A Long Line of Dead Men

Page 38

"And this?"
"This prick?" He leaned forward, blew some eraser dust from the surface of the sketch. "This doesn't have to be art. Just so it looks like him."
I went to a copy shop, ran two dozen copies of the sketch. It seemed to me it was a good likeness. I gave the original to Elaine but told her not to hang it anywhere for the time being. I left a copy with TJ, who raised an eyebrow and announced that Shorter was an ugly-looking dude.
Over the next few days, I got around to most of the men who'd been at the meeting at Gruliow's house, as well as a few who hadn't been able to make it. No one echoed TJ's sentiment, but neither did anyone recognize Shorter as a long-lost cousin.
"He's a pretty ordinary-looking guy," Bob Berk told me. "Not a face that would jump out at you in a crowd."
Several of them said he looked vaguely familiar. Lewis Hildebrand told me he might have seen Shorter before, that it was impossible to say. "The visual onslaught in this city is overpowering," he said. "Walk a few blocks through midtown Manhattan and more people will pass through your field of vision than the average small-town resident will see all year. Walk through Grand Central Station at rush hour and you'll see thousands of people without really seeing any of them. How much of it do we screen out? How much registers, consciously or otherwise?"
In his living room on Commerce Street, Hard-Way Ray Gruliow squinted at the sketch and shook his head. "He looks familiar," he said. "But in a very vague way."
"That's what I keep hearing."
"What a crazy thing, huh? Here's somebody who hates us all enough to devote his entire life to killing us. Because he's not a guy who got pissed off one morning and took a gun to the Post Office. This is his life's work."
"That's right."
"And we look at him," he said, "and all we can say is he looks vaguely familiar. Who could he be? How could he know us?"
"Where could you remember him from?"
"I don't know. The only time we were all together was once a year at dinner. Maybe he was a waiter at Cunningham's. What did we decide he was, sixteen years old? He couldn't have been a waiter. Maybe he was a busboy."
"And maybe you stiffed him on the tip."
"No, we wouldn't do a thing like that. We're a generous bunch."
Local 100 of the Restaurant and Hotel Workers of America maintains offices on Eighth Avenue, just two blocks from Restaurant Row. I talked to a man there named Gus Brann who was amused at the thought of trying to hunt down employees of a restaurant that had gone out of business twenty years ago. "Restaurant work isn't the trade it once was," he said. "Not on the service floor. You used to have waiters who spent their life in the profession. They knew their customers and they knew how to serve. Now do you know what you get? Actors and actresses. 'My name is Scott and together we'll enjoy a dining experience.' Guess what percentage of the rank and file also holds membership in Actors Equity."
"I have no idea."
"Plenty," he said. "Take my word for it. You go out for a meal and what you get is an audition."
"The turnover's not as high in the old-fashioned steak houses, is it?"
"No, you're right about that, but how many of them have we got left? You got Gallagher's, you got the Old Homestead, you got Keens, you got Peter Luger, you got Smith and Whatsisface, Wollensky, you got-"
I said, "Waiters tend to stay with the same general type of restaurant, don't they?"
"I just told you, they don't even stay with the business."
"But the old-fashioned type of waiter. If a man was working at Cunningham's and it went out of business, he'd probably look for work at one of the places you just mentioned, don't you think?"
"Unless he had a longing to scoop Rocky Road at a Baskin-Robbins. But yeah, you tend to stay with what you know."
"So if you wanted to find somebody who used to work at Cunningham's, those would be the first places to look."
"I suppose."
"But I myself would hardly know how to begin," I said. "And I'd have to spend a couple of days running all over the city, trying to convince people to give me the time of day. Whereas a knowledgeable person like yourself could probably manage the whole thing by just making a few phone calls."
"Hey," he said. "I got a job to do, you know what I mean?"
"I know."
"I can't sit around making phone calls, bugging people, asking who worked where twenty, thirty years back."
"You'd be saving me time," I said, "and time is money. I wasn't looking to get the information for free."
"Oh," he said. "Well, that puts a different light on it, doesn't it?"
The following day I called Gruliow and told him I'd found not one but two gentlemen who'd spent their lives bringing steak dinners to people with hearty appetites. "They were both working at Cunningham's when it closed," I said. "One of them started there as a busboy over forty years ago."
"He'd have been there for our first dinner," he said. "Christ, he'd have been around for quite a few meetings of the previous chapter."
"He didn't recognize the sketch, though. Neither did the other fellow, who's actually quite a bit older, although he was only at Cunningham's from 1967 on. He went from there to the Old Homestead, and that's where he was when he retired three years ago last September. They both said the same thing."
