If I Should Die Before I Die (34 page)

“Go ahead, Phil,” Nora said then from the couch. “Make your call now.”

I'd had my hand on the phone without realizing it. I didn't lift it for a moment. Instead I looked at Biegler, then back at her.

“One thing, Nora,” I said. “How much of what you've told me is the truth and how much did you just make up?”

“It's close enough,” she said steadily. “Go ahead and call.”

“Then what were you doing here, in this office? I thought you'd moved.”

She thought about that briefly. Then:

“I was afraid of being alone. I'd agreed to see Halloran. However mistakenly, I thought I had an obligation to. At the same time, I knew he was dangerous. You yourself had told me you thought he was dangerous. I wanted someone nearby, in case there was trouble.”

“That's not exactly …” Biegler began, but she cut him off.

“Yes, it is, Bill,” she said firmly. “That's what I was trying to get through to you all afternoon.”

Biegler didn't look any too happy about it, but he bought it.

And so, looking at it the way the rest of the world would, did I. She hadn't known about the “In Memoriam” letter we'd gotten because the Counselor hadn't told her. She hadn't even known about Halloran's possible connection to the Suzi Lee murder. Yes, she might have realized she was under surveillance, but maybe that had been the Counselor's doing for entirely other reasons.

“Go ahead, Phil,” she said, staring at me again. “It's okay.”

I made the call. And I stayed with them in silence till the Counselor showed up a few minutes later, followed by the police, followed by, unnecessary though it turned out to be, an Emergency Medical Squad complete with ambulance. The media, I figured, wouldn't be far behind. And I sat there, silent witness, during their first interview in her former office, while the Counselor sat next to her on the patient's couch, holding her hand.

Then at the first break, when the police started taking photographs of the scene, I slipped out and went into the night, past the revolving lights of the vehicles on Park Avenue, to look for a killer.

I'd have liked to have done it in style too, what Halloran had called the old
mano a mano
. To have gone back to the family castle, buckled on my mail and sword and ridden off into the night to bring the villain to justice. At lance point.

What did they call my adopted namesake's horse, old one-if-by-land Revere?

Maybe I'd have taken Fincher along, for redemption. He'd have looked better that way, his pointy head clanked over by a vizored helmet.

All for the fair Nora's honor.

Mixed metaphors anyway. For one thing, Paul Revere didn't wear armor. For another, I wasn't born Revere.

Besides, I was already too late.

I did get as far as the castle, its lights still ablaze in the night. The “family retainers,” you could call them, were all gathered in the reception area, along with a couple of leftover uniformed cops. Roger was there, and Myrna Shapiro, and Charlotte McCullough, who I hadn't even realized was still in the building when I'd been there before, and Althea from the residence upstairs, Bud Fincher, even Muffin. It was like our annual Christmas party, minus the king and queen.

“How is she, Phil?” Charlotte McCullough asked, worry lines creasing her broad florid face.

“She's okay,” I said. “She's safe. Unhurt.”

“Where did you find her?” somebody else asked.

“It's okay,” I repeated. “I think they'll be back soon.”

“Thank the Lord,” Althea said, and then there was a rush of questions which I ducked, and I took Bud Fincher into my office.

I briefed him on what had happened. I guess he was relieved. He told me a couple of calls had come in in my absence.

“Derr's on his way into the city,” he said. “He said to tell you the local police have Powell, also somebody called Fording?” I nodded. “But no sign of Halloran or the others. He said the Powell house is under surveillance, just in case.”

“Who was the other call?” I asked.

“Somebody called Intaglio?”

“That's right.”

“He's on his way in too. He was just leaving. He said to tell you he thought everything was under control in Shelter Island. He said: ‘Tell Revere I owe him one.' He wanted to know where he could find you later, and I told him I didn't know but to try here.”

I wanted Halloran. Bud said he had half a dozen of his people on hold, that he could put them into the field at a moment's notice. He suggested they start working the saloons and nightspots.

