That started a chattering among the guests that Wolfe halted by slapping a palm on his desktop. “If you please, let me continue. All of these five had their reasons for enmity toward Mr. Clay, who had written disparaging things about each of them in his newspaper column.”
“Disparaging things, hell! They were more than that, they were downright libelous, at least in my case,” Andrews spat.
“Perhaps,” Wolfe said, “although I will leave that to the lawyers to determine. Mr. Stokes, as our legal expert, do you feel Cameron Clay made actionable comments in the Gazette?”
“I would need to review all of his columns and study his comments case by case, but since I have no interest in reading his amateurish prose, I would not waste my time,” the attorney said. “However, some things that he wrote about me—quite a few of them, in fact—definitely were actionable. I chose not to take action, however.”
“Mr. Andrews, I know you did file suits against the columnist.”
“I did, and as you also well know, I was unsuccessful on two occasions, thanks to the tactics used by the Gazette’s lawyers,” Andrews said, looking daggers at both Haverhill and Cordwell. “But despite how I felt about Cameron Clay, I was not about to kill him, for heaven’s sake.”
“Nobody has killed him!” Cramer roared from the back of the room. “The man committed suicide, plain and simple. Let’s be clear about that. He shot himself, and I dare anyone to prove that he didn’t.”
That comment led to another outburst from the assemblage, including some excited and angry comments, with people talking over one another in the clamor. Once again, Wolfe stilled the furor, this time with four words: “Inspector Cramer is correct.”
Chapter 31
Jaws dropped, eyebrows shot up, Serena gasped, and no words were spoken for close to half a minute. Everyone wore a surprised expression, no one more than Inspector Lionel T. Cramer, although Purley Stebbins was a close second.
The silence was broken by Roswell Stokes. “If what you say is true, why in the name of God are we here?”
“A valid question, sir, and one to which I will respond. I became involved in this affair when Mr. Clay was still alive. He reported to his superiors, and later to me, that he had received a number of hostile telephone calls, some of them strongly suggesting that he was in mortal peril. However, no one else had heard any of these calls. They had only Mr. Clay’s word that they had occurred.”
“That’s not true, Mr. Wolfe,” Larry McNeil said after clearing his throat. “He received one of these calls one morning when I was at his home for our daily meetings.”
“Did you hear the voice of the person on the other end of the line?” Wolfe asked.
“Well, no. But the telephone did ring, and Cameron seemed very unsettled by the call. I only heard what he said, which was something like ‘What the hell do you want?’ ”
“We will come back to that call later,” Wolfe said. “Mr. McNeil, tell us what you found on that fateful day at Cameron Clay’s townhouse.”
“We’ve been through all this before,” Cramer said, “and the papers have reported it.”
“Indulge me please, Mr. Cramer,” Wolfe replied, turning toward McNeil.
“I was surprised when I got to Cameron’s place, because his front door was ajar, as I have reported before,” the young man said, swallowing hard. “I went upstairs to his living room and found him sitting on the sofa. At first, I thought he was dozing, that had happened a few times before, but it didn’t take me long to figure out he was dead. There was a hole in his right temple, and he had no pulse. His pistol was on the cushion next to him. After checking his carotid, I telephoned the police, and two officers got there maybe ten minutes later.”
“The medical examiner’s report indicated that Mr. Clay died between one and four in the morning. Where were you during that time?”
“I’ve already told you, and the police,” McNeil said, turning around and looking at Cramer, who nodded. “I was at a bachelor party at a restaurant in the Village until almost six thirty. After I left there, and not in the best of condition, I’m afraid, I went home to clean up and change before going to see Cameron.”
“I understand that several friends who were with you at this bacchanalian revelry confirmed your presence there straight through until the time when the festivities broke up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just so. You also knew that Mr. Clay was terminally ill with cancer and may not have had much more than a year to live.”
“I knew that, and later, so did others at the Gazette,” he said, looking at Haverhill and then at Cordwell and Lon.
