A Long Line of Dead Men (23 page)

I stayed long enough to drink a Coke and watch a little of the game on ESPN, the Brewers playing the White Sox, with a lot of players on both teams hitting the ball into the seats. But I wasn't paying any real attention, and when my glass was empty I went home.

Wally Donn called first thing in the morning. "I could use you a couple or three days this week," he said. "You up for it?"

"I'm in the middle of something," I told him.

"Keeping you busy?"

It wasn't, not really. There wasn't much I could do until we had our big meeting at Gruliow's Tuesday afternoon.

I said, "Suppose I call you Wednesday morning? Or late tomorrow afternoon, if I get the chance. By then I'll have a better idea of how I stand."

"I really need you today," he said. "You call me Wednesday, I might not have anything for you. But call and we'll see."

I could have gone in that day, for all the work I wound up doing. I made my usual call to Forest Hills and was not all that surprised when nobody answered. I had already decided that Mrs. Watson was out of town, and was beginning to wonder what I could possibly ask her if she ever turned up again.

Sometime after lunch I went over to Elaine's shop, intending to spell her, but she wasn't there; TJ, cool and professional in his preppy outfit, was minding the shop for her. I sat around talking with him for half an hour, during which time he sold a pair of bronze bookends to a stoop-shouldered man in a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The man offered thirty dollars, then forty, then said he'd pay the full fifty-dollar sticker price if TJ would forgo the sales tax. TJ stood firm.

"You're tough," the man said, admiringly. "Well, I'm probably paying too much, but so what? Ten years from now when I look at them on the shelf, will I even remember what I paid?" He handed over a credit card, and TJ wrote up the sale and did what you have to do with the card as if he'd been doing this sort of thing for years.

"They're really nice," he said at last, handing over the wrapped bookends. "All said, I think you got yourself a bargain."

"I think so, too," the man said.

Over dinner I gave Elaine a play-by-play description of the transaction. " 'All said, I think you got yourself a bargain.' Where do you suppose he learned to talk like that?"

"No idea," she said. "How come he got full price? I told him he can cut any price ten percent to make a sale."

"He said he knew the customer would pay the full fifty if he just held firm."

"Plus the tax?"

"Plus the tax."

"I guess shilling for the three-card monte dealers teaches you something. I guess if you can buy and sell on Forty-second Street you can buy and sell anywhere."

"Evidently."

"But it still amazes me when he turns the language on and off. Is it possible he's actually a middle-class kid and all the street jive's an act?"

"No."

"That's what I figured. But you never know, do you?"

"Sometimes you know," I said.

Jim Shorter hadn't called. I tried him after dinner and got no answer. I went over to St. Paul's. The woman who spoke had very strong opinions on everything. I left on the break and went over to my hotel room and sat there looking out the window.

I'd taken off Call Forwarding as soon as I came in. I was trying to make this automatic, and to put it on again automatically when I left. I picked up a book and read for a while, then put it down and looked out the window some more. And the phone rang, and it was Shorter.

"Hi," he said. "How's it going?"

"Just fine," I said. "How about yourself?"

"Well, I didn't drink yet."

"That's great."

"And I was at a meeting," he said, and told me where he'd gone and more of the speaker's story than I needed to know. We talked AA for a few minutes, and then he said, "And what about your investigation? How's that going?"

"It's sort of stalled."

"Tomorrow's the big day, isn't it?"

"The big day?"

"You know, when you get together with everybody and find out where you go from here. Do you suppose the killer'll be there?"

"There's a thought. I don't know for sure that there is a killer."

"Hey, Matt, I discovered Watson's body, remember? Somebody sure as hell killed him. I mean, he didn't do that to himself."

"A single killer," I said. "As I said, I don't know for sure that there is one, and if there is I have no reason to believe he's a member of the group."

"Who else would it be?"

"I don't know."

"Well, what I think- but where do I get off having an opinion? Forget it, you don't want to hear this."

"Sure I do, Jim."

