If I Should Die Before I Die (16 page)

Then Walters said: “We know why you're trying to stall us, Revere. Don't worry, we won't let the cat out of the bag. No problem.”

His grin had a lot of leer in it. I told him I didn't know what he was talking about.

“Oh no? You mean to tell us you're
not
balling his wife on the side? You mean you're
not
scared we'll spill it to him?”

I measured him, cop or no cop. He was about my height, a little older, maybe a couple of sizes wider.

Intaglio, though, must have seen what was coming.

“Here's the point, Revere,” he said, cutting in front of his partner. “This is an ugly case, and we've got no time for people playing cute with us. There's a killer out there who likes to play around with women and then suffocate them, or vice versa. We've got no idea when he'll strike again. We want him bad, and we want him now. We've got the manpower to follow every lead, and that's exactly what we're doing.”

He was the second one that day who'd accused me of being cute.

“Okay,” I said, “but you get two things straight. One, Mr. Camelot's not going to see you just because you're there. Besides, he doesn't know any more about the murders than what I've told you.”

“Except where his wife is,” Intaglio said.

“Maybe he'll tell you that, but you'd better let me call first. And the second thing,” staring behind him at Walters, “there's nothing going down between Mrs. Camelot and me. If you think there is and you want to tell him about it, go right ahead. But I'd strongly recommend you be sure of your facts.”

“Go ahead and call him,” Intaglio decided for them.

He crossed West Street with me to the phone. I got Roger LeClerc, who said with his usual pleasure that the Counselor had been looking for me. Then I got Ms. Shapiro who said the same thing, without the pleasure. I told her to interrupt the meeting, that it was urgent. A moment later he came on:

“What's going on, Phil? You're supposed to be here.”

“Unavoidably detained,” I said, “on West Street, by two representatives of the law. The DA's office, in fact. They're on the Pillow Killer case. There's been another murder. They're very insistent on talking to you and Mrs. Camelot.”

“Why?” he said.

“Information. I've told them everything I know.”

“Tell them to be here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.”

I passed this on to Intaglio. He shook his head angrily.

“He won't accept that,” I told the Counselor.

I heard him grunt at the other end. Then:

“Put him on, Phil. What's his name?”

“Intaglio,” I said, handing the assistant DA the phone.

Intaglio got in the first words and the last. In between came a fair-sized pause, punctuated here and there by a “Yes, sir,” and a “No, sir.” Then, finally: “Yes, sir, nine o'clock sharp.”

Intaglio handed the phone back to me.

“I want you back here, Phil,” the Counselor ordered. “Right now.”

And he hung up, without even leaving room for another “Yes, sir.”

“Your boss is some piece of work,” Intaglio said. “On the other hand, he did say he'd have his wife there, tomorrow morning.”

We dodged across through the traffic to the tan Accord, where Walters was just hanging up the police phone inside.

“Hey, Andy,” he called to his partner. “They've got him! They're bringing him in even as we speak!”

“Who's that?”

“McCloy. Revere's ole buddy, Carter McCloy.”

“Let's get going,” Intaglio said to Walters. Then, turning to me: “You want us to drop you off?”

My Fiero was still parked over near Sally Magister's.

“Thanks but no thanks,” I said.

“Probably we'll see you tomorrow morning?”

“Probably you'll see me tomorrow morning.”

“Nine o'clock?”

“Nine o'clock.”

“Nice of you to join us, Phil,” the Counselor said sarcastically when I showed up in his office, over an hour and a half late.

There were eleven people present, and they filled the room to bursting. In addition to the Counselor there were McClintock and Rand from the Firm, Young Bob Magister and his brothers Stafford and William, plus their personal attorneys, plus a steno from the Firm to take notes. I sat in a straight chair which I brought in from the outer office and sandwiched between Hank Rand and the far wall. We of the local staff had long since quit lobbying for a conference room. The Counselor would have no part of it. On rare occasions we'd held larger meetings on the top floor, where the Counselor's Wife had thrown parties for up to a hundred people, but the top floor was part of the residence and the Counselor liked to keep his business separate. I also think he had the theory that if people were that uncomfortable, jammed into his office, they wouldn't stay that long.

