A Long Line of Dead Men (29 page)

"I'm not sure I see the connection."

"There has to be one," I said. "I think the killer's tying off loose ends. He must be afraid somebody saw something, or knows something. He killed the widow, and the next logical step is the person who was first on the scene, the guard who discovered Watson's body."

"Jim Shorter?"

"His phone doesn't answer."

"He could be anywhere," she said. "Maybe he's at a meeting."

"Or in a bar," I said. "Or in his room with a bottle, not picking up the phone."

"Or having breakfast, or catching the Rothko retrospective at the Whitney, which would be my first choice if I didn't have a business to run. What are you going to do?"

"Look for him. There's something he knows, even if he doesn't know he knows it. I want to find him before it gets him killed."

"Hold on a second," she said. She covered the mouthpiece for a moment, then came back and said, "TJ's here. He wants to know if you want company."

By the time I got dressed and downstairs, he was waiting for me in front of the building. He was wearing his preppy clothes, the effect slightly compromised by the black Raiders cap. "We can lose the cap," he said, "if I's got to look straighter than straight, Nate."

"I didn't say anything about the cap."

"Guess I hearin' things."

"Or reading minds." I stepped to the curb, hailed a cab, told the driver Eighty-second and Second. "Anyway," I went on, "I don't think it matters what anybody wears. We're just wasting our time."

"You don't expect nothing."

"That's right."

"Just brung me along so's you'd have company."

"More or less."

He rolled his eyes. "Then what we doin' in a cab, Tab? Man like you take a taxi, be somethin' goin' down."

"Well," I said, "let's hope you're wrong."

I had him wait in the cab while I climbed a flight of stairs and checked the meeting room at the Eighty-second Street Workshop. That was where I'd brought Jim Friday night, and he'd mentioned going to other meetings there since. There was a meeting going on, and I went in and found a good vantage point beside the coffee urn. When I was sure he wasn't there I went downstairs and got back in the cab. I had the driver go up First Avenue and drop us at the corner of Ninety-fourth.

Our first stop was the Blue Canoe, and if Shorter didn't get drunk and didn't get killed, someday the place might figure in his qualification. "I met this guy there," he could say, "figuring I could con him into buying me a couple of beers, and the next thing I knew I was at an AA meeting. And here I am, and I haven't had a drink since."

He wasn't at the Blue Canoe now, or at any of the other bars or luncheonettes on First Avenue. TJ and I made the rounds together. It would have been convenient if we could have shared the work, but how would he know Shorter if he saw him?

When we'd finished with a four-block stretch of First Avenue, we walked west on Ninety-fourth to Shorter's rooming house. I'd have rung his bell if I knew which one it was. Instead I rang the bell marked SUPER. When it went unanswered we left and walked to Second Avenue, where we wasted some more time checking more bars and restaurants, from Ninety-second to Ninety-sixth and back to where we'd started. I found a phone that worked and called Shorter's number and it didn't answer.

I was starting to get a bad feeling.

There was no point combing the city for him, I thought, because we weren't going to find him that way. And there was no point dialing his number because he wasn't going to answer the phone.

I walked quickly back to the rooming house, TJ tagging along beside me. I rang the super's bell, and when there was no answer I poked other buttons at random so that someone could buzz me in. No one did, but after a few minutes a very large woman emerged from one of the first-floor rooms and waddled to the door. She frowned through the glass panel at us, and without opening the door she asked what we wanted.

I said we wanted the super.

"You're wasting your time," she said. "He ain't got no vacancies."

"Where is he?"

"This is a respectable house." God knows who she thought we were. I took out a business card from Reliable and held it against the glass. She squinted at it and moved her lips as she read it. When she was done her lips settled into a tight narrow line. "That's him on the stoop across the street," she said grudgingly. "His name's Carlos."

There were three men on the stoop she'd pointed to, two of them playing checkers, the third kibitzing their game. The kibitzer was drinking a can of Miller's. The players were sharing a carton of Tropicana orange juice. I said, "Carlos?" and they all looked at me.

I held out my card and one of the players took it. He was stocky, with a flattened nose and liquid brown eyes, and I decided he must be Carlos. "I'm concerned about one of your tenants," I said. "I'm afraid he may have had an accident."

"Who's that?"

"James Shorter."

"Shorter."

"Late forties, medium height, dark hair-"

"I know him," he said. "You don't have to describe him for me. I know all of them. I just tryin' to think if I seen him today." He closed his eyes in concentration. "No," he said at length. "I don't see him in a while. You want to leave your card, I call you when I see him."

"I think we should see if he's all right."

"You mean open his door?"

"That's what I mean."

"You ring his bell?"

"I don't know which bell is his."

"Don't it got his name on it?"

"No."

He sighed. "A lot of them," he said, "they don't want no name on the bell. I put the name in, they just take it out. Then their friends come, ring the wrong bell, disturb everybody. Or they ring my bell. I tell you, it's a big pain in the ass."

"Well," I said.

He got to his feet. "First thing we do," he said, "is we ring his bell. Then we see."

We rang his bell and got no response. We went inside and climbed three flights of stairs, and the house was about what I'd expected, with a Lysol smell battling the odors of cooking and mice and urine. Carlos led us to what he said was Shorter's door and banged on it with a heavy fist. "Hey, open up," he called. "This gen'man wants to talk to you."

Nothing.

"Not home," Carlos said, and shrugged. "You want to write him a note, put it under the door, an' when he comes home-"

"I think you should open the door," I said.

"I don't know about that."

"I'm worried about him," I said. "I think he might have had an accident."

"What kind of accident?"

"A bad one. Open the door."

"You say that," he said, "but I'm the one gets in trouble."

"I'll take the responsibility."

