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I'd been in the same room with Ray Gruliow a couple of times over the years, although we'd never been introduced. And I knew Lewis Hildebrand, my client.
But it seemed to me as though I could picture all of them readily enough, including the ones whose faces were wholly unfamiliar to me. As I read their names and reviewed their credit histories, images kept popping into my mind. I saw them walking behind power mowers over suburban lawns, I saw them dressed in suits, I watched them bend over to scoop up small children and hold them aloft. I pictured them on the golf course, then saw them having a drink in the clubhouse after they'd showered and changed, drinking whiskey and soda, say, in a tall frosted glass.
I could see them, in their well-tailored suits, leaving their houses at dawn, coming home at dusk. I could see them standing on platforms with their newspapers, waiting for the Long Island Rail Road or Metro North. I could see them striding purposefully along a midtown sidewalk, carrying brassbound attacheá cases, on their way to meetings.
I could picture them at the opera or the ballet, their wives finely dressed and bejeweled, themselves at once resplendent and slightly self-conscious in evening clothes. I could imagine them on cruise ships, in national parks, at backyard barbecues.
It was silly, because I didn't even know what they looked like. But I could see them.
"I'll give it another day or two," I told Elaine, "and then I'm going to call Lewis Hildebrand and tell him it's just a statistical anomaly. His group's ru
"You got all that from a batch of credit reports?"
"What I got," I said, "is a picture of fourteen very orderly lives. I'm not saying these men don't have a dark side. The odds are a couple of them drink too much, or gamble for high stakes, or do something they wouldn't want their neighbors to know about. Maybe this one slaps his wife around, maybe that one can't keep it in his pants. But there's a degree of stability in every one of their lives that just doesn't fit a serial murderer."
"If he's been doing it for this long," she said, "he's unusually disciplined."
"And patient, and well organized. No question about it. But there'd be chaos in his life. He'd be holding things together, but not without a lot of backing and filling, a lot of fresh starts and makeovers. I'd expect to see a lot of job changes, a lot of geographics. It's almost inconceivable that he'd have stayed married to the same person for a substantial period of time, for example."
"And have they all managed that?"
"No, there have been quite a few divorces. But the ones who've divorced show a consistent pattern of career stability. There's nobody in the whole group who looks at all like the kind of loose ca
"So it's not somebody in the group."
"And who could it be outside the group? Nobody else knows these people exist. I told you I went out and saw Fred Karp's widow. She was married to him for something like twenty-five years. She knew he had di
"She also told you she didn't think he could have killed himself."
"Well, the survivors always tell you that about suicides. If you go up in a tower and shoot twenty people, the neighbors tell the press you were a nice quiet boy. If you kill yourself, they say you had everything to live for."
"Then you think he did kill himself?"
"I think it's begi
"I thought you said the suicides could have been faked."
"Most suicides could have been faked," I said. "There are exceptions, like the poor son of a bitch who shot himself on live TV with the camera rolling."
"I'm glad I missed that one."
"But even if most suicides could have been faked," I went on, "that doesn't mean they are. Most of them are just what they look like. So are most accidents."
"You think the Warren Commission got it right?"
"Jesus, where did that come from?"
"Left field. I just wondered. Do you?"
"I think they're a lot closer to the truth than Oliver Stone. Why? You think I'm too quick to believe what I want to believe?"
"I didn't say that."
"Well, it's a possibility, whether you said it or not. It seems to me I've been working hard to prove that somebody really is knocking them off, and that I'm coming reluctantly to the conclusion that the true villain of the piece is our old friend Coincidence. But maybe that's what I wanted to conclude all along. I don't know."
"It just seems to me," she said, "that you're attaching an awful lot of significance to a good credit rating."
"It's not just that I'd be inclined to okay these guys for MasterCard. The whole lifestyle that goes with it, the whole-"
"I know. You look at the TRW reports and all you see is one big Norman Rockwell painting. They're the American Dream, aren't they?"
"I suppose so."
"And you feel excluded because you can't have that life, and even more excluded because you don't even want it. That's a big part of it, Matt, isn't it?"
The telephone rang.
"Saved by the bell," she said, gri
"Oh?"
I took the phone from her and said hello. He said, "Mr. Scudder, this is Ray Gruliow. I think we ought to get together, don't you?"
The voice was his, all right, rich and rasping, an instrument that he wielded like a rapier. I'd heard it last on the television news, when he was lecturing a gang of reporters on the insidious effect of institutionalized racism on his client, Warren Madison. Madison, as I recalled, had been so victimized by racism that he dealt dope, robbed and murdered other dope dealers, and shot six of the cops who showed up at his mother's house to arrest him.
"Maybe we should," I said.
"I've got a court appearance scheduled in the morning. How's the later part of the afternoon? Say, four o'clock?"
"Four is fine."
"Do you want to come over to my house? I'm on Commerce Street, if you know where that is."
"I know Commerce Street."
"Oh, of course you would. You were at the Sixth Precinct, weren't you? My house is number forty-nine, right across the street from the Cherry Lane Theater."
"I'll find it," I said. "Four o'clock? I'll see you then."
"I look forward to it," he said.
"Four o'clock tomorrow," I told Elaine, "and he looks forward to it. I wonder what the hell he wants."
"Maybe it's unrelated to what you're working on. Maybe he wants to hire you as an investigator."
"Oh, sure," I said. "He heard what a bang-up job I did nailing the Velcro Vaulter and he wants to sign me up for his team."
"Maybe he wants to confess."
"That's it," I said. "Hard-Way Ray Gruliow, with his house on Commerce Street and his twenty-grand lecture fees. He's been killing his old friends for the past twenty years, and he wants my help in turning himself in."