If I Should Die Before I Die (23 page)

“Then why …?” McClintock asked, leaving the question hanging.

“Because Barger's trying to smoke out how high the Magister boys will go.”

“Or Goldsmith?”

“Or anyone,” the Counselor said. “As for Mr. Goldsmith, my information tells me he may have decided to cash in early.”

I noticed that McClintock had started to sweat, even though the temperature in the Counselor's office was on the cool side. He'd heard the same thing, didn't know whether to believe it or not. Did the Counselor believe it? The Counselor shrugged. Raffy Goldsmith had been known to bail out on deals and take his profits in paper. Besides, he reminded McClintock, Goldsmith hadn't been his idea.

This unexpectedly set off a shouting match between them. More than anything, I think, it reflected the peculiar history of their relationship. Both had made senior partner at the Firm at roughly the same time. Then the Counselor had “gone private,” as he liked to put it, taking some of his clients with him but maintaining that loose relationship with the Firm I've described elsewhere. This meant, among other things, that the Counselor could pretty much wheel and deal as he chose, whereas McClintock was responsible for an organization of over a hundred attorneys. The loss of a client like Magister Companies would be devastating to the Firm.

This was why McClintock had called the Counselor in on the Magister situation, in which the Firm wanted above all to maintain the appearance of neutrality. But if anyone had managed to stay neutral, it was the Counselor. The Firm, willingly or not, had chosen sides. Worse, and this was clearly what McClintock was afraid of, they might have chosen wrong.

Whence the shouting match.

“Well, what the hell
should
we do?” McClintock said finally, his face flushed.

I think it was the first time I ever heard him curse.

“Tell them the offer,” the Counselor answered.

“And recommend what?”

“Recommend nothing. Just hope, for your sake, that they say no.”

The way it worked out, I got to Margie's first. I drove the Fiero over to Fifth Avenue in a chilling rain and parked among the Mercedeses and the BMWs, then identified myself to the doorman who sent me right up. The blond young houseman who'd served us that afternoon let me in, took my London Fog (the lining now in) and ushered me into that same boudoir room, where he asked if he could make me a drink. I told him I'd help myself, which I did. Then I sat by the French windows, by the table which had been set for two with a vase of flowers in the middle, and watched the rain sleeting across the terrace and the dim towers of downtown trying to fight off the murk.

I thought about why Margie wanted to see me. Margie with a hard
g
. I thought about how “the other half”—actually the other one percent—live and now their habitats always seem lonesome to me, too big, too empty, for regular human beings. Then I thought some more about why Margie wanted to see me.

No answer.

Then Margie herself.

She was already talking as she came in, wearing a wet mink coat that came down to her ankles, something about how her driver hadn't been able to get into the block where the theater was and how she'd half-drowned finding him, apologizing meanwhile for being late, the more so since the play she'd seen had been positively abominable. Abominable pronounced the French way, with the accent on the second
ab
. She took off the mink as she talked, shaking it like a terrier, then draped it carefully over a wooden valet. She shook her hair too, which sparkled from the rain, and kicked her shoes off and came toward me, once again in stockinged feet and with hands outstretched, to kiss me first on one cheek, then the other.

“Ah,” she said, smiling up at me from under the bangs, “a fellow beer drinker, would you pour me one too?” Then, picking up a telephone and buzzing, she ordered that supper be served.

The houseman, I remember, wheeled supper in, but then Margie dismissed him and served us herself.

I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember a thing we ate. I guess that was the effect of Margie, Margie with a hard
g
and a high-necked black dress of some gauzy material, with a large round diamond pin at the neck and round matching earrings, which I remember her taking off at some point.

The small talk didn't last long, maybe because it had to do mostly with me. Margie said she was naturally curious about people she liked: who they were, where they were going. So? Who was Philip Revere and where was he going?

I didn't answer well. I don't when I'm asked about myself.

