If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  “A lesser man,” Leary said. “Al doesn’t agree with me, though I think you do, don’t you, Olivia?” She made no comment. “Schwartz’s dedication has always seemed genuine enough to me. He’s of German descent, same as the boss, big on the work ethic – lives alone, too, so far as I know, but other than that I know very little about him.” He paused. “He could have done it, too. As I said before, any one of us could have.”

  There was a tap on the door, and Lipman came in.

  “The guys from Bomb and Arson are here, Lieutenant.”

  Joe checked his watch. Almost eight o’clock. Before too much longer the newly magnified task force would be starting to take the Hagen Pacing building apart in earnest, section by section, rooting through every file, every stockroom, every sheet of paper, every air-conditioning duct, every foot of pipework, if necessary, for the evidence that might help them move on to a conclusion. Not a moment too soon, so far as he was concerned.

  “You’ll excuse me?” He stood up.

  “Of course,” Ashcroft said.

  “Good luck.” Leary paused. “You probably know this already, but both my parents are still alive. So are my wife and three children. There’s no history of heart disease in my family, and I have no grudge against the company, other than the fact that it’s probably about to go down the tube.”

  “Putting you out of work,” Ashcroft said, mildly.

  “And every other member of the workforce,” Leary said.

  “Obviously.” Joe went to the door, where Lipman waited.

  Leary smiled one more time.

  “Except Al Hagen,” he said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Saturday, January 16th

  At half past eleven on Saturday morning, while Hugo was at the café and just as Toni Petrillo was leaving the house after a visit, Chris and Katy Webber arrived to see Lally. The hour that they stayed was, at least for Lally, one of the most miserable and frustrating she could remember.

  She had realized, ever since seeing the painting, that her attraction to Chris was almost certainly mutual, that he, too, had perhaps been guiltily counting the moments till they might meet again, and this morning, when he’d walked through her front door, she had looked up into his face and had seen her own emotions, raw and confused, mirrored in his eyes.

  But the child was there between them, preventing them from speaking their minds, from reaching out and touching even so much as a hand or a cheek. And Andrea Webber – for all that she was shut up miles away in a clinic, or perhaps all the more because of it – stood between them too. Or perhaps, Lally thought, it was simply their twin consciences, silencing their voices, stamping on their feelings, on their right even to consider their own feelings.

  “When are you going to start classes again?” Katy wanted to know.

  “Not for a little while yet,” Lally told her.

  “But you are going to be okay?”

  The girl’s anxious dark blue eyes were so like her father’s. Lally knew she would never be able to look at her again without thinking of him.

  “Lally’s going to be perfect, Katy,” Chris said.

  “Yes.” Lally smiled at him. “Of course I am.”

  They talked about ballet, about the conditions on the ski slopes at Bousquet, about an icicle that had dropped like a spear from the lintel over a grocery store on Elm Street two days earlier, narrowly missing Katy’s head. They talked about Jade and the other dogs at the big house down the road, and how Katy had promised her Mommy that she would help look after them while she was away. They talked about the imminent publication of Chris’s new teach-yourself painting guide. They talked about everything they could think of, except Andrea Webber’s alcoholism, or Katy’s bruises, or the fact that Chris and Lally were guilty of having fallen in love with each other, and that they both knew there was no future in it, no hope.

  When they had gone, Lally went into the kitchen and tried to make a soufflé, but it sank like a stone in the oven and then she put on a tape of Swan Lake, but she felt afraid to dance even a few steps. And it was snowing again, and suddenly she hated all the whiteness and the muffled sounds and the grey skies, and she felt trapped and claustrophobic and more depressed and alone than she could remember feeling in years.

  Hugo came home a little after four that afternoon, and found Lally curled up on her bed under a patchwork quilt, Nijinsky asleep beside her. Lally’s eyes were closed, and Hugo wasn’t quite certain if she was really sleeping, but there were tear stains on her cheeks, and a fresh bunch of sweet peas in a little vase beside Webber’s portrait on her dresser, and he knew who had been in the house and who had caused those tears.

