A Long Line of Dead Men

Page 24

I went out for coffee after the meeting with a couple of the others and we continued informally the sharing we'd done at the meeting. I tried Shorter's number when we arrived at the coffee shop and tried it again fifteen minutes later. I tried it a third time on my way out, which must have been a few minutes after seven. When my quarter came back once again I used it to call Elaine.
There were no messages for me, she said, and the mail had held nothing of interest. I told her what I was up to, and that I might be out most of the evening. "If he had an answering machine," I said, "I'd leave a message on it and call him again in a day or two if I didn't hear from him. But he doesn't, and I'm in the neighborhood, and it's not a neighborhood I get to often."
"You don't have to explain it to me."
"I'm explaining it to myself. And it's not as though he's likely to have any answers. Any question I've got, the Forest Hills cops already asked. So how could he have anything for me?"
"Maybe you've got something for him."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing really. Well, there's a lecture and slide show at the French church. I might go to that, and if Monica wants to go with me maybe we'll have a Girls' Night Out afterward. You'll be having a late night, won't you?"
"I might."
"Because you were going to drop in on Mick, weren't you? Just so you're home in time for Marilyn's Chamber tomorrow night."
"You still want to go?"
"After the time we had last night?" I could picture the expression on her face. "Now more than ever. You're pretty hot stuff, Mr. Scudder, sir."
"Now cut that out."
" 'Now cut that out.' You know who you sound like? Jack Benny."
"I was trying to sound like Jack Benny."
"Well, in that case, it wasn't a very good imitation."
"You just said-"
"I know what I said. I love you, you old bear. What have you got to say about that?"
North of Eighty-sixth Street, the landscape on the Upper East Side is one of a neighborhood in transition, neither Yorkville nor East Harlem but reminiscent of both. Luxury condos rise across the street from low-income public-housing projects, the walls of both impartially scarred by unreadable graffiti. The upwardly mobile stride along with briefcases and grocery bags from D'Agostino's; others, no less mobile but headed in the opposite direction, shake paper cups of change and drink forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor, or suck on crack pipes that glow like fireflies.
Shorter's building turned out to be a six-story brick tenement on Ninety-fourth between Second and Third. In the vestibule I counted over fifty doorbells, each with a slot beside it for the tenant's name. More than half the slots were empty, and none had Shorter's name on it.
Originally the building would have had four rooms to a floor, but over the years they'd been partitioned and the apartment house turned into a rooming house. I'd been in and out of hundreds of such places over the years, and if each was different they were still somehow all the same. The cooking smells in the halls and stairwells changed with the ethnic origin of the inhabitants, but the other smells were a constant throughout the city and through the years. The reek of urine, the odor of mice, the unventilated stench of neglect. Now and then a room in one of those rabbit warrens would turn out to be bright and airy, clean and trim, but the buildings themselves were always dark and sorry and sordid.
Something like that would have been my next stop after the hotel. If I hadn't stopped drinking, the day would have come when I couldn't make the rent or talk them into carrying me until I caught a break. Or I'd have reached a point where, money or no, I no longer had the self-esteem to walk past the desk each day, and would have looked for something more in keeping with my station.
I asked a man on his way out of the building if he knew a James Shorter. He didn't even slow down, just shook his head no and kept walking. I asked the same question of a little gray-haired woman who was on her way into the building, walking with a cane and carrying her groceries in one of those mesh bags. She said she didn't know anyone in the building but that they all seemed to be very nice people. Her breath smelled of mint and booze- peppermint schnapps, I suppose, or a beaker of gin with a breath mint for a chaser.
I walked to Second Avenue and tried Shorter's number from a pay phone on the corner. No answer. It struck me that if he wasn't working he might very well be somewhere having a drink, and the neighborhood afforded plenty of opportunities. There were half a dozen taverns on Second within two blocks of Ninety-fourth Street. I worked my way through them, asking bartenders for James Shorter. Was he in? Had he been in earlier? Nobody knew him, at least not by name, but the bearded fellow behind the stick at O'Bannion's said he'd heard precious few last names over the years, and not that many first names, either. "He could be one of these lads, for all I know," he said.
I considered calling out his name. "James Shorter? Is James Shorter here?" But then I'd have had to repeat the process in the saloons I'd already covered, and I didn't feel like it. I'd had enough of their boozy ambience.
And how about the gin joints on First Avenue? Shouldn't I go ask for the elusive Mr. Shorter there?
I might have, but first I tried his number again, and this time he answered.
I told him my name, said I'd got his from the police and his address and phone from Mr. Banszak at Queensboro-Corona. "I know you've been over this plenty of times," I said, "but I'd appreciate a few minutes of your time. I'm in your neighborhood right now, as it happens, so if I could come by and see you-"
"Oh, let's meet somewhere," he suggested. "There's a nice place around the corner on First Avenue, the Blue Canoe. It's a good place to talk. Say ten minutes?"
