A Long Line of Dead Men (30 page)

"Yes, and he was very steady, very reliable," he said. "That's why I was inclined to give him a break when he had the first incident."

"The drinking."

"Yes. He must have been ashamed, because he didn't even offer an argument in his own defense, just hung his head waiting to be fired. But his record was excellent, and he'd been with us for over seven months, so I gave him that second chance." He frowned. "The next time, of course, there was an official complaint called in. I had to let him go."

Seven months. Waiting, biding his time.

I picked up the application. "I'll need a copy of this," I said. "Is there a place in the neighborhood where I can get it copied?" He said he had a desktop copier and would run it for me. He went into another room, came back with the copy but held on to it for a moment.

He said, "I'm not sure I understand. If Shorter knows something, if he's disappeared in order to escape from the man who killed Watson"- that was the explanation I'd devised for him- "shouldn't the police be brought into the picture?"

"If it comes to that," I said. "But it looks as though Shorter's been living under an assumed name, and that he might have invented most of what's on that application. If I can spare him the embarrassment of official attention from the police-"

"Yes, of course," he said. "By all means."

He didn't exist.

He'd carried a New York State driver's license, and its number was listed on his job application. But the DMV never heard of him, and the license number he'd written down was unassigned. The Social Security number was real, but the account was that of a State Farm insurance agent in Emporia, Kansas, whose name was Bennett Gunnarson, not James Shorter.

It would have made my life easier if Banszak had fingerprinted his employees, even if he'd done nothing with the prints but file them away. Earlier, I'd left TJ on guard at the rooming house and cabbed down to the Flatiron Building and back, borrowing a fingerprint kit from Wally Donn at Reliable. Before I left Shorter's room I had fogged the telephone receiver with my breath the way Banszak had fogged his glasses. I hadn't seen any prints then, but sometimes they show up better when you dust for them. And the telephone wasn't the only surface in the room that would hold a print.

Back on East Ninety-fourth, I dusted the phone, the window, the washbasin, the headboard and footboard, the switchplate, and everything else that looked at all promising. There was nothing, not even smudges.

"He cleaned up," I told TJ. "He deliberately wiped every surface in the room."

"The man be neat."

"The man's a killer," I said. "He killed Alan Watson back in February. A few days ago he killed Helen Watson, and- Jesus."

"Say what?"

"Helen Watson," I said. "One time I was talking to him and he asked me if I'd reached Helen Watson yet. How did he know her first name? He never heard it from me. Jesus, how long was he stalking them?"

I had my answer now.

He'd been stalking Alan Watson for a minimum of seven months, from the time he'd started work with Queensboro-Corona to the night he seized his opportunity and stuck a knife in the commodity broker's heart. God knows how many opportunities he must have had in all that time, but he'd been in no hurry, he'd been content to bide his time, waiting, letting the anticipation build.

Then, when he finally struck, he'd allowed himself the extra satisfaction of discovering the body and phoning it in to the police, like a firebug coming back to watch the firemen battle the blaze he'd set. And then, remarkably, he'd stayed on the job another six weeks before he could contrive to get fired.

So I knew that he liked to take his time, and I knew, too, that he could strike quickly if he wanted to. I'd seen him on Friday night, and a day later Watson's widow was dead. A couple of days after that, Gerard Billings was shot to death in the back of a cab.

Oh, he was slick. But who the hell was he?

I called Ray Gruliow, brought him up to date. "I feel like a damn fool," I said. "I found the son of a bitch and then I lost him."

"You didn't know what you'd found."

"No. He knew and I didn't. He was playing with me, the bastard. He was the cat and I was a particularly dimwitted mouse. You want to know what I did? I took the son of a bitch to AA meetings."

"You didn't."

"Well, he'd been fired for drinking on the job, and he was leading a shabby life, and he looked for all the world like a drunk getting ready to bottom out. I couldn't see any reason not to talk about the program, and when I did he did a good job of seeming interested but wary. I have to say he's a natural when it comes to the principle of anonymity. He's the most anonymous person I ever met. I still don't know who the hell he is."

