by John Farrow
“A break in the case, actually,” Hammond inserts.
“How so?” Havilland-Clegg is smiling still, pleased to be included in their enclave. “I have to say, this is fascinating!”
“Only a scant few jewelers,” Till lets him know, “received the charoite from that shipment. We know who they are through the distributor’s records. The FBI is contacting the individual jewelers as we speak to see who among them made the necklaces that were oddly included in two murders.”
Their suspect raises his chin in curiosity. “Two? Which other one?”
“The necklace wasn’t found on the other victim. Only its radioactivity remained. We assume that the custodian was wearing one. Then that necklace, if it was the same one, showed up at her boyfriend’s house.”
“You’ve arrested the boyfriend, then. This is fascinating!”
“We can’t make that arrest. He’s one of those killed.”
His chin drops a notch. “The professor, you mean? He was the boyfriend? Getting it on with a custodian? My God. I expect hanky-panky at a university, lots of it, only that’s not the sort of liaison that pops to mind. To each his own, I suppose.”
“Of course, we’re hoping that when we locate the jewelers who made the necklaces, they’ll give us the customer we’re looking for.”
Havilland-Clegg nods his chin thoughtfully. “I commend you,” he says. “This sounds like excellent police work to me. Now, how can I be of service? Ah!” he suddenly exclaims. “Further help is on the way. My fresh Manhattan!”
Émile Cinq-Mars has chosen to bring it along himself, and takes the opportunity to ham it up.
“Flurry of activity in there. I think a few of the old biddies will soon be dancing on tabletops. The FBI showed up, talking a blue streak to President Palmerich. I get the feeling that our host is at his wit’s end. He can’t take more police action on his campus without busting a gut.”
“FBI?” Havilland-Clegg says. “I didn’t know that they were here.”
“Everybody’s here,” Till mentions. “They’re stumped, too. Although they might have information on who bought the necklaces.”
Hammond plays along with Émile. “Did you eavesdrop?”
“They weren’t speaking to my ears, no.”
“Even Homeland Security is on this case,” Till tacks on.
Havilland-Clegg reacts. “Why them?”
“The professor,” Hammond explains. “He has a spy background.”
“Really?”
“No limit to police activity on this case,” Till points out to him, “until it’s solved.”
“Is that the necklace?” Cinq-Mars asks, and he leans over the coffee table for a closer look.
Havilland-Clegg warns, “Watch out. It’s radioactive,” and Cinq-Mars jerks back.
“Shouldn’t you put it away?”
“A box won’t help,” Till explains. “The damage is done. We’ll need a lead safe for this thing.”
“You know, I’m a little leery,” Havilland-Clegg admits, looking as though he’s about to make a beeline for an exit. “I recovered from cancer in the last year—”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Till sympathizes. “I mean, I’m glad to hear that you recovered. Sorry that you had to go through it.”
“Perhaps the necklace can be taken away? I’ve said all I can about it.”
“Do you think it tells a story?”
“No, I don’t think it tells a story. Better yet, since I can’t help you, perhaps I’ll just remove myself back to the party. I wouldn’t want to miss the octogenarian tabletop dancers.”
“Hmm.” The utterance that Émile Cinq-Mars emits has the odd effect of stopping everyone right where they are. As though no one will take a breath until he has revealed the objection on his mind. His sudden rise to authority countermands his earlier persona as a retiree devoted to wire. He flashes a smile, before taking it back, looking stern again, and says, “Not just yet, Ben.”
Havilland-Clegg stares back at him a moment, then checks quickly with Hammond and Till. Returning his gaze to Cinq-Mars, he corrects him, “It’s Bennington. Not Ben. At the party, I may permit a compromise or two. Here, I shall ask that you call me Mr. Havilland-Clegg. Thank you.”
Cinq-Mars murmurs to himself again.
His adversary continues. “You have an interesting face, Mr. Cinq-Mars. I’d pick you out as an academic long before imagining you to be a manufacturer of wire.”
“Book by its cover,” Cinq-Mars cautions him. “I’m not an academic. Although I do have a degree in animal husbandry.”