“Mr. Clay was a man possessed of intense emotions,” Wolfe remarked, “the strongest of which was anger, anger at injustice, at irresponsibility, at graft, at the violation of public trust. However, lest I paint him as a man with only noble intentions, I should point out that often his anger was irrational and petty. He excoriated his ex-wife”—Wolfe nodded toward Serena—“because of a failed marriage in which he surely bore a substantial share of the responsibility.
“His anger often morphed into hatred and a desire to punish those to whom he bore strong animosities. Five persons in this room comprised the front rank of those he most detested, and he hit upon a devious plan to punish them.”
“This sounds like pop psychology,” Eric Haverhill scowled. “I still say that someone murdered Cameron.”
“I briefly considered that Mr. Clay may indeed have been killed,” Wolfe said, “but I could not conceive of any of those present carrying out the murder, or even having it done by proxy. Then, I got a report from Mr. Goodwin, who had attended Cameron Clay’s funeral service. Something the minister said crystallized my thoughts. This pastor praised the deceased, using a well-known phrase. He said Mr. Clay ‘comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comforted.’
“I do not know how much the columnist comforted the afflicted, but there is no doubt that he desired to afflict the comforted—in this case, those whom he detested, for a variety of reasons. So he devised the devious plan I alluded to moments ago.”
“And just what was this so-called devious plan?” Haverhill demanded.
“Mr. Clay, with the help of Mr. McNeil here, worked to make a suicide appear to be a murder.”
“Wait just a minute,” Larry McNeil rasped, standing. “I—”
“Sit down and shut up!” Cramer bellowed. To Wolfe: “Go on.”
“Thank you. Mr. Clay claimed he had been getting threatening telephone calls, and he told his superiors at the Gazette about this, naming the five individuals he felt could have been behind the calls. He suggested to them that he consult me, so I became an unwitting dupe in his plan. I am sad to say I took the bait.”
“Enough with the self-flagellation,” Cramer snapped. “Get on with it.”
“From the start, the story of the telephone calls seemed questionable, as there was no one’s word but Mr. Clay’s that they ever transpired, other than Mr. McNeil’s claim that he was present when Mr. Clay fielded one of them. Thus, the columnist would appear to have had a ‘witness’ to a threatening call, thereby establishing their credibility. Why would Mr. McNeil make up such a story?”
“So there were no calls?” Cordwell said, eyebrows raised.
“Never,” Wolfe said, “but again, who would doubt Mr. Clay and his assistant? And given the vitriol many of his columns contained, it was hardly a stretch that he would receive threats. As a result, knowing his life was nearing its end and not wanting to suffer through the last stages of a ravaging illness, he decided to end his own life, but to make it seem like murder so that one of those he most detested would be accused and perhaps convicted. He may not have cared which of them bore the blame.”
“So he shot himself?” Lon Cohen said.
“Yes, sir,” Wolfe replied. “Because on numerous occasions he had spoken highly o
f Mr. McNeil’s work as his assistant, I am sure he wanted the young man to continue his column, and he wanted to shield him from any suspicion in his apparent murder.
“Accordingly, the two of them planned the shooting to take place on a night when Mr. McNeil was at a gathering where several people could vouch for him. That immediately eliminated the young man as a suspect. The alibi was, as you like to say, Mr. Cramer, ironclad.
“Then to further make his death appear to be a murder, Mr. Clay left his front door ajar, suggesting that the ‘murderer’ somehow gained entry to the townhouse. As a plan, it was demoniacal, although Inspector Cramer never wavered in his insistence that this was a suicide.”
“I have a hell of a lot of trouble believing this, Mr. Wolfe,” Haverhill said. “I am still convinced that—” The owner of the Gazette was cut short by weeping that was coming from Larry McNeil.
“I … would have done … anything for Cameron. … Anything at all,” McNeil said between sobs. “He was wonderful to me. When he first learned about the cancer and how far along it was, he told me he had an idea. When he first said the word suicide, I did everything I could to talk him out of it. ‘You can beat this,’ I told him. ‘You’re tough.’
