Artie couldn’t believe it. Connie was lecturing him, as out of character as if she’d suddenly started combing her hair with her fingers. It wasn’t just that the ground had suddenly shifted; he wasn’t even sure he was standing on it anymore.
“China restricts births—”
“Come off it, Banks—the only Social Security for nine-tenths of the people in this world is their own kids. The more they have, the more to take care of them in their old age.”
Connie wasn’t looking at him; she was staring at somebody in the newsroom. But when Artie tried to follow her eyes, he couldn’t figure out who she was looking at.
“They don’t give you awards for playing it safe,” she said harshly. “Or promotions, either.”
Why the hell had he thought this assignment would be fun and games if he was working with Connie? Artie started to stuff his notes back into his briefcase, then hesitated. Connie couldn’t be a complete bitch.
“So what’s your hook? How you going to tease it?”
Connie’s eyes were muddy and unfocused, as if she were staring at him from the bottom of a pool of dirty water. She was on something, she had to be. Had she ever been to Betty Ford? He couldn’t remember.
“Imagine a lily pond … with one lily pad in it. The next day there are two lily pads and the day after that, four. In thirty days the pond is completely covered with lily pads and the rest of the life in the pond smothers—no sunlight, no oxygen. Question: At what point is the pond only half covered with lily pads?”
Artie sighed. “Let’s get coffee. We’ll come back to this afterward.”
“At what point, Banks?”
“On the twenty-ninth day, goddammit! Satisfied?”
“That’s right.” She looked pleased. “On the twenty-eighth day it’s only a quarter full and on the twenty-seventh, only an eighth. But by one of those days, it’s going to be much too late to do anything about the growth of lily pads.”
The picture she had drawn was oddly chilling. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning that any population that breeds out of control sooner or later crashes because it’s used up its environment. It’s happening right now—I figure we’re in the twenty-seventh day.”
Artie could feel the
hairs rise on the back of his neck. He couldn’t remember Connie ever getting on a soapbox about anything. Or maybe Hirschfield had put the fear of God into her on this assignment, but why Hirschfield hadn’t spoken to him, Artie didn’t know. Granted that Connie’s take on the series could probably be done. Shots of crowds with a telescopic lens so it looked like everybody was standing on someone else’s shoulders, stock footage of sick deer wobbling around Angel Island from when the deer population had exploded because there were no natural predators, immigration smuggling from China and Mexico and a dozen other countries.
It was doable.
If anybody wanted to do it.
“You want to win a Peabody,” Connie said slowly, “you have to take risks.”
“A little while ago you said it was a shit assignment.”
“I didn’t say that—I said you probably thought that. And you probably do.” Connie’s eyes were narrow, her face blank of any friendship at all. Right before Artie’s eyes she had turned into the Dragon Lady. “How long have you been here, Banks?”
Artie felt his face grow red.
“What the fuck’s going on, Connie? You know how long I’ve been here: a year and a half, give or take a few weeks.”
“And before that you put in a dozen years on a suburban daily and before that you worked for a clipping service and before that you had long hair and wore tie-dyes and worked for a hippy-dippy little counterculture station in Berkeley and before that—you were in the service, right? Special Forces, hero type, a chest full of medals? And now you think you’ve been here long enough and you deserve a promotion and a raise.”
Artie suddenly didn’t give a shit—he didn’t have to take this. It had been a lousy day ever since he’d left the house and now he’d been ambushed at work. And by one of his best friends.
“Damn straight. And if Hirschfield is unhappy with my work, he can tell me so in person.”
Connie was sweating so much her blouse was sticking to her bra. Her eyes kept darting to the newsroom beyond the glass.
“You come from a print background and you think television’s easy, that it’s beneath you. You start doing crappy work because you think crappy work is good enough to get by. ‘They call TV a medium because it’s rarely well done.’ Some print maven probably made that one up.”
Artie stood up and started stuffing his notepad and pencils into his briefcase. Connie was suddenly on her feet, plucking at his shirt, apologetic.
“I’m not saying you’re doing lousy work, Artie—all I want you to do is think a little. Every assignment is worth your best shot. End of lecture. I’ll buy lunch.”
Artie shook off her hand.
