True-Life Adventure

CHAPTER 1
    “That stuff’ll kill you.”
    “What? Your coffee?” Jack was just doctoring his second cup.
    “No. All that saccharine. You’re poisoning yourself.”
    “We’ve all gotta go sometime.”
    Jack went right about then. His eyes rolled back and he let go of the cup. Coffee sloshed all over my rug. His big body fell forward in the chair.
    I tried to lift him by the shoulders to get him upright again. I wasn’t sure why— I thought I wanted to look at his face or loosen his tie or something. But really I just wanted to undo what had happened, to see him sitting in the chair the way he’d been a moment before.
    But I saw how dumb that was and I called 911.
    I tried feeling for a pulse; I couldn’t find one. So I tried to think of something else I could do, anything. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation maybe. But I couldn’t get him in position. He was built like a bear and I wasn’t sure I should move him, anyway. I wound up just standing there by his chair with my hand on his back. My cat Spot rubbed against my legs, sensing I needed comfort, trying to do the same thing for me I was trying to do for Jack. I was grateful.
    We were there a long time, Jack and I, like some tableau in a wax museum. I heard a siren and I went to let the paramedics in. They laid him out and attached something to his chest. I went into the kitchen, telling myself I needed to get out of their way. But the truth was, I didn’t want to watch. Jack wasn’t a friend or even someone I especially liked, but I was afraid he was dead and death makes me squeamish. Or dying does, anyway.
    So I stood in the kitchen, patting Spot and staring out the window.
    After about a month and a half, one of the paramedics came in. He was twenty-fiveish and blond, very innocent-looking. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We couldn’t do anything.”
    “I— uh— thanks for trying.”
    “My partner’s calling the coroner’s office. We’ll wait till they get here.”
    I said I needed some fresh air and they let me go out into my postage stamp of a garden and sit there until the coroner’s wagon came. Then they said good-bye and a deputy coroner came out to talk to me. He said his name was Stanley Smith.
    “Paul Mcdonald,” I said.
    “And your friend’s name?”
    “My friend?” I realized he meant Jack. “Oh. Jack Birnbaum. He wasn’t a friend, exactly. I was doing some work for him.”
    “What kind of work?”
    “Client reports. Jack was a private detective.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I’m— uh— a ghostwriter.”
    It sounded dumb and I was embarrassed. Sometimes I said I was an editorial consultant. Really I was an ex-reporter trying to make a living freelancing. I did brochures for banks and how-to books for publishers and autobiographies for rich people who didn’t know how to write— anything, so long as you could do it on a typewriter and it wasn’t journalism.
    I started doing Jack’s reports when some client or other dumped him because he couldn’t make sense out of them. Jack called the Chronicle and tried to hire Debbie Hofer, who referred him to me.
    I thought the gravy train had just pulled into the station. Jack would detect all day and phone me at six for what he called “debriefing.” Since his verbal skills were pretty wanting, that usually took at least an hour, and I charged him thirty dollars a phone call. Then, at the end of the week, I’d whip him up a client report and he’d work me into his expense account somehow, and everybody’d be happy.
    The gig bought Spot a lot of Kitty Queen liver and chicken, but what I liked best was that it was so cute. I could go to a party and say I was a ghostwriter for a private detective and I’d have a crowd around me in about three seconds.
    But somehow, telling it to a coroner’s deputy in my backyard on a Monday morning, it didn’t sound so cute. It didn’t matter, though. Jack was the one he was interested in. I told him all about how he was drinking coffee one minute and lying there dead the next.
    “Did he complain of feeling sick at all?”
    “Yes. Come to think of it, he did. He said he thought he was getting the flu.”
    “Did he mention any symptoms?”
    Something Jack had said came back to me with a nasty clarity. “He said his heart felt funny— like it kept skipping a beat. And he said he was seeing spots.”
    Stanley Smith looked at me like I was a moron. I tried to explain why I hadn’t diagnosed heart trouble and bundled Jack off to