by Peter Israel
Then Squilletti had the center’s management to contend with. They had two corporate meetings scheduled to begin the next day with advance parties arriving that same Sunday evening, and there was no way they were going to call them off even after the threat of a court order. Yes, they would appeal a court order. Apparently they had as many connections as Squilletti did. This led to protracted negotiations and to Squilletti’s retreat. By Sunday evening, all he could seal off was the hotel annex and subsequently just the second floor of the annex.
And then there was the Counselor.
I gave the Counselor a hurried report moments after Bashard died and before I called the police.
The Counselor, as it turned out, didn’t wear pajamas either. He had on a blue terry-cloth bathrobe and his white hair was matted, like he’d washed it the night before or had sweated during the night.
He asked me three questions: Did I know who’d done it? Did I know how it had happened? Where was Grace? To the first I answered no, to the second that I thought Bashard had been beaten to death, to the third that she was asleep in my bed.
Then at the Counselor’s instructions, I carried Grace back into her room. The door to the suite was wide open but the lights were out. She may have moaned once or twice but she didn’t wake up. I put her into bed, covered her with a sheet, then closed the door, then closed the suite door. From the glimpse I had of the suite, there’d been some minor skirmishing in the living room, but nothing to suggest mayhem. The blood, it turned out, was mostly in Bashard’s bedroom.
I woke Price up, explained what had happened. Then I got a doctor’s name from the hotel and called him and explained why I’d roused him out of his sleep. He said he was on his way.
Then I called the police. Then I called Bud Fincher.
The whole of it, from the moment Raul Bashard collapsed on my rug and I satisfied myself that nobody was going to bring him back to life, until I called the police, couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes, half an hour maximum. But there was a gap. And Squilletti eventually spotted it.
“Why didn’t you call the police right away?” he asked. “How do I know you weren’t covering up evidence?”
“You don’t,” I answered. “But I wasn’t.”
“Oh no? Then why did you take the girl back to her room?”
“I was told to. By Mr. Camelot.”
“And why was that?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“I already have. If you ask me, Revere, you’re going to need a lawyer. Unless you want to defend yourself.”
This was a Squilletti habit, to change subjects in midstream, in the hope, presumably, of catching someone off-guard.
“I’m not a lawyer,” I said. “I already told you that. I only work for one.”
“Then maybe you’d better get one.”
“Why? Are you charging me?”
“Not yet. But you could well be an accessory. Just taking the girl back to her room could make you an accessory if nothing else does.”
This, too, was a Squilletti tactic. He worked us like a running back cruising the line on Monday Night Football, looking for a weak spot. To Squilletti the Counselor, Grace, Price and I were the front four of the defense, and by Sunday afternoon (when this conversation took place), he was still short of a first down.
The truth was that he might have blown his chance earlier, and I think he knew it. According to the Counselor’s instructions that morning, I was to cooperate with the police but at the same time protect the confidentiality of attorney and client. The ticklish thing about that was that it wasn’t clear at first who the Counselor represented, other than the corpse. By the time Squilletti figured this out though, the Counselor had had a chance to talk to Grace, and yes, Ms. Bashard was represented by counsel, Mr. Charles Camelot by name, and no, the police couldn’t interview her, she was suffering from shock, by physician’s order she needed rest, etc. It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that Squilletti got his first, abbreviated chance to interview Grace, by which time the Counselor was in full attendance.
Score one for the Counselor. Score another for the Counselor when Squilletti tried to get a court order to have Grace undergo a semen test. But score one for Squilletti when the Counselor tried to block an autopsy on Raul Bashard.
So it went. As for me, I went in a few hours from the man in charge to a suspect. Get a lawyer, Squilletti said, but the Counselor was otherwise occupied. Along the way, I’d failed in my duty, however you look at it. And the way Squilletti looked at it, there was Bud Fincher’s and my list of suspects culled from the Big O’s files, but no evidence of a break-in from outside the building. Plus there was the testimony of Bud Fincher’s people that nobody had gotten up from the ground floor; that left the other guests on the annex’s second floor; and that left me with the door open and the victim on my rug and the victim’s granddaughter in my bed.
Unless Grace Bashard had done it all herself.
In other words, you look for the weak point in the defense and you bang away at it.
Granddaughter, I notice I said. Somehow, once Raul Bashard was dead, I couldn’t think of her as his daughter anymore.
Here’s what I knew, augmented by what Squilletti found out:
Sometime after 3:30 A.M., the time when the local weather service estimated the storm had broken over the immediate area, I’d fallen asleep. I’d left my door open.
Sometime between 3:30 and 6:40 A.M.—the precise time had not been determined—Grace Bashard had left the suite and, finding my door open, had crawled into bed with me and gone to sleep. To the best of my knowledge, I had not had sex with Grace Bashard.
Sometime between 3:30 and 6:40 A.M.—presumably closer to 6:40 but how close could not be determined—someone had entered the suite and, using a brass-handled poker from the set of fireplace tools in the living room, had set about to beating the victim to death in his bed. He, or she, had not succeeded at first. There were signs that Bashard had tried to defend himself with a pillow, signs that he had fallen near the doorway from his bedroom and had lain there. The poker had been abandoned in the living room. No forensic evidence could be developed that specifically related to the killer, not even fingerprints, nor was there a way to show definitively whether Grace Bashard had left the suite before or after the event.
