Shock To The System

by Shock To The System (lit)

"It was probably queer-boy Bierly," Stover said. Moody pon­dered this briefly and then nodded.

  "Why do you think Larry would kill Paul? They had their dis­agreements, but they were lovers, after all."

  "That's exactly what I mean," Stover snarled. "Homos are un­stable people. You keep taking it up the butt, sooner or later you'll crack. It happens all the time. Don't you watch Pat Robert­son?"

  I said I'd only tuned in briefly. "What about Dr. Crockwell?" I asked. "He's a suspect in the eyes of some. And he was certainly upset with Paul for leaving the group."

  "Oh, Mary! Gimme a break, puh-leeze!" Moody squealed.

  "Who's going around saying such a thing?" Stover roared. "The

  idea of slandering a man of Dr. CrockwelFs standing in the com­munity is character assassination."

  I said, "Crockwell doesn't have an alibi, either. On the Thurs­day night Paul Haig died, Dr. Crockwell was alone in his office until after midnight, he says. Interestingly, the same is true for last Thursday night, when someone shot Larry Bierly in the Millpond Mall parking lot."

  They both got an I-smell-a-rat look. "Then maybe it was one of Dr. Crockwell's patients or former patients," Moody said, "and they were trying to pin something on him. Everybody who ever went to him knew Dr. Crockwell worked all by himself in his office on Thursday night. It's when you could call there and he'd answer the phone at night instead of you getting his answering machine."

  "Is there anyone in the group who might have wanted to do that?" I asked. "I mean, set Crockwell up?"

  "Dr. Crockwell was a beloved guy figure to all of us," Stover harrumphed. "He was a role model and a pal. Except to Larry and Paul, of course, those Judases who betrayed us all."

  "Anyway," Moody said, "Dr. Crockwell had three other groups going all the time, ten homos in a group. And if you count people from other years, hundreds of ex-gays must know about his Thursday-night routine."

  With a sinking feeling, I said, "I guess that would be true. Is either of you acquainted with a man by the name of Steven St. James?"

  Moody shook his head, and Stover said, "No, is he a saint?"

  I said I didn't know for sure, but I doubted it.

  18

  On Sunday morning, cool and rainy, Timmy had gone out and come back with bagels and the Times, and the kitchen was an aromatic Malabar Coast as he prepared his masala tea. Perhaps on that day in Visakhapatnam, twenty-six years after Timmy's Peace Corps leave-taking, an American ritual he had left behind was being reenacted similarly—a middle-aged Indian was sitting and picking the lint off his socks or whatever. I prefer­red what Timmy had brought home to what I imagined he had left behind. But my imagination in these matters was limited, as I was reminded whenever Timmy's Peace Corps crowd got to­gether and conversed in the patois of their exotic youth with its references to chicken sexing and blood meal, and place names that sounded like long, quick combinations of vowels, conso­nants and simmering lentils.

  I got on the phone. I reached my Department of Motor Vehi­cles contact at home. He called back three minutes later and, having spoken with a member of the weekend crew keeping an eye on the department's computer system, informed me that the two cars in Lord Chatterley's driveway, the Caddy and the Conti­nental, were registered to Mr. Emil Provost, of that address in Schuylers Landing. The name rang no bell, but why would it?

  I couldn't think of anybody I knew in Schuylers Landing, so I called a friend who worked for the New York State Historical Society and asked her about a member of the landed gentry in Schuylers Landing named Emil Provost. She had never heard of him, but she knew who to call downriver. Ten minutes later I had

  been informed that: Emil Provost was the surviving patriarch of an old Hudson River family that had made a lot of early money in canal shipping and later money in railroads; Provost and his wife, Ina, had two daughters and a son, all living in Greene County and involved in banking and real estate; both Emil and Ina Provost were patrons of worthy causes, she historical preser­vation, he naturalist organizations. He was also part-owner of the Hudson Valley Game Farm, I was told, and I thought: "farm." Steven St. James had not been at home on Saturday because "the farm is open now."

  I phoned the game farm, a touristy zoo and wild-animal pre­serve off the thruway, and asked for St. James—I did not slip and call him "Mellors"—and was told that he was not available at the moment, but would I like to leave a message? I said no thanks.

