A Long Line of Dead Men (28 page)

"No, she died years ago."

"So did mine. It was cancer killed her, but I always thought it was Dennis's dying that brought it on. She was never the same after she got the telegram." He looked at me. "We're orphans, the two of us," he said, and waved a hand at the windows, with the storm," he said, and took a drink.

"The other day," I said, "a lawyer I know told me that man is the only animal that knows he'll die someday. And he's also the only animal that drinks."

"It's an unusual thing for a lawyer to say."

"He's an unusual lawyer. But do you think there's a connection?"

"I know there is," he said.

I don't know how we got around to women. He didn't seem to need them as much now, he said, and wasn't sure whether it was the years or the drink that deserved credit for the change.

"Well, I stopped drinking," I reminded him.

"By God, so you did. And now no woman's safe from Inwood to the Battery."

"Oh, they're safe," I said.

"Are you still seeing the other one?"

"Now and then."

"And does herself know about it?"

"I don't think so," I said, "although she gave me a turn the other day. I was trying to get hold of the woman whose husband was stabbed to death in Forest Hills in February. I mentioned to Elaine that I was going to have to go out there and see her. A moment later she told me to enjoy myself with the widow, and I read more into the remark than she'd put in it. I guess I looked startled, but I managed to cover it."

That reminded him of a story, and he told it, and the conversation meandered like an old river. Then a little later he said, "The widow in Forest Hills. Why ever would you go to see her?"

"To find out if she knew anything."

"What could she know?"

"She might have seen something. Her husband might have said something to her." I told him some of the questions I'd ask, a few of the points I'd try to cover.

"Is that how you do your detecting?"

"That's part of it. Why?"

"Because I've no idea how you do what you do."

"Most of the time neither do I."

"Ah, but of course you do. And you try all these different approaches until something works. I'd never have the imagination to devise them all, or the patience to keep at it. When there's something I need to know, there's only one way I have of finding it out."

"What's that?"

"I go to the man who has the answer," he said, "and I do what I have to do to make him tell me. But if I didn't even know who to go to, why, I'd be entirely lost."

If the rain had let up I might have gone home earlier. I began to flag sometime around four-thirty or five in the morning, and there was a time when the conversation died down and I glanced over at the window. But it was still pouring, and instead of pleading exhaustion and heading for the door I pushed my Perrier aside and poured one more cup of coffee from the thermos. A little later I caught a second wind, and it carried me past dawn and down to St. Bernard's for the butchers' mass.

There were fifteen or twenty of us in the little side chapel, including seven or eight men from the meat market, dressed in white aprons just like Mick's, some of them stained as his was stained. There were several nuns as well, and a couple of housewives and some men dressed for the office. And a few elderly people, men and women, including one who was a dead ringer for the murderous Eamonn Dougherty, right down to the cloth cap.

We left when the mass was over, without having taken Communion. The sky was still overcast but no rain was falling. Mick's Cadillac was where he'd parked it, in the reserved space in front of Twomey's funeral parlor. Twomey was out in front and gave us a wave when he saw us. Mick gave him a smile and a nod.

"It's good days for Twomey," he said. "His business is more than twice what it was, now that they're dying of AIDS all around him. It's an ill wind, eh?"

"That's the truth."

"I'll tell you another," he said. "Every wind's an ill wind."

He dropped me at my door. I went upstairs and tried to make as little noise as possible opening the door, not wanting to wake Elaine if she was still sleeping.

When I opened the door she was standing there, wearing a robe I'd bought for her. The look on her face told me right away that something was wrong.

Before I could ask, she said, "You don't know, do you? You haven't heard?"

"Heard what?"

She put a hand out, took mine. "Gerard Billings was killed last night," she said.

For a full twelve years, Gerard Billings had been the weather reporter for an independent New York broadcast channel. While he was officially known as the chief meteorologist, his function was primarily reportorial. His colorful clothing, his irrepressible personality, and his evident willingness to make a fool of himself on camera were more important factors in his rise than his ability to read a weather map.

He was on the air twice a day, at 6:55 P.M., just before the close of the 6:30 news program, and again at 11:15, right in the middle of the late news and before the extended sports summary. Typically, he would arrive at the station at five in the afternoon, work out what he was going to say and get his maps and charts in order, and go out for dinner after the broadcast. Sometimes he would linger over dinner for a couple of hours, then return to the studio. Other nights he'd go home for a nap and a change of clothes, then go back to the studio for his second stint of the day. He'd get there between 10 and 10:30; he didn't need as much time to prepare, because he would be using the same charts and giving essentially the same report.

At seven that Tuesday night he went straight home to the apartment on West Ninety-sixth where he'd lived since his divorce four years previously. He ordered Chinese food from a restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. Shortly after ten he went downstairs and caught a cab driven by a recent Bengali immigrant named Rakhman Ali. As the cab waited to make a left turn into Columbus Avenue, it was sideswiped by a car that was attempting to pass it on the right. The driver leaped from his car and got into a loud argument with Rakhman Ali, at the climax of which he drew a handgun, shot Ali three times in the face and upper chest, then yanked open the door of the cab and emptied his gun into Ali's passenger. He then sped away in his own vehicle, which was variously described as anywhere from two to twelve years old. Witnesses seemed to agree that it was a four-door sedan, that it was dark in color, and that it had seen better days.

Elaine, watching the news, knew something was wrong even before they introduced a substitute weatherman to fill in for Billings. There were no jokes about the absent forecaster being under the weather, and all of the reporters in the studio seemed to be keeping a grim secret. It turned out that they had learned of Billings's death moments before they went on the air and decided to hold the story pending notification of kin. This decision was overruled toward the end of the broadcast when they realized they were in danger of getting scooped by their competitors; accordingly, the anchorwoman made the unfortunate announcement right after the sports wrap-up.

