A Long Line of Dead Men

25

Martin Banszak took off his rimless glasses and fogged the lenses with his breath, then polished each in turn with his handkerchief. When he was satisfied with the results he put them on and turned his sad blue eyes on me.

"You must know the caliber of men we get," he said. "Guard work pays just one or two dollars an hour over the minimum wage. It's a job that requires no experience and minimal training. Our best men are retired police officers looking to supplement a city pension, but men like that can usually find something better for themselves.

"We get fellows who are out of work and looking for stopgap employment until something opens up for them. They're often good workers, but they don't stay with us long. And then we get men who work for us because they can't do any better."

"What kind of checks do you run on them?"

"We do the minimum. I try not to hire convicted felons. After all, this is security work. You don't hire the fox to guard the henhouse, do you? But it's hard to avoid. I can run computer checks, but what good is that when the name's a common one? 'Query: Has William Johnson been an inmate in the New York State prison system?' Well, there are probably half a dozen William Johnsons in prison in this state on any given day, so how am I to know? And when a man comes to me and says his name is William Johnson, how can I tell if it's the name he was born with? If a man shows me a Social Security card and a driver's license, what can I do but accept it?"

"Don't you run their prints?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It takes too long," he said. "By the time I get a response from Washington, two weeks or more have passed. The applicant's found other work in the meantime."

"Couldn't you hire him provisionally? And let him go if he doesn't check out?"

"Is that how they do it at Reliable? Well, I'm sure you charge more for your services. A Manhattan firm, a fancy address. That's all well and good for the clients who can afford to cover your overhead for you." He picked up a pencil, tapped its eraser end on the desktop. "I can't have half my employees checking up on the other half," he said. "I'd be out of business in no time."

I didn't say anything.

"Two years ago," he said, "we tried taking fingerprints when we accepted applications for employment. You know what happened?"

"Your applications dropped off."

"That's exactly right. People didn't want to go through a messy and demeaning process."

"Especially the ones with outstanding warrants," I said. "It would have been particularly messy and demeaning for them."

He glared at me. "And the ones who had stopped paying alimony," he said. "And the ones running away from bad debts. And, yes, the ones who'd served time for minor narcotics violations and other low-level criminal behavior. It's hard to grow up in certain neighborhoods without getting arrested and fingerprinted along the way. The bulk of those men do just fine in this line of work."

I nodded. Who was I to judge him, and what did I care how he ran his business? He fired men for drinking because it bothered the clients. But what client was bothered by the fact that the man guarding his warehouse had failed to pay child support, or sold a gram of cocaine to an undercover police officer? Those weren't offenses you could smell on a man's breath, or spot in his walk.

"Let's get back to Shorter," I said.

Shorter's file contained the application he'd filled out, along with a record of the hours he'd worked and the compensation he'd received. No photograph, and I asked about that. Wasn't it part of the routine to photograph all employees?

"Of course," he said. "We need a photo for their ID. We take them right here, in front of that wall. It's a perfect backdrop." So where was the photo? Laminated to the ID card, I was told, which Shorter would have turned in when they let him go, and which would have been routinely destroyed.

"Did he turn it in?"

"I assume so."

"And it was destroyed?"

"It must have been."

"What about the negative?"

He shook his head. "We use a Polaroid. Everybody does. You want to be able to make up the ID right away, not wait for the film to come back."

"So there's no negative."

"No."

"And you only take the one shot? You don't shoot a backup to have on file?"

"We do, actually," he said, and shuffled through the file. "It doesn't seem to be here. It may have been misfiled."

Or removed from the file by Shorter, I thought. Or not taken in the first place, because Martin Banszak didn't seem to run the tightest ship around.

I took another look at the application. Shorter had had the same address on East Ninety-fourth Street when he'd applied for the job back in July of '92.

July of '92?

I checked the date with Banszak. Had Shorter actually been working there for seven months by the time Alan Watson was killed?

"Yes, and he was very steady, very reliable," he said. "That's why I was inclined to give him a break when he had the first incident."

"The drinking."

"Yes. He must have been ashamed, because he didn't even offer an argument in his own defense, just hung his head waiting to be fired. But his record was excellent, and he'd been with us for over seven months, so I gave him that second chance." He frowned. "The next time, of course, there was an official complaint called in. I had to let him go."

