by Peter Israel
She was wearing a black linen summer dress, with short sleeves and, so help me, white lace trim around the neckline. Bare legs, bare feet (though she put her shoes on later). No makeup that I could detect. Blond hair swept back and held in place by a black ribbon. Pale of complexion, younger-looking even than her years, and yes, to borrow from the Counselor again, a generally troubled and bereaved look.
“Phil,” she said. “My God. Mr. Camelot said you’d be coming but I didn’t know whether to believe him. Oh Phil, it’s been so long and I’ve been so frightened.”
All this in the same breathy tones. Call it her telephone voice, her made-for-television voice. Her Phil Revere voice.
By this time she was against me, reaching up, her hand burrowing into my shoulder, her arms tight around my neck. The smell of some perfumed shampoo lingered in her hair. It took a while for me to disengage her. There were tear streaks on her pale cheeks, and they looked real enough.
“Oh, Phil. Promise me you’ll never leave me again.”
She clutched at my arm, clung, as I walked her to where she’d been sitting.
“Never say never, Grace. But there’s no reason for you to be frightened.”
“Oh no? That’s easy for you to say. You haven’t been shipped around like a suitcase from hotel room to hotel room, and left alone, nobody to talk to. And nobody answering your calls. Did you know I’d been calling you, Phil?”
“Yes,” I said. “I got your messages.”
I started to say I didn’t know where she was, but that wasn’t altogether the truth. I didn’t know, but I could have found out. Instead, thinking that the Counselor was taking a hell of a risk when the New York media was just three floors below us: “When did you get here?”
“A couple of hours ago. More. Less. I’ve lost track of time. They brought me here this morning.”
“Who’s they?”
“My bodyguards. The watchdogs. I hate them.”
I knew about this, too. Bud Fincher had hired the teams the Counselor had wanted to keep an eye on her.
I sat her down where she’d been sitting, then made the mistake of sitting across from her, in a two-seater. A moment later she was next to me, under a spreading palm tree, sitting sideways on the floral print of the couch, legs tucked up so that the skirt of her dress was taut above the knees, hair splayed against the cushion and her free hand reaching out to hold mine.
“Have you found him yet, Phil?”
“Found who?”
“Whoever it was that killed my father?”
“Which one?” I asked, immediately regretting it, because after a moment’s incomprehension it started her crying in earnest. “Which father, I mean.”
“I only had one,” she said, squeezing my hand hard. “Raul Bashard was my father. This other man … this …”
“John Jameson,” I prompted.
“… whoever he was. He wasn’t my father. I never knew him. I never even talked to him.”
“But he was your real father, Raul was—”
“No he wasn’t! He walked out on me the day I was born. Raul brought me up, Raul took care of me, Raul …”
I never was much for tears. Like most men, a woman in tears makes me fidget, wish I was somewhere else.
“… Raul loved me,” she managed in a small voice.
I handed her a handkerchief, watched her wipe at her eyes. I told her to blow her nose. She did. Then quickly she seized my hand again. I thought distractedly that she’d come quite a ways, on the subject of Bashard, from you lousy filthy creep. I also thought, in spite of myself, that she might have been coached. But if so, she needed no further rehearsals.
“Where were you last night?” I asked her.
“What difference does that make?” she answered.
“It doesn’t particularly to me,” I said. “But the police are going to want to know.”
“I was in my room.”
“In the hotel?”
“In the hotel.”
“You didn’t go out?”
“No. If you want to know the truth, Phil, I was waiting for you to call. Why didn’t you call?”
“I couldn’t,” I said, half lying. “I was in an airplane. It wasn’t one of the ones that has a phone.”
“In an airplane? What were you doing in an airplane?”
“I spent yesterday in sunny California, talking to people about your gr … about Raul Bashard’s murder.”
“Oh?” she said. “Who did you talk to?”
I gave her the list, adding Cyn Morgan and Oliver Latham for good measure, plus the ones Bud Fincher had covered.
Her mouth made an O, but no sound came out. Then, letting my hand go: “Do you think one of them did it?”
“Either one of them, or you, or Price.”
“Price,” she said, giggling, “he’s such an asshole. Have you talked to Price?” Then, before I could answer: “So? Which one do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “Most of them say you did.”
If I expected a strong reaction from her, she disappointed me.
“I’m not surprised,” she said matter-of-factly. “They all hate my guts.”
“Hate your guts? Why is that?”
“Because I was so close to him, silly. Didn’t you see it? They’re all like leeches, you know. Every one of them. He was such a big man, don’t you see? Didn’t you see it at the party? He was a star … you know … famous, the celebrity. Center of attention. Without him, nobody else was anything, except—”
“Except who?”
“I don’t know. Except Ollie, maybe.”
“Ollie Latham?”
“A sweet man.”
“How well do you know him?”
“I used to know him very well, when I was little. He brought me presents, little things. Not so much anymore. I’ve only seen him a few times in …”
Her voice trailed off, and then she put some kind of barrette in her mouth, temporarily. She’d pulled the ribbon free of her hair and shook her head, with the barrette in her mouth, so that the blonde hair swirled and unswirled. It reminded me fleetingly of the first time I’d seen her, on the television screen, standing next to Bashard. Then she reached behind her head with both hands and swept her hair up, the gesture lifting her breasts into the black fabric of her dress. She took the barrette out of her mouth and repinned it to her hair, then retied the ribbon. Then reached again for my hand.
