A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “Fucking Jesus,” Mark said.

  “That’s what I walked in on.”

  “Man, the smell! It’s like a fucking distillery. That’s not from one drink sitting in a glass.”

  “It’s strong, isn’t it?”

  He moved past me, walked over to the bed. “Come here, Matt. Look.”

  That was what made the smell so strong. My pillow and mattress were soaked. My visitor had upended a bottle of bourbon over my bed.

  I turned from it, went to the desk. The open bottle had no more than a couple of ounces missing, less than the glass contained. So he’d come to my room with a glass and two bottles, poured a drink, emptied a bottle on my bed, and left me plenty of bourbon to get good and drunk on.

  “Unbelievable, man. Who could pull some shit like this?”

  “Steve,” I said.

  “You know the guy?”

  “Just his name.”

  He shook his head, and we both stood there for a moment, taking it all in. Then he said, “First things first, Matt. The bottle and the glass.”

  “Right.”

  “You want me to—”

  “No, let me do it,” I said, and picked up the glass and carried it into the bathroom. I held the thing at arm’s length, as if it were a snake that might whip its head around and bite me, and I upended it over the sink and ran water to wash its contents down the drain. I held the glass under the tap and rinsed it out, and then I dropped it in the wastebasket. It was a perfectly good drinking glass, and perfectly safe now that I’d rinsed the residue of bourbon out of it, but what did I need with it?

  I went back for the bottle, and emptied it into the sink, and let the tap water speed its passage through the plumbing. I rinsed out the bottle, too, and Mark handed me the cap, and I held that under the running water before I screwed it back onto the bottle. Then I put the thing in the wastebasket, with the glass.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Be hard to drink it now. You’d have to go down into the sewer after it, and the alligators’d beat you to it.”

  “A load off my mind,” I said.

  “Next we got to do something about that bed. No way you can sleep on it.”

  “No.”

  “There a porter or somebody who can get it out of here?”

  “Not at this hour.”

  We stood there thinking about it. Then Mark said, “You know, that mattress is done. You can’t fix a mattress like that. It’ll stink of alcohol forever.”

  “I know.”

  “The pillow too. Total loss.”

  “Right.”

  He walked over to the window, opened it as wide as it would open. “Good it’s a single bed,” he said. “Never work with a double.”

  “You think?”

  “What else, man?”

  I let him take charge. He was a good fifteen years younger than I, and I’d been sober a little longer, but he seemed to know what to do and that was more than I could say for myself. We stripped off the bed linen, and Mark had me help him lug the bare mattress over to the window. When we had it balanced half in and half out, he sent me downstairs to make sure no one was underneath the thing when he shoved it out.

  I walked past Jacob and out onto the pavement. I looked up, and there was my mattress, hanging out of my window. An older man wearing a suit and a tie had just emerged from McGovern’s, and I waited while he walked toward me with the careful gait of a man who’s drunk and knows it. He looked up to see what was holding my attention, decided it was nothing he had to be concerned about, and walked on by. The sidewalk was clear now, and I called out to Mark, and my mattress came sailing down at me and landed at my feet.

  I got hold of it, dragged it over to the curb. I went inside and asked Jacob which rooms were vacant. There was a single on my floor, at the rear of the building. He gave me the key.

  The room had been serviced since the last guest had departed. It was a little smaller than mine, but had the same iron bedstead, and the same size mattress. Mark and I took the mattress, linen and all, and carried it the length of the hall to my room, and placed it on my empty frame.

  “Like it’s been there forever,” Mark said. “Just one thing missing.”

  I fetched the pillow from the vacant room, and set it on my bed. We took my pillow and my sheets, balled them up, and put them in the service pantry. There was a big trash can there, and it got the contents of my wastebasket, the empty bottle and the glass. I locked the vacant room, and we stopped downstairs at the desk to return the key.

  “It’s a funny thing,” I told Jacob, “but there’s no mattress on the bed in that room.”

  “There ain’t?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’m sure the porter can rustle up a spare from the storeroom first thing in the morning.” A couple of bills moved from my hand to his. “For his trouble,” I said. “And for yours.”

  “Don’t see no problem there,” he said.

  Outside, Mark looked at my old mattress and nodded his approval. “I always wondered what it would be like to throw one of those out a window.”

  “And?”

  “One minute it was there,” he said, “and then it wasn’t. It was sort of satisfying, actually. Made more of a noise landing than I thought it would.”

  “Nobody on the street seemed to notice.”

  “Well, New York,” he said. “That dude at the desk. Jacob? He was pretty cool about the whole thing. He high on something?”

  “He has a fondness for cough syrup,” I said.

  “Well, shit,” Mark said. “Who doesn’t?”

  XL

  THERE WAS TIME for a quick bite before the meeting, and Mark suggested a deli on Broadway. “We’ll take the bike,” he said.

  It was eight or ten blocks away, and we got there in a hurry. When we were seated and had ordered our pastrami sandwiches, I excused myself and made a phone call.

  Jim was still at the shop. “I was supposed to call as soon as I got rid of the booze,” I told him, “and it slipped my mind completely.” I brought him up to date, and he asked me how I felt now. “A lot better,” I said.

