A Long Line of Dead Men (14 page)

Douglas Pomeroy. Robert Ripley. William Ludgate. Lowell Hunter. Avery Davis. Brian O'Hara. John Gerard Billings. Robert Berk. Kendall McGarry. John Youngdahl. Richard Bazerian. Gordon Walser. Raymond Gruliow. Lewis Hildebrand.

I knew what a few of them looked like. I'd seen Gerry Billings on television, talking about cold fronts and the threat of rain. In my library research I'd come upon news photos of Gordon Walser (with two partners, celebrating the opening of their own ad agency) and Rick Bazerian (with two punked-out rock stars who'd just signed with his record label). And of course I'd been seeing Avery Davis's picture in the paper for years.

I'd been in the same room with Ray Gruliow a couple of times over the years, although we'd never been introduced. And I knew Lewis Hildebrand, my client.

But it seemed to me as though I could picture all of them readily enough, including the ones whose faces were wholly unfamiliar to me. As I read their names and reviewed their credit histories, images kept popping into my mind. I saw them walking behind power mowers over suburban lawns, I saw them dressed in suits, I watched them bend over to scoop up small children and hold them aloft. I pictured them on the golf course, then saw them having a drink in the clubhouse after they'd showered and changed, drinking whiskey and soda, say, in a tall frosted glass.

I could see them, in their well-tailored suits, leaving their houses at dawn, coming home at dusk. I could see them standing on platforms with their newspapers, waiting for the Long Island Rail Road or Metro North. I could see them striding purposefully along a midtown sidewalk, carrying brassbound attachea cases, on their way to meetings.

I could picture them at the opera or the ballet, their wives finely dressed and bejeweled, themselves at once resplendent and slightly self-conscious in evening clothes. I could imagine them on cruise ships, in national parks, at backyard barbecues.

It was silly, because I didn't even know what they looked like. But I could see them.

"I'll give it another day or two," I told Elaine, "and then I'm going to call Lewis Hildebrand and tell him it's just a statistical anomaly. His group's running a high death rate and an unusual number of homicides, but that doesn't mean somebody's knocking them off one by one."

"You got all that from a batch of credit reports?"

"What I got," I said, "is a picture of fourteen very orderly lives. I'm not saying these men don't have a dark side. The odds are a couple of them drink too much, or gamble for high stakes, or do something they wouldn't want their neighbors to know about. Maybe this one slaps his wife around, maybe that one can't keep it in his pants. But there's a degree of stability in every one of their lives that just doesn't fit a serial murderer."

"If he's been doing it for this long," she said, "he's unusually disciplined."

"And patient, and well organized. No question about it. But there'd be chaos in his life. He'd be holding things together, but not without a lot of backing and filling, a lot of fresh starts and makeovers. I'd expect to see a lot of job changes, a lot of geographics. It's almost inconceivable that he'd have stayed married to the same person for a substantial period of time, for example."

"And have they all managed that?"

"No, there have been quite a few divorces. But the ones who've divorced show a consistent pattern of career stability. There's nobody in the whole group who looks at all like the kind of loose cannon he'd almost have to be, in order to do the damage he's done."

"So it's not somebody in the group."

"And who could it be outside the group? Nobody else knows these people exist. I told you I went out and saw Fred Karp's widow. She was married to him for something like twenty-five years. She knew he had dinner with some old friends once a year, but she thought they were fraternity brothers of his from Brooklyn College. And she didn't know the names of any of them."

"She also told you she didn't think he could have killed himself."

"Well, the survivors always tell you that about suicides. If you go up in a tower and shoot twenty people, the neighbors tell the press you were a nice quiet boy. If you kill yourself, they say you had everything to live for."

"Then you think he did kill himself?"

"I think it's beginning to look that way."

"I thought you said the suicides could have been faked."

"Most suicides could have been faked," I said. "There are exceptions, like the poor son of a bitch who shot himself on live TV with the camera rolling."

"I'm glad I missed that one."

