If I Should Die Before I Die (27 page)

So where did the sons of the New York rich go for vacations in November? Wasn't it too early for skiing? Or the Caribbean?

Early, we crossed tracks with the police, but then their traces grew faint and disappeared altogether. I tried calling Martindale a couple of times, but he never called back.

I did, though, get through to Sally Magister once.

The ruse I used, I admit, was pretty lame, but it worked. Briefly. I gave Sally's secretary the name of a writer of some prominence around New York, one I figured they wouldn't mind adding to their roster, and sure enough, Sally came on all milk and honey.

I let her soften me up a little. Then I said:

“I wonder if you could help me on another subject. I'm trying to locate Vincent Halloran.”

“Well, I'd be the last one to know that.”

“But he works for you, too, doesn't he?”

“He used to, not anymore. But what on earth would you want Vincent for?”

“I don't myself,” I said, “but a mutual friend does. Somebody who thinks your son might be in serious …”

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted, her voice shrilling, “who
is
this? Some kind of impersonator? You're not …” Then, before I could say anything else: “Oh. I get it. I know who you are. I told you once before, mister, I don't like cute. Well, you can tell that double-dealing …” Then, catching herself: “Never mind. Just tell her I don't care if he beat her up. If he beat her up, she probably deserved it.”

“She might not be the only one he beat up, Ms. Magister,” I said as calmly as I could.

“That's nice,” she said icily. “Are there any other accusations you'd like to make?”

Before I could answer, though, the phone went bang in my ear.

Each day, I got a full rundown on the Counselor's Wife from Bud Fincher. I felt like I knew more about where she'd been in a given week than she did herself: the patients she'd seen, the stores she'd been in, two doctor's visits (one her ob-gyn; the other a psychiatrist—her own shrink?), one lunch with Dr. Biegler (the shrink who shared her office, or her old office), another with the producer of the show, but home every evening excepting the night of her show, and then, home right after the show. And no entertaining. A low profile, in sum, which was hardly her style. I wondered if she suspected anything.

Each day too I reported to the Counselor. As time went by, I kept expecting him to pull the plug. I even predicted what he'd say:
For all we're getting out of it, Phil, you might as well be handing out dollar bills on the street
. But he didn't. On the contrary, he pushed me to keep going.

And each day, sometimes several times a day, I talked to Margie Magister.

You could say that if anybody had concrete reason to be afraid of Halloran, she was the one. Back on that October afternoon, when she'd called me and we'd met in the Madison Avenue saloon, not even her dark glasses had hid what he'd done to her. An ugly swelling almost closed her left eye, and Halloran had given it to her—a kind of going-away present—that same night of the Suzi Lee murder, when I'd sat waiting for him in the rain on Fifth Avenue.

I learned she'd waited up for him too that night. When he came in, she'd wanted to know where he'd been. He refused to tell her. It wasn't that he wasn't free to come and go as he chose, she'd told him, but she worried about him. It was, he'd answered, none of her goddamn business.

Then he'd wanted to go to bed with her.

She'd turned him down. She'd told him she wasn't his whore.

He'd laughed at her for that. If she wasn't his whore, then what was she?

Then he'd tried to force her.

She'd slapped him, as hard as she could.

In return, he'd beaten her. Apparently the swollen eye wasn't the only evidence of it, simply the most visible. And what good had it done her to struggle with him? In the end, though that wasn't the word she used, he'd raped her anyway, and then he'd gone off.

“I don't know what to do,” she'd said to me that afternoon, at a table in the back of the darkened bar. “I haven't seen him, he hasn't called. I have no idea where he is. What should I do?”

“Who else have you told about it?”

“Nobody. I just tell people I had an accident.”

“The first thing I'd do,” I told her, “is change the locks on your doors and hire a security service.”

“Oh that,” she said, waving the idea away. “I don't care what he does to me. He can kill me if he wants to. But I still want to help him. He needs help so badly.”

