by Peter Israel
“Let’s cut out the bullshit,” he said, once we were seated. “You’re here because you want to pin the murder on me. It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of. You haven’t got bupkis. I haven’t been convicted of a crime in my whole life. I wouldn’t hurt a fly. But you want to pin it on me. Well, go ahead. Try. But cut the bullshit, I’m a busy man.”
“Why do you think I want to pin it on you?” I asked, thinking that whereas Norman Hermatius wouldn’t hurt a cockroach, Frankaman wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“How do I know?” he shot back. “Maybe you and Camelot don’t like Jews. Maybe you and Camelot got nobody else.” I didn’t say anything right away, but he wasn’t one to put up with silence. “Look,” he said, jabbing the pinkie, “how dumb do you think I am? I know I’m on your list. Never mind how I know, I know. And what do you do? You call up everybody else on the list, you make nice, you go to see them, you ask lots of questions, you ask lots of questions about me, and so on. But do you call me up, too? No. Do you make an appointment? No. What do you do instead? You come snooping one morning when I’m not around, trying to dig something up, asking lots of stupid questions. Twenty-fifth Century Tales my ass. How dumb do you think I am?”
I started to laugh part way through but squelched it. If Sidney Frankaman was sensitive about the slight, not to say paranoid, maybe I could make some use of it. I didn’t get very far, though.
“About Twenty-fifth Century—” I began.
“Who told you about that?” he said, his glance darting out the picture window.
“Told me about what?”
“Come on, come on,” he retorted. “I said let’s cut out the bullshit. All right, so maybe we took Bashard to the cleaners a little, so what? He could afford it.” He laughed briefly, a braying sound. “Is that a crime? If that’s a crime, then put the handcuffs on.” Then, more subdued: “Gevalt, that’s what you get for trying to do somebody a favor. You end up taking gas.”
I didn’t quite get what he was talking about.
“Who’s we?” I asked. “You and Brinckerhoff?”
His eyes darted again, then fixed on me.
“Is that what Brinckerhoff said?”
“I haven’t seen him yet.”
“You haven’t seen him yet? Then who told you about Twenty-fifth Century Tales?”
“Nobody. I read the correspondence.”
“Ahhh,” he said. “Then ask Brinckerhoff.”
I pushed him on the point, but he clammed up. It was all “ask Brinckerhoff.” I pushed him on other points, his version of things I already knew. He’d visibly relaxed by then, and I looked for something to jolt him with again.
“All right, Mr. Frankaman—”
“Sidney,” he corrected.
“Sidney,” I said. “Who do you think killed him?”
“You don’t want to know,” he answered.
“Maybe I do.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Okay,” he said, his small eyes suddenly large and ringed through the magnifying lenses. “You and I both know it, and I doubt we’re alone. The cunt did it. His so-called ‘daughter.’”
“Why would she have done it?”
Frankaman rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together.
“The money,” he said, “what else? Once he changed his will, what did she have to lose as long as she could get away with it?”
That he, too, knew about the revised will, and the matter-of-fact, almost accidental, way he said it, jolted me in turn.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but how did you know he’d changed his will?”
“How did I know? Because he said so. He told everybody at the banquet, the night before he died.”
“Everybody?” I asked.
“Sure he did. Everybody up on the dais anyway. During dinner. He said he’d made a mistake, never trusting his own daughter. Some mistake, huh?”
“But you weren’t on the dais. How did you find out?”
“Of course I wasn’t on the dais. I should have been, but that was the bastard’s way of punishing me.”
“Then how did you find out?”
“I don’t remember. Everybody knew it. Somebody must have told me, maybe the next day. What difference does it make?”
“Did Grace know it, too?”
“Come on,” he said, staring at me. “How dumb do you take me for? Would she have murdered him if she didn’t?”
Before I knew it, he was off on a weird kind of diatribe. It was about the young people of today. The young people stank, he said. No morals, no learning. All they cared about was money. Money and garbage. Given half the chance, they stole it.
