A Long Line of Dead Men

"Jesus Christ, Matt!"

"They weren't all faked," I said. "It's hard to make murder look like testicular cancer, or a combat death in Vietnam. But the suicides could have been, and a few of the accidents."

"What's your guess?"

"Including the four that went into the book as homicides? A guess is all it is, but I'd say twelve."

"Jesus Christ. Over how many years?"

"Hard to say. Thirty-two since the group was formed, but the first deaths didn't happen for a couple of years, and they were probably legitimate, anyway. Say twenty, twenty-five years."

He pushed his chair back. "I don't see how I can sit on this."

"Sit on what?"

"Do you swear this isn't a sex thing?"

"On a Bible, if you've got one handy."

"You know what I think? I think I ought to take a statement from you."

"Fine. Type up 'No comment' and I'll sign it."

"You'd hold out?"

"Until I'm instructed otherwise."

"I don't get it," he said. "What's your client more scared of than getting killed?"

"A media circus."

"What makes you think they'd be that interested?"

"Are you kidding? Some clown targeting a group of men and taking decades to knock them off? If that won't put reporters in a feeding frenzy-"

"Yeah, you're right. And Boyd Shipton was one of the victims."

"There are three survivors who are at least as prominent as he is."

"Seriously? That's some club. And it had a cabdriver in it, and a commodities broker, and what was the gay guy? Interior decorator?"

"Carl Uhl? I think he was a partner in a catering firm."

"Same thing. Three guys as prominent as Shipton?"

"Household words."

"Jesus."

"I don't want to sit on this, Joe, but at the same time-"

"Yeah, sure. You said the fourteen of them are having a meeting?"

"Some of them, anyway."

"When's that?"

"Tuesday."

"Today's Friday. What do you do between now and then?"

"Whatever I can," I said. "I was thinking about Forest Hills."

"The guy who got stabbed. The commodities guy, Watson."

"Right. I was wondering what the private security guard might have seen."

"He saw a man lying on the ground and he ran over and called it in. If he saw anything else it would be in his statement. Believe me, they would have asked him."

"Would they have questioned him about what he saw earlier?"

"Earlier?"

"If someone was waiting for Watson, planning to ambush him-"

"Oh, I get you. Maybe they would have, back when they were thinking it might be a client with a resentment. But it wouldn't hurt to ask him again. You want his name?"

"And where he works."

He reached for the phone, then turned to look at me. "You seen these AT&T ads about the information highway? They don't say anything about it's a one-way street."

"I know that, Joe."

"Just so you know," he said, and made the call.

16

I caught the Number Seven train and got off at the 103rd Street station in Corona, two stops before Shea Stadium. Two blocks away on Roosevelt Avenue, Queensboro-Corona Protective Services occupied the top floor of a two-story brick building. The store on the ground floor sold children's clothing, and had a lot of stuffed animals in the window.

Most security firms are run by ex-cops, the majority of whom look the part. Martin Banszak, head man at Queensboro-Corona, looked as though he ought to be downstairs selling jumpers for toddlers. He was a small man in his sixties, round-shouldered, balding, with sad blue eyes behind rimless bifocals and a severely trimmed mustache under a button nose.

I carry two styles of business cards. One, a gift from my sponsor, Jim Faber, has nothing on it but my name and phone number. The second, supplied by Reliable, identifies me as an operative of that firm. It was one of the Reliable cards that I gave to Banszak, and it led to a little confusion; the next thing I knew he was explaining that Queensboro-Corona was mostly involved with furnishing uniformed guards and mobile security patrols, that they didn't employ trained operatives of my caliber often, but that if I would fill out one of these forms he'd keep it on file, because they did have need of investigators periodically, so I might get some occasional work from them.

We got that straightened out and I explained who I was and what I wanted.

"James Shorter," he said. "May I ask the nature of your interest in Mr. Shorter?"

"There was an incident several months ago," I said. "He was the first person on the scene of a street crime in Forest Hills, and-"

"Oh, of course," he said. "Terrible thing. Hardworking businessman struck down on his way home."

"I thought your man might have noticed something unusual that night, some unfamiliar presence in the neighborhood."

"I know the police questioned him at length."

"I'm sure they did, but-"

"The whole episode was very troubling for Shorter. It may have precipitated the other problem."

"What problem would that be, Mr. Banszak?"

He looked at me through the lower portion of his eyeglasses. "Tell me something," he said. "Has Jim Shorter applied for a position with your firm?"

"With Reliable? Well, I don't think so, but I wouldn't know if he did. I'm not part of management. I just give them a few days now and then."

"And you're not working for them now?"

"No."

