“But however fond of him you might have been—I don’t know, you might have been just using him—you couldn’t have him around as a potential blackmailer. You pulled out one of the guns he got you, punched his ticket, and took the money back.”
“Don’t you call yourself my friend!” she said. “You rejected me!”
“Well, hell, Phoebe, I’m not the only one. You never got close to Aliou, did you?”
“I never met Aliou.”
“True. You learned about him via Weiskopf. But somebody else rejected you, too.”
“Who?” she demanded.
“Your husband,” I said. “When I talked to him, he not only assumed I was shtupping you, he practically threatened to force me into it at gunpoint.”
“Stephen loves me!”
“Of course he does,” I said. “To the extent he can love anything.”
“Stephen is a great artist!” She was really furious.
“Sure he is,” I conceded. I began to inch closer to the sound of her voice. “Is that what this is all about? You were going to steal the company for Stephen?”
“Steal it? How can I steal what’s already his?”
She had a good point. Stephen already owned most of the stock involved. What the problem was was cash.
“We were doing fine,” Phoebe said. “We had the dividends, and we had our investment in the school.”
“The visa mill.”
Phoebe was scornful. “Who cares about that? It was profitable, and we were doing fine.”
“You keep saying ‘we.’ Was Stephen in on this, too?”
“No! Of course not. The whole idea was to keep him from worrying, so he could devote himself to his work.”
No wonder he’d been bewildered at my mention of guns. It was very tempting at this point to yell “His work is doo-doo!” but I didn’t.
Phoebe’s voice dropped. “I—I’ve left Stephen a letter. I wrote it long ago. It’s in our safe at home.”
“Why leave him a letter?” I said. “Come back with me and tell him yourself. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“I can’t do that,” she said sadly. “Stephen will be quite cross with me.”
I thought it was more to the point that Lady Arking and the Department of Public Prosecutions might be cross with her, but I was willing to let her go where she wanted to go.
“Stephen loves you,” I told her. “You said so yourself. He’ll forgive you.”
“No.” Her voice was heavy with sadness, and quieter all the time. I had to keep inching forward just to hear her.
“No,” she said again. “I was planning the one thing he could never forgive. After Pamela was dead, I was going to make him accept the title and salary of Managing Director of BIC. He wouldn’t have to do the work. There was a competent person to do the work. It was the title, and the prestige, and the money. The money. We’d never need to worry about money again, and Stephen could fulfill all his dreams and write his masterpieces in comfort.”
It just went to show, I reflected, that relativity really worked. If the block of stock Sir Richard left Stephen paid off at less than a million and a half pounds sterling per annum, I was a ring-tailed baboon. Most people would probably consider that comfortable, but geniuses, you see, need much, much more.
“But Pamela was so mean. She would never give Stephen anything other than his dividends. She forced me into partnership with Weiskopf. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have done anything but sleep with him.
“But that wasn’t enough for her, was it? She had to go and send her reporters around and ruin the whole business. Then Weiskopf wrote the letter, and she sent that Aliou around, and he found out something. He rang me on the phone and asked me if I knew anything about the school.”
“I see.”
There were lots of ways it could have happened. Aliou probably made the opportunity for a quick tiptoe through the files and saw a name or a phone number or an address that was worth following up on, and which led him to the opinion that a talk with Phoebe was called for. It couldn’t have been anything certain, or he would have had more than just a brochure in that envelope.
Still, it was too much for Phoebe to risk. Indulging her taste for rough trade (she’d made a play for me, hadn’t she?), she paid Winston with cash and physical fringes to pull the trigger on Aliou at our rendezvous.
She probably got that out of Lady Arking during a neck rub or something.
“She forced me into it, you know,” Phoebe said. “I didn’t want to kill anybody, even her.”
“Why did Weiskopf send the letter?” As far as I was concerned, that was still the unanswerable question.
She said, with true anguish, “I don’t know! He must have been insane. That afternoon, all I’d intended to do was seduce you. You’ll regret it until your dying day that I didn’t. Roxanne may be rich, but isn’t she a bit common?
“I’m sorry, there was no reason to hurt your feelings. But I’d planned such a pleasant afternoon, and then you said you were going back to that wretched school.”
“And you played Shirley Temple, and cajoled me into taking you along, right? And you had the gun in your purse. And we’d walk into the office, Weiskopf would recognize you, and you’d take out the gun and slaughter us both, right?”
She was petulant. “You talk as if I would have had a choice. I’ve been forced into all this. It’s been hell.”
“Don’t just tell me,” I said. “Come back and tell everybody.”
“Oh, Matt, I wish I could. And I’m glad it worked out that I didn’t have to kill you. Even if you did wind up destroying me. I hope you believe that.”
“Sure,” I said.
I was taking her with a large load of salt. Now I know why she crept up the stairs that day—so she could listen to our conversation and decide if she still needed to plug us.
“Tell me one thing. Did you trip Weiskopf into the traffic?”
“A little,” she said. “Matt, you’re getting too close to me.”