At or near 6:40 A.M., Bashard had gotten up and reached my room, where he collapsed and died.
I awoke at 6:40 A.M. I checked the victim, determined that he was dead. His pulse ws nonexistent, his heart had stopped beating. I went to Charles Camelot’s room and, after receiving his instructions, carried Grace Bashard back to her bedroom. I didn’t have to use my key to the suite, the door was open. Then I woke up Price. It took a somewhat long time for Price to answer, and I had to knock more than once. I instructed Price to get dressed and stand guard at the suite. Then I called the doctor, the police, and Bud Fincher, whom I asked to inform the hotel management.
I was talking again to the Counselor, who was up and dressed when the doctor arrived. I took him first to inspect Raul Bashard’s body. Then I let him and the Counselor into the suite.
The police came almost immediately after, followed in the course of the morning by more police, in waves, including a twosome armed with a vacuum cleaner.
Squilletti arrived in the second wave. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with no tie and the collar out wide over the lapels of a camel-colored blazer. The blazer had brass buttons, patch pockets, and a center vent in the back that spread apart over his backside. He took the blazer off shortly after he got to work, but then he had it on again later that day when he interviewed Grace Bashard. I noticed he carried one of those plastic pen holders in his shirt pocket, the kind you associate with construction bosses, but he took no notes. Sometimes he had a partner along for note taking, but Squilletti himself watched people when he asked them questions, watched them when he listened, and kept his hands mostly in his pants pockets.
All right, so I paid a l
ot of attention to him.
Why?
Because he paid a lot of attention to me.
He also paid a lot of attention to the doors to the suite. It figured. As I’ve said, I’d had the locks changed. I’d hired a local locksmith to do it over the hotel’s objections, a fact which Squilletti corroborated, also that the locksmith was due to restore the original later that day. I’d had four keys made: one for myself, one for Price, one for Grace, one for Bashard. Mine was in my pocket, Price’s was in his. Bashard’s was found in his room; Grace later produced hers.
There was no evidence of tampering with the lock.
If the doors to the suite (which I affirmed had been locked when I went to sleep) had remained locked, then either Price, Grace, or myself, alone or in combination, had at least participated in the crime. But if the door had been left open, possibly by Grace when she left her bedroom for mine, then the field of suspects would have to be enlarged to include at least everybody staying on the floor.
Unless—third possibility—somebody had knocked on the closed door and had it opened from the inside?
Possible, but unlikely. I’m not normally an insomniac. On the other hand, I’m not a deep sleeper. I knew I’d “dreamed”—that is, heard—Grace get into my bed. I hadn’t woken up, but I’d heard her. I hadn’t heard anybody at the suite door.
There were blood smears on the interior doorknob—Bashard’s as it turned out—but that didn’t prove anything either way. Bashard could have opened the door or he could have reached out for support. By that time he’d needed all the support he could get.
I myself believed Grace had left the door open behind her. Squilletti, though, wanted it the other way. It simplified things.
“Let me see if I got it straight,” he said. “The way you say it happened, sometime after three-thirty in the morning, Grace Bashard came out of the suite, leaving the door open, found your door open, got into bed with you and innocently went to sleep. Leaving your door open, too. Is that your version?”
“It could have been that way.”
“Sure. And she could have carried a megaphone into the hall, said: ‘Hey look, everybody, I’m shacking up with Revere here. Anybody who wants to kill my old man, come ahead. The door’s wide open.’ Is that it?”
I didn’t answer.
“Had you been shacking up with her before this?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, she must have wanted to. One of you must have wanted to. Else why did she climb into bed with you?”
“You’ll have to ask her that.”
“I’m going to,” Squilletti said, “but I figure you’ve got an opinion.”
I shrugged.
“Maybe she was cold,” I said. “Maybe she wanted a warm body.”
His eyes narrowed at me. I guess he thought I was pulling his leg.
“It sure sounds like she wanted to be found out,” Squilletti said.
Maybe so, I thought.
“So who do you think did it?” he asked, not for the first time.
“I don’t know.”
“All you know is that she didn’t?”
“I didn’t say that. But I don’t think so, no.”
“But couldn’t it also have been that she got up in the middle of the night, clubbed her old man to death, then came in here and went to sleep, leaving the doors wide open? I mean, if she wanted to be found out about the one thing, then why not the other?”
I started to say something about evidence, that there’d have to be evidence of it, like on her clothes, but then I remembered what Grace had been wearing when I woke up and I kept my mouth shut.
“Stranger things have happened,” Squilletti said. “We had a case like that a couple of years ago. Teenage kid went on a rampage, murdered his whole family, then went to sleep in his own bed. When he woke up, he called the cops. The first thing he did when we got there was confess to the whole thing.
“But it could also have been,” he went on in the same flat tone, “that you’ve invented this whole crock-of-shit story by way of protecting the girl. Or who knows? Protecting the both of you.”
