If I Should Die Before I Die (12 page)

“What do
you
think about McCloy?” the Counselor asked when I'd finished.

“I think he
is
weird,” I said. “In a screwed-up, rich-kid kind of way.”

“But is he a killer? The Pillow Killer?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I suppose there are plenty of men with sexual hangups, but that doesn't mean they go around murdering people. Other than what your wife gave me, I've got nothing. Then there's the note he put under her door, if he was the one who did it.”

Outwardly at least, he didn't seem very impressed. Maybe that should have struck me as strange, but it didn't at the time.

“Do you want me to put a stop to it?” I said.

“That's up to you.”

“And to Nora,” I said. “I'm going to have to tell her that I've told you.”

“Be my guest,” he said. “What you do on your own time is what you do on your own time.”

We were headed east by then, walking in cool shadows. It occurred to me in turn to ask him, ultimatum-style, what the hell was going on between him and Nora. But I didn't, and you could say that's what makes him an attorney-at-law and me his special assistant. Just before we reached the office, though, he answered it, kind of.

“There are times, Phil,” he said with a grunt, “when a woman really tries a man's soul.”

I didn't ask him what he meant.

“The manipulative son of a bitch,” the Counselor's Wife said later, in her office. She leaned back against her white parson's table-desk, palms propped on the edge of it behind her. I sat in the patient's chair, a few feet away.

“It's okay,” I said.

“It's definitely
not
okay!” she said angrily. “He's a manipulative son of a bitch. It's not fair that he drag you into what's going on between him and me. He'll manipulate anyone he has to to get what he wants.”

“I didn't have to tell him either.”

“Of course you did! He put your job on the line. I asked you to help me, not to put your job on the line.”

This was the first time I'd seen her since the afternoon of McCloy's appointment, when he hadn't shown up. She wasn't looking good, then or now. That's a relative statement with the Counselor's Wife, because even at her worst she'd make you sit up and take notice, but her face looked drawn. You could see the lines working out from her eyes, and her ashen hair, normally swirling and full-blown, had gone scraggly. She wore corduroy pants of an olive-khaki color and an oversized overblouse of sweatshirt material, three-quarter sleeves, same color tone. No jewelry, little makeup. A Hamptons outfit, I guessed.

“Maybe it's time somebody told me what
is
going on between the two of you,” I said.

She sighed, arched her chin, then lowered it into her collarbone, as though trying to relax her neck muscles.

“I've left him, Phil. Or at least I'm trying to.”

“Why?”

She smiled at me, the corners crinkling next to her eyes, but there wasn't much humor in the smile.

“How long have we known each other, Phil?”

“I don't know. Around ten years, I guess.”

“Ten years, yes. Doesn't it sometimes seem like it's gone by in a blur? As though you hardly know what's happened, but it's been ten years?”

“Sometimes,” I agreed.

“Doesn't that frighten you?”

I didn't answer. The truth is, I deal with things like that by not thinking too much about them.

“How old are you, Phil?”

“The same as you, if I remember correctly. Give or take a couple of months.”

In fact we were both still on the safe side of forty, but not very safe.

“Exactly,” she said. “Except that you're a man. You don't have a time clock inside your body. A time clock that's running out.”

“Oh,” I said.

Actually, I had my own version of her ten-year bit. For the past decade I'd been practically living in the same household as she and the Counselor—ten years, mind you—but I knew next to nothing about their private life. The Counselor was a lot older, and once in a while the age difference showed. But they both had successful careers, they had plenty of money, they'd been written up, more than once, as having an ideal marriage, and if they were childless, well, weren't lots of ideal marriages childless? I suppose if I'd ever thought about it, I'd have said that's what they both wanted. But I don't think I'd ever thought about it.

“So you're living in the Hamptons and commuting?” I guessed.

“Where? Oh yes, more or less.”

“How's Muffin?”

I don't know what made me think again of the cocker bitch, but I hadn't seen her since that morning in the rain, and I assumed that wherever the Counselor's Wife went, Muffin went with her.

