NINE

I hadn’t seen Barry drunk in years. He could pound down whiskey sours by the hour without slurring a syllable, and the few times I’d seen him bent under a load he’d managed to pass out without offending his host, hop up the next morning, and write Pulitzer prose over a breakfast beer. When drinking companions who didn’t know him well asked if he had a hollow leg, he raised the artificial one and knocked on it.

The man on my doorstep wasn’t that Barry. His eyes were swimming in blood, his fair hair stuck up where the steel plate plugged his skull, and he stumbled without moving his feet. He could still pass for a college kid, but only if his frat was located in Darfur. Tidy by nature, he had half his shirt hanging outside his waistband and grass stains on the knees of his slacks. He smelled like a four-truck pileup at Jim Beam.

“So sorry for the hour,” he said, almost too steadily. He was on his guard. “You look cute in a bathrobe.”

“You look like a chemical spill. This a party or a wake? Distillery’s the business to get into. The customers come in either way.”

“So clever, so late. You’ve been out, I guess. I tried to call you several times.”

“I work some nights.” I moved aside. He high-stepped over the low threshold, tripped on a shadow on the floor, but caught himself. “Bar still open?”

“We never close. How about a pot of coffee as an aperitif?”

“With toast and jam, when the sun’s up. I’m partial to Scotch this season, but in a pinch I can make do with Janitor in a Drum.”

“I’ve got a bottle that goes both ways.” There’s no use trying to sober up a determined sot. Their red cells gang up to resist it.

He made it to the armchair and lowered himself into it as carefully as if it were a tub of scalding water. He limped only slightly when all his brain cells were sparking, not at all when he was sloshed. You never knew he came without all his original parts until he made a joke about it. He was still awake when I came back from the kitchen with a couple of glasses heavy on ice. He scowled at his. “Looks like The March of the Penguins. What are you doing, defrosting your refrigerator?”

“Drink it up and I’ll take it easy next time. In this heat I like to suck on the cubes.” I took mine over to the spavined sofa and found a space between the springs I could live with. I’d picked it out with a wife I hadn’t thought about in months.

He slurped, made a face. “Scotch, I said. Squeezing it out of a bagpipe doesn’t count.”

“It came in a big plastic jug, with a toy. It hasn’t been a Glenlivet kind of year.”

“I hear it’s looking up.”

I set aside my glass. “Dump it out, Barry. It’s too late in the shift for nuance and innuendo.”

He shook his head and took another pull. They say it’s possible to drink yourself sober, but he was still in search of the formula. “I’m just in from Montreal. It’s just as hot there. You need to go as far as Newfoundland for relief.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t a pleasure trip. French-Canadian mug who used to pal around with Carlo Marcello in New Orleans was making nice with al Qaeda over importing undesirables into North America. Turns out he was kidding, but an Islamist with a sense of humor is like a feminist who doesn’t look like Casey Stengel. They sent his head by special messenger to Mountie headquarters in Ottawa.”

“What’d they do with the rest of him?”

“That never turns up, and no one ever seems to ask. Heads are prime rib on the hostage market.”

“Well, at least you got to brush up on your French.”

“Not much. It’s more like border-town Spanish up there. What are you working on?”

“I tried to call you about it. I didn’t know you were out of town.”

“I bet you tried. Three people who’d been trying to reach me called one after the other five minutes after I got in the door. They all had the same message.” He put down the rest of his drink and stuck out the glass. “This time neat.”

I dumped out the ice in the sink, poured in three fingers, and brought it back to him. I remained standing. “I called in a marker from Mary Ann Thaler when I couldn’t reach you,” I said. “She got right on it, I guess. I don’t imagine she was one of the ones who called you.”

“She didn’t have to. I’ve been priming the pump at Thirteen Hundred for years. She’s been asking around about Joseph Michael Ballista’s known associates. Ordinarily I wouldn’t think much about it, but she’s no longer with the DPD, and she’s only interested in the circles he swam around in almost thirty years ago. That was just about the time I was learning to walk on timber.”

“Was it really wooden back then?”

“It was polystyrene, same as now, but when I drink I get poetic. You’re pretty tight with Thaler.”

“I ain’t either. Just a known associate.”

