Lawrence Block - A Long Line of Dead Men

"So instead I turned the radio to WINS and stayed up for hours. I had the radio turned down low and I had a book to read, and I heard the same half hour of news over and over, and when they got to the Billings story I would stop reading and turn the volume up, and it would be the same thing as before, word for word. And I wound up falling asleep with the radio on and woke up at seven with it blaring away.

"Should I have called you? I didn't know what to do."

It was just as well she hadn't called me. There wouldn't have been anything for me to do. There was little enough for me to do now, the morning after the shooting, except field the telephone calls that came in from Ray Gruliow and Lewis Hildebrand and Gordon Walser. I'd have to know more, I told each of them, before I'd know how to proceed.

By early afternoon they'd found the car, a 1988 Ford Crown Victoria with Jersey plates, registered to an ophthalmologist in Teaneck. The vehicle had been located in the pound where it had been towed from a no-parking zone in the midtown theater district. Identification was made on the basis of a partial plate number supplied by a witness, and confirmed by paint scrapings on the car and on Rakhman Ali's yellow cab. The ophthalmologist's wife told police that her husband was in Houston attending a professional conference; he'd flown there Friday from Newark, after having left his car in the long-term parking lot.

There were fingerprints on the steering wheel and the dash, but they turned out to be those of the traffic officer who'd opened the car door and put it in neutral so that it could be towed. There were no prints that could have belonged to the shooter, whom witnesses described as of average height and wearing a baseball cap and a glossy dark blue warm-up jacket with a name embroidered over the breast pocket. None of the witnesses had been close enough to read the name.

The incident looked ordinary enough, newsworthy in that one of the two victims had enjoyed a measure of local celebrity. Someone had stolen a car from an airport parking lot, probably with the intention of using it in the commission of a crime. Maybe he was chemically impaired at the time of the accident. Maybe he was just having a bad day. In any event, he'd reacted badly to an ordinary fender-bender. Instead of exchanging licenses and insurance cards, he'd pulled a gun and started blasting.

It could have happened that way.

Or he could have parked his stolen car where he could keep an eye on the entrance to Billings's building, could have tagged along after the cab that stopped for Billings, could have engineered the collision and its aftermath.

Nothing to it.

I was up all day, drinking too much coffee and fighting off exhaustion. At 8:30 I made myself go over to St. Paul's for my regular meeting, but I couldn't make myself pay attention, nor could I keep from leaving at the break. When I walked in the door, Elaine told me to take a hot bath and go to bed.

"Just do it," she said.

The hot water took away some of the tension, and when I got into bed I fell asleep almost immediately. I must have dreamed about Jim Shorter, because I woke up concerned about him. I said as much to Elaine, and she told me he'd called the night before, while I was at St. Paul's.

"He said it wasn't important," she said, "and not to call him because he was on his way out. So I didn't mention it."

I called him. No answer.

I listened to the news and there was nothing about Billings. I went out and bought the Times and all three tabloids and read four versions of the same story. The Times article jumped from the front page to the obituary page, where his obituary included a photo and six inches of text. I read the obit, and the half-dozen others. And then I went on to read the half-page of paid death notices. Fully a third of these were for a man who had died the previous week and who had evidently contributed heavily to a wide range of charitable endeavors; each was now taking pains to reward him with a paid announcement of their sorrow at his passing.

I raced through those, but read the others fairly closely, as is my custom these days. My attention slacked off some toward the end, as it generally does. Once I've made it past the S's without finding my own name, my appetite for the pursuit is a little less keen. But I stayed there right through the alphabet, and thus learned of the death on Monday of Helen Stromberg Watson, wife of the late Alan Watson, of Forest Hills.

It took a few calls before I found a cop who would talk to me.

"Accidental drowning," he said. "Coulda slipped, hit her head on the tile. Drowned right in her own bathtub. All you gotta do is lose consciousness long enough to fill the lungs with water. Happens all the time."

"Oh, really?"

"Ask me, they oughta put warning labels on bathtubs. No, see, there's a possibility of suicide. Woman lost her husband earlier this year, despondent over the loss, so on and so on. We found a bottle of J amp;B on the floor next to the tub. You drink in the tub and pass out, you want to call that suicide? I don't, not without a note, not when you got the children's feelings to consider, losing both parents in less'n six months. 'Sides, who knows what's in somebody else's mind? You have a few drinks, and before you know it you pass out and you drown. Or the drinks hit you hard, especially in a hot tub, and you lose your balance and smack your head and that's what knocks you out. Hey, accidents happen."

"And she died on Monday?"

"That's when they found her. Doc's guess was she was in the water three days by then." No wonder she hadn't answered the phone.

"You know what the weather's been like," he said. "And maybe you know what a body's like after a couple of days in the water. Put 'em both together, do I have to tell you what they spell?"

"Who discovered the body?"

"A neighbor. One of her kids called next door, concerned because he couldn't reach his mother on the phone. The neighbor had a key and let herself in. Hell of a thing to walk in on."

I called Jim Shorter. No answer.

I called Elaine at the shop. I said, "When Shorter called last night did he seem nervous? Did he sound as though he was afraid?"

"No, why?"

"Alan Watson's widow drowned in her bathtub sometime over the weekend. The time of death's hard to pinpoint, but it evidently happened after I went out to Corona and talked to the head of that security firm."

"I'm not sure I see the connection."

"There has to be one," I said. "I think the killer's tying off loose ends. He must be afraid somebody saw something, or knows something. He killed the widow, and the next logical step is the person who was first on the scene, the guard who discovered Watson's body."

"Jim Shorter?"

"His phone doesn't answer."

"He could be anywhere," she said. "Maybe he's at a meeting."

"Or in a bar," I said. "Or in his room with a bottle, not picking up the phone."

"Or having breakfast, or catching the Rothko retrospective at the Whitney, which would be my first choice if I didn't have a business to run. What are you going to do?"

"Look for him. There's something he knows, even if he doesn't know he knows it. I want to find him before it gets him killed."

"Hold on a second," she said. She covered the mouthpiece for a moment, then came back and said, "TJ's here. He wants to know if you want company."

By the time I got dressed and downstairs, he was waiting for me in front of the building. He was wearing his preppy clothes, the effect slightly compromised by the black Raiders cap. "We can lose the cap," he said, "if I's got to look straighter than straight, Nate."

"I didn't say anything about the cap."

"Guess I hearin' things."

"Or reading minds." I stepped to the curb, hailed a cab, told the driver Eighty-second and Second. "Anyway," I went on, "I don't think it matters what anybody wears. We're just wasting our time."