Jericho's Fall (22 page)

Beck was sitting where she had sat with Jericho yesterday, looking up at the peak. She could not figure out what Lewiston Clark thought he knew. Jericho had not been indicted and was not the subject of an investigation. It was absurd to think that he had a billion dollars squirreled away somewhere.

“Doolie Bloom killed himself after he was indicted,” said Rebecca, half to herself.

“That’s right,” said Tish. “Only Scondell is facing trial.”

“What about Jack Notting? He didn’t get indicted.”

“True. And nobody knows where he is, although the smart betting is that he’s on the lam. He’ll turn up someplace with no extradition treaty, and spend his life counting his money.”

“Who is he? Where did he come from? I hear he was in the Foreign Service.”

Tish hooted. “Come on, Beck. Don’t be naïve. I bet when your guy was in Vietnam, in the sixties or whenever, his résumé said ‘Foreign Service,’ too. As a matter of fact, I’d bet it still does.”

“Are you saying—”

“Jack Notting was CIA. I thought everybody knew that.”

Tish made her promise to come for a long weekend when she got back. “Oh, and bring Nina. Maybe we’ll matchmake them one day.”

Rebecca hardly heard herself agreeing. She was remembering how Jericho had described his work for Scondell Bloom, and, just like that, she knew part of what he was hiding. Now all she had to figure out was where he had put it.

(iii)

Her appointment with Brian Navarro, the lawyer, was at ten. She would have preferred to talk to Jericho before she left for town, but Audrey said her father was resting and could not be disturbed. Beck was upstairs putting on her good shoes when her cell phone rang. The screen said
UNKNOWN NUMBER
.

Not again.

She considered not answering, but the phone went on ringing. She went to the window but saw no helicopter. She picked up the phone and turned it off.

The ringing stopped.

“Okay, then.”

She decided to take her briefcase so that she would look professional. She was checking her face in the mirror when the phone rang again.

It had switched itself back on.

There are people, these days, who write viruses for cell phones. Yours could be infected
.

She answered. The fax tone, and the whine.

She hung up and turned the phone off. The screen went blank, then recycled, brightening again. The phone began to ring. She hesitated. If the phone was malfunctioning, the problem was getting worse. If not, somebody somewhere was feeling rather…urgent.

Beck reminded herself that she was leaving tomorrow. She was just opening the back to take the battery out when she was startled by a knock, hard and peremptory, on the door connecting to the bathroom and the study.

Pamela’s voice: “Will you please stop playing with the damn phone? Some of us have actual work to do.”

Out on the landing, Beck ran into Audrey.

“He’s awake,” the nun said. “He’s asking for you.”

(iv)

“They tell me you’re running off again,” said Jericho with a frown. He was lying down. The body seemed strong but the energy was fading. “They tell me you’re collecting men like—oh, I don’t know.” He pushed himself up on his shoulders. “I’m the one who’s dying, Becky-Bear. When is there time in that busy schedule of yours for me?”

“Whenever you want,” she said, very surprised.

“Good. Let’s go out.”

She blinked. “Out?”

“You know. A date.”

“Jericho—”

“I’m told you’re heading for town. You told the girls you’d be back at noon. Fine. I have some calls to make anyway. I’ll be ready to go at one, and we’ll go for a little drive. How does that sound?”

Rebecca was, for a moment, wordstruck. She had promised Pamela that she would try to get Jericho out of the house, but, deep down, she wondered whether he was healthy enough. Then it occurred to her that this might be her only chance to get him alone, and away from the house—

“Jer-Bear?”

“Yes?”

“You mean, just the two of us?” Squeezing his hand. He squeezed back. “No Pamela? No Audrey?”

“Just the two of us.” He flopped back onto the bed. “I have to get away from them.”

She smiled. “I’d be honored.”

“That’s right,” said Jericho. “You would.”

Halfway to the door, she had a thought. “Jer-Bear?”

“Hmmm?”

“Do you know anything about—about people planting viruses in cell phones?”

One eye opened. “Are you planning to plant one?”

“Just tell me how it works.”