“Muffin? Oh, she's fine.” Then, with a shake of her head: “No, she isn't. She's not eating. I practically have to hand-feed her.”

I started to say something like: Well, where do you go from here? or: What's going to happen next? but the phone interrupted us, a jangling sound.

The Counselor's Wife twisted her body, then leaned across the white desk to pick it up.

“Who?” she said. Then: “Oh. Just a minute.” Then, turning her head to me with her hand over the receiver: “It's for you. How did anybody know you were here?”

Only one person did. I'd been waiting for a tip-off from Bobby Derr, and I'd given him the number.

“You gettin' any?” Bobby Derr asked me.

“That's not very funny,” I said. “What's up?”

“Your coast is clear, babe.”

“I want to talk to you, Bobby.”

“Not tonight, babe. We're on the town tonight, me and my buddies.”

“Is McCloy with you?”

“Yep. And rarin' to go. It's all yours, Philly, you got the keys?”

“I've got the keys. Remember to call—three rings—if there's a problem.”

“You got it. I'll check in with you tomorrow, Philly, but not too early. Gotta go now.”

And he hung up.

“What keys?” asked the Counselor's Wife.

“The keys to McCloy's apartment,” I told her. “Derr got me a set. I want to take a look.”

“Forget it, Phil.”

“Forget it?”

“I've gotten you into enough trouble as it is. I want us both to forget it. I think I made it all up anyway. I'm a hysterical woman who wants to have a baby. Hysterical women who want to have babies can make anything up.”

“You didn't make the tapes up,” I said. “I heard them, remember? I also checked your correlations, they were right on. You didn't make up the note either, did you?”

“No.”

“Then I'm going to take a look,” I said, standing.

“But we don't know for sure that
he
wrote the note.”

“We don't know anything for sure, Nora,” I said, “other than that he's a rich kid with a lot of poison in him. We also know he's capable of treating women like dirt,” seeing in my mind's eye Linda Smith sitting on the garbage bag, “and that he can be intimidated by men. Whether that's enough to make him kill people is anybody's guess, but you, who probably have better insight into him than anybody else around, thought it might.”

“I told you: I'm a hysterical woman who wants to have a baby.”

“Yeah. You're also a professional.”

For once, she didn't answer. She took it in and stared back at me meanwhile: no expression. Then it must have registered because she stood up, tall, chin up, and gave me one of those dazzling smiles, with the white teeth and the crinkles darting out from her eyes.

“You'd have made a hell of a shrink, Phil,” she said.

“I'll let you know if I find anything.”

“No you won't,” she said, taking my arm. “I'm going with you.”

I argued with her. Inevitably I lost. I pointed out that what I was doing was illegal and while, if I got caught, I could probably wriggle out, if she did it would sure shoot the hell out of her professional standing. Screw her professional standing, she said. Why was everyone so worried about her professional standing? Bill Biegler, the shrink who shared the office, wanted her to forget Carter and not see him anymore, but she thought that would really screw her standing—with herself if not the profession.

Besides, she said, she was tired of hiding, tired of feeling sorry for herself.

So we ended up on Park Avenue together, walking stride for stride in the darkness. The unusually balmy weather of the day had held, and people were out, and I guess those who noticed us took us for a couple. We talked about McCloy mostly. The McCloy I'd met and described, she thought, matched the one she knew. She was worried, though, that he hadn't shown up for their appointment. On the most simplistic level, she thought he could still be paying her back for August. But she suspected something else, some revival of the unresolved conflicts that had brought him to her in the first place. Whether she wanted it or not, it was conceivable that she'd lost him. After all, she said, she wouldn't be the first shrink he'd dumped. She only hoped she wouldn't be the last.

From my point of view, having her along actually helped. I'd expected trouble getting into McCloy's apartment, even with the keys, and I think if I'd showed up alone, the night super, the suspicious black man in the same cardigan sweater whom I'd run into that drunken night with McCloy, would have tried to stop me. But with the Counselor's Wife on my arm, I'm not sure he even recognized me.