  He said he might be late for the meeting, but that he’d see me there. I went back to the table and told Mark I’d never been on a motorcycle before. “You’re kidding,” he said. “Never?”

  “Not that I remember,” I said, “and I think it’s something I’d remember. Even in a blackout, that’s the sort of thing that would cut through the fog.”

  “You should get one, man. Seriously.”

  The pastrami was good, the french fries well-done. I liked the place, and wondered how come I’d never happened on it before. It wasn’t that far from my hotel, and I had to have walked past it dozens of times over the years.

  Mark told me parts of his story while we ate. There was a lot of heroin in it, and a lot of hectic trips back and forth across the country. He’d spent a lot of time in Oakland and San Francisco, and sometimes he missed it. “I’ll hear California calling,” he said, “but I’ll hear a needle calling, and it’s the same voice, you know? So I figure for now I’ll stay right where I’m at.”

  A couple of times over the years I’ve had dreams in which I was capable of flight. I soared over the rooftops, banking and turning effortlessly, reveling in the simple delight of it all. After our meal I got a second ride on the back of Mark’s Harley, from the deli to St. Paul’s, and it had an unreal quality that brought those flying dreams to mind. I had slipped into a zone of unreality when I opened my hotel room door the first time, and in this new world mattresses sailed out of windows and motorcycles tore through the night.

  Then we walked into the meeting at St. Paul’s and the world came back into focus.

  Jim wasn’t there. I got a cup of coffee and took a seat, and an exchange speaker from Bay Ridge told a story that started at age four, when he circled the living room the morning after a party and polished off the dregs of everybody’s drinks. “Right away,” he said, “I knew what my life was going to be about
.”

  I raised my hand during the discussion and said I’d had a difficult day, and one that had included a challenge to my sobriety. But I’d stayed sober, and what especially pleased me was that I’d actually gone so far as to ask for help, which was by no means characteristic behavior on my part. I’d received the help I needed, made a friend in the process, and capped the experience with an adventure. Just a little adventure, I said, but that was about as much excitement as I could stand. And, I added, if I just managed to go to bed sober, when I woke up the next morning I’d have a year.

  That got some applause. Several people congratulated me during the break, including Jim, who must have come in toward the end of the qualification. Afterward the two of us followed the crowd to the Flame, but instead of joining the big table we took a small one by ourselves. He ordered a full meal—he’d come straight to the meeting from the shop—and I had a cup of coffee.

  “You didn’t go into detail,” he said.

  “It was a little more drama than I wanted to share. Not that it wouldn’t have made a good story. We wound up throwing the mattress out the window.”

  “That must have been fun.”

  “I didn’t get to do it. I went downstairs to make sure it didn’t land on anybody. I figured I’ll have enough names on my Eighth Step list as it is.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Actually,” I said, “Mark did all the thinking. He took complete charge and showed real executive ability. Though I worked out how to replace the mattress.”

  “You swiped one from an empty room.”

  “I reassigned it,” I said. “But Jesus, Jim, when I opened the door…”

  He let me talk my way through it. When I was done he frowned and said, “It wasn’t a practical joke, was it?”

  “It was serious as a heart attack,” I said. “You couldn’t file charges, but what it was is attempted murder.”

  “He figured you’d pick up a drink and it would kill you. And it would have, though it might have taken a couple of years.”

  “He knew I was getting close,” I said. “And he didn’t want anybody getting close. He killed Jack Ellery because he was convinced he’d wind up in the spotlight as a direct result of Jack’s process of making amends. He killed Mark Sattenstein to keep him quiet, and he killed Greg Stillman to close down my investigation. He didn’t have to do all that, I’d done all I’d signed on to do, but every time he stirred the pot something new floated up and got me into it all over again. So the only way Steve was going to get rid of me was to kill me.”

  “You know his name?”

  “His first name. They called him Even Steven, as a counterpart to High-Low Jack. Because Jack had mood swings and Steven didn’t, evidently. He was cool as a pistol.”

  “Isn’t it—”

  “Hot as a pistol, cool as a cucumber. A fellow who knew them both hit on the idea of inverting clichés, and it only took him twenty-five years of daily marijuana use to come up with it.”

  “Cannabis, friend to man.”

  “If he could get me to drink,” I said, “I probably wouldn’t be able to pursue the investigation any further, and even if I did I’d lack credibility. I’d be another raving drunk with paranoid delusions, and the cops see plenty of those. And if I went on a decent bender, there was a good chance it’d kill me outright, and at the very least it would make me an easy victim. Things happen to people when they’re drunk. They fall down flights of stairs or off subway platforms, they lurch off curbs in front of buses. He’d made Sattenstein’s death look like a mugging and Stillman’s like a suicide, and he could find a way to kill me and make it look like something else.”

  “And now?”

  “He’ll look for another way.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Try to get him,” I said, “before he gets me.”

  He thought about it. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I’ll sit around the shop all day, and then at the last minute a job comes in and it has to be done in a rush. I wind up missing dinner with my wife and the first half of my meeting.”

  “And that’s what happened tonight.”

