I am taking a good firm knot and reducing it to a mess of loose ends. And why would I see it like that if it wasn’t so? It’s the last thing I want. This way, I don’t win. This way, I don’t prevail.
But let’s ride with the ketchup—with the procedural ketchup of questions and numbers and expert testimony. Then we can do the noir. I may still be prov-ably wrong.
This is where we came in.
-+=*=+-
On the phone I said that I would be buying, but when we’re standing at the bar in the Decoy Room and facing that palisade of booze Paulie No flattens out a twenty and asks me:
What’s your poison?
And I say seltzer.
There’s a lilt in his voice and his fold-lidded eyes are downward glancing. Since he’s apparently twigged that I’m off from CID just now, he seems to think that this is tantamount to a date. Unexpected, because I’d always fingered him for a fruit. Like every other pathologist you ever came across. As if anybody gives a fuck, one way or the other.
We talk about five-irons and RBIs and whether the Pushers have what it takes to beat the Rapists next Saturday, or whatever, and then I say,
Paulie. This conversation never happened, okay?
… What conversation?
Thanks, Paulie. Paulie. Remember when you cut the Rockwell girl?
Most definitely. Every day it should be like that.
It beats bursters, right, Paulie?
It beats floaters. Hey. We going to talk dead bodies? Or we going to talk living meat?
No speaks perfect American but he looks like Fu Manchu’s nephew. I’m staring at his mustache, which is shiny but also patchy, threadbare. Christ, he’s like the guy under the earphones in the Crescent. I mean it’s pretty basic, isn’t it: Why have a mustache when it just didn’t happen? His hands are clean, puffy, and gray. Like the hands of some dish-plunging stiff in a diner kitchen. I congratulate myself. I’m flesh and blood, not hide and ice: I can still get the creeps around Paul No, a state cutter who loves his job. But every ten minutes I’m shuddering at the thought of how hardbitten I’ve gotten.
“The night is young, Paulie. Eric: Another beer for Dr. No.”
“…With suicides, know what they used to do?”
“What, Paulie?”
“Dissect the brain looking for special lesions. Suicide lesions. Caused by?”
“Tell me.”
“Masturbation.”
“That’s interesting. This is interesting also. There was a tox report on the Rockwell girl. You didn’t see it.”
“Why would I?”
“Yeah well the Colonel had it shitcanned.”
“Mm-hm. What was it? Marijuana?” Then, horrif-ically overdoing the mock-horror, he said, “Cocaine?”
“Lithium.”
Somehow, we all bought the lithium. We all swallowed it. Colonel Tom, down to his last marble. Hi Tulkinghorn, going lean and mean into his own little end-zone. Trader—because he believed her dying words. Because he felt the special weight, as testimony, of dying words. And I, too, bought and swallowed. Because otherwise…
“Lithium?” he said. “No way. Lithium? Fuck no.”
Here we are in the Decoy Room, the day after April Fool’s: These, surely, are not Jennifer’s jokes. It’s just the world being heavyhanded. Similarly, in the center of the room, over the white baby grand, the sleepy-looking… Let me recast that sentence. Over the white baby grand the pianist with the big hair is playing “Night Train.” Of all things. In the Oscar Peterson style, but with trills and graces. Not passion and muscle. I make my head do a half circle and expect to see, straddling the next stool along, Am Debs’s tense and keglike thighs. But all I get are the Monday-night drinkers, and decoys, decoys, and the wall of hooch, and the bubbling tideline on No’s mustache.
I say so don’t tell me. An individual’s on that shit for a time. Maybe a year. What would you see?
He says oh you’d most certainly be seeing signs of renal damage there. After maybe a month. Most definitely.
I say seeing what signs?
He says distal tubules where the salt was reab-sorbed. The thyroid, also, would underfunction and enlarge.
I say and the Rockwell girl?
He says no fucking way. Her organ tree was like a wall chart. The kidneys? They were dinner. No, man. She was—she was like Plan A.