We rode up to the ninth floor, then down a nondescript corridor to McCloy's apartment. I had two keys for the door, one for a dead bolt, but the dead bolt had been left open. So much for security.

“Ucch,” the Counselor's Wife said behind me, and with reason.

At first glance, you'd have said somebody had beaten us to it. I mean: ransack city. You walked into a small hall, then the living room, and the first thing you saw in the living room was a foldout couch. The couch was open, unmade, and there was a flotsam and jetsam of clothes dumped on it, around it, draped on chairs, on the cross bar of a floor lamp, hanging from the corners of the mantel over the fireplace. The second thing you saw was the TV, a king-size console job facing the couch, with a VCR on the floor next to it and a jumble of videotapes, some loose, some in those black boxes the rental shops use. To judge from the adjoining kitchen, this was one of those households where they let the dirty dishes pile up till there are no clean ones left, and then they go out and buy new ones. The contents of the refrigerator I didn't examine long enough to try to describe.

At the other end of the living room were a pair of windows nobody had washed in a long time and a door that opened onto a small terrace. The waist-high parapet, a curved affair built of brick, gave out onto the street far below. On the neighboring terrace some kind of tree was growing in a large clay tub, but this one seemed to be a dumping ground for what nobody wanted anymore: a carton containing parts of a vacuum cleaner, an old typewriter, an abandoned stereo which seemed to have been replaced by a big-speakered rig on the floor behind the couch.

I left the Counselor's Wife in the living room and explored down a back hall, off of which were two bedrooms, two baths. Whatever it was I was looking for, I didn't find it there, only more of the same: clothes everywhere you looked, on the beds, the floors, hanging in the closets, dumped on the closet floors. Men's mostly, but some women's too. And good labels if that's your taste: Brooks, Paul Stuart, Calvin Klein, Lauren. Shoes from Church. The strangest thing was that, as lived in as the place obviously was, I found very little that you'd call personal. It was more like everything was interchangeable among the people who came and went, and maybe that was the point. Like: If it fits you and it's fairly clean, wear it. Like: If you need some aftershave, help yourself. (I counted a dozen bottles, with different labels, in the two medicine cabinets. Over half of them were empties.) No drugs that I saw; no booze either except for some empty Dewars bottles; no personal mail, just some bills in their envelopes, none of which was addressed to Carter McCloy. A few posters tacked to the walls, the old Farrah Fawcett among them, and Willie Nelson too, torn, on which somebody had scrawled: “Willie sucks.”

It was, in sum, the way Bobby Derr had described it, being there made it more depressing.

While I stood in one of the bedrooms, trying to figure out what it told about McCloy, or didn't, I became aware of sound from the living room, like somebody had turned the TV on. Then I heard the Counselor's Wife calling:

“Hey, Phil, come here a minute.”

Then:

“Oh my God …”

She was kneeling on the floor in the living room, in front of the television set.

“It's my show,” she said softly when I hunkered down beside her. “My God, Phil, he's taped my show.”

And taped it carefully, we discovered. The commercials had been neatly zapped. Somebody had sat there, watching, working the Pause and Record buttons.

The one she was watching was the very one I'd gone to, the show about Female Orgasm, but before we quit we found half a dozen “Nora Saroff's Hours.” And not only Nora Saroff. There were tapes of other television women—newscasters, talk-show hosts, anchorwomen. Diane Sawyer was there. So were Suzi Lee and Brenda Simpson. So was the one who does the news on Channel 9. But Nora Saroff, it seemed, was the local favorite.

“God, Phil,” she said when I put the last one on Rewind. “You don't know how this spooks me. It really does. It spooks the living daylights out of me.”

“I can't say I blame you.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don't know. Except that somebody—McCloy—is pretty fixated on you.”

“Brrr,” she said, and I saw her shoulders shudder. “I mean, I've seen tapes of the show before. I look at them all the time myself, trying to figure out ways to improve it. But that somebody out there should actually be taping me …” She shook her head from side to side, inhaled, exhaled. “God, I find that spooky.”