A Long Line of Dead Men (9 page)

"Is that how he described the group?"

"I don't know that he ever 'described' it as such. That was certainly the impression I had. Why?"

"I understand it was a little more formal than that."

"It's possible. I know he never missed a dinner. One year we had tickets donated at the school, the Manhattan Light Opera, and Fred told me I'd have to find someone else to go with me. And he loved Gilbert and Sullivan, but he regarded his annual dinner as sacrosanct. What does the dinner have to do with his death? He died in December. The dinner was always sometime in April or May."

"The first Thursday in May."

"That's right, it was a set day every year. I'd forgotten. So?"

Was there any reason not to tell her? I said, "There have been a lot of deaths in the group over the years, more than you'd expect. Several of them were suicides."

"How many?"

"Three or four."

"Well, which is it? Three or four?"

"Three definite, one possible."

"I see. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap. Do you want more coffee?" I said I was fine. "Three or four suicides out of how many members?"

"Thirty-one."

"There's a suicide virus, I've heard it called. There'll be some perfectly nice middle-class high school in Ohio or Wisconsin, and they'll have an absolute rash of suicides. But that's teenagers, not middle-aged men. Were these suicides all grouped together?"

"They were spaced over a period of several years."

"Well, ten to fifteen percent, that's a high suicide rate, but it doesn't seem..." Her words trailed off and I watched her eyes. I could almost see the wheels turning as her mind sorted the data. She was not a pretty woman by any means but she had a good, quick mind and there was something quite attractive about her intelligence.

She said, "You mentioned a high death rate overall. How many deaths in all?"

"Seventeen."

"Of thirty-one."

"Yes."

"And they're all Fred's age? They must be if they were all in college together."

"Approximately the same age, yes."

"You think someone's killing them."

"I'm investigating the possibility. I don't know what I think."

"Of course you do."

I shook my head. "It's a little too early for me to have an opinion."

"But you think it's possible."

"Yes."

She turned to look at the cat clock. "Of course I'd rather believe that," she said. "I've never completely come to terms with his suicide. But it's awful to think of someone, God, killing him. How was it done, I wonder? I suppose the killer would have knocked him out, then written the suicide note on the computer and opened the window and, and, and..." She made a visible effort and got hold of herself. "If he was unconscious when it happened," she said, "he wouldn't have suffered greatly."

"No."

"But I have," she said softly, and was silent for a long moment. Then she looked up at me and said, "Why would anybody want to kill a bunch of fellows who went to Brooklyn College together thirty-five years ago? A group of Jewish guys in their fifties. Why?"

"Only a few of them were Jewish."

"Oh?"

"And they weren't in college together."

"Are you sure? Fred said-"

I told her a little about the club. She wanted to know who the other members were, and I found a page in my notebook where I'd listed all thirty-one members, living and dead, in alphabetical order. She said, "Well, here's a name that pops out. Philip Kalish. He was Jewish, and Fred knew him in college, if it's the same Phil Kalish. But he died, didn't he? A long time ago."

"In an auto accident," I said. "He was the first of the group to die."

"Raymond Gruliow. There's another name I recognize, if it's the same Raymond Gruliow, and it would almost have to be, wouldn't it? The lawyer?"

"Yes."

"If Adolf Hitler came back to earth," she said, "which God forbid, and if he needed a lawyer, he'd call Raymond Gruliow. And Gruliow would defend him." She shook her head. "I have to admit I thought he was a hero during the Vietnam War when his clients were draft resisters and radicals. Now they're all black anti-Semites and Arab terrorists and I want to send him a letter bomb. Fred didn't know Raymond Gruliow."

"He had dinner with him once a year."

"And never said a word? When Gruliow was running his mouth on the eleven o'clock news, wouldn't he at least once have said, 'He's a friend of mine' or 'Hey, I know the guy'? Wouldn't that be the natural thing to do?"

"I guess they kept it private."

She frowned. "This club wasn't a sex thing, was it?"

"No."

"Because I'd find that very hard to believe. I know the most unlikely people keep turning out to be gay, but I can't believe this was-"

"No."

"Or some sort of Boys' Night Out, with too much to drink and some girl jumping out of a cake. It doesn't sound like Fred."

"I don't think it was like that at all."

" 'Boyd Shipton.' The painter?" I nodded. "Now I know he was murdered several years ago, or am I confusing him with somebody else?"

I agreed that Shipton had been murdered, and told her that several other members had also been the victims of homicide. She asked which ones they were and I pointed out the names.

"No, I don't know any of them," she said. "Why would anyone want to kill these men? I don't understand."

Heading back to Manhattan, I wondered what I'd accomplished. I hadn't learned very much, and I'd left Felicia Karp wondering what sort of secret life her husband had led. If she could draw any comfort from the thought that he hadn't killed himself after all, it was very likely offset by the disquieting probability that he'd been murdered.

Maybe that was what led me to leave Nedrick Bayliss's widow undisturbed. A series of telephone calls to Atlanta, where he'd died in a room at the downtown Marriott of a single gunshot wound to the head, left me feeling I knew as much as I had to know about him and his death. He'd been a stock analyst, employed by a Wall Street firm, commuting to work from a home in Hastingson-Hudson. His area of specialization was the textiles industry, and he'd gone to Atlanta to meet with officers of a company he was interested in.

Again, no note, and no indication how he'd come by the unregistered revolver found at his side. "I don't know how it is up there," an Atlanta police officer told me, "but it's not the hardest thing in the world to find somebody who'll sell you a gun in this town." I told him it wasn't that hard in New York, either.

Instead of a note there was a sheet of hotel stationery in the middle of the desk, with a pen uncapped next to it, as if he'd tried to write something and couldn't think of the right way to say it. Having given up on it, he called the desk instead and told the clerk they'd better send a bellman to room 1102. "I'm about to take my life," he announced, and hung up the phone.

