A Long Line of Dead Men

16

I caught the Number Seven train and got off at the 103rd Street station in Corona, two stops before Shea Stadium. Two blocks away on Roosevelt Avenue, Queensboro-Corona Protective Services occupied the top floor of a two-story brick building. The store on the ground floor sold children's clothing, and had a lot of stuffed animals in the window.

Most security firms are run by ex-cops, the majority of whom look the part. Martin Banszak, head man at Queensboro-Corona, looked as though he ought to be downstairs selling jumpers for toddlers. He was a small man in his sixties, round-shouldered, balding, with sad blue eyes behind rimless bifocals and a severely trimmed mustache under a button nose.

I carry two styles of business cards. One, a gift from my sponsor, Jim Faber, has nothing on it but my name and phone number. The second, supplied by Reliable, identifies me as an operative of that firm. It was one of the Reliable cards that I gave to Banszak, and it led to a little confusion; the next thing I knew he was explaining that Queensboro-Corona was mostly involved with furnishing uniformed guards and mobile security patrols, that they didn't employ trained operatives of my caliber often, but that if I would fill out one of these forms he'd keep it on file, because they did have need of investigators periodically, so I might get some occasional work from them.

We got that straightened out and I explained who I was and what I wanted.

"James Shorter," he said. "May I ask the nature of your interest in Mr. Shorter?"

"There was an incident several months ago," I said. "He was the first person on the scene of a street crime in Forest Hills, and-"

"Oh, of course," he said. "Terrible thing. Hardworking businessman struck down on his way home."

"I thought your man might have noticed something unusual that night, some unfamiliar presence in the neighborhood."

"I know the police questioned him at length."

"I'm sure they did, but-"

"The whole episode was very troubling for Shorter. It may have precipitated the other problem."

"What problem would that be, Mr. Banszak?"

He looked at me through the lower portion of his eyeglasses. "Tell me something," he said. "Has Jim Shorter applied for a position with your firm?"

"With Reliable? Well, I don't think so, but I wouldn't know if he did. I'm not part of management. I just give them a few days now and then."

"And you're not working for them now?"

"No."

He thought about it. Then he said, "He was, as I said, very troubled by that crime. After all, it had occurred on his watch. There was never the slightest implication that he ought to have been able to prevent it. Each of our mobile units has a considerable area to patrol. We aim for maximum deterrent capability through maximum visibility. The criminals see our marked patrol cars, they know the area's under constant surveillance, and they're that much less apt to commit their crimes."

"Isn't it more a case of their committing them somewhere else?"

"Well, what can any police presence do, public or private? We can't change human nature. If we can reduce crime in the neighborhoods we're hired to protect, we feel we're doing our job."

"I understand."

"Still, I suppose Shorter must have felt some element of responsibility. That's human nature, too. And there was shock as well, coming upon a crime scene, discovering a corpse. There was the stress of multiple police interrogations. I don't say this caused anything, but it may well have precipitated it."

"Precipitated what, sir?"

For an answer, he bent his elbow and moved his wrist up and down, like a man throwing down shots.

"He drank?"

He sighed. "If you drink, you're gone. That's a rule here. No exceptions."

"It's understandable."

"But I did make an exception," he said, "because of the stress he'd been under. I told him I'd give him one more chance. Then there was a second incident and that was that."

"When was this?"

"I'd have to look it up. I'd guess he didn't last more than a month after that man was killed. Say six weeks at the very outside. When was the fellow killed? End of January?"

"Early February."

"I'd say he was gone by the middle of March. Middlemarch," he said surprisingly. "That's a novel. Have you read it?"

"No."

"Neither have I. It sits on my bookshelf. My mother owned it and died, and now it's mine, along with a couple of hundred other books I haven't read. But the spine of that one always catches my eye. Middlemarch. George Eliot wrote it. I'm sure I'll never read it." He waved a hand at the futility of it all. "I have James Shorter's telephone number. Would you like me to call him for you?"

No one answered Shorter's phone. Banszak copied the number for me, along with an address on East Ninety-fourth Street in Manhattan. I grabbed a quick bite at an Italian deli and caught the train back to the city. At the Grand Central stop I switched to the Lexington Avenue express and got off at Eighty-sixth. I tried Shorter from a pay phone and got my quarter back after half a dozen rings.

It was a quarter to five. If Shorter had found a new position, he was probably at work right now, like most of the rest of the city's working force. On the other hand, if he was still in the same line of work there was no guessing his schedule. He could be a uniformed guard at a check-cashing facility in Sunset Park or night watchman at a warehouse in Long Island City. There was no way to tell.