  “It is,” he said, “and it invariably annoys the bejesus out of me. But nobody pours top-shelf bourbon for me, and nobody’s trying to kill me, so maybe I haven’t got all that much to complain about.”

  When we left the Flame he said, “You know, you’re always going out of your way to walk me home. Tomorrow’s your anniversary, and I think it’s time I walked you home for a change.”

  And when we reached the Northwestern he said, “All these months and I’ve never had a look at your room.”

  “You want to see it?”

  “Long as I’m here.”

  I said, “Jim, I’m all right.”

  “I know that.”

  “Mark and I left the room in good shape. There was still a faint odor of bourbon, but we left the window open, so it’ll be gone by now.”

  “Probably true.”

  “And he wouldn’t have come back. He tried something and it didn’t work, so he’ll try something else.”

  “Stands to reason.”

  “But you still want to come up.”

  “Why not?”

  We went upstairs, and I opened my door to a room that was just as I’d left it, if a good deal colder. I closed the window. Jim looked around the room, then walked over to the window himself. “Nice view,” he said.

  “It’s something to look out at,” I said, “when I’m in the mood to look out at something.”

  “A man couldn’t ask for more. It seems to suit you.”

  “I think so.”

  “And when you wake up tomorrow,” he said, “you’ll have a year.”

  “Sometimes that sounds like a lot,” I said, “and sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “You know what else you’ll have tomorrow? One more day to get through. And sometimes that’s a lot.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s all a day at a time, and there’s no need to think in long-range terms, but if you keep it up you might wind up with long-term sobriety. You know how to make sure you achieve that elusive distinction?”

  “How?”

  “Don’t drink,” he said, “and don’t die.”

  I told him I’d see what I could do.

  When he left I decided I needed more than a shower. I drew a hot bath and soaked in it until the water wasn’t hot anymore. It took the tension out of my muscles and the back of my neck, but what it didn’t do was make me sleepy. I lay in bed with the lights out, and of course the new mattress felt unfamiliar, and so did the pillow. There was nothing really wrong with either of them, and it was clear to me that they weren’t keeping me awake. It was my mind that was keeping me awake.

  I got up and turned the light on. Jim had once suggested I read the chapter on Step Seven in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions as a cure for insomnia. “It’ll stop a charging rhino in his tracks,” he said. “Years ago I’d read the first chapter of Swann’s Way, which is as far as I ever got with Monsieur Proust. Put me out every time. But the Seventh Step is almost as good.”

  I read the first couple of paragraphs, then put the book back on the shelf and hauled out Jack Ellery’s account of the double homicide on Jane Street. I read it through and set it aside and thought about it, and decided I wasn’t any closer to sleep than I’d been before, and that it felt out of the question, at least for the time being.

  I thought about Motorcycle Mark, and how there’d been more to him than I would have suspected. People surprise you that way, especially the sober ones. It had been sheerest happenstance that led me to call him: a phone call from someone else had led me to ask if he’d called, and he’d responded by asking for my number and giving me his, and I’d taken it from him more out of politeness than anything else. And, because I didn’t have my phone book with me, and because I still had his number in my wallet, he’d been the one I’d called. And I couldn’t have made a better choice.


  Funny how it works.

  I decided I ought to have his number in my book, and that the task of copying it, along with the other cards and slips of paper in my wallet, was just the right sort of task for my current state of mind. I sorted everything, put a batch of receipts in the cigar box where I stow them when I remember, and found a fine-point pen to copy Mark’s number and the others I’d accumulated since I last forced myself to perform this particular task.

  Halfway through, something brought me up short. I stared at the card in my hand, copied the number into my book, stared at the card some more, and returned it to my wallet.

  I picked up Jack’s confession, read it through one more time, and noticed something I’d missed the first time through. “I will call him S.,” he wrote of his partner, and so he did, S. for Steve. And then when he described the killing itself, he called the man E.S. For Even Steven, obviously.

  Maker’s Mark, I thought. There was Mark Sattenstein, and there was Motorcycle Mark, and now there was Maker’s Mark.

  Why had he picked that brand?

  It wasn’t a very popular bourbon. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it advertised—but then I tried not to pay much attention to liquor ads these days. It was expensive, but less so than Dickel or Wild Turkey, and it didn’t have their reputation. Nor was it a brand I ordered often.

  At bars I didn’t always specify the brand. I might just order bourbon, or I might look at the bottles on the back bar and name whatever label caught my eye. Old Crow, Old Forester, Jim Beam. Jack Daniel’s. There were bourbons I’d try because I liked the sound of their name, or the look of the bottle they came in. And when I went across the street for a bottle I generally came back with Early Times or Ancient Age, or maybe J. W. Dant—something modestly priced and serviceable, smooth enough to go down easy, strong enough to do the job.

  It was Carolyn Cheatham who had a fondness for Maker’s Mark. She was Tommy Tillary’s girlfriend, and one night she turned up at Armstrong’s without him. She lived nearby on Fifty-seventh Street, just a few doors west of Ninth Avenue, in an Art Deco building with a sunken living room and high ceilings, and that night the two of us began consoling each other and wound up sharing her bed, along with a fifth of Maker’s Mark.