by Peter Israel
The Counselor spotted me and took me into the hot tub room, where we sat in deck chairs while I gave my report on Price.
“Ultra U.S. Navy,” I concluded. “The ramrod kind. To hear him tell it, Bashard was his hero of heroes. He also claims he knew Bashard was dying.”
The only thing I’d thought of that Squilletti had left out of his questioning was to ask Price how he came out in Bashard’s will. The answer was zero. Ditto for MacGregor and Kohl. I wondered if that would change Price’s opinion of his boss.
“Do you think he’s covering anything up?” the Couselor asked me.
I thought about it for a second.
“Could be,” I said, “but the chances are good we won’t get at it unless we find it somewhere else.”
“Then go find it,” the Counselor said.
Aye aye, sir, I thought. Instead: “Is it true you asked him to stay on at Bashard’s?”
“That’s right,” he answered. “Somebody has to keep the souvenir hunters away.”
“It’s also a way of keeping him on tap.”
“Exactly.”
“And what about Grace?”
“I’ve taken care of Grace myself,” he said pointedly.
We were interrupted then, and it wasn’t till the next morning that I learned he had Grace sequestered in a fancy hotel, one a little off the beaten track, under an assumed name.
Right then, though, the Counselor’s Wife sailed into the hot tub room.
“Well, here you are, Charles! You can’t just duck … oh,” spotting me, “hi, Phil. I didn’t even know you were here. Welcome to the party. Don’t you want a drink? Leave it to my husband to forget to offer you one. So how’s the crime solving going? Haven’t you two figured out who did it yet?”
She leaned back against the hot tub, perching herself on her hands, and gazed at me with head tilted and a twinkle in her eye.
“We’re working on it, dear,” the Counselor answered.
“Puh-lease. Don’t give me that don’t-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-it line, Charles. I was there, too, remember?”
“We’re working on it,” the Counselor repeated. He may have said it to bait her, but it also confirmed what Bud Fincher and I had told each other on the way into the city: that we were going on a fishing expedition, with no evidence, no motive. No suspect either.
Other than Grace.
And that was the point.
“If you have any shortcuts for us, Nora,” the Counselor said, “let’s hear them.”
“Both of you know what I think,” she answered.
“Do we?” the Counselor said, looking at me.
“It’s very simple,” she said,” and I bet I could prove it, too, if you’d let me. Grace did it. You don’t have to look further than a classic case of patricide.”
“Oh?” the Counselor said.
“But what I don’t understand,” she went on, “and this is the interesting part, is why the two of you are so intent on protecting her.”
“Is that what we’re doing, Phil?”
“Don’t ask Phil,” she retorted. “All he wants to do is get into her pants, and that much I get. But what about you? What do you want?”
Uh-oh, I thought, feeling my own gorge rising.
But the Counselor just stared back at her calmly, as though considering his words.
“The truth,” he said at length. “And I promise you this, love. If we find out we’re wrong about Grace, you’ll be the first to know.”
NAME: Morgan, Cynthis Ewer white Caucasian female
Age: 44
Health: good (corrected vision, complete hysterectomy)
Sign: Pisces
Function: Artist/illustrator
Marital status: divorced (1978, Morgan, John H.)
Children: none
Employment: self-employed
Earnings: $50,000 per annum
Net worth: $200,000 (divorce settlement: $20,000 cash plus apartment, current valuation: $100,000)
Born: Keene, New Hampshire Resides: New York City
Education: B.A., U of New Hampshire Art Students League (New York)
Sexual preference: Males (young), chronic promiscuity
She lived in the basement apartment of a brownstone in the South Village, near the old printing district, where giant trucks rumble through the streets on their way to the Holland Tunnel and the inhabitants are sandwiched in like an accident between Soho and the Hudson River. The apartment was small, dark, low-ceilinged, and crammed with objects—furniture that had seen better days, bric-a-brac, pictures on every inch of wall space, and cats everywhere you turned. Artists are supposed to need light and space, but Cyn Morgan’s place looked more like a squirrel’s nest, one where any normal-size human would have to keep his head ducked all the time.
