A Long Line of Dead Men

32

When he woke up I was the first thing he saw. I was sitting on a folding metal chair. He was lying on a mattress atop a low plywood platform. His hands and one leg were free, but there was a thick steel cuff fastened around one ankle. A chain was attached to it, its other end anchored to a plate in the floor.

"Matt," he said. "How'd you find me?"

"You weren't that hard to find."

"I spend two hours watching dinosaurs, I walk in the door, and whammo! What did you get me with, a tranquilizer dart?"

"That's right."

"Jesus, how long was I out? Couple of hours, it must have been."

"Longer than that, Jim."

" 'Jim.' That's not what you called me just before you shot me."

"No."

"You called me another name."

"I called you Severance."

"Any point in pretending I don't know what you're talking about?"

"Not really."

"Of course if there's a tape recorder running-"

"There's not."

"Because I don't remember anybody reading me my rights."

"Nobody did."

"Maybe you ought to, huh?"

"Why? You're not under arrest. You haven't been charged with anything."

"No? What are you waiting for?"

"There's not going to be a trial."

"I get it. You son of a bitch, why didn't you use a real gun? Why not get it over with?" He sat up, or started to, and noticed the chain on his leg. With the discovery came the realization that he wasn't still lying on an Oriental carpet in the Tierneys' apartment in Morningside Heights.

He said, "What's this, fucking leg irons? Where the hell am I?"

"Red Hawk Island."

"Red Hook's no island. It's just a bad part of town."

"Red Hawk, not Hook. It's a small island in Georgian Bay."

"Where the fuck is Georgian Bay?"

"In Canada," I said. "It's an arm of Lake Huron. We're a couple of hundred miles due north of Cleveland."

"You're telling me a story, right?"

"Sit up, Jim. Look out the window."

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up, got to his feet. "Whew," he said, sitting down again. "Little groggy."

"That's the drugs."

He stood again, and this time he stayed on his feet. Dragging the chain, he walked over to the room's single window. "Pine trees," he said. "There's a fucking forest out there."

"Well, it's not Central Park."

He turned to face me. "What the hell is this? How'd we get here?"

"A couple of men carried you out of the Tierney apartment on a stretcher. They loaded you into the backseat of a limousine. You were driven to a private airport in Westchester County, where they transferred you to a private plane. There's a small landing strip here on Red Hawk Island, and that's where we touched down. That was around noon when we got here, twelve hours or so after you came home from the movie. It's almost five in the afternoon now. You've been kept unconscious with injections while we got everything ready for you."

"And what's this? A cabin?"

I nodded. "There's a main house and several outbuildings. This is one of the outbuildings. The floor's poured concrete, in case you were wondering, and the metal plate you're chained to is anchored solidly in it. In case you were wondering."

"Message: I ain't going nowhere."

"Something like that."

He went back to the bed and sat down on it. "Lot to go through to kill a guy," he said.

"Look who's talking."

"Huh?"

"Look at all you went through," I said, "to kill all those men. Why, Jim?"

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You called me Jim all along. That's the name you met me under, Jim Shorter. It's funny, 'cause that was the one name I stayed away from. For years I'd pick different names, always the same initials, but never Jim, never James. I used Joe a few times, John, Jack. I was Jeremy on one occasion. And Jeffrey, I was Jeffrey when I got Carl Uhl. 'Oh, God, Jeff, what are you doing!' He begged for his life, that cocksucker." His grin was quick and nasty. "All sorts of different names. But I didn't use the name I was born with once in all that time. Then finally I figured why not, what's it gonna hurt? So the name you met me under, it turned out to be my real name. The first name, anyway."

"What got you started?"

"Why the hell should I tell you a fucking thing?"

"It's been a lot of years," I said. "Isn't it about time you told somebody?"

"A lot of years. I got a bunch of 'em, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did."

"I shoulda just disappeared, you know? Time I met you, I already had this place rented."

"This place?"

"Can you believe it? I think I'm still back on Manhattan Avenue. I already had it arranged to sublet Tierney's apartment. I was just waiting for them to get on the plane. Soon as that happened, goodbye Jim Shorter, hello Joel Silverman. He's a nice Jewish boy, Joel is. You know you can trust him to water your plants and not piss on your carpet." He laughed. "Then you turned up. I couldn't disappear right away, not the way I'd planned. I had to wait for you to lose interest. But instead of shining you on and getting rid of you, I let you take me to a fucking AA meeting. Can you believe that?"

"And one meeting changed your life."

"Yeah, right, just like those lamebrains telling their stories. All of a sudden you're calling me on the phone, I'm calling you on the phone, and how do I get you off my back and quit being Jim Shorter? First I went and did Helen in Forest Hills, because that wasn't a load of shit about having an affair with her. Widows are pretty easy targets, you know. She's not the first I got next to after I did the husband. There was a guy named Bayliss you wouldn't even know was one of mine-"

"In a hotel room in Atlanta."

