by Peter Israel
He shook his head.
“I’m disappointed in you, Phil,” he said, a glint of humor in his eyes. “I’d have thought you’d have guessed it on your own.”
His pleasure annoyed and confused me at the same time. I had guessed it, or something like it, when I first saw her frolicking with Bashard’s Dobermans over the TV screen. The scene was innocent enough, but Bashard hadn’t looked at her like a father, then or later. Plus the numbers hadn’t added up, and for a girl of eighteen she came on like she’d already forgotten things about sex you and I never thought of.
“Who is she, then? His whore?”
The Counselor laughed, his head thrown back.
“Wrong again,” he said. “I must say, Phil, for a womanizer, you certainly can be a prude.”
He waved off my retort, then went on with Bashard’s story.
“The woman of his dreams,” he repeated. “That’s what he called her. Madge, Margaret. He met her in Arizona and married her a week later. Maybe this is what finally made Johnny crack. Nora says it was the final proof that he could never belong. Madge was only a few years older than he was, they could have passed for sister and brother. But now she was his stepmother. Anyway, Johnny took off. He went back to San Francisco where, in very short order, he got married, sired a child—a daughter, of course—and divorced, came out of the closet, and changed his name legally from Bashard to Jameson. I believe Jameson was his mother’s name. Anyway, that’s where I came into the picture, as you’ll see here—helping Raul sort out the mess.”
He handed me some of the documents he’d been looking at when I came in. I leafed through them: adoption papers, waivers, financial agreements, all—as I discovered when I read them later—neatly tied together by the Counselor.
“Grace is Bashard’s granddaughter by blood,” he said, “but his daughter and heir by law. It’s all there in the papers.”
“I didn’t know you could legally adopt your own granddaughter,” I said.
“You can do virtually anything legally,” the Counselor answered, “if you’re willing to pay the price.” A remark he relished.
“What happened to Grace’s real mother?”
“Money,” he said. “Major money, as you’ll see. She was a so-called flower child, in the Haight-Ashbury district. She had more use for money than for a baby.”
“And Johnny?”
“Cut out. Disinherited. Raul Bashard doesn’t have much use for homosexuals.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“Could be Johnny’d want to get even,” I said.
“Could be. But the last I heard he was living in Sydney, Australia. That’s the gay capital of the Southern Hemisphere, I’m told.”
And a long way away, I thought.
“What about Grace?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“Well, in the first place, I could imagine her cutting somebody’s throat. Particularly somebody who keeps her a virtual prisoner. And if she stands to inherit everything, then—”
But the Counselor shook his head at the idea.
“I know,” I said, irritated, “he trusts her more than anything in the world, he—”
“It’s not that,” the Counselor interrupted. “Maybe he trusts her, maybe he doesn’t. But if it’s money she’s after, she stands to lose a lot more than she’d gain.”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“It’s in his will,” he said, handing a folder over. “Read the last section.”
I found the last section. In the event of Raul Bashard’s death by other than natural causes, Grace would inherit a vastly reduced amount, and it would remain in trust even after her twenty-first birthday. The rest would go to a variety of foundations and charitable organizations. Grace wouldn’t be exactly destitute, but she might have to trade the silver spoon in for stainless steel.
So much for trust, I thought. Maybe the Dobermans fared better, but there was no reference to them in the last section.
I wondered if the proviso would stand up in court. Then I noticed that the will’s sole executor was Charles Camelot, and I figured it would.
“You’re wrong about the paranoia, Phil,” the Counselor said. “He may seem so, but we all might seem a little paranoid in his position. If he believes someone’s out to kill him, then I think there’s a good chance someone’s out to kill him.”
I disagreed. We argued the point. I’d ruled out everybody inside the castle except Grace, and Bashard’s will tended to rule out Grace. Assuming money counted with her. A reasonable assumption, I thought.