"But even if most suicides could have been faked," I went on, "that doesn't mean they are. Most of them are just what they look like. So are most accidents."

"You think the Warren Commission got it right?"

"Jesus, where did that come from?"

"Left field. I just wondered. Do you?"

"I think they're a lot closer to the truth than Oliver Stone. Why? You think I'm too quick to believe what I want to believe?"

"I didn't say that."

"Well, it's a possibility, whether you said it or not. It seems to me I've been working hard to prove that somebody really is knocking them off, and that I'm coming reluctantly to the conclusion that the true villain of the piece is our old friend Coincidence. But maybe that's what I wanted to conclude all along. I don't know."

"It just seems to me," she said, "that you're attaching an awful lot of significance to a good credit rating."

"It's not just that I'd be inclined to okay these guys for MasterCard. The whole lifestyle that goes with it, the whole-"

"I know. You look at the TRW reports and all you see is one big Norman Rockwell painting. They're the American Dream, aren't they?"

"I suppose so."

"And you feel excluded because you can't have that life, and even more excluded because you don't even want it. That's a big part of it, Matt, isn't it?"

The telephone rang.

"Saved by the bell," she said, grinning, and reached to answer it. "Hello? May I ask who's calling? Just a moment, I'll see if he can come to the phone." She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. "Raymond Gruliow," she said.

"Oh?"

I took the phone from her and said hello. He said, "Mr. Scudder, this is Ray Gruliow. I think we ought to get together, don't you?"

The voice was his, all right, rich and rasping, an instrument that he wielded like a rapier. I'd heard it last on the television news, when he was lecturing a gang of reporters on the insidious effect of institutionalized racism on his client, Warren Madison. Madison, as I recalled, had been so victimized by racism that he dealt dope, robbed and murdered other dope dealers, and shot six of the cops who showed up at his mother's house to arrest him.

"Maybe we should," I said.

"I've got a court appearance scheduled in the morning. How's the later part of the afternoon? Say, four o'clock?"

"Four is fine."

"Do you want to come over to my house? I'm on Commerce Street, if you know where that is."

"I know Commerce Street."

"Oh, of course you would. You were at the Sixth Precinct, weren't you? My house is number forty-nine, right across the street from the Cherry Lane Theater."

"I'll find it," I said. "Four o'clock? I'll see you then."

"I look forward to it," he said.

"Four o'clock tomorrow," I told Elaine, "and he looks forward to it. I wonder what the hell he wants."

"Maybe it's unrelated to what you're working on. Maybe he wants to hire you as an investigator."

"Oh, sure," I said. "He heard what a bang-up job I did nailing the Velcro Vaulter and he wants to sign me up for his team."

"Maybe he wants to confess."

"That's it," I said. "Hard-Way Ray Gruliow, with his house on Commerce Street and his twenty-grand lecture fees. He's been killing his old friends for the past twenty years, and he wants my help in turning himself in."

Commerce Street is only two blocks long. It angles southwest from Seventh Avenue a block below Bleecker, and runs along parallel to Barrow Street. The first block is all of a piece, with both sides lined with brick three-story Federal townhouses. Most are residential, but a few have commercial tenants on the first floor. One window shows a lawyer's shingle, with a second matching shingle hanging just below the first. I ALSO DABBLE IN ANTIQUES, it announces, and there are antiques and collectibles in the window. The building two doors down houses a macrobiotic restaurant, its menu listing dishes of tofu and seitan and seaweed. Whatever else they dabble in remains unstated.

The second block of Commerce Street, on the other side of Bedford, is more of a jumble architecturally. Buildings of different heights and shapes and styles are jammed together like straphangers in a rush-hour subway car. The street, as if confused by this sudden change of character, veers abruptly to the right and runs into Barrow Street, where it calls it quits.