“It happens,” he said. The other eye opened, and Jericho was all professional again. “If you just want to wreck a phone, it’s easy as pie. If you want to cut a phone off from the network, so it can’t make calls? That’s even easier. On the other hand, if you want to hack it—use it as a GPS, say, to follow somebody with—or a listening device? Technically possible, but a lot harder. The phone companies take lots of precautions against that kind of thing. The equipment you would need you can’t just buy on the street.” He laughed, then coughed. “The good thing about living up here is, you don’t have to worry about them bugging your cell phone. There’s no service.”

Down in the kitchen, she announced the plan to the sisters. She would pick up Jericho at one, and they would go driving. Audrey was adamant: the risk was too great. Pamela was
dubitante:
after all, she was the one who had asked Rebecca to get her father out of the house. As the sisters quarreled, it dawned on Beck that the outcome didn’t matter.

“You know what?” she said. “It’s not up to you.”

The sisters were startled. “Try to keep it to an hour,” said Audrey.

“It’ll take as long as it takes.”

And, very pleased with herself, Beck left for town.

(v)

Brian Navarro was broad and sixty and brown and voluble, a man delighted to be a power in his town, and not particularly concerned about what others thought. His gestures were wide. He filled a lot of space. He dressed beautifully. He insisted on showing her his ego wall, the scattering of poses with the state and congressional representatives from the district, then toured her through his wife and five children, delightedly following their photographs as they grew, and wedded, and brought forth children of their own. She oohed and aahed at the right moments, and, probably, meant it. Then he sat her in the conference room adjoining his office, and chose the side of the table with the sun at his back. He asked if she minded his smoking, and lit a cigar like a gas bomb. Then he waited while Beck, sufficiently softened up, and squinting and occasionally coughing into the bargain, explained what she wanted, all the while thinking that Brian Navarro was more clever than she had thought.

Yes, he said. Sure, he hung around with Jericho. He was Jericho’s friend, he said proudly, as well as Jericho’s lawyer. She noticed that no receptionist was present. She wondered how large a practice an attorney could maintain in a town like this. She didn’t have the heart to tell him about the duo who had driven up from Denver to take possession of the will.

“He talks about you all the time, Miss DeForde. You’re very important to him. I hope you know that, because that old coot isn’t much on showing he cares.”

“Beck,” she said.

“Fine. Beck. I’m Brian.” He blew smoke rings. “Jericho came to me a few years ago with a tax question. I hope I’m not giving anything away. He said he’d given you a gift, and that you gave it to charity. He wanted to know if he could get a deduction. I told him no. I hope you took one, though. For the full value. Doesn’t matter if the cost basis was zero.”

Beck dropped her gaze, momentarily embarrassed. “I never thought about it,” she confessed.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. You can file an amended return. Just talk to your accountant.”

“That would be H&R Block.”

They shared a laugh, slightly strained. Each was waiting for the other.

“The two of you spend a lot of time together,” she said at last.

“Some. Not as much as we used to, of course. He’s been sick, and even before that, he hadn’t been coming to town quite so much. He used to play in the mayor’s poker game, but I don’t think he’s been there in a year or so.”

“But I understand he spends a lot of time at the library.”

“I know I’ve run into him there a time or two. I’m in and out a lot. My wife teaches history at the regional high school down in the valley. We’re writing a little history of the native people on this mountain, and the town doesn’t have a historical society. Bethel has some archives— not a lot, but some—and they’re kept at the library.”

“Is that what Jericho was looking at? The archives?”

He shook his head. “Not that I know of. But the archives are in a little room behind the librarian’s desk. Same room where they keep the photocopier and the printer. Jericho did lots of photocopying, and he printed stuff off the Internet. We’d chat while the machines were running.”

“Do you remember what he printed?”

“Not really. Well, once. Schematic for some kind of motor or something. I couldn’t really tell.”

Beck was frustrated. For all of the lawyer’s evident openness, she felt as if she had less information than when she started. The meetings in the library were casual and unplanned. That part had to be true. If Jericho had wanted to meet Brian Navarro in private, he could have done so right in this room, protected by attorney-client privilege.