“You’re a fucking bitch, Connie.”
There was a knock on the door of the booth and Jerry Gottlieb leaned around so they could see his face through the glass. He looked worried. Artie waved him in.
“You just got paged, Artie. Some cops want to talk to you. They’re in the lobby.”
Artie had a momentary vision of Susan on the road to Willow with the tule fog smothering the freeway.
He picked up his briefcase. “Right behind you, Jerry.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a pale Connie sag back in her chair. Serve her right if she died at her desk.
He worried about Susan all the way to the lobby, but a part of his mind kept going back to Connie’s lecture. Somewhere along the line, he must have fucked up. And Jesus, he needed the job; he was too old to hustle for a new one. Maybe Hirschfield had put Connie up to it, was giving Artie a warning before calling him in. Or maybe Connie was just trying to make it look like the program premise was all his idea, and if the ratings sucked the albatross would be around his neck.
Then he remembered the confused look on Connie’s face at the end and felt a sudden chill slide down his spine. Connie had been trying to convince him of something and had tried to make her point by picking an argument. But all of it had been out of character for Connie—way out. When was it that she had started to sound like somebody else? Just after she’d guessed that Adrienne Jantzen was going to blow it?
“Mr. Banks?”
He had reached the lobby, where two cops were waiting for him. His mind immediately filled with visions of Susan in a wreck on I-5.
It came as a complete shock when the cops told him about Larry Shea.
The room in the
city morgue had a tiled floor with a drain in the center, several waist-high stainless-steel tables covered with rubber sheeting, and against the far wall a bank of stainless-steel drawers. Sullivan, the older and more poker-faced of the two cops, checked the names and motioned to the attendant in blue scrubs, who pulled one of the drawers halfway out. Artie could feel the butterflies start fluttering in his stomach. He’d seen war victims in ’Nam but had never gotten used to it. Besides, that had been a lifetime ago.
The attendant folded back the sheet so the body was exposed down to the navel. Sullivan glanced at it impassively. “His wallet ID was for one Lawrence Shea, M.D. Can you confirm that?”
Artie forced himself to step closer and take a long look. It was Shea, all right—but just barely. The eyes were blank and staring, the hair matted with dried blood. The soft tissues around the mouth were gone, exposing the teeth, and both the jugular and carotid arteries in the neck had been torn. The rest of the face was hamburger.
“Yeah, it’s Larry.” A part of Artie was morbidly comparing the body in the drawer with the live Larry Shea, laughing and cracking jokes and full of off-color stories about the nurses and interns at Kaiser. Another part of him was numb with the sense of personal loss.
“You sure?”
Artie nodded. “Didn’t Cathy … didn’t his wife identify him?”
“We called her last night—helluva thing to have to tell her. She said she’d come right over but she never showed. We called again this morning and nobody answered. The Oakland police reported a neighbor said she’d seen Mrs. Shea and two boys leaving the house early the previous evening. One of the doctors who worked with him at the hospital should be down any minute, but we like to get more than one ID if we can.”
Artie wondered why they’d called him and how they’d gotten his name, then forgot it when he took another look at the body. He felt like throwing up. The attendant covered what remained of Shea’s face with the sheet and rolled the drawer back into the wall. It seemed like it was freezing cold in the room and Artie wanted to rub his hands together to warm them up; the two cops seemed oblivious to the chill or were making a point of not noticing it.
Sullivan took pity on him. “Coffee, Mr. Banks?”
Of the two officers, Sullivan seemed the more relaxed in his uniform. McNeal, younger and buffed, was still playing the role of a rookie. Both of them looked like they might have been extras on a TV cop show.
“Thanks—black.” A moment later he buried his face in the steam from a paper cup, grateful that it killed the smells of death and disinfectant.
“He was found in an alley off Larkin, about eight o’clock last night,” McNeal said. He straddled a wooden chair and leaned his elbows on the back. “Actually, he was found in a packing crate in the alley.”
The details were going to be sickening, Artie thought. No way was he prepared for them, no way he could tell the police to stop.
“Somebody … dumped the body there?”
