by Peter Israel
It occurred to me that with Bashard dead, Latham might become the Grand Old Man himself.
As much to keep the conversation going as anything, I asked him about the old days. There’d been a photograph shown at the BashCon banquet of Latham and Bashard when they were young, along with some others. Ron Whitefield had used it as a way of introducing Latham.
He remembered the photo, too. In fact he named the others in it, noting that he was the last one still on his feet.
“Times were different then,” he said, “that’s all. I wouldn’t say better, that would be stupid nostalgia. Different. We were young, broke, not two nickels among the bunch of us. We wrote, we read each other’s work, we drank a ton, we argued, fought; we also helped each other. We were going to change the world. I guess we didn’t. Everybody had to make a living some other way. Do you know what Raul did? He was a free-lance typist. He’d take in typing, whenever he could get it. Ten cents a page, that was the going rate, then it went up to twenty-five cents. Plus a nickel for every carbon. There were years he made more typing other people’s manuscripts than his own. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
“You must have known his first wife,” I said.
“I met her once,” he answered.
“She committed suicide, didn’t she?”
“That’s right.”
“Why was that?”
He shrugged slightly.
“I told you,” he answered. “He was a son of a whore. A real one.”
“To his second wife, too?”
“Who, Madge? No, I guess if there was an exception, she’d have been the one.”
“But I’ve heard that didn’t keep him from chasing other women.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Maybe so.”
There was another lull, during which he found the last cigarette in the pack and lit up. He looked inside the pack, as though hoping to find more inside, then crumpled it and dropped it among the desk papers.
“How well do you know Grace Bashard?” I asked.
“I knew her very well as a child. She was a beautiful little girl. Impulsive. Also utterly charming, when she wanted something.”
“Is she still that way?”
“I wouldn’t know. Still beautiful, at any rate.”
“But let me ask you something; before, when I said most people thought she was the one who’d killed him, you found it funny. Why was that again?”
“I told you that. Not because of her but because of the people, the way people think.”
“So you still think she might have done it?”
“I never said I thought she did,” he corrected.
“But it was a particularly bloody crime. Do you think she’d have been capable of that?”
If I expected some reaction, I got none.
“I wouldn’t know,” he repeated imperturbably. “How people murder each other doesn’t interest me that much.”
This was, I thought in passing, a surprising statement for a writer to make. But it was virtually the last one he made.
“One other thing,” I said. “At the BashCon, at the end of the banquet, did you and Bashard have an argument?”
“An argument? I don’t remember one.”
“You said something, shouted something … strange. It sounded like Burro.”
“Did I?”
I remembered that I wasn’t the only one who’d heard it.
“It sounded like Burro. What could that have meant?”
“I’ve no idea,” he answered. “I’d had too much to drink, I think. I’m not so used to it anymore.”
Abruptly, then, he ended the interview. Without fanfare. He’d already given me more time than he could spare, he said, and he had work to do. He hadn’t slept well the night before, he was tired even before his day began.
He didn’t apologize. That was simply, clearly, the way it was. Nor did he offer me his hand, nor stand up.
I left him sitting, a thin and bony figure, paper-thin, and made my way out through the clutter and the dusty shafts of light. I’d left my jacket in the car, and still squinting in the sunlight, the midday heat started me sweating. I stopped level with his dusty VW, listening to the insects buzzing, and it was there that he caught up with me.
“I know I asked you before,” he said, patting at his pockets, “but are you sure you don’t have any cigarettes?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “I quit.”
“I know, nobody smokes anymore. But goddammit it, it’s hard to write anything without a cigarette.”
I volunteered to go get him some if he wanted me to, but he said never mind, he was quitting, too, he thought he’d find some more in the house somewhere anyway. Then his voice trailed off and I noticed he was staring off through the trees, uphill, toward the farmhouse, his eyes squinting and unblinking.
“Sons of bitches,” he said quietly, as if to nobody. “I used to live up there, did you know that? But I’m going to get it back, never mind.”
He stood next to me for a moment, still staring, eyes squinting, then left me without another word. I watched him duck his head and disappear into the dark interior of the little house. I trudged back to the Fiero. If anybody was watching me from the farmhouse I couldn’t see them, and the only sound I heard was the bugs.
I was back on the New Jersey side of the river, heading home, when, twiddling with the radio knob, I hit one of the twenty-four-hour all-news all-crime stations. I was half listening, I guess, to the rapes, muggings, robberies, because only the tail end of one of the stories broke into my consciousness. At that, it sent me off onto the Route 80 shoulder, and I stopped the car. I didn’t believe what I’d heard, or thought I’d heard.
I was addled enough, I remember, to reach for the tape rewind, thinking I could call it back. Then, knowing the same news item would recycle in twenty minutes or so but not having twenty minutes I drove off again and swung the dial indicator over to the other all-news station. The sound kept yinging and yanging as I descended into the valleys, but when their version of the report came on I caught it on a yang, loud and clear.
