Scudder - Eight Million Ways To Die Part 50

I walked on to St. Paul's and lit a candle for Sonya Hendryx. I sat in a pew, giving myself a few minutes to remember Sunny. There wasn't much to remember. We'd barely met. I couldn't even recall very clearly what she looked like because her image in death pushed my dim memory of the living Sunny to the side.

It occurred to me that I owed the church money. Ten percent of Chance's fee came to $250, and they were further ent.i.tled to a t.i.the of the three hundred bucks and change I'd taken off the kid who'd tried mugging me. I didn't have an exact count but $350 struck me as a fair estimate, so I could give them $285 and call it even.

But I'd put most of my money in the bank. I had a few hundred dollars in my wallet but if I gave the church $285 I'd be strapped for walk-around money. I weighed the nuisance of another trip to the bank, and then the fundamental insanity of my little game struck me like a kidney punch.

What was I doing anyway? Why did I figure I owed anybody money? And who did I owe it to? Not the church, I didn't belong to any church. I gave my t.i.thes to whatever house of wors.h.i.+p came along at the right time.

To whom, then, was I in debt? To G.o.d?

Where was the sense in that? And what was the nature of this debt? How did I owe it? Was I repaying borrowed funds? Or had I invented some sort of bribe scheme, some celestial protection racket?

I'd never had trouble rationalizing it before. It was just a custom, a minor eccentricity. I didn't file a tax return so I paid a t.i.the instead.

I'd never really let myself ask myself why.

I wasn't sure I liked the answer. I remembered, too, a thought that had crossed my mind momentarily in that alley off St. Nicholas Avenue - that I was going to get killed by this boy because I hadn't paid my t.i.the. Not that I'd really believed it, not that I thought the world worked that way, but how remarkable that I'd had such a thought at all.

After awhile I took out my wallet, counted out the $285. I sat there with the money in my hand. Then I put it all back in my wallet, all but a dollar.

At least I could pay for the candle.

That afternoon I walked all the way to Kim's building. The weather wasn't bad and I didn't have anything better to do. I walked past the doorman and let myself into her apartment.

The first thing I did was pour the bottle of Wild Turkey down the sink.

I don't know how much sense that made. There was plenty of other booze there and I didn't feel like doing my Carrie Nation imitation. But the Wild Turkey had taken on the status of a symbol. I pictured the bottle every time I thought of going to that apartment, and the picture was accompanied more often than not by a vivid memory of the taste and smell. When the last of it went down the sink I was able to relax.

Then I went back to the front closet and checked out the fur coat hanging there. A label sewn to the lining identified the garment as consisting of dyed lapin. I used the Yellow Pages, called a furrier at random and learned that lapin was the French word for 'rabbit.' 'You could find it in a dictionary,' I was told. 'A regular American dictionary. It's an English word now, it came into the language from the fur business. Plain old rabbit.'

Just as Chance had said.

On the way home something triggered the thought of having a beer. I don't even recall what the stimulus was, but the response was a picture of myself with a shoulder pressed against a bar and one foot up on the bra.s.s rail, bell-shaped gla.s.s in hand, sawdust on the floor, my nostrils full of the smell of a musty old tavern.

It wasn't a strong drink urge and I never considered acting on it, but it put me in mind of what I'd promised Jan. Since I wasn't going to have a drink I felt no compulsion to call her but decided to anyway. I spent a dime and dialed her number from a booth around the corner from the main public library.

Our conversation had traffic noises for compet.i.tion, and so we kept it brief and light. I didn't get around to telling her about Sunny's suicide. I didn't mention the bottle of Wild Turkey, either.

I read the Post while I ate dinner. Sunny's suicide had had a couple of paragraphs in the News that morning, which is as much as it merited, but the Post would hype anything that might sell papers, and their hook was that Sunny had the same pimp as Kim, who'd been chopped to pieces in a hotel just two weeks ago. n.o.body had been able to turn up a picture of Sunny so they ran the shot of Kim again.

The story, though, couldn't fulfill the promise of the headlines. All they had was a suicide and some airy speculation that Sunny had killed herself because of what she knew about Kim's murder.

