ommerce 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&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.

In the front room Gruliow gave me my drink, cleared off a chair for me, and sat on the sofa with his long legs out in front of him. "Matthew Scudder," he said. "When I heard your name the other day, it wasn't entirely unfamiliar to me. Actually, I'm surprised our paths haven't crossed over the years."

"As a matter of fact," I said, "they have."

"Oh? Don't tell me I had you on the stand. I've always said I never forget a hostile witness."

"I was never called to testify in any of your cases. But I've seen you in the Criminal Courts Building and a couple of restaurants in the area, Ronzini's on Reade Street and a little French place on Park Row that's not there anymore. I don't remember the name."

"Neither do I, but I know the place you mean."

"And years ago," I said, "you were at the next table at an after-hours way the hell west on Fifty-second Street."

"Oh, for God's sake," he said. "One flight up over an Irish experimental theater, with burned-out buildings on either side and a rubble-strewn lot across the street."

"That's the one."

"Three brothers ran it," he remembered. "What the hell were their names? I want to say Morrison, but that's not right."

"Morrissey."

"Morrissey! They were wild men, red beards halfway down their chests and cold blue eyes hinting at sudden death. According to rumor, they were tied in with the IRA."

"That was what everybody said."

"Morrissey's. I haven't so much as thought about the place in years. I don't think I went there more than two or three times all told. And I imagine I was always fairly well lit by the time I got there."

"Well, there was a time when I was there a lot," I said, "and everybody was fairly well lit by the time he got there. People behaved themselves, the brothers saw to that, but you'd never have looked around and thought you were at a Methodist lawn party."

"That must have been twenty years ago."

"Close to it."

"Were you still on the police force?"

"No, but I wasn't long off it. I moved into the neighborhood and drank at the local ginmills, most of them long gone now. On the nights when they were ready to quit before I was, there was always Morrissey's."

"There was something very liberating about a drink after hours," he said. "Lord, I drank more in those days than I do now. Nowadays an extra drink makes me sleepy. Back then it was fuel, I could run all day and night on it."

"Is that where you learned to drink Irish?"

He shook his head. "You know the old formula for success? 'Dress British, think Yiddish?' Well, it spoils the rhyme, but I'd add 'drink Irish' and 'eat Italian' to that, and I learned both of those principles right here in the Village. I learned to drink Irish at the White Horse and the Lion's Head and right across the street from here at the Blue Mill. Did you ever get to know the Blue Mill when you were at the Sixth?"

I nodded. "Food wasn't great."

"No, terrible. Vegetables out of cans, and dented cans at that, but you could get a steak for half what it cost most places and if you had a sharp knife you could even manage to cut it." He laughed. "It was a hell of a good place to sit around with friends and drink until closing time. Now it's calling itself the Grange, and the food's much better, and you can't drop in for a quiet drink because you can't hear yourself think in there. The customers are all my wife's age or younger, and Christ they're a noisy bunch."

"They seem to like the noise," I said.

"It must do something for them," he said, "but I've never been able to figure out what. All it does for me is give me a headache."

"I'm the same way."

"Listen to us," he said. "We're a couple of old farts. You're a lot younger than I am. You're fifty-five, right?"

"I guess it stands out all over me."

He looked me in the eye. "I made it my business to learn a little about you," he said. "That can't come as a surprise to you. I imagine you did the same."

"Your credit rating's good," I said.

"Well, that's a load off my mind."

"And you're sixty-four."

"I mentioned that a few minutes ago, didn't I? Not that it comes under the heading of closely held information." He leaned back, one arm extended along the back of the sofa. "I was the second-oldest member of the club of thirty-one. Not counting Homer, that is. That's Homer Champney, he's the man who founded our chapter."

"So I understand."

"I was thirty-two then, working for Legal Aid, thinking about joining the Village Independent Democrats and trying to make a place for myself in politics. Trouble was I found the reform Democrats even more odious than the regulars. The old clubhouse hacks were full of crap, but at least they knew it. The reformers were always such sanctimonious little shits. Who knows, if I could have learned to put up with them I might have turned out to be Ed Koch."