I stood up.
She was pretty, very. She might grow up to be a great beauty, or maybe not, I wasn’t good at guessing such things. But you couldn’t help wishing you could freeze her looks right where they were, and her age, with the body too luscious for eighteen years, and the pale, perfect complexion totally free of makeup, and the fresh swirling hair. Too young for an adult, too old for a child. Too young to kill anybody, you’d almost have to say.
Okay, and I was feeling sweat, too, inside my shirt.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Grace,” I said. “Why did you tell everyone we made love that night? At the BashCon?”
I stood waiting. There was no answer, but I thought I could hear her breathing. Maybe she was debating whether she could make it stand up with me, too. Then, with a soft giggle: “You can’t blame a person for wishing, can you?”
I turned on her. She was facing me now, her legs off the couch, and half smiling up at me. Then, maybe because she saw something in my face, she bit at her upper lip.
“Is it that?” I said angrily. “Or is it that you were covering up?”
“Covering up what? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Because you thought nobody would believe you could have murdered you own gr … all right, your own father … and then gone and had sex with a man in the room next door. Because you thought nobody would believe you could be that cold-blooded. Because you believed it would get you off!”
I watched her cover herself up. Her arms went across her breasts to hug her lace
-collared shoulders, and she rocked her body forward and back and the tears came again.
“But Phil, that’s not true! … I didn’t say it to cover up!”
I took her back through it then, in detail. I started her with the banquet, when she’d been furious, enraged at me she said, and she’d gone off drinking and how, when she’d seen me later in the suite, she was still furious and had gone to bed. Yes, and she’d gone to sleep. Passed out was more like it. And how she’d woken up in the middle of the night, awakened by the storm probably she thought, and was still kind of drunk but felt terrible about what she’d said to me, the way she’d acted. She’d wanted to tell me that, at least that, apologize. So she’d gotten up and left her room, yes, everything was quiet in the suite, and she’d gone outside, intending to knock on my door and wake me up but, finding my door open and me lying in bed sound asleep, so sweetly she said, looking so innocent she said (giggling a little), she’d just gotten into my bed and passed out again. The next she knew, she woke up back in her own room and the doctor was there and Mr. Camelot and they were telling her that her father was dead.
But when she’d left the suite, had she left the door open or not? She didn’t remember. What about the lights? She didn’t remember that either. Had she seen anybody in the hall? No, she hadn’t. She hadn’t heard a sound either, not from Price’s room or anywhere else. But why hadn’t she closed the door behind her? She didn’t know she hadn’t. She thought she might have, but she wasn’t sure. She’d been groggy, like hung over, all she’d wanted to do was talk to me. Apologize.
“If all you wanted to do was to talk to me,” I said, “why were you wearing that getup?”
“What getup?”
The next-to-last costume in the striptease, I thought. Red and black lace. I described it, more or less. She giggled.
“Do you normally go to bed wearing outfits like that?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“But had you that night?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I probably wasn’t wearing anything. I don’t usually … to bed, I mean.”
“So when you woke up in the middle of the night, naked, you said, and groggy, that’s what you put on?”
She giggled again, softly.
“When all you wanted to do was talk to me?”
And again. Then she adjusted the hem of the skirt, continuing to gaze up at me, her eyes wide and steady.
“I told you, Phil,” she said. “You can’t blame a person for wishing.”
The feeling came over me, not for the first time, that I was being set up. And not only by her. In this, as it turned out, I was both right and wrong. I walked over to the glass terrace doors and stared out at the nearby rooftops. I realized this was the first time since Bashard’s murder that I’d been alone with Grace. I wondered if that was just a coincidence. Why else had the Counselor made me rush from New Jersey? Downstairs he was meeting with the media, and sooner or later he was going to have to expose his client. Sooner, probably.
“There’s something I want you to know, Phil,” Grace said behind me. “It’s important. I mean, it’s important to me. I mean, that you know it.”
I turned to her. She was sitting in the same spot, her hands now propped on the couch cushions, her arms stiff-elbowed and her teeth biting at the upper lip.
“Nobody’s ever had me,” she said, smiling a little over her lace collar. “I’m a virgin.” Then, when I didn’t react: “Does that surprise you?”
I don’t know that I’d thought about it, either way.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to,” she went on. “They just never gave me the chance. No way.” A giggle. “I’ll prove it to you if you want.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
She shrugged. “My father certainly. And everybody who worked for him. God,” she said, sighing, “I’m so tired of bodyguards.”
I thought of Price, Robert, OCS, USN. According to Bashard, she’d tried Price. According to what she’d just said, she’d failed.
“Are you going to tell the police this?” I asked.
“That’s up to you, Phil,” she answered, lowering her eyes. “I’ll tell them whatever you want me to.”
The setup grew clearer.
“Did you tell this to anyone else?”