"I didn't know what to do," Elaine said. "I knew you were at Grogan's and I looked up the number and thought about calling, but what were you going to do in the middle of a rainy night? Besides, for all I knew it was just what it looked like, an argument over a traffic accident that got out of control. It happens all the time, and everybody's got a gun these days, and maybe they'd catch the poor loser who did it within the hour, and why ruin your evening with Mick over that?

"So instead I turned the radio to WINS and stayed up for hours. I had the radio turned down low and I had a book to read, and I heard the same half hour of news over and over, and when they got to the Billings story I would stop reading and turn the volume up, and it would be the same thing as before, word for word. And I wound up falling asleep with the radio on and woke up at seven with it blaring away.

"Should I have called you? I didn't know what to do."

It was just as well she hadn't called me. There wouldn't have been anything for me to do. There was little enough for me to do now, the morning after the shooting, except field the telephone calls that came in from Ray Gruliow and Lewis Hildebrand and Gordon Walser. I'd have to know more, I told each of them, before I'd know how to proceed.

By early afternoon they'd found the car, a 1988 Ford Crown Victoria with Jersey plates, registered to an ophthalmologist in Teaneck. The vehicle had been located in the pound where it had been towed from a no-parking zone in the midtown theater district. Identification was made on the basis of a partial plate number supplied by a witness, and confirmed by paint scrapings on the car and on Rakhman Ali's yellow cab. The ophthalmologist's wife told police that her husband was in Houston attending a professional conference; he'd flown there Friday from Newark, after having left his car in the long-term parking lot.

There were fingerprints on the steering wheel and the dash, but they turned out to be those of the traffic officer who'd opened the car door and put it in neutral so that it could be towed. There were no prints that could have belonged to the shooter, whom witnesses described as of average height and wearing a baseball cap and a glossy dark blue warm-up jacket with a name embroidered over the breast pocket. None of the witnesses had been close enough to read the name.

The incident looked ordinary enough, newsworthy in that one of the two victims had enjoyed a measure of local celebrity. Someone had stolen a car from an airport parking lot, probably with the intention of using it in the commission of a crime. Maybe he was chemically impaired at the time of the accident. Maybe he was just having a bad day. In any event, he'd reacted badly to an ordinary fender-bender. Instead of exchanging licenses and insurance cards, he'd pulled a gun and started blasting.

It could have happened that way.

Or he could have parked his stolen car where he could keep an eye on the entrance to Billings's building, could have tagged along after the cab that stopped for Billings, could have engineered the collision and its aftermath.

Nothing to it.

I was up all day, drinking too much coffee and fighting off exhaustion. At 8:30 I made myself go over to St. Paul's for my regular meeting, but I couldn't make myself pay attention, nor could I keep from leaving at the break. When I walked in the door, Elaine told me to take a hot bath and go to bed.

"Just do it," she said.

The hot water took away some of the tension, and when I got into bed I fell asleep almost immediately. I must have dreamed about Jim Shorter, because I woke up concerned about him. I said as much to Elaine, and she told me he'd called the night before, while I was at St. Paul's.

"He said it wasn't important," she said, "and not to call him because he was on his way out. So I didn't mention it."

I called him. No answer.

I listened to the news and there was nothing about Billings. I went out and bought the Times and all three tabloids and read four versions of the same story. The Times article jumped from the front page to the obituary page, where his obituary included a photo and six inches of text. I read the obit, and the half-dozen others. And then I went on to read the half-page of paid death notices. Fully a third of these were for a man who had died the previous week and who had evidently contributed heavily to a wide range of charitable endeavors; each was now taking pains to reward him with a paid announcement of their sorrow at his passing.

I raced through those, but read the others fairly closely, as is my custom these days. My attention slacked off some toward the end, as it generally does. Once I've made it past the S's without finding my own name, my appetite for the pursuit is a little less keen. But I stayed there right through the alphabet, and thus learned of the death on Monday of Helen Stromberg Watson, wife of the late Alan Watson, of Forest Hills.

It took a few calls before I found a cop who would talk to me.

"Accidental drowning," he said. "Coulda slipped, hit her head on the tile. Drowned right in her own bathtub. All you gotta do is lose consciousness long enough to fill the lungs with water. Happens all the time."

"Oh, really?"

"Ask me, they oughta put warning labels on bathtubs. No, see, there's a possibility of suicide. Woman lost her husband earlier this year, despondent over the loss, so on and so on. We found a bottle of J amp;B on the floor next to the tub. You drink in the tub and pass out, you want to call that suicide? I don't, not without a note, not when you got the children's feelings to consider, losing both parents in less'n six months. 'Sides, who knows what's in somebody else's mind? You have a few drinks, and before you know it you pass out and you drown. Or the drinks hit you hard, especially in a hot tub, and you lose your balance and smack your head and that's what knocks you out. Hey, accidents happen."

"And she died on Monday?"

"That's when they found her. Doc's guess was she was in the water three days by then." No wonder she hadn't answered the phone.

"You know what the weather's been like," he said. "And maybe you know what a body's like after a couple of days in the water. Put 'em both together, do I have to tell you what they spell?"

"Who discovered the body?"

"A neighbor. One of her kids called next door, concerned because he couldn't reach his mother on the phone. The neighbor had a key and let herself in. Hell of a thing to walk in on."

I called Jim Shorter. No answer.

I called Elaine at the shop. I said, "When Shorter called last night did he seem nervous? Did he sound as though he was afraid?"

"No, why?"

"Alan Watson's widow drowned in her bathtub sometime over the weekend. The time of death's hard to pinpoint, but it evidently happened after I went out to Corona and talked to the head of that security firm."