“But he said the doctors had given him no hope at all, and that they would see that he got drugs that could ease the pain,” McNeil went on, his sobs turning to wailing. “‘Look, I know a way I can go out in a blaze of glory,’ Cameron said to me, ‘and with a little luck, I might be able to take somebody else with me.’”
There were gasps from the assemblage and a four-letter word shouted by Tobin. Cramer looked down at McNeil with a look of utter disgust. “How can you stand to live with yourself?” he said.
“I didn’t want to do any of it,” he moaned. “But Cameron … He was so excited by the idea. I resisted him on this for days, weeks, actually. But he wore me down. In the end, I couldn’t say no to him.”
“Didn’t it bother you that someone else might get unfairly charged, Larry?” Ashton Cordwell asked.
McNeil nodded, wiping the tears from his face. “Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with that. But I also had a lot of trouble knowing that Cameron was going to shoot himself, and that he would be all alone when it happened.”
“You could have stopped the whole damn thing right in its tracks,” Cramer said.
“But Cameron kept telling me over and over that he couldn’t stand the idea of a slow death. And I was the closest person to him; he had nobody else, nobody at all.”
“You told Mr. Goodwin that he left the bulk of his money to the Salvation Army,” Wolfe said.
“He did. The Salvation Army had helped his uncle in his last days, and Cameron never forgot that. It was just about the only organization that I ever heard him say anything good about.”
“That bit of sentiment notwithstanding, we’re seeing that Cameron Clay was a louse to the very end,” Kerwin Andrews said. “They tell us not to speak ill of the dead, but I think an exception can be made here.”
Millard Beardsley nodded vigorously. “I second that. The Lord tells us we will all be forgiven some day, but some people are beyond forgiveness, and I truly believe that Cameron Clay was one of them.”
“Now just wait a minute,” Eric Haverhill said angrily. “Cameron exposed a lot of wrongs in this city, and I was proud of the Gazette for carrying his column for all those years. He was a man of the people, a defender of the little guy.”
“Defender mainly of himself,” Roswell Stokes countered. “I know this fellow abetted the man’s warped scheme, but I honestly believe that Clay had him under some kind of spell.”
“That may be the case,” Cramer said, “but nonetheless, we’re going to be taking him in.” The inspector then read McNeil his rights, and he and Purley Stebbins escorted him out of the office.
“What will happen to the young man?” Serena Sanchez asked. “Will he go to prison?”
“Probably not,” Roswell Stokes said, “depending on who he gets to defend him.”
“Mr. Wolfe, you have earned your fee,” Ashton Cordwell said. “When you send me a bill, please include any expenses.”
“Yeah, you did earn it,” Eric Haverhill conceded. “You said early on that you might not find a murderer, and you were right. Did you have suspicions of this from the beginning?”
“I had inklings that the situation was not entirely what it seemed,” Wolfe said, draining the last of his second beer.
Chapter 32
“Inklings, huh?” I said to Wolfe after everyone had left. “Did you really have some?”
“I did. For one thing, none of the five people Clay had suggested as possible threats had what I felt was sufficient reason to kill him or to have him killed. Overall, they were not a likable bunch, but lack of likability is not necessarily an indication of an intent to kill.”
“So you—” I was interrupted by the doorbell. “Maybe that’s Cordwell, coming back to give you a check,” I said, rising and heading down the hall. Through the glass, I saw the figure of Inspector Cramer.
“I hope I’m not calling too late, Archie,” he said with unaccustomed politeness as I let him in. He almost never calls me by my first name.
“You’re not. Mr. Wolfe and I were reviewing the events of the day,” I told him as we headed for the office.
Wolfe did not seem surprised to see the inspector. “Will you have something to drink?” he asked. “I’m about to have more beer.”
“I’ll have a bourbon and water on the rocks,” he said. I served the inspector first, then went to the kitchen for Wolfe’s beer, knowing Fritz had turned in.