The Cherry Lane Theater is in the middle of the block, just before the street's sudden change of direction. Raymond Gruliow's townhouse, four stories tall and two windows wide, stood on the other side of the street, buttressed by a shorter and wider building on either side. I climbed a half-flight of steps. There was a heavy brass door knocker in the shape of a lion's head, and I had my hand on it when I saw the recessed button for the doorbell. I pushed that instead, and if a bell or buzzer rang within, no sound came through the heavy wooden door. I was ready to try the knocker when the door opened inward. Gruliow had answered it himself.

He was a tall man, around six-three, and rail thin. His hair, once black, was an iron gray now, and he'd let it grow; it cascaded over his collar and lay in ringlets on his shoulders. The years had worked on his features like a caricaturist's pen, lengthening the nose, accenting the bony ridge of brow, hollowing the cheeks, giving a forward thrust to the jaw. He looked searchingly at me, and then his face lit up with a smile, as if he were genuinely glad to see me, as if someone had played a cosmic joke on the world and the two of us were in on it.

"Matthew Scudder," he said. "Welcome, welcome. I'm Ray Gruliow."

He led me inside, apologizing for the condition of the house. It looked all right to me, if marked by a comfortable level of disorder- books overflowing the built-in cabinets and piled on the floor, a stack of magazines alongside a club chair, a suit jacket folded over the back of a Victorian sofa. He was wearing the pants to the suit, and a white shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up. He had sandals on his feet, Birkenstocks, and they looked odd over the thin black socks that went with the dark pinstriped suit.

"My wife's in Sag Harbor," he explained. "I'm going to join her out there tomorrow afternoon, come back in time for court Monday morning. Unless I call her and tell her I've got too much work. And I might just do that. What the hell's the point of running out of town for a weekend, then running right back in again? Is that supposed to be relaxing?"

"Some people do it all the time."

"Some people go to truck-pulling contests," he said. "Some people sell Amway dealerships to their friends. Some people believe the earth is a hollow sphere, with another whole civilization living on the inside edge." He shrugged eloquently. "Some people keep getting married. Are you married, Matt?"

"Virtually."

" 'Virtually.' I like that. All right to call you Matt?" I said it was. "And I'm Ray. 'Virtually.' I suppose that means living together? Well, you're an unlicensed private eye, why shouldn't you be an unlicensed spouse? I assume you were married previously."

"Once, yes."

"Children?"

"Two sons."

"Grown now, I suppose."

"Yes."

"I've been married three times," he said, "and I've had children with all three of them. I'm sixty-four years old and I have a daughter who was two in March, and she's got a brother who'll turn forty next month. He's damn near old enough to be her grandfather. For Christ's sake, I've got three generations of families." He shook his head at the wonder of it all. "I'll be eighty years old," he said, "and still paying to put a kid through college."

"They say it keeps you young."

"In self-defense," he said. "I think it's late enough for a drink. What can I get you?"

"Plain club soda, thanks."

"Perrier all right?"

I said it was. He fixed the drinks from a sideboard in the dining room, filling two glasses with Perrier, adding Irish whiskey to his. I recognized the shape of the bottle; it was JJ amp;S, Jameson's premium label. The only other person I know who drinks it is a career criminal who owns a Hell's Kitchen saloon, and he'd have blanched at the thought of diluting it with soda.

In the front room Gruliow gave me my drink, cleared off a chair for me, and sat on the sofa with his long legs out in front of him. "Matthew Scudder," he said. "When I heard your name the other day, it wasn't entirely unfamiliar to me. Actually, I'm surprised our paths haven't crossed over the years."

"As a matter of fact," I said, "they have."

"Oh? Don't tell me I had you on the stand. I've always said I never forget a hostile witness."

"I was never called to testify in any of your cases. But I've seen you in the Criminal Courts Building and a couple of restaurants in the area, Ronzini's on Reade Street and a little French place on Park Row that's not there anymore. I don't remember the name."

"Neither do I, but I know the place you mean."

"And years ago," I said, "you were at the next table at an after-hours way the hell west on Fifty-second Street."

"Oh, for God's sake," he said. "One flight up over an Irish experimental theater, with burned-out buildings on either side and a rubble-strewn lot across the street."

"That's the one."