"You sure? Well, I bet it's one of the members. Some guy whose life looks picture-perfect on the surface, but underneath it's a mess. You know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"Are all of them coming tomorrow?"

"Most of them. A few can't make it."

"If you were the killer," he said, "and if somebody called a meeting like this, would you go? Or would you say you couldn't make it?"

"Impossible to say."

"I'd go. How could you stay away? You'd want to hear what they were saying, wouldn't you?"

"I suppose so."

"You better get a good night's sleep," he said. "Tomorrow you're going to be in the room with the killer. Do you think you'll be able to sense anything?"

"I doubt it."

"I don't know," he said. "You were a cop a long time. You've got the instincts. That might keep him away."

"My instincts?"

"Knowing that you're going to be there. Unless, you know, he wants to be face-to-face with his adversary. What do you think?"

"I think you've been watching too much TV."

He laughed. "You know what? I think you're right. Where's this going to happen tomorrow? Somebody's office?"

"I really can't say, Jim."

"But it's in Manhattan, right? Sorry, I'm sticking my nose in, and I don't mean to."

"It's in the Village, but I don't want to say any more than that."

"Not important. Speaking of the Village, I was thinking I might go to that midnight meeting on Houston Street. I don't suppose you're up for that tonight, are you?"

"Not tonight."

"No, you got a busy day tomorrow. I don't know if I want a late night myself. One o'clock by the time the meeting lets out, and then I've got to get all the way uptown. And it might rain. It's threatening. You know what? I think I'll stay home."

"I don't blame you."

He laughed. "It's good talking to you, Matt. Believe me, it helps. Before I called you I was thinking, why the hell can't I have one glass of beer? I mean, who would even feel the effects of one glass of beer?"

"Well-"

"Don't worry," he said. "I'm not gonna have it. I don't even want it now. Have a good day tomorrow, huh? And give me a call afterward if you get a chance, will you do that?"

"I'll do that," I said.

I must have been waiting for his call. Once I'd finished talking to him, I put on Call Forwarding and went home. Ray Gruliow had called in my absence. I called him back.

He said, "Three-thirty tomorrow. That work for you?"

"Fine."

"I told the others three o'clock. That'll give us a chance to bring everybody up to speed before you join us."

There would be eight of them, he said, nine if Bill Ludgate could clear his calendar. And it would be strange seeing them again so soon, not quite two months after the last dinner. Strange to see them away from the usual venue, in a private living room instead of a restaurant.

"Incidentally," he said, "I enjoyed our conversation the other night."

"So did I."

"We'll have to do it again sometime," he said. "After this nonsense is all taken care of. Deal?"

"Deal," I said.

I hung up and poured myself a cup of coffee. I went and watched television with Elaine, but I couldn't keep my mind on the program.

Depending on Bill Ludgate's ability to cancel his appointments, we'd have eight or nine members at Gruliow's house, five or six absentees. Would the killer be present or absent? Would curiosity draw him? Would fear keep him away?

Maybe it was his house.

Ridiculous to think it could be Gruliow. Hard-Way Ray as diabolical murderer? God knows he was bright enough to work out the details, and resolute enough to carry it out. And there were people who would say he was ruthless enough, and even crazy enough.

I couldn't see it. But I couldn't see it for any of them, and nobody else had a motive. Forget motive- no one else even knew the club existed.

Could I rule out anyone? Hildebrand, I thought. The one thing the killer wouldn't do was bring in a private detective.

Unless-

Well, it was crazy, but why expect sane behavior from someone who was systematically wiping out his lifelong friends? Maybe bringing in a detective would add a little excitement to the game. Maybe it was getting dull, knocking off somebody every year or so. Maybe it was infuriating the way the rest of them refused to realize what was going on. So maybe Lew Hildebrand had decided to even the odds a little by bringing in a detective. But, because he didn't want to make things too hard for himself, he'd had the good sense to hire a detective who wasn't all that bright...