He thought about it. Then he said, "He was, as I said, very troubled by that crime. After all, it had occurred on his watch. There was never the slightest implication that he ought to have been able to prevent it. Each of our mobile units has a considerable area to patrol. We aim for maximum deterrent capability through maximum visibility. The criminals see our marked patrol cars, they know the area's under constant surveillance, and they're that much less apt to commit their crimes."

"Isn't it more a case of their committing them somewhere else?"

"Well, what can any police presence do, public or private? We can't change human nature. If we can reduce crime in the neighborhoods we're hired to protect, we feel we're doing our job."

"I understand."

"Still, I suppose Shorter must have felt some element of responsibility. That's human nature, too. And there was shock as well, coming upon a crime scene, discovering a corpse. There was the stress of multiple police interrogations. I don't say this caused anything, but it may well have precipitated it."

"Precipitated what, sir?"

For an answer, he bent his elbow and moved his wrist up and down, like a man throwing down shots.

"He drank?"

He sighed. "If you drink, you're gone. That's a rule here. No exceptions."

"It's understandable."

"But I did make an exception," he said, "because of the stress he'd been under. I told him I'd give him one more chance. Then there was a second incident and that was that."

"When was this?"

"I'd have to look it up. I'd guess he didn't last more than a month after that man was killed. Say six weeks at the very outside. When was the fellow killed? End of January?"

"Early February."

"I'd say he was gone by the middle of March. Middlemarch," he said surprisingly. "That's a novel. Have you read it?"

"No."

"Neither have I. It sits on my bookshelf. My mother owned it and died, and now it's mine, along with a couple of hundred other books I haven't read. But the spine of that one always catches my eye. Middlemarch. George Eliot wrote it. I'm sure I'll never read it." He waved a hand at the futility of it all. "I have James Shorter's telephone number. Would you like me to call him for you?"

No one answered Shorter's phone. Banszak copied the number for me, along with an address on East Ninety-fourth Street in Manhattan. I grabbed a quick bite at an Italian deli and caught the train back to the city. At the Grand Central stop I switched to the Lexington Avenue express and got off at Eighty-sixth. I tried Shorter from a pay phone and got my quarter back after half a dozen rings.

It was a quarter to five. If Shorter had found a new position, he was probably at work right now, like most of the rest of the city's working force. On the other hand, if he was still in the same line of work there was no guessing his schedule. He could be a uniformed guard at a check-cashing facility in Sunset Park or night watchman at a warehouse in Long Island City. There was no way to tell.

Sometimes I tuck a meeting schedule in my pocket, but it's a bulky affair, listing every AA meeting in the metropolitan area, and more often than not I don't have it with me. I didn't today, so I dropped the quarter in the slot again and dialed New York Intergroup. A volunteer was able to tell me that there was a 5:30 meeting in the basement of a church at First Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street.

I got there early and found out they didn't have coffee- some groups do, some don't. I went to the bodega across the street and ran into two others on the same mission, one of whom I recognized from a lunchtime meeting I go to sometimes at the West Side Y. We trooped back across the street with our coffee and took seats around a couple of refectory tables, and by half-past five a handful of others had straggled in and the meeting got under way.

There were just a dozen of us- it was a new group, and if I'd had my meeting book with me I'd never have found it, because it wasn't listed yet. A woman named Margaret, sober a little over a year, told her story and took most of the hour getting through it. She was about my age, the daughter and granddaughter of alcoholics, and she'd been careful to keep alcohol at bay for years, limiting herself to a single cocktail or glass of wine at social occasions. Then her husband died of an esophageal hemorrhage- she'd married an alcoholic, of course- and in her midforties she turned to drink, and it was as if it had been waiting for her all her life. It embraced her and wouldn't let go, and the progression of her alcoholism was quick and sudden and nasty. In no time at all she'd lost everything but her rent-controlled apartment and the Social Security check that enabled her to pay the rent.

"I was rooting around in garbage cans," she said. "I was waking up in strange places, and not always alone. And I was a well brought-up Irish Catholic girl who never slept with anybody but my husband. I remember coming out of a blackout one time, and I won't tell you what I was doing or who I was doing it to, but all I could think was, 'Oh, Peggy, the nuns would not be proud of you now!' "

After she was done we passed the basket and went around the room. When it was my turn I found myself talking about how I'd gone looking for a security guard and found he'd been dismissed for drinking. "I had a strong sense of identification," I said. "My own drinking picked up after I left the police force. If I'd kept on drinking any longer than I did I'd have gone after jobs like this man's, and I'd have drunk my way out of them, too. I don't really know anything about him or what his life's like, but thinking about him has given me an idea of what my own life could have been like if I hadn't found this program. I'm just glad to be here, glad to be sober."