Sullivan interrupted before McNeal had a chance to answer. “Don’t think so. His keys and a pocket flashlight were also in the box, ditto his wallet. So far as we know, nothing was missing.” His eyes never left Artie’s. “It was a crate big enough to hide in. It’s possible he crawled in it to get away from his killers.”
Artie looked up from his coffee, bewildered. Plural. How did they know that?
“He wasn’t alone,” Sullivan added. He had settled comfortably back in a chair a few feet away, his own cup of coffee on the tiled floor beside him. “Some homeless guy was in the crate with him. Apparently he was living in it, judging from the crap strewn around. He was dead too, but he wasn’t torn up. Alcoholic. Probably died of natural causes.”
“I don’t get it,” Artie said.
Sullivan shrugged but offered no explanations. “Any idea what Dr. Shea was doing in the Tenderloin that time of night?”
Artie shook his head. “We were all supposed to meet last night at eight, at Soriano’s on Geary—”
Sullivan glanced over at McNeal.
“You know the place, Mike?”
“Yeah—good Italian, pricey. They got rooms in back for parties.”
Sullivan turned back to Artie. “Who do you mean by ‘we’?”
Artie took a big swallow of coffee and felt it burn all the way down. “We’re members of a club. Larry was supposed to be the speaker that night.”
McNeal, suddenly alert, said, “What kind of club, Mr. Banks?”
“We’re all professional men—some women, too,” Artie said slowly. “We meet every three weeks and talk about the latest in our different fields. I’m a television newswriter, Larry was a doctor, Mitch Levin is a psychiatrist—”
“Any idea what Dr. Shea was going to talk about?” Sullivan interrupted.
“Nobody ever knows; that’s the point.”
Sullivan and McNeal glanced at each other without expression. Sullivan cleared his throat.
“A couple of kids in the neighborhood said they saw Dr. Shea running north up Larkin. From their description, he was either on drugs, drunk, or running away from somebody. But there was nobody chasing him. That would have been around seven-thirty or so. One kid saw him duck into an alley about half a block south of the Century Theater. Sometime later a cook in a Thai restaurant went out in the alley to dump some garbage and saw a man standing by the crate. The cook asked what he was doing there and the man didn’t answer, just walked away.”
Sullivan finished his coffee and put the cup back down on the floor.
“It’s well enough lit back there that the cook should have been able to make some identification, but he claimed he didn’t get a good look. He sounded a little spooked—he was the one who found the body.”
“Larry didn’t drink,” Artie said. “He didn’t do drugs either.”
Sullivan stared at him. “Any idea where his wife might have gone? We had the Oakland police check this morning. Nobody home, no sign of foul play.”
Artie felt shock and then a sudden wave of fear. He shook his head.
McNeal had been teetering on the back two legs of his chair and now dropped to the floor and leaned forward.
“Dr. Shea didn’t make any rounds in the Tenderloin, did he? Drop in on some of the down-and-outers? Maybe some of the prostitutes?”
Artie smothered a glare and shook his head. “He was a happily married man.” He caught the look on McNeal’s face and let his voice freeze. “Really.”
Sullivan said, “Ever been in trouble with the law, Mr. Banks?”
Artie hadn’t been expecting it, then realized he should have.
Stiffly: “No.” And then he remembered. “Just kid stuff.”
McNeal unfolded from his chair and said, “Would you come with us, Mr. Banks?”
Neither of them seemed very friendly now.
The conference room had
a battered wooden table in the middle surrounded by a dozen folding chairs. A few feet away was a card table with a large coffee Thermos, a stack of paper cups, a small jar of Coffee-mate, and a bowl holding little blue packets of Equal. Artie guessed that the coroner and his assistants met here to discuss the bodies on the floor below.
The man in the rumpled business suit at the head of the table looked like he was a year this side of retirement. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a belly that pushed against the edge of the table, and looked vaguely familiar. He nodded at Artie to sit down and Artie judged him as curious, friendly, and professionally detached. There was a small ashtray in front of him, a straight-stemmed pipe resting in it.
McNeal had remained by the door. The suit glanced over at him, then back to Artie. “If you want any coffee, just signal officer McNeal.”
His voice was familiar, too: heavy and whiskey rough, the result of too many doubles after a shift. When he talked, he flashed a mouthful of gold crowns, and it was only then that Artie recognized him.
