If I Should Die Before I Die (5 page)

“Or anybody else?”

She shrugged, a jerky movement.

“So you think McCloy.”

“I don't know. One minute I can't believe it. The next minute I believe it.”

“Then why don't you take it to the police?”

“But how could I do that?”

“Easy,” I said. “They've got hundreds of people on the case, a whole task force. They could trace the paper this was written on, the typewriter. They're tracking down leads a lot flimsier than this one.”

“But I'd have to tell them about Carter, wouldn't I?”

“Yes.”

“And what would they do to him?”

“I don't know. Probably they'd haul him in for questioning. They'd …”

She was shaking her head, slowly, side to side.

“I couldn't do that,” she said. “Even if he did send the note, suppose that was just his idea of a joke? It would fit his sense of humor. And suppose the rest of it … the correlations … were just coincidence?”

“Suppose you're wrong, in other words?”

“Yes, suppose I'm wrong. I couldn't do that to him. It would be just one more betrayal, a woman betraying him, which I think is his deepest fear. I don't want to go into it, but believe me, subconsciously he sees all women as betrayers of men, starting with his mother. Suppose the note is just a test? He's always tested me, that's obvious on the tapes.”

Maybe
testing
was what a shrink would call it.

“Anyway,” she said, and then she shook her head slowly again and smiled at me, one of her dazzlers, “and here comes the confession. Oh, I tell you, it's been a great day for self-criticism. Yes, I couldn't do that to Carter, and that's true enough as far as it goes. But I also couldn't do it to myself. If I went to the police and it turned out I was wrong, it would ruin me professionally. I mean,” with a wave at the room, “I couldn't do this anymore, not for a day. I'd have to go eat bonbons, whatever. It'd be just one more case of a woman too hysterical to do a man's work, do you know what I mean?”

I did, but I didn't say anything.

“At the same time, I'm frightened. I'm not supposed to be, but I can't help it. I've never felt in danger from a patient before. And I tell myself: all the killings have been random, so the police say, and even if Carter McCloy was a murderer, he's incapable of matricide, which is what his neurosis is really about. Or even surrogate matricide, meaning me. Yes, I know that's right clinically, but if it's supposed to reassure me, it doesn't. Because what if I'm wrong? What if he's charged? The victim this time—last night—was older than the others. And blonde. The first blonde. And I'm blonde. And I know that's irrational, hysterical, but what if it isn't? So I'm a little freaked out, Phil. Not a lot, but a little. But here's the point: in order for me to do anything, like going to the police or anything, I need to be surer than I am now. I've also decided I can't just wait—for him to show up or make contact again. Or for the killer to kill someone else.”

I waited for her to continue, but that was all she had to say. We stared at each other across the desk.

“So that's what brings you to me?” I said.

“That's what brings me to you,” she said, smiling.

“And you haven't told Mr. Camelot?”

I watched the crinkles vanish, and her eyes went that deep blue, and her voice, when she spoke, dripped icicle water from some underground pool.

“He doesn't know anything about it. I don't want …”

She glanced at her watch and suddenly started.

“My God, Phil, it's almost eight! Why didn't you tell me? The limo's late, I'm going to be late for the show! God, I've got to run!” She stood, rushing and reaching at once, then, as quickly, jerked back at me, her eyes on mine. “But please, Phil, please come with me. I need someone with me tonight, I can't help it. I mean it. Besides, I've got more to tell you about him. I …”

I hesitated. In fact I had nothing on for that night. Laura Hugger maybe, but she hadn't called back. Actually, I think I'd been tilting toward Chinese take-out, a rental video, and my feet up. But she already decided everything: that I was coming with her, that I was going to investigate Carter McCloy for her and determine if he was the Pillow Killer, and God knows what else.

Simplify it: it was hard to say no.

By way of explanation, I ought to say something about our relationship, undefined though it is.

