A Long Line of Dead Men (6 page)

"What do you mean?"

"I mean context is everything," she said.

The next day she beeped TJ and hired him to mind the store while she hit every thrift shop she could get to. By the end of the week she had covered most of Manhattan, sorting through hundreds and hundreds of paintings and buying almost thirty, at an average price of $8.75. She lined them up and asked me what I thought. I told her I didn't think Matisse had anything to worry about.

"I think they're great," she insisted. "They're not necessarily good, but they're great."

She picked out her six favorites and had them framed in simple gallery-style black frames. She sold two the first week, one for $300 and one for $450. "See?" she said, triumphant. "Stuff 'em in a bin at the Salvation Army at ten bucks apiece and they're thrift-shop art that nobody looks at twice. Treat them with respect and price them at three to five hundred and they're folk art, and people think they're a steal. I had a woman in just before closing who fell in love with the desert sunset. 'But this looks like paint-by-number,' she said. 'That's just what it is,' I told her. 'It was the artist's favorite medium. He worked only with paint-by-number.' What do you bet she comes back tomorrow and buys it?"

It was getting on for midnight when we left Paris Green and walked home on Ninth Avenue. There was rain forecast but you never would have known it. The air was cool and dry, and there was a breeze off the Hudson.

"Hildebrand gave me a check," I told her. "I'll deposit it in the morning."

"Unless you want to use the ATM."

"No, I want to go straight home," I said. "I'm a little tired. And I want to go over my notes some more before I go to sleep."

"Do you really think-"

"- that somebody's been knocking them off like clay pigeons? I'm not supposed to know yet. I was hired to find out, not to make up my mind in advance."

"So you're keeping an open mind."

"Not entirely," I admitted. "It's hard for me to get away from the numbers. There have been too many deaths. There has to be an explanation. All I have to do is find it."

We stood at a corner, waiting for the light to change. She said, "Why would anyone want to do something like that?"

"I don't know."

"If they were all in college together, and they raped some girl at a drunken fraternity party, and now her brother's getting revenge."

"That's pretty good," I said.

"Or it's her son, and his mother died in childbirth, so he wants vengeance, but he also has to find out which of the men is his father. How does that sound?"

"Like a Movie of the Week."

"I guess the killer would have to be one of the survivors, huh?"

"Well, I don't think it's one of the victims."

"I mean as opposed to-"

"- somebody from outside," I said. "That's Hildebrand's fear, of course. That's why he's had to keep his suspicions to himself. He would have liked to voice his concern to a fellow member, but suppose he picked the wrong one to confide in? According to him, nobody on the outside even knows that the club exists."

"You seem dubious."

"Well, they've been doing this for thirty-two years. Do you really think nobody let something slip in all that time?" I shrugged. "Still, the fourteen surviving members would have to be the chief suspects."

"But why on earth would one of them want to kill the others?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, if you got sick of the whole thing, couldn't you just quit? Didn't anybody ever resign, incidentally?"

"After two or three years, Homer Champney read the group a letter from one of the members who'd written to explain that he no longer wanted to participate. He'd relocated in California and didn't see the point in flying three thousand miles each way for a steak dinner. He had written to suggest that they might want to replace him. They all agreed with Champney that it was against the spirit of the thing to take in any replacement members, and somebody- Hildebrand thinks it would have been Champney- was going to write a letter designed to draw him back into the fold."

"What happened?"

"I guess the letter got written, and it seems to have worked. A year later the would-be dropout was back at the dinner table."

"Just in time for some fatted calf," she said. "Well, there you go. They wouldn't let him leave, so he was quietly smoldering with resentment. He's been getting back at them ever since, killing them off one man at a time."

"By God," I said. "I think you've cracked the case wide open."

"No, huh?"

"I forget the guy's name, but I've got it written down. He never did miss another meeting, and if he had a resentment he kept it hidden remarkably well. Wayne Fletcher, that was his name. Hildebrand says Fletcher used to joke about the time he tried to quit, that it would have been easier to resign from the Mafia."

"Used to?"

"He died eight or nine years ago, if I remember correctly. I don't remember the circumstances, but it's in my notes. It's hard to keep it all straight. So many men, and so many of them dead."

"It's so sad," she said. "Don't you think it's sad?"

"Yes."

"Even if nobody's killing anybody, even if all the deaths are perfectly natural, there's something absolutely heartbreaking about the idea of this group just dwindling away. I suppose it's life, but that makes life a pretty sad business."

"Well," I said, "who ever said it wasn't?"

On the way past the desk we traded greetings with the concierge. We had our individual names on the mailbox and the building's directory, but as far as the staff was concerned we were Mr. and Mrs. Scudder.

ELAINE MARDELL, her shop sign says.

Upstairs, she made coffee while I went over my notes. Wayne Fletcher had died six years ago, not eight or nine, of complications arising from coronary-bypass surgery. I told Elaine as much when she came into the living room with her tea and my coffee.

"It may have been borderline malpractice," I said, "according to Hildebrand, but it's a real stretch to call it murder."

"That's something. The poor man didn't sign his own death warrant when he let himself be talked into rejoining the group."

"Unless someone visited him in the hospital," I went on, "and tampered with his IV."

"I didn't even think of that," she said. "Honey, are you going to be able to check out all of this on your own? It sounds as though you'll have to go in a dozen different directions at once. And how much help can TJ be?"

TJ is a black teenager with no fixed address beyond his beeper number. "He's resourceful," I reminded Elaine.

"So he says," she said, "and so he is, but somehow I can't see him interviewing middle-aged businessmen at the Addison Club."