“Yes. To Mr. Camelot. He asked me if I was a virgin and I told him the truth.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said I’d better talk to you about it.”
So there it was, the fine hand of Charles Camelot, Esq., Attorney-at-Law. The Counselor was leaving the choice up to me. Either I could make our client reverse her story, in which case, quite clearly, anyone investigating the murder would start to doubt and question every other element in it. Or I could reverse my own story which, on a scale of one to ten, would be but a small sin. And it would go down, too. Us practiced seducers, you could say, don’t like to brag about our teenaged conquests.
“I didn’t do it, Phil,” Grace said, as though to help decide me. “I won’t say I never thought it. I mean, not to kill him but to wish him dead. I did that. But I didn’t kill him.”
She gave me the tearstains and the quivering lip to go with it, but I, at least, didn’t need them. I believed her anyway.
The dress rehearsal was over. In other words, the last changes had been made to the script, and the show could go on.
The script called for the elevator to open right then. As it happened, the Counselor missed his cue by a little, and I had the chance to question Grace further.
She claimed not to know anything about S.O.W. or a Sow Account. Raul Bashard, I said, had told me S.O.W. referred to a group of people who played chess by mail. She said she’d never seen him play chess, but she didn’t know that he hadn’t either. The names Leo Mackes and Viola Harmel meant nothing to her, she said.
“Well here’s the funny part,” I said. “To get to the S.O.W. file in the computer, you apparently needed some kind of access code. For all we know now, the file’s gone. At least somebody deleted the references to it in the Mackes and Harmel correspondence. Now why would somebody have done that?”
She had no idea what I was talking about.
“Then who else could have done it?”
She shrugged. Maybe her father had done it himself. He was always tinkering with the Big O.
If he had, I thought, it would have had to be in the last day or two before he died. In which case, why?
She had no idea.
And if not Bashard, who else had: one, access to the machine, and two, enough knowledge of programming to make a change like that?
“Price,” she said. “Price probably did.”
Bud Fincher and I, I thought, would have been talking to Price right then if Johnny Jameson hadn’t gotten himself killed.
“And who else?” I said. “Who else besides Price had the access and the knowledge?”
She thought a minute, then grinned.
“Only me,” she said.
At this point the elevator door slid open and, ever the gentleman, the Counselor ushered out three people. I knew the two men by sight, but not the woman. Harmon Waller wore a cord suit and tie, Al Squilletti a cord jacket, brown slacks and a Windsor-knotted tie pulled down from the collar. The woman wore the uniform, city-executive-style, of blue summer suit and white blouse with the attached white cravat knotted in a bow. She turned out to be Anne Garvey of the New York District Attorney’s Office. Ms. Garvey’s name, at least, was familiar to me. The Counselor had always described her as an “up-and-comer,” a skilled attorney with political ambitions well above her current job. She was a thin nervous creature about my age, with an aquiline face and brown hair a little too big and bushy for her face.
It took me a little while to figure out the Counselor’s orchestration. Harmon Waller and Al Squilletti were there because Anne Garvey was. Anne Garvey was there because the Counselor, given the range of possibilities open to him, had chosen her. He had furthermore
brought the two murders and their investigations together, not only because if he didn’t the media clearly would, but because by demonstrating Grace’s innocence in the one, he could encourage the belief in her innocence in the other.
He’d also moved fast. Like I said: When in doubt, counterattack.
He made sure everyone was seated, myself included. He even offered drinks all around and got two takers, Squilletti first and then Harmon Waller, for sodas. Then, still standing, an imposing shaggy-haired figure in double-breasted summer blue blazer, tan twill slacks, blue oxford shirt and repp bow tie, he said: “Given the stress my client has been under, I’ve requested that this meeting be informal and off-the-record. If, when we’re finished, any of you want to take it further to sworn depositions, then I’m open to that. Now Grace,” he said, turning to his client, sitting alone now on the floral couch, “I want you to answer these people’s questions as freely as if you were talking to me alone. You and I have gone over everything. Don’t be afraid to tell them anything you’ve told me. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know when you don’t.”
“I understand,” Grace said in a small voice, her hands now clasped in her lap.
“All right, Counselor,” he said, turning and with a flourish extending his hand toward Anne Garvey, “why don’t you begin?”
Anne Garvey’s questions were sharp and to the point. So were Grace’s answers. No, she didn’t know John Jameson. She hadn’t seen him since she was a baby, had no memory of him, had had no contact with him. She didn’t even think she knew he’d changed his name from Bashard to Jameson. He may have been her father by blood, but she wouldn’t have recognized him if she’d bumped into him. She had no knowledge of his having been in New York. As to her whereabouts the night before, yes, it might have been theoretically possible for her to have sneaked out of her hotel without having been seen, even by her watchdogs (a possibility Bud Fincher’s men themselves later denied). But she hadn’t gone out. She’d ordered room service for dinner. She hadn’t eaten much of it. She watched some TV. She’d made a few phone calls. Whom had she called? Well (with a glance in my direction), me. But as it turned out, I wasn’t home. Finally, with the help of a sleeping pill, she’d gone to sleep.