Margie said that was usually a sign that people were dissatisfied with themselves.

I worked for an attorney, I said, though I wasn't one myself. The work was interesting; I was reasonably well paid. No, I'd never been married. Yes, I'd had my share of girlfriends. Why had I never gotten married? Well, I thought that was something you had to want to do pretty badly, maybe I'd never wanted to badly enough.

Did I think Charles was a great lawyer?

I thought he served his clients extremely well.

That's not what she'd asked, though. She'd asked if I thought he was a great lawyer.

I said I wasn't sure I knew what “great” meant when it came to lawyers. He was smarter than any lawyer I'd ever met, and more resourceful, but he stayed out of courtrooms, which was where most famous lawyers made their reputations. He served his clients extremely well, I repeated.

“Do you see what I mean?” Margie said. “You find it easier to talk about him than you do about yourself, Philip. I have a theory, you see. That is why I ask if you think he's great. It is that most young men who work for great men, or men they think are great, tend to underrate themselves. I think this is true of my husband's sons. Maybe they are better men than people think, but how will we ever know if they don't think so themselves? And I imagine this is true for you, how can you ever find out who you are yourself?”

She waited for me to answer, but I didn't.

“I'm sorry,” she said, reaching out and touching my hand. “I don't mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“You're not making me uncomfortable.”

“Oh yes I am. You're … how do you say? … fidgeting. I see you fidgeting inside. You're also smoking too much. Do you want to kill yourself with tobacco?”

“No, I don't.”

“Well, why don't you stop then? Maybe this will be my job—Margie's job—to make you stop. What do you think?”

She laughed at that, and I joined her, and if in fact I had been fidgeting inside, well, I stopped when she laughed.

“Maybe this is
my
real role in life,” she said. “To help young men find themselves. Like Vincent. Tell me, Philip, what do you think about Vincent?”

For just a second I didn't recognize who she was talking about. It was her French pronunciation again:
Van-sahn
, sort of.

“Vincent Halloran,” she said. “He says you know him.”

“I hardly do,” I said. Then I started to say: He helped beat up one of my friends. Then, a little to my surprise, I went ahead and said it.

“This doesn't surprise me,” Margie said, shaking her head thoughtfully. “He is so violent sometimes. It isn't just
macho
. He has that too, the
macho
, all you American men have that, but this is something else. There is so much anger in him. Such scorn. You must have seen that.”

“I haven't,” I said, shaking my head. “But I hardly know him.”

“But you knew his friend, didn't you? The one who killed himself after he killed all those girls? Carter?”

“Yes, in a way,” I said.

“He is so strange about his friends, so …
scornful
! But they
were
friends, for a very long time. Do you know why Vincent says he committed suicide? He says it was because he couldn't even kill the last one. You know, the girl who survived? Do you know what Vincent says? He says Carter never killed all those girls, it had to have been someone else because Carter didn't have the nerve. He says it is the biggest joke of all time that Carter was the Pillow Killer.”

I found myself reaching for another cigarette. It wasn't so much what Halloran had said, and in fact he wasn't the first to have said it. One of the tabloids had been running a series called
Was McCloy the Real Pillow Killer?
They'd raised the same question: If he was, why had he flubbed it with Linda Vigliotti? They'd sent out a team to investigate the earlier murders again, and while the reporters hadn't actually proven anything, they'd found a witness, the one in the Costello murder, who said, yes, she thought McCloy could have been the one she'd seen with the victim.
Could have been?
the paper had headlined that particular episode.

“… changed since then,” Margie was saying. “I can't even tell you how he is changed, but there are times when I think I don't even know him, and I
do
know him. I know him very well. He has been moody always, but I thought he has … potential. I
still
think he has potential.”

For the first time, I was aware of her hesitating, like she was avoiding some point.

“Does he live here?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she said, with a sly smile. “When he wants to. He is a free man, free to come and go. He used to spend much time in that dreadful apartment they all shared. I went once, but I swore never again! The filth was horrible. Now I don't know where he goes. But this is all right.”

