All the Dead Were Strangers (Conrad Voort)

Book by Black Ethan

Chapter One

"Admit it. You're disappointed," says the dark-haired man across the table. "Things didn't turn out the way you planned."

An old friend. A boyhood pal. A best buddy Voort hasn't seen in nine years, drunk enough to talk too much, sober enough to keep secrets. Meechum Keefe smiles at some private thought, some unshared bit of bitter knowledge. He reaches for his third Johnny Walker Red as eagerly as a cardiac patient picking up a nitroglycerin tablet. He downs the liquid as carefully as a diabetic administering his insulin shot.

"You said you needed help," Voort prompts. "You were afraid to even say the name of this bar, on the phone."

They occupy a rear table in the White Horse Tavern, on Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village, a few short blocks from the Hudson River. The hundred-and-twenty-year-old bar is all dark wood and whirling ceiling fans. The burgers are fat and the beers are dark, cold, foamy. The men, both about thirty, draw glances from admiring women at adjacent tables. Both, to females, are prime-of-life, head-turning males.

But the women might be surprised to hear the dark-haired man mutter, "It's going to sound crazy, Voort. The nuttiest story you ever heard."

"I've heard a lot."

The dark man is shorter but makes up for it with bundled energy, physical power compressed into his wide shoulders and corded neck, and shining in the half-drunken intensity of his Irish-black eyes. His hair is on the long side of acceptably corporate, slicked down on top but rebelling with a slight curl at the tail, over the collar of his fisherman's knit sweater. His hands are smooth, like an office worker's, but powerful, gripping his glass. His ring finger is bare of intimate entanglement. He hovers over his drink, protecting turf.

"People start out believing in things, but then they see the truth," he says.

The blond is leaner but equally fit, more kayaker than weight lifter. His hair is shorter and brushed to the side, his attentive eyes the vivid blue of the sky in New Mexico. He wears a pressed white shirt without a tie, and an Italian jacket of black corduroy. His jeans are stone washed. He's still on his first beer.

"In the end," Meechum says, "people find out their career was dirty. Their boss screwed them. Their girl cheated on them. Their kid shot drugs. Pick an area. The subways are collapsing. The stock market is falling. The good times are over, and getting worse fast."

Over the sounds of the televised Monday night Jets­Buffalo Bills game, the place is packed with a hodgepodge of neighborhood types -- brokers still in their rumpled business suits after a hard day on Wall Street; writers who need to get out of their apartments each night, after pounding on a keyboard all day, alone; tourists who peruse the guidebooks that recommended this historic tavern, reading about the night George Washington spent here, during his retreat up the West Side of Manhattan, when it was forest.

"How about a steak to go with that scotch?" Voort says.

"I'm not hungry," says the deep, familiar voice that had surprised Voort over the phone this afternoon with "The prodigal best friend, old buddy, is home after nine long years."

Meechum signals the waitress for a refill by lifting his empty glass.

He says, with a half-drunken flourish, "The seven deadly sins all start with disappointment. Greed? 'I don't have enough.' Lust? 'My woman got fat, boring, older.' You know what I'm talking about. I called One Police Plaza and some secretary said you quit for awhile and just came back. Something disappointed you, didn't it?"

"I took a leave, got out of town awhile."

"Ha! For two months? All you ever wanted to do, all your whole family ever did, for three hundred years, was police work. Voorts don't disappear for two months. What went wrong?"

"We're talking about you," Voort says, thinking that the job hasn't been as satisfying, nothing has been satisfying since his return.

"We're talking about blame. How you get disappointed and blame someone for it. And then you dwell on it and it becomes all you think about. And finally you set out to destroy the thing you blame."

"Is someone trying to do that to you?"

"They did already."

"So you're the one who wants revenge on them."

"You're good, Voort, but I told you, I'll get to it when I'm ready."

"I have all night."

Meechum's eyes slide over Voort's right shoulder, across the crowded restaurant, to the front door and back.

In the oak-framed mirror above his friend's head, Voort tries to guess what Meechum sees. Is it a specific person? Or is he worried that a specific person will appear?

"Ah, you were always able to zero in on the fundamental questions, Voort. Or am I too drunk to make sense anymore? Sometimes it turns out, in the end, that a person has everything, even the little pieces, upside down in his head. The devil turns out to be an accountant. Mephistopheles needs glasses, and he's pigeon-toed to boot."