"But you've seen him. You sat across a table and talked to him."

"Right," I said. "I know what he looks like." I described Shorter in detail. "Now we both know what he looks like," I said. "Does he sound like anybody you know?"

"I'm not very good at recognizing a man from a description."

"He's forty-eight years old. He listed his place of birth as Klamath Falls, Oregon, but they never heard of anybody by that name, and there's no reason to assume he's ever been within a thousand miles of the place. He moved into his rooming house a week before he turned up on their doorstep at Queensboro-Corona, and it's my guess that James Shorter was born right about that time. I think he slapped together some fake ID, rented himself a room by the week, and went out to look for a job."

"So that he could stalk Alan."

"That's right," I said. "I think he's a stalker. That's the only way I can begin to make sense out of what he's been doing. I did a little research on the subject, and there are elements here that seem to fit the pattern. The way he structured his whole life to support his pursuit of Alan Watson. And the way he postponed the kill. How many chances do you suppose he had in the six months he worked for Q-C? Twenty? A hundred? But he kept putting it off, and not because he was afraid of getting caught."

"He was holding back to boost his excitement."

"Exactly."

"But with Gerry-"

"I think he started stalking somebody else very shortly after he killed Watson. Probably Billings, but it could have been anybody. Maybe he was keeping tabs on a couple of you. He was still at the same rooming house, still calling himself James Shorter, so I don't think he was anywhere close to the last act of his little drama. But then I turned up, and he realized it was time for James Shorter to disappear, and he wanted to do something dramatic on the way out."

"He picked a pretty dramatic way to kill Gerry."

"He would have known where he lived, and his usual schedule. I suppose he had a gun, or knew where to get one. It couldn't have been too hard for him to take a bus to Newark Airport and drive back in a stolen car. Then all he had to do was wait for Billings and pick his opportunity. Engineering a car crash was a nice touch, but he had other options. He could have staged a drive-by shooting, he could have tried running Billings down."

Or he could have found a way to toss a bomb through Gruliow's high-tech plastic window. That way he could have taken out nine of the fourteen remaining members at once. He'd known about the meeting, because I'd been obliging enough to tell him, and when he'd pumped me a little I'd even said it was in the Village. Gruliow was the only member who lived in the Village. Maybe Shorter had been around Commerce Street Tuesday afternoon, maybe he'd been across the street at the Grange, nursing a beer and watching them file in. Watching me, too.

I said, "Who the hell is he? Do you have any idea?"

"None."

"We know he's not a member, but I don't think any of us seriously thought it could be. Who else knows about the club?"

"No one, really. Not in any detail."

"He's forty-eight. In 1961 he would have been what, sixteen? Could he have been somebody's younger brother, transferring a resentment against a sibling to the entire club?"

"God, that strikes me as farfetched."

"I don't know that we can expect to find a logical motive," I said, "because why should there be a sane explanation for a long-standing pattern of insane behavior? All he needed was a pretext."

"Wouldn't it have to be a good one to sustain him this long?"

"No," I said. "All it had to do was get him started. Once he was in motion his own momentum would sustain him, no matter how frail the original impetus."

"Because he enjoys what he's doing."

"He loves it," I said, "but I have a feeling it's more than that. It's his whole life."

I had abbreviated versions of that conversation with as many of the other members as I could get hold of. I described Shorter and asked them if the description seemed to fit anybody who might have picked up a resentment against the group years ago. They all said essentially the same thing- the description fit too many people, and they couldn't think of anyone, of any description, who had any reason, sane or otherwise, to resent the group. Or even to know it existed.

"It's a shame there's no photograph," more than one of them said. And I explained how his employers in Corona had taken a pair of Polaroids, but nobody could furnish a copy. One was on his ID, which he'd very likely retained; the other had conveniently disappeared from his file.

And when, I wondered, had that happened? Had he been resourceful enough to slip off with the photo before they let him go? Or had he paid an unauthorized visit sometime over the weekend to tidy up after himself? He could have combined it with the trip to Forest Hills to drown Helen Watson in her tub.