The Counselor wanted to know about the hate mail. I’d sampled a lot of it the day before, more than I’d wanted to. The Dean of Science Fiction got mail by the sackful; a certain percentage of it could be (and was) classified as hate mail, and some of it was unprintable. People wanted money. People wanted (as he’d pointed out) to give him their organs and/or to acquire his organs. People (more female than male, but far from a hundred percent) were enraged that he hadn’t answered their intimate invitations. And so on. Nobody so far as I know has ever made a study of it, but I’d still bet the percentage of hate in Raul Bashard’s hate mail was no higher, no lower, than that in any celebrity’s. There are crazies all over the place, some of whom write letters, and if Bashard had a would-be killer among them it would take a track team to find him.
In that case, the Counselor said, I should hire a track team.
“If you want my opinion,” I said, “he’s as safe inside that castle as anyone could be. The real problem is that he’s planning to leave it—for the first time in God knows how long. If you want my opinion, that’s what’s got him scared: the BashCon. But when I suggested he cancel, he said, ‘Once I undertake to do something, once I give my word, then it will require more than the threat of death to keep me from it.’”
If I say so myself, my imitation of Bashard wasn’t half bad.
“It doesn’t matter whether you think he’s safe, Phil,” the Counselor said. “It’s whether he is safe. Hire the track team.”
You win some, you lose some.
I shrugged and put the call through from the Counselor’s desk. Bud Fincher was a private detective we sometimes used. He has his own agency and plugs into a network of other agencies across the country. I arranged for a meeting the next morning. Bud was no genius, but he could provide the track team, even though I was pretty sure nothing would come of it except a bill. Which the computer would charge back to Raul Bashard.
I’d just hung up and was starting to explain the BashCon to the Counselor when the door behind me opened. There was a commotion and a rush and a beige-colored whir bounded across the room and onto my lap. It was Muffin, the Counselor’s Wife’s cocker bitch, her stub tail going a thousand beats a minute.
I stood up.
“I’m sorry, darling,” the Counselor’s Wife’s voice rang behind me. “I didn’t know you were in the midst. Do you realize what time it is?”
The Counselor stood up, too, and the dog thrashed and rolled on the carpet, and Nora Saroff Camelot surged between us. Surge is the key word. I mean, when the Counselor’s Wife comes into a room, nothing’s ever the same as it was before.
She’s a tall and some say beautiful woman, striking certainly, with ash-blonde hair and salient, highly photogenic features, plus a loud voice that takes over a conversation the minute she gets into it. I’ve always had a hard time imagining her a shrink, somebody who has to listen to people’s troubles for hours on end.
“Oh hi, Phil, I didn’t know you were back. How’d you like the Great Writer? If you two aren’t finished, why don’t you come upstairs for a drink, Phil? I want to hear all about the dread Bashard—you’re more than welcome to stay for dinner, too. We’re eating in, aren’t we, darling? Yes, you’re eating in, too, Muffie McTuffie …”
While she talked she was in constant motion around the office. The Counselor stood like an eye in the sudden storm, beaming, and I, for the umptee
nth time, was struck by how he, who usually and easily dominates a scene, stepped aside and let her take control.
Maybe that’s love.
I turned down her invitation. I said I had another engagement, but I thanked her anyway.
“Who is she tonight, Phil?”
This was part of the ritual. The Counselor’s Wife is as insistent on trying to fix me up as she pretends to be convinced I’m a hopeless philanderer. I’ve sometimes wondered what would happen if I ever took her up on the first, or agreed with her on the second. As is, I mostly duck.
I did, as it turned out, have another engagement. Even if I hadn’t, though, I’d have pleaded one. To simplify, say that I prefer West Side cooking to East Side.
Her name is Laura Hugger, a fitting name. We’ve been between-people people for each other, off and on, for a very long time. I guess we each think we could do better, and sometimes we try, and then when things fall apart for one or the other of us, we start off again. We go to the movies together, now and then to a Broadway show, once in a blue moon for a weekend in the mountains. But mostly we eat dinner together, Thai or Chinese, and then go to her place or mine and screw each other’s brains out. And few questions asked. Only recently the questions have gotten more numerous again, which makes me think—Laura, too, probably—that we’ve been here before and maybe could do better elsewhere.