The Blue Canoe was paneled to look like a log cabin. There were a couple of trophy heads on the wall, a stuffed marlin displayed above the mirrored back bar. The lighting was subdued and indirect, the taped music a mix of jazz and soft rock. The crowd was light and upscale for the neighborhood.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, looked around, then walked directly to a table where a man sat alone with a glass of beer. I said, "Mr. Shorter?" but I already knew that's who he was. I'd waited for him across the street from his rooming house and tagged him to the bar, then gave him time to settle in before making my own entrance.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
We shook hands and I took the seat across from him. I'd formed a mental picture of him- the mind will do that, helpfully conjuring up an image to fit the sense one has of a person. People don't usually wind up looking much like I've pictured them, and he was no exception, being older, darker, and, yes, shorter than I'd had in mind. Late forties, I figured. Five-eight, wiry, with a round face and deep-set eyes. A pug nose, a narrow-lipped mouth. No beard or mustache, but a good two days' worth of stubble darkening his cheeks and chin. Dark hair, black in the dim light of the Blue Canoe, cut short and combed flat on his round skull. He was wearing a T-shirt, and had a lot of dark hair on his forearms and the backs of his wrists.
"It must have been a shock," I said. "Finding Watson's body."
"A shock? Jesus, I'll say."
The waitress came and I ordered a Coke. Then I took out my notebook and we started going over his story.
There wasn't a lot to get. He'd gone over it repeatedly with detectives from Queens Homicide and the One-one-two, and he'd had close to five months to forget anything he might have left out. No, he hadn't seen anybody suspicious in the neighborhood. No, he hadn't spotted Alan Watson earlier on, heading home from the bus stop. No, he couldn't think of anything, not a damn thing.
"How come you're checking now?" he wondered. "Do you have a lead?"
"No."
"Are you from a different precinct or what?" He'd assumed I was a cop, an assumption I'd been perfectly willing for him to make. But now I told him I was private.
"Oh," he said. "But you're not with Q-C, are you?"
"Queensboro-Corona? No, I'm independent."
"And you're investigating a mugging in Forest Hills? Who hired you, the victim's widow?"
"No."
"Somebody else?"
"A friend of his."
"Of Watson's?"
"That's right."
He caught the waitress's eye and ordered another beer. I didn't much want another Coke but I ordered one anyway. Shorter said, "I guess people with money see things differently. I was just thinking how if a friend of mine got stabbed on the street, would I hire detectives to find out who did it?" He shrugged, smiled. "I guess not," he said.
"I can't really talk about my client."
"No, I can understand that," he said. The waitress brought the drinks and he said, "I guess it's your own policy, then. Not drinking on duty."
"How's that?"
"Well, like if you were a cop, you wouldn't be drinking on duty. Or private, either, if you worked for somebody like Q-C. But working independent, you can judge for yourself whether you should be having a drink or not having a drink, right? So you're ordering Coke, I figure it has to be your own policy."
"Is that what you figure?"
"Or maybe you just like Coca-Cola."
"It's all right, but I can't say I'm crazy about it. See, I don't drink."
"Oh."
"But I used to."
"Yeah?"
"I loved it," I said. "Whiskey, mostly, but I probably drank enough beer over the years to float a light cruiser. Do you have a law-enforcement background yourself, Mr. Shorter?" He shook his head. "Well, I do. I was a cop, a detective. I drank myself off the police force."
"Is that right?"
"I never got in trouble for it," I said. "Not directly, but I would have the way I was going. I walked away from it, the job, my wife and kids, my whole life…"
I don't see what he could have for me, I'd told Elaine. Maybe you've got something for him, she'd said.
Maybe I did.
The way it works is remarkably simple. A day at a time, you don't drink. You go to meetings and share your experience, strength, and hope with your fellow alcoholics.
And you carry the message.
You do that not by preaching or spreading the gospel but by telling your own story- what it used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now. That's what you do when you lead a meeting, and it's what you do one-on-one.
So I told my story.
When I was done he picked up his glass. He looked at it and put it down again. He said, "I drank myself out of the job at Q-C. But I guess you know that."
"It was mentioned."
"I was kind of shook, finding the body and all. Not the sort of thing I'm used to, you know what I mean?"
"Sure."
"So I was hitting it a little heavy for a while there. It happens, right?"
"It does."
"General rule, I don't drink that much."
"They say it's not how much you drink," I said. "It's what it does for you."
"Have to say it does a lot for me," he said. "Lets me relax, unwind, get some thinking done. That's some of what it does for me."