If I Should Die Before I Die (25 page)

We headed east from the park then, pulled by the dog and pushed by the west wind. By the time we reached the house, she'd managed to worm out of me that I'd been to Margie's the night before for supper, alone, which got me my usual dose of teasing. Normally the Counselor's Wife irritates me no end when she gets off on my alleged philandering, but that morning I gave back as good as I got, and I guess that was because I was glad to see her back in her usual form.

Even if, in a way, she wasn't.

I tried Margie Magister as soon as I got to my office. She wasn't there, or at least not available to me. I left a message that I'd called and my number.

Later that day we got the answer to Margie's proposal back from the Magister brothers. It came from Young Bob to McClintock to the Counselor to me. The answer was no, no deal.

“Pass it along,” the Counselor instructed me.

“Who to?” I asked. “Barger or Margie Magister?”

“Either one. Or both.”

“What should I say when they ask me why?”

“Say you're just the messenger, that you don't know. For your own edification, though, McClintock says they were outraged. Young Bob says he won't be stampeded, not by Margie or his sister or anyone else. He's calling the stockholders' meeting.”

“That sounds like war,” I said.

“So it does.”

“And which side's going to win?” I asked.

“Neither, probably,” came his reply.

I tried Margie Magister again, again had to leave a message. I got Barger, though. In his typical way, i.e., by asking me what I'd do next if I were advising his client, he tried to pump me.

Without success.

Then, sometime that afternoon, the news broke.

The local television stations had it on special bulletins. I first became aware of it myself on my way home, when I stopped on Broadway to pick up the Wall Street Extra of the
Post
which had it in three-inch headlines on the front page, and the evening television news ran on-the-spot coverage, including a pickup from, as it turned out, my own neighborhood precinct.

There'd been a murder the night before, a particularly brutal one, in a high-rise co-op on Central Park West. Just another murder, you might say, in a city which has another murder every few minutes. But what made this one front page was that we all knew the victim.

CHAPTER

14

Somewhere in New York City, you might have found somebody who didn't know who Suzi Lee was, but you'd have been hard pressed. People said she actually owned the local channel she worked for, a reflection of the multimillion-dollar contract she'd been given when the networks tried to hire her away, and she anchored their nightly news, anchored her own weekly interview show, and did heavily promoted woman-in-the-street specials which regularly outperformed the network shows in the local ratings. She was pretty in that big-eyed Asian way, smart, sharp-tongued, as New York as the mayor and, at least in the play the media gave her, every local bachelor's dream.

She was also dead.

She was also, as I realized with an immediate shock, one of the celebrities we'd discovered on tape that night in Carter McCloy's apartment.

According to the first reports, there was no sign of a break-in at Suzi Lee's apartment. Her maid had discovered the body when she showed up for work that morning, and the police were looking for an unnamed suspect who'd allegedly been with Suzi in the apartment the night before. That suspect was subsequently found but never publicly identified, because by that time there was evidence that the killer had let himself down from the roof of the building onto Suzi's terrace and had entered through the terrace doors.

This time the media, especially Suzi's own TV channel, had a field day. Somehow they got hold of copies of police photos of Suzi's bedroom, including the one of her corpse sprawled on her bed, and they aired them despite a temporary restraining order. They were the ones who, in the face of police uncertainty, decided that the killer had mutilated her body before he strangled her, not after, and that the murder “weapon” had been her own pantyhose. They were the ones who debated the question: did the semen traces discovered on Suzi belong to the unnamed visitor or the killer? Or both?

And how had the killer gotten in? The doorman in the main lobby of the building swore categorically (for the television cameras) that he hadn't left his post once during his tour of duty, nor had he let anybody in he didn't know or hadn't announced, finally that he'd announced nobody to Ms. Lee after she'd come in, accompanied, around ten o'clock in the evening.

That left the underground garage, which you entered from a ramp on the side street. The garage also had a round-the-clock attendant, but the attendant spent at least part of his time jockeying cars in and out, and it would have been easy enough for someone to slip through unobserved, gain access to the elevators, ride to the roof and let himself down two stories to Suzi's terrace.

But how had he gotten out after?

Television (again) voted for the garage. But the garage attendant swore on the air that he hadn't seen anybody he didn't know.

The killer had also left a message, in lipstick, on the dressing-table mirror in Suzi's bedroom.

It read: “In Memoriam.”

Nobody knew what that meant.

Maybe I was the only person in the city, that first night, who thought he might.

It took me a while to find him. Not that the Manhattan phone directory was rich in Intaglios, Andrew. In fact it didn't have one, nor did 718 Area Code Information. I worked my way through much of the tristate area before I located him, in a place called Woodbridge, N.J., which I knew only as an exit from the turnpike.

I got Mrs. Intaglio on the phone. No, her husband wasn't home yet, and she had dinner waiting for him. Was it that urgent? Couldn't he call back tomorrow?

Then I heard commotion at the other end, what sounded like children's voices, and a moment later Intaglio himself came on.

“I only just got in, Revere,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

It turned out he knew less about the Suzi Lee murder than I did. He'd only just heard about it on the car radio, driving home.

Then I asked him the question that had been bothering me: “How tightly did you button down the McCloy investigation?”

“What do you mean, how tightly? McCloy's dead, isn't he?”

“Yes, he's dead, but there were a lot of loose ends lying around after he jumped.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the business of the alibis, for one. You sweated McCloy one whole night and you couldn't break him, remember? The reason was that you couldn't bust his alibis. Well, either somebody had to be lying to the Task Force or McCloy didn't kill all those women.”

“That's right, he only confessed to it,” Intaglio said sarcastically.

“Exactly, he only confessed. But if he
knew
he was going to kill himself, what difference did it make? He could've confessed to anything, couldn't he?”

