I'll Cry When I Kill You

by Peter Israel

  Did John Jameson, Ms. Garvey wanted to know, stand to benefit from Raul Bashard’s will?

  Grace looked up at the Counselor. The Counselor, still standing, looked down at Ms. Garvey.

  “That’s still privileged information,” he said. “But if it doesn’t leave this room, I’ve no objection to telling you.” Ms. Garvey had been taking notes in one of those leatherbound, executive-looking affairs. The Counselor waited for her to close the notebook before he went on. “The answer is no. Not one penny. His name isn’t even mentioned.”

  “But that wouldn’t prevent him from bringing an action against the estate, would it?” Anne Garvey said.

  “No,” the Counselor agreed. “People bring suit against estates all the time, whether they’ve cause or not. But in this case, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. He signed off on any interest in Raul Bashard’s estate years ago. We can document that for you.”

  “I see. I wonder why else he would have been in New York?”

  The Counselor shook his head. “People come to New York for all kinds of reasons. We can’t help you there.”

  At this point Anne Garvey yielded to Harmon Waller. With occasional help from Squilletti, Waller questioned Grace on the chronology of that night, and morning, at the BashCon. Item by item, detail by detail.

  Grace stood up to it. What Waller and Squilletti didn’t know, of course, was that I’d just taken her over the same terrain. Only when she got near the place in the script where our accounts diverged did she hesitate slightly. She glanced at me, her pale skin flushing.

  The Counselor, I noticed, didn’t so much as bat an eyelash. He didn’t have to.

  Maybe I flushed, too.

  “I want to set the record straight on one point, Mr. Waller,” I heard myself say. “Ms. Bashard … Grace … and I did in fact have sex that night.”

  “You what?” Harmon Waller exlaimed, coming halfway out of his seat.

  “Just like I said,” I answered as calmly as I could. “We had sex. We made love.”

  Squilletti, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, had broken into an ear-to-ear grin. But Harmon Waller wasn’t the kind of man who liked surprises.

  “Then why in Hades didn’t you tell us that before?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t make much difference, does it?” I said with a shrug. “I guess I was embarrassed, kind of.”

  “Embarrassed?”

  “Well, the man I was supposed to be guarding was about to be murdered. And there I was in bed with his daughter.”

  “Had you had …?” Waller caught himself, on the verge of the three-letter word. “Had you had relations with her before then?”

  “No.”

  “And since?”

  “No.”

  “But just that one night. Why that one night?”

  “I guess I’d had too much to drink. Also …”

  “Also what?”

  “Well,” I said, probably flushing again, “Grace is a very seductive young woman.”

  The idea seemed to make Waller nervous.

  “And what happened after that?” he persisted. “What else do you want to change in your story?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I fell asleep. Sound asleep. I usually do,” I added for good measure, “after lovemaking.”

  “And you still claim you woke up with the victim dying in your room?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And slept through the rest of it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Waller was sore all right, like I’d offended him personally, but there wasn’t much more he could make of it. A small sin, like I said. My version now lined up with Grace’s, and either we were both telling the truth or both lying, Waller could take his choice.

  As to what I’d say if I were ever asked the same question on a witness stand, well, I’d worry about that then.

  Or let the Counselor do the worrying.

  At that particular moment, the Counselor didn’t look worried at all. Or approving either. I was aware of him listening to my exchange with Waller impassively, like nothing he heard about people’s private lives would surprise him. But the minute Waller was finished with Grace, having taken her into that morning-after at the BashCon, he stepped in again. He thought his client had had enough. If anyone had any more questions, she could answer them. If not …?

  There were no more questions.

  “All right, then, Phil,” the Counselor said. “Would you show our visitors out? Thank you for coming, Anne, and thank you, gentlemen. We’re at your disposal.” With handshakes all around, he shepherded us toward the elevator. Grace Bashard waited behind him, in that black dress with lace trim.

  Then, while the four of us stood inside the elevator: “Oh Phil”—as an afterthought—“when you’re finished I’d like to see you in my office.”

  The elevator door slid shut on him.

  The resignation part, then.

  It’s probably misleading for me to make such a big deal of it, because the Counselor was full of revelations that afternoon in his office—at least one of which showed what thin ice he’d been skating on during the press conference. But that’s where my head was. I mean, I’d just lied for his client—all right, our client—and I didn’t much like it. I’d done it because the Counselor as much as instructed me to. Mr. Camelot said I’d better talk to you about it, Grace had said. So I’d gone ahead and lied, partly, I admit, because I myself believed she was innocent of the murder. I assumed the Counselor felt the same way.

  All right, the revelations part.

  As I mentioned, and verified later that night on TV, the Counselor had only been asked at the press conference if he’d seen John Jameson. No, he’d answered. Fortunately nobody thought to ask him if he’d heard from him. In any case he had, and sitting in the clouds of pipe smoke at his desk that afternoon, he played the tape of their phone conversation for us.

  The call had been logged in the morning before. That is, the morning before Johnny was murdered in the Village hotel. The caller had announced himself as John Jameson but then, in case the Counselor’s memory needed jogging, said he was Johnny Bashard. He’d refused to say where he was calling from, but the connection had been clear. His purpose, he said, was to find out where he stood in his father’s will.

