"You were a friend of Timmy's." He repeated it in an odd way. Apathetic and yet somehow cynical.
"I was with him when he died."
"So was Fitz. Sit down, Mr. Howard. Drink?"
I said I would have a drink. He pushed by my chair and went out to a sink. I heard him rinsing out a glass. He came back and picked a bottle off the floor in the corner and put a generous drink in each glass.
"Here's to Timmy," he said.
"To Timmy."
"Fitz got out of it. You got out of it. But Timmy didn't make it."
"I almost didn't make it."
"What did he actually die of? Fitz couldn't say."
I shrugged. "It's hard to tell. We didn't have medical care. He lost a lot of weight and his resistance was down. He had a bad cold. He ran a fever and his legs got swollen. He began to have trouble breathing. It hurt him to breathe. A lot of them went like that. Nothing specific. Just a lot of things. There wasn't much you could do."