Get a good night's sleep, Jim Shorter had urged.

Fat chance.

They assembled, nine of fourteen of thirty-one, at three o'clock on the last Tuesday in June, a hot and hazy day with the burnt reek of ozone soiling the dense air. No one was anxiously early or fashionably late. The first to arrive were Gerard Billings and Kendall McGarry, who came in separate taxis that discharged their passengers simultaneously. The two men rang Gruliow's bell at five minutes before the hour. They had no sooner taken seats than the bell rang again. When Bob Berk arrived at 3:02, apologizing for being late, he was the ninth man. It was five minutes after three when Ray Gruliow got to his feet to open the meeting.

He had done this once before. With Frank DiGiulio's death the previous September, he had become the club's senior member, and had accordingly presided at the annual meeting in May. This was only the second time the gavel had passed in thirty-two years- from Homer Champney to Frank DiGiulio, and now to Gruliow.

What he had not done before, what no one had done, was open a meeting at other than the traditional time and place. He had given some thought to the form this meeting ought to take, and had consulted several of the others on the matter. His conclusion was that it ought to vary as little as possible from the usual form, and he began accordingly by intoning the names of deceased members in the order of their passing, beginning with Philip Michael Kalish and James Severance and Homer Gray Champney, concluding in due course with Francis DiGiulio and Alan Walter Watson.

"I want to thank you for coming," he said. "I've talked with each of you about the situation we're facing, and I know some of you have talked to one another. Let me see if I can summarize what we're up against, and then we can go around the room in our usual fashion and get a sense of where we are on this. There's a fellow who'll be joining us at three-thirty, a detective by the name of Scudder. It would be good if we could reach some sort of consensus by the time he gets here..."

I got to Commerce Street fifteen minutes early and killed the time wandering the narrow winding streets. It took me back to when I was a new face at the Sixth Precinct, itself housed on Charles Street in those days. I was new to the Village, and excited by what I saw, but I kept getting lost on those eccentric streets. I thought I'd never get the hang of it, but nothing familiarizes you with an area like a tour of duty there. I caught on.

At 3:30 exactly I mounted the steps at Gruliow's house and worked the lion's head door knocker. Gruliow opened the door at once and met me with a smile, one he'd shown me before, the one that suggested that we two shared a secret. "You're right on time," he said. "Come on in. There's a bunch of fellows here who want to meet you."

The heat notwithstanding, I was glad I'd worn a suit. They were all in dark business suits, except for Lowell Hunter, whose suit was seersucker, and Gerard Billings, the TV weatherman, with his trademark bow tie and a Kelly-green blazer. Gruliow introduced me and I shook hands all around, trying to fix each face in my mind and match it with a name I already knew. I didn't have that many to remember; of the nine, I had already met Gruliow and Hildebrand, and I recognized Billings and Avery Davis. That left Hunter, along with Bob Berk, Bill Ludgate, Kendall McGarry, and Gordon Walser.

Of the other five, Brian O'Hara was trekking in the Himalayas with his eldest son and wouldn't be back for another ten days. John Youngdahl lived in St. Louis; he'd moved there eight years ago, never missed the annual May meeting, but was unable to come in this afternoon on such short notice. Bob Ripley was in Ohio to attend a daughter's college graduation, while Douglas Pomeroy and Rick Bazerian had business appointments they'd been unable to reschedule.

After the introductions we all took our seats and they all waited for me to say something. I looked around at the ring of expectant faces and all I could think of was that I wanted a drink. I took a deep breath and let it out and pushed the thought aside.

I told them I was grateful to them for the meeting. "I know you've had a little time to discuss the situation," I said, "but I thought I might tell you what it looks like from my perspective, which is that of an outsider and a professional investigator." I talked for fifteen or twenty minutes, discussing the various deaths in turn, speculating on the probable legitimacy of the suicides and accidents. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I didn't trip over my own tongue and I guess I made some sort of sense. From the looks on their faces, they were hanging on every word.