A Long Line of Dead Men

"You bet your ass." He stood up, pushed through the crowd at the bar, and brought back a fresh gin and tonic for himself and another Coke for me. I tried to pay for the round but he waved me off. "Please," he said, "I'm enjoying myself. You know who drank here? O. Henry. You know, the writer. They're very proud of the fact, they don't let you forget it, but I have to say I love drinking in places like this that are older than God. You know McSorley's down in the East Village? 'We were here before you were born,' that's their motto. Nowadays their crowd is all college kids, Christ, the World Trade Center was there before they were born."

"And still is."

"Yeah, and no thanks to our Arab brothers." We talked about the recent bombing, and then he said, "About people getting tossed in front of trains, yeah, I do think it happens a lot. People acting on an impulse, they're stoned on something, or they're just nuts, they don't need drugs to go crazy. Easiest way in the world to kill someone and get away with it."

"But it would be a hard way to murder someone specific, wouldn't it?"

"You mean like somebody you got a reason to kill?" He thought about it. "You could tail him into the subway, but suppose he stays away from the edge of the platform? Crowded station, you'd have a few dozen people crammed between him and the tracks. Unless you and him were friends."

"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 gonna put me close to the edge of the platform, I wait until I can step past him on the other side. I want to take a chance, I'll go in a deli, buy a lottery ticket. I'll go by OTB, put two bucks on a horse. I love it down in the tunnels, but I don't take chances down there." He shook his head. "Not me. I seen too much."

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.