A Long Line of Dead Men

"Education," he said, "is not the object. I'm going to have another drink. Join me?"

I let him top up my Perrier.

* * *

I said, "I'll tell you this much. I was surprised to see your name on the list of members."

"Oh?"

"It seemed to me," I said, "that it was an unusual group for you to join."

He snorted. "I'd say it's an unusual club for anybody to join. An annual celebration of mortality, for God's sake. Why would anybody want to sign on for that?"

"Why did you?"

"It's hard to remember," he said. "I was much younger then, obviously. Undefined personally and professionally. If Karp's widow- what was her name, Felicia?"

"Yes."

"You name a child Felicia and you're just daring the whole world to call her Fellatio, aren't you? If Felicia Karp had seen my name on a list in 1961, she wouldn't have looked at it twice. Unless she thought Gruliow was a typographical error. I ran into that years ago, you know. People thought it must be Grillo."

"Now they know the name."

"Oh, no question. The name, the face, the hair, the voice, the sardonic wit. Everybody knows Hard-Way Ray Gruliow. Well, it's what I wanted. And that's a great curse, you know. 'May you get what you want.' Hell of a thing to wish on a man."

"The price of fame," I said.

"It's not so bad. I get tables in restaurants, I get strangers saying hello to me on the street. There's a coffee shop on Bleecker Street named a sandwich after me. You go in there and order a Ray Gruliow and they'll bring you some godforsaken combination of corned beef and raw onion and I don't know what else."

His second drink was darker than the first, and he looked to be making it disappear faster.

"Of course it's not all corned beef and onions," he said. "Sometimes they break your windows."

My eyes went to the front window.

"Replaced," he said. "That's high-impact plastic. It looks like glass, unless the light hits it just right, but it's not. It's supposed to stop bullets. Not high-velocity rounds, concrete won't stop them, but your run-of-the-mill gunshot ought to be deflected. It was a shotgun last time around, and I'm told shotgun pellets will bounce right off of my new window. Won't even mar the finish."

"They never caught the guy, did they?"

He cocked his head. "You don't really think they knocked themselves out trying, do you? I think the shooter was a cop."

"I think you're probably right."

"It was right after twelve public-spirited citizens of the Bronx gave Warren Madison judicial absolution for his sins, and that rubbed a lot of cops the wrong way."

"And a few ordinary citizens, too."

"Including you, Matt?"

"What I think's not important."

"Tell me anyhow."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"I think Warren Madison is a homicidal son of a bitch who ought to spend the rest of his life in a cell."

"Then we agree."

I looked at him.

"Warren," he said, "is what some other clients of mine might characterize as a stone killer. I'd call him an utterly remorseless sociopath, and I'd like to see him live out his days as a guest of the state of New York."

"You defended him."

"Don't you think he's entitled to a defense?"

"You got him off."

"Don't you think he's entitled to the best possible defense?"

"You didn't just defend him," I went on. "You put the whole police department on trial. You sold the jury a bill of goods about Madison being a snitch for the local Bronx precinct, in return for which they let him deal dope and supplied him with stash confiscated from other dealers. Then they were afraid he would talk, though God knows who he would talk to or why, and they went to his mother's house not to arrest him but to murder him."

"Quite a scenario, wouldn't you say?"

"It's ridiculous."

"Don't you think cops use snitches?"

"Of course they do. They wouldn't make half their cases if they didn't."

"Don't you think they allow snitches to pursue their criminal careers in return for the help they provide?"

"That's part of how it works."

"Don't you think confiscated dope ever finds its way back onto the street? Don't you think some police officers, cops who've already broken the law, will take extreme measures to cover their asses?"

"In certain cases, but-"

"Do you know for a fact, an irrefutable fact, that those cops didn't go to Warren's mother's house looking to kill him?"

"For a fact?"

"An irrefutable fact."

"Well, no," I said. "I don't."

"I do," Gruliow said. "It was utter bullshit. They never used him as a snitch. They wouldn't use him to wipe their asses, for which I can't say I blame them. But the jury believed it."

"You did a good job of selling it to them."

"I'll be happy to take the credit, but it didn't take much selling. Because they wanted to buy it. I had a jury full of black and brown faces, and that ridiculous scenario I cooked up struck them as perfectly plausible. In their world, cops pull shit like that all the time, and lie like hell about it afterward. So why should they believe a word of police testimony? They'd rather believe something else. I gave them an acceptable alternative."

"And you put Warren Madison on the street."