A Ticket to the Boneyard

I found the bourbon section and looked at the bottles. Jim Beam, J. W. Dant, Old Taylor, Old Forester, Old Fitzgerald, Maker's Mark, Wild Turkey.



Each name rang a bell. I can walk past saloons all over town and remember what I drank there. I may be less clear on what brought me there or whom I drank with, but I'll recall what was in my glass, and what bottle it came from.



Antique Age. Old Grand Dad. Old Crow. Early Times.



I liked the names, and especially the last. Early Times. It sounded like a toast. "Well, here's to crime." "Absent friends." "Early Times."



Early Times indeed. They got better the more of a distance you looked back at them from. But what didn't?



"Help you?"



"Early Times," I said.



"A fifth?"



"A pint'll be enough," I said.



He slipped the bottle into a brown paper bag, twisted the top, handed it over the counter to me. I dropped it into a pocket of my topcoat and dug a bill out of my wallet. He rang the sale, counted out change.



One drink's too many, they say, and a thousand's not enough. But a pint would do. For starters, anyway.



There's a liquor store right across the street from my hotel, and I couldn't guess how many times I went in and out of it during the drinking years. This store, though, was a few blocks away on Eighth Avenue, and the walk back to the Northwestern seemed endless. I felt as though people were staring at me on the street. Maybe they were. Maybe the expression on my face was the sort to draw stares.



I went straight up to my room and bolted the door once I was inside it. I took the pint of bourbon from my coat pocket and laid it down on the top of my dresser. I hung my coat in the closet, draped my suit jacket over the back of a chair. I went over to the dresser and picked up the bottle and felt its familiar shape through the brown paper wrapping, and weighed it in my hands. I put it back down, still unwrapped, and went over to look out the window. Downstairs, across Fifty-seventh Street, a man in a topcoat like mine was entering the liquor store. Maybe he'd come out with a pint of Early Times and take it back to his room, and look out his window.



I didn't have to unwrap the damn thing. I could open the window and pitch it out. Maybe I could take aim, and try to drop it on someone who looked as though he just got out of church.



Jesus.



I put the TV on, looked at it without seeing it, turned it off. I walked over to the dresser and took the bottle out of the paper bag. I put it back on the dresser but I stood it upright this time, then crumpled the paper bag and dropped it in the wastebasket. I returned to my chair and sat down again. From where I was sitting I couldn't see the bottle on top of the dresser.



Back when I was first getting sober I'd made Jan a promise. "Promise me you won't take that first drink without calling me," she said, and I'd promised.



Funny the things you think of.



Well, I couldn't call her now. She was out of town, and I'd ordered her not to tell anyone where she'd gone. Not even me.



Unless she hadn't left. I'd had a call from her the day before, but what did that prove? The connection, now that I thought about it, had been crystal clear. She might have been in the next room from the sound of it.



Failing that, she could have been on Lispenard Street.



Would she do that? Convinced that the danger was largely in my mind, would she have stayed in her loft and lied to me about it?



No, I decided, she wouldn't do that. Still, there was no reason I could think of not to call her.



I dialed, got her machine. Was there anyone left in the world who didn't have one of those damned things? I listened to the same message she'd had on there for years, and when it ended I said, "Jan, it's Matt. Pick up if you're there, will you?" I waited a moment while the machine went on taping the silence, and then I said, "It's important."



No answer, and I hung up. Well, of course she hadn't answered. She was miles away. She wouldn't have played it dishonest. If she'd decided to stay in the city, she'd have told me so.



Anyway, I'd kept my promise. I'd made the call. Not my fault there was nobody home, was it?



Except that it was. My fault, that is. It was my warning that got her in a cab to the airport, and it was my actions years ago, long before I met her, that made the trip necessary. My fault. Jesus, was there one thing in the fucking world that wasn't my fault?



I turned, and the pint of Early Times was on the dresser, with light from the overhead fixture glinting off its shoulder. I went over and picked up the bottle and read its label. It was eighty proof. All of the popular-priced bourbons had been eighty-six proof for years, and then some marketing genius had come up with the idea of cutting the proof to eighty and leaving the price unchanged. Since the federal excise tax is based on alcohol content, and since alcohol costs the manufacturer more than plain water, the distiller increased his profit while slightly boosting the demand at the same time, since dedicated drinkers had to swill down more of the product in order to get the same effect.



Of course the bonded bourbons were still a hundred proof. And some of the brands came in at odd figures. Jack Daniel's was ninety proof. Wild Turkey was 101.



Funny what sticks in your mind.



Maybe I should have picked up a fifth, or even a quart.



I put the bottle down and walked over to the window again. I felt curiously calm, and at the same time I was all hyped up. I looked out across the street, then turned and looked at the bottle again. I switched on the TV and clicked the dial from channel to channel, not even noticing what I was looking at. I went around the dial two or three times and turned the set off.