  When I'd gotten home Saturday night I found a message on my machine from my credit-check contact. She had informed me, with full particulars, that Larry Bierly's financial situation was stable, that his business financing was stretched to the limit but his cash flow was sufficient to keep him afloat. Paul Haig, on the other hand, had been on the edge of financial collapse when he died. As Bierly had told me truthfully, it was only his personal intercession after Haig's death that had saved Beautiful Thingies from being snatched back by Haig's creditors.

  I said to Timmy, "I've got it."

  " 'It'?" He was absorbed in the Times crossword puzzle, and I knew I would have access to only about a tenth of his brain until he had either completed the puzzle or, after inner pain, made the mature decision to put the puzzle aside unfinished and resume his life.

  "I think I know why Paul died."

  He looked at me interestedly across the dining room table, his pencil still poised. "Why?"

  "He died because he was trying to blackmail someone to get hold of enough money to save his business. As you theorized, he had gone to his mother for money and she had turned him down. That's why she's alternately guilt-ridden and delusionary over

  what deep in her heart she thinks of as Paul's suicide—his suicide over impending financial ruin. But Haig told Bierly a week before he died that his financial troubles were over, that he'd come up with a way to pay off his debt. He didn't tell Bierly how he was raising the cash, because he couldn't—it was illegal."

  Timmy put his pencil down.

  "The other reason he couldn't tell Bierly was, Bierly probably knew the person Haig was blackmailing and even the guilty secret that made the blackmail possible. Had he been informed of the blackmail attempt, Bierly might have objected—on ethical grounds, or even fear of his own involvement and exposure."

  Timmy said, "That's plausible, but where's the evidence of any of it?"

  "I haven't found any yet. But get this: Bierly, Crockwell, St. James and St. James's landlord—whose name is Emil Provost, I now know—all seem to have been mixed up in something to­gether none of them wants to talk about. That thing is what Haig was using to blackmail one of them. The next question is, Which one? Bierly, of course, was not a candidate for blackmail, because in March he was still Haig's friend, if no longer lover, and anyway he had no ready cash. St. James is an unlikely target; he drives an old Rabbit and works in a game park with—by the smell of him—farm animals. He's not at all a good blackmailee.

  "Crockwell is a possibility. He must have a few bucks in the bank that he's extracted over the years from his bevies of repen­tant buttfuckers. Though if Crockwell was being blackmailed by Haig, and then killed Haig to shut him up, why would Crockwell hire me and risk my uncovering three ugly truths—the blackmail, the thing that made the blackmail possible, and the murder?"

  Timmy said, "That leaves—Provost? That sad old man?"

  "Emil Provost is wealthy. There's a lot of oldish money in the family that appears not to have been misspent or otherwise dis­sipated. He's an ideal blackmail target."

  He looked at me skeptically. "Do you really think that decrepit old aristocrat could have killed Paul Haig?"

  "Haig wasn't strangled with some goon's bare hands," I said.

  "Somebody he obviously knew somehow induced him to start drinking again and got him drunk and then dissolved the Elavil in his Scotch. Anybody of any age or background could have ac­complished that."

  "Sure—anybody who is completely without morals or human feelings. That old guy didn't strike me that way at a
ll."

  "Timothy, not every murderer looks like Charles Manson. You're talking as if you don't own a television set or read a daily newspaper. Dear hearts and gentle people who live and love in your hometown can have murder in their hearts. It happens somewhere every day."

  After a moment he said, "That's true, sure. But I don't think that old guy is one of those. For him, murder would be—you know. In poor taste."

  "That's exactly my point," I said. "Provost is a pillar of his community. He has everything to lose. As a blackmail target, he's a natural."

  "He was cool and condescending to you, so that makes him a murderer? Nah, I don't believe it."

  "That's not what I said."

  "Anyway, what could they all have been mixed up in that Provost would actually kill somebody over to stop it from coming out?" -

  I said, "I don't know."

  "You don't have a clue?"

  "No."

  "That's a problem with your theory."