Police were investigating the apparent homicide, the night before, of one John Jameson, whose body had been found this morning in a downtown hotel room. John Jameson was the assumed name of John Jacob Bashard, son of Raul Bashard, the famous science-fiction writer, whose own recent murder in the Catskills was still unsolved. Raul Bashard had been beaten to death. His son, John, had apparently been killed by two pistol shots, at close range, at or about twelve midnight. NYPD headquarters had no comment as to whether the two crimes were linked.
I had to drive some ten miles before I reached an exit, then another few of winding road till I found a gas station with a telephone.
“He’s absolutely screaming for you, Philippe,” said Roger LeClerc. “Where are you?”
“Never mind, put me through to him.”
“I can’t. The lines are tied up. Where are you, Philippe?”
“Then put me through to Shapiro!”
“I told you I can’t, Philippe. Do you want to hold on?”
“Well, who else is there besides you?”
“Nobody but Monsieur Fanshare. Monsieur Fanshare is sitting in your office.”
“Then for Christ’s sake put him on!”
A moment later—which Roger, typically, made a long one—I had Bud Fincher on the line.
Had I heard the news? Yes, I’d just heard it. What in hell was Bashard’s son doing in New York? Had anybody known it? He didn’t have the answer. He himself had only just gotten back, with Charlotte McCullough, from Bashard’s place in New Jersey. Why had he left? I was supposed to meet him there to talk to Price, wasn’t I? Because the Counselor had called him back. The Counselor wanted us all there. All he knew was that the Counselor was enraged that I wasn’t there, too, that the police wanted to talk to Grace Bashard and that the Counselor would be held in contempt if he didn’t produce her by the end of the day.
Where was Grace? I
asked him. He didn’t know that. Was there reason to believe she’d done it? He didn’t know that one either. He knew the name of the hotel where Jameson had been killed, a Village fleabag known to us both (by reputation anyway) as a gay hangout. Beyond that he could add nothing to the radio report. Also that it had, in fact, happened around midnight; there were witnesses to the time.
At this point there was a break in the line. Then the Counselor’s voice broke in.
“Where in goddamn hell are you, Phil?” I could see the face behind that tone, brows descended.
I told him. I had about an hour and a half’s drive.
“That’s not good enough,” he said. “Put wings on the car. I need you in less than an hour.”
At that, the phone went dead in my ear.
I took him at his word. Fortunately the New Jersey state troopers were out to lunch. With my headlights on and the use of the horn, I made it to the tunnel and was parking next to the hydrant a couple of blocks from the office, which was the closest I could get, exactly fifty-seven minutes from the time he’d hung up.
And all the way in, in spite of myself, two thoughts kept bonging into my head. The first was that the Counselor had evidently missed his lunch at La Gonzesse. The second was that at least this crime, to judge from the timing, was one nobody could try to pin on yours truly.
Third thought: How in God’s name did 1010 WINS know that John Jameson was Raul Bashard’s son?
CHAPTER
11
NYPD time.
This put the Counselor in his element, because he knew how they played the game. Personally I’d choose the simpler Catskills version, where there was Al Squilletti and Harmon Waller, and you could figure out pretty easily who called which shots and where one individual’s power and responsibility stopped and another’s took over. With the NYPD, you never know entirely. The further up the organization you go, the more you have to worry about an individual covering his own ass, and covering it not only from an immediate superior, which would be easy, but from a totally different branch or division that is always looking out for its own piece of the power pie. In other words, the New York Police Department may look like a monolith to the outside—self-protective, secretive, autonomous—but inside, particularly in the upper echelons, the power struggle never ends.
This creates a hell of a dangerous situation for somebody who doesn’t know how the game is played. But for somebody who does, like the Counselor, there can be hidden opportunities.
Translate, please, into the murder of John Jameson.
All right. In a city where a major crime is committed every few minutes, ninety-nine out of a hundred times nobody gives a damn, and that nobody includes, obviously, the police. Blacks kill blacks, Hispanics Hispanics, etc., etc., and it’ll make the radio, sometimes TV, headlines in the Post and the News, once in a while the Times, but twenty-four hours later it’s gone and the police can forget about it. Sure, once in a blue moon you’ll read about their unsolved-crime statistics, but statistics make lousy headlines, and whereas most crimes that aren’t solved in the first hours stay that way, time works for the police. Which isn’t to say, mind you, that they do a bad job or don’t care, only that crime detection requires manpower—and short of putting the entire populace in uniform there just aren’t enough cops to handle the caseload.
From the police’s point of view, this is not their problem. They’re right. And the citizenry, while they may not like it, accept it.
But what most people don’t realize is that most cases that stay in the headlines are put there, and kept there, by the police and the media working hand in glove. One example ought to prove what I’m getting at:
Question: When you stop to think about it, is there anything intrinsically worse about a cop killing than any other murder?
Answer: Of course not. Dead is dead, murder is murder and punishable by the laws of the land and so on.
Question: Then what is it, who is it, that makes a cop killing seem worse?