Seven months. Waiting, biding his time.

I picked up the application. "I'll need a copy of this," I said. "Is there a place in the neighborhood where I can get it copied?" He said he had a desktop copier and would run it for me. He went into another room, came back with the copy but held on to it for a moment.

He said, "I'm not sure I understand. If Shorter knows something, if he's disappeared in order to escape from the man who killed Watson"- that was the explanation I'd devised for him- "shouldn't the police be brought into the picture?"

"If it comes to that," I said. "But it looks as though Shorter's been living under an assumed name, and that he might have invented most of what's on that application. If I can spare him the embarrassment of official attention from the police-"

"Yes, of course," he said. "By all means."

He didn't exist.

He'd carried a New York State driver's license, and its number was listed on his job application. But the DMV never heard of him, and the license number he'd written down was unassigned. The Social Security number was real, but the account was that of a State Farm insurance agent in Emporia, Kansas, whose name was Bennett Gunnarson, not James Shorter.

It would have made my life easier if Banszak had fingerprinted his employees, even if he'd done nothing with the prints but file them away. Earlier, I'd left TJ on guard at the rooming house and cabbed down to the Flatiron Building and back, borrowing a fingerprint kit from Wally Donn at Reliable. Before I left Shorter's room I had fogged the telephone receiver with my breath the way Banszak had fogged his glasses. I hadn't seen any prints then, but sometimes they show up better when you dust for them. And the telephone wasn't the only surface in the room that would hold a print.

Back on East Ninety-fourth, I dusted the phone, the window, the washbasin, the headboard and footboard, the switchplate, and everything else that looked at all promising. There was nothing, not even smudges.

"He cleaned up," I told TJ. "He deliberately wiped every surface in the room."

"The man be neat."

"The man's a killer," I said. "He killed Alan Watson back in February. A few days ago he killed Helen Watson, and- Jesus."

"Say what?"

"Helen Watson," I said. "One time I was talking to him and he asked me if I'd reached Helen Watson yet. How did he know her first name? He never heard it from me. Jesus, how long was he stalking them?"

I had my answer now.

He'd been stalking Alan Watson for a minimum of seven months, from the time he'd started work with Queensboro-Corona to the night he seized his opportunity and stuck a knife in the commodity broker's heart. God knows how many opportunities he must have had in all that time, but he'd been in no hurry, he'd been content to bide his time, waiting, letting the anticipation build.

Then, when he finally struck, he'd allowed himself the extra satisfaction of discovering the body and phoning it in to the police, like a firebug coming back to watch the firemen battle the blaze he'd set. And then, remarkably, he'd stayed on the job another six weeks before he could contrive to get fired.

So I knew that he liked to take his time, and I knew, too, that he could strike quickly if he wanted to. I'd seen him on Friday night, and a day later Watson's widow was dead. A couple of days after that, Gerard Billings was shot to death in the back of a cab.

Oh, he was slick. But who the hell was he?

I called Ray Gruliow, brought him up to date. "I feel like a damn fool," I said. "I found the son of a bitch and then I lost him."

"You didn't know what you'd found."

"No. He knew and I didn't. He was playing with me, the bastard. He was the cat and I was a particularly dimwitted mouse. You want to know what I did? I took the son of a bitch to AA meetings."

"You didn't."

"Well, he'd been fired for drinking on the job, and he was leading a shabby life, and he looked for all the world like a drunk getting ready to bottom out. I couldn't see any reason not to talk about the program, and when I did he did a good job of seeming interested but wary. I have to say he's a natural when it comes to the principle of anonymity. He's the most anonymous person I ever met. I still don't know who the hell he is."

"But you've seen him. You sat across a table and talked to him."

"Right," I said. "I know what he looks like." I described Shorter in detail. "Now we both know what he looks like," I said. "Does he sound like anybody you know?"

"I'm not very good at recognizing a man from a description."

"He's forty-eight years old. He listed his place of birth as Klamath Falls, Oregon, but they never heard of anybody by that name, and there's no reason to assume he's ever been within a thousand miles of the place. He moved into his rooming house a week before he turned up on their doorstep at Queensboro-Corona, and it's my guess that James Shorter was born right about that time. I think he slapped together some fake ID, rented himself a room by the week, and went out to look for a job."

