A Long Line of Dead Men (35 page)

Afterward I said, "Am I screwing up your life, Lisa? Tell me and I'll stop."

"Ha."

"I mean it."

"I know you do. And no, you're not. I'm screwing up my own life. Like everybody else."

"I guess."

"Someday you'll stop calling me. Or someday you'll call and I'll tell you no, I don't want you to come over." She took my hand, placed it on her breast. "But not yet," she said.

The days came and went and the summer slipped away. Elaine and I got out to a few movies and listened to some jazz. I went to meetings and, a day at a time, I didn't pick up a drink.

Wally called, but I told him I couldn't take on any per diem work, not until I cleared the case I was working on.

On Sundays I had dinner with my sponsor. Now and then I dropped in at Grogan's, usually after a midnight AA meeting. I would sit for an hour or so with Mick, and we always managed to find things to talk about. But we never made a long night of it, and I was always home well before sunrise.

A friend of Elaine's invited us out to East Hampton for the weekend, and I didn't feel I could afford to put myself a couple of hours away from the city. I told her to go by herself, and she thought it over and went. Perversely, I didn't call Lisa at all that weekend. I did go out for dinner with Ray Gruliow, to a seafood restaurant he liked. They didn't have his brand of Irish whiskey, but he made do with something less exotic, and drank a hell of a lot of it in the course of the evening.

I wound up telling him about Lisa. I'm not sure why. He said, "Well, what do you know? The guy's human."

"Was the issue in doubt?"

"No," he said, "not really. But I thought people quit doing that sort of thing when they joined AA."

"So did I."

"So we were both wrong. Well, that's good to hear. And good for you, my friend. You know the four things a man needs to sustain life, don't you?" I didn't. "Food, shelter, and pussy." That was only three, I said. "And strange pussy," he said. "That's four."

He was good company until the booze took him over the line, and then he started telling me the same story over and over again. It was a pretty good story, but I didn't need to hear it more than once. I put him in a cab and went home.

The Yankees were making it interesting in the American League East, winning a lot of games but having trouble gaining ground on the Blue Jays. In the other league, the Mets had last place pretty well sewn up. We stayed in the city for Labor Day, and Elaine kept the shop open the whole weekend.

On a Thursday afternoon in the middle of September, I was sitting in my hotel room watching it rain. The phone rang.

A woman said, "Is this the man looking for the man in the picture?"

There had been calls from time to time. Who was the man in the picture? What did I want with him? Was it true about the reward?

"Yes," I said. "I'm the man."

"You really gonna pay me that money?"

I held my breath.

" 'Cause I seen him," she said. "I know right where he's at."

Two hours later I was in a Laundromat on the corner of Manhattan Avenue and 117th Street, next door to a Haitian store-front church. I had TJ with me, dressed in khakis and a light green polo shirt and carrying his clipboard. The manager was a short, squat woman in her sixties with unconvincing yellow hair and a European accent. It was she who had called me, and I had a hard time convincing her that she would indeed get ten thousand dollars when we had the man on the palm card in custody, but nothing if he gave us the slip. She wanted more than a promise before she parted with her information, and I could see her point. I gave her two hundred dollars up front and made her sign a receipt for it, and I think it was the receipt that convinced her, because why would I want anything on paper if I planned to stiff her? She took four fifties from me, folded them together, tucked them in a pocket of her apron and secured them there with a safety pin. Then she took me to the window and pointed diagonally across the street.

The building she indicated was a seven-story apartment house built sometime before the First World War. The facade was in good repair, and there were plants hanging in some of the windows. It didn't look like any SRO I'd ever seen.

But she was sure that was where he lived. He had come in at least once before, and afterward she had remembered the card someone had given her and found it in a drawer, and sure enough, it was him. So she almost called the number, but what was she going to say? She didn't know his name or where he lived. And if she said anything to anybody, how could she be sure she was the one who wound up with the reward?

