Seven months. Waiting, biding his time.
I picked up the application. "I'll need a copy of this," I said. "Is there a place in the neighborhood where I can get it copied?" He said he had a desktop copier and would run it for me. He went into another room, came back with the copy but held on to it for a moment.
He said, "I'm not sure I understand. If Shorter knows something, if he's disappeared in order to escape from the man who killed Watson"- that was the explanation I'd devised for him- "shouldn't the police be brought into the picture?"
"If it comes to that," I said. "But it looks as though Shorter's been living under an assumed name, and that he might have invented most of what's on that application. If I can spare him the embarrassment of official attention from the police-"
"Yes, of course," he said. "By all means."
He didn't exist.
He'd carried a New York State driver's license, and its number was listed on his job application. But the DMV never heard of him, and the license number he'd written down was unassigned. The Social Security number was real, but the account was that of a State Farm insurance agent in Emporia, Kansas, whose name was Bennett Gunnarson, not James Shorter.
It would have made my life easier if Banszak had fingerprinted his employees, even if he'd done nothing with the prints but file them away. Earlier, I'd left TJ on guard at the rooming house and cabbed down to the Flatiron Building and back, borrowing a fingerprint kit from Wally Donn at Reliable. Before I left Shorter's room I had fogged the telephone receiver with my breath the way Banszak had fogged his glasses. I hadn't seen any prints then, but sometimes they show up better when you dust for them. And the telephone wasn't the only surface in the room that would hold a print.
Back on East Ninety-fourth, I dusted the phone, the window, the washbasin, the headboard and footboard, the switchplate, and everything else that looked at all promising. There was nothing, not even smudges.
"He cleaned up," I told TJ. "He deliberately wiped every surface in the room."
"The man be neat."
"The man's a killer," I said. "He killed Alan Watson back in February. A few days ago he killed Helen Watson, and- Jesus."
"Say what?"
"Helen Watson," I said. "One time I was talking to him and he asked me if I'd reached Helen Watson yet. How did he know her first name? He never heard it from me. Jesus, how long was he stalking them?"
I had my answer now.
He'd been stalking Alan Watson for a minimum of seven months, from the time he'd started work with Queensboro-Corona to the night he seized his opportunity and stuck a knife in the commodity broker's heart. God knows how many opportunities he must have had in all that time, but he'd been in no hurry, he'd been content to bide his time, waiting, letting the anticipation build.
Then, when he finally struck, he'd allowed himself the extra satisfaction of discovering the body and phoning it in to the police, like a firebug coming back to watch the firemen battle the blaze he'd set. And then, remarkably, he'd stayed on the job another six weeks before he could contrive to get fired.
So I knew that he liked to take his time, and I knew, too, that he could strike quickly if he wanted to. I'd seen him on Friday night, and a day later Watson's widow was dead. A couple of days after that, Gerard Billings was shot to death in the back of a cab.
Oh, he was slick. But who the hell was he?
I called Ray Gruliow, brought him up to date. "I feel like a damn fool," I said. "I found the son of a bitch and then I lost him."
"You didn't know what you'd found."
"No. He knew and I didn't. He was playing with me, the bastard. He was the cat and I was a particularly dimwitted mouse. You want to know what I did? I took the son of a bitch to AA meetings."
"You didn't."
"Well, he'd been fired for drinking on the job, and he was leading a shabby life, and he looked for all the world like a drunk getting ready to bottom out. I couldn't see any reason not to talk about the program, and when I did he did a good job of seeming interested but wary. I have to say he's a natural when it comes to the principle of anonymity. He's the most anonymous person I ever met. I still don't know who the hell he is."
"But you've seen him. You sat across a table and talked to him."
"Right," I said. "I know what he looks like." I described Shorter in detail. "Now we both know what he looks like," I said. "Does he sound like anybody you know?"
"I'm not very good at recognizing a man from a description."
"He's forty-eight years old. He listed his place of birth as Klamath Falls, Oregon, but they never heard of anybody by that name, and there's no reason to assume he's ever been within a thousand miles of the place. He moved into his rooming house a week before he turned up on their doorstep at Queensboro-Corona, and it's my guess that James Shorter was born right about that time. I think he slapped together some fake ID, rented himself a room by the week, and went out to look for a job."
"So that he could stalk Alan."
"That's right," I said. "I think he's a stalker. That's the only way I can begin to make sense out of what he's been doing. I did a little research on the subject, and there are elements here that seem to fit the pattern. The way he structured his whole life to support his pursuit of Alan Watson. And the way he postponed the kill. How many chances do you suppose he had in the six months he worked for Q-C? Twenty? A hundred? But he kept putting it off, and not because he was afraid of getting caught."
"He was holding back to boost his excitement."
"Exactly."
"But with Gerry-"
"I think he started stalking somebody else very shortly after he killed Watson. Probably Billings, but it could have been anybody. Maybe he was keeping tabs on a couple of you. He was still at the same rooming house, still calling himself James Shorter, so I don't think he was anywhere close to the last act of his little drama. But then I turned up, and he realized it was time for James Shorter to disappear, and he wanted to do something dramatic on the way out."
"He picked a pretty dramatic way to kill Gerry."
"He would have known where he lived, and his usual schedule. I suppose he had a gun, or knew where to get one. It couldn't have been too hard for him to take a bus to Newark Airport and drive back in a stolen car. Then all he had to do was wait for Billings and pick his opportunity. Engineering a car crash was a nice touch, but he had other options. He could have staged a drive-by shooting, he could have tried running Billings down."
Or he could have found a way to toss a bomb through Gruliow's high-tech plastic window. That way he could have taken out nine of the fourteen remaining members at once. He'd known about the meeting, because I'd been obliging enough to tell him, and when he'd pumped me a little I'd even said it was in the Village. Gruliow was the only member who lived in the Village. Maybe Shorter had been around Commerce Street Tuesday afternoon, maybe he'd been across the street at the Grange, nursing a beer and watching them file in. Watching me, too.
I said, "Who the hell is he? Do you have any idea?"
"None."
"We know he's not a member, but I don't think any of us seriously thought it could be. Who else knows about the club?"
"No one, really. Not in any detail."
"He's forty-eight. In 1961 he would have been what, sixteen? Could he have been somebody's younger brother, transferring a resentment against a sibling to the entire club?"
"God, that strikes me as farfetched."
"I don't know that we can expect to find a logical motive," I said, "because why should there be a sane explanation for a long-standing pattern of insane behavior? All he needed was a pretext."