  The Counselor replied that he was under no obligation to answer the question, but after an exchange he said there was no provision for John in Raul Bashard’s will, that in fact he wasn’t mentioned at all.

  You could almost hear Johnny suck air and hold it on the tape.

  “Then my daughter gets it all, is that it?” he asked after a long pause.

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge that information,” the Counselor answered.

  “Not at liberty to divulge that information,” Johnny mimicked. “Well, suppose I make you divulge that information? What then?”

  “You can try,” the Counselor said imperturbably, “but I doubt you’ll succeed.”

  “We’ll see about that, Camelot. But I’ll tell you this. If that’s what the will says, if she gets it all, then it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. I’ll fight it all the way. I’m his son, and I can prove that. There’s no way you’re going to cut me out, you can bet on it.”

  And words to that effect, more and less printable. John Jameson, it seemed, had been one of those people whose voice went higher and nastier the more he got worked up. He’d started in a flat monotone, ended in a near shriek.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jameson,” the Counselor said. “I doubt you will succeed, but I can’t prevent you from pursuing any possible legal remedies you may choose.”

  “You’re damn right you can’t!” Johnny shouted back excitedly. “You’ll hear from my lawyer, you can bet on that!” Then a pause, a long one, like the connection had been broken. Then, loud and clear: “What about the Sow money?”

  “What about it?” the Counselor asked, fishing.

  “I bet you’re going to try to stop that, too. Well, r
ots o’ ruck. He outsmarted himself on that one, the bastard. It’s locked up tight. There’s no way you can touch it.”

  “And you can?” the Counselor asked, fishing again.

  Only it didn’t work this time.

  There was another silence, then a sound like a laugh or a snicker, then: “I bet you don’t even know about the Sow money, Camelot. He never told you, did he? He was such a secretive bastard. It must’ve driven him crazy, but there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it.”

  The Counselor had tried to keep the conversation alive. He asked Johnny how he’d learned about Bashard’s death. Johnny had seen it on Australian TV. It had been a big story Down Under, where there weren’t enough good murders to go around and the best ones came from the United States. When he’d seen it, Johnny said his first thought had been that there was some justice in the world after all. And so he’d come to New York? Exactly. He thought the plane ticket was the best investment he’d made in years. He was going to fight the will all the way to the Supreme Court, if that’s what it took.

  But try as he did, the Counselor couldn’t budge him on what the Sow money was. If Johnny knew, and it sounded like he did, he wasn’t telling.

  The Counselor leaned forward, pressed the stop button on the tape recorder, then the rewind.

  “What do you make of it?” he said.

  I shrugged. It was weird, kind of, hearing the voice of somebody you never met and knowing it was one of his last conversations. Weird, too, hearing a grown man use a teenage expression like “rots o’ ruck.”

  If Johnny had lived to attack the will, I thought, it might have made an interesting legal case—the whole question of whether you can actually disown a son. But the man was dead, there wasn’t much he could contest from a city morgue.

  The Counselor also had a pretty good idea why Johnny had been shot, if not by whom. It turned out Johnny had made at least one other phone call the evening before. He’d called a newspaper columnist we both knew, one of those self-styled dese-dem-and-dose journalists who had (or so I always thought) an inflated reputation as an investigator of local crime and corruption and actually did it by playing the NYPD game about as well as anybody in his business. According to the columnist, Jameson, who’d identified himself as Bashard’s son, had had information to sell—information that would solve the Bashard case. He’d wanted ten thousand dollars for it. The columnist had wanted documentation but had agreed to meet Johnny the next morning.

  Too late as it turned out. But it explained the source of all the media hoopla.

  “Sounds like Johnny might have been blackmailing somebody,” I said.

  “It does,” the Counselor said.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” the Counselor said. “The police don’t either.”

  “Well, what about the Sow money?” I asked.

  The Counselor leaned back in his chair.

  “Sow,” he said. “S.O.W. The Sow Account. What have you found out about it?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He was running one hand through his white hair from front to back. Then he stopped to scratch behind an ear. Obviously he enjoyed the moment. At such times, when the Counselor comes on like he’s got all the answers, I wonder why he bothers employing me.

  Sometimes the only reason I can think of is that he likes an audience.

  Only this time, as it turned out, he didn’t have the answers.

  He had asked Arthur Trout, the accountant, and Charlotte McCullough, our resident genius in numbers, to dig for any peculiarities in Bashard’s finances, and uncovered the S.O.W. Account.

  Well, not uncovered really. Arthur had known about it all along. Bashard had had a number of similar arrangements. The difference was that the Counselor had set up all the others himself, but this one predated us.

  Anyway, for as long as Trout had worked for Bashard, ten percent of all Bashard’s royalty income had been paid, by bank transfer, to an account in another New York bank. On the one of two occasions when he’d asked Bashard about it, Trout had been told to mind his own business.

  Twice a year Trout received a statement from one of those downtown fiduciary outfits, the ones which watch over trusts and estates for a fee or a percentage, outlining the activity in the S.O.W. Account in the previous six months: deposits, securities bought and sold, etc. Trout forwarded these on to Bashard but, like any good accountant, he’d always kept copies for his files.