So she'd said nothing, electing to wait for him to return. Laundry, after all, was not a one-time occurrence. You washed your clothes, sooner or later you would have to wash them again. Every day she looked at the sketch on the card to make sure she would know him if she saw him again. She was starting to think maybe it wasn't really him, and then today he'd come in with a laundry bag and a box of Tide, and it was him, all right. No question. He looked just like his picture.

She almost made the call while his clothes were spinning around, first in the washing machine, then in the dryer. But how could she make sure she was the one who collected the reward? So she'd let him sit there, his face buried in the newspaper, until his wash was done. When he left, she slipped out the door and followed him. She left the Laundromat unattended, risking her job in the process. Suppose the owner stopped in while she was gone? Suppose there was an incident in her absence?

But she wasn't gone long. She followed her quarry a block and a half uptown and waited across the street while he stopped in a deli. He came out moments later carrying a shopping bag in addition to his sack of clean clothes, and he turned back in the direction he'd come from, and wound up entering the apartment house diagonally across the street from her Laundromat.

From the doorway of the apartment house, she watched him get on the elevator, watched the doors close behind him. There was a panel of numbers above the elevator that lit up when the car was moving to show you what floor it was on. She couldn't make it out from the entrance, but when the elevator had finished its ascent she walked through the unattended lobby and pressed the button to summon it. The 5 lit up right away.

"So he's on the fifth floor," she said. "I don't know which apartment."

And she thought he was there now. She couldn't swear to it, because she had a job to do, making change for people, washing and drying and folding clothes for customers who paid extra to drop their laundry with her and pick it up later. So she'd been unable to spend every moment watching the entrance of his building, but she'd watched it as much as she could, and she hadn't seen him leave.

I stayed in the Laundromat, not wanting to risk running into him in the lobby or being spotted from a fifth-floor window, while TJ checked the bells and mailboxes. He came back with a list of the fifth-floor tenants. There were twelve apartments on the fifth floor, and there was a nameplate in every doorbell and mailbox slot. None of the surnames began with an S.

I slipped out the door with my face averted, walked to the corner of 116th Street, then crossed the street and walked back to the building where Severance had been spotted. I rang the super's bell, and a voice came over the static-ridden intercom. I said, "Investigation. Like to talk to you." He told me to come to the basement and buzzed me through the door.

I rode down on the elevator, walked past a padlock door marked LAUNDRY and another marked STORAGE. At the end of the corridor was an open door. Inside a white-haired man was watching television and drinking coffee. His hands were arthritic, their backs dark with liver spots. I showed him the sketch and he didn't recognize it at first. I said I believed the gentleman was living on the fifth floor. "Oh," he said, and got out a pair of reading glasses and took another look.

"I didn't place him at first," he said. "It's Silverman."

"Silverman?"

"Five-K. Subletting from the Tierneys."

Kevin Tierney was on the faculty at Columbia, his wife a teacher at a private school in the West Eighties. The two had the summer off and were spending it in Greece and Turkey. Shortly before they left, they had introduced Joel Silverman as a friend who would be staying in their apartment.

"But he wasn't no friend of theirs," he said. "All that month they were bringing people in, showing the place. They didn't want to notify the landlord and sublet formally, so as soon as somebody took the place he becomes their friend, if you take my meaning. Tierney gave me a couple bucks to look the other way, which was decent of him, no question, but it shows you where he's coming from, don't it?" And what kind of tenant was Silverman?

"I never see him. That's why I didn't recognize him right off, not until you said fifth floor. No complaints from him, no complaints about him. Be okay with me if they were all like him."

If I'd been a cop, with a warrant and some backup and a Kevlar vest, I would have gone right in. I'd have put a man on the fire escape and others on the exits, and gone through the door with a gun in my hand.

Instead we waited across the street at the Laundromat. TJ and I took turns keeping an eye on the entrance across the street, and on the one set of 5-K's windows that were visible from our vantage point. TJ kept coming up with stratagems for gaining access to the apartment. He could pose as a delivery boy, as a student of Professor Tierney's, as an exterminator come to spray for roaches. I told him we'd just wait.

