"Just Grey Oliveira."
"Uh-huh."
"Grey came into Whisk 'n' Apron one night recently—it was some time soon after I had dinner with you last week, I think— and I got to fuming about Crockwell. I told him a lot of people didn't think Paul had really committed suicide, and both you and the cops were investigating Crockwell. I might have exaggerated the situation a little. Do you think Grey had something to do with Paul's death?"
"Yes, I think Grey murdered Paul. And if he had killed Paul and had learned that the cops and I were investigating Paul's death and we suspected Crockwell, he could have buttressed those suspicions of Crockwell, first by sending the cops the therapy-
session tape that shows a nasty conflict between Crockwell and you and Paul, and second by shooting you on a Thursday night, when he knew Crockwell would have no alibi, and then by planting the gun in Crockwell's dumpster."
"Jesus!"
"You played into his hands with your hatred of Crockwell, which blinded you—and me."
"But, God, what would Paul have had on Grey to blackmail him with?"
"I plan to question Oliveira about just that. An excellent possibility is, he's the member of the therapy group who Paul caught in what he described to you as a wild scene in a tearoom. Paul never told you who that was, right?"
"No."
"Did he say where it was?"
"No."
"But it happened during the period Paul was traveling once a week up the Northway to his psychiatrist in Ballston Spa, if my chronology is accurate."
"That sounds right, yeah."
"That's the route Grey takes home to Saratoga every day after work. Did Oliveira have much money that you know of, Larry?"
"I have no idea," Bierly said. "I don't think he ever talked about money in the group. Grey was always just kind of polite and reasonable. He was rather sarcastic sometimes, and I got the idea once in a while he was putting us all on—especially Crockwell— and that he was just going through the motions of staying in the therapy program because for some reason he had to."
"I've spoken to Grey," I said, "and he admitted to me that that was the case. He went to and stayed with Crockwell because his wife asked him to, he told me, even though he had no hope for, or interest in, succeeding at being zapped straight. He struck me as being an extremely cynical man. In fact, I think he worked hard at portraying himself to me as a cynical and amoral man of a certain not-too-unusual type in order to keep me from suspecting him of being a hard and cynical man of another, rare type—
a man who kills people in cold blood in order to keep what he wants to have."
Bierly said, "That's absolutely horrible if it's true. Can you keep Grey from getting away with it?"
"I think so," I said. "But first I want you to get out your checkbook. Then I want you to call up Vernon Crockwell and apologize for trying to turn him on to farm animals, and tell him to get out his checkbook too. Then I want you to ring Phyllis Haig, taking care to catch her before noon, and tell her I said I want her to apologize to you for calling you a murderer and a buttfucker, and she had better get out her checkbook too."
Bierly stared at me open-mouthed for a long moment, and then he said, "If you say so."
At one-thirty my credit-check agent confirmed what I had suspected: that none of the former members of the Haig-Bierly-Crockwell psychotherapy group had any net worth to speak of, and that while Grey Oliveira's assets were proving harder to pin down, his cash flow was ample enough to suggest net worth well beyond what one might expect from a state employee who commutes to work every day.
I phoned a friend who grew up in Saratoga and still runs his family's restaurant there and asked if he knew Grey Oliveira. He said sure, Grey was a town fixture. Grey was not originally from Saratoga but had married into an old town family. Annette Dreher, Grey's wife, was a horsey-set Saratoga hostess and benefactress and an heiress of some means.
When I phoned him at his office at the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal, Oliveira flirted with me in his dry, crude way and agreed to meet me for a drink at six at the Broadway bar where we'd met the week before.
Then I dropped by Al Finnerty's office to fill him in and to ask to borrow some police equipment.
24
So, it's Albany's numero-uno private dick. Land any big ones since I last saw you, Strachey?"
"Nah. How about yourself, Grey?"
"Me? I'm not the dick, that's you. Though from where you're standing you could probably spit and have it land on a few people who think I'm kind of a prick."
"I'll bet."
