A Long Line of Dead Men

"If Adolf Hitler came back to earth," she said, "which God forbid, and if he needed a lawyer, he'd call Raymond Gruliow. And Gruliow would defend him." She shook her head. "I have to admit I thought he was a hero during the Vietnam War when his clients were draft resisters and radicals. Now they're all black anti-Semites and Arab terrorists and I want to send him a letter bomb. Fred didn't know Raymond Gruliow."

"He had dinner with him once a year."

"And never said a word? When Gruliow was running his mouth on the eleven o'clock news, wouldn't he at least once have said, 'He's a friend of mine' or 'Hey, I know the guy'? Wouldn't that be the natural thing to do?"

"I guess they kept it private."

She frowned. "This club wasn't a sex thing, was it?"

"No."

"Because I'd find that very hard to believe. I know the most unlikely people keep turning out to be gay, but I can't believe this was-"

"No."

"Or some sort of Boys' Night Out, with too much to drink and some girl jumping out of a cake. It doesn't sound like Fred."

"I don't think it was like that at all."

" 'Boyd Shipton.' The painter?" I nodded. "Now I know he was murdered several years ago, or am I confusing him with somebody else?"

I agreed that Shipton had been murdered, and told her that several other members had also been the victims of homicide. She asked which ones they were and I pointed out the names.

"No, I don't know any of them," she said. "Why would anyone want to kill these men? I don't understand."

Heading back to Manhattan, I wondered what I'd accomplished. I hadn't learned very much, and I'd left Felicia Karp wondering what sort of secret life her husband had led. If she could draw any comfort from the thought that he hadn't killed himself after all, it was very likely offset by the disquieting probability that he'd been murdered.

Maybe that was what led me to leave Nedrick Bayliss's widow undisturbed. A series of telephone calls to Atlanta, where he'd 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. He'd 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 he'd gone to Atlanta to meet with officers of a company he was interested in.

Again, no note, and no indication how he'd come by the unregistered revolver found at his side. "I don't know how it is up there," an Atlanta police officer told me, "but it's not the hardest thing in the world to find somebody who'll sell you a gun in this town." I told him it wasn't 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 he'd tried to write something and couldn't think of the right way to say it. Having given up on it, he called the desk instead and told the clerk they'd better send a bellman to room 1102. "I'm about to take my life," he announced, and hung up the phone.

The clerk wasn't sure whether he was in the middle of a tragedy or a practical joke. He rang Bayliss's 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 you'd expect to find it. Nothing to suggest he hadn't been alone when he did it. He hadn't locked his door with the chain, but he'd have wanted to make it easy for them to get in. He was considerate, after all; he'd 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 shouldn't be any harder than finding an unregistered gun. Then, when he's sitting down, say, looking at some papers you've handed him, and you're crouching next to him to point out something, you reach into your jacket pocket and come out with the gun and before he knows what's happening you've got the muzzle to his temple and you're 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 couldn't find any record of a test, but said that didn't prove anything. After all, he said, it all happened eighteen years ago, so it was a wonder that he'd been able to lay his hands on the file.

I could have called his widow.