  “As you’ll see,” the Counselor said, handing me a file, “the amount of money involved is not to be sneezed at.”

  To say the least.

  I let out a low whistle.

  The market value of the account, summarized in printout form on the top page, was in the seven figures. S.O.W., whatever it was, owned shares in a number of blue-chip companies and enough Treasury bonds and triple-A securities to keep, say, the Revere household in Chivas Regal for years to come. The last page in the file was a written summary of the account’s activity, complete with “investment philosophy” and the market outlook for the next period. It was signed by one Gwendolyn Graw, who called herself Account Executive.

  “I’ve talked to Ms. Graw,” the Counselor said. “Ms. Graw is a very testy lady, at least over the phone. She said she’d never heard of Raul Bashard. Hard to believe, but you never know. She said she had no idea he was making deposits into her account. She sounded doubtful about it, whatever proof I had. In no event was she going to reveal anything about the account to a total stranger.”

  I didn’t say anything at first. One thing at least was clear though: why, when I was in Los Angeles, the Counselor had suddenly “discovered” S.O.W. First Charlotte and Arthur Trout’s discovery, then Johnny Jameson’s call, and, in the background, the deletions in Bashard’s computer files.

  Leo Mackes, I thought. Viola Harmel. I said the names aloud.

  “Exactly,” the Counselor said, holding up the memo pad he kept next to his tobacco jar. I saw the names written on the top sheet and underlined. “Why haven’t you found them yet?”

  That was Bud’s assignment I started to say, but didn’t. Instead: “I guess we had better things to do.”

  Lame enough, from the sound of it.

  “Well, now you don’t,” the Counselor said. Then, when I started to get up, “Never mind, I’ve already put Fincher on it. I’ve got another assignment for you. But what do you make of it? S.O.W.? A pool of some kind? A shakedown?” Then, gesturing with the stem of his pipe, “Look at the last deposit sheet there.”

  I found it. There were several entries covering the six-months period. One of them, for a comparatively small amount, had been circled in red.

  “Charlotte found that,” the Counselor said. “All the others she could correlate to Bashard’s own deposits, but the one she circled was from another source. If you ask me, it’s a shakedown of some kind, something Raul was embarrassed enough about to hide from me. It’s not in his will, not part of the estate. It predates Arthur, and Johnny Jameson clearly knew about it. If Johnny knew, somebody else must have, too. Who?”

  I shook my head. Bud Fincher and I had put the question to everybody we’d interviewed. I ran down the list for him.

  “Maybe you didn’t ask hard enough,” the Counselor said, reaching toward the tobacco jar.

  This wasn’t the kind of statement designed to improve employee relations, but I was used to it. What followed, though, caught me short.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I want you down there tomorrow morning to call on Ms. Graw. Maybe you’ll have better luck in person that I did over the phone. If not, then we’ll have to resort to stronger measures, though I’d rather keep the law out of it till we know more.

  “Meanwhile … I hope you don’t have anything planned for tonight?”

  Actually I did have something planned for that night.

  “I want you to take Grace home,” the Counselor said.

  “Grace?” I think I said. Or maybe, “Home?”

  “
That’s right,” he answered.

  At some point the Counselor said: “Seems to me you protesteth too much, Phil,” and in view of what happened later …

  But at the time, well, I’d had enough of Grace Bashard for one day, and maybe one lifetime. Ever since I’d started on the case, people had been pushing her on me. It had begun with Bashard, who, I figured, liked to play games with other people’s lives. The Counselor’s Wife had joined in, for fun. And, of course, there was Grace herself. In the beginning, I’d figured that was the bored little rich girl in her, all dressed up and no place to go. But after Bashard’s murder? Well, she was still bored, still cooped up, and now a little scared in the bargain, with nobody to turn to.

  Okay, from Grace’s point of view maybe it was more than that. And okay, from mine, yes, she was by anybody’s standards a delicious physical creation. It was like whoever had made her had had sex in mind from day one.

  But for Christ’s sake, I was old enough to be her father! Plus I was, and am, old enough to choose my own sexual partners.

  And now, finally, there was the Counselor himself. Like they say in the military, I’d already saluted and charged up the hill once that day, in the client’s interest, by lying to Waller, Garvey, and Squilletti. Wasn’t enough enough?

  Or did he really think that, in lying, I was actually admitting the truth?

  “Seems to me you protesteth too much,” said the Counselor.

  I think that’s what set me shouting.

  He had his reasons, of course. He didn’t want Grace in a hotel anymore, didn’t want her left alone either. For all we knew it was open season on Bashards, and as long as the killer or killers hadn’t been identified, Grace was our responsibility. She wasn’t going home, in any case, to stay. The house was going on the market. Price had already been dismissed. Kohl and MacGregor would be once the house was sold. Grace was going to rent an apartment in the city, she wanted to go home just to collect some belongings, if I’d take her out there and just spend the night, I’d be relieved in the morning. Etc., etc.

  Of course, none of the above was his real reason.