Cyn Morgan herself, though, was a miniature of a woman, somewhere short of “petite” in stature, with bare feet, a voluminous skirt down to her ankles, a tight-fitting white shirt, a lot of antique-looking jewelry. She had an intuitive and sharp-featured face with Irish blue eyes, and curly jet-black hair that didn’t look real but somehow belonged. Pretty, in sum, and she didn’t look anything close to the forty-four years the printout claimed.
“I was glad you called,” she said over her shoulder, leading the way. “I’ve never met a real live detective before.”
She took me through a small cluttered bedroom and a narrow kitchen where pots and pans hung on nails, then up a few steps to a postage-stamp backyard, which barely had room for a small wrought-iron table and two chairs, a cracked stone tub bursting with roses, and a spindly-trunked ailanthus tree.
“I know,” she said, hugging herself while I sat down at the table, “it’s tiny. It’s just too small a place. Even for one person. That’s what everyone says. If you told me when I moved in that I’d still be living here fifteen years later, I’d’ve laughed at you. But I like it. And how could I do that to the cats? I mean, cats can’t stand moving. Well,” she said, still standing, “tell me everything you want to know. But first, tell me how you like your coffee.”
I told her I liked my coffee black. I also repeated what I’d said over the phone, that I wasn’t a detective, but that didn’t seem to matter. She served the coffee on a small round metal tray, in one of these flip-over European pots with a miniature creamer and sugar bowl on the side, even though she drank it black, too.
“All right,” she said, sitting close to me at that wrought-iron table. Her bare feet, I noticed, didn’t quite reach the ground. “Tell me who did kill Raul.”
“If I knew that,” I said, “I guess I wouldn’t be sitting here drinking coffee with you.”
“Well, in that case I’m glad you don’t,” she said. “Don’t know, I mean. But wait a minute,” she said, her eyes going round and blue, “you don’t think I did it, do you?” She laughed, throwing her head back, a busy, musical sound. “That would be a switch. Why, I’m the most timid person in the world! Ask anybody. I have trouble swatting flies. Not that there weren’t times when I didn’t feel like killing him.”
“What times were those?” I asked.
She was one of those people who dawdle over their coffee, then drink it all at a gulp. She was in the dawdling stage now, stirring the dark liquid with a miniature spoon while she talked.
“All right,” she said, “let me try to guess the questions, and I’ll answer everything. First off, when did I first meet him? Oh, Lord, longer ago than I like to think about. I was just starting out. I’d done a few book jackets, exhibited at some of the cons, but I was a long way from … what did Ron say? … The best-loved science-fiction artist in America. Now there’s a joke for you. What does that mean, The best-loved science-fiction artist in America? Who? Me? Anyway … where was I?”
“You were just starting out,” I reminded her.
“That’s right. And I couldn’t afford to turn any work down, I had to take my assignments where I got them. Anyway, one day the phone rang, and this voice said”�
��here her own voice dropped down to a masculine register—“‘Mr. Bashard wants to see you, at ten o’clock tomorrow.’
“So I went, what would you expect?” she went on in her normal voice. “Even though I don’t like being summoned, you know what I mean? It turned out he’d seen some of my art, wanted me to do some sketches for the jacket of his next novel. Mind you, I wasn’t exactly a beginner; I thought I was past the audition stage. But it was R. R. Bashard; you didn’t say no to him. At least I didn’t. He said he’d pay me for my work, even if the sketches weren’t accepted. Anyway, they were accepted, pending revisions—there were always revisions with him—and I’ve done all his jackets ever since. Or did …”
She drank the coffee at a swallow and wrinkled her nose.
“It’s gone cold,” she said. “Do you want me to heat up the rest?”
Before I could answer she was gone, the flip-over pot in hand, talking at me from the kitchen door while she waited.
