A Long Line of Dead Men

by Lawrence Block

Page 11

 

  Maybe that was what led me to leave Nedrick Baylisss widow undisturbed. A series of telephone calls to Atlanta, where hed died in a room at the downtown Marriott of a single gunshot wound to the head, left me feeling I knew as much as I had to know about him and his death. Hed been a stock analyst, employed by a Wall Street firm, commuting to work from a home in Hastingson-Hudson. His area of specialization was the textiles industry, and hed gone to Atlanta to meet with officers of a company he was interested in.

  Again, no note, and no indication how hed come by the unregistered revolver found at his side. "I dont know how it is up there," an Atlanta police officer told me, "but its not the hardest thing in the world to find somebody wholl sell you a gun in this town. " I told him it wasnt that hard in New York, either.

  Instead of a note there was a sheet of hotel stationery in the middle of the desk, with a pen uncapped next to it, as if hed tried to write something and couldnt think of the right way to say it. Having given up on it, he called the desk instead and told the clerk theyd better send a bellman to room 1102. "Im about to take my life," he announced, and hung up the phone.

  The clerk wasnt sure whether he was in the middle of a tragedy or a practical joke. He rang Baylisss room and no one answered the phone. He was trying to think what to do when someone else called to report a gunshot.

  It certainly looked like a suicide. Bayliss was slumped in a chair, a bullet in the temple, the gun on the floor right where youd expect to find it. Nothing to suggest he hadnt been alone when he did it. He hadnt locked his door with the chain, but hed have wanted to make it easy for them to get in. He was considerate, after all; hed proved that when he called the desk to let them know what he was about to do.

  How hard would it have been to stage it?

  You get Ned Bayliss to let you into his room. Finding a pretext shouldnt be any harder than finding an unregistered gun. Then, when hes sitting down, say, looking at some papers youve handed him, and youre crouching next to him to point out something, you reach into your jacket pocket and come out with the gun and before he knows whats happening youve got the muzzle to his temple and youre giving the trigger a squeeze.

  Then you wipe your prints from the gun, press it into his hand, and let it drop to the carpet. You arrange the hotel letterhead and the pen on the desk, pick up the phone, and announce your impending death. Back in your own room, you make another call to report a gunshot.

  Easy enough.

  A paraffin test would very likely suggest that the dead man had not fired a gun recently, but how much lab work would the police allot to an open-and-shut suicide? The officer I talked to couldnt find any record of a test, but said that didnt prove anything. After all, he said, it all happened eighteen years ago, so it was a wonder that hed been able to lay his hands on the file.

  I could have called his widow.

  I took the trouble to trace her, which wasnt difficult, given that she hadnt been trying to disappear. She had remarried, divorced, and been married a third time, and now she was living in Niles, Michigan, and I suppose I could have called her and asked her if her first husband, Ned Bayliss, had been despondent before his fateful trip to Atlanta. Was he drinking a lot, maam? Did he have any kind of a drug history?

  I decided to let her be.

  Id called Atlanta from my room in the Northwestern, and when I hung up the phone for the day something kept me right there in the little room. I pulled a chair over to the window and looked out at the city.

  I dont know how long I sat there. I started off thinking about the case I was working on, the club of thirty-one. I thought how their ranks had thinned over the past three decades, and before I knew it I was thinking of my own life over the same span of years, and the awful toll those years had taken. I thought of the people Id lost, some to death, some because our lives had slipped off in different directions. My ex-wife, Anita, long since remarried. The last time Id spoken to her was to offer condolences for her mothers death. The last time Id seen her- I couldnt remember the last time Id seen her.

  My sons, Michael and Andrew, both of them grown, both of them strangers to me. Michael was living in northern California, a sales rep for a company that supplied components to manufacturers of computers. In the four years since he graduated from college Id spoken to him ten times at the outside. Two years ago he got married to a girl named June, and hed sent me their wedding picture. She is Chinese, very short and slender, her expression in the photograph utterly serious. Mike started putting on weight in college, and now he looks like a bluff, hearty salesman, fat and jolly, posed incongruously next to this inscrutable daughter of the Orient.

  "Well have to get together," he says when we speak on the phone. "Next time I get to New York Ill let you know. Well have dinner, maybe catch a Knicks game. "

  "Maybe I could get out to the Coast," I suggested the last time I talked to him. There was just the slightest pause, and then he was quick to assure me that would be great, really great, but right now wasnt a good time. A very busy time at work these days, and he was traveling a lot, and-

  He and June live in a condominium near San Jose. I have spoken to her on the phone, this daughter-in-law whom I have never met. Soon I suppose theyll start a family, and then Ill have grandchildren Ive never met.

  And Andy? The last time I heard from him he was in Seattle, and talking about heading on up to Vancouver. It sounded as though he was calling from a bar, and his voice was thickened with drink. He doesnt call often, and when he does its always from someplace new, and he always sounds as though hes been drinking. "Im having fun," he told me. "One of these days I guess Ill settle down, but in the meantime Im gathering no moss. "

  Fifty-five years old, and what moss had I gathered? What had I done with those years? And what had they done to me?