Shortly before sunset a light came on in Severance's window. I was on the phone when it happened, and TJ pointed it out to me. Now we knew that he was still in there, that he hadn't slipped out before we reached the scene, or while we were looking the other way.

TJ went around the corner and brought back pizza and a couple of Cokes. I made another telephone call. The light went out across the street.

TJ said, "What's that mean? He goin' to sleep?"

"Too early."

Five minutes later he was standing in front of his building, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of army fatigues. His hair was cut shorter than the last time I'd seen him, but it was unmistakably him.

"Go," I told TJ.

"You got the beeper?"

"I've got everything. Try to keep him in sight, but I'd rather have you lose him than let him spot you. If you do lose him, beep me and let me know. You know the code."

"Got it all writ down."

"After you beep me, come back here where you can watch the entrance. Beep me again when you see him come home. It's no big deal if you lose him, but try not to let him spot you."

He grinned. He said, "Hey, don't worry, Murray. Nobody spots the Shadow."

I'd acquired a set of keys from the super, easing his conscience with cash. One of them let me into the building. The other two opened the dead-bolt locks on the door of apartment 5-K. I let myself into the darkened apartment, drew the door shut, and refastened the locks. Without turning on any lights, I moved around the apartment, getting a feel of the place. There was a good-sized living room, a small bedroom, a windowed kitchen, and an office in what must originally have been a smaller second bedroom.

I sat down and waited.

The time would have passed faster if I could have read a book from the Tierneys' enormous library, but I didn't want to risk a light in the window. I left the television set off for the same reason. The boredom was part of the territory, but fatigue was a problem. My mind drifted, and my eyes kept wanting to close. I went into the kitchen, looking for something that might keep me awake, and found a half-full sack of unground coffee beans in the refrigerator. I stuck a handful in my pocket, chewing one from time to time. I don't know what did more for me, the caffeine or the bitter taste, but one way or another my eyes stayed open.

Some forty-five minutes after I got there, TJ's beeper sounded. We'd worked out a whole system of two-digit signals, but he'd punched in a whole seven-digit number. I picked up the phone and dialed it.

He answered the instant it rang. His voice pitched low, he said, "We in the movies. I followed him over to Broadway an' down. You know how people keep lookin' over their shoulders, seein' if they bein' followed? He didn't do that."

"It's probably a good thing."

" 'Cept I thought maybe he's bein' slick. Maybe he just goin' to duck into the movies and then slip out a side exit. Minute he bought the large-size popcorn I knew I didn't have to worry. Man's in for the duration, Jason."

"You're in the theater?"

"Phone in the lobby. I went in, saw where he's sittin'. Soon's I hang up I'll go back where I can keep an eye on him. Won't be keepin' no eye on the screen, tell you that. You know what he had to see?"

"What?"

"Jurassic Park."

"You already saw that, didn't you?"

"Seen it twice. Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself."

The show was scheduled to break at 10:15, and we added a new signal to our battery of codes. At twenty after ten the beeper sounded and I saw that he'd punched in 5-6, indicating that they had left the theater. In the course of the next hour he beeped me three times, each time with the same code, 2-4, indicating he was still in contact with Severance. Another beep came at ten to twelve, and the 1-1 meant Severance was entering the building.

I switched off the beeper. I didn't want it making any sounds. I moved to a chair to the left of the doorway.

I got out the gun, the one I'd been carrying since I got the first call that afternoon. I turned it over in my hands, trying to get accustomed to the feel of it.

I put it in my lap and sat there, waiting.

I was listening carefully but I didn't hear any footsteps. The hallway was carpeted and I guess that must have muffled them, because the first warning I had of his presence was the sound of his key in the lock. He opened one lock, and then there was a long pause, just long enough for me to wonder if he'd somehow sensed something. Then I heard his key again and he opened the second lock. I watched the doorknob turn, watched as the door opened inward.