If I Should Die Before I Die (11 page)

Margie Magister must have felt it too. She reached across, put her hand on the Counselor's arm.

“Please, Charles,” she said, her eyes widening. “I asked you to come here not only because I love bow ties, although I do, but because Roy told me you were the best lawyer in New York. Better even than Roy.” I saw the Counselor glance at Barger, who, by way of response, simply shrugged and grinned. “I don't want you to be arrayed against me.”

“I'm not arrayed against you,” the Counselor began, but Margie interrupted him:

“Oh yes you are. Can't we finally be open with each other? The great big firm of lawyers wants me to give up and go away, but they don't know how to go about it because they're afraid I'll fire them, once I have control. So they call in Charles Camelot to deal with me and his master spy, Phil Revere, to dig up all my dirt, and I'll tell you, Philip,” looking at me, a smile working up into her cheekbones, “what I want us to do about that part. I want you to move in with me, morning, noon and night, and take notes on all the money I spend and interview all the people I'm sleeping with—of both sexes, mind you, including goats—and make pictures of the drugs I shoot into my arms, and do you know? It won't make any difference. When you have finished, I will still be running the business.”

She'd made the Counselor laugh aloud, his craggy head back, hair shining white in the sunlight. Then he leaned forward, still smiling, head now shadowed again by the umbrella.

“But where did you hear all this, Margie?” he said. “What makes you so certain that's my role?”

“Well, Sally said …”

But she broke off abruptly, and the hand, the one which had been holding the Counselor's arm, swung over her mouth as though to shut off the words.

Too late.

“Merde,”
she said, looking at Barger. The lawyer just tilted his head sideways as though to say to his client: You've dug your own hole, now climb out of it yourself. Then she looked ruefully back at the Counselor, started to say something, then thought better of that, and her mouth closed and the lower lip rose in that pouting expression.

“Okay,” she said carefully, as though choosing her words. “Yes, Sally and I have talked together, what's wrong with that? We are two women. I admire her. As a woman. I mean: I, as a woman, I admire her. It is remarkable what she has accomplished in the man's world. I don't just mean her magazines, although
Fem
speaks to the women of today. But a single woman, divorced, three times divorced, and still she is working and bringing up her children. All at once. It isn't easy, you know? They're remarkable. The children, I mean …”

Her voice broke off, though, as though she'd lost the thread.

“You said you and Sally have talked,” the Counselor said. “What exactly did you decide?”

Barger started to intervene, but Margie waved him off.

“Don't you see, Charles? Bob wanted to create an empire. I think all you men do. You don't want what you make to die. You want heirs, your own blood, to make it grow. That's what Bob wanted. But he knew the boys—Young Bob, Stafford, William—well, he knew they were no good, that they would lose what he'd built. One time he said to me: ‘Sometimes these things have to skip a generation.' He was looking toward his grandchildren, don't you see?”

“Then why didn't he provide for that in his will?” the Counselor said.

“Because he thought he would live long enough to take care of it himself. I don't know why, but in spite of everything, some men think they will live forever.”

“And Sally? What does she want?”

“What can I tell you? Sally hated her father more than anyone else in the world. But she loves her children to the point that she would lay down her life for them.” She seemed to hesitate, as though surprised by what she'd just said. Then: “Sally wants to stay in the company. There is a place for her; she wants this place.” Then, her hand reaching to touch the Counselor's arm again: “In fact, there is a place for everyone. Nobody should have to leave. We should all work together to make Bob's dream come true.”

Maybe that was a little heavy, the part about Bob's dream, but taking the meal and the weather into account, I'd still have to give her performance a 9.9. Including the “mistake” she'd made, mentioning Sally Magister. The point about that was that there'd been no good reason for her to slip Sally's name into the conversation—Barger himself had surely briefed her on the Counselor's role—and I suspected she'd done it not inadvertently but, to use her own word, as a calculation. A calculation and a message.