He gazed at me with those eyes. "Get you a beer?"
"I could force one down."
He signaled the bartender and I asked for a Molson. Oliveira shifted on his stool as I eased onto the one next to him. He seemed to sense that something was different, but he wasn't going to act as if he was in a hurry to find out what it was.
I let him pay for my beer, and then said, "Are you still sucking every dick you can stuff in your mouth up and down the Hudson Valley, Grey?"
He froze for about half a frame before going on. "That's not a very good come-on line, Strachey. I'm not particularly romantic, as you might recall. But if I had made the first move, I would have come up with something a hell of a lot sexier than that."
"I didn't mean it as a sexual icebreaker, Grey."
"Does this mean that you're going to break my heart, Strachey?"
"You told me on Friday that you've made it a rule to have sex only with two people, your wife and your married fuck buddy, Stu. You described this situation as an AIDS-safe closed circle.
But I have the impression you make exceptions to your rule."
"On rare occasions, yes. If I believe a man to be both well-endowed and healthy, I have been known to follow my glands down whatever happy trail they may lead me."
"If you believe him to be healthy. That sounds unscientific, Grey."
He shrugged. "It might not pass muster at Oak Ridge, but of course this is Albany."
I said, "Does your boyfriend Stu also participate in high-risk unsafe-sex orgies at the Northway tearoom between Albany and Saratoga? Does your wife?"
Now he looked grim. "Have you seen me there? I've never seen you. And I'd remember you, Strachey."
"I've only stopped there once."
"And you saw me and I didn't see you? I hope I wasn't back in the woods bent over with my drawers down around my ankles."
"I didn't see you there," I said. "Paul Haig did."
He blinked, maybe because his heart jumped. "He did?"
"Yes."
"How do you know? What makes you think that?"
As the bartender passed us, Oliveira threw him a quick glance. Oliveira was aware now of all the people around us and that we were holding what he knew would be an exchange that could change his life, and it was happening in one of the most public of public places, a white-collar bar during happy hour. I wasn't crazy about the milieu either—it lacked dignity.
I said, "There are photos of you, Grey. Did you think that you got the only copies, that there weren't others?"
He blinked again, three times, and then studied my face. He said, "I'm not even recognizable in those pictures. They're dim and out of focus. Those pictures are shit."
"Then why am I here?"
He swigged from his beer. "Fucked if I know."
"Let me lay it out," I said. "Please correct me if I'm wrong in any of the details." He watched my lips form words. "Paul Haig desperately needed money," I said, "to save his business. After he
caught you in some wild scene in the Northway tearoom, he checked up on you to see how much you were worth. When he discovered that you had access to your wife's big bucks, Paul came back to the tearoom during the evening orgy hour, caught you again, and—presumably with a hidden camera—repeatedly took your picture committing lewd acts." I waited.
"There were five of us that night," Oliveira finally said convers
ationally. "Paul joined in part of the time. It was a hot scene and he was as big of an animal as anybody else there. The rest of the time, when he wasn't participating, he was acting as a lookout, he said. I remembered later he had a Beautiful Thingies box he was carrying, and the camera must have been mounted in that box somehow."
"That sounds plausible, Grey. Then Paul must have contacted you soon after the event—at work would be my guess—and he informed you that if you didn't cough up sixty thousand dollars, he would see to it that your wife received copies of the photos."
Wincing, Oliveira said, "He actually mailed copies of the pictures to me at my office at HCR. If my secretary hadn't been out sick on the day the envelope arrived—she probably had the rag on—she'd've opened the envelope herself probably. Luckily, I got to it first. After that, Paul called me and said it was another set of photos and the negatives that I was supposedly buying from him."
"Right. That's how a thoughtful blackmailer would handle it. So you made an appointment then to hand over the cash in return for the negatives and extra prints?"
"At Paul's apartment on Willet Street," Oliveira said casually, as if he were describing the site of a pleasant small dinner party. "Paul wanted me to deliver the money on a Wednesday night. But I said it would take me until Thursday to round up that much cash."