"So that he could stalk Alan."

"That's right," I said. "I think he's a stalker. That's the only way I can begin to make sense out of what he's been doing. I did a little research on the subject, and there are elements here that seem to fit the pattern. The way he structured his whole life to support his pursuit of Alan Watson. And the way he postponed the kill. How many chances do you suppose he had in the six months he worked for Q-C? Twenty? A hundred? But he kept putting it off, and not because he was afraid of getting caught."

"He was holding back to boost his excitement."

"Exactly."

"But with Gerry-"

"I think he started stalking somebody else very shortly after he killed Watson. Probably Billings, but it could have been anybody. Maybe he was keeping tabs on a couple of you. He was still at the same rooming house, still calling himself James Shorter, so I don't think he was anywhere close to the last act of his little drama. But then I turned up, and he realized it was time for James Shorter to disappear, and he wanted to do something dramatic on the way out."

"He picked a pretty dramatic way to kill Gerry."

"He would have known where he lived, and his usual schedule. I suppose he had a gun, or knew where to get one. It couldn't have been too hard for him to take a bus to Newark Airport and drive back in a stolen car. Then all he had to do was wait for Billings and pick his opportunity. Engineering a car crash was a nice touch, but he had other options. He could have staged a drive-by shooting, he could have tried running Billings down."

Or he could have found a way to toss a bomb through Gruliow's high-tech plastic window. That way he could have taken out nine of the fourteen remaining members at once. He'd known about the meeting, because I'd been obliging enough to tell him, and when he'd pumped me a little I'd even said it was in the Village. Gruliow was the only member who lived in the Village. Maybe Shorter had been around Commerce Street Tuesday afternoon, maybe he'd been across the street at the Grange, nursing a beer and watching them file in. Watching me, too.

I said, "Who the hell is he? Do you have any idea?"

"None."

"We know he's not a member, but I don't think any of us seriously thought it could be. Who else knows about the club?"

"No one, really. Not in any detail."

"He's forty-eight. In 1961 he would have been what, sixteen? Could he have been somebody's younger brother, transferring a resentment against a sibling to the entire club?"

"God, that strikes me as farfetched."

"I don't know that we can expect to find a logical motive," I said, "because why should there be a sane explanation for a long-standing pattern of insane behavior? All he needed was a pretext."

"Wouldn't it have to be a good one to sustain him this long?"

"No," I said. "All it had to do was get him started. Once he was in motion his own momentum would sustain him, no matter how frail the original impetus."

"Because he enjoys what he's doing."

"He loves it," I said, "but I have a feeling it's more than that. It's his whole life."

I had abbreviated versions of that conversation with as many of the other members as I could get hold of. I described Shorter and asked them if the description seemed to fit anybody who might have picked up a resentment against the group years ago. They all said essentially the same thing- the description fit too many people, and they couldn't think of anyone, of any description, who had any reason, sane or otherwise, to resent the group. Or even to know it existed.

"It's a shame there's no photograph," more than one of them said. And I explained how his employers in Corona had taken a pair of Polaroids, but nobody could furnish a copy. One was on his ID, which he'd very likely retained; the other had conveniently disappeared from his file.

And when, I wondered, had that happened? Had he been resourceful enough to slip off with the photo before they let him go? Or had he paid an unauthorized visit sometime over the weekend to tidy up after himself? He could have combined it with the trip to Forest Hills to drown Helen Watson in her tub.

"Wouldn't he have had other pictures taken?" Elaine wondered. "How did he cash his paychecks? I can't believe he had a bank account."

"He used a check-cashing service. But he had his Queensboro-Corona ID and his driver's license. He wouldn't need anything else."

"And you sat across a table from him."

"And took him to a meeting."

"And you don't get mugged and printed at AA meetings, do you? I guess it would be a violation of the tradition of anonymity, wouldn't it?"

"I'm afraid so."

"If I'd been along," she said, "I could have taken a sneak photo of him, the way we did at Wallbanger's. Remember?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said.

"What's the matter? Did I say something wrong?"

"No," I said. "You said something right. I don't know what the hell's the matter with me, I really don't. Why can't I think straight?"

"What do you mean?"

For answer I pointed to a framed drawing on the wall.