  And Hugo, who seldom drank spirits – never drank any liquor that early in the day – went quietly downstairs and poured himself a glass of whisky, and stood at the sitting room window sipping and staring out through the veil of white steadily blanketing Lenox Road and West Stockbridge and most of the Berkshires. The whisky tasted sour, but little more so than his own jealousy.

  Chris Webber had made Lally cry, and Hugo hated him for that, but at the same time he despised his own hypocrisy, for the hatred implied that if Webber were able to make Lally happy, Hugo might like him better.

  Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sunday, January 17th

  On Sunday morning, the sun shone on Chicago for the first time in almost a week. It was bitterly cold, the wind blew off the lake and the snow lay, caked to lethal icing, on the sidewalks and piled up on the kerbs, but the sky was pure azure and the sunlight bestowed such a brilliance on the city that Joe felt better than he had in a while. His moods had always been influenced, if not controlled, by weather changes; he functioned better on days such as this, which was just as well today, considering the two appointments that lay ahead of him.

  Heading south on Lakeshore Drive, Joe found himself thinking about Lally. His sister flitted into his thoughts most days – brief feelings of fondness, mostly, when he drank his first cup of coffee each morning facing two of his favourite photographs of her on the opposite wall – but during the course of the last few days, in spite of the craziness of the pacemaker case, he’d found his thoughts switching to her at less likely moments. If Jess had known that his sixth sense, as she called it, was tweaking him, if she hadn’t gone to her parents with Sal, she would have made sure he made time to call his sister, but Jess wasn’t there, and it was less than two weeks since he and Lally had last talked, and Joe hadn’t felt exactly troubled about her, but all the same, as he parked the car and turned off the ignition, he made up his mind to call her again real soon.

  With Hagen Pacing still being turned inside out – still fruitlessly – and with the FBI’s computers linking with Hagen Industries’ to prepare as complete a list as possible of pacemaker recipients at potential risk, in case a decision had to be made to try to organize mass explantation, Joe was concentrating on going after two of the three men who still remained his chief suspects and whose illness now gave him an excuse to enter their homes. The plan this morning had been for Lipman to accompany Joe when he visited Hagen and Schwartz, but she, too, had gone down with the flu last night, and Joe wanted Valdez and Cohen to stay at the factory in case some scrap of evidence – hell, he was ready to settle for crumbs, they all were – finally showed itself. So he was on his own, getting out of the car opposite Lake Michigan, sparkling today like a great frosted ocean, and climbing the curved reddish stone steps up to the entrance of The Carlyle.

  It was one of the most expensive looking buildings in perhaps the choicest residential street in Chicago; a handsomely designed sandy-coloured stone building of around forty storeys, erected in the mid-sixties, identified only by a discreet sign, too small to be seen from the street. The entrance was locked. Joe waited a moment before ringing the bell, turning around to look back at the lake. It was part frozen, though not thickly enough for ice fishing. Some years, if it froze hard enough, the fis
hermen took chairs out onto the ice, made holes, sat down and fished through. Joe saw no chairs this morning.

  Upstairs, on the thirty-third floor, Hagen opened his own front door. From within, Joe heard music, opera, probably Wagner again, remembering what Cynthia Alesso had told them.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant.” He wore a black silk dressing gown with matching pyjamas and wine-red slippers, and a white silk scarf was wrapped around his throat. His voice sounded hoarse and though he’d taken the trouble to shave, Joe thought he looked like hell, and there was certainly no question that he had gone down with the same flu bug that had now felled Linda Lipman.

  “How are you, sir?”

  “Pretty lousy. Come in, if you dare.”

  Hagen closed the door, and an aura of wealth enfolded Joe. He noted bronze sculptures and paintings, recognized a Dali and guessed it was an original. Not that they hadn’t known it anyway, but Leary had been right in one respect. If Hagen Pacing went down the tubes, this man would not, at least financially, suffer unduly.