“Look at what I’ve got to sell to make a living today!” he shouted, jabbing toward the main floor of the Dark Star. “Garbage! Do you think I like selling garbage? It was better in the old days. We didn’t make so much money, but I was never greedy. That was when science fiction meant something. Oakes, Heinlein, Bradbury, Latham, Sturgeon … even Bashard. All right, Bashard, too. They were real writers! I read them when I was a young man. Can you imagine what it was like to meet them? But today? A bunch of hacks, typists. That’s all the new ones are, typists. Gimme a break. But that’s what the kids want, that’s what you sell ’em. I’ll tell you what; you want to buy a business? The whole chain is yours. I’ve already turned down six mill, but make me a decent offer, I’ll give you the keys today. Enough is enough. I’ve made mine, I’m not greedy.”
From what I knew of him, six million dollars was probably double the price he would take, and for all I knew, the Dark Star was worth it. But I didn’t have a handy six million or half of it lying around. I tried instead to bring the conversation back to Bashard’s will, but that set him off in a new direction.
“He was a mean and stingy goy, I’ll tell you that. Sure, he could write, but even when he made a fortune and others didn’t, do you think he’d share any of it? All right, Herbert did all right, one or two others, but take Oakes. Did you ever read Clem Oakes? A terrific talent, let me tell you. As good as Latham. He never made much money at it. He didn’t write enough, for one thing. He was sick half the time. He smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, and died of emphysema. Not so long ago. A couple of years. Drugs, too, so they say. He tried to get money out of Bashard, used to say he was entitled to it, but the bastard never gave him a nickel. When Clem died, we had to pass the hat to get him buried. Even Latham kicked in, who couldn’t afford it either. But Bashard? Bupkis. Do you know what he said? ‘I’ve already given enough.’ The lying son of a bitch. I even kicked in myself, can you believe that?”
He was puffed up enough about it that you had to believe him, and he underlined the point by taking out a bandanna-size handkerchief and blowing his nose emphatically into it. Then he folded the handkerchief over and dabbed his forehead.
“Poor bastard,” he said.
At this point the phone on his desk buzzed. A moment later Ms. Petulant stuck her head in the door, glancing first at me and then at Frankaman through the horn-rims before she announced that someone was waiting to see him.
“Tell ’em to wait, honey,” he said, then to me: “Bunch of sales reps. Garbage peddlers.”
He stood up, though. He came up to my shoulders.
“Did I convince you, Revere?”
“Convince me of what?”
“Of the futility of trying to pin it on me?” He laughed heartily, then put a hand on my shoulder, the one with the pinkie ring. People in L.A., it seemed, like to touch. “Let me give you a piece of advice, though. You seem like a nice-enough young man. Stop trying to pin it on somebody else. The cunt did it, we all know that. A terrible thing. I know, it’s money. Camelot’s in for a piece if you get her off. A big piece, I’d guess. You don’t have to tell me. But money isn’t everything. You’ll sleep better nights.”
He’d steered me into the outer office by then, where Ms. Petulant was standing by and the two sales reps were just getting up from a couch. The
gesture was so swift I almost missed it, but I’m pretty sure he patted her on the ass as we walked by. Or, given what he said next, he may have wanted me to notice.
He came with me to the top of the stairs. He offered to answer any other questions I had, any time, then stopped and took my arm.
“One other thing,” he said in a confidential voice. “Are you going to see Charlotte?” It took me a second to remember that Charlotte was Mrs. Sidney Frankaman. “A waste of your time, she was out like a light that whole night for one thing. But if you do, do me a favor, honh? Don’t tell her about that one.” He pointed with the ringed pinkie in the direction of his office. I gathered he was talking about his secretary. “It doesn’t mean anything, but I’m in trouble enough as it is.”