“Does he have other friends in town?”

“Jericho Ainsley isn’t the kind of man who has a lot of friends.”

“Still.”

The lawyer was tapping his fingers on the table, a device that annoyed her until she realized that he was making a decision. She had the wit to stay silent.

“You have to understand something,” he finally said. “Jericho and I are friends, after a fashion, but we aren’t particularly close. We enjoy each other’s company, but he doesn’t confide in me, except in the course of my representation. So, whatever I tell you, I’m only surmising. These aren’t things I know. And the only reason I’m telling you anything at all is that I do think he’s having some trouble, and I do think that knowing some of the background might help. And—well, you’re who you are. You’re his Beck.”

“I understand,” said Beck, controlling her eagerness.

“Before he got sick, Jericho used to come into town once or twice a week, in the evenings. He’d have a couple of drinks at Corinda’s. If he arrived early, maybe dinner. I joined him a couple of times, and he was with strangers from out of town a couple of times, or maybe one of his daughters, but mostly he would sit there alone, looking at the room. He didn’t read anything, he didn’t watch television, he just sat there and stared into space.” He continued the drumming. “The only one allowed to wait on him was Corinda herself. Have you met her? Jericho liked her a lot. She was the only one who could ever get his drink order right, or even his dinner, which was always the same. That’s what he said, anyway. If Corinda was away somewhere, he wouldn’t even come into town.”

“I see,” she said again, feeling her face grow warm, knowing where this was leading.

“One night, very late, I saw them together. This was, oh, three or four years ago. They were in the cab of Jericho’s pickup. They were arguing, Rebecca. Pretty passionately, too.” He had the grace to blush. “Naturally, I thought—well, you know—a lovers’ quarrel.”

“I see.”

“I’m not saying they
were
. I’m saying it
looked that
way.”

And Beck nodded, thinking it was odd indeed, if Brian Navarro
was Jericho Ainsley’s friend, to say nothing of his lawyer, that he was confiding so freely these more personal aspects of his client’s business.

She wondered why.

All at once, in a great flurry, yet without being rude, he was shepherding her toward the door. He had another client coming in, a bankruptcy, a local store owner, very sad case, big family, first-generation immigrant, good people, he explained, not letting her get a word in.

In the anteroom, the lawyer asked if she was headed back up to Stone Heights.

She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Good. Then you can save me a trip.” He handed her a manila envelope with Jericho’s name typed on an address sticker for Brian’s firm. The envelope was marked
Personal and Confidential
.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Well, I guess I can tell you, because you’re practically family.” He put a finger to his lips, playfully, and it occurred to her that he just liked to tell secrets; and that he had managed nevertheless, through all his artful bonhomie and gossip, to keep the important ones. Her esteem for him grew. “It’s his will,” said the lawyer. “He asked me to make some changes.”

She looked at the envelope. “His will.”

“That’s right.”

“How long have you been Jericho’s lawyer?”

“About ten years. Twelve.”

“And how often has he redrawn his will?”

“A lot.” The smile faded. “I’m afraid I can’t say more than that.”

Driving back up the mountain, Rebecca kept the envelope on the seat beside her, shaking her head in admiration. Once more Jericho was five steps ahead of everyone else. The document he had sent to Denver had not been his will, and the people who picked it up might not even have been lawyers. Whatever he was hiding, he had slipped a copy down the mountain under everyone’s nose, by being so obvious about the whole thing that even the great Philip Agadakos had been fooled.

CHAPTER 20
The Break

(i)

“Thank you for getting me out of there,” grumbled Jericho. He did not sound particularly grateful. She noticed that he was watching the outside mirror. The Former Everything, even in his last months, was never off his guard. “Those harridans are driving me crazy.”

“They’re not harridans,” she said. She searched for more, probably missed the mark. “They love you.”

“Love. Let me tell you something about love.” Beck had heard it from him before, but did not interrupt. “People who love make bad decisions. It’s a rule. Love isn’t rational, ergo, people who love aren’t rational. They can’t be trusted.”