We were just getting started, chopsticks at the ready, on some General Ching’s Chicken and Beef With Four Flavors on the upstairs floor of a Hunan joint we like. We’d dawdled over a couple of drinks. The coziness was setting in. It must have been around ten. Then the beeper went off in my pocket.
We use the system sparingly. I mean, we’re not doctors and we don’t make house calls. But the Counselor insists I carry one, and once or twice it’s come in handy.
I excused myself and went to the phone.
I didn’t get the Counselor himself, only his voice on the answering tape.
“Grace Bashard wants you, Phil. She called you. She claims an emergency. Call her immediately.”
He gave me the phone number, then the tape went dead. No explanation.
I had one of those uh-oh premonitions. I saw Ms. Laura Hugger eyeing me across the restaurant.
I punched 0, then the number, then my credit-card number. “Thank you-u-u,” droned the recorded operator. The number hadn’t rung once before Grace answered.
“Oh Phil,” she said breathily, “I’m glad you called. Thank God it’s you. Oh Phil, it’s terrible …”
She started to sob then.
“Grace,” I interrupted, “pull yourself together now. I can’t understand—”
“… Jules! It’s Jules, Phil! Jules is dead!”
I started to say: Who’s Jules? Then I caught myself. Jules Verne, one of Bashard’s Dobermans.
“Tell me what happened, Grace.”
“I can’t. Daddy’s beside himself. Jules is dead, and Daddy won’t talk to anybody. He told me to get you, then he shut himself up. Oh Phil, you’ve got to come, I …”
Then she was sobbing again.
There was no stopping her except to say I’d come. I told her I’d be there in forty-five minutes.
I hung up and went back between the tables. The joint was full, people talking, people eating, people making plans—all except Laura Hugger, who was still eyeing me as I came her way.
I hadn’t told her about Bashard.
“I’m sorry, Laura, I’ve got to go,” I said. It may have sounded stupid to say: “A dog is dead, a dog called Jules Verne,” but I said that, too.
“Fine,” said Laura, “it’s fine, Phil,” in a shorthand that told me that it wasn’t fine at all but what the hell did I expect her to do about it?
I paid the check and took Laura home. No, she didn’t want to finish dinner without me. Ten minutes later I had the Fiero out of the garage and was on my way.
CHAPTER
3
It was cooler in the suburbs by a good ten degrees, and pitch-dark in the estate area till I got to Bashard’s. All the floodlights were on, lighting up the grounds like a baseball diamond, but there wasn’t a living soul in sight.
Weird.
Price controlled me in through the front gates, and he was waiting for me at the portico entrance. Price was the button-down chauffeur in the Mercedes, and doubled as Bashard’s bodyguard. He was a product, I knew, of the United States Navy by way of the University of Southern California. Bashard had recruited him out of the service simply by tripling his salary.
According to Price, Mr. Bashard had gone on a tour of the grounds with the two Dobermans after dinner. He often did this. After that, things became unclear. The dogs sometimes sat with Mr. Bashard until he went to bed. Sometimes they slept in the pantry, sometimes outside in their kennel. Sometimes Jules slept upstairs with Grace but never the two dogs together. In any case, they had access to the main house through a dog door in the pantry, and they came and went pretty much as they pleased.
Mr. Bashard had retired after their walk. Grace had been in her room. Price himself, he said, was talking to MacGregor, the cook, while the cook cleaned up after dinner.
They’d heard a howling outside the house. They’d paid it no attention at first. Dogs howl. When it persisted, they’d gone outside and found the other Doberman, Herbert, baying alone in the darkness. Mr. Bashard had joined them. They couldn’t shut Herbert up. They’d turned the floods on and gone investigating, Herbert leading the way, and had eventually found Jules lying at the back end of the property—an area beyond the eyes of the cameras where the road curved and the vegetation, mostly rhododendrons, grew thickly over the fence.