Roy Barger summed it up for her:

“We don't want a war, Counselor. We want to negotiate the peace in good faith. But if the brothers insist on fighting, in or out of the courts, then we will fight back. And we will win.”

We stood. I could guess at least some of the questions the Counselor would be turning over in his mind, but evidently he decided to keep them to himself.

He towered over Margie Magister. She had to stand on tiptoes, extending her arms. For a minute I thought she was going to kiss him. Instead, she straightened his bow tie.

“I'm so sorry you have to go already,” she said to him.

“I am too.”

“But you're leaving Philip with me, aren't you? To watch over me?”

She'd taken the Counselor by the arm and, turning to me, now linked her free arm in mine. We walked that way into the cool interior of the duplex while Roy Barger stayed on the terrace.

“I'm afraid Phil has other things to do,” the Counselor said.

“Better things than to stay with me?” she asked, laughing and squeezing my arm.

“I didn't say better,” he replied.

“Well, I would absolutely insist on it,” she said, “if he wore bow ties too. Bow ties make me—how do you say it?—go weak in the knees. I think they're so cute. Do you know what we call them in French?
Papillons
. Butterflies. Big men wearing butterfly ties …”

I've never, I've got to say, seen the Counselor respond that way to flattery. He stood there chatting animatedly, his eyes on hers, a bemused smile on his face, and if the elevator had taken all day to get up to the penthouse, I doubt he'd have noticed.

The elevator did get there finally.

Margie Magister turned to me. We shook hands, and I got a quick kiss on the cheek, a tiptoe job, and a strong whiff of some tangy, floral scent.

Then she turned to the Counselor. Both hands on his shoulders, tiptoes, then one leg kicking out behind the other. Two kisses, European style, one for each cheek.

“I'll be talking to you soon, Mr. Camelot,” she said, gazing up at him.

“I hope so, Mrs. Magister,” replied the Counselor.

So help me God.

We rode down in silence, side by side, facing the door. Then the Counselor said:

“Bow ties, Phil. That's the secret.”

It was almost 3:30 in the afternoon. I've never known him to get back to the office later than 3.

I was trying to wave down a cab in front of Margie Magister's building when he said we should walk. Four blocks was about his usual limit; we had a dozen to get to the office.

A day, like I said, for the unprecedented.

“So what do you think?” the Counselor asked as we headed up Fifth Avenue.

“Charming,” I said. “She's a genuine charmer.” Then: “Also, she seemed to take a special shine to you. And you to her, I guess.” Then: “The food and the booze were first-rate.”

No comment from him on any of the above. We walked on, in silence. Then he said:

“What have we got on Sally Magister?”

I pulled from memory the main points in Bud Fincher's reports. Three marriages, three divorces; four children, one by the first marriage, three from the second; took back the Magister name after the last divorce; ran the company's magazine division; practicing lesbian, according to Bud's latest intelligence; big on feminist causes.

“What about her finances?”

“Fairly well loaded, as far as we can tell,” I answered. “In addition to Magister money, she got big settlements out of the first two marriages. The third was some painter, no bucks. According to what we've got, she pays him off. She gives a lot of it away too.”

“Where to?”

“Feminist causes,” I said, naming a few Bud Fincher had dug up. “She's a major backer.”

“I want you to go see her,” the Counselor said.

“How come?”

“Because they want us to,” he said. “For the minute, we're going to do exactly what they want us to. But I want you to focus on her children too. There's something wrong there.”

“What do you mean, wrong?” I asked.

“Margie Magister doesn't strike me as the type who'd worry overly about other people's children. And there was something Barger said about the skeletons having baby skeletons.”

Another block, in silence. There were, I noticed, a lot of kids going into and coming out of the park, some on their own feet, some pushed in strollers by their nannies or mothers, these days it's hard to tell one from the other. There was a vendor selling helium balloons and pinwheels, and another selling ice cream, and a cop with nothing better to do than write a ticket for a double-parked car with out-of-state plates. A panhandler or two, but nothing else to remind you that there were homeless on the streets, and teenagers peddling crack, and somewhere a killer who liked to stalk women who had pillows on their beds.