“I hated going out there. Awful. That dark, lugubrious place, like a morgue, everybody over sixty. Why did he lock himself up there? You should talk to the secretaries, they’d have things to tell you, but they’re all dead, I think. He had a bunch of them before he put in the stupid computer. All retired-professor types.” Then, in the same deep male voice: ‘“Mr. Bashard wants to see you, at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’”
A shiver shook her shoulders as she stood in the kitchen doorway.
“So why did I do it? Well, the money, first off. We always had the same deal: whatever the publisher paid me, he’d match it on the side. My fee’s gone up over the years—it’s six thousand dollars now for sketches and finished art. Does that sound like too much? The trouble is, I work very slowly. I’m too much of a perfectionist. But whatever it was, Raul would match it. He got his money’s worth, too.”
I started to ask her what she meant by that, but she did it for me.
“We fought like cats and dogs,” she said. “He was a perfectionist, too, knew exactly what he wanted. The breasts, for instance. I like to paint big boobs, I can’t help myself. And make no mistake, the fans like it, too. Ask anybody in science fiction—the covers with big boobs outsell everything else. But they gave Raul grief. He had trouble coming right out and saying it. He’d criticize this or that other detail, sometimes I’d do sketches for him on the spot, but in the end there was nothing for him to do but come out with it.”
She cleared her throat.
“‘The chest,’” she began in a weirdly familiar voice, then cleared her throat again. “‘The chest is too prominent.’ Can you beat that? ‘Cyn, I think you’ve made her chest too prominent.’”
She had mimicked Bashard’s voice right down to the intonations. I laughed, and she laughed with me. She’d come back to the table, pot in hand. She refilled our cups and perched again on the chair next to me, giggling.
“In the end, I’d have to reduce ‘the chest.’ Or else bring the hair down further over the boobs, so you couldn’t see. Probably the next year—or the next time I worked for him—I made them even bigger.”
She dawdled with the coffee again, stirring, not drinking. She was thinking about something, I thought, and something told me to give her room.
“Did I tell you he tried to buy me?” she said finally. “That’s right. He was always after me to find out what my annual income was. He told me he’d double it if I worked for him exclusively, did no other covers but his. Once I was almost tempted. It was when I got divorced. I had the shorts. Not just money; I’d lost my confidence generally. But it’s a good thing I didn’t, a damn good thing. I mean, where would I be now, at thirty-eight? The Best-Loved Science-Fiction Artist in America Who Nobody’s Ever Heard Of?”
She’d fudged her age by a good six years, I noticed. Unless the computer was wrong. I figured it wasn’t, but she looked a lot closer to thirty-eight than forty-four, even close up.
She was staring at me over the rim of her small cup, the blue eyes large, the forehead wrinkled. Then it crinkled a little, and her nose, too, in a half-smile.
“All right,” she said, putting the little cup down. “Something makes me trust you, trust your discretion. Besides, if I don’t, somebody else is sure to tell you.”
She seemed to draw herself up to full size in her chair, as though getting her act together, and the crinkle went away.
“I once had an affair with him,” she said. “I know it was stupid, knew it was stupid. But I told you I’m timid. Too timid. I guess I don’t know how to say no easily. Anyway, it was more embarrassing than anything else. It didn’t last long. You could almost say it didn’t happen.”
She looked away, at the wall of the neighboring building which protruded past her own and formed one boundary to her backyard.
“What do you mean, ‘embarrassing’?” I asked.
“What do I mean, ‘embarrassing’?” she repeated, her chin jutting in profile. “He couldn’t do anything, that’s what I mean. He was too old, or too something. But do you know what he said afterward? Try to guess. He said it was my fault. He said he thought I was too aggressive! Can you beat that? Me? Too aggressive?”
She laughed abruptly—a harsh sound—then turned back to me.
“I don’t mean to insult you,” she said, “but sometimes men are such assholes. Most men. Some men anyway.”
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“When? Five or six years ago. Six, I think. But that’s not the point. Do you know what happened after that?”
“What?” I said.
“He asked me to marry him, that’s what! You’d have thought it was a joke, but he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. It was a joke, really, only he took it seriously. Very seriously. He offered to sign a premarital contract, giving me half his estate when he died. He even went so far as to have one drawn up.”