  “It was kind of you to agree to see me here,” Joe said. “I hope you’re up to it.”

  “No problem. In fact, it’s something of a relief.” Hagen led the way through the magnificent marble entrance hall into a huge, bright sitting room, all ice blue furnishings and creamy rugs and crystal chandeliers, a world away from his black and white office. “I can’t begin to tell you how guilty I’ve felt walking out on you the way I did, Lieutenant, but I spent most of yesterday barely able to get out of bed.”

  “Perhaps you should sit down, sir.”

  Hagen nodded weakly, and settled himself on a high-backed settee, indicating to Joe that he should sit wherever he wished. A silver tray with matching coffee service stood waiting on a table beside the settee, and Hagen poured for them with hands that trembled a little.

  “So,” Hagen said, “how can I help you, Lieutenant? Or has there been some progress you want to tell me about? I’ve spoken to Chief Hankin several times, of course, and Howard and Olivia have been keeping me informed.”

  “I wish I could say there’s been a breakthrough.”

  “But still nothing.” Hagen looked wretched. In spite of the incongruously boyish scarf around his neck, the youthful quality that had been apparent on the previous occasions he and Joe had met was not in evidence this morning. Today, the close-cropped fuzzy grey hair was not so much a style decision, just grey, the skin on his throat showed every one of its fifty-one years, and the eyes behind the round wire glasses were dismayed.

  “Tell me about Mr Leary,” Joe said, suddenly.

  “What would you like to know?” Hagen paused. “I’d have thought, by now, that you’d know most things about us all.”

  “I thought that, too.”

  “But something changed your mind?”

  “Just reminded me how fallible our checking systems can be.” Joe smiled. “Most citizens still have surprisingly few details on file, in spite of our national paranoia about lack of privacy.”

  “I’d have thought the FBI would have a reasonably detailed file on Howard,” Hagen said, “in view of his years of work on military projects.”

  The music, well-modulated, crescendoed softly and ended.

  “May I speak frankly, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “Has Mr Leary any particular reason to dislike you?”

  Hagen’s eyes flickered only a little. “This isn’t actually about Leary, is it, Lieutenant?” he asked shrewdly. “It’s about me.”

  “It’s about both of you,” Joe said, carefully. “About everyone in the company.”

  “But Leary’s told you something about me.”

  “He’s talked about you.”

  “Something that’s made you suspicious of me?” Hagen’s voice was very calm. “Or perhaps I should say, more suspicious, since we must all be prime suspects.”

  “He told me about your mother.”

  “My mother?” Hagen looked puzzled. “What about her?”

  “He referred to her death.”

  “My mother died many years ago.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Joe saw the anger move across Hagen’s face. It was no flash of heat, merely a change of mood, though a little more than irritation.

  “Mr Leary mentioned the fact that your mother’s life might have been saved by a pacemaker.”

  “That’s true, had they been available,” Hagen agreed. “They had, of course, been invented, but no living human patient had yet received one.”

  “You were very young when she died.”

  “Fourteen years old. I was younger when my father died.”

  “But it influenced you enough to start manufacturing pacemakers more than fifteen years later.”

  Hagen nodded. “I’m sure it was a motivating force.”

  Joe picked up his coffee cup. It was fine porcelain, and he was glad he’d never been a clumsy man. He felt, for the thousandth time that week, that he was getting nowhere. Hagen undoubtedly resented this new line of questioning, but he still remained scrupulously courteous, the picture of a man who understood that since he must be a suspect, he must, therefore, tolerate some invasion of privacy. Joe wanted, more than anything, to look around, to see the rest of the apartment, but he knew there would be no opportunity, at least not on this occasion.

  “I have no deep-seated hatred of pacemakers, Lieutenant, if that’s what you, or perhaps Leary, were thinking,” Hagen said. “If I stop to think about it, I do still feel a certain sadness at knowing that my mother might have lived many years longer than she did – but I might just as well loathe all the surgeon generals who didn’t ban cigarettes, because my father died of lung cancer.”