Magical
, Margie Magister had called it.

Anyway, that's more or less what I was thinking. The Counselor, apparently, was somewhere else.

“Phil,” he said out of the blue, “I want to know everything that's going on between you and my wife.”

Maybe I walked another block without breathing. Maybe less.

“Nothing's going on,” I said. “She asked me to look into something for her, that's all.”

“What?”

“I'm not sure I can tell you that, not without asking her permission.”

“But you work for me, don't you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You should know that I overheard her talking to you a couple of times this weekend. Unless there's another Phil in her life, it was you, wasn't it?”

“Yes, it was.”

At least this meant they'd been together after all. At the house in the Hamptons, I assumed. It also explained why she'd been in a hurry and why, once, she'd cut me off.

“It's about one of her patients, isn't it?” the Counselor said.

“It could be.”

We'd stopped walking. We stood at a corner, waiting for the light to change. Then it changed, and we still stood there.

“How long have we worked together, Phil?” the Counselor said.

“Over ten years.”

“And you're well compensated?”

“Relatively well, yes.”

“I know I've always said to you that what you do on your own time is your own business. But I didn't know that you free-lanced.”

“I don't, as a rule.”

“How much is she paying you?”

“Expenses only,” I said. “Out-of-pockets.”

“Including Bobby Derr?”

This threw me, I admit.

“When did you talk to Bobby?” I asked.

“I didn't have to. He's been spreading the word that he's working on a job for me.”

That stupid bastard, I thought. Whether or not Bobby had believed what I'd told him, he'd bragged that he was working for the Counselor, probably to somebody who worked for Fincher, and Fincher must have passed it on, either to the Firm or the Counselor himself.

We stood on the Fifth Avenue corner, head to head. He's only a little taller than I am, but he gives the impression of towering. I remember the breeze lifting his white hair.

He's never been one, needless to say, not to press home an advantage.

“Nobody likes ultimatums,” he said, “but take this as one. I want to know what's going on. I want it now.”

“And if I decide not to tell you?”

“Then you're out of a job, Phil. As of this minute.”

Eyeball to eyeball.

Knowing what I know now, I could say that I'd been crazy to keep the McCloy business to myself. I'm not a cop, not even a PI in the normal sense. I should have made the Counselor's Wife take it to the police right away, or done it for her. You could also say I was simply relieved to have somebody else to share it with, there on Fifth Avenue, other than a woman who, at least in her own mind, had reasons beyond the Pillow Killer to be in a semihysterical state.

Yeah, and if pigs had wings, etc., etc.

In short, I blabbed the whole thing. I was sore about it all right, about the way he squeezed it out of me, but I gave him all my facts and suppositions, including some things I haven't put down yet, like my interview with the Staten Island girls that Bobby had set up over the weekend, like the surveillance I'd organized at Nora Saroff's office for McCloy's scheduled appointment, when McCloy didn't show. I also told him what Bobby Derr had dug up from his carousings with McCloy and his buddies. According to Bobby, the others had been on McCloy's case lately. It had mostly to do with sex, Bobby said, with McCloy not being able to get it up. The Staten Island girls had corroborated this. They thought “Cloy” was cute, weird but cute, and not much in bed. They thought maybe he drank too much. On the other hand, Bobby said, Cloy was the one who organized them, Cloy and Hal, and what really seemed to burn them was Cloy taking off on his own. Like that night after the Rosebud. In fact, he hadn't been around at all the last couple of nights. All of them, according to Bobby, had money to spend, but he hadn't been able to get at the source of the bucks other than their families, because only a couple of them held down regular jobs. According to Bobby, there was stuff he thought they still hadn't let him in on, drugs maybe although they themselves were booze hounds, but it had occurred to me that this could also be Bobby Derr's own way of hanging on to a good thing.