“For Christ's sake,” I said, “we won't find him there. By this time he's got to know the whole NYPD is out looking for him. He's got the car. He could have just taken off, could be anywhere by now. Do the police have the car's description?”

“Yes, they do,” Fincher answered. “Derr phoned it in before you even got here.”

If Halloran had done anything rational, I figured, and there was no saying he had, then there were only two possibilities I knew to pursue, and neither required Fincher's help.

I told him so.

He went thin in the mouth, but nodded and left me alone.

Heads or tails. It came up heads in my mind. I punched out Margie's number.

She herself picked up, but only after a number of rings. Her voice was fuzzy.

“It's Phil,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Who? Me? Yes, I'm fine. I must have dozed off.”

“Have you heard from Vincent?”

“From Vincent? No. Is he …?” Then suddenly, catching herself, as though she'd only just remembered: “My God, Nora Saroff! Is she …?”

“She's fine, Margie,” I said. “I just saw her. He was there, but she's all right.”

“Mon Dieu,”
she said. Then a long pause. Then, in a faint voice: “And Vincent? Where is he now?”

“I don't know. I thought he might have come to you, but if he hasn't by now, I don't think …”

Just then, though, Bud Fincher rushed back through my doorway, his eyes bright and motioning with his hand when he saw me talking.

I covered the mouthpiece.

“They got him!” he shouted at me. “It's on the police radio! He's been shot and …”

I shut up, took my hand away, and said into the phone:

“I'll call you back, Margie. Something's come up. I'll call you back.”

I think she was trying to say something, but I hung up.

I went outside with Bud. The one remaining cop in the reception area confirmed it, and we headed out into the street where I heard it again, leaning in through the open window of the cop car.

The call had come into the downtown precinct that includes Tribeca. I'd had the right idea but, not that it mattered anymore, I'd flipped wrong.

Vincent Halloran had gone home all right, but all the way home. To the converted loft building, with the posh duplex on top. Where his mother, Sally Magister, had greeted him with a bullet in the face.

Then she'd put the gun down and called the police.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER

18

It'd have been better if she'd killed him.

That's what Intaglio said. He invited me to lunch the next week, and we went to one of those Italian restaurants down off Grand Street where the fare can vary all the way from high-priced mediocre to reasonable sensational, depending on which menu they give you and whether your last name ends in a vowel. Like Colombo or Gambino.

Or, to judge from our meal, Intaglio.

In between, I had a quiet Thanksgiving, and that's putting the best face on it. The Counselor and his wife finally got off to their Hamptons house late on Wednesday. They even invited me to come along. Though I had no plans, I declined. I figured, rightly or wrongly, that they had plenty to sort out, and I didn't want to be a part of it.

I called Laura Hugger that Wednesday afternoon. I knew, from a couple of previous calls, that she'd been seeing someone, but I didn't know how serious it was. Plenty, apparently. Her secretary told me she'd already gone away for the weekend. I left a message that I'd called. I thought better of it the minute I hung up but decided against calling back, lest the secretary leave a second message, like Phil Revere called again to say he hadn't called the first time.

In the end I took Bobby Derr to Thanksgiving dinner. No, we didn't eat at the Roosevelt. We timed it so as not to interfere with the football games on TV, and I got a couple of bets down with my friendly neighborhood book. Then we went to one of New York's more famous traditional American joints, which had advertised all you could eat for a fixed price. No way of knowing, but I've a suspicion the Roosevelt would have been better.

I broke even on the games, so I lost on the vigorish.

The rest of the weekend I just sort of hung around. I thought about calling some of the other numbers in my book, but the thought passed. I jogged every day and swam in the health club I belong to but never get to. I went to the movies. At some point I realized I'd never called Margie Magister back that Tuesday night, but I didn't call her either. Nor she me.

“It'd have been better if she'd killed him,” Andy Intaglio said.

“How so?”

“Well, if she'd killed him, he'd be dead and your friend Powell would be in the headlines. He'd never have gotten immunity.”