I'd never met the Magister men before. At least they didn't look like Jerks. Young Bob looked every bit the gilt-edged executive at fifty, in blue serge, lustrous white shirt with collar pin, maroon rep tie with navy crests on it which probably signified some club or university. His brothers were similarly turned out. They all came on self-assured and articulate, and the fact that there were no less than eight people in the room whose services were being billed to them, directly or indirectly, some at high figures, didn't seem to bother them in the slightest. Probably, if it had occurred to them, they'd have liked the idea of it.

The people who were sweating, I saw quickly, were Doug McClintock and Hank Rand. I knew the Magisters had called the meeting—a “council of war,” they'd said. The Firm, I also knew, had contrived to put it off for one reason or another, but now, with the apparent defection of Sally, the brothers had insisted. The Firm, in other words, was now being forced to choose sides, and I figured they'd asked for the meeting to be held at our office as a last-ditch attempt to stay on the fence.

The part I'd missed, I found out later, had been devoted largely to reviewing and assessing all the litigation-in-progress, particularly the contesting of Old Bob's will. The consensus was that the case was a loser. Nobody could produce evidence that Old Bob was mentally incompetent when the will was written. On the contrary, the Firm itself had drawn it up. Nor could anyone prove that Margie Magister had coerced him into signing it. At the same time, no one was willing to drop it, lest it be taken as a sign that the brothers were throwing in the towel.

By the time I got there, they'd shifted to mudslinging, or to mudslinging as an offensive strategy.

Young Bob put it this way:

“I don't believe,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “and by the way,” motioning to the stenographer, “I want this off the record.… But I don't believe that any shareholder or investor in his or her right mind is going to support a Jewish nurse from Europe and an avowed dyke, even if she is my sister, to manage a corporation like ours. It's patently absurd. Does anybody disagree with me?”

“We don't know that she's Jewish,” somebody said.

“Believe me,” Young Bob went on. “Look, I've nothing against Jews. They run some of our biggest companies, particularly in the communications industry. But look at what you've got. You've got two women—
women
, mind you—one of who's a Jew who's never worked a day in the business, the other an artsy lesbian who lives in SoHo or wherever and who only got where she is because the old man had a temporary weak moment. We all know Wall Street. Do you think they'll leave a dollar invested in Magister?”

“In fact, Bob, Sally hasn't done so badly,” his brother Stafford said.

“Let's not get into that. You and I both know that if the old man hadn't played games with the corporate overhead, the magazine group would have long since been in water up to its chin.”

“Still,
Fem
's been the best new income producer we've had in the last decade.”

“I don't want to hear about
Fem
,” Young Bob said icily. “What is it? Less than five percent of our annual revenues? Somebody's got to worry about the other 95 percent.”

“Maybe Wall Street doesn't think anyone is, enough,” Doug McClintock said calmly.

“I'm surprised to hear that from someone like you, Doug,” Young Bob said, turning on McClintock.

“It's not me, Bob,” the lawyer said, unflustered. “I'm simply gauging Wall Street opinion.”

“And you know the reason for that. The old man kept our hands tied for years. But I'll tell you this much: If I knew for sure those bitches were going to win, I'd dump every last share of Magister I own. Right this minute.”

Part of Young Bob's plan, as I've indicated, had been to get enough dirt on Margie and, more recently, his sister that they could be bought out, either in private negotiation or through investor pressure. Blackmail, in sum, by another name. He now asked McClintock for an update. McClintock turned to the Counselor, and the Counselor, not to my surprise, turned to me.

I told them I had little to report that they didn't already know. I described my interview with Sally Magister. She'd been clearly hostile toward her brothers and open about her own life, particularly her sex life. For what she'd said, everything Bud Fincher had dug up on her was true enough, and it hadn't seemed to bother her.