She'd taken my hand, squeezing it so hard her nails bit into the skin. I didn't know what to tell her, other than to stay away from him. That the Counselor's Wife, in turning Halloran down as a patient, had offered to give Margie a referral was no longer relevant, though I told her anyway.

“Do you really think he's dangerous?” she asked me in the bar, her face upturned toward me.

“I think he may be very dangerous,” I answered. I thought, but didn't say, that she'd might have been lucky to get away with bruises.

She looked away.

“I do too,” she said in a low voice. “I will tell you what he said. If it means I betray him, then I betray him. He was very angry. I have had men say terrible things to me before, but not like this. It was while we were …” She stopped, bit at her lip, then plunged on. “He said: ‘Keep it going, Grandma. You want to end up like all the others? Keep it going, keep it going.' I didn't dare ask him what he meant by this. I was too afraid. And now he's gone.”

I guess there's no telling about women, though. Margie may, like I said, have had more reason than anybody else to be scared of him, but that didn't keep her from calling several times a day to see if I'd learned anything. I wasn't the only person she called either. And no, she still didn't change the locks on her doors.

Into November then, and still nowhere. We felt like fools, Derr, Fincher, myself, the Counselor, outsmarted, reduced to listening to the news, scanning the crime headlines. The city had its normal run of same, sure enough. An off-duty cop got gunned down in Washington Heights, and the next day the police had to cordon off a couple of blocks in the Twenties when somebody set off a bomb in one of the welfare hotels. Drug-related crimes, it was said. Not our line.

Waiting, I guess, for the proverbial shit to hit the fan.

And then it did, unexpectedly, the Monday before Thanksgiving, when Intaglio called.

Here's how it went:

Intaglio: “I'm not supposed to be telling you this, but some friends of mine down here have had a visit from somebody you know.”

Revere: “Oh?”

Intaglio: “That's right. He didn't come by himself either. He brought an attorney. Seems like they want to swear out complaints against my friends and your friends, including some people who work for you and who you work for.”

Revere: “On what basis?”

Intaglio: “Oh, harassment, slander, false accusation, a few other goodies. They claim my friends and your friends are going around town saying this person's been implicated in a certain criminal act. They claim my friends are doing it because we've got an unsolved case on our books. They claim you're doing it because of another matter you're involved in.”

Revere: “What do you mean? What other matter?”

Intaglio: “Say, the takeover of a certain company.”

Revere: “But that's a lie!”

Intaglio: “I wouldn't know. That's what they're saying.”

Revere: “Let me ask you something. This attorney, do his initials happen to be R. B.?”

Intaglio: “I'm unable to answer that.”

Revere: “But is it somebody I know? And who knows me?”

Intaglio: “I think that's a fair guess. He also says he's planning to go public with it.”

Revere: “I think that's baloney.”

Intaglio: “I wouldn't know. But they produced alibis for the criminal act in question, complete with written statements.”

Revere: “I'd like to see those.”

Intaglio: “Sorry, can't help you there.”

Revere: “Why not?”

Intaglio: “Because my friends don't know you. They don't know a thing about what you're up to.”

Revere: “Jesus Christ.”

Intaglio: “It's serious, I think. I think you're going to be served. That's about all I can tell you.”

Revere: “Thanks a bunch.”

Intaglio: “No problem. Gotta go now.”

End of conversation.

I sat at my desk, momentarily stunned. Not by the fact that the police would disavow any connection to me. Martindale had already warned me, in the cafeteria, and no matter what else he'd said, it's pretty obvious the the NYPD is intimidated by rich and influential people with high-powered lawyers. It wasn't either the no-names-mentioned, paranoid tinge to the conversation. Intaglio, I guessed, had been calling from downtown. Maybe their own phones were tapped. Hell, maybe ours were.

No. What floored me was Halloran himself. Would any of us in a million years, if we'd committed a murder or murders, actually go to the police and make a grandstand play like that?