I couldn't find anything about the boy whose legs I'd broken. But there was the usual complement of crime and deaths scattered throughout the paper. I thought about what Jim Faber had said about giving up newspapers. It didn't seem like I'd be giving up all that much.

After dinner I picked up my mail at the desk. The mail was the usual junk, along with a phone message to call Chance. I called his service and he rang back to ask how things were going. I said that they weren't, really. He asked if I was going to keep at it.

'For a while,' I said. 'Just to see if it goes anywhere.'

The cops, he said, had not been ha.s.sling him. He'd spent his day arranging funeral services for Sunny. Unlike Kim, whose body had been s.h.i.+pped back to Wisconsin, Sunny didn't have parents or kin to claim her. There was a question about when Sunny's body would be released from the morgue, so he'd made arrangements to have a memorial service at Walter B. Cooke's on West Seventy-second Street. That would take place Thursday, he told me, at two in the afternoon.

'I should have done the same for Kim,' he said, 'but I never thought of it. It's mostly for the girls. They're in a state, you know.'

'I can imagine.'

'They're all thinking the same thing. That business about death comes in threes. They're all worrying about who's next.'

I went to my meeting that night. It struck me during the qualification that a week ago I'd been in a blackout, wandering around doing G.o.d knows what.

'My name's Matt,' I said when my turn came. 'I'll just listen tonight. Thanks.'

When the meeting broke up a guy followed me up the stairs to street level, then fell into step with me. He was about thirty, wearing a plaid lumber jacket and a peaked cap. I couldn't recall seeing him before.

He said, 'Your name is Matt, right?' I allowed that it was. 'You like that story tonight?'

'It was interesting,' I said.

'You wanna hear an interesting story? I heard a story about a man uptown with a broken face and two broken legs. That's some story, man.'

I felt a chill. The gun was in my dresser drawer, all rolled up in a pair of socks. The knives were in the same drawer.

He said, 'You got some pair of b.a.l.l.s, man. You got cojones, you know what I mean?' He cupped his groin with one hand like a baseball player adjusting his jock. 'All the same,' he said, 'You don' wanna look for trouble.'

'What are you talking about?'

He spread his hands. 'What do I know? I'm Western Union, man. I bring the message, tha's all I do. Some chick gets herself iced in a hotel, man, is one thing, but who her friends are is another. Is not important, you know?'

'Who's the message from?'

He just looked at me.

'How'd you know to find me at the meeting?'

'Followed you in, followed you out.' He chuckled. 'That maricn with the broken legs, that was too much, man. That was too much.'

TWENTY-FOUR.

Tuesday was largely devoted to a game of Follow the Fur.

It started in that state that lies somewhere between dreaming and full consciousness. I'd awakened from a dream and dozed off again, and I found myself running a mental videotape of my meeting with Kim at Armstrong's. I began with a false memory, seeing her as she must have been when she arrived on the bus from Chicago, a cheap suitcase in one hand, a denim jacket tight on her shoulders. Then she was sitting at my table, her hand at her throat, light glinting off her ring while she toyed with the clasp at the throat of her fur jacket. She was telling me that it was ranch mink but she'd trade it for the denim jacket she'd come to town in.

The whole sequence played itself off and my mind moved on to something else. I was back in that alley in Harlem, except now my a.s.sailant had help. Royal Waldron and the messenger from the night before were flanking him on either side. The conscious part of my mind tried to get them the h.e.l.l out of there, perhaps to even the odds a little, and then a realization screamed at me and I tossed my legs over the side of my bed and sat up, the dream images all scurrying off into the corners of the mind where they live.

It was a different jacket.

I showered and shaved and got out of there. I cabbed first to Kim's building to check her closet yet again. The lapin coat, the dyed rabbit Chance had bought her, was not the garment I had seen in Armstrong's. It was longer, it was fuller, it didn't fasten with a clasp at the throat. It was not what she'd been wearing, not what she'd described as ranch mink and offered to trade for her old denim jacket.

Nor was the jacket I remembered to be found anywhere else in the apartment.