  "It might have something to do with drugs," I said, without much conviction. "Moody and Stover, the low-voltage fetishists, told me Bierly and Haig used to argue about their drug habits in the therapy group—Haig's alcohol dependency and Bierly's pen­chant for street drugs. I'll have to look into that one some more. Otherwise, I won't know what they're all hiding until one of them decides to tell me. Bierly's a possibility. Once he understands that his and the others' dirty secret may have led to blackmail and Haig's murder, that should loosen him up."

  "And if it doesn't?"

  "I can try the same approach with both Crockwell and St. James."

  "But," Timmy said, "if all of these people were involved in something that made them vulnerable to blackmail, wouldn't they already have speculated on the possibility that Paul had threatened one of the others with exposure and was killed for it? And thinking that, they haven't come forward so far for the same reason they won't in the future: Exposure of the mysterious foul goings-on would ruin their lives too."

  "There is that," I said. "But there's another possibility, too, for finding out what Paul Haig might have been mixed up in with Bierly, Crockwell and St. James. There's another person he might have confided in."

  "Not Mom?"

  "Not a chance, is my guess. According to Bierly, the Haigs not only did not confide in one another, they lied to one another habitually. No, the man Haig may have trusted with the informa­tion that was so volatile that it got him killed is the man he went to for relief from the anxiety that that information and other stresses in his life were causing him. That man is Dr. Glen Snyder, the Ballston Spa psychiatrist Haig went to for the month before he died and who prescribed the Elavil that killed him."

  "Do you think he'll talk to you? It's hard to imagine he would."

  "Not," I said, "if I just walk in off the street. He might open up, however, if he is urged to do so by someone whose good opinion he needs and who is the family member who sent Paul Haig to him in the first place."

  "Phyllis Haig. Back to her again. The client from hell."

  "Oh, I've got plenty of those. Or did."

  19

  Sunday afternoon I drove over to Albany Med. I talked my way past the guard and into Bierly's room, but when I got there he refused to speak with me. I told him, "I think Paul was killed by someone he was trying to blackmail. It had to do with whatever you and Paul and Crockwell and St. James and Emil Provost were mixed up in together. If you want Paul's killer brought to justice, you've got to open up about this."

  But he had already buzzed for the nurse, and when she arrived Bierly was looking at me peculiarly and slowly shaking his head.

  "Just leave me alone, will you, please?" he said, not at all Garbo-like—Victor Mature-like was closer to it. The nurse said I would have to go, so I did.

  Back on Crow Street, I sat down by the phone. Crockwell's home number was unlisted, and his machine answered at his office. I got no answer at the St. James number; he was probably still at the game farm. I started to dial Phyllis Haig, but checked my watch—1:40—and figured I might make out better at that time of day if I met her face-to-face. Timmy had gone off with some friends to a lecture at SUNY on the evils of the Guatemalan military. I drove up to Latham for my own encounter with a kind of human-being-as-banana-republic.

  "I don't want to talk to you, I said you are fired—F-I-R-E-R-E-D. Can't you understand English? Do I have to call a cop?" She was standing barricade-like in her front doorway, a low glass in her hand.

  I said, "Look, Paul did not commit suicide. You were right

  when you called me the first time. I keep trying to tell you, Phyllis, that there is evidence pointing to the likelihood that Paul was murdered. I need to talk to you about it, and I need your help in identifying Paul's killer."

  She looked more worn out than relieved by this assertion, as if the thing she was least able to cope with now was additional thought.

  "Oh, Christ on a crutch," she finally said resignedly. "Come on in and let me fix you a drink."

  I followed her through the foyer of a rambling split-level house full of horsey prints and Duncan Phyfe reproductions of unvary­ing constricted good taste, the sort of decor Joseph Stalin might have chosen for the Kremlin had he been from Connecticut. The one touch of modern-day-Haig authenticity in the place, and of life, was Phyllis Haig herself. She'd gotten her makeup to fit almost exactly over its intended place on her face, and she had on a pair of silky pale blue slacks that were casually hippy and an orange blouse with plenty of demurely rouged decolletage.

  She said, "We better head for the den if we know what's good for us."