The clerk wasn't sure whether he was in the middle of a tragedy or a practical joke. He rang Bayliss's room and no one answered the phone. He was trying to think what to do when someone else called to report a gunshot.

It certainly looked like a suicide. Bayliss was slumped in a chair, a bullet in the temple, the gun on the floor right where you'd expect to find it. Nothing to suggest he hadn't been alone when he did it. He hadn't locked his door with the chain, but he'd have wanted to make it easy for them to get in. He was considerate, after all; he'd proved that when he called the desk to let them know what he was about to do.

How hard would it have been to stage it?

You get Ned Bayliss to let you into his room. Finding a pretext shouldn't be any harder than finding an unregistered gun. Then, when he's sitting down, say, looking at some papers you've handed him, and you're crouching next to him to point out something, you reach into your jacket pocket and come out with the gun and before he knows what's happening you've got the muzzle to his temple and you're giving the trigger a squeeze.

Then you wipe your prints from the gun, press it into his hand, and let it drop to the carpet. You arrange the hotel letterhead and the pen on the desk, pick up the phone, and announce your impending death. Back in your own room, you make another call to report a gunshot.

Easy enough.

A paraffin test would very likely suggest that the dead man had not fired a gun recently, but how much lab work would the police allot to an open-and-shut suicide? The officer I talked to couldn't find any record of a test, but said that didn't prove anything. After all, he said, it all happened eighteen years ago, so it was a wonder that he'd been able to lay his hands on the file.

I could have called his widow.

I took the trouble to trace her, which wasn't difficult, given that she hadn't been trying to disappear. She had remarried, divorced, and been married a third time, and now she was living in Niles, Michigan, and I suppose I could have called her and asked her if her first husband, Ned Bayliss, had been despondent before his fateful trip to Atlanta. Was he drinking a lot, ma'am? Did he have any kind of a drug history?

I decided to let her be.

I'd called Atlanta from my room in the Northwestern, and when I hung up the phone for the day something kept me right there in the little room. I pulled a chair over to the window and looked out at the city.

I don't know how long I sat there. I started off thinking about the case I was working on, the club of thirty-one. I thought how their ranks had thinned over the past three decades, and before I knew it I was thinking of my own life over the same span of years, and the awful toll those years had taken. I thought of the people I'd lost, some to death, some because our lives had slipped off in different directions. My ex-wife, Anita, long since remarried. The last time I'd spoken to her was to offer condolences for her mother's death. The last time I'd seen her- I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her.

My sons, Michael and Andrew, both of them grown, both of them strangers to me. Michael was living in northern California, a sales rep for a company that supplied components to manufacturers of computers. In the four years since he graduated from college I'd spoken to him ten times at the outside. Two years ago he got married to a girl named June, and he'd sent me their wedding picture. She is Chinese, very short and slender, her expression in the photograph utterly serious. Mike started putting on weight in college, and now he looks like a bluff, hearty salesman, fat and jolly, posed incongruously next to this inscrutable daughter of the Orient.

"We'll have to get together," he says when we speak on the phone. "Next time I get to New York I'll let you know. We'll have dinner, maybe catch a Knicks game."

"Maybe I could get out to the Coast," I suggested the last time I talked to him. There was just the slightest pause, and then he was quick to assure me that would be great, really great, but right now wasn't a good time. A very busy time at work these days, and he was traveling a lot, and-

He and June live in a condominium near San Jose. I have spoken to her on the phone, this daughter-in-law whom I have never met. Soon I suppose they'll start a family, and then I'll have grandchildren I've never met.

And Andy? The last time I heard from him he was in Seattle, and talking about heading on up to Vancouver. It sounded as though he was calling from a bar, and his voice was thickened with drink. He doesn't call often, and when he does it's always from someplace new, and he always sounds as though he's been drinking. "I'm having fun," he told me. "One of these days I guess I'll settle down, but in the meantime I'm gathering no moss."

Fifty-five years old, and what moss had I gathered? What had I done with those years? And what had they done to me?

And how many did I have left? And, when they'd slipped away like the rest, what would I have to show for them? What did anybody ever have to show for the years that were gone?

There's a liquor store right across the street. From where I sat I could see the customers enter and leave. As I watched them, it came to me that I could look up the store's number in the phone book and have them send up a bottle.

That was as far as I allowed the thought to go. Sometimes I'll let myself consider what type of liquor I'd order, and what brand. This time I shook the thought off early on and breathed deeply several times, willing myself to let it go.

Then I reached for the phone and dialed a number I didn't have to look up.

It rang twice, three times. I had my finger poised to break the connection, not wanting to talk to a machine, but then she picked up.

"This is Matt," I said.

She said, "That's funny. I was just this minute thinking of you."

"And I of you. Would you like company?"

"Would I?" She took a moment to consider the question. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I would."

When I first moved to my hotel, Jimmy Armstrong had a saloon right around the corner on Ninth Avenue, and that was where I spent most of my waking hours. After I got sober Jimmy lost his lease and reopened a long block west, at the corner of Tenth and Fifty-seventh. In AA they tell you to avoid the people and places and things that might make you want to drink, and for several years I stayed away from Jimmy's joint. These days I get there now and then. Elaine likes the place on Sunday afternoons, when they have chamber music, and it's always been a good choice for a late supper.

I walked west on Fifty-seventh, but instead of paying a call on Jimmy I went to the high-rise apartment building diagonally across the street. The doorman had been told I was coming; when I gave him my name he said I was expected and pointed to the elevator. I rode up to the twenty-eighth floor and her door opened even as I knocked on it.

"I really was," she said. "Thinking of you just before you called. You look tired. Are you all right?"