“I’m just going to take you back to the house,” I said. “You can talk to people there.”
“They’ll put me in jail. There are evil women in jail. They’ll want to touch me. I won’t go.”
“I think,” I began. “I can’t make any promises, but I think, that you’ll probably go to hospital, rather than to jail.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes, I do.” I didn’t know if I thought so or not. I just wanted to get the hell out of the fog.
“I shouldn’t mind being in hospital quite as much,” she said. She sounded like a little girl. “I have been so dreadfully tired lately.”
I personally couldn’t see how she could be, with all the time she spent in bed.
“All right, then,” I said. “Then just come along with me and we’ll see if we can’t get that arranged, what do you say?”
She didn’t say anything, not for a long time. I kept quiet, giving her a chance to make up her mind. I was fairly confident that I’d be able to hear her if she ran away.
Slowly, I walked toward the spot her voice had come from. I wanted to be close enough to grab her if she did decide to run.
I got close enough so that she began to take shape. I couldn’t make out a distinct image, just a smear of orange and pink in the white air.
I held out my hand. “Come on, Phoebe.” I held up my hand. “Let’s go on back. It’s cold.”
I don’t know if she took a step toward me before it happened, or if she ever would have. I just know that behind me, a loud, gruff voice said, “What the bloody ’ell are you two doin’ ’ere, then?”
A zoo guard. Armed with a rifle. Phoebe screamed and ran.
Animals voiced discontent all around us. I had the presence of mind to yell, “Police, don’t shoot!” and took off after her. The zoo guard, in turn, took off after me.
She used her last bullet. I found out later she used it to shoot the lock off another gate. Maybe, in her myopia, she thou
ght it was the fence to the outside. Maybe she just thought of it as a place to hide.
What it was was the gate that surrounded the little grotto that housed one of the animals the zoo had that liked to be out on a cold night. I remembered as soon as I heard its roar.
The Siberian tiger.
22
“Case solved!”
Rory Bremner
Rory Bremner, Who Else?, Channel Four
YOU MAY BE WONDERING why you never read about these details in the newspaper. After all, MEDIA EXEC’S NYMPHO DAUGHTER-IN-LAW KILLS THREE, GETS EATEN BY TIGER is a story that catches the eye. Even The New York Times would cover that, though they’d manage to stick a dull headline on it.
There were a couple of reasons. I discussed them the next morning with Rox.
She was being cynical, you see. Her outlook had been shaped by her own none-too-good experience with media-conglomerate power struggles.
“So the whole thing gets swept under the rug,” she said. “Typical.”
I could see that this was supposed to be a serious discussion, so I reached out and pulled the sheet farther up her body to avoid distractions. That particular gambit always makes her laugh at me, but as I tell her, Man is not made of wood.
Life would be so much less complicated if we were.
“It’s not all going to be swept under the rug. Just the part about her trying to take over BIC as a source of cash for Stephen and his Muse. There isn’t any goddamn evidence, anyway.”
“What happened to the letter she wrote to Stephen?”
“It was there, all right. It was just heavy on apology and light on detail. Incidentally, that safe held five more guns. She must have had Winston feeling like Guns ’r’ Us.”
“How did she meet people like that?”
“She went looking for them. That was in the letter.”
“I’m almost sorry I went with Lady Arking to the hospital.”
“She asked for you. Besides, Bristow never would have let you see the letter, anyway. He was fit to bust. I think he’s going to go get his nose sewn up for the duration of our stay here.
“Anyway,” I went on, “Phoebe went looking for thugs and weirdos like Winston and Weiskopf, because, and I quote, ‘I was seeking physical stimulation only; mentally and spiritually, compared to you, dear Stephen, men are mindless and soulless blobs.’”
“Wow,” Roxanne said.
“Yeah, the whole thing was like that. When I read her writing style, I could finally understand why she liked Stephen’s poetry.”
“Hey, she propositioned you, didn’t she?”
“Yep,” I said. “One soulless and mindless blob at your service.”
“Oh, Matt, if she only knew.”
“Thank you,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead. Chastely, because the conversation wasn’t over, and Man was still not made of wood.
“Bristow is going to close the case quietly, because that’s really all he can do. The only one who gets completely protected is the tiger.”
“The tiger?”
“Yeah, the tiger. By British law, an animal who kills a human has to be destroyed.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know how many Siberian white tigers are left in the world?”
“Not a lot?”
“Fewer than that. Besides, it’s not like the tiger actually ate her. He was sleeping peacefully, minding his own business, when Phoebe shot the lock off, stepped through the gate, fell down the gully, and landed on top of him. Naturally, this startled him.”
“Naturally.”
“And he lashed out with a paw, like any kitty-cat would. Of course, this particular paw was like a baseball bat with four-inch spikes driven through it. A couple of swipes with that ...”
“Ugh. You don’t have to describe it, I can imagine.”