Answer: The media and the police, themselves, and for obvious reasons. The police are motivated by self-preservation, also by the ongoing need to create public sympathy. (Nothing works for the police, at union contract time, like the public’s sense of how thankless and dangerous their task is.) The media are motivated by their need for serial stories, ones that’ll keep people buying papers day after day, or tuning in the six o’clock news to catch the latest episode, complete with pictures of uniformed men in funeral processions.
What I’m getting at is simply this: the killing of John Jameson would have been buried in small print and forgotten if somebody hadn’t known about the connection. What could be more humdrum in a city like New York than one more crime of passion, in this case one gay shooting another, particularly in a notorious joint like the Village “hotel” in question? Only somebody did know the connection—a reporter, as it turned out—and the police, once they learned that the victim was Raul Bashard’s son, went public in spades.
By the time I got to the office, as I’ve said, there wasn’t a parking place for blocks around, not even an illegal one. Mobile units from the local TV stations were parked up and down our street and around on Park Avenue, and NYPD plates were double-parked to Madison. A tangle of cables and wires led the way up from the ground floor to the Counselor’s office where, it turned out, the Counselor himself was holding an impromptu press conference for a media mob. All designed, needless to say, to ingratiate us with the neighborhood.
Roger LeClerc met me downstairs. He was a nervous wreck, poor soul. His domain was in the process of being trashed and trampled, and he’d had nothing to say about it. Althea, the housekeeper, was standing guard over the residential floors, but who knew how long she’d hold out? Roger’s instructions for me, if I arrived too late for the press conference, was to go straight up to the fifth-floor solarium, by elevator, but otherwise he was too busy to talk to me; no, he didn’t know where Bud Fincher had gone, and he ran off in about four directions at once, accomplishing nothing much that I could see.
As a result, I missed the press conference, though I caught snatches of it that night on the late-night news.
I’ll give you one guess who called it. Or to put it another way: when in doubt, counterattack.
The Counselor had no information concerning the death of John Jameson, nor did his client, nor did he have any basis to link it to the murder of Raul Rogan Bashard, Jameson’s father. For all he knew it was a tragic coincidence, though that was for the police to determine. Meanwhile his client, Grace Bashard, legal daughter of Raul Bashard and daughter by birth of John Jameson, was understandably in a state of shock and being kept in seclusion.
Was it true that Jameson had information about the Bashard case? The Counselor didn’t know. Where was Grace Bashard? The Counselor was not at liberty to say.
When would the media be allowed to interview her? The Counselor couldn’t say. Certainly not at present.
But she was the subject of considerable public interest. How long was Charles Camelot going to hide her?
At this question, the camera closed in on the Counselor behind his desk. He drew himself up, furrowed his brows dramatically, and pointing with the stem end of his pipe (a still-smoking pipe), said: “I know many of you individually, you ladies and gentlemen of the media. You’re fine people, individually. Most of you take your jobs seriously. But all together, you’re like a pack of hyenas. I’m not going to expose an eighteen-year-old girl, in a troubled and bereaved state of mind, to a pack of hyenas.”
This response drew a new torrent of questions all at once (thereby, it should be said, tending to prove the Counselor’s point). But he, now in command and still pointing with the pipe, took them one at a time.
Would the police be allowed to interview Grace? Yes.
When? That was currently being discussed with representatives of the police department.
Was Grace Bashard a suspect in the second Bashard murder? They would have to ask the police
that. But he wouldn’t be surprised if she were.
How long had John Jameson, Raul Bashard’s son, been in New York? He had no idea.
Had he seen John Jameson? Not in many years.
Was it true that John Jameson was an avowed homosexual? If the word avowed meant a public declaration of some kind, he was unaware of one, but yes, he understood that John Bashard had been of the gay persuasion.
Was it true that John Jameson had been suffering from AIDS? The Counselor had no such knowledge.
Did he believe the Raul Bashard murder would ever be solved? The Counselor certainly hoped so, but that was a question that should be put to the appropriate authorities.
At this point, at least on the late news, a female reporter-in-the-street took over, mouthing some so-called irony about tragedy having struck the Bashard family twice. Then the image of our building, shot from the street, gave way to a commercial. I don’t remember what the commercial was about. I was too busy by then drafting my letter of resignation.
Back to that afternoon, the elevator, the fifth-floor solarium. I’ve described the place before. What a great idea, you’d say, an indoor tropical garden all your own complete with hot tub and smack in the middle of New York City. Only try it in the New York summer heat—even with the shutters down over the skylights and the great striped awnings shielding the outer terrace as well as the glass walls—when the air-conditioning has to be kept low and the humidifying up because of the plantings. You’d say whoever designed it had to be crazy.
I never said the Counselor’s Wife was crazy. Only a shrink.
Maybe it wasn’t the temperature that brought little beads of sweat onto my forearms that afternoon. Maybe it was the sight, totally unexpected, of Grace Bashard, the troubled and bereaved eighteen-year-old, standing as I came off the elevator and walking toward me, barefooted, arms outstretched.