Sometimes I tuck a meeting schedule in my pocket, but it's a bulky affair, listing every AA meeting in the metropolitan area, and more often than not I don't have it with me. I didn't today, so I dropped the quarter in the slot again and dialed New York Intergroup. A volunteer was able to tell me that there was a 5:30 meeting in the basement of a church at First Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street.

I got there early and found out they didn't have coffee- some groups do, some don't. I went to the bodega across the street and ran into two others on the same mission, one of whom I recognized from a lunchtime meeting I go to sometimes at the West Side Y. We trooped back across the street with our coffee and took seats around a couple of refectory tables, and by half-past five a handful of others had straggled in and the meeting got under way.

There were just a dozen of us- it was a new group, and if I'd had my meeting book with me I'd never have found it, because it wasn't listed yet. A woman named Margaret, sober a little over a year, told her story and took most of the hour getting through it. She was about my age, the daughter and granddaughter of alcoholics, and she'd been careful to keep alcohol at bay for years, limiting herself to a single cocktail or glass of wine at social occasions. Then her husband died of an esophageal hemorrhage- she'd married an alcoholic, of course- and in her midforties she turned to drink, and it was as if it had been waiting for her all her life. It embraced her and wouldn't let go, and the progression of her alcoholism was quick and sudden and nasty. In no time at all she'd lost everything but her rent-controlled apartment and the Social Security check that enabled her to pay the rent.

"I was rooting around in garbage cans," she said. "I was waking up in strange places, and not always alone. And I was a well brought-up Irish Catholic girl who never slept with anybody but my husband. I remember coming out of a blackout one time, and I won't tell you what I was doing or who I was doing it to, but all I could think was, 'Oh, Peggy, the nuns would not be proud of you now!' "

After she was done we passed the basket and went around the room. When it was my turn I found myself talking about how I'd gone looking for a security guard and found he'd been dismissed for drinking. "I had a strong sense of identification," I said. "My own drinking picked up after I left the police force. If I'd kept on drinking any longer than I did I'd have gone after jobs like this man's, and I'd have drunk my way out of them, too. I don't really know anything about him or what his life's like, but thinking about him has given me an idea of what my own life could have been like if I hadn't found this program. I'm just glad to be here, glad to be sober."

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."

"Uh-huh. How about what it does to you?"

"Ha," he said. "Now that's something else, isn't it?" He picked the glass up again, put the glass down again. "I guess you're pretty strong on this AA stuff, huh?"

"It saved my life."

"You been sober awhile, huh? Two, three years?"

"More like ten."

"Jesus," he said. "No, uh, little vacations along the way?"

"Not so far."

He nodded, taking it in. "Ten years," he said.

"You do it a day at a time," I told him. "It tends to add up."

"You still go to the meetings after all this time? How often do you go?"

"At first I went every day. Sometimes I went to two or three meetings a day during the early years. I'll still go every day when I feel like drinking, or if I'm under a lot of stress. And sometimes I'll let my attendance drop to one or two meetings a week. Most of the time, though, I go to three or four meetings a week."

"Even after all these years. Where do you find the time?"

"Well, I always had time to drink."

"Yeah, I guess drinking does pass the time, doesn't it?"

"And it's easy to find meetings that fit into my schedule. That's a nice thing about New York, there are meetings around the clock."

"Oh, yeah?"

I nodded. "All over town," I said. "There's a group on Houston Street that has a meeting every day at midnight and another at two in the morning. What's ironic is the meeting place was one of the city's most notorious after-hours joints for years. They stayed open late then and they still do today."

He thought that was pretty funny. I excused myself and went to the john, stopping on the way back to use the phone. I was pretty sure there was a late meeting on East Eighty-second Street, but I wanted to make sure of the time and the exact address. I called Intergroup, and the woman who answered the phone didn't even have to look it up.

Back at our table, Shorter was still looking at the same half-ounce of beer. I told him there was a meeting in the neighborhood at ten o'clock and that I thought I would probably go to it. I hadn't been to a meeting in a couple of days, I told him, which was a lie. I could use a meeting, I said, which was true.

"You want to go, Jim?"

"Me?"

Who else? "Come on," I said. "Keep me company."

"Gee, I don't know," he said. "I just had these beers, and I had one or two earlier."

"So?"

"Don't you have to be sober?"

"Just so you don't start shouting and throwing chairs," I said. "But I don't think you're likely to do that, are you?"

"No, but-"

"It doesn't cost anything," I said, "and the coffee and cookies are generally free. And you hear people say really interesting things." I straightened up. "But I don't want to talk you into anything. If you're positive you haven't got a problem-"

"I never said that."

"No, you didn't."

He got to his feet. "What the hell," he said. "Let's go before I change my mind."