A Long Line of Dead Men

5

"God, it's such a guy thing," Elaine said. "Thirty-one grown men sitting around wooden tables eating meat and checking for chest pains. You can just about smell the testosterone, can't you?"

"I'm beginning to understand why they didn't tell their wives about it."

"I'm not putting it down," she insisted. "I'm just pointing out how intrinsically masculine the whole thing is. Keeping it all a secret, only seeing each other once a year, talking solemnly about Important Subjects. Can you imagine the same club composed of women?"

"It would drive the restaurant crazy," I said. "Thirty-one separate checks."

"One check, but we'll make sure it gets split fairly. 'Let's see, Mary Beth had the apple pie á la mode, so she owes an extra dollar, and Rosalie, you had the Roquefort dressing, which is an additional seventy-five cents.' Why do they do that, anyway?"

"Splitchecks item by item? I've often wondered."

"No, charge extra for a tablespoon of Roquefort. When you're paying twenty or thirty dollars for a meal it ought to include whatever salad dressing you want. Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because I find you fascinating."

"After all these years?"

"It's probably abnormal," I said, "but I can't help it."

It had been late afternoon by the time I left the Addison Club. I walked home and took a shower, then sat down and went over my notes. She'd called around six to say she wouldn't be getting home for dinner. "I've got an artist coming at seven to show me his slides," she said, "and I've got my class tonight, unless you want me to skip it."

"Don't do that."

"There's some leftover Chinese in the fridge, but you'd probably rather go out. Don't throw out the leftovers, I'll have them when I get home."

"I've got a better idea," I said. "I want to get to a meeting. You go to your class, and meet me afterward at Paris Green."

"Deal."

I went to the 8:30 meeting at St. Paul's, then walked down Ninth Avenue and got to Paris Green around a quarter after ten. Elaine was on a stool at the bar, chatting with Gary and nursing a tall glass of cranberry juice and seltzer. I went to collect her and he laid a hand on my arm.

"Thank God you're here," he said archly. "That's her third one of those, and you know how she gets."

Bryce gave us a window table, and over dinner she told me about the artist who'd come around earlier, a West Indian black who was the superintendent of a small apartment house in Murray Hill and a self-taught painter.

"He does these village scenes in oil on masonite," she said, "and they have a nice folk-art look to them, but they left me underwhelmed. Maybe I've seen too much of that kind of thing. Or maybe he has, because that's the feeling I got, that his source of inspiration wasn't his own childhood memories as much as it was the work of other artists he's been exposed to." She made a face. "But that's New York, isn't it? He's never taken a class or sold a painting, but he knows to bring slides. Who ever heard of a folk artist with slides? I bet you don't get that crap in Appalachia."

"Don't be so sure."

"You're probably right. Anyway, I told him I'd keep his name on file. In other words, don't call us. I don't know, maybe he's the long-lost bastard son of Grandma Moses and Howard Finster, and I just blew the chance of a lifetime. But I have to go with my instincts, don't you think?"

They had served her well over the years. When we met I was a cop with a brand-new gold shield in my pocket and a wife and two sons in Syosset, and she was a young call girl, bright and funny and beautiful. We made each other happy for a few years, and then I drank my way out of my marriage and the police department and we pretty much lost track of each other. She went on doing what she'd been doing, saving her money and investing in real estate, keeping fit at the health club, stretching her mind in night school.

A couple of years ago circumstances threw us together again, and what we'd had was still there, stronger than ever and richer for the years we'd lived through. At first she went on seeing clients and we both pretended that was okay, but of course it wasn't, and eventually I bit the bullet and said so and she admitted she'd already put herself out of business.

We kept inching closer and closer to marriage. Last April she'd sold her old place on East Fiftieth and picked out an apartment in the Parc Vendôme and we'd moved in together. It was her money that bought the place and I'd refused to let her put my name on the deed.

I paid the monthly maintenance on the apartment and picked up the checks when we went out to dinner. She covered the household expenses. Eventually we would put all our money together, but we hadn't gotten around to that yet.

Eventually we would get married, too, and I wasn't sure why it was taking us so long. We kept not quite setting a date. We kept letting it slide.

Meanwhile, she had opened a gallery. First she'd gone to work at one on Madison Avenue with the intention of learning the business. She had an argument with the woman who ran the place and quit after two months, then got a similar job downtown on Spring Street. She didn't much care for the artwork in either establishment; the photo-realists at the uptown gallery struck her as sterile, while she saw the commercial can-vases at the SoHo gallery as clicheád and cloying, a high-ticket equivalent of Holiday Inn seascapes and bullfighters.

