Free A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block

dollars,” I told Jim. “Ten hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t have to count them, he had them set aside in his wallet, so I don’t guess he was making things up as he went along.”
    “I trust you remembered your police training.”
    “I put it in my pocket.”
    Another thing Vince Mahaffey had told me, years ago in Brooklyn. That’s what you did when somebody handed you money.
    “You don’t sound happy,” Jim said, “for somebody with a thousand dollars in his pocket.”
    “Most of it’s gone. I paid the next month’s rent, and I sent Anita a money order. I put a couple of bucks in the bank, and what’s left is in my wallet.”
    “All of it? Or did you give up a tenth of your crop as a burnt offering to the gods?”
    “Well,” I said.
    Some years ago I’d gotten in the habit of tithing, slipping ten percent of what money I received into the first church collection box I came to. Jim found this an amusing eccentricity, and one he assumed would fade away in sobriety. Meanwhile the Catholics got most of my money, if only because their sanctuaries were more likely to be open, and on my way home I’d detoured to pay my respects to the poor box at St. Paul the Apostle. And while I was there I lit a couple of candles, one of them for Jack Ellery.
    “You’re still a few dollars ahead of where you were yesterday,” Jim pointed out, “and you still don’t sound very happy.”
    “I took the money,” I said. “Now I have to earn it.”
    “By finding out who killed your friend.”
    “By finding out if there’s a name here I feel comfortable passing on to Redmond. I suppose that amounts to the same thing.”
    “Can’t you just eliminate the ones who couldn’t have done it and give him whoever’s left?”
    “Stillman could have done that himself,” I said. “The idea is to avoid creating a problem for someone who’s innocent of Jack’s murder, even though he may not be innocent of much else.”
    “Some nasty people on that list?”
    “I don’t know who’s on it,” I said, “except for Jack’s father, and he’s been dead for a few years now.”
    “Which would constitute exculpatory evidence, wouldn’t it? You haven’t read the list?”
    “I was too tired last night, and this morning I found other things to do. I guess I’ll go read it now.”
    “That’s probably a good idea,” my sponsor said.
    But it still wasn’t something I wanted to do, and I went back to the room entertaining the fantasy that the manila envelope would have disappeared during my absence. The maid—whose weeklyvisit was a day away—would have come early, changing my sheets and emptying my wastebasket and consigning Jack’s Eighth Step to the incinerator. Or a burglar would have broken in and, annoyed at having found nothing worth stealing, would have walked off with it. Or spontaneous combustion, or a flash flood, or—
    It was there. I sat down and read it.
    By the time I was done I’d skipped lunch, and the sun was down. I went out and had something to eat before my regular Friday night step meeting at St. Paul’s. I had the urge to leave at the break but made myself stay for the whole meeting.
    “I’m going to pass on coffee tonight,” I told Jim. “I think I’ll go to a bar instead.”
    “You know, there’s been many a time I’ve had that thought myself.”
    “I read that fucking list,” I said, “and it took forever, because I kept stopping and staring out the window.”
    “At the liquor store across the street?”
    “At the Trade Center towers, I suppose, but I wasn’t really looking at anything. Just gazing off into the distance. It was hard going, Jim. I got more of a peek than I wanted into the guy’s heart and soul.”
    “So what else would you want to do but go to a bar?”
    I gave him a look. “I’ve got a slip of paper with five names on it, and there’s a guy I want to run them past.”
    “And the bar’s where you have to meet him.”
    “It’s where he’ll be. The Top Knot