Out on the Cutting Edge (13 page)

"Yes, Mother. I've got your number."

He laughed. "You know what old Frank would say, Matt. 'Lad, there's a slip under every skirt.' "

"I'll bet he would. And I'll bet he hasn't looked under too many skirts lately. You know what he did say?

He asked me if Eddie died sober, and when I said he did, he said,

'Well, thank God for that.' "

"So?"

"He's just as dead either way."

"That's true," he said, "but I've got to go along with Frank on this one. If he had to go, I'm glad he went out sober."

I hurried back to my hotel, grabbed a fast shower and shave, and put on a sport jacket and tie. It was twenty to eleven by the time I rang Willa's bell.

She had changed, too. She was wearing a light blue silk blouse over a pair of white Levi's. She had braided her hair, and the braid was coiled across the front of her head like a tiara. She looked cool and elegant, and I told her so.

"You look nice yourself," she said. "I'm glad you're here. I was getting paranoid."

"Was I very late? I'm sorry."

"You weren't more than ten minutes late, and I started getting paranoid forty-five minutes ago, so it had nothing to do with the time. I just decided you were too good to be true and I was never going to see you again. I'm glad I was wrong."

Outside, I asked if there was any place special she wanted to go.

"Because there's a restaurant not far from here I've been wanting to try.

It has a sort of French bistro atmosphere, but they have more ordinary pub fare on the menu, too, along with the French food."

"It sounds good. What's it called?"

"Paris Green."

"On Ninth Avenue. I've passed it but I've never been inside. I love the name."

"It gets the feel of the place across. The French atmosphere, and all the plants hanging from the ceiling."

"Don't you know what Paris green is?"

"Evidently not."

"It's a poison," she said. "It's an arsenic compound. Arsenic and copper, if I remember right, and that would account for the color."

"I never heard of it."

"You might have if you were a gardener. It used to get a lot of use as an insecticide. You would spray it on plants to kill chewing insects.

They absorbed it through their stomachs and died. They don't use arsenicals in the garden these days, so I don't suppose it's been around for years."

"You learn something every day."

"Class isn't over yet. Paris green was also used as a coloring agent.

To color things green, predictably enough. They used it primarily in wallpaper, and consequently a lot of people have died over the years, most of them children with a bent for oral experimentation. I want you to promise me that you won't put chips of green wallpaper in your mouth."

"You have my word."

"Good."

"I'll try to find other channels for my bent for oral experimentation."

"I'm sure you will."

"How do you know all this, anyway? About Paris green?"

"The party," she said. "The Progressive Commies. We learned everything we could about toxic substances. I mean, you never know when somebody's going to decide that it's tactically correct to poison the municipal water system of Duluth."

"Jesus."

"Oh, we never did anything like that," she said. "At least I didn't, and I never heard of anyone who did.

But you had to be prepared."

The tall bearded bartender was behind the stick when we walked in. He gave me a wave and a smile.

The hostess led us to a table. When we were seated Willa said.

"You don't drink and you've never eaten here, and you walk in and the bartender greets you like a cousin."

"It's not really all that mysterious. I was in here asking some questions. I told you about that young

woman I've been trying to find."

"The actress, and you told me her name. Paula?"

"He recognized her, and described the man she was with. So I came in a second time hoping he'd remember more. He's a nice fellow, he's got an interesting mind."

"Is that what you were doing earlier tonight? Working on your case? Do you call it a case?"

"I suppose you could."

"But you don't."

"I don't know what I call it. A job, I guess, and one I'm not doing particularly well with."

"Did you make any progress this evening?"

"No. I wasn't working."

"Oh."

"I was at a meeting."

"A meeting?"

"An AA meeting."

"Oh," she said, and she was going to say something else, but the waitress, with a great sense of timing, showed up to take our drink orders. I said I'd have a Perrier. Willa thought for a moment and ordered a Coke with a piece of lemon.

"You could have something stronger," I said.

"I know. I already had more to drink than I usually do, and I was a little headachey when I woke up. I don't think you mentioned earlier that you were in AA."

"I don't generally tell people."

"Why? You can't think it's something to be ashamed of."

"Hardly that. But the idea of anonymity is sort of bound up in the whole program. It's considered bad form to break somebody else's anonymity, to tell people that the person in question is in AA. As far as breaking your own anonymity is concerned, that's more of an individual matter. I suppose you could say that I keep it on a need-to-know basis."

"And I need to know?"

"Well, I wouldn't keep it a secret from someone I was involved with emotionally. That would be pretty silly."

"I guess it would. Are we?"

"Are we what?"

"Emotionally involved."

"I'd say we're on the verge."

"On the verge," she said. "I like that."

The food was pretty good considering that the place was named after a lethal substance. We had Jarlsberg cheeseburgers, cottage fries, and salad. The burgers were supposedly grilled over mesquite, but if there was a difference between that and ordinary charcoal, it was too subtle for me. The potatoes were hand-cut and fried crisp and brown.

The salad contained sunflower seeds and radish sprouts and broccoli florets, along with two kinds of lettuce, neither of them iceberg.

We talked a lot during the meal. She liked football, and preferred the college game to the pros. Liked baseball but wasn't following it this year. Liked country music, especially the old-time twangy stuff. Used to be addicted to science fiction and read shelves of it, but now when she read at all it was mostly English murder mysteries, the country house with the body in the library and butlers who had or hadn't done it. "I don't really give a damn who did it," she said. "I just like to slip into a world where everybody's polite and well-spoken and even the violence is neat and almost gentle. And everything works out in the end."

"Like life itself."

"Especially on West Fifty-first Street."