More to the point, she found the business itself unpleasant, the snobbery, the petty jealousies, the relentless courting of investors and corporate collectors. "I thought I quit prostitution," she said one night, "and here I am pimping for a bunch of bad painters. I don't get it." She went in the following morning and gave notice.

What she wanted, she decided, was a sort of cross between a gallery and a curiosity shop. She'd stock it with things she liked, and she'd try to sell them to people who were looking for something to hang on the wall, or place on the coffee table. She had a good eye, everyone told her that, and she'd taken more courses over the years at Hunter and NYU and the New School than your average art historian, so why shouldn't she take her best shot?

It turned out to be easy to get started. There were a lot of vacant storefronts in the neighborhood that season, and she checked them all out and charmed the owner of a building on Ninth and Fifty-fifth into giving her a good lease at a reasonable rent. Over the years she'd packed a locker in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse with things she'd bought and tired of; the two of us went through it and filled the back of a borrowed station wagon with prints and canvases, and that gave her enough stock to open.

Toward the end of her first month of operation she paid a second visit to the Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art and came back wide-eyed. "It's an exalting experience," she said, "even more than the first time, and I was completely blown away, but you know what? I realized something. Some of those early paintings, the portraits and still lifes. If you take them entirely out of context, and if you forget that they happened to be painted by a genius, you'd think you were looking at something out of a thrift shop."

"I see what you mean," I said, "but isn't that a little like looking at a Jackson Pollock and saying, 'My kid could do this'?"

"No," she said. "Because I'm not knocking Matisse. I'm putting in a word for the anonymous unheralded amateur."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean context is everything," she said.

The next day she beeped TJ and hired him to mind the store while she hit every thrift shop she could get to. By the end of the week she had covered most of Manhattan, sorting through hundreds and hundreds of paintings and buying almost thirty, at an average price of $8.75. She lined them up and asked me what I thought. I told her I didn't think Matisse had anything to worry about.

"I think they're great," she insisted. "They're not necessarily good, but they're great."

She picked out her six favorites and had them framed in simple gallery-style black frames. She sold two the first week, one for $300 and one for $450. "See?" she said, triumphant. "Stuff 'em in a bin at the Salvation Army at ten bucks apiece and they're thrift-shop art that nobody looks at twice. Treat them with respect and price them at three to five hundred and they're folk art, and people think they're a steal. I had a woman in just before closing who fell in love with the desert sunset. 'But this looks like paint-by-number,' she said. 'That's just what it is,' I told her. 'It was the artist's favorite medium. He worked only with paint-by-number.' What do you bet she comes back tomorrow and buys it?"

It was getting on for midnight when we left Paris Green and walked home on Ninth Avenue. There was rain forecast but you never would have known it. The air was cool and dry, and there was a breeze off the Hudson.

"Hildebrand gave me a check," I told her. "I'll deposit it in the morning."

"Unless you want to use the ATM."

"No, I want to go straight home," I said. "I'm a little tired. And I want to go over my notes some more before I go to sleep."

"Do you really think-"

"- that somebody's been knocking them off like clay pigeons? I'm not supposed to know yet. I was hired to find out, not to make up my mind in advance."

"So you're keeping an open mind."

"Not entirely," I admitted. "It's hard for me to get away from the numbers. There have been too many deaths. There has to be an explanation. All I have to do is find it."

We stood at a corner, waiting for the light to change. She said, "Why would anyone want to do something like that?"

"I don't know."

"If they were all in college together, and they raped some girl at a drunken fraternity party, and now her brother's getting revenge."

"That's pretty good," I said.

"Or it's her son, and his mother died in childbirth, so he wants vengeance, but he also has to find out which of the men is his father. How does that sound?"

"Like a Movie of the Week."

"I guess the killer would have to be one of the survivors, huh?"

"Well, I don't think it's one of the victims."

"I mean as opposed to-"

"- somebody from outside," I said. "That's Hildebrand's fear, of course. That's why he's had to keep his suspicions to himself. He would have liked to voice his concern to a fellow member, but suppose he picked the wrong one to confide in? According to him, nobody on the outside even knows that the club exists."

"You seem dubious."