"There's a thought."

"Frank DiGiulio was about ten months older than me. I barely knew him but I liked him. Face off an old Roman coin. He died, you know."

"Last September."

"I saw the obit in the Times. That's the first page I read these days."

"I'm the same way."

"That's my definition of middle age. It starts the day you pick up the morning paper and turn to the obituaries. When Frank dropped dead, I thought to myself, Well, Gruliow, you're walking point." He frowned. "As if it would be my turn next. Instead it was Alan Watson. Decent fellow, very straight, stabbed to death for his watch and wallet. You don't expect that in Forest Hills."

"They've evidently had more street crime lately. It was a private security guard who found him, and you don't hire a private security force if you don't have to."

"Sign of the times," he said. "They'll have them everywhere soon." He looked down into his glass of whiskey and soda. "I had a call from Felicia Karp," he said. "I didn't know who she was, and when she told me she was Fred Karp's widow I was still in the dark. Fred Karp? Who the hell was Fred Karp? A lawyer, a mob guy, a radical? Remember, he was a guy I used to see once a year at dinner, and then three years ago I stopped seeing him because he jumped out his office window. So it took me a minute, and then she went on to say that she'd had a visit from a detective, and this chap had told her there was a possibility her husband hadn't killed himself after all, that he'd been murdered. And she'd seen my name on a list of some sort of club, and it was the one name on the list she recognized, so she was calling in the hope that I could shed some light on the matter."

"And?"

"And I did what I could to conceal my own ignorance, which at the time was all-encompassing, and told her I'd see what I could find out. I made the obvious phone calls, and when I felt I'd learned enough about you I called you up myself." He smiled engagingly. "And here you are."

"And here I am."

"Who's your client?"

"I can't tell you that."

"You're not an attorney, you know. It's not privileged information."

"And we're not in court."

"No, of course we're not. I have to assume your client is one of the other surviving members. Unless you've been hired by a widow or some other survivor." He watched my face as he spoke. "You're not giving anything away," he said after a moment.

"My client may be willing for you to know who he is. But I'd have to check with him first."

" 'He, him.' Hardly a widow, not with those pronouns. Although I think you might be a subtle man, Matt. Are you?"

"Not very."

"I wonder. Still, it almost has to be a group member, doesn't it? Who else would know the names of all the other members? Although I suppose some of us may have talked openly about the club with our wives." A smile, this one a little darker at the corners. "Our first wives," he said. "If your first divorce teaches you nothing else, it teaches you discretion."

"Does it matter who hired me?"

"Probably not. I like to know everything about people— jurors, witnesses, the lawyer on the other side. Preparation's everything, you know. The courtroom thearics may make me a hot ticket on the lecture circuit, but it's the pretrial prep work that wins the cases. And I like to win cases."

He asked if I wanted more Perrier. I said I was fine.

He said, "Well, what's your best guess, Matt? Is someone killing us off? Or is that confidential, too?"

"The club's had a lot of deaths."

"I don't need a detective to tell me that."

"Several murders, several suicides, a few accidents that could have been staged. So it looks as though more than coincidence would have to be involved."

"Yes."

"But it's impossible. The killer would almost have to be one of you, and there's no motive, no financial incentive, at least none I'm aware of. Or am I missing something?"

"No," he said. "There was some talk early on about laying down a case of good Bordeaux for the last man to drink. We decided whoever was left would be too old to enjoy it. Besides, it seemed inappropriate, even frivolous."

"So the killer would have to be crazy," I said. "And not just sudden-impulse crazy, because he'd have been at it for years. He'd have to be long-term crazy, and all fourteen of you look to have been leading sane and stable lives."

"Ha," he said. "I've got two ex-wives who would give you an argument on that point, and I could name a few other people who'd be quick to tell you I'm only eating with one chopstick. Maybe I'm the killer."