“I don’t have to imagine, I saw it. In any case, since the tiger was only acting in self-defense, we’re all going to lie to save it. The official story is Phoebe fell down and broke her neck.”
“But what about the body?”
“Closed-coffin cremation. This afternoon. We are, believe it or not, invited. Wanna go?”
“You’re sick, Cobb.”
“I already gave Stephen our regrets, though that doesn’t seem to be exactly the right word, does it?
“But as I was saying, the zookeeper loves that cat, he’ll personally see that no traces of bloodstained organdy remain? Chiffon?”
“Organdy.”
“What’s the difference, anyway?”
“Organdy is stiffer.”
“Oh. No wonder she wore it. He’ll personally remove any trace from the tiger’s claws and burn it.”
“Better him than me.”
“My sentiments exactly. What time is it?”
She climbed up and put her chin on my shoulder to see the clock behind me.
“Ten after eleven,” she said. “Why?”
“Bernard Levering is picking me up at one o’clock. With Lady Arking recuperating, he’ll pretty much be running TVStrato by himself. I thought I ought to have a talk with him.”
“If you let yourself get involved in the TV business again, I’ll strangle you myself.”
“No chance, darling,” I told her.
“After this, it’s over.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s over.”
“Then we can probably figure out a way to fill the time between now and the time Bernard shows up.”
“I’d like that, Rox. I really would.”
“Oooo, so serious all of a sudden.”
“You’ve got to be serious about the important things. At least every once in a while.”
“Okay, Cobb,” she said. “I seriously love you.”
“I seriously love you, too.”
My hair was still wet from the shower when Bernard picked me up. He was, he told me, taking the day off from work, but he was dressed for the office anyway. I had on a turtleneck and a denim jacket and jeans.
He drove up in a dark blue Mercedes with a chamois interior.
I got in, buckled up, and asked him if he was hungry.
“Not very,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “I’m tired of business lunches. Let’s drive around a little and see how we feel.”
The first place I made him take me was a bookstore called The Lighter Side, on the Upper Richmond Road in East Sheen. The places deals exclusively in comedy books and tapes, and contains stuff you can’t find anywhere else. It also serves as a sort of clearing house for a lot of comedians in London.
I bought a couple of comic collections, Beau Peep and Alex, which are by far the best comic strips in Britain. Bernard waited patiently, though he seemed puzzled.
We left the shop, got back in the car. I suggested we go down by the river. He shrugged and said okay.
We parked down by the terrace in my part of Barnes. “Let’s take a walk,” I told him.
It was a cool day, probably as cold as last night, but less penetrating than the fog. It was clear, and the usually black Thames reflected a bright blue sky and white clouds. There was a bench a little way along. I sat, and waited for him to join me.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, old friend, you’re acting rather strangely.”
“I’ve got a problem.”
“Maybe I can help,” he said. “Lord knows we owe you one.”
“You and Lady Arking, you mean?”
“The whole bloody company, Matt. You know that. If you don’t, I’m telling you now. Stephen in charge of British International Communications would have been a bloody catastrophe.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe you can help, at that.”
“I’m willing to try. What’s the problem?”
“Phoebe. Isn’t it always?”
“Whatever she did, she sure paid for.” He shuddered.
“I suppose so. It’s a pity.”
“I didn’t know you cared about her to that extent.”
“I don’t. I�
��m not getting sentimental over a psycho killer—I’m lamenting the fact that she checked out before all the questions were answered.”
“Like what?”
“Well, how it worked out that Winston happened to keep the same appointment with Aliou that I did. How Weiskopf knew I was coming to visit him. Or the biggest question of all: Why did Weiskopf send that anonymous letter?”
Bernard scratched his chin.
“When you string them out like that, they do seem hard to figure. Probably coincidence.”
I shook my head.
“Nah. It’s when you string them out like that that you can begin to make sense of them.
“Take the anonymous letter, for instance. It wasn’t just threatening, it was hurt. It was outraged. This guy’s warped but real sense of fair play had been violated. And that could only happen if he legitimately thought that the money for the diploma mill really did come from Lady Arking.”
Bernard shrugged. “Maybe Phoebe told him it did.”
I nodded. “That’s way I read it. Until last night, in the zoo. I asked Phoebe the same question, and she was in absolute despair. That letter started the chain reaction that crashed her whole life. She had no idea what might have inspired it.”
Bernard shook his head.
“Then I’m stuck.”
“You sure are. Old friend.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, who knew everything that was going on at TVStrato? Who was routinely apprised of everything Lady Arking did? Who besides Phoebe was the only person I spoke to about my intention to drop in on Weiskopf? And was the only person besides Phoebe who could plausibly represent the money as coming from Lady Arking?”
“Stephen, for one.”
“Come off it. Stephen didn’t know a thing about my visit to Weiskopf. For another thing, Phoebe died because she was obsessed about how Stephen would react when he found out all of this. No, old friend, no matter how I turn it over in my mind, the answer to those questions always has your name in it. How was she in bed?”
“Do you honestly expect me to answer a question like that?”
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