“All she said was that you'd better be able to prove it. She also said to tell you that if you want to start slinging mud, then she and La Marga—that's what she calls Mrs. Magister—can sling with the best of them.”

“That sounds like our sister,” Stafford Magister commented.

“There was one other thing I didn't quite get,” I said.

“What was that?” McClintock asked.

“I haven't even had a chance to tell Mr. Camelot yet,” I said, eyeing the Counselor whose long face was partly hidden behind wreathes of pipe smoke and whose eyes were half-closed. “But there's something funny about one of her children.”

“Vincent. The oldest one.”

“What's funny about Vince?” Young Bob said. “Other than that he's a bum.”

“I don't know,” I said. “But according to his mother, if I understood her right, he's been sleeping with Margie Magister.”

This revelation seemed to start everybody talking at once, except for the Counselor, and then Young Bob was shouting louder than the rest.

“I don't know what you're all getting so excited for,” he called out. “We all know Vince. Did he ever finish school, Staff? I don't think he even graduated. The biggest joke of all is that she's employed him in the magazine group, can you beat that?”

“Used to, Bob,” his brother William said. “I think he's out again now.”

“In or out, what difference does it make? The word around the company is that if you want to get Vince Halloran on the phone before lunch, you'd better call him at home.”

“Or at Margie's,” someone else said. “God, that means he's shacking up with his grandfather's widow!”

“It wouldn't surprise me at all,” said Young Bob. And then, to me: “Is there anything else?”

“No,” I said. “Or maybe. I could be wrong, but I got the impression she—your sister—didn't like it. Not at all.”

They chewed on that one for a while. Someone ventured that that's how Margie had gotten Sally to defect, by convincing her son to convince his mother. Someone else suggested that Sally had gone over to Margie in order to keep tabs on her son. As for me, I was thinking about my third list, Bobby Derr's, and Vince Halloran's old buddy, Carter McCloy, who, as far as I knew, was being interrogated by the Pillow Killer Task Force even as we sat there.

The meeting then drifted into numbers. Numbers of shares, numbers of stockholders, balance sheet items and income statements, P/E ratios, ROI's—all the stuff, in sum, that's the lifeblood of accountants, attorneys, investment bankers, and all the rest who serve and use the corporation. I half-listened because I was there, but the longer they went on, the more it seemed to me they were just marking time, either waiting for some other revelation like the one I'd brought them or, more likely, for somebody to decide what to do next. Following this train of thought, I realized that the Counselor himself had said virtually nothing since I'd arrived. This was as usual. To watch him in a meeting, the unchanging expression, the distracted gestures, you'd never have guessed he was listening. But he was, as I knew from experience, not necessarily the way you and I would but absorbing what was said and formulating his opinions meanwhile, so that when the time came he'd be ready to hold forth.

That time took a long time coming, but it did.

I remember Doug McClintock turning to him.

“Well, Charles, what are your thoughts?”

The room, I noticed, had fallen silent.

The Counselor's chair creaked as he leaned forward. He propped his elbows on the desk and, facing the Magister brothers, pointed at them with the stem end of a pipe.

“You're not going to like what I think,” he told them.

“Go ahead,” Young Bob answered. “Try us.”

“Very well,” he said. “From what I've heard, you have only three intelligent choices, and the only recommendation I'd make is that you choose and exercise any one of them as rapidly as possible. The first would be: accept what the Magister women want. The second: sell off your own holdings in Magister. The third: look for a friendly takeover.”

“But all those would mean effectively giving up control of the company!” the brothers protested, more or less in the same words.

“I think that's already happened, gentlemen,” the Counselor said. “If you had effective control, we wouldn't be sitting here today. I understand that none of you may like these alternatives, but you know yourselves that you risk losing any protracted struggle, and there's a chance you'll take the company down in the process. So I suggest you take a closer look at the three choices.