“Seriously? What is that? Are you the wife? That’s unkind. The midwife, then? Yet you made wire for a living? Who are you?”
“Émile Cinq-Mars is my name. But you know that.”
“You don’t make wire.”
“Metaphorically I do.”
“FBI?”
“No, sir.”
“Homeland Security.” Havilland-Clegg speaks the words as though they constitute a joke.
“No, sir. Although I’ve worked for both the FBI and your Homeland Security.”
“In animal husbandry?” He snorts.
“The question of the hour, sir, is not who am I, the question is, who are you? And what have you done? What have you done, Ben?”
Their suspect hardly skips a beat. “Gentlemen, a delight and an education. Thank you for serving as the day’s entertainment. You should go on tour! Unfortunately, I’ll be on my way now. Ta-ta.”
Although he is standing in the man’s path, Cinq-Mars deigns to sit down, in one sense giving him an open exit. He sets up an obstacle to his escape route, however, by what he says next. “Palmerich has had a change of heart.”
Havilland-Clegg, hands on his knees to give himself a push to his feet, stalls. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t know if you are aware of this. President Palmerich has been sheltering you from us. He didn’t want his old-boy benefactor being upset by the scrutiny of ragamuffin police. The sophisticate from Virginia and Washington being bothered by local yokels—not acceptable. I understand. Your money is important. Nobody denies that. Still, he’s had a change of heart. Apparently, the FBI has told him a few things.”
“You do realize that you’re starting to tick me off.”
“Brace yourself, sir, because we have a long way to go down that road.”
“I’m outta here,” Havilland-Clegg states.
“What a thing to say!” Cinq-Mars challenges him. “First of all, Ben, you haven’t touched your Manhattan. I’d expect you to say I shall take my leave, or I can assure you that my departure is imminent or any one of your annoying locutions. I would not expect you to say ‘I’m outta here.’ Before you know it, you’ll be telling us that you have to split, or head back to the ’hood.”
Till and Hammond chuckle, for they know now that they’ve been given permission to needle their man.
“Chief Till,” Havilland-Clegg instructs, his voice monotone and irritated at last, “please advise this man that my alibi for the time in question is airtight.”
“I haven’t investigated your alibi,” Till reminds him.
“It’s airtight! The three of you are making fools of yourselves. Tell him. I can produce one witness after another to demonstrate that I could not have been in the clock tower while that poor girl was going through her ordeal.”
“Oh, we already know that,” Cinq-Mars scoffs. “You were being watched at the time, didn’t you notice? By the boy who was tossed out of a car. Or is that why he was tossed out of a car? Or did something go terribly wrong with that abduction, which led to the boy being tossed out of a car? Which was it? The FBI,” Cinq-Mars tells his newfound colleagues, “have located the two men who were involved, as I predicted they would, actually.”
Hammond whistles. “That’s major,” he states.
“A breakthrough,” Till agrees.
Havilland-Clegg is wearing that supercilious grin again.
“What is it, Ben? Y
ou don’t seem pleased that we’ve found the two culprits?”
“What? No. I’m delighted. In fact, if you’ve just arrested the two men, pin the crimes on them. They’ve got nothing to do with me.”
“They may talk. Aren’t you concerned? They may have a lot to say.”
“Don’t know them. They don’t know me. Why should I be concerned?”
“What’ve they told us?” Hammond asks.
Cinq-Mars punctuates the air with a finger. “You see, that’s a good question. Why didn’t Benji ask that question?”
“Duh. Because I’m not a cop?”
“Possibly. Or—?”
“Or? Or because … I think this is a policeman’s silly trick where you invent a discovery to fool your witness into believing that the jig is up. Well, I’m not guilty. I didn’t kill that girl. I have absolutely nothing to admit. And yes, I will take a polygraph if you like. My alibi is simply that I was with a lot of other people at the time. If these two fellows that you say you have located said anything detrimental about me, then I’m quite certain that you put the words into their mouths. Or they never said anything at all because you haven’t found them. You just made that up.”
“Or?” Cinq-Mars asks him again.
