A Long Line of Dead Men

28

I arranged to meet Felicia Karp at four o'clock. I got to the house on Stafford Avenue ten minutes early, and at 4:20 I was beginning to worry. Fifteen minutes later I was in the vestibule examining the lock on the door leading up to her second-floor flat and wondering how much trouble it would be to let myself in. The possibility of getting nailed for illegal entry scared me less than the thought of what I might find. She lived, after all, just a fifteen-minute walk from where Helen Watson had drowned in her bath.

I got a flat strip of flexible steel from my wallet and turned to make sure no one was watching me when I took a shot at the door. Across the street, someone was maneuvering a Ford Escort into a tight space. I could have been through the door and up the stairs before the car was parked, but I waited, and Felicia Karp emerged from the car. I put my burglar's tool away and went to meet her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "They sprang a meeting on us literally at the last minute and there was no way to reach you." She gave me her canvas tote bag to hold while she unlocked the door. Inside, she led me to the kitchen and heated two cups of the morning's coffee in the microwave. From the wall, the black cat swung its pendulum tail and rolled its eyes at me.

I showed her Ray Galindez's sketch. She held it at arm's length and asked who it was supposed to be.

"Do you recognize him?"

"He looks familiar. Who is he?"

"He worked as a patrol officer for a private security firm. Back in February he discovered the body of Alan Watson while making his rounds a few blocks the other side of Continental Avenue. Watson had been stabbed, and it wasn't hard for this man to be the first person on the scene."

"You're implying that he killed him."

"Yes."

"Was Alan Watson one of the men my husband had dinner with once a year?" I said that he was. "And this man? Did he kill my husband?"

"I believe so."

"My God," she said, and stared at the sketch, and shuddered. "I knew Fred Karp would never kill himself," she said. "My God."

I said, "You say this man looks familiar."

"I know him."

"Oh?"

"I know I've seen him. Where did he patrol? We don't have private guards around here, although the neighborhood association has been talking about hiring them. You said the other side of Continental Avenue? I wouldn't have seen him there. It's a nice section, upscale compared to this, but I don't have any reason to go there. Anyway, I know his face, and I wouldn't know it from glimpsing it through the window of a patrol car. Why do I know his face? Help me."

"Have you seen him in the neighborhood recently?"

"No."

"Has he come to the house?" She shook her head. "Have you seen him at the school? He could have posed as a parent."

"Why would he do that? Am I in danger?"

"It's possible."

"For God's sake," she said. She studied the picture. "He looks so damn ordinary," she said. "To look at him, you'd think he was too much of a nebbish to be a policeman."

"What could you picture him doing?"

"I don't know. Something menial, something completely pedestrian."

"Close your eyes. He's doing something. What do you see him doing?"

"What's this, some new guided-imaging technique? It's not going to work. I intellectualize too much, that's my problem."

"Try it anyway. What's he doing?"

"I can't see him."

"If you could see him, what would he be doing?"

"I don't-"

"Don't figure it out. Just answer it. What's he doing?"

"Pushing a broom. My God, I don't believe it."

"What?"

"That's it. He was a janitor in the Kashin Building where Fred had his office. He wore a uniform, matching pants and a shirt in greenish gray. How would I remember that?"

"I don't know."

"Sometimes I would meet Fred at his office and we would have dinner and go to a play. And one time I saw this man. I think-"

"Yes?"

"I seem to remember that he was in Fred's office when I got there, and they were talking. He was sweeping the floor and he was emptying a wastebasket."

"What was his name?"

"How would I know?"

"Your husband might have introduced you."

"I'm afraid… John. His name was John!"

"That's very good."

"Nobody introduced him. It was on his shirt." She traced a short horizontal line above her left breast. "Over the pocket, embroidered in white. No! Not white, yellow." She shook her head. "It's just amazing the things you remember."

"And his name was John."

"Yes. I didn't like him."

"Why not?"

"There was something about him. I thought he was sly. In fact I almost said something to Fred, but I let it go."

"What would you have said?"

"I would have warned him."

"You thought the man was dangerous?"

She shook her head. "Not physically dangerous. I thought he would steal something. There was a furtive quality about him. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"But it wasn't so pronounced that it stayed in my mind. I don't believe I ever gave him another thought from that day to this. And I'm positive I never saw him again."

"If you ever do-"

"Yes," she said. "I'll call you immediately, rest assured." She frowned at the sketch. "Definitely yellow. His name, I mean. John, in yellow script, over the left breast pocket."

The superintendent at the Kashin Building didn't recognize the sketch, and it turned out he hadn't been working there at the time of Fred Karp's death. I went to the management company's office on West Thirty-seventh Street. Nobody there recognized the sketch, either, but a young woman checked personnel records and came up with an employee named John Siebert. He had started work five months before Karp's death and quit three weeks after. Under "Reason for Leaving," she told me, it said "Moving to Florida."

"I guess he decided to retire," she said.

Hal Gabriel had been reclusive toward the end of his life, rarely leaving his apartment, ordering in from the Chinese restaurant and the liquor store. There were half a dozen Chinese restaurants within a few blocks of his building at Ninety-second and West End. I didn't know which ones had been in business twelve years ago when Gabriel was found hanged, but I hadn't yet known of a Chinese restaurant that employed Caucasian delivery boys.

I checked the two liquor stores a block east on Broadway. Both had had recent changes of ownership. One had changed hands when the owner retired and moved to Miami. The owner of the other had been killed five years before in a robbery. No one in either store recognized James Shorter from the sketch.

