by Peter Israel
“Why did he hate homosexuals?” I asked.
Brinckerhoff shrugged, but his wife said: “Most men do. At least those who’re worried about their own sexuality.”
This was as close as they came to what you could call marital discord. Brinckerhoff said she was talking psychological hogwash. Serena said if Bashard was as much in love with Madge as everybody said, why did he make passes at everything in skirts? And why, more recently, had he locked himself up with his own daughter? Or granddaughter? Or whatever she was?
Brinckerhoff went red in the face. All that incest stuff, he said angrily, was dirty talk, disgusting gossip. He didn’t want to hear it—not from her, not from anybody else.
I wondered who else he might have heard it from, but it didn’t seem like an opportune question. It was Serena herself who saved the moment.
“Honey, you don’t understand these things,” she said, reaching over and patting him again. “And how could you? You’ve never had the problem, and praise the Good Lord, you never will.”
At this she burst out laughing, a guffawing sound, and he, once he got the point, joined in. By the time tea was served, they were holding hands.
By the time tea was served, I also realized I’d blown the last daytime flight out of LAX. This meant either the red-eye or spending another night, but since I had an appointment the next morning, the red-eye would be it. And since it was the red-eye, Serena Brinckerhoff pointed out, there was no reason for me not to stay for tea.
As for the beverage, I never touch the stuff. I had a beer instead, and Brinckerhoff joined me. But along with tea came varieties of little sandwiches on decrusted breads cut into triangles, miniature stuffed croissants, and mounds of those one-bite Danish where one bite leads to half a dozen more. To watch the Brinckerhoffs put them away, you’d have to figure they needed all the tennis they could get. I reminded myself that I was a long way, in distance and days, from the reservoir in Central Park.
During tea, I asked Richard Brinckerhoff about the Twenty-fifth Century Tales affair. He seemed surprised I knew about it, then a little annoyed by what Sidney Frankaman had told me, then finally amused as he remembered how furious Bashard had gotten.
“How much was the set really worth?” I asked him.
He shrugged.
“Whatever somebody was fool enough to pay, I guess,” he said. “When you’re a collector of scarce things, it all depends on how badly you want the item.”
“But eleven thousand dollars was a high price?” I asked.
“Exorbitant, I’d say,” he answered with a chuckle. “But Raul could afford it.”
“And you were the owner, weren’t you?”
“Me?” A look of surprise. “No, not at all. I only acted as an honest broker.”
“Then who was?”
“What did Sidney say?” he asked suspiciously.
“He said to ask you.”
“Oh, come on, Richard”—Serena put it, popping another miniature croissant into her mouth and dabbing her hands on a linen napkin—“tell him. It doesn’t make any difference anymore, does it?”
“I guess not,” he said. “Well, the set belonged to Ollie Latham.”
“Latham?” I said. “But wouldn’t he have sold it directly to Bashard?”
“You’ll have to ask him that,” Brinckerhoff said guardedly.
“C’mon, honey,” Serena interrupted, “Raul never would have paid that much money if he’d known it was Ollie, because Ollie’s too much of a gentleman to have asked for it. You know that. That’s why he needed a heavy like you.”
“He made out like it was a joke on Raul,” Brinckerhoff said, “but I think it was really because he needed the money. Not that he’d ever admit it. You know Ollie.”
I explained that I didn’t, not really, although I was going to see him the next morning.
“A beautiful man,” Serena said.
“Something of a hermit, too,” Brinckerhoff said. “At least I’ve never been invited to his place when I’ve been East. It always struck me as ironic that Raul made all the money because a lot of people will tell you—at least people who know science fiction—that Latham’s better.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
Brinckerhoff hesitated, and his wife echoed a remark I’d heard her make once before, at the BashCon banquet: “It’s all boys’ stuff,” she said, “like a bunch of grown men watching another bunch of grown men chase a pointed ball around a football field. That’s all science fiction is. I’ve been trying to get my husband to admit it for years.”
