A Drop of the Hard Stuff Read Online Free PDF

matter with me? She said she was tired, and I was going to be seeing her Saturday.”
    “You thought you’d be going home with her tonight. More or less took it for granted.”
    “And she asked if I was all right with it, and I said sure, that was fine.”
    “But that’s not how you felt.”
    “I felt like telling her to forget about Saturday, while she was at it. That way she could get plenty of rest. All the fucking rest she wanted.”
    “Nice.”
    “And thank you very much, lady, but I’ll get my own cab. But what I said was I felt like walking.”
    “Uh-huh. And how do you feel now?”
    “Tired. And a little silly.”
    “Both appropriate, I’d say. Did you drink?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Did you want to?”
    “No,” I said, and thought about it. “Not consciously. But I probably wanted to, on some level.”
    “But you didn’t drink.”
    “No.”
    “Then you’re okay,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
    Not counting our Bronx boyhood, that was the third time I saw Jack Ellery—once through one-way glass, and twice at meetings.
    The next time I saw him he was dead.

IV
     
    I WENT OUT for breakfast at the Morning Star Friday morning, and went straight from there to the Donnell Library on West Fifty-third. In the restaurant the night before we’d talked some about the
General Slocum
disaster, but I’d been uncertain exactly when it had occurred and how many lives had been lost. I found a book that would answer all my questions, including some that hadn’t come to mind until I started reading about it. Just about everyone involved had been grossly negligent, from the owners and line management on down, but the only one who went to jail was the captain, and his sentence struck me as awfully light for the enormity of his actions.
    As far as I could tell, nobody bothered to bring a civil suit, and I thought how the world had changed in three-quarters of a century. Nowadays people filed a lawsuit at the drop of a hat, even if it was somebody else’s hat and it hadn’t been dropped within half a block of them. I tried to decide whether the country wasbetter or worse for all that relentless litigation, and I chose to postpone my decision, because something I’d read was leading me to another book on another subject.
    That took care of the morning, and I went straight from the Donnell reading room to the Sixty-third Street Y, getting there just in time for the 12:30 meeting. It broke at 1:30, and I stopped at a pizza stand for a slice and a Coke, which would do me fine for lunch, although I didn’t suppose it would bring a smile of delight to the face of a board-certified nutritionist. It was around 2:15 when I got home, and there were two slips in my message box. The first call had come at 10:45, and I’d missed the second one by less than ten minutes. They were both from Jack, and both times he’d said he would try again later.
    I went upstairs and called his number on the off chance that he was home now, or that he’d acquired an answering machine. He wasn’t and he hadn’t.
    I stayed in the room until it was time to go out to dinner. I had no reason to go anywhere and I had a book to read, so I wasn’t there specifically to wait for his call, but that was probably a factor. The only time the phone rang it was Jan, confirming that we were still on for Saturday night. Then she asked if I’d walked all the way home the previous night, and I took a breath before I answered. “I walked two blocks,” I said, “and then I said the hell with it and flagged a cab.”
    We established when and where we’d meet, and I hung up and wondered at my first impulse, which had been to say yes, that I’d walked all the way home from Yorkville. And what else? That my feet were sore and my calves ached? That I’d been mugged and pistol-whipped en route and it was all her fault?
    But instead I’d paused for breath and told her the unremarkable truth, and she’d passed up the chance to remind me I couldhave