“That was quite a performance you put on tonight,” Cramer said, when I returned, raising his glass in a salute. “I thought for sure you were going to tag someone with Clay’s death.”
Wolfe looked pleased. “Mr. Clay was something of a scoundrel, to say the least. He raised hatred to new levels.”
“Yeah, that’s hard to argue with,” Cramer said. “To be charitable to the guy, I suppose you could say he did some good by blowing the whistle on some of the scum in this town. But he was a vicious bastard, and he didn’t care who he hurt. Do you have any thoughts about which of those five Clay hoped would get nailed for his so-called murder?”
“He, of course, disliked all of them, but for different reasons. But I got the sense his repugnance toward Mr. Tobin was the strongest.”
“That’s where my repugnance lies, too,” the inspector said with feeling. “The damage Tobin did to the department’s reputation is going to hang around for a long time to come.”
“No doubt. I presume Mr. McNeil will be charged.”
“That’s up to the DA, but I’d be surprised if he went to trial. You know as well as I do that when a newspaper is directly involved in a big story in this town, there’s a lot of pressure to keep its bosses happy.”
“Yes, the power of the press is not to be underestimated. You certainly have felt that power over the years.”
“I have,” Cramer said. “At one time or another, the editorial writers of at least four papers have called for my scalp, the Gazette among them.”
“Yet you’ve survived all their shots,” I put in.
“So far. But I figure that someday, one of those shots from the press is going to hit home with my bosses, and I’ll be asked to turn in my badge. Maybe when that happens, you’ll take me on as one of your part-time operatives, working alongside Panzer and Durkin.”
I couldn’t tell if the inspector was kidding, but the look on Wolfe’s face was priceless. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen to him registering shock.
The two old warhorses, who had butted heads so often over the years, went on talking and reminiscing for another half hour about cases they had been involved in and had fought about. I suspect the inspector’s mellow mood had something to do with four words Wolfe had spoken earli
er in the evening: “Inspector Cramer is correct.” Cramer wasn’t used to hearing that from Wolfe. I wondered how long this era of good feeling between them would continue. Probably until the next case we had, but for now, I leaned back with my scotch and enjoyed the moment.
Chapter 33
Larry McNeil got charged with interfering with a police investigation and abetting a suicide and was indicted. Ironically, he hired none other than Roswell Stokes to defend him, although I was not surprised, as Stokes had seemed sympathetic toward McNeil when everyone was gathered in the office. From the start, the trial was a circus, covered by all the local newspapers and TV and radio stations, as well as the Associated Press and the United Press International.
Stokes relished the exposure and rose to new heights of histrionics as he implored the jury to spare his youthful client. Things were slow in the brownstone one late March morning, so I decided to take in the trial, getting to the courthouse early because of Lon Cohen’s advice. “They’re packing the place every day, Archie, so you may not get a seat, and I can’t give you press credentials,” Lon said. “They’ve all been gobbled up.”
I got in, all right, and I saw a sample of vintage Stokes in action. “This young man, as loyal an assistant as anyone could ever ask for, found himself in a terrible position,” the lanky lawyer said, loping back and forth in front of the jury box and brushing a shock of hair from his eye in what had to be a practiced gesture.
“Put yourselves in my client’s place, ladies and gentlemen,” Stokes went on. “His respected mentor is dying of a terminal illness. There is no hope whatever of recovery. Cameron Clay has decided to end his own life, but in so doing, he also wishes to exact revenge upon any one of several people he feels deserve punishment—me among them.” That evoked gasps from some jurors.
“Yes, you heard right—me among them. And so, ladies and gentlemen, you must be asking yourselves at this moment: Why am I defending this young man, whose mentor detested me to the point that he was willing to make me, along with four other persons, seem to be a suspect in his murder? I will tell you why I am defending Mr. McNeil: Because he is an honorable man who was placed in an untenable position. He was asked to be a party to a suicide, the suicide of a man he revered and loyally served. But it would be a suicide to prevent the agonies that were surely to come.
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