We're close to the same age, and probably because of that there's a kind of running banter that goes on between us. Usually it takes this form: (a) I'm a hopeless and sexist philanderer; (b) I'm a confirmed and generally prudish bachelor; (c) since (a) is unacceptable and (b) is wasteful, somebody (she, namely) has to take me in hand and fix me up permanently from a seemingly endless roster of available candidates.

I've never taken her up on the available candidates.

On occasion—rare occasion—the teasing has threatened to get out of hand. It never has, though. By presumably mutual consent.

After all, she's the Counselor's Wife and I work for her husband.

In some weird way, I guess that makes us friends. At least I imagine that's what she'd say, and it's why it wasn't so strange that she'd turned to me in the Carter McCloy situation. Or that, in the end, I went along with her in the limo provided by the television station, she leaning back in the seat and talking animatedly as we drove to the studio way west in the Fifties. Or that I sat in the studio way west of the Fifties. Or that I sat in the studio audience, the only male in the joint, it seemed, except for the cameramen, while she did the show.

If you go in for that kind of thing, and a lot of people seem to, I needn't describe “Nora Saroff's Hour” because you'll already have watched it. The set turned out to be an almost replica of the office we'd just left, except that there were three chairs adjacent to the white parson's table for her three guests: a women's magazine editor, a well-known sculptress I'd never heard of, and an allegedly $1000-a-night call girl who called herself Carrie. The subject (what else is new?) was Female Orgasm. To tote it up: the sculptress said she never had one, Carrie claimed she always did, the magazine editor never pronounced herself (nor, really, did Nora) and the studio audience, in that part of the show where Nora goes out and interviews with a portable mike, seemed about evenly divided. But the topic seemed to turn them on enough that, even after the broadcast part ended in a shouting match with Nora standing behind her desk, hands raised and smiling broadly at the cameras, they kept at it for another good half hour.

She didn't want to go home afterward. We ended up in one of those overpriced checkered-tablecloth Italian joints in the West Forties and ate spaghetti and meatballs and drank red wine into the second bottle while the limo waited outside. She also emptied the bread basket, the salad bowl, and had
zabaglione
for dessert, and critiqued the show, signed three autographs for people who recognized her, and gave me data on Carter McCloy, which I noted down. I told her that, with a full-time job myself, I'd have to hire in from the outside. This was all right with her, provided I didn't use Bud Fincher or anyone else who worked regularly for the Counselor. She said she counted on me for total discretion.

If she was still freaked, in short, she'd stopped showing it at the restaurant. The awkwardness came outside, where the limo driver held the passenger's door open and an umbrella over our heads.

I told her I felt like walking, that I thought I'd walk home.

“You can't do that, silly,” she said. “It's raining again.”

Was it raining? Yes, it was. I hadn't noticed.

In that case, I said, I'd take a cab. No good. Then I suggested that I see her home in the limo and either ride it the rest of the way or walk across the park. No good either. We were already on the West Side, wasn't it stupid to go over to the East and then back again?

We got in. So help me, as we drove up Tenth, which turns into Amsterdam, and the windshield wipers
wickwacked
against the night lights, I thought about whether I'd made the bed that morning. I knew I hadn't.

The Counselor's Wife must have got the picture. As we crossed the 72nd Street intersection where Broadway and Amsterdam meet, she started to giggle softly. Then, a little later, taking my hand:

“You're so sweet, Phil. I couldn't have gotten through tonight without you. I thank you, dear Phil. But I'm not getting out with you, not to worry. Don't misunderstand: another time, with pleasure. Right now, I can't explain …”

We were at my corner, stopped. I had the door open. She pulled me back, then, with her hand reaching around my neck, kissed me.

“Please call when you find out something,” she said, letting me go. “Please call anyway. I'll be in my office all day tomorrow.”

I watched the limo pull away, thought I saw her wave through the rear window. I still didn't get why she'd insisted on taking me home first, and when the truth finally hit me—I remember I was eating a sandwich at my desk with the door open—it was because I realized the cocker bitch was no longer in the house.