The suit caught the sudden look of recognition and smiled. “My name’s Matt Schuler. I’m a lieutenant of detectives. I used to be assigned to Park Station.”
It had been a long time, and Schuler had changed a lot. He was a little pudgy now and Artie guessed he’d given up his workouts at the gym years ago. But then he was twenty pounds heavier himself and it wasn’t all muscle, either.
Schuler glanced at some papers in front of him.
“Ordinarily I’d have you sign a statement—you can do that later—and I’d fill you in on the investigation and that would be that. Unless we had occasion to call you back. But you were a friend of Dr. Shea’s and I thought we might talk about him a bit, try and figure out just what happened and why.”
He was a lot smoother than he used to be, Artie thought. Experience counted for something after all.
“How’d you get my name?”
“We checked Dr. Shea’s ID when they brought him in, phoned the hospital, and they gave us his schedule. He was on call and they knew he’d be at the restaurant. We checked with the manager and he said a group of you were having a meeting there. Apparently you’ve been meeting there for some years now; he remembered all your names without even checking the reservations list.”
“The officers told me something of what happened,” Artie said in a strained voice. “Larry was supposed to meet a group of us at the restaurant and he never showed. That’s all I know.”
Schuler leafed through some yellowing papers in front of him and Artie suddenly realized what they were and why the cops had asked if he had ever been in trouble with the law. Arrest records from when he had lived in the Haight.
“All of you have known each other for a long time,” Schuler said thoughtfully. “Long before you started having your dinner meetings.”
For Christ’s sake, Artie thought bleakly, it had been more than twenty years ago.
Schuler took a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses from his shirt pocket and centered them on his nose before picking up one of the records to read. It was all for show, Artie realized; Schuler had gone over them before he’d even walked into the room.
“We all do things when we’re younger that we’d like to forget when we grow older.” Schuler glanced at him over the top of his glasses. “I don’t think you’d be up to climbing the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge today.”
It had been after
most of the hippies and the rock groups had left the Haight-Ashbury to the students and young singles. There had been a group of them who used to hang out at a coffee shop on Irving near Ninth, and one night they’d decided to form a club. You had to have been there, Artie thought wryly, and most of all you had to have been young and stupid.
That first night they’d voted for a group initiation and decided on doing something really daring: They’d climb the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been a moonless night, the tower had been wreathed in fog, and at the top the wind had been chill and so strong it would have blown him off if he hadn’t held on for dear life. He’d been scared shitless.
Mitch Levin had taken one look at the tower and immediately elected himself as lookout. He hadn’t been a very good one. A driver in a passing car had spotted them and called the police. When they finally climbed down, the cops were waiting for them. The story had made the front page of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the fine had been a hundred dollars each, a lot of money back then. All of them had framed the clipping—Artie’s was somewhere on a shelf in the bedroom closet—and prevailed on their parents to pay the fines.
Schuler had been the arresting officer.
A month later they’d climbed the wall and paid a nocturnal visit to the San Francisco Zoo. The animals hadn’t been happy to see them, and the uproar woke the neighborhood. That time they’d spent the weekend in jail in addition to paying a fine. After that, they scaled down their adventures and became more cautious. Or so Artie had heard. Two weeks after the animal act, he decided to do something positive about his education and joined the army; later, he heard that most of the others had done the same. It had been an education, but not quite the kind he’d been hoping for. He’d been in time for the last year of the war in ’Nam and still had nightmares about the three months spent in a Charlie prison camp before escaping.
Schuler was looking at him with a bemused smile on his face, probably remembering when they all had been a bunch of hippie kids and he had been the Establishment Pig. Christ, had they ever called him that?
“I’ve always wondered,” Schuler said. “Why’d you call it the Suicide Club?”
“It was from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson. We started meeting in a coffee shop and the owner suggested it—I think he might have collected Stevenson. At the time, it seemed appropriate.”
“I heard later that most of you wound up in Vietnam. Decorated—all of you, right?” There was a note of respect in Schuler’s voice.
Artie nodded without saying anything. Schuler put down the yellowed forms and shifted gears.