by Peter Israel
The girlish outfit helped, too. I wonder what she’d have said if Squilletti had asked her what she’d been wearing when she visited me.
Then it was my turn. Al Squilletti stood up, his hands in his pockets, and said to me: “You’ve got a different version of it, Revere. According to what you told me, you and the girl didn’t make love. Do you still stick by that?”
I remember glancing at the Counselor, looking, I guess, for a cue as to how he wanted me to answer. But there was none.
“That’s right,” I said.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Well, it’s possible you don’t remember, isn’t it? You said you’d had a lot to drink. Or could you have thought you dreamed it when it actually happened?”
I thought about it a minute. I had had a lot to drink, but that was earlier. I also remembered having sexy dreams.
“Anything’s possible,” I said. “But it’d be a first for me. I’ll stand by what I said.”
“Well,” Squilletti said, “you’ve got two different accounts. One of you’s gotta be lying. Or else remembering wrong. Why would she lie about it, Revere?”
“I can’t imagine why. Maybe wishful thinking?”
Nasty words. But I wasn’t feeling very kindly toward Grace right then.
“Or flip it over: Why would you lie?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Well, it’d be pretty embarrassing to you, wouldn’t it?”
“Not to that point,” I said.
“Well, let me put the same question to you, Revere. Are you in love with this girl?”
This was the point where I felt Grace look up at me—the one time.
“No,” I said, looking back at her. Her eyes, I noticed, had turned big and watery blue. But no tears.
“Well, is she in love with you, do you think?”
“I don’t think so, no,” I answered.
Squilletti shrugged his shoulders and sat down again, his hands on the table.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t see why it’s that important, one way or the other, but if it is, there’re ways of finding these things out.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell your boss,” Squilletti answered.
“Enough,” the Counselor interrupted. “If there’s going to be any further debate on that subject, I see no reason why my client has to listen to it. She’s answered all your questions. If you’ve any more, now’s the time for her to answer them. If not, I suggest we excuse her.”
Neither Squilletti nor Waller had anything more. The Counselor got up and escorted Grace from the room. While he was gone, Squilletti told me he’d already tried to get a judge to order that Grace be tested for semen, but that the Counselor had outargued him. He tried to pump me further on Grace, but the Counselor (the last I’d heard) was still my boss, and Grace Bashard our client.
The Counselor returned. The buddy-buddy atmosphere Squilletti had tried to foster between himself and me evaporated.
“You surprise me, Sergeant,” the Counselor said sharply, glowering down. “Neither I nor Judge Conlan saw any reason for my client to be tested for the presence of semen, but you persist in bringing it up. If you want our cooperation, that’s a damned stupid thing to do. My client and my colleague here have different versions of what took place, or didn’t, in Revere’s bed last night. So? Neither of them is testifying under oath. Maybe if the subject is ever brought up in a courtroom, one of them will change the story. But as my colleague points out, it’s of no importance whatsoever. And Conlan agrees.”
Squilletti had nothing to say. He clearly didn’t like being slapped, verbally or otherwise. Waller, the district attorney, simply sat there, his hands in his lap, his thin face expressionless.
The Counselor sat down again.
“To business, gentlemen,” he said, staring directly at them. “My offer still stands. I’m ready to offer you full cooperation, including certain information you don’t now have and which may prove hard to get if I choose to oppose you. Revere and Fincher will work with your investigation in any and every way, until it is finished.”
“You mentioned conditions,” Waller said. “What are the conditions?”
“Very simple. Nothing, not a word, is to get into the media. As far as the media are concerned, the investigation is proceeding. Period. Nothing about this sexual incident, which Revere says didn’t happen. Nothing about some of the things I’m going to tell you.”
“That kind of thing’s pretty hard to control,” Squilletti said.
“No it isn’t. You two will know certain things. Whether people who work for you need to know is up to you. It’s also up to you to shut them up.”
“And if we don’t? If something leaks out?”
“Then you’ll wish to hell you never heard of me. I know the press and the media, gentlemen, know them much better than you do. Any leaks will rebound on you, rest assured, and once that happens, you’ll have cameras and reporters on you every step of the way.”
“Is that all?” the district attorney asked.
“No, it isn’t. Ms. Bashard will be allowed to leave here tomorrow morning. She will be made available to you, as needed, through me.”
Squilletti hesitated, glanced at Waller, then back at the Counselor. You could tell Squilletti wasn’t happy about it, but making him happy wasn’t the Counselor’s top priority.
Squilletti started to say something, but the district attorney interrupted him.
“Please excuse us for a minute,” he said.
They got up and left the room. The Counselor stoked a pipe. He lit it and puffed silent clouds of tobacco smoke toward the ceiling. I watched the square air-conditioning ducts suck them in.
They were gone long enough for an argument to have taken place, and when they came back they didn’t sit down.
“We have your offer, Mr. Camelot,” the district attorney said. “We’ll give you an answer by tomorrow at one.”
Buying time, I figured, to evaluate the physical evidence.
But the Counselor wasn’t to be denied. He pressed home.
“No you won’t,” he said. “You’ll give me your answer right now, or you can consider the offer withdrawn.”