  Hagen picked up a cup and saucer, his hands still trembling – though almost certainly more from the effects of the flu, Joe thought, than from emotion or guilt – and then he set them down again on the table before him.

  “I’ve been prouder, Lieutenant Duval, of my role in producing pacemakers than of anything else I’ve ever done in my life.”

  Joe nodded. “I can imagine that, sir.”

  “As to Howard Leary, did he say anything else of consequence?” Hagen gave a wan smile. “This is a rare opportunity to learn a little more of what my colleagues think of me.”

  Joe noted the use of the word colleagues instead of employees. He had no sense that it had been used for effect.

  “He referred to your college career.”

  “To my lack of qualifications.”

  “To your dropping out.”

  Hagen smiled again, less bleakly this time. “Howard’s never dared say it to my face, but he’s always enjoyed feeling superior. Olivia’s the only one of us he respects, because he has no choice – she’s easily our best brain.”

  “How does he feel about Fred Schwartz?” Joe asked.

  “He trusted him well enough, until this happened, but even then, I felt it was his effectiveness he mistrusted, not his innocence.”

  “Mr Schwartz has been the most obviously distraught since this began,” Joe said.

  “I’ve always been fond of Fred.” Hagen shrugged. “That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of him as a potential suspect too.”

  “But you’ve rejected the idea?”

  “I think so.” Hagen leaned back heavily. “I’d much rather think we’ve had an enemy working for us somewhere on the line, someone from a rival firm, perhaps.”

  “That’s still a possibility, of course, sir, though it seems increasingly unlikely,” Joe told him.

  Hagen looked very tired. “We really are getting nowhere, Lieutenant, aren’t we? Hagen Pacing has been shut down, and you’ve found neither the perpetrator nor the method – we still don’t even know how many devices have been tampered with.”

  “We may not know that until we find the person, or people, responsible.”

  “And in the meantime, they’re presumably laughing at us.”

  “Presumably.”

  “I’m no
t laughing,” Hagen said darkly.

  “No, sir. I know you’re not.”

  “Do you?” Hagen shook his head. “I don’t think you know much more than you did when you came in here, Lieutenant.”

  Joe didn’t answer.

  “How much longer,” Hagen asked, “before we’re forced to go public?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Leary’s right about that much, you know. It would be a nightmare.”

  “There may be no alternative.”

  Hagen made an effort, and stood up.

  “Do something for me, Lieutenant.”

  “If I can.”

  “Put an end to it.” Behind the glasses, Hagen’s eyes glinted with what Joe thought might almost be tears. “Stop pussyfooting around us all, stop being so damnably polite, and get a result.”

  Fred Schwartz’s apartment building was not too much further north on Lakeshore Drive than Al Hagen’s, yet in social and economic terms Joe knew it might as well have been a continent away. It looked okay, brownstone and solid enough, but Joe guessed that the residents probably fought a running battle against the things most ordinary solid citizens had to. In a place like The Carlyle, if something went wrong with the electricity or air-cooling system or elevators, or if someone found a nest of bugs in a supply room, Al Hagen would doubtless never have to know about it. Schwartz’s building would probably have had a string of residents’ action committees, aborted one at a time through a mixture of apathy and a case of too many chiefs. Hagen lived on the thirty-third floor of The Carlyle. Schwartz lived on the twenty-second of his building. Hagen’s terrace overlooked Lake Michigan, with the Magnificent Mile a few hundred yards over to the right. Schwartz’s side-facing apartment had no balcony, but if he leaned right out of his sitting room window, he could probably see the lake, too. The interiors might be vastly different, Joe mused later on, and he didn’t know if Schwartz had ever been inside his boss’s home, yet there was no question in his mind that Schwartz had gotten as close to Hagen’s lifestyle as possible, though whether it was a case of flattery or of envy, he could not tell. It was, at least, interesting. It was, at least, something.