"You sound like you feel sorry for him."

"Well, I just finished knocking him on his ass," I said. "I can afford a little sympathy."

I told Wally I wanted something else, not from the client but from him. I wanted credit reports from TRW on fourteen men. I'd pay for them, I said, but I wanted them at cost. He assured me that would be no problem, and I gave him the list of survivors.

He said, "Ray Gruliow? I think his credit's pretty good. And Avery Davis could write out a check and buy the building we're in, if it's the same Avery Davis, and it must be if he lives at 888 Fifth. In fact I think he did own the Flatiron for a while, didn't he? No, wait a minute, that was the one who went off the terrace two years ago. What the hell was his name?"

"Harmon Ruttenstein."

"That's the guy. Talk about everything to live for, but you never know, do you?"

"I guess not."

Three, possibly four, of the club members had killed themselves. Nedrick Bayliss had shot himself to death while on a business trip to Atlanta. Hal Gabriel hanged himself in his apartment on West End Avenue. Fred Karp, working late at the office, went out a window. Ian Heller jumped or fell from a crowded subway platform.

You never know, do you?

A series of phone calls got me through to one of the transit cops who'd been there to pull Ian Heller's body from beneath the wheels. There was a long silence when I told him I wanted to talk to him about a death that had occurred almost fifteen years earlier. "You know," he said, "I keep my notebooks, and I can probably sort it out somewhat, but you can't expect me to remember too clearly after all these years. I remember my first, they say you always do. But I been on the job close to nineteen years, so I already seen a lot by the time this guy bought it. So don't expect too much."