Name: Brinckerhoff, Richard white Caucasian male
Age: 68
Health: good
Sign: Gemini
Function: retired
Marital status: married (Serena Baker, 1945)
Children: 4 Grandchildren: 3
Employment: former chairman, mbr board, Baker Ocean Transport Corporation
Income: circa $2 million annum
Net worth: circa $25 million
Born: Riverside, Conn. Resides: Pasadena, California
Education: B.A., Yale
Sexual preference: faithful spouse
I’ve heard it said that Pasadena was once a haven for the rich, which in California means very rich, but that it’s lately gone to seed, which in California means an influx of blacks and Hispanics. I didn’t find out that day, because my route took me off the freeway outside Pasadena and until I got up into the hills a brown haze of smog hid the horizon. To tell the truth, I didn’t much care either. I was focused more on the dense traffic, the length of time it took me to get there, and my own very recent lapse of memory.
Before I left Westwood I’d made two calls. The first was to the office. The Counselor wasn’t available, but he had a question for me.
“What’s the S.O.W. Account?” the Counselor wanted to know, via Ms. Shapiro. “S, period, O, period, W, period. Is it some kind of writers’ club?”
I didn’t know what the S.O.W Account was, or anything about a writers’ club. I didn’t know if S.O.W. stood for “sow” or if the initials meant something else. But I knew immediately that I’d seen it before, and where, and I remembered Raul Bashard’s explanation. I was also willing to bet my last buck it had been missing, or erased, when Bud Fincher, Squilletti, and I reviewed the computer hate-mail files two days before.
I told Ms. Shapiro as much.
Only the names escaped me. A man and a woman, I thought.
I hung up and called Bud Fincher. Mr. Fincher was out, his secretary said, “in the field.” Where precisely, I asked her. She said he’d had an appointment with a Mr. Varga, did I want Mr. Varga’s number? I decided I didn’t, but told her that if Bud wasn’t going to be in his office later, he should leave me his whereabouts for the rest of that day and evening on my home phone. I’d be calling in.
Then I drove out to Pasadena in the smog, wrestling with the traffic and my memory, or lack of memory.
The Brinckerhoffs, Richard and Serena, were a hearty, open couple, visibly satisfied with each other and their circumstances. He was East Coast money; she was more money from the West. She had inherited the Baker Ocean Transport Corporation and he had made it what it was, or is, today. They lived in Pasadena because she’d grown up there and loved it. So did Richard. They loved their home, a Spanish-style manse in the Pasadena hills. I found it remarkable for its spaciousness and lightness, given that style of architecture. It was all chintz and light walls and red-tiled floors. The tiles, Serena Brinckerhoff told me, had been imported from Spain. Interior and exterior. The wrought iron, too. They loved swimming and had their own pool, a long, kidney-shaped affair of pale, shimmering water implanted in tile and surrounded by flower beds of Serena’s own planting. They loved tennis and had a pair of courts, clay, with lighting for night play. They loved travel and were gone now three to four months every year, but the best part of travel was always coming home, to their home. The portrait of them which hung in their living room had been painted twenty-four years ago in that very same living room. They loved that portrait. It showed her as beautiful and him as handsome. For a couple in their sixties, they still looked pretty good.
I suppose that if they loved golf, they’d have laid out eighteen holes somewhere on the grounds.
And Richard loved science fiction, and his extensive collection (which I toured), because he had read H. G. Wells as a boy. Serena didn’t, not at all. It was one of the few things they disagreed about, but that maybe added spice to their harmony.
The first question I asked Richard Brinckerhoff, once the niceties were over, was what kind of chess player Bashard had been.
“I never knew that he played chess,” Richard Brinckerhoff told me. We were sitting, finally, in what they called their indoor-outdoor room, a plant-filled, screened-in terrace really, which was covered by a single striped awning that rolled out from the side of the house. “Not that it would surprise me. Back when Madge was still alive, he did a million and one things.”
“Did you know him well then?” I asked.
“Yes, we did,” Brinckerhoff said. “He was a different man when Madge was alive.”
