Eight Million Ways To Die

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 tithe. 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 brass rail, bell-shaped glass 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 competition, 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. Nobody 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 hassling him. He'd spent his day arranging funeral services for Sunny.

Unlike Kim, whose body had been shipped 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 God 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.