  And how many did I have left? And, when theyd slipped away like the rest, what would I have to show for them? What did anybody ever have to show for the years that were gone?

  Theres a liquor store right across the street. From where I sat I could see the customers enter and leave. As I watched them, it came to me that I could look up the stores number in the phone book and have them send up a bottle.

  That was as far as I allowed the thought to go. Sometimes Ill let myself consider what type of liquor Id order, and what brand. This time I shook the thought off early on and breathed deeply several times, willing myself to let it go.

  Then I reached for the phone and dialed a number I didnt have to look up.

  It rang twice, three times. I had my finger poised to break the connection, not wanting to talk to a machine, but then she picked up.

  "This is Matt," I said.

  She said, "Thats funny. I was just this minute thinking of you. "

  "And I of you. Would you like company?"

  "Would I?" She took a moment to consider the question. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I would. "

  8

  When I first moved to my hotel, Jimmy Armstrong had a saloon right around the corner on Ninth Avenue, and that was where I spent most of my waking hours. After I got sober Jimmy lost his lease and reopened a long block west, at the corner of Tenth and Fifty-seventh. In AA they tell you to avoid the people and places and things that might make you want to drink, and for several years I stayed away from Jimmys joint. These days I get there now and then. Elaine likes the place on Sunday afternoons, when they have chamber music, and its always been a good choice for a late supper.

  I walked west on Fifty-seventh, but instead of paying a call on Jimmy I went to the high-rise apartment building diagonally across the street. The doorman had been told I was coming; when I gave him my name he said I was expected and pointed to the elevator. I rode up to the twenty-eighth floor and her door opened even as I knocked on it.

  "I really was," she said. "Thinking of you just before you called. You look tired. Are you all right?"

  "Im fine. "

  "Its probably the humidity. This is go
ing to be some summer if its like this in June. I just put the air on. This place cools off pretty quickly. "

  "How are you, Lisa?"

  She turned aside. "Im all right," she said. "Do you want some coffee? Or would you rather have something cold? Theres Pepsi, theres iced tea…"

  "No, thanks. "

  She spun around to face me. She said, "Im glad youre here, but I dont think I want to do anything. Is that all right?"

  "Of course. "

  "We could sit and talk. "

  "Whatever you say. "

  She walked to the window. Her apartment faces west, and there are no tall buildings to block her view. I moved up behind her and watched a couple of sailboats on the Hudson.

  She was wearing perfume, the musky scent she always wore.

  She said, "Oh, who am I kidding?"

  She turned to face me once again. I circled her waist and linked my hands, and she leaned back and looked up at me. Her forehead was shining and there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. "Oh!" she said, as if something had startled her, and I drew her close and kissed her, and at first she trembled in my arms and then she threw her own arms around me and we clung together. I felt her body against me, I felt her breasts, I felt the heat of her loins.

  I kissed her mouth. I kissed her throat and breathed in her scent.

  "Oh!" she cried.

  We went to the bedroom and got our clothes off, interrupting the process to kiss, to clutch each other. We fell together onto the bed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh, oh…"

  Her name was Lisa Holtzmann, and it would not be inaccurate to describe her as young enough to be my daughter, although she had in fact been born almost ten years before my elder son. When I first met her shed been married to a lawyer named Glenn Holtzmann, and pregnant with his child. She lost the baby early in the third trimester, and not long after that shed lost her husband; hed been shot to death while using a pay phone just a couple of blocks away on Eleventh Avenue.

  Id wound up with two clients, one of them the dead mans widow, the other the brother of the man accused of shooting him. I dont know that I did either of them a world of good. The alleged killer, one of the neighborhood street crazies, wound up getting stabbed to death on Rikers Island by someone no saner than himself. The widow Holtzmann wound up in bed with me.

  That it happened does not strike me as extraordinary. Traditionally, widows have been regarded as vulnerable to seduction, and as more than ordinarily seductive themselves. My role in Lisas personal drama, the knight in tarnished armor riding to her rescue, did nothing to hinder our falling into bed together. While I was deeply in love with and committed to Elaine, and by no means uncomfortable with that commitment, there is something in the male chromosomal makeup that renders a new woman alluring simply because she is new.

  There had been no other women for me since Elaine and I had found each other again, but I suppose it was inevitable that there would be someone sooner or later. The surprise was that the affair wouldnt quit. It was like the Energizer rabbit. It kept going and going and going…

  You didnt need a doctorate in psychology to figure out what was going on. I was obviously a father figure to her, and only the least bit more available than the genuine article. For several years back home in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, he had come to her bed at night. He had thrilled her with his fingers and his mouth, teaching her to gasp out her pleasure like a lady, softly, so the sounds would not carry beyond her bedroom door. He taught her, too, to please him, and by the time she went off to college she had become skilled beyond her years.