“Well,” Serena Brinckerhoff put in, “he was never exactly what you’d call the life of the party.”
“I don’t know, dear. Maybe he wasn’t the life of the party, but he went to parties. And talked, was interesting to listen to …”
“And always wore those awful sneakers,” Serena said.
“Yes, he did.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I always found him dour.” She pronounced the word dower. “Do you know what dour means, Phil?”
I nodded.
“Stiff, more,” Brinckerhoff corrected. “And I always felt he was stiff because he was shy, inside.”
“Shy?” Serena exclaimed, laughing.
“All writers are shy.”
“Well, he wasn’t so shy that he couldn’t make a pass at me.”
“He made a pass at you?” Brinckerhoff asked cheerfully. “You never told me that.”
“Oh yes I did. You just don’t remember. He was very correct about it. I mean, he waited till Madge was out of the room. He said he’d like to see me sometime, if I was free. I told him I wasn’t free, and that was that. I gather he tried elsewhere, too.”
“You don’t know that for a fact, darling,” Brinckerhoff said.
“Oh, no?” she retorted gaily, patting her husband on the knee. “Do you still believe women don’t tell each other things?”
They sat side by side on a wrought-iron couch with flowered cushions. I noticed that they touched each other frequently.
“It’s hard to believe he’s dead,” Richard Brinckerhoff said. “I mean, he had more things wrong with him than a dozen men have, but he always pulled through. He had the constitution of an ox, isn’t that right, darling? But now he is dead, murdered. Brutally murdered. It’s hard to believe.”
This was as close, I realized, as any of these people came to expressing regret over Bashard’s death.
“Did you know he was going to die anyway?” I asked Brinckerhoff.
“Aren’t we all?” he answered.
“No, I mean that the doctors had given him only a few months to live?”
“I think I read something to that effect,” Brinckerhoff replied.
“But did you know it before he was murdered?”
“No. But we wouldn’t have paid much attention if we had. He was always being given up for dead, or dying.”
“Anyway,” Serena Brinckerhoff said, “have you found the murderer yet?”
“If we had,” I answered, “I probably wouldn’t be here. But we’re working on it.”
“Well in that case,” she said brightly, “I’m glad you haven’t, because you wouldn’t be here otherwise. But I suppose
you want to know who we think did it, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not sure he does, darling,” Brinckerhoff put in.
“Of course he does!” Then, to me: “We think Grace did it. It’s obvious, isn’t it? And that you’re trying to cover up for her. You and that lawyer you work for.”
“Camelot,” her husband said.
“Camelot,” she repeated.
They made the accusation so conversationally, like it fitted into a general chitchat, that I couldn’t summon up any indignation. Or maybe that was because, by then, I’d gotten too used to hearing it.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked. “For his money?”
“No, not the money,” Brinckerhoff said. “She had that anyway.”
“Because of what he’d done to her father,” Serena said. “We’ve talked it over, and we think that was the motive. She killed him because of how he’d treated her real father. You know all about that part, don’t you?”
“Some,” I said. John Jameson, last known address: Sydney, Australia. “Did you know him? The son, I mean?”
“Hardly,” Brinckerhoff said. “You’d have to ask—”
“When we first met Raul,” Serena interrupted, “we didn’t even know there was a son. Raul was with Madge then.”
“The first we knew about it,” Brinckerhoff said, “was when they showed up with a baby.”
“That would have been Grace?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“And Madge hadn’t even been preggers,” Serena added. “If I remember right, she couldn’t have children. At least that’s what Raul said. So he’d done the next best thing, he’d gone out and gotten her one. That’s what he always said.”
I tried to push them on the subject, but they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Like why had Johnny—Bashard’s son—given up the baby? Money, they said. Bashard had paid him off. Besides, they said, the son was gay, a homosexual. How did they know that? They couldn’t remember exactly. It was common knowledge. It was also common knowledge that Raul Bashard hated homosexuals.