I had TJ along and we worked opposite sides of the street, showing the sketch in coffee shops and pizza parlors. The counterman at Poseidon looked at it and said, "Haven't seen him in years and years. Two scrambled dry, toasted English no butter." He grinned at the expression on my face. "Good memory, huh?"

Almost too good. I complimented him on it and went outside, and TJ reported the dry cleaner across the street had also made Shorter from the sketch, and recalled that his name was Smith.

"Right, Smith," I said. "And he didn't want any butter on his English muffin."

"Huh?"

"Smith? And he happened to remember the guy from twelve years ago?"

"Was a woman," TJ said. "An' she remembers him because he never came back for his suit jacket. Lady kept it for him for years, finally gave it to the Goodwill sometime last year. Soon as I showed her the picture, she got scared she's gonna get in trouble. 'I kep' it a long time,' she said."

No one in Hal Gabriel's building recognized the sketch, nor did the list of 1981 tenants suggest anything. But there was an SRO hotel around the corner, and an old desk register showed that a Joseph Smith had occupied a room on the fourth floor for several months prior to Gabriel's death. A week after the body was discovered, Mr. Smith moved out and left no forwarding address.

Rumpelstiltskin.

I thought of him often, the evil dwarf from the fairy tale. I didn't know what Shorter had meant by the clue, or if it was in fact a clue at all. I followed a lot of very cold trails, looking for further traces of his presence near the scene of other deaths.

It didn't matter. Nothing led anywhere.

I have been detecting one way or another for so long that certain parts of the process have become virtually automatic for me. Now and then in recent years I have looked around for some other way to make a living, and invariably I have realized that this is what I do, that I am reasonably good at it, and that my experience and talent equip me for nothing else.

And yet I don't begin to understand it.

Sometimes it's reasonably straightforward. You go up one side of the street and down the other, you knock on every door, figuratively and literally, and each new piece of data clicks into place and points you toward a new street, with new doors to knock on. Finally you've walked down enough streets and knocked on enough doors, and the final door opens and there's your answer. It's not easy and it's rarely simple, but there is a logic to the way it unfolds.

But it's not always like that.

Sometimes it's like a jigsaw puzzle. You separate all the straight-edged pieces and get the outside hooked together, and then you sort by color, and you try this and try that until you've made a little progress. And you're looking for a certain piece, and it's not there. It's got to be missing, and you want to write the manufacturer and complain, and then you pick up a piece you've already tried in that particular spot three or four times already, and you know it's not the one you're looking for, but this time it fits.

It's not always like that, either.

Jim Shorter, aka Joseph Smith, aka John Siebert. Aka Rumpelstiltskin?

"Maybe he stole some monogrammed luggage," Elaine suggested, "and he can't bear to part with it."

"The places he lives," I said, "you'd be conspicuous if you moved in with shopping bags from a good store. He does like to hold on to those initials, though. What does JS stand for?"

"Joan Scherman."

"Who's Joan Scherman?"

"A photo stylist. She showed up at the shop yesterday and wanted to rent that little Biedermeier chair as a prop for a magazine ad. I had it tagged three-fifty and I would have taken three hundred for it, and she's paying a hundred dollars to rent it for two days. Isn't that great?"

"It is if you get the chair back."

"Oh, she gave me a damage deposit and everything. It's a nice way to make money, don't you think? But that's not helping you."

"No."

"JS, JS, JS. Just Shopping. Jonas Salk. Jesus Saves. Jelly Sandwich. I'm sorry, I'm no help at all."

"That's okay."

She struck a pose. "I've got it," she said. "Jewish Sexpot. What do you think?"

"I think it's bedtime," I said.

And so I went to bed and forgot all about James Shorter and his several aliases, and the next morning, shaving, it came to me.

I put on a suit and tie, drank a cup of coffee, and took a cab to Penn Station.

Sixteen hours later I emerged from Penn Station. It was past midnight. There was a man I wanted to talk to, but it was too late to call him. It would have to wait until morning.

It was cool for a change, and although I'd been on my feet a lot earlier in the day, I'd spent the past several hours sitting on the train. I felt like stretching my legs, and I wound up stretching them all the way to the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street.

"I thought of you today," I told Mick Ballou. "I was in Washington, and I went to have a look at the Vietnam Memorial."

"Did you now."

"I saw your brother's name."

"Ah," he said. "Then no one's gone and rubbed it out."

"No."

"I hadn't thought they would," he said, "but you never know what someone might do."

"You don't."

"It's quite a sight, isn't it? The Memorial. The shape of it, and all of those names. Name after name after name."

"It's a long line of dead men," I said. "You were right about that."

"You couldn't have gone just to look at Dennis's name. You scarcely knew him."

"That's true."

"You knew Eddie Dunphy, and Eddie knew Dennis, but beyond that-"

"I knew him by sight, but no, I didn't really know him."

"So you must have had other business in Washington, and just thought you'd have a look at the Memorial while you were there."

"No," I said. "As a matter of fact I went there just to look at the Memorial."

"Did you then."

"I used the directory," I said, "and I managed to find Dennis's name, and the names of a few other men I'd known who died over there. The brother of a girl I knew in high school. Fellows who'd gotten killed over there twenty or twenty-five years ago, and I thought of them for the first time in years and looked for their names and there they were."

"Ah."

"And then I found myself doing what you mentioned having done, just walking along and reading names more or less at random. It was very moving. I'm glad I went, if just for that."

"But you didn't go just for that."

"No," I said, "I didn't. There was another name that I went to look for."

"And was it there?"

"No, it wasn't."

"So you went all the way there for nothing?"

"No," I said. "I found what I was looking for."