To Voort, Meechum's unexplained fear is not overdramatic. He's seen too much justifiable terror on the job. Usually it's been in women -- victims stalked by boyfriends, husbands, fathers, strangers. Women tracked to their apartments, offices, bedrooms, or shops. He's seen the sick mail they receive. He's listened to the perverted messages on their answering machines. Time after time he's answered radio calls, out of the sex crimes unit, to find a body -- someone who was once afraid, who perhaps no one took seriously -- bloodied and, if lucky under these perverted circumstances, at least half alive.

It had not occurred to him when he became a policeman that he would become an expert on fear. He'd started out with a more romantic vision of the Blue Life. But nine years after graduating from the police academy, Voort understands fear the way a physicist understands atoms. He smells its variations with the skill of a French chef appraising the freshness of a fish. He has come to understand, since he took a leave, that there had been a time when he could have chosen a different area of life professionally -- Nature perhaps, or commerce, or the arts.

My father told me to quit if things were getting to me. I just need a little equilibrium now, and I'll be fine again.

And now he sees the thousand ways New Yorkers have incorporated fear into their daily lives, weaving it into the fabric of his city. There's the quiet fear in the subway as passengers clutch bags to their laps, their wary eyes attuned to strangers. There's the nervous fear of pedestrians hurrying home, keeping to the center of dark streets at night, and away from parked cars, dark doorways, alleys. Fear makes women hide their engagement rings, their proudest possessions, in public places. It stalks workers in a suddenly failing economy. They work longer hours. They pore over financial pages, seeking magic in a stock market that may be coming apart. Their fights about money at home elevate over the cost of a new hat, a nine-dollar ticket to the cineplex, or a sixty-watt lightbulb left burning in an empty flat.

Now Voort says, "Let's change the subject if you need time to get to things. Tell me. How's the army? I figured after all these years, you'd be a general by now."

"I quit."

"But it's all you ever wanted to do."

"That's why we're pals. We think the same way. We get disillusioned together. I left Washington two years ago and moved back to New York. Sorry I didn't call you before. I guess I had to keep to myself while I figured things out. Now I work in a...you'll laugh...corporate head-hunting firm."

Meechum laughs at Voort's stunned expression, and glances, again, toward the front door. "Hey, remember the old army commercial, before they started firing people instead of hiring them? Learn skills for the real world? Well, I took those computer talents and now I use 'em to do psychological profiling. It's the biggest thing in hiring. You sit around with some six-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year exec, and a ten-page questionnaire, and ask questions like, 'Which would you rather do? Go fishing alone, or watch a Yankee game with friends?' You ask five hundred questions and feed 'em into our trusty analyst computer, and it gauges the guy's suitability to take responsibility to fire workers at General Motors, International Harvester, Calgary Wheat. It's astounding, the way those computers can predict the way someone will act."

"Sounds boring," Voort says.

"Boring," Meechum says, draining the glass, "is my goal in life now."

"The day you got into West Point was the proudest I ever saw you."

"And the stupidest. But now it's time to tell you why I'm here."

Meechum twists around to extract from his wallet a folded napkin, which, Voort sees, has writing on it, in Magic Marker. From his perspective the writing is backwards and has soaked through the paper, so Voort can't read what it says.

"I need a favor," Meechum says. His hand is trembling.

"I'll do it," Voort tells him.

"Don't you want to hear it first?"

"No. I want you to know that I'll do it, whatever it is, first."

A slow smile relaxes the tense expression on Voort's old buddy's face. "You know, Voort, after all these years, I still think of you as the only person, outside family, who I can trust. You and family. That's about it. Even at fifteen, with your parents dead, you were the head of your family. You had that house, and your uncles came to you for advice, not the other way around, and..."

His eyes freeze, focused, over Voort's shoulder, on the front door.

Voort is up instantly, even before he sees who is there. He swings around and strides toward the entrance, Mee-chum's "No!" dying into the general din behind the laughter and Monday night football and the Tony Bennett revival hit, "San Francisco," blaring over a jukebox, forcing people to shout to be heard.

Through the crowd, Voort catches sight of a man in a brown flight ja...