I made a mental note to check our files. I didn’t remember ever seeing such a document, which meant that Bashard had drafted it himself, that he’d gotten someone other than the Counselor to do it, or that Cyn Morgan was lying.
“The last time I saw him,” she went on, “before last weekend, I mean—it was a couple of months ago. I went out to discuss the jacket for his new book—he brought it up again. Poor bastard. He told me I was stupid, that he didn’t have much longer to live, that if I’d marry him, I’d be set up for life. What did I tell him? I told him to stop being morbid, that if he’d lasted this long he’d last forever. In other words, I told him no. I tried to make light of it, but he wasn’t much of one for …”
Her voice trailed off. Then, as if interrupting herself: “Lord, do you think I made a mistake?”
I didn’t know what she meant at first. A mistake in not marrying him?
My confusion showed, it seemed.
“All the money!” she said gaily. “Why, I’d be rich now, if I’d married him. Set up for life.”
She looked at me, blue-eyed, and burst out laughing.
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s a pretty sick joke. Besides, if I’d done it, I’d be your prime suspect now, wouldn’t I?”
She waited for me to answer.
“I guess so,” I said. “But I take it you’re telling me you didn’t kill him.”
“You’re right. I didn’t.”
“Well, who do you think did?”
“Everybody thinks Grace did, Raul’s daughter, and that you helped her cover it up.”
“What makes you so sure?” I said.
“I didn’t say I agreed with them,” she answered. “For what it’s worth, I think Grace is too young to murder anybody. Maybe not too young to think it, but too young to do it. Like I was too young to murder my ex-husband.”
I thought, irrelevantly, that Cyn Morgan was also too small to murder anyone, unless she stood on a chair. But maybe I was wrong about that.
“If it happened now, though,” she said fiercely, narrowing her eyes, “I’d slit his throat with a straight razor.”
“What happened?�
�� I asked.
“Oh, never mind,” she answered. “It was too long ago, and too boring. He found somebody sexier than I was. When he got tired of her, he tried to come back. That’s when I would have slit his throat. Or should have. I didn’t. End of story.”
Whoever Mr. Morgan was, I don’t think I envied him.
“If you don’t think Grace killed Bashard,” I said, “who do you think did?”
“I don’t know. You’re the detective.” Then, before I could say anything: “I know, you’re not the detective, you only work for Camelot. Well, who does Camelot think did it?”
A good question, and one I couldn’t answer.
I took out my list then, Bud Fincher’s list, with the floor plan of the second-floor annex clipped to it. She’d seen the floor plan before, had been over it with one of Squilletti’s people, had gone over the details of what she had done that night and early morning. She couldn’t add anything to it. She’d seen nothing, heard nothing.
Then I led her through the list of names, one by one. She knew them all, commented freely on them. She said she’d slept with about half of the men, and half the men would tell me they’d slept with her, and that it would be up to me to guess which ones were telling the truth. Still, as she chatted on, you could feel a curtain being drawn inside her, not the who-invited-you kind that Sidney Frankaman had thrown up that Sunday in the hotel bar, but a curtain that said: we all know each other, everyone on your list, and maybe one of us did murder Bashard for reasons good or bad, but I’m not going to finger anyone for you—at least not inadvertently.
It wasn’t that she turned hostile either. There was something appealingly brash and no-nonsense about her, and I think she liked me, too. In fact when it came time for me to leave, it was all I could do to get out the door without staying for lunch.
Still. Not, I guessed, that she was covering up something she knew, but she wanted to keep her suspicions to herself.
I thought I might be imagining it.
I found out I wasn’t.
The Brinckerhoffs, she’d always thought, were assholes of the first degree. Actually, Richard wasn’t so bad, but maybe the only reason she said it was that he’d bought several of her paintings, including the original artwork to three of Bashard’s jackets. Actually, he’d called her the day before. He wanted to buy the art for the last Bashard, the one that would be published posthumously. He was putting a check in the mail. She didn’t know if she’d accept it or not. She’d always heard it said that he’d helped Bashard financially, years ago.