"Grey, I'm impressed. You were planning that far ahead— already setting Crockwell up as a suspect in case anybody saw through the 'suicide' scenario. You're quite the planner."
"That's the area of my training and expertise," he said,
nodding. "I'm not just a planner, I'm a professional planner, and a damned good one too." When I just stared at him, he added, "I know what you're thinking, Strachey. You're thinking, If only this bright young man with his darkly brooding good looks and his hypnotic gray eyes had applied his talents in the cause of good instead of evil, what a boon that would have been to him and to mankind. Isn't that what you're thinking?"
"Something like that."
"Well, 'Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.' John Greenleaf Whittier. It's the one thing I can remember from junior high. Don, are you ready for another Molson?"
"I'm fine."
Oliveira caught the bartender's eye and signaled for another draft.
I said, "How did you get Paul Haig drunk that night, Grey?"
"Easy," he said. "I brought a bottle and opened it. I suggested we toast the successful completion of our business transaction. Paul thought that was a wonderful idea. He was extremely nervous, and I suppose he figured a good stiff drink would calm him down. And it sure did. And his second drink, and third, et cetera, made him even more loosey-goosey."
"And then you—what? Discovered the Elavil in the bathroom?"
"On the bathroom sink when I went in to take a whiz. The container was nearly full, and I thought, 'Well, my my, such a stroke of fortune. Now I won't have to shoot him."
Oliveira's beer arrived. He dug a couple of bills out of his pants pocket and laid them on the bar.
I said, "That was lucky, not having to make a loud bang on Willet Street, and a bloody mess in Paul's apartment."
"I bought the gun off a kid on the street in Brooklyn one time. So it could never have been traced back to me. But still, if Paul had, quote-unquote, 'shot himself,' the police might have wondered where he got the gun, and so forth. So the Elavil was definitely better. Paul was blotto by the time I found the pills, so
I helped myself to about fifteen. They were high-milligram, high-powered little fuckers, so I didn't have to feed him the whole bottle and risk him puking everything up all over the both of us. I mashed the pills up in the kitchen and stirred them into his next drink, and then I stayed around until he finished the bottle. While he was drifting off, I tapped out the goodbye-cruel-world suicide note on Paul's computer. By that time, I could have used a second drink myself. My own share of the fifth came to about a teaspoon-ful, and that was damn fine liquor that Paul got to drink. Paul went out with style, as only a Haig should. There's no need for Phyllis Haig ever to know about any of this. But if she did have to know, she'd find some solace in the fact that in providing the libations that eased Paul into his eternal rest, I did not stint. It was the finest Glenlivet."
I wanted to rip him to shreds, but instead I swigged from the beer bottle. I said, "So that was the gun you shot Bierly with? And then you tossed it in Crockwell's dumpster?"
"Yo, you got it."
"What if Bierly had died from the shooting? What had he done to deserve that?"
"Not a thing, really. But I ran into Larry at the mall, and he told me that you and the cops suspected Paul's death hadn't been a suicide. So it made sense to further fuel everybody's suspicion of Crockwell—I'd already sent the tape to the cops, understand— by popping Larry and trying to pin it on Crockwell. But I didn't shoot to kill, and I really am glad ol' Lar pulled through. He could use a sedative himself once in a while, but overall Larry's okay in my book, and I wish him all the best."
I said, "The tape you sent to the cops along with the anonymous note pointing to Crockwell in Paul's death—where did you get it?"
"I'm not sure. Radio Shack? Kmart? Now you're straining my powers of recall."
"My question is, Who recorded the therapy session? You?"
"Naturally. Who else would?"
"But how did you know to record that particular session? Did Larry tip you off that he and Paul were quitting the program that day?"
"And that I'd need the tape of that angry scene six months later to throw suspicion on Crockwell in Paul's death? Hey, what am I, the Psychic Friends Network? I taped that session, Don, my man, because I taped them all."
"Why did you do that?"