"Well, they've been doing this for thirty-two years. Do you really think nobody let something slip in all that time?" I shrugged. "Still, the fourteen surviving members would have to be the chief suspects."

"But why on earth would one of them want to kill the others?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, if you got sick of the whole thing, couldn't you just quit? Didn't anybody ever resign, incidentally?"

"After two or three years, Homer Champney read the group a letter from one of the members who'd written to explain that he no longer wanted to participate. He'd relocated in California and didn't see the point in flying three thousand miles each way for a steak dinner. He had written to suggest that they might want to replace him. They all agreed with Champney that it was against the spirit of the thing to take in any replacement members, and somebody- Hildebrand thinks it would have been Champney- was going to write a letter designed to draw him back into the fold."

"What happened?"

"I guess the letter got written, and it seems to have worked. A year later the would-be dropout was back at the dinner table."

"Just in time for some fatted calf," she said. "Well, there you go. They wouldn't let him leave, so he was quietly smoldering with resentment. He's been getting back at them ever since, killing them off one man at a time."

"By God," I said. "I think you've cracked the case wide open."

"No, huh?"

"I forget the guy's name, but I've got it written down. He never did miss another meeting, and if he had a resentment he kept it hidden remarkably well. Wayne Fletcher, that was his name. Hildebrand says Fletcher used to joke about the time he tried to quit, that it would have been easier to resign from the Mafia."

"Used to?"

"He died eight or nine years ago, if I remember correctly. I don't remember the circumstances, but it's in my notes. It's hard to keep it all straight. So many men, and so many of them dead."

"It's so sad," she said. "Don't you think it's sad?"

"Yes."

"Even if nobody's killing anybody, even if all the deaths are perfectly natural, there's something absolutely heartbreaking about the idea of this group just dwindling away. I suppose it's life, but that makes life a pretty sad business."

"Well," I said, "who ever said it wasn't?"

On the way past the desk we traded greetings with the concierge. We had our individual names on the mailbox and the building's directory, but as far as the staff was concerned we were Mr. and Mrs. Scudder.

ELAINE MARDELL, her shop sign says.

Upstairs, she made coffee while I went over my notes. Wayne Fletcher had died six years ago, not eight or nine, of complications arising from coronary-bypass surgery. I told Elaine as much when she came into the living room with her tea and my coffee.

"It may have been borderline malpractice," I said, "according to Hildebrand, but it's a real stretch to call it murder."

"That's something. The poor man didn't sign his own death warrant when he let himself be talked into rejoining the group."

"Unless someone visited him in the hospital," I went on, "and tampered with his IV."

"I didn't even think of that," she said. "Honey, are you going to be able to check out all of this on your own? It sounds as though you'll have to go in a dozen different directions at once. And how much help can TJ be?"

TJ is a black teenager with no fixed address beyond his beeper number. "He's resourceful," I reminded Elaine.

"So he says," she said, "and so he is, but somehow I can't see him interviewing middle-aged businessmen at the Addison Club."

"He can do some legwork for me. As far as the rest of it goes, I won't have to go over all seventeen deaths with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers. All I have to do is find out for certain if there's a pattern of serial murder operating, and be able to support that argument with enough evidence so I can turn it over to the cops and be sure they'll give it their undivided attention. If I can bring that off, the case will get the benefit of a full-scale official investigation without starting out as a media circus."

"God, once the press gets hold of it-"

"I know."

"Can you imagine what they'd do with it on Inside Edition or Hard Copy? The club would come off sounding like a cult of moon worshipers."

"I know."

"And Boyd Shipton was a member. That wouldn't exactly discourage their interest."

"No, he'd still be news. And he wasn't the only prominent member, either. Ray Gruliow is guaranteed front-page news. And Avery Davis is a member."

"The real estate developer?"

"Uh-huh. And two of the dead men were writers, and one of them had some plays produced." I looked at my notes. "Gerard Billings," I said.

"He was a playwright?"

"No, that was Tom Cloonan. Billings is a broadcaster, he does the weather report on Channel Nine."

"Oh, Gerry Billings, with the bow ties. Gosh, maybe you can get his autograph."

"I'm just saying he's in the public eye."

"A mote in the public eye," she said, "but I see what you mean." She fell silent, and I went back to sifting my notes. After a few minutes she said, "Why?"

"Huh?"

"It just struck me. All these deaths over all those years. It's not like a disgruntled postal employee showing up on the job with an AK-47. Whoever is doing this must have a reason."

"You'd think so."