Clearly, though, it wasn't all right. She reached across and grasped my forearm.

“He needs help, Philip. I mean to say, serious help. Professional. I don't think I can do anything more for him. Today, for example, it was all I could do to make him be here for the press conference. And he belonged there. But then the whole time I was afraid he was going to say something absolutely terrible. Did this show? That I was afraid?”

“No, it certainly didn't. But what were you afraid he was going to do?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Something destructive. He used to work there, did you know? He hated it. I think I encouraged him to leave. Now all he says he wants is the money.”

“But not that much of it is his, is it?”

“Mmm? Not so bad. For a young man in his twenties?”

“But what's going on between him and his mother?”

“Sally?” she said. “Ach, Sally adores him. But it is so typical: the more she adores him, the more scornful he is.”

Vincent the Angel, I thought. Somehow, though, it didn't ring right. I remembered the display of photos in the Tribeca loft and how Vincent the Angel appeared to have dropped out around the age of five. I told Margie about it.

“This doesn't surprise me at all,” she said. “It's so typical of doting mothers. Sally must still think of him as five years old, her little boy. She doesn't want him to grow up.”

“Or to live here?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” she said, smiling quickly, then making an expression of disapproval with her mouth. “Yes, there is that. I doubt she likes that very much.”

Which, from what I'd heard in Tribeca, seemed the understatement of the month.

Little by little it'd begun to dawn on me that the real reason I'd been invited for supper was Vincent Halloran, and putting aside what that did or didn't do for my ego, I didn't see where I fit in. The more so with Margie's hand still grasping my arm and her eyes fixed on me, large and watery.

“I'm sorry,” I said, “but I don't understand what you want me to do.”

“Oh, I think you understand,” she said with a teasing smile. “But seriously, Philip. Number one, I do want Vincent to have help. Number two, it cannot come from me anymore, I recognize that. And so? Well, I thought that, maybe, Charles's wife …? You know, Nora Saroff? I've never met her, I've only seen her on television. She's very beautiful on television. I didn't even know she and Charles were married till Roy mentioned it. I thought: How lucky for Charles Camelot to have such a beautiful wife. But then, when I met Charles, I thought: How lucky for Nora Saroff to have such a handsome husband! They must be very happy, no?”

I didn't answer. The question, just then, seemed a little complicated.

“I thought maybe you could talk to her,” Margie said. “Could you?”

“Well, yes, I could, but …”

“You see, it's because she was Carter's therapist. Even though she couldn't help Carter, or at least she couldn't stop him, Vincent says he liked her. Once he said to me: ‘Carter thought she was great.' And I am thinking of myself: If it is someone who knew Carter and at least tried to help him, then maybe I could convince Vincent to go to her. But I don't want even to try if she wouldn't see him.”

“I see,” I said. “But that would be up to her. You know she's mostly a sex therapist, don't you?”

“Ach, you Americans, you and your Dr. Freud! Everything is sex for you, sex and the orgasm. Well, I will tell you the scandalous truth, Philip: I think I was good for Vincent. In making love he was … how shall I say? … so exuberant? Many young men are like that. I think I helped him.” She pinched her lips together. Then: “I think I want him to go now. I think he is tired of me now, and if it is only that he is tired of me now, then he should leave. This is what I tell him. It would be terrible for me, yes, I would be hurt. Of course. But I would understand. If that was …”

I remember, though, that her voice trailed off. We were still sitting at the table near the darkened terrace, and it was raining hard outside, and the meal was over, the houseman must have cleared the dishes away, because we were drinking coffee from demitasse cups and cognac from a pair of those balloon snifters. And that was when suddenly—no warning—Margie started to cry. Big tears at first, welling like bubbles, no sound. Then her shoulders started to shake, and she moaned, and turning her head away, she tried to hide her eyes with her hand.