“Who’s the client?”

“Lucille Lettermore.”

“I know Lefty Lucy. Ted Kaczynski had her number in his Rolodex. When did she become a mob mouthpiece?”

“When the Justice Department took over the rackets. She’s reopening your case.”

“It was never closed. We never found out if Joey was working for himself or someone else. He didn’t give up a name.”

“Cold, then. She wants to wipe it off his record along with some others so he can walk on his latest beef as a first-time offender.”

He took a stiff gulp, shuddered when it mixed with whatever he’d started on. “You the only sleuth in town didn’t fly north for the summer?”

“I inherited the job from Reliance. It’s piecework, not general assembly. Lucille isn’t just grandstanding. She’s convinced it was a bum rap.”

“That’s her story. What’s yours?”

“Maybe Joey didn’t give up any names because he didn’t have any to give.”

“I hear he’s in a bad way,” he said after a moment. “You see a sick man, you forget what he was like when he wasn’t sick. That’s how parole boards get fooled.”

“I was standing as close to him as I am to you when he said he never killed a man he wasn’t looking in the eye.”

“He didn’t kill me.”

“You know what he meant.”

“I knew what he meant when he told me to my face I was dead but still breathing, and I knew what he meant when I hit the ground just ahead of the rest of me not twenty-four hours later. Ten fingers are only important to watchmakers and pianists, and I’ve just about forgotten what it was like to get out of bed without reaching for my leg ahead of my pants, but I get headaches you could boil borscht on. It’s like my brain’s chewing tinfoil. I know what he meant when I’m screaming for the pain to stop.”

“Barry, I’ve spent almost as much time with these sons of bitches as you. I know when they’re putting me on. Then there’s Joey’s record; not his sheet downtown, I mean the stuff that didn’t stick because the evidence was thin. When he used a gun he stood close enough to leave powder burns on his man. He took a couple of turns with a knife and one with a garrote, probably for sentimental reasons. Right up until he got too high on the ladder to do his own hits, he never once used so much as a rifle, or anything else that wouldn’t put him face to face with the vic. The lawyer who lost that case couldn’t very well use that in his defense, but it says plenty to me. Smart crooks don’t change their lay.”

“Who ever said Joey Ballistic was smart?”

“Smart enough not to go down on any of the lifer plays.”

“Smarter, maybe. He used a new MO to throw the cops off track.”

“That’s dumb smart. It only works in movies, and if he thought it worked at all he wouldn’t have tipped his hand by threatening you in the first place. What’d you do to set him off, by the way?”

“I don’t remember. As to your point, half a dozen sticks of dynamite can usually be counted on to prevent a positive ID from the victim at the showup.”

“We could shuffle this deck all day. Try this angle: If Joey didn’t do it, whoever did got away clean.”

“What if he did? He cheated the statute of limitations when he screwed up. The clock never runs out on murder, but there’s a sell-by date on attempted. That expired more than twenty years ago.”

I said, “Argue all you want. It won’t convince me you don’t care if the wrong man pays the bill for all that aspirin you eat. You and Lucille have a couple of things in common. One is you both put plenty of store in small-j justice.”

“So let him rot for what he got away with.”

“Try it again. You didn’t sell it the first time.”

He gathered his feet close to the base of the chair; the thigh muscle he used to bring the artificial leg into line stood out like steel cable. The glass creaked in his fist. The laws of equal pressure were against his crushing it, but he’d been known to break a law or two in the interest of the greater good.

I pushed it; I was curious. “I need you on this, Barry. Mary Ann’s good, but disinterested. The system’s not proof against an honest-to-Christ vigilante on a crusade.”

The science question went unanswered for the time being. He turned on his pelvis, placed the glass on the telephone stand at his elbow with delicate precision, and came back around in one smooth movement with all the torque required to launch himself from the chair and swing a long beautiful left hook that caught me on the corner of the jaw and put me out to the count of thirty.

I’m a connoisseur of unconsciousness. You’re seldom all the way out on the instant. Just before I slipped under I heard him quite clearly: “We’re done, you keyhole-peeking bastard. Dead and buried. I don’t see you on the street, I don’t hear you on the phone. You’re a ghost.”