"Are you?"

"How's that again?"

"Are you the killer? Did you kill Watson and Cloonan and the others?"

"My God, what a question. No, of course not."

"Well, that's a load off my mind."

"Am I a suspect?"

"I don't have any suspects."

"But did you seriously think—"

"That you might have done it? No idea. That's why I asked."

"You think I would have told you?"

"You might have," I said. "Stranger things have happened."

"Jesus."

"What I was taught to do," I said, "was ask all the questions, including the stupid ones. You never know what somebody'll decide to tell you."

"Interesting. In a trial it's the exact opposite. There's a basic principle, you never ask a question of a witness unless you already know the answer."

"You'd think it would be hard to learn anything that way."

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

I let him top up my Perrier.

oOo

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."

He gave me a look, eyebrows raised, mouth on the verge of a smile. I'd seen it before; it was his patented expression of disappointed skepticism, flashed in court at a difficult witness, in the hallways at an uncooperative reporter. "In the first place," he said, "do you seriously think the quality of life in this city is going to be measurably different for the rest of us if Warren Madison or anybody else is on or off its streets?"

"Yes," I said, "but a cop has to believe that or it's hard to get to work in the morning."

"You're not a cop anymore."

"It's like being raised Catholic," I said. "You never get over it. And I do think it makes a difference, not so much in terms of the people Madison's likely to kill but in the message people get when they see him walking around."

"But they don't."

"How's that?"

"They don't see him walking around, not unless they're in maximum security at Green Haven. That's where Warren is, and where he's likely to be until you and I are both long past caring. Remember what Torres said when he sentenced the kid for stabbing that Mormon boy in the subway? 'Your parole officer hasn't been born yet.' You could say that about Warren. He killed those drug dealers, and he was convicted, and he'll be behind bars as long as he lives."

"You couldn't get him out from under those charges?"

"I never even tried. He had other counsel. And I wouldn't have wanted the case. Killing a drug dealer is murder for profit, and there are plenty of other lawyers who can represent you. Shoot a cop and you're making a political statement. That's when a guy named Gruliow can do you some good."

"Somehow no one remembers that Madison's serving time."

"Of course not. All they remember is Hard-Way Ray got him off. And the cops don't care whether he's locked up in Green Haven or out in Hollywood fucking Madonna. Their take on it is the same as yours, that I put the department on trial. I didn't, I put the system on trial, which is what I always do, in one sense or another. Whether it's civil-rights workers or draft resisters or Palestinians or, yes, Warren Madison, I put the system on trial. But not everybody sees it that way." He pointed at his plastic window. "Some of them take it personally."

I said, "I keep seeing that picture of you and Madison after the trial."

"Embracing."

"That's the one."

"You figured what? Bad taste? Theatrical gesture?"

"Just a memorable image," I said.

"Ever hear of a criminal lawyer named Earl Rogers? Very flamboyant and successful, represented Clarence Darrow when the great man was brought up on charges of jury tampering. In another case his client was charged with some particularly odious murder. I forget the details, but Rogers won an acquittal."

"And?"

"And when they read the verdict, the defendant rushed to shake hands with the man who got him off. Rogers wouldn't take his hand. 'Get away from me,' he cried out right there in the courtroom. 'You son of a bitch, you're as guilty as sin!' "

"Jesus."

"Now that's theatrical," he said with relish. "And bad taste, and ethically questionable at the very least. 'You're guilty as sin!' They're almost all of them guilty, for God's sake. If you don't want to defend the guilty, find another line of work. But if you do defend them, and if you're lucky enough to win, you can damn well shake their hands." He grinned. "Or give 'em a hug, which is more my style than a handshake. And I felt like hugging Warren, I didn't have to fake it. It's goddam exhilarating when they say 'Not guilty.' It's moving. You want to hug somebody. And I liked Warren."

"Really?"

He nodded. "Very charming man," he said, "unless he had reason to kill you."