“We carried him back here,” Price said. “The poor bugger didn’t have a mark on him. He had to have been poisoned. We found some meat samples just to this side of the fence. Mr. Bashard said some crazy son of a bitch must have thrown them there. Then Grace herself, when she saw the body, she went crazy. She was very attached to that dog.”
I asked Price where everybody was now. He said Grace had been given a sedative after she’d called me. He guessed she was asleep. She’d gone crazy, he repeated, when she’d seen the dead animal. She’d wanted them to call the police. Mr. Bashard had refused. He wouldn’t have the police in the house. She’d wanted to call the vet, at least to check out Herbert. Mr. Bashard had refused that, too. Then she had called me. As for Mr. Bashard, he’d left instructions that he wasn’t to be disturbed, not even when I got there.
Then what was the rush? I started to ask, getting a fleeting last glimpse of Laura Hugger. And why me? But Price wasn’t the person to answer.
“Do you want to see the corpse?” he asked me.
I didn’t especially, but he wanted to show it to me.
I followed him through the living room, its emptiness startling with the lights on, and down the back hall past the dining room, through the empty kitchen, to the pantry. The pantry itself was larger than most kitchens I’d seen, even so-called country kitchens. The walls were lined with glass-fronted mahogany cabinets that held glassware and china. They looked like they’d come with the house. But in the center was one of those enormous, modern, aisle-type counters, with double stainless-steel sinks and dishwashers underneath and a butcher block top that looked long enough to play shuffleboard on. Sitting on the butcher block was a bundle, wrapped in a plaid steamer rug.
Price unwrapped the bundle.
Jules’s body was on its side, the front legs stretched forward and the hind ones back toward the rear, giving the dog a strangely elongated look. The eye I could see was almost but not entirely shut, showing a reddish slit, and the upper lip lifted slightly over the gums. I’ve little enough experience with dead animals, but this one’s coat already seemed to have lost its luster. It was mat-textured and dry, like worn velvet.
“Go ahead,” Price said next to me. “Go ahead and touch him.” Price chuckled a little. “He won’t bite.”
I touched the Doberman’s flank. It still felt ve
lvety. The bodyguard picked up the front paws together, swinging the torso as he lifted them, then let them drop with a clunk.
“Already stiff,” he said matter-of-factly.
I could smell, faintly, a doggy odor; but nothing you’d associate with death.
“Are you going to have an autopsy done?” I said.
“I thought so,” Price answered. “But Mr. Bashard said no. We’ve got the meat samples, though. They’re on ice, in the refrigerator. We’ll have them tested tomorrow morning. But you already know the answer. I’ll give you a hundred to one, and then some. You can see, there’s not a mark on him. Flip him over on the other side, same thing.”
Either Price was a frustrated mortician or he was enjoying baiting me.
“Go ahead,” he went on. “Flip him over and take a look.”
I didn’t.
“The one thing that makes no sense,” I said, “is if it was poison, why is only one of the dogs dead? They did everything together, didn’t they?”
Price shrugged.
“Well, not everything,” he said. “They’re different, once you’ve been around them a while. But,” he confided, “I thought the same thing.”
“Then why not have an autopsy and make sure?”
“That’s what I thought. But …”
I felt him stiffen next to me even before he turned around. I turned with him.
Raul Bashard was standing in the doorway behind us, propping himself with a cane in his right hand. With his left he held the flaps of his bathrobe together. The bathrobe was navy blue with white piping, and a white monogram and the pajamas underneath were a pale blue. He wore sneakers on his feet, untied, and no socks.
“There’ll be no autopsy on my dog, Revere,” he said. “I fought the vivisectionists once, I’ll fight them again. The dog is dead. He’ll be buried in peace.”
“Yes, sir,” Price said beside me, standing at attention.
“I don’t know if you heard my question, Mr. Bashard,” I said, “but if it was poison, why would one dog be alive and the other dead? They were brothers, weren’t they? Didn’t they do everything together?”