“Never mind, darling,” Richard Brinckerhoff said, taking his wife’s hand in his. They were still holding hands later, standing before the entrance to their Pasadena hacienda, when I finally managed to get back behind the wheel of my rented car.
I got to LAX in the trough between the last daytime flights and the red-eye. Airports are among my least favorite hangouts, next to California freeways, but you can only kill so much time handing in your rented car. I was the only one on the Avis shuttle bus, and I had my choice of phones when I got inside the terminal building.
I chose one of the ones where you slide your credit card through the slot. I punched my home number, then broke into my own recorded voice by punching the beeper into the receiver and got my messages.
There were three.
The first was from the Counselor, asking me some more questions about S.O.W. and telling me he wanted to see me first thing in the morning.
The second was from Bud Fincher, giving me a couple of numbers where he could be reached.
I’ll get to the third.
I hung up and found Bud Fincher.
The Counselor had been on to Bud Fincher, too, about S.O.W. Bud didn’t know what it meant either, but he’d given the Counselor the two names I’d been trying to remember all afternoon from the Big O’s hate-mail file: Viola Harmel and Leo Mackes, and he’d already reactivated his search team on the Counselor’s instructions. Maybe, we decided, Viola Harmel was someone Bashard had had an affair with, who’d been trying to shake him down. Bud didn’t hold out much hope, though. Most of the Harmel correspondence had been postmarked from the Philadelphia area, most of the Mackes from Northern California, but that hadn’t led anywhere in his previous search. He, too, had the same recollection I did: that the S.O.W. references hadn’t shown on the computer screen when he, Squilletti, and I reviewed it the day of Bashard’s funeral. At the Counselor’s request, he and Charlotte McCullough, our resident guru in accounting (and particularly computer accounting), were going out to Bashard’s the next morning. Unless it was a glitch, the only two people we could imagine who might have tampered with the computer were Grace Bashard and Price. Grace was the Counselor’s responsibility. Bud wanted us to question Price the next day, and I told him I’d join him at Bashard’s on my way back to the city from the Latham meeting.
Between us, Bud and I had covered all but one of the list of interviewees. He had done Varga, Whitefield, and Wright. I was finished on the West Coast, had done Cyn Morgan, had Latham to go. We compared notes at length. In a factual, evidentiary sense, we were nowhere further than we’d been two days before. If either of us had sat in the presence of a brutal murderer, it was a very well-guarded brutal murderer. Nobody who’d spent the night at the BashCon on the second-floor annex had heard a thing between the storm and the morning. Nobody had cast the least suspicion on anyone other than Grace. They were all good friends, more or less: friends of science fiction, friends of each other.
I’d drawn several general conclusions, and I tried them out on Bud. The most important ones, or so I thought, were:
1) The group had decided as a whole that Grace was the murderess. Explanations for her motive varied: money; sex; revenge. Furthermore, I had either helped her or was trying to cover up for her, or both.
2) Nobody much regretted Raul Bashard’s death. No mourning, no keening, no flags at half-mast. It was almost as if they’d expected it. Even as if he’d deserv
ed it.
3) Everybody, although I couldn’t begin to put my finger on it, was covering up something they knew, or suspected. No, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the impression had come and gone for two days.
4) Therefore, whatever the group had decided as a whole, the individuals in it thought Grace Bashard might not be the murderess.
5) I felt—continued to feel—the same way. Don’t ask me why.
Bud Fincher agreed with the second point. Only with the second. The only regrets he’d heard he’d judged to be skin-deep. The “Grand Old Man of Science Fiction” kind of regrets, except for Ron Whitefield, the book publisher, who had business reasons for caring. George Varga had said that Bashard’s writing had deteriorated badly, best-seller lists or not. Sam Wright had called him a mean, coldhearted son of a bitch. Ron Whitefield had run black-bordered in-memoriam ads in papers across the country.
But Bud hadn’t felt people were covering up, at least things to do with the murder. It was more like: Bashard was dead, however it had happened, and life went on. Maybe, he said, a little apologetically, he hadn’t asked the same questions I did.