“He what? You're giving him
immunity?
”

“That's what the man said.”

“But why?”

“If I knew the answer to that one, pal, I'd be a partner in some big firm and I wouldn't be living in the boonies.”

By this time we were into a platter of
vitello tonnato
, as good a version as I've ever encountered, having already worked our way through fresh oysters and a minestrone so thick you could eat it with a fork. I wasn't about to let the workings of Justice, New York City style, stunt my appetite. Still …

The argument, the way Intaglio explained it, worked like this:

Without Powell, they had nothing on Halloran other than aggravated assault plus breaking and entering, this in the Saroff/Biegler episode. Not even attempted murder; he hadn't actually tried to kill anybody. Without Powell, Suzi Lee went unsolved and Halloran's role as mastermind, or co-mastermind, in the Pillow Killer case got lost in a murk of alibis true and false. With Powell, though, they not only had Halloran but all the other members of what somebody in the media dubbed The Silver Spoon Gang, and the powers-that-be in New York City law enforcement could tie a ribbon around their files and get on to their next fiasco.

I had two glaring problems with it:

One was that, of all the members of the gang, the case against Powell was the most ironclad. Not so, according to Intaglio. The forensic evidence from the Park Slope murder had turned out inconclusive. It didn't rule Powell out, but it wouldn't convict him either. And if the testimony in the Suzi Lee case would put him irrefutably in the building at the time of the murder, nobody could prove he'd been on the roof, much less in Lee's apartment.

“But Jesus,” I protested, “he
confessed
to me and Derr!”

“That was you, Phil, and according to Powell, you got it out of him under duress. By the time we got him, he had representation, and all he'd talk about was a deal.”

“Don't tell me,” I said. “Was it Barger again?”

Intaglio laughed and said no. As far as he knew, Roy Barger had dropped out of sight.

I happened to know better, but in a field other than murder.

What stuck in both our craws, though, was the near-certainty that Vincent Angus Holloran himself would never stand trial.

The way Intaglio put it, the bullet Sally Magister had fired might have failed to kill her son but it had pretty thoroughly rearranged his head. By the day we had lunch, his condition was called “stable,” but even if the doctors pulled him through, their most optimistic medical prognosis for him was an institutionalized future. In no event would he ever be “competent” to stand trial.

“I don't know if I buy that,” I said. “Hell, in a couple of years they'll probably even be able to transplant brains.”

“Sure,” Intaglio said, quoting me without knowing it, “and if pigs had wings they could fly.”

He predicted better results on the other members of the gang. Wrongly, as it turned out. The granting of immunity to Powell brought on a veritable stampede of plea-bargaining attempts by the attorneys representing Sprague Fording, Shrimp Stark, and Michael Villiers. The DA's office resisted for a time, but public interest in these cases inevitably waned, and at the end of the day all three were allowed to plead guilty to crimes short of murders one and two. All three would do time. All three could expect to live long enough to try to hide it from their grandchildren.

The most interesting open item, at the time of that Grand Street lunch, was the legal fate of Sally Magister.

“Provided they can make her keep her mouth shut,” Intaglio ventured over a stemmed glass of
zabaglione
, “self-defense ought to do it. Strictly between you and me, though, that's so much bullshit. I looked at the police report. No sign of a struggle, and Halloran was unarmed. If you ask me, she took one look at him when he came in the door that night, and then she shot his face off.”

“I've got it a little different,” I said. I was thinking of Halloran's half-smile and Vincenzo the angel. “I think he bragged about it first. I think she confronted him with it, and he said ‘Mom, you don't know the half of it,' and then she shot him.”

“Either way,” Intaglio said, “premeditated or not, it's still attempted murder. But what jury will convict her? They'll say she was doing society a favor. They'll say her son's getting the best medical care money can buy, and it'll be her money. I'll bet they never even have to put her on the stand. Hell, I'll go a step further and bet it never even goes to a jury.”