* * * * *

"Malnutrition induced by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out
the death certificate. He turned to me. "There's no mystery to it,
Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than digging
into their savings."

I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to
decide that I ought to eat even if it cost me something. I came out of
it and said, "That's what you keep telling me."

"I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more.
What are the chances, Weldon?"

"Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not."

He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon
and had the old woman carried out. He and the beat cop left with the
basket team. He could at least have said good-by. He never did,
though.

A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion.
Getting inside this character was more important. The setting should
have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary
desperation and needless death.

Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for
me. I let my joints stiffen as if they were thirty years older and
more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma
between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money
out of the bank.

I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you
acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up.

"The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right."

Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time
without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might
have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark."

"But he doesn't know old people."

"What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through
a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was--and still
would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of
acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a
psychotic than eating?"

"Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation,
no."

"Why not?"

"You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't. Not
when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a
nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid
of. Anybody who's willing to eat that stuff can stay alive on nearly
nothing a