CHAPTER

4

“He had five children,” Bud Fincher said. “The oldest, Bob, is forty-nine, the youngest twenty-nine. Then you start over again with grandchildren, starting at twenty-six and working down to eleven months. Then …”

“I can count,” the Counselor growled. “I also know their names and that they breed like rabbits. What's that you've got there?”

What Bud had, and handed over, was his first report on the Magisters. It ran some twenty pages. Some of it was warmed-over data, the kind any city paper would have in its morgue: names, dates of birth, education, marriages, divorces, principal assets; and Bud, after an intervening call from the Counselor, had had full access to the Firm's files. But there was stuff in it that was fresh, including items I was pretty sure the Counselor didn't know about, and even though Bud's organization had had only a few days to develop it, it already pointed to one conclusion: that when push came to shove, the Magister children's worst enemy wasn't going to be Margie so much as each other.

Bud's report, in sum, was precisely what the Counselor had ordered. I knew this because I'd helped him edit it.

The Counselor glanced at it momentarily, then flung it into the debris on his desk.

“What's in it that Roy Barger doesn't already know?” he said, glowering at me and reaching for a pipe.

Why don't you give it to Barger and ask him yourself? I thought but didn't say. There is no point, at such moments. The trouble was that his mood had been like that for almost a week, unappeasable, stormy. I'd been spared the brunt of it mostly, but when Doug McClintock, senior partner at the Firm, took to calling me to find out if the Counselor had called Barger yet, and when Ms. Shapiro was reduced to tears as she had been that morning—a first, in my experience …

“And what's Fincher Associates' fee for this?” he went on, through clouds of smoke and gesturing at Bud's report. “What would you guess, Phil, all in? Ten thousand dollars? Fifteen? What's in there that Roy Barger doesn't already know that's worth fifteen thousand dollars?”

It would have been pointless, like I say, to tell him his number was exaggerated, or to remind him, for that matter, that Bud's fee would be passed through to the Firm, along with an hourly charge, overhead included, for my own participation.

“Well,” Bud Fincher said beside me, “that Sally Magister may be a practicing lesbian, for one thing.”

The Counselor's reaction lay hidden behind a bank of smoke.

“May be? Or is?” he said gruffly. “There's a difference.”

“May be,” Bud answered. “We think we can prove it, though. At a price. But I wanted instructions from you before we took it further.”

“Even supposing it's true,” the Counselor said, “or supposing it turns out she prefers animals? What difference would that make in today's day and age?”

“A lot,” I said.

“How so?”

I knew he knew the answer, but I laid it out for him anyway. Sally Magister, the second child and only daughter of her generation, had been the Magister black sheep for years. Three times married, three times divorced, mother of four, she also ran the Magister magazine division. Ran it into the ground, some said. Ironically, the one bright spot in her otherwise faltering empire was
Fem
, once known as Sally's Folly because she'd allegedly sunk millions into it but which had somehow turned out to be what women in the Eighties wanted to read. Without
Fem
, so Wall Street said, the Magisters would long since have either folded or sold off their magazine interests.

In any case, Sally was the obvious weak link in the family's solidarity against Margie. Her contempt for men in general, and her brothers in particular, had been widely publicized. As long as their father lived and, as the dominant shareholder, wielded effective control of the company, Sally could shout all she wanted. But with him dead, and his shares split, and control of the company up for grabs?

Actually, Sally had been quiet since Bob III's death. She'd sided with the family in contesting the will, had accepted Young Bob's appointment as acting chairman without complaint. Without public complaint anyway. But I could think of several ways a clever lawyer like Barger could use the information Bud had dug up, even if Sally didn't give a damn who knew what about her private life, and I guessed the Counselor could think of more.

“Push it,” he told Bud Fincher. “And you,” he said, turning to me, “you go after the widow.”

It wasn't just that he called me “you.” His tone was accusatory and anonymous at the same time, like a sergeant giving orders to a new recruit.