"He can do some legwork for me. As far as the rest of it goes, I won't have to go over all seventeen deaths with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers. All I have to do is find out for certain if there's a pattern of serial murder operating, and be able to support that argument with enough evidence so I can turn it over to the cops and be sure they'll give it their undivided attention. If I can bring that off, the case will get the benefit of a full-scale official investigation without starting out as a media circus."

"God, once the press gets hold of it-"

"I know."

"Can you imagine what they'd do with it on Inside Edition or Hard Copy? The club would come off sounding like a cult of moon worshipers."

"I know."

"And Boyd Shipton was a member. That wouldn't exactly discourage their interest."

"No, he'd still be news. And he wasn't the only prominent member, either. Ray Gruliow is guaranteed front-page news. And Avery Davis is a member."

"The real estate developer?"

"Uh-huh. And two of the dead men were writers, and one of them had some plays produced." I looked at my notes. "Gerard Billings," I said.

"He was a playwright?"

"No, that was Tom Cloonan. Billings is a broadcaster, he does the weather report on Channel Nine."

"Oh, Gerry Billings, with the bow ties. Gosh, maybe you can get his autograph."

"I'm just saying he's in the public eye."

"A mote in the public eye," she said, "but I see what you mean." She fell silent, and I went back to sifting my notes. After a few minutes she said, "Why?"

"Huh?"

"It just struck me. All these deaths over all those years. It's not like a disgruntled postal employee showing up on the job with an AK-47. Whoever is doing this must have a reason."

"You'd think so."

"Is there money in it?"

"So far there's twenty-five hundred in it for me. If Hildebrand's check is good, and if I can remember to deposit it."

"I meant for the killer."

"I figured you did. Well, if he gets a good agent maybe he'll do all right when they make the miniseries. But if he gets away with it there won't be a miniseries, so where does that leave him?"

"High and dry. Don't you get something for being the last man alive?"

"You get to start the next chapter," I said. "You get the right to read the names of the dead."

"You're sure they don't all leave their money to each other?"

"Positive."

"They don't each kick in a thousand dollars to start things off, and the money got invested in a small upstate corporation that changed its name to Xerox? No, huh?"

"I'm afraid not."

"And the whole club isn't some kind of a tom-tom?"

"Huh?"

"Wrong word," she said. "A tom-tom's a drum. Dammit, what's the word I want?"

"Where are you going?"

"To look it up in the dictionary."

"How can you look it up," I wondered, "if you don't know what it is?"

She didn't answer, and I drank the rest of my coffee and went back to my notes. "Ha!" she said, a few minutes later, and I looked up. "Tontine," she said. "That's the word. It's an eponym."

"Is that a fact."

She gave me a look. "That means it was named for somebody. Lorenzo Tonti, to be specific. He was a Neapolitan banker who thought it up back in the seventeenth century."

"Thought what up?"

"The tontine, although I don't suppose he called it that. It was a sort of a cross between life insurance and a lottery. You signed up a batch of subscribers and they each put up a sum of money into a common fund."

"And it was winner take all?"

"Not necessarily. Sometimes it was set up so that the funds were distributed when the survivors were down to five or ten percent of the original number. Others, smaller ones, stayed locked up until there was only one person left alive. People would be enrolled by their parents in early childhood, and if the investments did well they could wind up looking at a fortune. But they couldn't collect it unless they outlived the other participants."

"You got all this from the dictionary?"

"I got the word from the dictionary," she said, "so I'd know what to look up in the encyclopedia. I knew the word, I just couldn't think of it. Fifteen or twenty years ago I spent a weekend at an inn in the Berkshires. There was this historical novel on the subject, I think it was even called The Tontine, and somebody had left a copy there and I picked it up. I was only a third of the way through it when it was time to leave, so I stuck it in my bag."

"I think God'll forgive you for that."

"He's already punished me. I read it all the way through, and do you know what it said on the bottom of the last page?"

" 'Then she awoke and found it had all been a horrible dream.' "

"Worse than that. It said, 'End of Volume One.' "

"And you were never able to find Volume Two."

"Never. Not that I made searching for it my life's work. But I would have liked to know how it all came out. There were times over the years when that's what kept me from jumping out the window. I'm not talking about the book, I'm talking about life. Wanting to know how it all comes out."

I said, "You really look beautiful tonight."

"Why, thank you," she said. "What brought that on?"

"I was just struck by it. Watching the play of emotions on your face. You're a beautiful woman, but sometimes it all shows- the strength, the softness, everything."

"You old bear," she said, and sat down on the couch next to me. "Keep saying sweet things like that and I've got a pretty good idea how tonight's going to turn out."

"So have I."

"Oh? Give me a kiss, then, and we'll see if you're right."

Afterward, as we were lying side by side, she said, "You know, when I was saying earlier that the club was a real guy thing, I wasn't just making war-between-the-sexes jokes. It's very much a male province, getting together to work out a relationship with mortality. You boys like to look at the big picture."

"And girls just want to have fun?"

"And pick out drapes," she said, "and exchange recipes, and talk about men."

"And shoes."

"Well, shoes are important. You're an old bear. What do you know about shoes?"

"Precious little."

"Exactly." She yawned. "I'm making it sound as though women's concerns are trivial, and I don't think that for a minute. But I do believe we take shorter views. Can you think of a single female philosopher? Because I can't."

"I wonder why that is."

"It's probably biological, or anthropological, anyway. When you guys finished hunting and gathering, you could sit around the campfire and think long thoughts. Women didn't have time for that. We had to be more centered on home and hearth." She yawned again. "I could formulate a theory," she said, "but I'm one of those practical broads, and I'm going to sleep. You work it out, okay?"

I don't know that I worked anything out, but a few minutes later I said, "What about Hannah Arendt? And Susan Sontag? Wouldn't you call them philosophers?"