“Sure,” I said. “And if pigs had wings …”
His eyes squinted again.
“I don’t get that,” he said.
“It’s just an expression. If pigs had wings, they could fly.”
“Oh,” he said. I guess he thought I’d been using pigs for cops. “Then tell me this: who stands to gain from it?”
“To gain from what?”
“Well, Bashard’s a rich man, isn’t he? Or was? You make a lot of money writing books these days. I imagine she gets it, doesn’t she?”
I didn’t answer.
“I guess you’d know, wouldn’t you? You work for the lawyer, the lawyer draws up the will. What’s in the will?”
It was going to come out eventually, but right then I was still following the Counselor’s instructions.
“That’s privileged information,” I said.
“What do you mean, privileged information? You’re not a lawyer yourself, are you?”
“No, I’m not. But the confidentiality between client and counsel applies to me, too.”
“Is that right?” Squilletti said, tilting his head at me. “Well, that’s one I never heard of before. There’s also the question of obstructing a police investigation into a homicide. Did you ever hear about that one?”
“Yes I have.”
“So?”
“It’s still privileged information.”
This wasn’t my first conversation with Squilletti, and it was far from my last, but along the way he managed to unnerve me. Not that he didn’t have help. There were the circumstances, for one thing. It wasn’t just that Bashard had been murdered; he’d been horribly, painfully murdered. And like I said, I’d gone from being the man-in-charge to somebody under suspicion. I could recognize the fact of it in people’s faces, in what they said or didn’t. For instance, the police asked everybody who’d spent the night on the second floor of the annex to stay in or near the hotel until the police had interviewed and released them. This included the Brinckerhoffs, Latham, Cyn Morgan, Sidney Frankaman and his wife, Norman Hermatius, Varga, Sam Wright and his wife, as well as the Counselor and his wife, Price and myself. For the most part they—that is, the science-fiction crowd—sat around a large round, rustic table in the hotel bar, where Ron Whitefield, Helga Hewitt and some others joined them. Some drank booze, some drank coffee, some didn’t drink anything. A couple of times I joined them. The first time I thought I might learn something, by getting people to talk. But nobody was talking. They sat like people in shock, together but separate, each well inside him or herself. The second time, maybe I was in search of company myself and the conversation around the table had grown animated. But the minute I sat down, it dropped to the proverbial pin drop. And stayed there. Ping. Until Sidney Frankaman turned to me.
Mr. Frankaman was a balding, round-faced man from Los Angeles with goggle glasses that magnified his eyes in concentric rings. I’d met him the night before at the banquet when he’d boasted to me, in figures, that he owned and ran “the largest chain of pure science-fiction stores in the world.”
Now Mr. Frankaman said to me, goggle eyes staring: “Who invited you?”
“Nobody,” I answered. “I didn’t know you needed an invitation.”
“Then why are you here?” Frankaman said, still staring at me.
I thought of a retort, but it stuck in my throat. Some of the others had averted their eyes, but those who were looking my way, including my former friend, Helga Hewitt, wore the same expression.
Call it their “Man from Mars” look.
I excused myself, beer in hand, and heard the conversation start up again behind me.
I ran into the Counselor’s Wife and Muffin in the lobby. They were on their way for a walk. To judge from the way she wriggled and pulled toward me, Muffin was t
he only one on the premises who still believed I was innocent till proven otherwise. While normally I’d have invented any excuse to avoid joining them, this time I welcomed the Counselor’s Wife’s asking. The hotel had become claustrophobia city.
The outside wasn’t much better.
The police, by then, had sealed off the hotel building to all who didn’t belong there. Outside, television crews with portable cameras ringed the walk from the main entrance to the driveway. Their motors idling, so to speak. Presumably they’d already exhausted the outside interview possibilities, for the minute they saw us, they went into action.
“How do you fit into the case?” a pushy young blond woman asked me, pushing a microphone in the general direction of my mouth.
I made the mistake of answering: “No comment.”
This brought a crowd.
Then I heard someone shout: “Isn’t that Nora Saroff? Sure it is. Hey, Nora, what’re you doing here?”
“She’s the lawyer’s wife!” somebody answered.
“That’s right! She’s Camelot’s wife!” said another.
“Did she do it, Nora?”
“Did the daughter do it?”
“What was the cause of death, Nora? It’s murder, isn’t it?”
“Sure it’s murder! They beat him to a pulp. Where’s your husband, Nora?”
“Is Charles Camelot defending the girl?”
And the persistent microphone in my face: “What’s your name, sir? How do you fit into the case?”
Hit ’em high and hit ’em low, as they say. Muffin growled, snarled, bared teeth. Between us, the dog and I drove a wedge, pulling the Counselor’s Wife behind us. Even so, we could still be there if the Counselor’s Wife hadn’t freaked.
“Fuck off!” I heard her shout behind me. “Just fuck off!” Then spinning angrily on them: “And if a single one of you runs so much as a second of this, you’ll be featured on my show next week for media harassment. Just try me! Name, picture and channel!”
