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"What do you mean?"
"What was his name again? Ian? 'Hey, Ian, good to see you. How's it goin', old buddy?' And you throw your arm around him, and you walk this way and you walk that way, and you just manage to be standing right at the edge of the platform when the train's coming. If he thinks you're his friend, he won't draw away, he won't get suspicious, and the next thing he knows he's under the wheels. You think that's what happened?"
"No idea."
"Fifteen years later and somebody's starting to wonder? Let me know how it comes out, huh? If it comes out." I said I would. "What I do, I take the subway all the time. I'll be honest with you, I love the subway, I think it's a wonderful and exciting urban rail system. But I am very careful down there. I see a guy who don't look right, I don't let myself be between him and the edge. I got to walk past somebody and it's go
7
Hal Gabriel had lived on West End Avenue at Ninety-second Street. At the Two-four station house on West One Hundreth I sat across a desk from a young police officer named Michael Selig. He was still in his twenties and already losing his hair, and he had the anxious look of the prematurely bald. "This all ought to be on computer," he said of Gabriel's file. "We're working our way back, getting our old files copied, but it takes forever."
Gabriel, forty-six, married but separated from his wife, had been found hanging in his eighth-floor apartment on a weekday afternoon in October 1981. He had evidently stood on a chair, looped a leather belt around his neck, wedged the tongue of the belt between the top of his closet door and the doorjamb, and kicked the chair over.
"High blood alcohol," Selig said.
"No note."
"They don't always leave a note, do they? Especially when they get drunk and start feeling sorry for themselves. Look at this- he estimates death as having occurred five to seven days before discovery of the body. Must have been ripe, huh?"
"That's why they broke in."
"Didn't have to, it says here the super had a key. Woman across the hall noticed the smell."
She'd also told the investigating officers that Gabriel had seemed despondent since his wife's departure several years earlier, that his only visitors had been delivery boys from the liquor store and the Chinese restaurant. He'd worked up until two months of his death, managing a film lab in the West Forties, but had been out of work since then.
"Most likely drank himself out of the job," Selig offered.
His wife, apprised of his death, said she hadn't seen Gabriel since they'd signed their separation agreement in June of 1980. She described her late husband as a sad and lonely man, and seemed saddened herself if not terribly surprised by his death.
Fred Karp had left a note. He'd tapped it out on his computer screen, printed out two copies, left one on his desk and tucked the other, neatly folded, into his shirt pocket. I'm sorry, it read. I can't take it anymore. Please forgive me. Then he'd opened the window of his fifteenth-floor office and stepped out.
That's tough to do in the newer buildings, where you generally can't open the windows. Often they aren't windows at all, just glass walls. At an AA meeting I once heard an architect talk about how he'd had to reassure office workers who had a phobic response to glass walls. He used to run full speed and crash headlong into the wall to demonstrate its solidity. "People got the point," he said, "but I felt pretty stupid the time I broke my collarbone."
You could open the windows in Karp's building. It was a twenty-two-story prewar office building on Lexington Avenue, just a couple of blocks north of Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building. Karp was an importer, dealing primarily in goods from Singapore and Indonesia. He'd sent his secretary home at five, called his wife to tell her he'd be working late. A deli on Third Avenue delivered two sandwiches and a container of coffee around seven. At ten after nine he went out the window, and it was easy to pinpoint the time of death because there were people on the street who saw him land. One of them collapsed, and was treated by paramedics at the scene.
This had happened just three years ago, and the police of-ficer I spoke to was still attached to the Seventeenth Precinct and had no difficulty remembering the incident. "Hell of a mess," he said, "and a hell of a way to do it. Suppose you change your mind halfway down. 'Hey. I take it back! I was only kidding!' Yeah, right, lots of luck."
There was no question in his mind that it was suicide. There was the note, on Karp's desk and in his pocket and right up there on the still-glowing screen of the computer monitor. And there were no injuries inconsistent with a fall from a great height, although he agreed that the fall itself would have erased evidence of an earlier blow to the head, or indeed of anything less obvious than a gunshot wound.
I said, "I wish the note was handwritten. Who on earth types out a suicide note on a computer?"
"It's a new world," he said. "You get used to a computer, you want to use it for everything. Pay your bills, balance your checkbook, keep your appointments straight. Here's a guy ran his whole business by computer. He wants to get the note right, he can tinker with it, phrase it just the way he wants it. Then he can print out all the copies he wants with one keystroke, plus he can save it on his hard drive." He was around thirty, part of the computer generation himself, and he was eager to tell me how the computers in the station house speeded up the paperwork and took a lot of the unpleasantness out of it. "Computers are great," he said. "But they spoil you. The trouble with the rest of life is there's no UNDO key."
I went to Karp's office, now occupied by an attorney specializing in patents, a man about my age with a drinker's complexion and the sour smell of failure clinging to him. He'd had the office for less than two years and knew nothing of its history. He let me look out his window, although I don't know what either of us thought I might see out there. I didn't tell him a previous tenant had taken a dive from that very window. I didn't want to give him any ideas.
Karp's widow, Felicia, lived in Forest Hills and taught math in a middle school in South Ozone Park. I phoned her at home around di
I told her it was in co
"I never thought it was," she said forcefully. "But what else could it be? Listen, do you want to come to the house? I have two hours of tutoring to do tonight, but I could meet you tomorrow. Say four-thirty?"
She was waiting for me in the upper flat of a semidetached two-family house on Stafford Avenue, just a few blocks from where they used to play the te
"All right."
"It never made sense to me that he would kill himself. They said he was having problems with his business. Well, he was in that business for over twenty years, and you always have problems. He never had trouble making a living. And we had two incomes, and we were never extravagant. Look where we live."