A Long Line of Dead Men

Page 9

He nodded. "Yeah, that won't be any problem. And it's a good thing to have in the files when you get your own ticket, isn't it? In fact it's more important than the money."
"Probably," I said. "But that doesn't mean I don't want the money."
"Well, why shouldn't you have it all? The commendation, the bonus, and the satisfaction of nailing the bastard."
"He's not a bad guy."
"Who, Charlie?"
"He probably really did hurt himself when the chair collapsed under him. And when he told his drinking buddies about it they all told him he should sue, and somebody steered him to Cerutti. Cerutti sent him to his pet doctors for evaluations and hydrotherapy, and taught him never to go out without crutches, or at least a couple of canes. Of course he's had to give up his job, but it's a worthwhile investment if it gets him a big settlement. But at this point he's been out of work for two months, and he's getting a gut on him because his only exercise is walking funny to McAnn's and back, and now he's not getting a settlement after all, and who knows if UPS'll even take him back?"
"You sound like you feel sorry for him."
"Well, I just finished knocking him on his ass," I said. "I can afford a little sympathy."
I told Wally I wanted something else, not from the client but from him. I wanted credit reports from TRW on fourteen men. I'd pay for them, I said, but I wanted them at cost. He assured me that would be no problem, and I gave him the list of survivors.
He said, "Ray Gruliow? I think his credit's pretty good. And Avery Davis could write out a check and buy the building we're in, if it's the same Avery Davis, and it must be if he lives at 888 Fifth. In fact I think he did own the Flatiron for a while, didn't he? No, wait a minute, that was the one who went off the terrace two years ago. What the hell was his name?"
"Harmon Ruttenstein."
"That's the guy. Talk about everything to live for, but you never know, do you?"
"I guess not."
Three, possibly four, of the club members had killed themselves. Nedrick Bayliss had shot himself to death while on a business trip to Atlanta. Hal Gabriel hanged himself in his apartment on West End Avenue. Fred Karp, working late at the office, went out a window. Ian Heller jumped or fell from a crowded subway platform.
You never know, do you?
A series of phone calls got me through to one of the transit cops who'd been there to pull Ian Heller's body from beneath the wheels. There was a long silence when I told him I wanted to talk to him about a death that had occurred almost fifteen years earlier. "You know," he said, "I keep my notebooks, and I can probably sort it out somewhat, but you can't expect me to remember too clearly after all these years. I remember my first, they say you always do. But I been on the job close to nineteen years, so I already seen a lot by the time this guy bought it. So don't expect too much."
I met him at Pete's Tavern on Irving Place. His name was Arthur Matuszak and he told me to call him Artie. "You were NYPD," he said. "Right?"
"That's right."
"Got your twenty and put your papers in, huh?"
"I didn't hang around long enough for that."
"Yeah, I almost hung it up myself a couple of times. But then I didn't, and the time goes by before you know it. It's nineteen years in September for me, and I swear I don't know where they went. I been on a desk the past two years, administrative work, and it's a lot easier on you, but I have to say I miss the tunnels. You're switched on every single minute down there, you know what I mean?"
"Sure."
"You can't help wondering if it would have been different aboveground. The NYPD instead of the Transit Police. There's not a lot of glamour in the tunnels. How often do you get a Bernie Goetz, does something colorful enough to stay on the front page more than a day or two? He was one in a million." He sighed. "It's been nineteen years of con artists and drunks and chain snatchers and nut jobs. And, yeah, a whole lot of jumped-or-fells. I told you I remembered the first one."
"Yes."
"It was a woman, just a girl, really, and she lost half of one leg below the knee and part of her other foot. She was a jumper, no question, admitted it right off. I visited her in the hospital and she looked me right in the eye and said she'd get it right the next time. I don't know if she ever did. For a while every time we had a jumped-or-fell, whether I caught the case or not, I was looking for it to be her. It could be a man lying there, six-four, three hundred pounds, and I'm still expecting to see her face on him when we roll him over. But if she ever did it she must have saved it for somebody else's tour of duty."
"Considerate of her."
"Yeah, right. Matt, I went over my notes, and I remember your guy. Ian Robinson Heller, killed by the southbound Number One train coming into the IRT station at Broadway and Fiftieth at approximately 5:45 on a Saturday afternoon. Date was the fifteenth of October, 1988. Which happens to be my father-in-law's birthday, only he's been dead for ten years and we been divorced for six, so I don't suppose I have to remember all that, do I? Heller was on his way home from work. It was his usual train. He worked two blocks from the station and he normally rode that train to Times Square and caught the express to Brooklyn, which is where he lived. The point is it was natural for him to be there. I gather you're looking to determine whether it was suicide or accidental death."
"Or homicide," I said.
He cocked his head. "Well, you can't rule it out," he said, after a moment's reflection. "It was rush hour, the platform was packed with commuters heading for home, and he was at the edge of the platform with the train coming. Maybe he stopped for a drink after work, maybe he was loaded up on antihistamines and it affected his sense of balance. Maybe somebody backed up into him accidentally."