"Wouldn't he have had other pictures taken?" Elaine wondered. "How did he cash his paychecks? I can't believe he had a bank account."

"He used a check-cashing service. But he had his Queensboro-Corona ID and his driver's license. He wouldn't need anything else."

"And you sat across a table from him."

"And took him to a meeting."

"And you don't get mugged and printed at AA meetings, do you? I guess it would be a violation of the tradition of anonymity, wouldn't it?"

"I'm afraid so."

"If I'd been along," she said, "I could have taken a sneak photo of him, the way we did at Wallbanger's. Remember?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said.

"What's the matter? Did I say something wrong?"

"No," I said. "You said something right. I don't know what the hell's the matter with me, I really don't. Why can't I think straight?"

"What do you mean?"

For answer I pointed to a framed drawing on the wall.

"I'll tell you something," Ray Galindez said. "This is a piece of cake. You got a nice clear picture of the guy in your mind and how long did it take to get it out of your head and onto a piece of paper? Fifteen, twenty minutes?"

"Something like that."

"Compared to witnesses who don't know how to use their eyes and can't remember what they saw with them, this is a cinch. I had one a week ago, over and over she's telling me I got the eyes wrong. How are they wrong? Too big, too small, too far apart, too close together, what? Are they slanted? Are they almond-shaped? Droopy eyelids? Tell me something, because just saying they're wrong don't cut it. I try this, I try that, I change this, I fix that, all I get is the eyes are wrong. You know what it turns out?"

"What?"

"She never saw his fuckin' eyes. The guy was wearing mirrored sunglasses. It takes her the better part of an hour to remember this, and this is a guy who stood right smack in fucking front of her and held her up at gunpoint. 'The eyes are wrong,' she said. 'I'll never forget those eyes.' Except she never saw 'em, so what's she gonna forget?"

"At least she had the sense to sit down with you," I said. "I couldn't get past the fact that I didn't have a photograph of him. I was sitting in the same room with one of your sketches and I still didn't get the message."

"Sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of you."

"I guess."

When I went to pay him he didn't want to take the money. "I figure I owe you," he said, "everything Elaine's done for me. I took my mother to see the gallery and now every word out of her mouth is mi hijo el artista. She wasn't this impressed when I got on the job. Speaking of which, it's not the same."

"The Department?"

"Oh, who's to say, but I'm just talking about my own detail. They want me to use a computer to do what I do."

"You mean like an Identi-Kit?"

"No, this is different," he said. "Much more flexible than the Identi-Kit. You can make minute adjustments to the shape of the mouth, elongate the head, set the eyes deeper, anything you could do with pencil and paper." He explained how the software worked and what it would do. "But it's not drawing," he said. "It's not art."

He laughed, and I asked him what was funny.

"Just hearing myself use the word," he said. "I would always correct Elaine when she called it art, what I do. I'm beginning to think she's right. I'll tell you one thing, what I been doing with that European woman is different from anything I ever done before. You know about her? Customer of Elaine's, she lost all her family in the Holocaust?"

"Elaine told me. I didn't know you'd started working with her."

"Two sessions so far, and it's the most exhausting thing I ever did in my life. She doesn't remember what any of the people look like."

"Then how can you possibly draw them?"

"Oh, the memory's in there. It's a question of reaching in and dragging it out. We started with her father. What did he look like? Well, that doesn't get us anywhere, because she hasn't got an answer. The best she can do is he's tall. Okay, what kind of man is he? He's very gentle, she says. Okay, so I start drawing. He's got a deep voice, she remembers. I draw some more. Sometimes he would lose his temper. Okay, now I'm drawing a tall gentle man with a deep voice who gets angry. Late at night he would sit at the kitchen table adding columns of numbers. Okay, great, let's draw that. And we keep on, and now and then we have to stop because she's crying, or she can't look at the paper anymore, or she's just wiped out. Believe me, time we're done, we're both wiped out."