I thought Squilletti was going to explode, but the district attorney said: “All right, Mr. Camelot. You have a deal.”
“Good,” the Counselor replied. “Then please bear with me for a few more minutes. Sit down. There are some things you ought to know.”
It was then, and only then, that he told them about the changes in Bashard’s will. Grace, he told them, was going to inherit everything. Bashard has originally put in restrictions in the event of violent, or unnatural, death, but these had been removed the day before.
Squilletti knew he’d been had. He glared at the district attorney and started forward in his chair, then just as quickly slumped back. The Counselor had trapped him. Bashard’s will was hardly enough of a basis, in and of itself, for him to charge Grace with murder. Which meant that all he could do with it, for the moment anyway, was chew on it.
I watched him chew.
A few days later Bashard’s ashes, at his request, were scattered over the grounds of his estate. It was the second funeral I’d gone to there. By comparison to Jules Verne’s, Bashard’s was even shorter in ceremony. Those present included Grace, Bashard’s three full-time employees (Price, MacGregor, and Kohl), the Counselor, myself, Bud Fincher, and Al Squilletti. There were two absentees, one named in Bashard’s instructions and one by implication.
I’d called Oliver Latham the day before. He couldn’t come, he said. His health was poor, he said; he was too tired to make another trip so soon. He said something to the effect that the next funeral he attended would probably be his own.
Bashard’s instructions, which were typically detailed, had called for the immediate family to be present. His immediate family consisted, at most, of two people: Grace and her by-blood father, John Jameson, born Joh
n Jacob Bashard. I sent a cable to the last address we had for him, in Sydney, Australia. I also tried calling. I did get a number out of Sydney Directory Assistance but when I dialed it a recorded voice interrupted, saying the number was no longer in service and that I should call Directory Assistance. I gave Directory Assistance one last try and got nowhere.
Squilletti noticed the small turnout, too.
“Jesus,” he said to me, “for a guy that famous, you’d think there’d be more of an affair.”
“That was his doing,” I said. “No media, no flowers, no announcements in the papers, no donations. No speeches over his grave. No grave.”
The media was there, of course, but outside the gates.
“That’s a lot of nos,” Squilletti said.
“That’s the way he was. He shut himself off.”
“Weird,” Squilletti said.
“Weird,” I agreed.
We stood in a small clump on the back lawn of the estate. We were all appropriately dressed, more or less, except for Squilletti. Grace wore black. Even Price, MacGregor, and Kohl had on dark suits. Squilletti wore brown slacks and a cord jacket. The man from the undertaker’s wore a morning suit and gray gloves.
Nobody wept. Who mourned I can’t say.
We stood in the clump while the man from the undertaker’s walked the grounds, sprinkling ashes from a handled brass pot he cradled in his left arm. It wasn’t strictly legal, but who was there to challenge him? He did a thorough job, too, dipping his gray gloves into the pot. I guess he was paid to. I thought about how weird it was, even though the body’s supposed to be ninety-eight percent water, that a man Bashard’s size could be reduced to the contents of a brass pot. I thought about the speech I’d heard Bashard give a couple of times, at the dog’s funeral and again at the BashCon, the one about continuity. Maybe birds would peck at the ashes, or squirrels, bugs, worms, get some kind of nourishment out of them. Ashes were supposed to be good for trees, plants. Still, the idea of it depressed me. I guess I was still thinking about the number the Counselor had done on me.
Suffice it to say that, when he’s roused, Charles Camelot has a tongue that stings like a hornet. He’d landed on me for two things mainly: one, I’d fallen asleep on the job; two, I’d encouraged Grace Bashard. I’d tried to defend myself on both counts, but the Counselor wasn’t interested. I wasn’t paid, he’d said—highly paid—to defend myself. I wasn’t paid, he’d said—highly paid—to be unprofessional in my performance. Nor was I paid—highly paid—to have seduced the client’s eighteen-year-old daughter.
“You may not want to hear it,” the Counselor had said, “but I’m holding you responsible, Phil. I’m going to be sitting on your neck from now on. Together we’re going to find out who killed Raul. It’s damned important to me. And do you know why that is?”
He’d looked at me, waiting for an answer.
“No, I don’t know why that is,” I’d said, hot under the collar.
“Because I don’t like people getting murdered, and I don’t like somebody making assholes of us. And that’s exactly what happened.”
If his aim had been to light a firecracker under me, I guess it worked. But right then (and the morning of Bashard’s funeral, or nonfuneral) I was in one of those who-said-life-was-meant-to-be-fair moods, which made me think of the years I’d spent, or wasted, as a working stiff in the Counselor’s office, which made me think of the bar exams I’d never passed and why that was, and so forth, all the way back to Rivera, Pablo Evaristo Maria (whoever he was), while the man from the undertaker’s finished sprinkling Bashard’s remains over the hillside in New Jersey.
Nothing like a funeral to lift your spirits.
The man from the undertaker’s finished his work. I remember that he dusted off his gloves by clapping his palms together. Then he took off his right glove—a delicate touch—and for some reason went to shake hands with everybody present. Then he left, in a black sedan with a driver.