"What's that?"
"They said he looked familiar."
"Oh, Jesus," Gruliow said, "You know what our friend's got? He's got a universally familiar face. Nobody can place it, but everybody thinks he must have seen it somewhere before. You know, Matt, that was just an offhand remark of mine about his having worked at Cunningham's."
"I know."
"Yet you followed it up."
"It was worth checking."
"How on earth did you find those fellows?"
"I didn't," I said. "I found someone who could find them for me. You know, if I were to hand this over to the cops, they'd be able to turn up a dozen men who worked at Cunningham's during the period in question. And one of them might be able to put a name to the face in the sketch."
"I was talking to some of the others," he said.
"And?"
"We all intend to be very cautious. We'll keep an eye out for the man in the sketch. But we'd rather not go public with this if we don't have to."
"If someone else is killed-"
"You said he'd probably lay low for the next six months."
"That's what I said," I agreed, "but what the hell do I know? I can't presume to predict what a madman is going to do next. And so far he hasn't shown any inclination to call me up and let me know."
That was on a Wednesday afternoon. That night I went to a meeting for the first time all week, and I stopped at the Flame afterward and had a cup of coffee. One of the fellows at the table was a newcomer, and the others were trying to help him, answering his questions and reassuring him that there really was life after sobriety. The new man was in his early thirties and looked nothing like Jim Shorter, but his attitude was very similar to the persona Shorter had adopted for the occasion, mixing guarded hope and cynical skepticism. It made me very uncomfortable to sit at the same table with him. He wasn't doing anything wrong, and I knew he wasn't putting on an act, but I couldn't help feeling as though I was being conned all over again.
I went home and told Elaine about it. She said, "You'd like to kill him, wouldn't you?"
"The guy tonight? Oh, you mean Shorter."
"Of course."
"I guess I'm angry," I said. "I don't really feel it, but it must be there. I was trying to help him, the cocksucker, and he was just playing me like a fish on a line. The son of a bitch."
"Yes," she said. "I think you might be the slightest bit angry." She started to say something else but the phone rang and she got up and answered it. "Yes," she said. "Just one moment, I'll see if he's in."
She covered the mouthpiece. "It's him," she said.
27
"Jim," I said. "I'm glad you called. I was hoping I'd hear from you."
"Well, I've been busy, Matt."
"Hey, I know what it's like," I said. "I've been running around a lot myself. I tried to reach you a couple of times but I guess you were out."
"I guess I was."
"I thought I might run into you at a meeting, but I'm on the other side of town."
"Whole different world."
"That's right. How's it going?"
There was a pause. Then he said, "I know you know, Matt."
"Oh?"
"Funny thing is I thought you knew from the jump. I thought, shit, they finally figured out what's going on and hired themselves a detective. But you didn't know a thing, did you?"
"No."
"Getting me to come to an AA meeting. I thought it was a ruse at first. Get me off my guard, take me by surprise. But you weren't suspicious at all, were you? You figured I needed help and you wanted to help me."
"Something like that."
"You know," he said, "that was very decent of you, Matt. Seriously."
"If you say so."
"And the meetings were interesting. I can see how a person with a drinking problem would find a whole new life in the rooms. And I get the feeling some people who aren't alcoholics go for the companionship and the sense that they're getting their lives in order."
"I don't think you'll find many like that," I said.
"No? Well, you'd be a better judge of that than I am, Matt. See, I, uh, gave you a false impression. I'm not an alcoholic."
"Whatever you say."
He laughed. "Denial, right? I bet you get to hear it all the time. No, see, I just wanted a neat exit from Queensboro-Corona, and Marty Banszak's a bear when it comes to booze. Son of a bitch eats Valium all day long, he's tranked out like the night of the living dead, but if he smells alcohol on your breath you're history."
"But he gave you a second chance."
"Yeah, isn't that a gas? Second time around I figured let's leave nothing to chance."
"What did you do, call in the complaint yourself?"
"How'd you know? Hey, you're a detective, right? It's your job to figure things out."
"It is," I said, "and I don't seem to be doing too well at it."
"Hey, I think you're doing fine, Matt."
"There are things I can't figure, Jim."
"Like what?"
"Like why you're doing it."
"Ha. Can't work that out, can you?"
"I thought maybe you'd help me."
"You mean like give you a hint?"
"Something like that."
"Nah, I can't do that. Hey, I'll tell you, it hardly matters how I got started on this project. Man starts collecting stamps, pasting 'em in a book, lives in an attic on peanut-butter sandwiches, puts every dime he can into his stamp collection, are you gonna ask him what got him started collecting in the first place? He's a stamp collector. It's what he does."