"Yeah, well, I looked up the wife afterward. Same thing with Helen, such a shock discovering your husband's body, blah blah blah, next thing you know she's got her knees up and I'm slippin' her the salami. I don't know if I can explain what a pleasure it was. It's like killing the husband a second time."

"And then you killed Helen."

"I thought I could keep you from finding out. You were talking about going out to see her, so I figured I'd better see her first. Then afterward I thought, shit, even a good accident's suspicious. You got to know I'm good at doing accidents. I realized I had to pull the plug on Jim Shorter and disappear, and the hell with whether or not you figured it out. So I thought let's go out with a bang, let's be dramatic, and I got that fucking clown of a weatherman."

"Gerry Billings."

"Asshole. Chirpy little fucker with his bow ties and his million-dollar smile. The look on his face when I shot him. He bought the scene, you know. Thought it was a traffic accident and he was an innocent bystander who was getting shot for no reason at all. I was praying he'd recognize me and go out knowing, but I didn't have time to waste so I just shot him and got it the fuck over with."

"Why kill them, Jim?"

"You think I need a reason?"

"I think you've got one."

"Why should I tell you?"

"I don't know," I said, "but I think you probably will."

He hated them from the start.

Bunch of self-satisfied bastards. Eating and drinking and running their mouths, and he sat there among them and wondered what he was doing there. Whose idea had it been to invite him? What made anybody think he fit in?

Crazy, too. Bunch of grown men sitting around and waiting to die. The whole idea of dying made him sick to his stomach. He didn't like to think about it. Everybody died, death was out there waiting for everyone, but did that mean he had to think about it?

He was shaking when he left Cunningham's that first night back in 1961. If there was one thing he was clear on, it was that he was done with this group of fruitcakes. They could meet next year without him. He was done. Let 'em read his name or burn his name, whatever the fuck they wanted, because he was through with the whole deal. Luckily they hadn't made him sign his name in blood, or swear an oath on the head of his mother, or any of the usual secret-society mumbo jumbo. They had let him in, God knows why, and he could let himself out. And don't bother to show me to the door, thank you very much, but I can find my own way out.

But he went back the next year. He hadn't planned on it, but when the time came something made him go.

It was just as bad. Most of the talk concerned the progress they'd made since the last dinner- the promotions, the raises, the goddamn successes all over the place. The following year was more of the same, and he decided that was it, he was finished.

Then Phil Kalish died and excitement went through him like an electrical charge. I beat you, he thought. You were smarter and taller and better-looking, you were making good money, you had a wife and a family, and where did it get you? Because you're dead and I'm alive, you son of a bitch.

And wasn't that the point of it, staying alive? Wasn't that what they got together to celebrate? That they were alive and the ones who weren't there were dead?

So he went to the dinner in 1964 and heard Phil Kalish's name read. And he looked around the room and wondered who would be next.

That's when he started planning. He wasn't sure he was going to do anything, but in the meantime he could set the stage.

The first thing to do was die. He thought of a lot of ways to do it, most of them involving killing somebody and planting his identification on the corpse. But Vietnam was starting to heat up, and that was easy. He called Homer Champney and explained that his reserve unit had been called up and he couldn't make it back to the city for the dinner. He wasn't in the reserves, he'd never been in the army or the National Guard, a psychiatric evaluation had kept him out, which showed what they knew, the idiots, because he had turned out to be a far better killer than the people they took in. He phoned again, the week before the dinner, to report that he was being sent overseas.

By the following year he'd died in combat. The night of the dinner he went to a movie on Forty-second Street and thought how they'd be reading his name along with Kalish's, and they'd all say nice mournful things about him, and every one of the cocksuckers'd be glad it was him and not them.

A lot they knew.

He took plenty of time setting up the first one. He took his time with each of them, wondering how many of them he could do before they started to get suspicious. Well, they were down to fourteen men before anybody suspected a thing. More than half of them gone, although not all of them were his doing, not by any means.

But most of them were. And each time, all through the planning and the preliminary steps, he felt really alive, really in charge of his life. And then when he did it, well, actually doing it was pretty exciting, because it was dangerous and you had to be careful nothing went wrong.

Once it was done, though, it was sort of sad.

Not that he mourned for them. Fuck 'em, they deserved what they got. And it was wonderfully satisfying, because each time it was one more down and he was still standing, and he'd beaten another of the bastards.

No, what was sad was that it was over. A cat probably felt the same way when the mouse she was playing with finally gave up the ghost and died. You got to eat your dinner, but the game was over. Kind of bittersweet, you could call it.

That's why he was stretching it out. That's why he'd taken so many years instead of knocking them off at the rate of one a month. He'd kept them from finding out for a long time, and now they knew, and in a way that made it even better, because what could they do about it? Gerard Billings had known, and what good did it do him?

They wore the best clothes, and they ate at the best restaurants, and they got their names in the paper. Expensive dentists kept their teeth white and expensive doctors kept them feeling fit, and they got their suntans on expensive beaches. And this was their game, not his, and he was beating them at it. Because someday they'd all be dead, and he'd be alive.

