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.
“Do you know why Dr. Shea was in the Tenderloin?”
Artie shook his head. “No—he was supposed to meet us at the restaurant. He was the speaker for the night.” Schuler looked curious and Artie explained what the Suicide Club had turned into.
“Any idea what he was going to talk about?”
“He’d phoned Susan—my wife—earlier in the afternoon and sounded excited about the meeting, but he didn’t mention the topic.” Schuler looked thoughtful and Artie asked, “Do you have any idea who did it?”
Schuler surprised him. “We have them in custody right now.”
Them.
“I still don’t understand why Dr. Shea was wandering around the Tenderloin. Your club doesn’t have some kind of oddball ritual …” Schuler looked embarrassed for even suggesting it.
Artie stiffened. “We’re a little old for that, Lieutenant.”
“My apologies for asking. It’s just that I suspect there are no straight answers to any of this.”
“You said ybu have somebody in custody?” Artie tried to sound strictly professional. He was a long way from being a kid and he wanted to remind Schuler of that.
“Do you know where Shea’s wife might have gone?” Schuler suddenly asked. “She was scheduled to come in last night to identify him. She didn’t and when we called this morning, she didn’t answer. We had the Oakland police check and she’d left, along with their two boys. Any idea where they went?”
“None at all,” Artie said slowly. “You think she’s …” His voice dribbled off.
Schuler shrugged. “The husband is dead and the wife has disappeared. It’s impossible not to think there’s a connection, but at the moment I don’t know what it could be.” He turned to McNeal. “Okay, bring ’em in, Mac.”
Artie moved his arms slightly so his sweaty shirt wouldn’t stick to him. He wondered how he would react to seeing the murderers of a good friend. Dispassionate? Or filled with rage and a desire to commit murder himself?
McNeal came back leading three dogs on leashes: two pit bulls and what looked like a collie-retriever mix. Artie stared. The three of them would be enough to take a man down, but it was still difficult to believe. They trotted behind McNeal, glancing curiously around the room and wagging their tails.
“You serious?”
Schuler lit his pipe and leaned back in his chair. “Ordinarily if dogs attack somebody, they’re destroyed
almost immediately. These we’re saving for evidence until we locate the owners.” He looked disapproving. “People turn dogs loose in the city when they don’t want them anymore. Pit bulls are always bad news if they’ve been trained to fight and then are abandoned by their owners. Back in the good old days, we used to have dogcatchers who took care of them. The city doesn’t have that kind of money now, and neither does Animal Care and Control. So we wind up with packs of feral dogs on our hands. The small ones die, get run over, get killed by bigger dogs. Some of the larger ones acquire street smarts—they avoid busy streets, they learn to keep away from traps and poison. They attack people’s pets, sometimes young kids. This is the first instance we know of where they’ve attacked an adult male—and killed him.” He shook his head. “Dr. Shea was apparently hiding in the packing crate. He would have been on his hands and knees—an invitation for feral dogs.”
Schuler glanced down at a report in front of him and read it aloud.
“‘Officers called to the scene found three bloodstained dogs at 15 Olive Street’—they call it a street but it’s really an alley—‘nosing around a packing crate. They apparently attacked Dr. Shea in the crate and were responsible for his death.’” He looked up. “We still don’t have a clue as to what Dr. Shea was doing in the Tenderloin or why he was hiding in the crate.”
Artie stared down at the dogs sniffing around his shoes and the leg of the table. He had a sudden desire to reach out and scratch the nearest one behind the ears.
Then he noticed the matted hair and the rich dark stains around its muzzle.
Outside, Artie had just flicked open his umbrella and stepped to the curb to hail a cab when somebody called, “Hey, Artie, over here!”
The group was huddled under an overhang, and he hurried over. Schuler must have interviewed them one by one and afterward they had waited to see who had been next and to compare notes.
Artie furled his umbrella and squeezed under the overhang with them. “What do we do, wait for Jenny and Lyle?”
Mary Robards looked impatient. “I’m getting soaked. If we’re going to talk about it, let’s go someplace.”
Charlie Allen turned and started to waddle down the street. “Coffee shop’s this way; spotted it driving over.”
At the tiny restaurant with its faded beer signs and grease-stained walls, Artie ordered coffee, black, then hesitated and added a pastrami sandwich.
He glanced around the table. Hail, hail, the Suicide Club was now in session. Mary Robards, one of the few original women members who had stayed in the Club, now thirty pounds heavier and abrasively cynical. Schuler must have been surprised. The last time he’d seen her, Mary was a sweet-tempered eighteen with a bad complexion and a figure that wouldn’t stop. Both had given her an attitude, one that had changed a lot when her sexy walk became a middle-aged waddle. She was an attorney now and considerably more self-assured; she also seemed more comfortable than the others with growing older.
Pudgy Charlie Allen looked sweaty and nervous and obviously guilty of something, but then he usually did. Charlie had been the bravest of them all; he’d always figured they were going to get caught anyway so what the hell. He now had two kids and was assistant city librarian for San Francisco Public—he was the only one Artie really envied, purely because he seemed the happiest.
Then there was Mitch Levin, his best friend and a regular racquetball partner he could always beat—the best kind. Tall, wiry, with a sharp nose and thin face that made you think of the old Strand drawings of Sherlock
Holmes. A professional bachelor and man-about-town whom they all claimed to envy but whom nobody did. As always, Mitch was dressed to the nines but still managed to look at home in a south-of-Market grungy coffee shop, even with his steel-framed granny glasses. Mitch had a sharp mind and was somebody Artie always felt he could depend on. His only fault was that he had been a captain in ’Nam when Artie had been a sergeant, and Mitch had never quite forgotten it.