I talked a little about the search for Paula Hoeldtke and about my work in general. I said it wasn't much like her genteel English mysteries.

The people weren't that polite, and everything wasn't always resolved at the end. Sometimes it wasn't even clear where the end was.

"I like it because I get to use some of my skills, though I might be hard put to tell you exactly what they are. I like to dig and pick at things until you begin to see some sort of pattern in the clutter."

"You get to be a righter of wrongs. A slayer of dragons."

"Most of the wrongs never get righted. And it's hard to get close enough to the dragons to slay them."

"Because they breathe fire?"

"Because they're the ones in the castles," I said. "With moats around them, and the drawbridge raised."

Over coffee she asked me if I'd become friendly with Eddie Dunphy in AA. Then she put her hand to her mouth. "Never mind," she said. "You already told me it was against the rules to break another member's whatchamacallit."

"Anonymity, but it doesn't matter now. Being dead means never having to remain anonymous. Eddie started coming to meetings about a year ago. He'd stayed completely sober for the past seven months."

"How about you?"

"Three years, two months, and eleven days."

"You keep track to the day?"

"No, of course not. But I know my anniversary date, and it's not hard to figure the rest out."

"And people celebrate anniversaries?"

"Most people make it a point to speak at a meeting on their anniversary, or within a few days of it. At some groups they give you a cake."

"A cake?"

"Like a birthday cake. They present it to you, and everybody has some after the meeting. Except for the ones on diets."

"It sounds--"

"Mickey Mouse."

"I wasn't going to say that."

"Well, you could. It does. In some groups they give you a little bronze medallion with the number of years in roman numerals on one side and the serenity prayer on the other."

"The serenity prayer?"

" 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.' "

"Oh, I've heard that. I didn't know it was an AA prayer."

"Well, I don't think we have exclusive title to it."

"What did you get? A cake or a medallion?"

"Neither. Just a round of applause and a lot of people telling me to remember it's still a day at a time. I guess that's why I belong to that group. No-frills sobriety."

" 'Cause you're just a no-frills kind of guy."

"You bet."

When the check came she offered to split it. I said I'd get it, and she didn't put up a fight. Outside, it had turned a little colder. She took my hand when we crossed the street, and went on holding it after we reached the curb.

When we got to her building she asked me if I wanted to come in for a few minutes. I said I thought I'd go straight home, that I wanted to get an early start the next morning.

In the vestibule she fitted her key in the lock, then turned to me.

We kissed. There was no alcohol on her breath this time.

Walking home, I kept catching myself whistling. It's not something I'm much given to.

I gave out dollar bills to everyone who asked.

I woke up the next morning with a sour taste in my mouth. I brushed my teeth and went out for breakfast. I had to force myself to eat, and the coffee had a metallic taste to it.

Maybe it was arsenic poisoning, I thought. Maybe there had been shreds of green wallpaper in last night's salad.

My second cup of coffee didn't taste any better than the first, but I drank it anyhow and read the News along with it. The Mets had won, with a new kid just up from Tidewater going four-for-four. The Yankees won, too, on a home run by Claudell Washington in the ninth inning. In football, the Giants had just lost the best linebacker in the game for the next thirty days; something illicit had turned up in his urine, and he was suspended.

There had been a drive-by shooting at a streetcorner in Harlem which the paper had characterized as much frequented by drug dealers, and two homeless persons had fought on a platform of the East Side IRT, one hurling the other into the path of an oncoming train, with predictable results. In Brooklyn, a man in Brighton Beach had been arrested for the murder of his former wife and her three children by a previous marriage.

There was nothing about Eddie Dunphy. There wouldn't be, unless it was a very slow day for news.

After breakfast I set out to walk off some of the loginess and lethargy. It was overcast, and the weather forecast called for a forty percent chance of rain. I'm not sure just what that's supposed to mean.

Don't blame us if it rains,they seem to be saying, and don't blame us if it doesn't.

I didn't pay much attention to where I was going. I wound up in Central Park, and when I found an empty bench I sat on it. Across from me and a little to the right, a woman in a thrift-shop overcoat was feeding pigeons from a sack of bread crumbs. The birds were all over her and the bench and the surrounding pavement. There must have been two hundred of them.

They say you just exacerbate a problem by feeding pigeons, but I was in no position to tell her to stop.

Not as long as I went on handing out dollar bills to panhandlers.

She ran out of bread crumbs, finally, and the birds left, and so did she. I stayed where I was and thought about Eddie Dunphy and Paula Hoeldtke. Then I thought about Willa Rossiter, and I realized why I'd awakened feeling lousy.

I hadn't had time to react to Eddie's death. I'd been with Willa instead, and when I might have been sad for him I was instead exhilarated and excited by whatever was growing between us. And the same thing was true, in a less dramatic way, with Paula. I'd gotten as far as some conflicting data relating to her telephone, and then I'd put everything on hold so that I could have a romantic encounter.

There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with that. But Eddie and Paula had been stowed somewhere under the heading of Unfinished Business, and if I didn't deal with them I was going to keep having a sour taste in my mouth, and my coffee was going to have a metallic aftertaste.

I got up and got out of there. Near the entrance at Columbus Circle a wild-eyed man in denim cutoffs asked me for money. I shook him off and kept walking.

She'd paid her rent on July 6. On the thirteenth it was due again, but she didn't show up. On the fifteenth Flo Edderling went to collect and she didn't answer the door. On the sixteenth Flo opened the door and the room was empty, nothing left behind but the bed linen. On the seventeenth her parents called and left a message on her machine, and that same day Georgia arranged to rent the just-vacated room, and a day later she took possession. And two days after that, Paula called the phone company and told them to disconnect her phone.