"Except I guess I lose," he said. "You're gonna kill me."

"No."

"Then someone else'll do it for you. What's the matter, you don't want to get your hands dirty? That's why they hired you, 'cause I know those fucks wouldn't get their hands dirty, but what's your problem that you got to pass the buck? I'm ashamed of you, Matt. I thought you had more to you than that."

"Nobody's going to kill you, Jim."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"Believe what you want," I said. "In an hour or so I'm getting back on the plane with the other fellows."

"And?"

"And you're staying here."

"What are you trying to say?"

"You haven't been arrested," I said, "and you haven't been charged, and there won't be a trial. But sentence has been passed, and it's a life sentence with no possibility of parole. I hope you like this room, Jim. You're going to spend the rest of your life in it."

"You're just going to leave me here?"

"That's right."

"Shackled like this? I'll fucking starve."

I shook my head. "You'll have food and water. Red Hawk Island is the property of Avery Davis. He comes here once a year to fish for smallmouth bass. The rest of the time there's nobody here except for the family of Cree Indians who live here and maintain the place. One of them will bring your meals to you."

"What about keeping myself clean? What about using the toilet, for Christ's sake?"

"Behind you," I said. "A toilet and a washbasin. I'm afraid you'll be limited to sponge baths, and you won't be changing your clothes much. There's another jumpsuit like the one you're wearing and that's the extent of your wardrobe. See the snaps along the inseam? That's so you can get the suit on and off without unfastening the ankle cuff."

"Great."

I watched his eyes. I said, "I don't think it'll work, Jim."

"What are you talking about?"

"You think you'll be able to get out. I don't think you will."

"Whatever you say, Matt."

"The Cree family has worked for Davis for twenty years. I don't think you're going to be able to bribe them or con them. You can't slip the shackle or open it, and you can't get the metal plate out of the concrete slab."

"Then I guess I'm stuck here."

"I guess you are. You can vandalize your cell, but it won't do you any good. If you break the glass out of the window, it won't be replaced- and it can get pretty cold here. If you wreck the toilet you'll get to smell your own waste. If you find a way to start a fire, well, Davis has instructed his employees to let the place burn down around you. No one's greatly concerned about saving your life."

"Why not kill me?"

"Your fellow club members don't want your blood on their hands. But they don't want any more of their blood on your hands, either. There's no appeal from this sentence, Jim. No time off for good behavior. You stay here until you die. Then you'll wind up in an unmarked grave, and they'll start reading your name again at the annual dinners."

"You son of a bitch," he said.

I didn't say anything.

"You can't keep me caged like an animal," he said. "I'll get out."

"Maybe you will."

"Or I'll kill myself. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way."

"It won't be hard at all," I said. I took a matchbox from my pocket, tossed it to him. He picked it up from the bed and looked at it, puzzled. I told him to open it. He picked up the contents, held it between his thumb and forefinger.

"What's this?"

"A capsule," I said. "Courtesy of Dr. Kendall McGarry. He had it made up for you. It's cyanide."

"What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Just bite down on it and your troubles are over. Or if that doesn't appeal to you-"

I pointed to a corner of the room. He didn't see it at first. "Higher," I said, and he raised his eyes and saw the noose dangling from the ceiling.

"If you drag a chair over there and stand on it," I said, "it ought to be just the right height. Then kick the chair out of the way. It should do for you as well as the belt in the closet door did for Hal Gabriel."

"You bastard," he said.

I stood up. "There's no way out," I said. "That's the bottom line, and it's the only thing you really have to know. Sooner or later you'll probably try to trick the Cree guard, figuring you can knock him out or overpower him. But that won't do you any good. You can't force him to release you because he couldn't manage it if his life depended on it. He doesn't have a key. There is no key. The cuff's not locked around your ankle, it's welded. You'd need a torch or a laser to get through it, and there's no such thing on the island."

"There has to be a way."

"Well, you could chew your foot off," I said. "That's what a fox or a wolverine would do, but I don't know how well it works for them, or how far they get before they bleed to death. I don't think you've got the teeth for it. Failing that, you can try the rope or the capsule."

"I wouldn't give you the satisfaction."

"I wonder. Personally, I think you'll kill yourself. I don't think you'll be able to stay like this for too long, not with a quick exit that close to hand. But maybe I'm wrong. Hell, maybe you'll get what you've wanted all along. Maybe you'll outlive everybody. Maybe you'll be the last one left alive."

When I got back to the main house, Davis and Gruliow were having a drink. I looked at the bottle and the two glasses of amber whiskey and it seemed like a perfectly wonderful idea. It was a thought I chose not to entertain. The pilot was drinking coffee, and I poured myself a cup.

Well before sunset we were on the plane and in the air. I closed my eyes for a minute, and the next thing I knew Ray Gruliow was shaking me awake and we were on the ground again in Westchester.