“I have nothing to add.”
“Or,” Cinq-Mars explains to Till and Hammond, “Benny is not concerned about what the two men might’ve said because he knows that they are both quite dead. You know that, Bens, and now we know it, too. I predicted things would turn out this way.”
Hammond takes out his wallet, extracts a twenty-dollar bill, and passes it over to Cinq-Mars, who holds his palm up to receive it. Havilland-Clegg observes the slow-motion transaction played out for his benefit.
“I shared that prediction with President Palmerich, as well. Now that the FBI has confirmed that it’s true, he’s more impressed with me, less impressed by you. Of course, I bit my tongue earlier, about what the agents said. I was permitted to listen in. A jeweler gave the FBI an excellent description of the man who commissioned the necklaces, and that description was relayed to President Palmerich. Of course, you looked different then, less hair, you had your cancer at the time and it showed, although the president remembers how you looked back then.”
“Are you full of shit from the knees up or all the way down from your nuts?”
“Cute,” Cinq-Mars says.
“Mind your manners, please, sir,” Till suggests.
“Fuck you.”
“Let’s keep it civil,” Hammond warns him.
“Or what?” Havilland-Clegg fires back.
“Or I’ll take you in, lock you in a cell, and have my guys beat the living crap out of you. Then, we’ll talk again. Your choice. Which do you prefer?”
Havilland-Clegg briefly waves his hand in midair. “I get this now,” he says.
“Do you?”
“You’ve got nothing, so you’re trying to pin it on a rich guy. No wonder our prisons are full of people who never committed a crime. All due to police incompetence and pure laziness. Well, sir. Think again. They say that money can’t buy happiness but it sure as hell can buy the best lawyers in the land. By the time they’re done with you, you’ll be two scrambled eggs”—his eyes take in the police officers—“on toast,” and they get who toast is supposed to be.
“Think so?” Cinq-Mars presses him.
“For starters, I know President Palmerich. He’s a brilliant man. He has no reason to believe that two dead ruffians means that one of his most faithful benefactors is guilty of a crime. Get real.” To Cinq-Mars he adds, “Pardon me for using the vernacular.”
“There is the matter of the description.”
“Lots of people with cancer look like me with cancer.”
“Who said the jeweler described you?”
“Go to hell. I know what you implied.”
Cinq-Mars adds, “Oh, and the FBI had one other thing to say to him. I asked the president this morning if he might permit the FBI to search through school records. He acquiesced. He’s not going to stand in the way of justice if none of his money people are inconvenienced, now is he? What they found out—tell me. Can you guess?”
Havilland-Clegg makes a face and indicates that he cannot.
“Yeah,” Cinq-Mars says. “It’s been a while, Benji. Easy to forget these tiny loopholes in the perfect crime. Is that what you were after, by the way? The perfect crime? How to be vile and vicious and commit murder and confound the authorities into submission? Nice effort. Anyway, what the search of school files indicated—you may not have known that the archives carried such information; they do, and we hired a number of students to help us cull through the records on microfiche. Old technology is slow. They culled the records on behalf of the bureau, and those records indicate that when you were at Dowbiggin, a long time ago, during the Winter Festival, when the public is permitted to go up the clock tower, for three years running you were entrusted to be the Guardian of the Tower, which means that you were in possession of the keys. Do you remember that?”
“Nice try,” Havilland-Clegg tells him, although he does seem more subdued now. “Those keys are not the kind that can be duplicated, and of course I returned my copies.”
“Oh, please, a young man of your wealth and cunning, you could have had the keys cut. Unscrupulous people exist in the world, some are locksmiths. Don’t tell me you haven’t met an unscrupulous person willing to break a rule for cash.”
“Why are we even having this conversation? Check out my alibi! And seriously, do you think I planned a murder thirty years ago?”
“I don’t give you that much credit, no. I think you planned escapades in the clock tower, with your private keys, while you were a rambunctious student, and over the years. Your personal den of iniquity. Or maybe you used it as your own private study hall, who knows?”
“As I said. My alibi is airtight. This conversation is over. Talk to my lawyers. I’ll bring in a truckload.”