The phone rang. I stood there for a moment, looking at it as though I couldn't figure out what it was, or what to do about it. It rang again. I let it ring a third time before I picked it up and said hello.



"Matt, this is Tom Havlicek." It took me a moment to place the name, and I got it just as he added, "In Massillon. Beautiful downtown Massillon, isn't that what they say?"



Did they? I didn't know how to respond to that, but fortunately I didn't have to. He said, "I just thought I'd give you a call, find out what kind of progress you were making."



Great progress, I thought. Every couple of days he kills somebody. The NYPD doesn't have a clue what's going on, and I stand around with my thumb up my ass.



What I said was, "Well, you know how it goes. It's a slow process."



"You don't have to tell me. I guess that's one thing's the same the whole world over. You put the puzzle together a piece at a time." He cleared his throat. "Why I called, I might have a piece of the puzzle. There's a night clerk at a motel on Railway Avenue who recognized your sketch."



"How did he happen to see it?"



"She. Little bitty woman, looks like your grandmother and has a mouth on her would shame a sailor. She took one look at him and knew him right away. Only problem was matching him to the right registration card, but she found him. He didn't call himself Motley. No surprise there."



"No."



"Robert Cole is what he put down. That's not far from the alias you said he used in New York. You had it written down on the sketch but I don't have it handy. Ronald something."



"Ronald Copeland."



"That's right. For address he put a post-office box, and he put down Iowa City, Iowa. He had a car, and he put down the plate number, and the motor vehicles people in Des Moines tell me there's no such plate been issued. They say they couldn't issue such a plate because it doesn't jibe with their numbering system."



"That's interesting."



"I thought so,'' he said. "Now my thinking is either he just made up the plate number or he used the one on the car he was driving, but it wasn't an Iowa tag in the first place."



"Or both."



"Well, sure. To take it the rest of the way, if he drove from New York he most likely had New York plates, and he might want to put down the correct plate number just in case some sharp-eyed clerk compared his car with the card he filled out. So if you were to check motor vehicles there at your end-"



"Good idea," I said. He gave me the plate number and I copied it down, along with the name Robert Cole. "He used an Iowa address at a local hotel here," I remembered. "Mason City, though. Not Iowa City. I wonder why he's fixated on Iowa."



"Maybe he's from there originally."



"I don't think so. He sounds like a New Yorker. Maybe he locked with somebody from Iowa in Dannemora. Tom, how did the motel clerk get to see the sketch?"



"How did she get to see it? I showed it to her."



"I thought the case wasn't going to be reopened."



"It wasn't," he said. "Still hasn't been." He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "What I do on my free time's pretty much up to me."



"You ran all over town on your own?"



He cleared his throat again. "Matter of fact," he said, "I found a couple of the fellows to help out. I was the one who showed the sketch to that woman, but that was just the luck of the draw."



"I see."



"I don't know what good all of this is, Matt, but I thought you ought to know what showed up so far. I don't know where we go from here, if anywheres, but you'll hear from me if anything else turns up."



I hung up and went over to the window again. On the street a couple of uniforms were in conversation with a street vendor, a black man who'd set up shop a few weeks ago in front of the florist's, selling scarves and belts and purses, and cheap umbrellas when it rained. They come over from Dakar on Air Afrique, stay five and six to a room in the Broadway hotels, and fly back to Senegal every few months with presents for the kids. They learn quick over here, and evidently their curriculum includes low-level bribery, because the two blues left this one to tend his open-air store.



Nice of Havlicek, I thought. Decent of him, putting in his own time on a case his chief wouldn't reopen, even getting some other cops to work some of their off-hours.



For all the good it would do.



I looked over at the bottle and let it draw me across the room to the dresser. The federal tax stamp ran from one shoulder to the other, so arranged that you'd tear it when you twisted the cap. I teased the edges of the stamp with the ball of my thumb. I picked up the bottle and held it to the light, looking at the overhead bulb through the amber liquid the way you're supposed to view an eclipse through a piece of smoked glass. That was what whiskey was, I'd sometimes thought. The filter through which you can safely look upon a reality that's otherwise too vivid for the naked eye.



I put the bottle down, made a phone call. A gruff bass voice said, "Faber Printing, this is Jim."



"This is Matt," I said. "How's it going?"



"Not so bad. And you?"



"Oh, I can't complain. Say, I didn't catch you at a bad time, did I?"



"No, it's a slow day. What I'm doing right now is running carry-out menus for a Chinese restaurant. They buy thousands of them at a time and their deliverymen leave stacks of them in every vestibule and hallway they can find."



"So you're printing litter."



"That's exactly what I'm doing," he said cheerfully. "Contributing what I can to the solid-waste disposal problem. And you?"



"Oh, nothing much. It's a slow day."