"And what do I say, huh? 'This guy took the responsibility.' It's still my ass inna crack, man."

"If you don't open it," I told him, "I'll kick it in."

"You serious?" He looked at me and decided I was. "You think maybe he's sick in there, huh?"

"Or worse than that."

"What's worse'n sick?" I guess it came to him, because he winced at the thought. "Shit, I hope not." He hauled out a ring of keys, found his master passkey, and fitted it in the lock. "Anyway," he said, "you wouldn't have to kick it in, less'n he got the chain on. These locks is nothin', you can slip 'em with a plastic card. But if the chain's on, shit, you still gonna have to kick it in."

But the chain wasn't on. He turned the lock, paused to knock on the door one final unnecessary time, and pushed the door inward.

The room was empty.

He stood in the doorway. I pushed past him, walked around the little room. It was as neat and bare as a monk's cell. There was an iron bedstead, a chest of drawers, a bedside table. The bed was made.

The drawers were empty. So was the closet. I looked under the bed. There were no personal articles anywhere, just the thrift-shop furniture that had been there when he moved in.

"I guess he moved out," Carlos said.

The telephone was on the beside table. I slipped a pencil under the receiver and lifted it enough to get a dial tone, then allowed it to drop back in place.

"He didn't say nothin' to nobody," Carlos said. "He pays a week at a time, so he's paid through Sunday. Funny, huh?"

TJ walked over to the bed, picked up the pillow. There was a booklet under it. He took a close look at it and handed it to me.

I already knew what it was.

"It don't make sense," Carlos said. "You gonna move out, why you gonna make the bed first? I got to change it anyway before I rent it to somebody else, don't I?"

"Let's hope so."

"Course I do." He frowned, puzzled. "Maybe he's comin' back."

I looked at the AA meeting book, the one I'd bought him, the only thing he'd left behind.

"No," I said. "He's not coming back."

Martin Banszak took off his rimless glasses and fogged the lenses with his breath, then polished each in turn with his handkerchief. When he was satisfied with the results he put them on and turned his sad blue eyes on me.

"You must know the caliber of men we get," he said. "Guard work pays just one or two dollars an hour over the minimum wage. It's a job that requires no experience and minimal training. Our best men are retired police officers looking to supplement a city pension, but men like that can usually find something better for themselves.

"We get fellows who are out of work and looking for stopgap employment until something opens up for them. They're often good workers, but they don't stay with us long. And then we get men who work for us because they can't do any better."

"What kind of checks do you run on them?"

"We do the minimum. I try not to hire convicted felons. After all, this is security work. You don't hire the fox to guard the henhouse, do you? But it's hard to avoid. I can run computer checks, but what good is that when the name's a common one? 'Query: Has William Johnson been an inmate in the New York State prison system?' Well, there are probably half a dozen William Johnsons in prison in this state on any given day, so how am I to know? And when a man comes to me and says his name is William Johnson, how can I tell if it's the name he was born with? If a man shows me a Social Security card and a driver's license, what can I do but accept it?"

"Don't you run their prints?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It takes too long," he said. "By the time I get a response from Washington, two weeks or more have passed. The applicant's found other work in the meantime."

"Couldn't you hire him provisionally? And let him go if he doesn't check out?"

"Is that how they do it at Reliable? Well, I'm sure you charge more for your services. A Manhattan firm, a fancy address. That's all well and good for the clients who can afford to cover your overhead for you." He picked up a pencil, tapped its eraser end on the desktop. "I can't have half my employees checking up on the other half," he said. "I'd be out of business in no time."

I didn't say anything.

"Two years ago," he said, "we tried taking fingerprints when we accepted applications for employment. You know what happened?"

"Your applications dropped off."

"That's exactly right. People didn't want to go through a messy and demeaning process."

"Especially the ones with outstanding warrants," I said. "It would have been particularly messy and demeaning for them."

He glared at me. "And the ones who had stopped paying alimony," he said. "And the ones running away from bad debts. And, yes, the ones who'd served time for minor narcotics violations and other low-level criminal behavior. It's hard to grow up in certain neighborhoods without getting arrested and fingerprinted along the way. The bulk of those men do just fine in this line of work."

I nodded. Who was I to judge him, and what did I care how he ran his business? He fired men for drinking because it bothered the clients. But what client was bothered by the fact that the man guarding his warehouse had failed to pay child support, or sold a gram of cocaine to an undercover police officer? Those weren't offenses you could smell on a man's breath, or spot in his walk.

"Let's get back to Shorter," I said.

Shorter's file contained the application he'd filled out, along with a record of the hours he'd worked and the compensation he'd received. No photograph, and I asked about that. Wasn't it part of the routine to photograph all employees?

"Of course," he said. "We need a photo for their ID. We take them right here, in front of that wall. It's a perfect backdrop." So where was the photo? Laminated to the ID card, I was told, which Shorter would have turned in when they let him go, and which would have been routinely destroyed.

"Did he turn it in?"

"I assume so."

"And it was destroyed?"

"It must have been."

"What about the negative?"

He shook his head. "We use a Polaroid. Everybody does. You want to be able to make up the ID right away, not wait for the film to come back."

"So there's no negative."

"No."

"And you only take the one shot? You don't shoot a backup to have on file?"

"We do, actually," he said, and shuffled through the file. "It doesn't seem to be here. It may have been misfiled."

Or removed from the file by Shorter, I thought. Or not taken in the first place, because Martin Banszak didn't seem to run the tightest ship around.

I took another look at the application. Shorter had had the same address on East Ninety-fourth Street when he'd applied for the job back in July of '92.

July of '92?

I checked the date with Banszak. Had Shorter actually been working there for seven months by the time Alan Watson was killed?