The Counselor escorted Grace to the limo that had brought them out from the city. That was the only shot they showed on the evening news: the limo bearing Grace Bashard and her attorney, picking up speed as it emerged from the gates—because that was as close as the mobile units parked on the road outside had gotten to the funeral.
If you assume that neither Grace nor I, together or separately, had murdered Bashard, then Squilletti had blown it on the Sunday of the crime. He as much as admitted this to Bud Fincher and me. Yes, either he or one of his men had interviewed everyone who’d been staying on the second floor of the hotel annex. Yes, either he or one of his men had been inside every room on the floor while the guests were convened downstairs. But none of the people had heard a thing. All had claimed to have been asleep between the hours of 3:30 and 6:40 A.M., athough some stated they’d been awakened briefly by the storm. And the forensic investigation, Squilletti said, had focused on Bashard’s suite and on my room because the body had been found there. If there’d been evidence in any of the other rooms—on somebody’s clothes, in somebody’s suitcase—then there was a good chance “it had walked out the door.”
“Look at it this way,” Squilletti said. “I focused on you and the daughter, that is true. Maybe I still do. But otherwise, there were hundreds of people there. What was I supposed to do? Hold them all? Impossible. A physical impossibility.”
“Wrong,” I said.
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“There weren’t hundreds. There were only fifteen by my count, sixteen if you include Grace. You yourself found no evidence of a break-in from outside. And you’ve got Bud’s testimony that nobody came up from downstairs the whole night. That leaves the people on the second floor, twelve rooms not counting the suite, eleven of which were occupied. Fifteen people in eleven rooms, any one of whom could have done it.”
“If the suite door was open,” Squilletti said, “or they had a key.”
“If the suite door was open or they had a key,” I repeated.
“Shit on a stick,” Squilletti said, twisting one end of his mustache. “I still couldn’t’ve held them. I’d’ve had every high-priced lawyer in America sitting on my head.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “But let’s look at them now.”
We’d set up shop in the outbuilding I’d worked in that time before, where Grace, I remembered, had asked me why I didn’t marry her. I had an idea the computer, the Big O, might help us; and in any case I wanted it to walk Bud and Squilletti backward through where I’d been myself. We had Bashard’s three staff members on tap for Squilletti to interrogate, and meanwhile the cook, MacGregor, supplied us with a platter of sandwiches and a pot of coffee.
Bud Fincher produced his floor plan of the annex’s second floor, the same one we’d used setting up the BashCon, with the names of the guests written in the places. He also had a typed alphabetized list of the names, with brief captions of who they were. It read as follows:
Brinckerhoff, Mr. and Mrs. Richard, collector.
Camelot, Mr. and Mrs. Charles, Bashard attorney.
Frankaman, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney, store owner.
Hermatius, Norman, filmmaker.
Latham, Oliver, writer.
Morgan, Cyn, illustrator.
Price, Robert, Bashard security.
Revere, Philip.
Varga, George, magazine publisher.
Whitefield, Randall, book publisher.
Wright, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel, BashCon organizer.
The floor plan included the twelfth room, the one reserved for Arthur Clarke, the writer. But Arthur Clarke had never shown up, and the room had remained vacant.
“There’re two we can eliminate,” I said, drawing a line through the Counselor’s line and my own. “That leaves nine. Twelve people in nine rooms.”
“Not so fast,” Squilletti said. “Who said you could eliminate anybody?”
“I did,” I said. I looked at him and grinned. Maybe I couldn’t pull a number on him like the Counselor had, but I had my own versio
n of it. “Look, Al,” I said, “Mr. Camelot already said it. You want to play games with us, go right ahead, but you’ll do it without Bud and me. The way I see it, though, you’ve already made your choice.”
He stared at me, then at Bud, then back, like he was trying to make up his mind. Then his face broke into one of those broad, pizza smiles, with the creases cut out to the edges of his face.
“You’re right, Phil,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not a suspect. Or your boss and his wife either.”
“Suspect all you want,” I said. “Only do it on your own time.”
“Fair enough.” Then, pointing at Price’s name on Bud Fincher’s list: “We’ll start with the one closest to hand.”
“Right,” I said. “But let’s see what the computer’s got on them first.”
I should have known better, I guess. I mean, if the Big O’s memory bank contained detailed files on the neighbors who lived down the road, it would—logically—be encyclopedic on people Bashard had known well. But it didn’t turn out that way. The computer had entries for them, and they were detailed enough, but nowhere near what it had on the neighbors. Maybe Bashard carried his friends in his head and hadn’t bothered to enter all their dirty laundry. Squilletti asked me who had done the entering. I didn’t know for a fact—I knew Grace and Price had had access to the computer, and that Price had taken care of a lot of the sorting and entering of correspondence—but I thought Bashard himself had done most of it. I remembered him hovering over the keyboard that first morning, bringing up the jogger’s file, the pleasure he’d gotten out of it. It was a hobby with him, like a kid collecting nature specimens.
Still, it took us a long time to wade through them, with their cross references to correspondence and telephone conversations. And even though (assuming the data was accurate) it represented a hell of a shortcut, particularly for Bud Fincher and me, there was something numbing about the exercise.