“Come on, Bud,” I heard myself say over three thousand miles of cabling, “is that the best you can do?”
“That’s the best I can do, Phil,” he answered back.
I felt myself going hot and a little prickly under the skin.
“Well, why the hell don’t you ever tell me what you think?”
“You never asked.”
“All right, I’ll ask. Do you think Grace did it and that all we’re doing is covering up for her? Or trying to?”
There was a long pause on the line. I thought I could see Bud’s face and the jaw muscles working a little under the skin.
“I’d rather not answer that one, Phil,” he said quietly.
“Why not?”
“I don’t see the point.”
So be it.
I made two other calls, at least for form’s sake. Sidney Frankaman wasn’t home. He wasn’t expected till later. Was this Mrs. Frankaman? Yes, it was. I explained who I was. I asked her if she’d ever heard of a Viola Harmel or a Leo Mackes. No, she hadn’t. Were they science-fiction people? Yes, in a way. Well, she didn’t know much about science-fiction people, but she’d ask her husband when she saw him.
I thanked Mrs. Frankaman. Then I tried Norman Hermatius, but his office didn’t answer, and his home number was unlisted. I called the Brinckerhoffs. Serena was delighted to hear from me again, so soon. No, I wasn’t disturbing them. She’d put Richard on.
Richard Brinckerhoff hadn’t heard of them either. As for S.O.W., what was that? He didn’t know anything about it.
I hung up, still sitting in the partitioned booth, the plastic credit card still in my hand, while the hot and prickly came over me again.
All right, ask me why.
The third message on my answering machine. Like a voice from another life. Now breathy, whispery, like trying to avoid being overheard. Now shrill, angry, and punctuated by the high-pitched buzz when she’d have had to redial to continue the message.
Phil, my darling, where are you? Why haven’t you come? Why haven’t you called? I need you, I’ve never needed you more. I thought you’d get me out of here long before now. I hate these hotels, I hate being cooped up. I’m frightened, worried, I want—(buzz) … “Phil, it’s me again. I hate your Mr. Charles Camelot! I want to go home, Phil. I want you to come take me home. Phil, I’ll make it worth your while. I mean, I know how to make it worth your while, remember, darling? … (giggle)—(buzz) … God damn your machine! Where are you when I need you? About the murder, Phil. I didn’t kill him, I swear it. I swear it to you, my baby. Everybody thinks I did except you, even Mr. Camelot does, but I’m ready to talk about it, Phil. I couldn’t before. But only to you. I’ll only talk about it while you—(buzz) … I hate this. I’m so frightened. Something terrible’s going to happen, I can’t tell you what, but I’m so scared. I can feel it. I’m all alone. I hate it. Please come get me. I’ll do all the things you like, anything, I’ll run away with—(buzz) … All right, Phil, it’s me again. Remember me? If you don’t come, if you don’t call, I’m going to … (starting to sob) … I’m going to tell them everything we did that night … (sobbing, accusing) … I’m going to tell them … every thing you did for …
At this point, though, the machine must have run out of tape.
PART THREE
CHAPTER
10
Creature of habit.
I could have gotten on any number of flights out of LAX, and maybe I should have. United States and foreign, Alaska, Japan, Europe, Mexico, Hawaii, New Zealand, Singapore, South America, and points north, east, south and west. Fly the Friendly Skies. Per my own vital statistics in Bashard’s computer I was as footloose as the next guy, with enough plastic credit to get started and, actuarially speaking, good years in front of me.
Why not? Start a new life from scratch, bury the old one. Let the Counselor solve the crime.
He’d collect the fee anyway.
But I had a ticket that said New York, a boarding pass with a gate number and a seat number, a pillow and a blanket waiting for me, and an empty seat next to mine that I took over for my knees. I told the stewardess not to wake me up for earphones, drinks, dinner, movies, seat belts, hot towels or anything she had on her schedule. She actually wished me “sweet dreams.”