Now he looked at me with his big, lovely eyes much glassier than when I'd arrived, and with an odd little smile. He said, "I taped all the sessions because I figured that sooner or later Annette—that's my wife—would catch onto the fact that I'm totally, insanely, expialidociously man-crazy, and I'm getting fucked by half the men in eastern New York and western New England. Then she'd throw me out on my ass without a dime. And to maintain the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed, I thought I might blackmail other men—men in the therapy group, guys in the tearooms, you name it. I don't know whether I would actually have done it—or really thought I could ever get away with it—but I did fantasize about blackmail. The tapes were my security blanket. And then that wussie drunk Paul Haig showed up and he tried to blackmail me. Ironic, isn't it? I love it."
I sat and looked at him. Who was Oliveira? How did he get this way? He had told me at our first meeting that he had had an alcoholic, abusive father. But so do lots of people, and they are not psychopaths. I said, "Well, it's all over now, Grey. You're through. You're done. You'll be locked away for—in effect, the rest of your life. You can't get away with what you did to Paul Haig and to Larry Bierly."
"Yes, I can," he said.
"Nope. You can't."
"What's the evidence? Those blurry pictures? That's circumstantial. There's no way to connect them to Paul's death or me to Paul's death. If anybody asks me, I'll deny everything I told you. If the cops start bothering me, my wife's father will hire the best
criminal lawyer in New York State, and if all the prosecutor has to go on is some cheesy blackmailer's smear pictures and the word of some nancy private dick from Albany, I'll be sent back home with an apology. And then the Drehers will sue your queer-boy's ass for every nickel you own, which I would guess from the looks of those cheap scuffed shoes and that raggedy-ass jacket you've got on is about ten cents."
I took another swig of beer. Then I said, "Where'd you get the taping equipment to record the therapy sessions, Grey? Did you steal it from the taxpayers of the State of New York? Was it from your office?"
"Jeez, Strachey. Do you think you can get me on petty larceny? Do you think I'm a damn thief? Really, my friend. I bought all my own equipment."
"W
ell, that clears that up, Grey. You're right, you won't be charged with stealing taping equipment in addition to your other crimes. By the way, are you recording our conversation today? Are you wired right now?"
"No, Strachey, as a matter of fact I'm not wired."
I said, "I am."
He looked at me, then at the bottles lined up on the shelf straight ahead of him. After a minute, he looked back at me. His hands were shaking. He said, "Too bad a beautiful hunk like you had to turn out to be such a flaming asshole, Strachey."
I shrugged.
He said, "Prison life. Yuck."
"It's undeniably a step down from Saratoga."
"How's the medical care in New York state prisons?"
"Variable, I suppose. Not the best, Grey."
"Jesus. I've got these lumps in my armpits and groin. I hope it's not what I think."
"You were fucking all those people and you've never even been tested?"
He only managed to shake his head twice before I got him by
the collar and dragged him off his stool and out the door to the waiting police cruiser, where I was threatened with arrest for assault if I didn't release Oliveira immediately, which I did after hoisting him to a height of about five feet.
25
Timmy said, "You seem to have been shortchanged by Phyllis Haig."
He had his calculator and her check made out to me in front of him on the kitchen table, and he had concluded that the daily rate she had paid me came to about forty dollars.
"Although," he said, "since you're triple-billing people on this case, you'll still come out ahead."
It was Friday evening and we were celebrating the end of Timmy's work week with Indian take-out and Danish beer.
"I'm not actually that far ahead," I said. "I'm cashing Phyllis's check and billing her for the unpaid balance of many hundreds of dollars. And I'm cashing Bierly's check too—but not Crockwell's. I'm returning his check. I don't want his money."
"Sure you do."
"Nope."
"Why? It's ill-gotten, but better you than he should get to spend it. Better it should go toward our mortgage than Crockwell's."
"He'll need every dollar he's got," I said. "Crockwell is closing his practice and he's going back to school for retraining in a different field. I spoke to him this afternoon."
Shock To The System Page 17