Intaglio went silent at the other end.

“Halloran was one of them, wasn't he?” I went on. “One of his alibis? Vince Halloran? Vincent Angus Halloran?”

“That's right.”

“Well, you could've had Halloran at least for aiding and abetting, couldn't you?”

Another silence. Maybe he was doing a slow burn, but it was hard to tell over the phone.

“What can I tell you, Revere?” he said. “I only worked there. Being on the Task Force was like being in a war. You ever been in a war?”

“Actually I have, yes.”

“Then you'll understand what I'm talking about. Once the war's over, it's over, and all anybody wants to do is go home.”

“What you're saying is that nobody buttoned it down.”

“I don't know that,” he said. “Once we had McCloy's confession, the Task Force kind of disintegrated. I was back in my own office the next week. Maybe the police kept people on the case, maybe …”

“And maybe they didn't?” I finished for him.

I guess I could understand it. The Pillow Killer had put all law enforcement in New York under tremendous pressure. Once the case was “solved,” nobody wanted to unsolve it. Not, in addition, when it would have meant going after rich kids from influential families.

Case closed, war over.

“Look, Revere,” Intaglio said, “if you've got evidence to reopen the McCloy case, I'll tell you who to call. But you've got the wrong guy. Anyway, my wife's calling me for dinner.”

“I don't know if I do or don't,” I said, “but what about the tapes?”

“What tapes?”

“The videos. The ones Dr. Saroff and I found that night in McCloy's place.”

“Yeah, I remember them. But we never found them.”

“You didn't? I told you to look in the garbage.”

“Maybe I'm missing something,” Intaglio said, “but what do the tapes have to do with it?”

“One of them,” I answered, “at least one, was of Suzi Lee.”

Silence again. I could hear a voice, or voices, in the background. Then:

“Jesus Christ,” I heard Intaglio say softly. Then: “You got anything else?”

I summarized it for him, editing out most of the Margie Magister part. Even as I spoke, though, it sounded pretty flimsy to my own ears. So I'd seen Vincent Halloran arriving at Margie's in the rain, in the wee hours of the night before, wearing Carter McCloy's scarf or a replica of same. So what?

When I was done, Intaglio said: “Let me get off now, Revere.”

“I understand,” I said. “Dinner's waiting.”

“No, it's not that. I've got some calls to make. I'll get back to you. Give me a number.”

I gave it to him.

“This may take a while,” he said. “How late do you stay up?”

“I'll wait,” I answered.

It was near midnight when my phone rang again. In between I'd done something I rarely do: I called the upstairs phone at the Counselor's and had the following essentially stupid conversation.

Althea, the cook and housekeeper, picked up.

“Cam'lot res'dence,” she said.

“It's me. Phil. Are they home?”

“Phil who?” she asked suspiciously. Then, her voice brightening in recognition: “Oh, it's you, Phil. Which one of them do you want?”

“Neither,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure …”

Then the Counselor's deep voice broke in:

“It's all right, Althea, I'll take it. Who is this?”

“It's me,” I said again. “I'm sorry to call this …”

“That's all right, Phil. Did you get Margie Magister?”

“No,” I said, switching mental gears. “But I talked to Barger. But that's not why I'm calling. Is Nora there?”

“Yes, she is, but she's already gone to bed. I think she's asleep. Did you want to talk to her?”

“No, I didn't.”

“But then …?”

“It's all right,” I said hastily. “I just wanted to make sure she was home. I'll explain in the morning.”

I stumbled my way out of it and hung up. It was a little after 10:30. God knows what the Counselor thought, but I saw no reason to alarm them as long as she was there. The whole building was wired, all the way up to and including the fifth floor, and once the systems were turned on, there was no way anyone could break in without bringing the whole security service down on their heads.

Besides …

That's what I was telling myself:
Besides
…, when Intaglio called me back.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “When can we meet?”

“What's up?” I said.

“Look, it's late.”

“I know it's late,” I said, “but I've got to sleep nights too.”

I heard him sigh into the phone.

“All I can tell you is that the Lee woman got one of those letters too, the same one Saroff got.”

I didn't say anything.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Where and when?”

The one the Counselor's Wife had gotten, I remembered, had said:
WHAT MAKES YOU SO SURE YOU COULDN
'
T BE THE NEXT ONE
, and it had been signed:
A FRIEND
. The receptionist had found it slipped under their office door.

The one Suzi Lee had gotten had been identical.

So were the two others which had been received by prominent television personalities, both women.

There may in fact have been more. These were the ones the Task Force had known about.

All had been typed on a little portable called a Canon Typestar which the Task Force had never found, never been able to trace. All of them had apparently been delivered by hand, but in only one instance had anybody recalled anything about the messenger. One of the doormen—Suzi Lee's, in fact—had thought he remembered a black teenager on a bicycle.

“Of which,” Intaglio said, “how many do you suppose there are in the city?”

We met at the Roosevelt on the Upper West Side at 8:30 the next morning. I was beginning to think I should buy stock in the joint, given the number of times I'd been there recently, but Intaglio hadn't wanted to meet at his office. He didn't come alone either. His companion was a large-format cop in plain clothes, with hooded gray eyes. His name was Martindale. I gathered from the conversation, and later confirmed, that he was pretty high up in the NYPD hierarchy, also that he'd been pretty high up in the Task Force. This explained, among other things, why we met uptown instead of down. If in fact the Suzi Lee murder could be linked to the Pillow Killer, then the Task Force had certainly blown its investigation. Whoever brought the connection to light might win gold stars up the kazoo; but whoever brought it to light would hate like hell to be wrong.

“What you're telling me,” I said to Intaglio over coffee, “is that you never really focused on the letters.”