“You were being followed that night, Benny! By the boy who was thrown from a moving car! We’ve interviewed him. We know where you were when the girl was raped. We know where you were when she was murdered. Stop fretting about that, please.”
“This is ridiculous. Can I go now?”
“Nobody’s holding you,” Cinq-Mars tells him, and the man stands. “Of course, you have to understand that whether you are guilty or not, you are going to be accused of raping the poor girl’s corpse, which occurred at a later hour when you have no such alibi, unless it’s being alone in a room, and even if you are entirely innocent of the crime, it is going to stick to you like glue, like Krazy Glue, that accusation, and you know how hard that stuff can be to get off. Intimate relations with a corpse. Chances are, the stench of that will hover around you for life. You might want to consider talking to us now to see if you can’t wiggle free and persuade us otherwise.”
Havilland-Clegg stands over him as though he’s been walloped by a telephone pole. Teetering, he absorbs the blow.
“Seriously,” Cinq-Mars puts to him, “how willing are you to take that polygraph now that you know what will be the key question? Did you rape the corpse, Bens?”
In apparent slow motion, he sits down again.
An innocent man, Cinq-Mars believes, would not have bothered. While he’s still relying on gut instinct, and evidence that only barely qualifies as circumstantial, although it’s growing, he feels more certain than ever that he has his man. This far, anyway, his one lie has worked, as the FBI has no report from a jeweler. Not yet. He got away with that one, as he believed that only Havilland-Clegg could have designed and overseen the creation of the necklace.
“That’s a terrible thing you said,” Havilland-Clegg contends. “A sordid accusation like that will carry repercussions in public.”
“I realize that I just threatened you, Ben. I accept that it is your prerogative to threaten me back. Tit for tat. A retaliation. I’m not an officer of the law, nor even a citizen of this country, so good lu
ck with whatever legal maneuver you have in mind to come and get me. No, no,” Cinq-Mars says, interrupting Havilland-Clegg before he can get a word in edgewise. “I’m giving you this one. You don’t need to object. I expect you to be angry with me. As I said before, we have a long way to go down the road toward me ticking you off. Or to put it another way, the road to your perdition is long and bumpy, and yet, we’re going down it. That is our final destination.”
Havilland-Clegg stares back at him. “The road … to my perdition? Gentlemen,” he asks the others, “who’s the madman? What’s he doing here? The road to my perdition? What fucking train to the nuthouse did you leap off of, Cinq-Mars?”
The former detective nods, as though agreeing with the man’s objection. “You’re right,” he says. “Are you a religious man, Benji? Probably not. Most killers lack both an efficient conscience and the spiritual consciousness that’s required to be a religious man. I am, oddly enough, exactly that. Religious. I know! Incongruous, isn’t it? In my profession. In this day and age. It takes all kinds, even to be a detective.”
“That’s what you are.”
“A detective, yes. Retired, though. That part, at least, is true. A retired detective and a religious man. I apologize, you see, for my language. The road to perdition. You’re right. Way too formal, too orthodox, too religious, for the circumstances. After all, we’re not here to consign you to hell, sir, or even to pass judgment. We’re here merely to compile evidence sufficient to see you convicted and incarcerated. For life. I don’t suppose New Hampshire has the death penalty?”
Hammond confirms that his state does not.
“What a shame. Life imprisonment, then. That’s what we’re here for. I’ll retract the bit about perdition. Not my domain.”
Havilland-Clegg has gone both cocky and amused. “Oh, bring it on, sir. Show me what you’ve got. Tell me how you’re going to convince a jury to convict an innocent man, with an airtight alibi, of a crime he did not commit when that man is rich, with great lawyers in his corner—that’s inevitable—and who is a veritable pillar of the community. You’ve got your work cut out for you, I’d say.”
Cinq-Mars returns his amused manner. “I knew you’d enjoy this. Why else tempt us by introducing yet another necklace to the afternoon party? You’re here, in part, for the sport. That’s a given, and that’s a weakness I’ll freely exploit. If‚” he finishes, and lets the word linger in the air between them.