  What was good for Phyllis was a cigarette and a refill, and I had a reactionary but well-chilled Coors.

  "I don't know why you're still pestering me," she said, draping herself across a chintz couch. I chose the well-worn manly leather chair facing her that must have been her late husband's seat. "You keep missing the point, Donald, that I've had it up to here with you and with this whole goddamn stinking load of crap. I should never have called you in the first place. I should have gone to Arizona with Helen Small when she tried to get me to hop on a plane and blow this Popsicle stick. But no, I didn't listen to Helen. Just to get even with that stupid little pansy Larry Bierly, I had to start picking at scabs and opening up running sores and dredging up a lot of ugliness and heartbreak. Well, I learned my lesson on this one, Don, that's for goddamned cer­tain. Never again, never again. Not ever, ever, ever."

  What was she trying to say? "I'm a little hazy on that, Phyllis. Never again what?"

  "Some people can get away with murder and there's nothing you can do about it. My husband told me a hundred times if he told me once, when you run into one of those people who can get away with anything they damn well please, don't screw around with them. It's just not worth it."

  "Who do you think is getting away with murder?" I said, and as I said it, it suddenly sounded as wacky to me as it must have sounded to Phyllis Haig.

  "Why, Larry Bierly! What the hell do you think I've been telling you for the last five days, for chrissakes?" She stared at me as if I were armed and dangerous.

  I said, "I got the wrong impression from something you said over the phone, Phyllis. I'm sorry about the confusion. I misun­derstood and got the idea from the way you reacted to some things I said about Paul's financial situation at Beautiful Thingies that you felt you were somehow responsible for his death."

  She sagged. "Oh, that's what you thought?"

  "I'm sorry."

  She blew smoke over her left shoulder and then peered at me through narrowed eyes. After a moment she said, "Well, it's the goddamned truth."

  "What's the truth?"

  She took in another lungful for strength. "It's true that I'm partly responsible for my son's death, goddamnit to hell."

  When she just sat watching me with a look of defiance tinged with despair, I said, "In what way are you partly responsible?"

  She shuddered and then shook her head. "Why am I tell
ing you this?"

  "Because you have to tell someone, Phyllis."

  That got a snort. "What bullshit. I know verbal diarrhea is in style, but I've done without it for fifty-some years and I don't intend to take up the disgusting habit now. No, I'm spilling my guts to you, Don, because I think you are a pathetically naive

  man and I want to educate you. What you can learn from me will come in handy in your line of work. And I won't even charge you for it."

  "Thank you, Phyllis."

  She ingested and inhaled. The drinking was painful to watch, but she smoked with such fierce pleasure that it took me back to when I was young and easy under the apple boughs and con­stantly sucking on a Chesterfield or an Old Gold and finding happiness if not health in every drag.

  Abruptly, she said tightly, "Paul came to me for money. I re­fused to give it to him."

  She watched me for a reaction, but I offered none.

  She went on. "After Paul left Vernon Crockwell's program, Crockwell called me. He advised me to shut Paul out—disown him, is what Crockwell was saying, even though he never used the ugly word. He said if Paul wanted anything from me to make sure I gave it to him only if Paul first agreed to go back into Crockwell's program. He also said it would be best if Paul started fresh, without Larry Bierly, because Bierly was probably a hope­less case, a man who wanted to be a pervert. Crockwell said this approach might be a tough row to hoe for me, but it was in Paul's best interest in the long run."

  Another gulp of whatever was in the glass.

  "I'd already paid Crockwell over eight K," She said. "And I figured a man who can rake in that kind of money from zinging people with cattle prods, or whatever it is he does, and getting them to think normal smutty thoughts, must know what he's doing. So when Paul asked me for sixty thousand dollars in March, I said I'd give it to him only after he went back into Crockwell's program and finished it and Crockwell personally guaranteed me that Paul had come out normal. That's a lot of money for a warranty, but normalcy is worth money."

  I said, "But Paul didn't accept the offer."

  "No," she said grimly. "He said he might go back to Crockwell sometime—he'd have to think about that. Apparently he still had dick on his mind. He'd already started seeing Glen Snyder, who'd