardboard quart of orange juice. A glass in the sink held a residue of what looked like a mixture of the two, and there'd been a faint trace of orange in the reek of her vomit. You didn't need to be much of a detective to put those pieces together. Pills, washed down with a batch of strong screwdrivers, their sedative effect boosted by the alcohol.

  I hope I took enough this time.

  I had to fight the impulse to pour the last of the vodka down the drain.

  "How long were you here, Chance?"

  "I don't know. Didn't pay attention to the time."

  "Talk to the doorman on the way out?"

  He shook his head. "I went down to the basement and out through the garage."

  "So he wouldn't have seen you."

  "Nobody saw me."

  "And while you were here-"

  "Like I said. I looked in the drawers and closets. I didn't touch many things and I didn't move anything."

  "You read the note?"

  "Yeah. But I didn't pick it up to do it."

  "Make any phone calls?"

  "My service, to check in. And I called you. But you weren't there."

  No, I hadn't been there. I'd been breaking a boy's legs in an alley three miles to the north.

  I said, "No long-distance calls."

  "Just those two calls, man. That ain't a long distance. You can just about throw a rock from here to your hotel."

  And I could have walked over last night, after my meeting, when her number failed to answer. Would she still have been alive by then? I imagined her, lying on the bed, waiting for the pills and vodka to do their work, letting the phone ring and ring and ring. Would she have ignored the doorbell the same way?

  Maybe. Or maybe she'd have been
unconscious by then. But I might have sensed that something was wrong, might have summoned the super or kicked the door in, might have gotten to her in time-

  Oh, sure. And I could have saved Cleopatra from the fucking asp, too, if I hadn't been born too late.

  I said, "You had a key to this place?"

  "I have keys to all their places."

  "So you just let yourself in."

  He shook his head. "She had the chain lock on. That's when I knew something was wrong. I used the key and the door opened two, three inches and stopped on account of the chain, and I knew there was trouble. I busted the chain and came on in and just knew I was gonna find something I didn't want to see."

  "You could have gone right out. Left the chain on, gone home."

  "I thought of that." He looked full at me and I was seeing his face less armored than I'd seen it before. "You know something? When that chain was on, the thought came to me right away that she killed herself. First thing I thought of, only thing I thought of. Reason I broke that chain, I figured maybe she was still alive, maybe I could save her. But it was too late."

  I went to the door, examined the chain lock. The chain itself had not broken; rather, the assembly had ripped loose from its moorings on the doorjamb and hung from the door itself. I hadn't noticed it when we let ourselves into the apartment.

  "You broke this when you came in?"

  "Like I said."

  "The chain could have been unfastened when you let yourself in. Then you could have locked it and broken it from inside."

  "Why would I do that?"

  "To make it look as though the apartment was locked from the inside when you got here."

  "Well, it was. I didn't have to. I don't get where you're comin' from, man."

  "I'm just making sure she was locked in when you got here."

  "Didn't I say she was?"

  "And you checked the apartment? There wasn't anybody else here?"

  "Not unless they was hiding in the toaster."

  It was a pretty clear suicide. The only thing problematic was his earlier visit. He'd sat on the knowledge of her death for over twelve hours without reporting it.

  I thought for a moment. We were north of Sixtieth Street, so that put us in the Twentieth Precinct and out of Durkin's bailiwick. They'd close it as a suicide unless the medical evidence didn't match, in which case his earlier visit would come to light later on.