A Long Line of Dead Men (5 page)

"In one building?"

"Well, it was a pretty good-sized building," I said. "And it couldn't have been a very nice neighborhood."

In addition to the homicides, Lew told me, there were cases of suicide and accidental death, some of which might have been murder in disguise. He had a pair of lists, which he took from his inside breast pocket and unfolded for me. One bore in alphabetical order the names of the club's fourteen surviving members, along with their addresses and phone numbers. The other was a list of the deceased- all seventeen of them, including Homer Champney. They were listed in the order they'd died, with the presumptive cause of death noted for each man.

I read through both lists, drank some coffee, and looked across the table at him. I said, "I'm not sure what sort of role you have in mind for me. If you just wanted a consultation, I'll say this much. Your club's been hit with an awfully high death rate, and it certainly seems to me that a disproportionate number have resulted from causes other than illness. Any of the suicides could have been faked, along with most of the accidents. Even some of the deaths that look natural might be disguised homicide. This one fellow who choked to death on his own vomit, well, there's a way to make that happen."

"How, for God's sake?"

"The victim has to be unconscious. You jam a pillow or towel over his face and hold it there while you induce vomiting. There's an emetic you can give by subcutaneous injection, but something might show up in an autopsy if anyone had the wit to look for it. A knee in the pit of the stomach is almost as effective. The victim vomits and there's no place for it to go, so he automatically aspirates it into the lungs. It's an easy way to knock off a drunk, you just wait until he's passed out and sleeping it off. And drunks are apt to die choking on their vomit, so it's a very plausible kind of accidental death."

"It sounds absolutely diabolical."

"I guess. Back in the mid-sixties there was aUnited States senator who died like that, and there were strong rumors that he'd been assassinated, either by the Cubans or the CIA, depending on who was telling the story. But this was in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, when every public death brought rumors of murder and conspiracy. If a politically prominent person died of Alzheimer's, you'd hear that the Illuminati had been putting aluminum salts in his cornflakes."

"I remember." He drew a deep breath. "I figured there might have been some elaborate way Eddie Szabo's death might have been brought about. But I had no idea it could have been managed that simply."

"And it also could have been just what it looks like."

"An accident."

"Yes."

"But on balance you think I have reason to be concerned."

"I think it calls for investigation."

"Would you be willing to undertake that investigation?"

I was expecting the question and I had my answer ready. "If this is what it's beginning to look like," I said, "you're dealing with a serial murderer with a remarkable degree of patience and organization. This isn't some drifter on a cross-country spree, snatching truck-stop hookers at random and strewing their corpses along I-80. He's picking specific targets and taking his time knocking them off. He's probably killed eight people, and maybe more.

"All of which calls for a full-scale investigation, and I'm just one guy. If this were an NYPD investigation, they'd have a whole roomful of detectives working on it."

"Do you think I should take this to the police?"

"In an ideal universe, yes. In the real world, I think they'd just shine you on. The way the bureaucracy works, no cop would be all that eager to open this can of worms. You're looking at a whole crazy quilt of conflicting jurisdictions, and some possible homicides dating back twenty years. If I were a cop and this landed on my desk, I'd have every reason to drop it in a file folder and lose track of it." I took a sip of coffee. "If you really wanted to get the police moving on this, the best way would be through the media."

"How do you mean?"

"Just tell some eager reporter the same thing you told me. It's got plenty of news value all by itself, and a whole lot more when you toss a couple of prominent names in the hopper. Boyd Shipton, for one. And your survivors list shows a Raymond Gruliow onCommerce Street. I assume that's the lawyer."

"The defense attorney, yes."

" 'The controversial defense attorney' is how the press generally phrases it. If you went around telling cops Hard-Way Ray was on somebody's hit list, nine out of ten of them would try to find the guy just so they could buy him a drink and wish him good luck. But if you told a reporter, you'd get a ton of coverage."

He frowned. "The idea of publicity," he said, "is one I find very disturbing."

"So I'd imagine."

"If what I suspect is true, if there's a murderer stalking us and thinning our ranks, then I would do whatever's required to stop him. I'd go on Oprah, if it came to that."

"I don't think it will."

"But if I'm just overreacting to a statistical coincidence, well, it would be a shame to destroy the club's anonymity unnecessarily. And the attention we'd get as individuals would be most unwelcome, too."

"For most of you," I said. "Ray Gruliow probably thinks 'unwelcome attention' is a contradiction in terms. Still, you've got a tough call to make. The fastest way to get a full-scale investigation under way is to sit down with a reporter and tell him the same story you just told me. My guess is you'd have national media coverage within twenty-four hours and a police task force assigned inside of forty-eight. With dead men in several states, plus the serial-killer element, you might even see the FBI come in on it if the publicity heats up enough."

"It's beginning to sound like a circus."

"Well, if you hired me you'd get a much lower profile. I don't even have a PI license, let alone influence in high places. Any investigation I might mount would have to proceed at a relatively slow pace, and I don't know how much of a factor time might turn out to be. Have you discussed this with any of your fellow members?"

"I haven't said a word to anybody."

"Really? That's a surprise. I would have thought... Oh."

He gave a long slow nod. "The club's not a true secret society, but we've certainly kept it a secret from the world. Nobody else knows we exist." He took hold of the glass of brandy. "So if there's a killer," he said evenly, "it would almost have to be one of us."

"God, it's such a guy thing," Elaine said. "Thirty-one grown men sitting around wooden tables eating meat and checking for chest pains. You can just about smell the testosterone, can't you?"

"I'm beginning to understand why they didn't tell their wives about it."

"I'm not putting it down," she insisted. "I'm just pointing out how intrinsically masculine the whole thing is. Keeping it all a secret, only seeing each other once a year, talking solemnly about Important Subjects. Can you imagine the same club composed of women?"