"Or maybe he jumped."
"Right, and how can you ever say? Sometimes they plan it. Sometimes they survive and you find out later they never planned it, never even thought about it, that the impulse just swept over them and took 'em right over the edge. Maybe that's how it was with Heller. Or maybe somebody got next to him and timed it just right and gave him a shove or a body block, sent him flying. Again, planned or unplanned, I'll tell you something, I think there's a fucking ton of that goes on."
"People killed that way?"
"You bet your ass." He stood up, pushed through the crowd at the bar, and brought back a fresh gin and tonic for himself and another Coke for me. I tried to pay for the round but he waved me off. "Please," he said, "I'm enjoying myself. You know who drank here? O. Henry. You know, the writer. They're very proud of the fact, they don't let you forget it, but I have to say I love drinking in places like this that are older than God. You know McSorley's down in the East Village? 'We were here before you were born,' that's their motto. Nowadays their crowd is all college kids, Christ, the World Trade Center was there before they were born."
"And still is."
"Yeah, and no thanks to our Arab brothers." We talked about the recent bombing, and then he said, "About people getting tossed in front of trains, yeah, I do think it happens a lot. People acting on an impulse, they're stoned on something, or they're just nuts, they don't need drugs to go crazy. Easiest way in the world to kill someone and get away with it."
"But it would be a hard way to murder someone specific, wouldn't it?"
"You mean like somebody you got a reason to kill?" He thought about it. "You could tail him into the subway, but suppose he stays away from the edge of the platform? Crowded station, you'd have a few dozen people crammed between him and the tracks. Unless you and him were friends."
"What do you mean?"
"What was his name again? Ian? 'Hey, Ian, good to see you. How's it goin', old buddy?' And you throw your arm around him, and you walk this way and you walk that way, and you just manage to be standing right at the edge of the platform when the train's coming. If he thinks you're his friend, he won't draw away, he won't get suspicious, and the next thing he knows he's under the wheels. You think that's what happened?"
"No idea."
"Fifteen years later and somebody's starting to wonder? Let me know how it comes out, huh? If it comes out." I said I would. "What I do, I take the subway all the time. I'll be honest with you, I love the subway, I think it's a wonderful and exciting urban rail system. But I am very careful down there. I see a guy who don't look right, I don't let myself be between him and the edge. I got to walk past somebody and it's gonna put me close to the edge of the platform, I wait until I can step past him on the other side. I want to take a chance, I'll go in a deli, buy a lottery ticket. I'll go by OTB, put two bucks on a horse. I love it down in the tunnels, but I don't take chances down there." He shook his head. "Not me. I seen too much."
7
Hal Gabriel had lived on West End Avenue at Ninety-second Street. At the Two-four station house on West One Hundreth I sat across a desk from a young police officer named Michael Selig. He was still in his twenties and already losing his hair, and he had the anxious look of the prematurely bald. "This all ought to be on computer," he said of Gabriel's file. "We're working our way back, getting our old files copied, but it takes forever."
Gabriel, forty-six, married but separated from his wife, had been found hanging in his eighth-floor apartment on a weekday afternoon in October 1981. He had evidently stood on a chair, looped a leather belt around his neck, wedged the tongue of the belt between the top of his closet door and the doorjamb, and kicked the chair over.
"High blood alcohol," Selig said.
"No note."
"They don't always leave a note, do they? Especially when they get drunk and start feeling sorry for themselves. Look at this- he estimates death as having occurred five to seven days before discovery of the body. Must have been ripe, huh?"
"That's why they broke in."
"Didn't have to, it says here the super had a key. Woman across the hall noticed the smell."
She'd also told the investigating officers that Gabriel had seemed despondent since his wife's departure several years earlier, that his only visitors had been delivery boys from the liquor store and the Chinese restaurant. He'd worked up until two months of his death, managing a film lab in the West Forties, but had been out of work since then.
"Most likely drank himself out of the job," Selig offered.
His wife, apprised of his death, said she hadn't seen Gabriel since they'd signed their separation agreement in June of 1980. She described her late husband as a sad and lonely man, and seemed saddened herself if not terribly surprised by his death.
Fred Karp had left a note. He'd tapped it out on his computer screen, printed out two copies, left one on his desk and tucked the other, neatly folded, into his shirt pocket. I'm sorry, it read. I can't take it anymore. Please forgive me. Then he'd opened the window of his fifteenth-floor office and stepped out.
That's tough to do in the newer buildings, where you generally can't open the windows. Often they aren't windows at all, just glass walls. At an AA meeting I once heard an architect talk about how he'd had to reassure office workers who had a phobic response to glass walls. He used to run full speed and crash headlong into the wall to demonstrate its solidity. "People got the point," he said, "but I felt pretty stupid the time I broke my collarbone."