'I understand it was a little more formal than that.'
'It's possible. I know he never missed a dinner. One year we had tickets donated at the school, the Manhattan Light Opera, and Fred told me I'd have to find someone else to go with me. And he loved Gilbert and Sullivan, but he regarded his annual dinner as sacrosanct. What does the dinner have to do with his death? He died in December. The dinner was always sometime in April or May.'
'The first Thursday in May.'
'That's right, it was a set day every year. I'd forgotten. So?'
Was there any reason not to tell her? I said, 'There have been a lot of deaths in the group over the years, more than you'd expect. Several of them were suicides.'
'How many?'
'Three or four.'
'Well, which is it? Three or four?'
'Three definite, one possible.'
'I see. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap. Do you want more coffee?' I said I was fine. 'Three or four suicides out of how many members?'
'Thirty-one.'
'There's a suicide virus, I've heard it called. There'll be some perfectly nice middle-class high school in Ohio or Wisconsin, and they'll have an absolute rash of suicides. But that's teenagers, not middle-aged men. Were these suicides all grouped together?'
'They were spaced over a period of several years.'
'Well, ten to fifteen percent, that's a high suicide rate, but it doesn't seem…' Her words trailed off and I watched her eyes. I could almost see the wheels turning as her mind sorted the data. She was not a pretty woman by any means but she had a good, quick mind and there was something quite attractive about her intelligence.
She said, 'You mentioned a high death rate overall. How many deaths in all?'
'Seventeen.'
'Of thirty-one.'
'Yes.'
'And they're all Fred's age? They must be if they were all in college together.'
'Approximately the same age, yes.'
'You think someone's killing them.'
'I'm investigating the possibility. I don't know what I think.'
'Of course you do.'
I shook my head. 'It's a little too early for me to have an opinion.'
'But you think it's possible.'
'Yes.'
She turned to look at the cat clock. 'Of course I'd rather believe that,' she said. 'I've never completely come to terms with his suicide. But it's awful to think of someone, God, killing him. How was it done, I wonder? I suppose the killer would have knocked him out, then written the suicide note on the computer and opened the window and, and, and…' She made a visible effort and got hold of herself. 'If he was unconscious when it happened,' she said, 'he wouldn't have suffered greatly.'
'No.'
'But I have,' she said softly, and was silent for a long moment. Then she looked up at me and said, 'Why would anybody want to kill a bunch of fellows who went to Brooklyn College together thirty-five years ago? A group of Jewish guys in their fifties. Why?'
'Only a few of them were Jewish.'
'Oh?'
'And they weren't in college together.'
'Are you sure? Fred said-'
I told her a little about the club. She wanted to know who the other members were, and I found a page in my notebook where I'd listed all thirty-one members, living and dead, in alphabetical order. She said, 'Well, here's a name that pops out. Philip Kalish. He was Jewish, and Fred knew him in college, if it's the same Phil Kalish. But he died, didn't he? A long time ago.'
'In an auto accident,' I said. 'He was the first of the group to die.'
'Raymond Gruliow. There's another name I recognize, if it's the same Raymond Gruliow, and it would almost have to be, wouldn't it? The lawyer?'
'Yes.'
'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