"Is there money in it?"

"So far there's twenty-five hundred in it for me. If Hildebrand's check is good, and if I can remember to deposit it."

"I meant for the killer."

"I figured you did. Well, if he gets a good agent maybe he'll do all right when they make the miniseries. But if he gets away with it there won't be a miniseries, so where does that leave him?"

"High and dry. Don't you get something for being the last man alive?"

"You get to start the next chapter," I said. "You get the right to read the names of the dead."

"You're sure they don't all leave their money to each other?"

"Positive."

"They don't each kick in a thousand dollars to start things off, and the money got invested in a small upstate corporation that changed its name to Xerox? No, huh?"

"I'm afraid not."

"And the whole club isn't some kind of a tom-tom?"

"Huh?"

"Wrong word," she said. "A tom-tom's a drum. Dammit, what's the word I want?"

"Where are you going?"

"To look it up in the dictionary."

"How can you look it up," I wondered, "if you don't know what it is?"

She didn't answer, and I drank the rest of my coffee and went back to my notes. "Ha!" she said, a few minutes later, and I looked up. "Tontine," she said. "That's the word. It's an eponym."

"Is that a fact."

She gave me a look. "That means it was named for somebody. Lorenzo Tonti, to be specific. He was a Neapolitan banker who thought it up back in the seventeenth century."

"Thought what up?"

"The tontine, although I don't suppose he called it that. It was a sort of a cross between life insurance and a lottery. You signed up a batch of subscribers and they each put up a sum of money into a common fund."

"And it was winner take all?"

"Not necessarily. Sometimes it was set up so that the funds were distributed when the survivors were down to five or ten percent of the original number. Others, smaller ones, stayed locked up until there was only one person left alive. People would be enrolled by their parents in early childhood, and if the investments did well they could wind up looking at a fortune. But they couldn't collect it unless they outlived the other participants."

"You got all this from the dictionary?"

"I got the word from the dictionary," she said, "so I'd know what to look up in the encyclopedia. I knew the word, I just couldn't think of it. Fifteen or twenty years ago I spent a weekend at an inn in the Berkshires. There was this historical novel on the subject, I think it was even called The Tontine, and somebody had left a copy there and I picked it up. I was only a third of the way through it when it was time to leave, so I stuck it in my bag."

"I think God'll forgive you for that."

"He's already punished me. I read it all the way through, and do you know what it said on the bottom of the last page?"

" 'Then she awoke and found it had all been a horrible dream.' "

"Worse than that. It said, 'End of Volume One.' "

"And you were never able to find Volume Two."

"Never. Not that I made searching for it my life's work. But I would have liked to know how it all came out. There were times over the years when that's what kept me from jumping out the window. I'm not talking about the book, I'm talking about life. Wanting to know how it all comes out."

I said, "You really look beautiful tonight."

"Why, thank you," she said. "What brought that on?"

"I was just struck by it. Watching the play of emotions on your face. You're a beautiful woman, but sometimes it all shows- the strength, the softness, everything."

"You old bear," she said, and sat down on the couch next to me. "Keep saying sweet things like that and I've got a pretty good idea how tonight's going to turn out."

"So have I."

"Oh? Give me a kiss, then, and we'll see if you're right."

Afterward, as we were lying side by side, she said, "You know, when I was saying earlier that the club was a real guy thing, I wasn't just making war-between-the-sexes jokes. It's very much a male province, getting together to work out a relationship with mortality. You boys like to look at the big picture."

"And girls just want to have fun?"

"And pick out drapes," she said, "and exchange recipes, and talk about men."

"And shoes."

"Well, shoes are important. You're an old bear. What do you know about shoes?"

"Precious little."

"Exactly." She yawned. "I'm making it sound as though women's concerns are trivial, and I don't think that for a minute. But I do believe we take shorter views. Can you think of a single female philosopher? Because I can't."

"I wonder why that is."

"It's probably biological, or anthropological, anyway. When you guys finished hunting and gathering, you could sit around the campfire and think long thoughts. Women didn't have time for that. We had to be more centered on home and hearth." She yawned again. "I could formulate a theory," she said, "but I'm one of those practical broads, and I'm going to sleep. You work it out, okay?"

I don't know that I worked anything out, but a few minutes later I said, "What about Hannah Arendt? And Susan Sontag? Wouldn't you call them philosophers?"

I didn't get an answer. Ms. Practicality was sleeping.