Creature of habit.
As it was I sat up most of the night, in the darkness. I watched a movie off and on, without earphones. Somewhere in the dark cabin a baby cried, as fretful as I was, and every so often I heard its mother shouting at it in Spanish to shut up, which didn’t work. I had one of those weird obsessive feelings, the stronger because of the night, that all the answers were there in my head if I could only put the pieces together in the right order. I kept running them through, like the rewind and fast forward on a VCR machine: Grace sneaking out of the suite in the middle of that stormy night to get into my bed, and, key question, did she leave the suite door open or shut? Because if she shut it, then she or I or Price or Bashard himself was either the murderer or the murderer’s accomplice. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that, if she was sneaking out on Raul Bashard, she’d have shut the door behind her? Yes, it would stand to reason, but was Grace Bashard a creature of reason? Maybe she’d wanted him to discover her in my bed, and had left the suite door open, the lights on, the tom-toms beating, looka Daddy, come looka what your baby’s doing now, while the murderer, he or she, had stolen down the corridor and, selecting the poker from the arsenal of fire tools, had methodically beaten Raul Bashard to his death while Grace tucked her body behind my sleeping, dream-besotted self. Only why methodically? It had been a brutal crime; an overkill. Why not madly? But I couldn’t get near the image of him or her, the murderer in the corridor, even though I knew it was there. Grace was in the way, holding me to her, and I knew at the same time I was in the position of having to defend this poor little screwed-up rich teenager against the accusation that was only twenty-four hours and change away, because if I didn’t she was sure as hell going to drag me down with her.
There was more to it than that, sure enough. What was it the Counselor’s Wife had said about sexual deprivation?
I remember straightening myself out of the cramped position I’d gotten into on the two seats. I remember sitting up in the darkness, and the baby crying, and the black sky finally turning gray and then red under the wing, then over the wing, and light coming into the cabin from outside. And my fellow passengers, those who’d been lucky enough to sleep, stretching in their seats, in the aisles, and clustering at the lavatories, and somebody announcing that we were beginning our descent into the New York area, and only then did I drop off for the few minutes till the wheels bumping against earth woke me up again along with the surge of the power of the engines breaking against their own momentum and the people standing to get at the overhead compartments who had to be told to sit back down.
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Home.
Home is wherever you are, maybe.
I rode a taxi into the hazy city. The streets looked foreign to me, even after we came through the park at Seventy-ninth and headed south on Columbus. The people looked foreign too: the dogwalkers, the joggers jogging, the truckers unloading at the food stores, and the business males and females heading for their subways with their briefcases. It was going to be one hot son of a bitch of a day, you could tell that already.
I went upstairs to my place. It was silent, empty, neutral. Unslept-in. It even smelled unslept-in. I plugged in the coffeemaker. I showered, hot followed by cold, and shaved away the twenty-four-hour beard. I got dressed again, leaving the clothes I’d taken off in clumps on the bedroom floor. I swigged a couple of swallows of coffee. It wasn’t good, wasn’t bad. Neutral. I didn’t listen to the message tape again, didn’t stick in a new one, didn’t turn on the radio, didn’t call the office, and when I left I stepped over the newspaper that had been dropped outside my door in the interim.
I felt like an interloper in my own place, like I was doing everything in reverse.
I walked to the garage and woke up the Fiero. First I had the Latham interview, and afterward I wanted to talk to Price again. I headed down Columbus, then Ninth Avenue, and ducked into the tunnel through the jumble of traffic near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Traffic came against us into the city, backed up from the ramp all the way into the Meadowlands. Even the buses in the special lane were immobilized, bumper to bumper in a diesel fog. Shadow Traffic would be calling it a thirty-minute delay, or worse, but I didn’t turn that on either. Instead I triggered up the windows, put the air-conditioning on, and stuck an old Stevie Wonder tape into the dashboard. We fingertipped west against the flow, Stevie and me, with the cruise control at sixty-five.