Maybe the answer is that, since only a few of us have committed a murder or murders, we don't know.

Except that I did, or thought I did. Because I saw in my mind's eye Vince Halloran's smile. That arrogant, rich kid's smile.

I reached for the phone. I had something else I wanted to ask Intaglio. But then I thought better of it. The timing was wrong: he'd made it clear in the conversation that there was no way he was going to do anything else for me right then.

Instead I went upstairs to see the Counselor.

I half expected him to land on me. After all, if Barger did carry through on his threat to take the story public, the Magister brothers would scream like stuck pigs. The Counselor heard me out, and I watched the smoke curling and eddying upward from the bowl of his pipe while I talked. His eyes seemed fixed on an envelope on his desk and meanwhile he was playing with one of those oversized paper clips, turning it on one flat edge, then over on the ones with the points, then back again.

“How did he know?” he asked when I was done.

“How did who know what?”

“Halloran. Unless you've been going around telling people he murdered Suzi Lee? You haven't, have you?”

“Of course not. At least not in so many words.”

“What does that mean?” he said. “Did you or didn't you?”

I thought about it. We'd greased a lot of people, asked a lot of questions. Maybe Halloran had outgreased us? But I didn't think I'd ever mentioned Suzi Lee by name, and Bobby Derr, I figured, was too slippery a talker to have done it either.

“The closest I could have come,” I said, “was with one of the bartenders at Melchiorre's. He knows me from when I was in there with McCloy. I gave him fifty bucks to call me if Halloran showed up. He has my card. I also asked him some questions about the night of the Lee murder. Had Halloran been in there, or any of his pals? But that's as close as I got. I'm pretty sure I never even mentioned the murder.”

“That was the same night he beat Margie up, wasn't it?”

“That's right.”

“So you could have been asking for that reason too, couldn't you? Or any number of other reasons?”

“That's right.”

I watched the paper clip fall over, and he leaned his pipe against the telephone console.

“One of two things, Phil. Either you or Derr—or just conceivably the police, though I doubt that—went too far. Or you've got Halloran feeling the heat. I'll go for number two. He's got to know you're looking for him by now. You've scared him, and he's trying to scare you back. With Barger's help. If he so much as sees you again, he'll be able to shout ‘Harassment.'”

“Do you want me to lay off?” I asked.

“No. We'll keep the heat on him. I even want you to take it up a notch if you can.”

“But what if Barger carries through on his threats?”

“I hope it happens,” he said. “I think it's time we went to the mat with Roy Barger. But I doubt it'll happen.”

I looked at him questioningly.

“I think Barger's got a problem,” he went on. “He put together the coalition, the three generations, but now it's breaking up and he's stuck with a proxy fight. I think he's trying like hell to hold it together. But you can't represent the whole world, and it looks to me like he's got the makings of a nice conflict of interest.”

“You mean between Margie and Halloran?”

“Exactly. That's why he won't go public with Halloran's story, at least not directly. Innuendo's more his style anyway. He may have gone this far, going to the police with Halloran, but if he has to choose, and we're going to make him choose, he'll drop Halloran like a hot potato.”

“Because Halloran's a murderer?”

“Hardly,” the Counselor answered. “Because the bucks are in Margie.”

If I'd expected criticism, I hadn't gotten it. On the contrary. But there was another reason for that.

“There's one other thing you'd better know,” the Counselor said, handing me the envelope that had been sitting on his desk. “Without telling you, I've just tightened the security around Nora. I've already told Bud to close it up.”

“But won't she find out?” I asked.

“I don't want her to,” he said, “but if she does, I'm not sure how much that matters anymore.”

I looked at the envelope. It was a plain white #10 job, with the top slit open. Roger LeClerc, the Counselor told me, had found it slipped under our front door less than an hour before and had brought it upstairs.

No name on the address side of the envelope. Inside, a single sheet of typewriter paper, folded in three, with only the words “In Memoriam” on it.