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"Serendipity. Dont you like the coffee? Is it too strong?"
"There is no such thing. And its fine. "
"Youre not drinking it. "
"Im sipping it. Ive had gallons of coffee already today, its been that kind of a day. But Im enjoying it. "
"I guess I dont have too much confidence in it," she said. "After all those months of instant decaf. "
"Well, this is a big improvement. "
"Im glad. So you didnt learn anything more about Eddie? And what was on his mind?"
"No," I said. "But then I didnt really expect to. "
"Oh. "
"Because I already knew. "
"I dont follow you. "
"Dont you?" I got to my feet. "I already knew what was on Eddies 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 didnt want to know about it. I tried to shut out the knowledge, and I went out there hoping Id 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 cant 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 wouldnt have flagged anybodys 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 shouldnt 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. Hed tried dicking around with marijuana shortly after he came into the program and he knew that didnt work. He wouldnt 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 couldnt sleep hed have stayed awake. Nobody ever died from lack of sleep. Thats 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.
"Id 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 couldnt let go of it. I went up to his apartment and I gave it a pretty decent search. If hed 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 couldnt sleep, that he was going nuts. He wouldnt take a drink or a bottle of beer so I gave him a couple of drops in a cup of coffee. "
"Thats 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.
"Thats 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 havent 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. Its going to make me sound stupid, but I can explain. "
"Lets hear it. "
"I gave him the chloral hydrate. I didnt know any reason not to, for Gods sake. He came in to talk and he wasnt 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 didnt give any indication what it was. "
"And?"
"I told him decaf wouldnt 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 didnt 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. "
"And the reason you didnt say anything-"
"Was because I thought Id killed him! I thought the dose I gave him made him drowsy, and then as a result he lost consciousness while he was half strangling himself, and that was why he died. And by this time you and I were sleeping together, and I was terrified youd hold it against me, I knew what a fanatic you are about sobriety, and I couldnt see what purpose it would serve to admit that Id done something that might have contributed to his death. " She held her hands at her sides. "That may make me guilty of something, Matt. But it doesnt mean I killed him. "
"Jesus," I said.
"Do you see, darling? Do you see what-"
"What Im beginning to see is how good you are at improvisation. I suppose you had good training, living under false colors for all those years, putting up one front after another for your neighbors and co-workers. It must have been a great education. "
"Youre talking about the lies I told earlier. Im not proud of that but I guess its true. I guess Ive learned to lie as a reflex. And now I have to learn a new way of behavior, now that Im involved with someone whos really important to me. Its a different ball game now, isnt it, and I-"
"Cut the shit, Willa. "
She recoiled as if from a blow. "It wont work," I told her. "You didnt just slip him a Mickey. You knotted the clothesline around the neck and hanged him from the pipe. It wouldnt have been hard for you to do. Youre a big strong woman and he was a little guy, and he wouldnt have put up a fight once youd knocked him out with the chloral. You set the stage nicely, you stripped him, you put a couple of bondage magazines where theyd tell a good story. Where did you buy the magazines? Times Square?"
"I didnt buy the magazines. I didnt do any of the things you just said. "
"One of the clerks down there might remember you. Youre a striking woman, and they dont get that many female customers in the first place. I dont suppose it would take a whole lot of legwork to turn up a clerk who remembers you. "
"Matt, if you could hear yourself. The awful things youre accusing me of. I know youre tired, I know the kind of day youve had, but-"
"I told you to cut the crap. I know you killed him, Willa. You closed the windows to hold the smell in a little longer, to make the medical evidence a little less precise. Then you waited for someone to notice the stench and report it, to you or to the cops. You were in no hurry. You didnt really care how long it took before the body was discovered. What mattered was that he was dead. That way his secret could die with him. "
"What secret?"
"The one he had trouble living with. The on
e you didnt dare let him tell me. About all the other people you killed. "
I said, "Poor Mrs. Mangan. All her old friends are dying while she sits around waiting for her own death. And the ones who dont die are moving away. There was a landlord around the corner who moved junkies into the building so that they would terrorize his rent-controlled tenants. He got fined for it. He should have gone to jail, the son of a bitch. "
She looked right at me. It was hard to read her face, hard to guess what was going on behind it.
"But a lot of people have been moving out of the neighborhood willingly," I went on. "Their landlords buy them out, offer them five or ten or twenty thousand dollars to give up their apartments. It must confuse the hell out of them, to get offered more to vacate an apartment than theyve paid all their lives to live in it. Of course, once they take the money, they cant find a place they can afford to live in. "
"Thats the system. "
"Its a funny system. You pay steady rent on a couple of rooms for twenty or thirty years and the guy who owns the building pays a small fortune to get rid of you. Youd think hed want to hang on to a good steady tenant, but then the same kind of thing happens in business. Companies pay their best employees big bonuses to take early retirement and get the hell out. That way they can replace them with young kids wholl work for lower salaries. You wouldnt think it would work that way, but it does. "
"I dont know what youre getting at. "
"Dont you? I managed to get hold of the autopsy report on Gertrude Grod. She had the apartment directly above Eddies, and she died right around the time he was starting to get sober. She had just about as much chloral hydrate in her as Eddie did. And her physician never prescribed the drug for her, and neither did anyone on staff at Roosevelt or St. Clares. I figure you knocked on her door and got her to invite you in for a cup of tea, and when she was looking the other way you dosed her cup. On your way out you could have made sure the window gates were unlocked, so that Eddie could slip in a few hours later with a knife. "
"Why would he do this for me?"
"My guess is you had a sexual hold on him, but it could have been anything. He was just starting to get sober and he wasnt a model of mental health at the time. And youre pretty good at getting people to do what you want them to do. You probably convinced Eddie hed be doing the old lady a favor. Ive heard you rap on the subject, how nobody should have to grow old that way. And shed never know what happened to her, the drug would keep her from waking up, and so shed never feel a thing. All he had to do was go out his window, climb up a flight, and stick a knife into a sleeping woman. "
"Why wouldnt I just knife her myself? If I was already in her apartment and I got her to drink a dose of chloral. "
"You wanted it to go in the books as a burglary. Eddie could make it a lot more convincing. He could lock her door from the inside and put the chain latch on before he went back out the window. I saw the police report. They had to break the door down. That was a nice touch, made it look a lot less like a possible inside job. "
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