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I didn’t sarlic What I did s for a working pay phone

XXXI

YOU SEE SOMETHING like that," Redmond said, "you want to cut hi hi and you catch hell fro apisses the bad"

He’d opened all the s, and that was a help The odor I’d caught a whiff of in the hallway hit us in the face when the super opened the door for us, and alked into a stench that rateful I’d skipped lunch

Aside fro room was as I remembered it, and in perfect order The kitchen was immaculate, but for a half-finished cup of coffee in itsbut a pair of blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts, Greg Stillman had a black leather belt looped around his neck, the wide brass buckle mostly hidden by his swollen throat The other end of the belt disappeared over the top of the closet door, which had been closed to anchor it there A folding step stool lay on its side, where it would have landed when he kicked it away

"Nobody would ever do this," Red idea what they’d wind up looking like Or what they’d smell like"

The head swells, the neck stretches, the face blackens The bowels and bladder eans and find their way out Flesh rots

"The poor son of a bitch," Red there But a fat lot of good it’d do him to cut him down"

The ht it was a very bad way to kill yourself "Because you’re a long ti," he said "And you’re conscious You flop around like a trout on a line, and it’s too late to change yourThere’s pills you can take, you just go to sleep and you don’t wake up And if you have second thoughts after you s theency room and have your stoun and at least it’s quick"

"Makes a goddah," the ME told him "But you’re not the one has to clean it up, so what do you care?"

"Me?" Redmond said "Let’s leave un"

He said, "You don’t so, but whenever I walk in on so like that, I wish I still s and an inch thick So to smell instead of e had to smell in there"

We were in the Emerald Star, a Second Avenue bar I’d noticed on aunt Hispanic with long sideburns and a pencil-line mustache Redmond, who’d had whiskey and water when I met him at the Minstrel Boy, said he’d have a double Cutty Sark, neat, no ice

I thought that sounded like a very sensible choice But what I ordered was a Coke

"My first partner," I said, "was addicted to those little Italian cigars that look like pieces of twisted rope They came in a little cardboard box, five or six to the box I think the brand was De Nobili, but Mahaffey always called theuinea stinkers"

"Nowadays they’d write hiht, and he wouldn’t care I hated the s like just now, he’d light one up and he’d give lad for it, I’ll bet"

"It helped," I said

He picked up his glass, looked through it at the overhead light I wondered why he did that I’d done it often enough myself, and never knehy

"No note," he said

"No"

"My impression of him was that he’d be the type to leave a note You knew him better than I did"

"My impression," I said, "was he wasn’t the type to kill himself"

"Everybody’s the type," he said "The et around to it"

"Maybe"

"My father killed himself You knohat that means?" I did, but he didn’t wait for an answer "Means et the numbers, but the sons of suicides are thus and so many times as likely to kill themselves as the rest of the world"

"That doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice"

"No," he said, and took a drink "I have a choice But have I got a choice what choice I h your ets you So let’s run some other questions instead When’s the last time you saw him?"

"I don’t remember," I said, "but the last time I spoke to hies The tape starts on MondayThe ME said what, a couple of days?"

"I think so"

"A person could go nuts listening to thosea few feet away"