A Long Line of Dead Men

Commerce Street is only two blocks long. It angles southwest from Seventh Avenue a block below Bleecker, and runs along parallel to Barrow Street. The first block is all of a piece, with both sides lined with brick three-story Federal townhouses. Most are residential, but a few have commercial tenants on the first floor. One window shows a lawyer's shingle, with a second matching shingle hanging just below the first. I ALSO DABBLE IN ANTIQUES, it announces, and there are antiques and collectibles in the window. The building two doors down houses a macrobiotic restaurant, its menu listing dishes of tofu and seitan and seaweed. Whatever else they dabble in remains unstated.

The second block of Commerce Street, on the other side of Bedford, is more of a jumble architecturally. Buildings of different heights and shapes and styles are jammed together like straphangers in a rush-hour subway car. The street, as if confused by this sudden change of character, veers abruptly to the right and runs into Barrow Street, where it calls it quits.

The Cherry Lane Theater is in the middle of the block, just before the street's sudden change of direction. Raymond Gruliow's townhouse, four stories tall and two windows wide, stood on the other side of the street, buttressed by a shorter and wider building on either side. I climbed a half-flight of steps. There was a heavy brass door knocker in the shape of a lion's head, and I had my hand on it when I saw the recessed button for the doorbell. I pushed that instead, and if a bell or buzzer rang within, no sound came through the heavy wooden door. I was ready to try the knocker when the door opened inward. Gruliow had answered it himself.

He was a tall man, around six-three, and rail thin. His hair, once black, was an iron gray now, and he'd let it grow; it cascaded over his collar and lay in ringlets on his shoulders. The years had worked on his features like a caricaturist's pen, lengthening the nose, accenting the bony ridge of brow, hollowing the cheeks, giving a forward thrust to the jaw. He looked searchingly at me, and then his face lit up with a smile, as if he were genuinely glad to see me, as if someone had played a cosmic joke on the world and the two of us were in on it.

"Matthew Scudder," he said. "Welcome, welcome. I'm Ray Gruliow."

He led me inside, apologizing for the condition of the house. It looked all right to me, if marked by a comfortable level of disorder- books overflowing the built-in cabinets and piled on the floor, a stack of magazines alongside a club chair, a suit jacket folded over the back of a Victorian sofa. He was wearing the pants to the suit, and a white shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up. He had sandals on his feet, Birkenstocks, and they looked odd over the thin black socks that went with the dark pinstriped suit.

"My wife's in Sag Harbor," he explained. "I'm going to join her out there tomorrow afternoon, come back in time for court Monday morning. Unless I call her and tell her I've got too much work. And I might just do that. What the hell's the point of running out of town for a weekend, then running right back in again? Is that supposed to be relaxing?"

"Some people do it all the time."

"Some people go to truck-pulling contests," he said. "Some people sell Amway dealerships to their friends. Some people believe the earth is a hollow sphere, with another whole civilization living on the inside edge." He shrugged eloquently. "Some people keep getting married. Are you married, Matt?"

"Virtually."

" 'Virtually.' I like that. All right to call you Matt?" I said it was. "And I'm Ray. 'Virtually.' I suppose that means living together? Well, you're an unlicensed private eye, why shouldn't you be an unlicensed spouse? I assume you were married previously."

"Once, yes."

"Children?"

"Two sons."

"Grown now, I suppose."

"Yes."

"I've been married three times," he said, "and I've had children with all three of them. I'm sixty-four years old and I have a daughter who was two in March, and she's got a brother who'll turn forty next month. He's damn near old enough to be her grandfather. For Christ's sake, I've got three generations of families." He shook his head at the wonder of it all. "I'll be eighty years old," he said, "and still paying to put a kid through college."

"They say it keeps you young."

"In self-defense," he said. "I think it's late enough for a drink. What can I get you?"

"Plain club soda, thanks."

"Perrier all right?"

I said it was. He fixed the drinks from a sideboard in the dining room, filling two glasses with Perrier, adding Irish whiskey to his. I recognized the shape of the bottle; it was JJ amp;S, Jameson's premium label. The only other person I know who drinks it is a career criminal who owns a Hell's Kitchen saloon, and he'd have blanched at the thought of diluting it with soda.