Artie lingered a moment at Dave Chandler, the leading man and director of Theater DuPre, making a production of ladling sugar into his coffee and stirring it with a plastic spoon. Whatever Dave did, he did it as if an audience were watching. Boyishly handsome, so the reviewers said, even in his midforties. What irritated Artie was that the reviewers were right; for Chandler, time seemed to have stood still. In real life, he had been cast against type: a man who was universally well liked and would give you the shirt off his back if only he had one. Scratch him behind his left ear and his right foot would twitch. Dave was an inoffensive guy but always on stage. To the best of Artie’s knowledge, the real David Chandler had never stood up.
“Schuler’s just as big a bastard as always,” Mary said, grimacing at a trace of lipstick on her cup. “He didn’t need all of us down here.” She looked like everybody’s mother, Artie thought—a great asset when she was trying to convince a jury. “Goddamned cold in there. At least they could have told us to keep our coats … .”
Her voice faded and they were all quiet for a moment, remembering the stainless-steel table and what Larry had looked like.
“Anybody talk to Larry yesterday?” As usual, Mitch had elected himself to chair the meeting.
“I had an appointment two days ago.” Charlie Allen looked uncertain. “He talked about the meeting but he didn’t say much.” They all stared at him expectantly, and he shrugged. “Just a general physical—prostate exam, that sort of thing. Pretty embarrassing when a friend does it.”
“Thanks for sharing,” Mitch said dryly. “Anybody know of any enemies Larry might have had?”
Artie certainly didn’t; neither did the others. There was a long silence. Then Chandler said; “What about drugs?”
Mary stared at him. “Drugs?”
“Don’t doctors have access?” Chandler said defensively. “Maybe somebody wanted him to write a prescription, badly. You call it—you know more about drug cases than I do.”
“I doubt it,” Mary sniffed.
Their food came and they fell silent again. Artie’s pastrami-on-rye was better than he expected.
Mitch took several bites of his sandwich, then pushed it away. “Anybody have any ideas why Larry was in the Tenderloin?”
It sounded too much like McNeal, and Artie muttered, “He sure wasn’t looking for a peep show.”
Schuler had put his finger on something during their meeting, something that Mark had mentioned at home. Charlie Allen said it for him.
“Anybody know what Larry was going to talk about?”
Mary frowned. “Medicine’s a big field; it could have been anything, I doubt that it would have been world-shaking. Last time it was his turn, he talked about the importance of aspirin in Western civ.”
“I thought that one was pretty good,” Chandler murmured. He concentrated on his hamburger, not meeting her eyes. Jesus, Artie thought, some antagonisms die hard. Twenty years ago, Chandler had been the only one in the Club whom Mary had turned down and he’d never forgiven her.
He teetered back in his chair. “Cathy talked to Susan a few days ago; said Larry was looking forward to their Christmas get-together.”
Mary turned sarcastic. “Not exactly of crushing importance in a homicide, Artie.”
There was another long silence, then Chandler offered, “I had lunch with him last week. He said he was working on an article for Science—sounded pretty enthusiastic.”
Even Charlie Allen looked serious at that one, but it was too easy to draw a connection, Artie thought. The Science article and his talk, both about the same thing? Maybe.
“You tell Schuler?”
“I didn’t think it was important.” Chandler caught the expressions of the others and looked embarrassed. “Hell, I didn’t know. Maybe it was. I’m not a cop.”
Charlie Allen smothered a belch and pushed back from the table. “None of us are,” he said regretfully. The undertone of sadness in his voice reminded Artie of Larry Shea and the body in the morgue and his own difficulties in making a connection between the two. Charlie had probably been Larry’s best friend; the two had been a lot alike.
“Anybody think the dogs did it?” Chandler asked.
They looked at one another in sudden silence. Larry had been a palpable presence at the table, but they had gone out of their way to keep the conversation technical. Now Larry was upfront in their minds, the contrast between the memories of a laughing, very-much-alive Larry Shea and the ruin in the morgue stark and tragic.
Mary was the first to offer a professional opinion. “I think the wounds on Larry’s face and throat would be consistent with an animal attack. But I don’t think the dogs went after him out of the blue. I think … somebody was responsible.”
Chandler nodded at Mary, taking advantage of a chance to make peace. “You’re probably right.”
Another moment of silence, then Mitch dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin. “If Schuler comes up
with more information and lets any of us know—”
“Not likely,” Mary muttered. “I don’t think he trusts any of us.”
Artie signaled the waiter for the check and fished around in his pocket for his wallet. The only new information had been offered by Chandler, and it didn’t seem like much on the face of it. But it was a shame they all hadn’t been there. Jenny Morrison—quiet, beautiful, reserved—a dean’s assistant at San Francisco State and Mary Robards’ significant other, which nobody ever talked about. And Lyle Pace, a former star athlete never able to forget the one time he’d almost made the Olympics. Artie hadn’t been close to either of them when they had joined. He still wasn’t. But they might have had something to offer.
“The services,” Charlie Allen said at the door. “What about the services for Larry?”
Mitch shrugged into his coat. “Cathy will probably make the arrangements.” Then he added vaguely, “Or relatives. I’m sure Schuler’s notified them.”
Which meant that Schuler had told Mitch they hadn’t been able to locate Cathy, but he hadn’t told the others. Artie paid at the cash register, pulled his collar up around his neck, and stepped outside into the drizzle. These were sad circumstances but it was always good to see his friends—despite the fact that they had pretty much drifted apart over the years and it was only the Club meetings that kept most of them together.
He smiled to himself. It was tragic, but it was almost like it was the old Club again. Somebody had attacked one of their own, and suddenly it seemed like it was all for one and one for all, even with the backbiting. Unconditional loyalty was probably a tradition in every club.
Except something hadn’t been right.
But he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.