"It would drive the restaurant crazy," I said. "Thirty-one separate checks."

"One check, but we'll make sure it gets split fairly. 'Let's see, Mary Beth had the apple pie a la mode, so she owes an extra dollar, and Rosalie, you had the Roquefort dressing, which is an additional seventy-five cents.' Why do they do that, anyway?"

"Splitchecks item by item? I've often wondered."

"No, charge extra for a tablespoon of Roquefort. When you're paying twenty or thirty dollars for a meal it ought to include whatever salad dressing you want. Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because I find you fascinating."

"After all these years?"

"It's probably abnormal," I said, "but I can't help it."

It had been late afternoon by the time I left the Addison Club. I walked home and took a shower, then sat down and went over my notes. She'd called around six to say she wouldn't be getting home for dinner. "I've got an artist coming at seven to show me his slides," she said, "and I've got my class tonight, unless you want me to skip it."

"Don't do that."

"There's some leftover Chinese in the fridge, but you'd probably rather go out. Don't throw out the leftovers, I'll have them when I get home."

"I've got a better idea," I said. "I want to get to a meeting. You go to your class, and meet me afterward at Paris Green."

"Deal."

I went to the 8:30 meeting at St. Paul's, then walked down Ninth Avenue and got to Paris Green around a quarter after ten. Elaine was on a stool at the bar, chatting with Gary and nursing a tall glass of cranberry juice and seltzer. I went to collect her and he laid a hand on my arm.

"Thank God you're here," he said archly. "That's her third one of those, and you know how she gets."

Bryce gave us a window table, and over dinner she told me about the artist who'd come around earlier, a West Indian black who was the superintendent of a small apartment house in Murray Hill and a self-taught painter.

"He does these village scenes in oil on masonite," she said, "and they have a nice folk-art look to them, but they left me underwhelmed. Maybe I've seen too much of that kind of thing. Or maybe he has, because that's the feeling I got, that his source of inspiration wasn't his own childhood memories as much as it was the work of other artists he's been exposed to." She made a face. "But that's New York, isn't it? He's never taken a class or sold a painting, but he knows to bring slides. Who ever heard of a folk artist with slides? I bet you don't get that crap in Appalachia."

"Don't be so sure."

"You're probably right. Anyway, I told him I'd keep his name on file. In other words, don't call us. I don't know, maybe he's the long-lost bastard son of Grandma Moses and Howard Finster, and I just blew the chance of a lifetime. But I have to go with my instincts, don't you think?"

They had served her well over the years. When we met I was a cop with a brand-new gold shield in my pocket and a wife and two sons in Syosset, and she was a young call girl, bright and funny and beautiful. We made each other happy for a few years, and then I drank my way out of my marriage and the police department and we pretty much lost track of each other. She went on doing what she'd been doing, saving her money and investing in real estate, keeping fit at the health club, stretching her mind in night school.

A couple of years ago circumstances threw us together again, and what we'd had was still there, stronger than ever and richer for the years we'd lived through. At first she went on seeing clients and we both pretended that was okay, but of course it wasn't, and eventually I bit the bullet and said so and she admitted she'd already put herself out of business.

We kept inching closer and closer to marriage. Last April she'd sold her old place on East Fiftieth and picked out an apartment in the Parc Vendome and we'd moved in together. It was her money that bought the place and I'd refused to let her put my name on the deed.

I paid the monthly maintenance on the apartment and picked up the checks when we went out to dinner. She covered the household expenses. Eventually we would put all our money together, but we hadn't gotten around to that yet.

Eventually we would get married, too, and I wasn't sure why it was taking us so long. We kept not quite setting a date. We kept letting it slide.

Meanwhile, she had opened a gallery. First she'd gone to work at one on Madison Avenue with the intention of learning the business. She had an argument with the woman who ran the place and quit after two months, then got a similar job downtown on Spring Street. She didn't much care for the artwork in either establishment; the photo-realists at the uptown gallery struck her as sterile, while she saw the commercial can-vases at the SoHo gallery as clichead and cloying, a high-ticket equivalent of Holiday Inn seascapes and bullfighters.

More to the point, she found the business itself unpleasant, the snobbery, the petty jealousies, the relentless courting of investors and corporate collectors. "I thought I quit prostitution," she said one night, "and here I am pimping for a bunch of bad painters. I don't get it." She went in the following morning and gave notice.

What she wanted, she decided, was a sort of cross between a gallery and a curiosity shop. She'd stock it with things she liked, and she'd try to sell them to people who were looking for something to hang on the wall, or place on the coffee table. She had a good eye, everyone told her that, and she'd taken more courses over the years at Hunter and NYU and the New School than your average art historian, so why shouldn't she take her best shot?

It turned out to be easy to get started. There were a lot of vacant storefronts in the neighborhood that season, and she checked them all out and charmed the owner of a building on Ninth and Fifty-fifth into giving her a good lease at a reasonable rent. Over the years she'd packed a locker in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse with things she'd bought and tired of; the two of us went through it and filled the back of a borrowed station wagon with prints and canvases, and that gave her enough stock to open.

Toward the end of her first month of operation she paid a second visit to the Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art and came back wide-eyed. "It's an exalting experience," she said, "even more than the first time, and I was completely blown away, but you know what? I realized something. Some of those early paintings, the portraits and still lifes. If you take them entirely out of context, and if you forget that they happened to be painted by a genius, you'd think you were looking at something out of a thrift shop."

"I see what you mean," I said, "but isn't that a little like looking at a Jackson Pollock and saying, 'My kid could do this'?"

"No," she said. "Because I'm not knocking Matisse. I'm putting in a word for the anonymous unheralded amateur."