I'll Cry When I Kill You

by Peter Israel

  Grace wanted me to take her. She’d specifically asked.

  “Is this an order?” I remember saying.

  “Phil, come on,” the Counselor answered, conciliating, “We’ve worked together too long. I don’t give you orders. That’s not how we relate to each other.”

  Relate was a Nora Saroff word.

  “Then maybe it’s how we should,” I answered.

  “I wouldn’t want that. I doubt you would either.”

  I took a deep breath and shook my head.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Is it an order?”

  He sighed, creaked his chair, and stared at me quizzically.

  “If you insist then. Yes, it’s an order.”

  No job’s worth that much, etc., etc.

  In hindsight you could say, Quit the bitching, and given what happened, I’d have to agree with you. But that was how I found myself, again, in Bashard’s ghostly mansion, in the same room I’d stayed in that first time, having driven Grace down in the Fiero through the summer evening heat because suddenly I couldn’t stand the windows closed and air-conditioning in the car. And how I found myself watching the Counselor on TV, doing his number expertly, I thought, not even blinking during the thin-ice part when, with the camera on his craggy face, he was asked if he’d seen John Jameson. And how I found myself insomniac, dictating my letter of resignation to myself because maybe he was right, maybe we had worked together too long, maybe it wasn’t too late for me to go back and pass the stupid bar exam and …

  Etc., etc.

  And found myself, meanwhile, waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop.

  I watched parts of the Tonight show, and David Letterman, but I couldn’t tell you what I saw. At some point, I took a shower. At another, I carried the remnants of the sandwich tray MacGregor had made up for me all the way down to the kitchen, just to help tidy up, but I couldn’t tell you if the house lights were on or if I made my way down and up in darkness. I do remember stopping on the second-floor landing, looking, listening. Not a sound. That was where she’d left me earlier. She’d kissed me good night, on the cheek, saying she was really glad I was there, repeating that, for the first time in her life, she was scared to be in the house. She wasn’t going to stay there another night if she could help it. Then she’d gone off down the hall, carrying her own tray, and I’d continued on up with mine.

  We’d talked a while before that. She said the house weirded her out now. She’d never been scared of it before. It had been more like a prison, sometimes. Now it scared her, being there. Still, she was glad Price was gone from the estate. She would have felt awkward around Price, she said. She’d talked to Mr. Camelot about it. Mr. Camelot had said he’d take care of it, and she’d asked him to be generous with Price. She’d asked him to give Price a special bonus. She thought Price would be happier that way, because his loyalty had been to her father, not to her. And Kohl and MacGregor could take care of the place till the new owners decided what they wanted.

  Still, she was awfully glad I’d come with her. She didn’t know if she could have stayed in the house alone.

  She was excited about having an apartment of her own. That was a little scary, too, because everything had happened so suddenly, but she was getting used to the idea. What she really wanted now was for her father’s murder to be solved so she could put everything behind her and start fresh. She wanted to be involved in the case, she said. She was ready and willing to help me any way she could, only she wanted to talk to me, and me only, not all those other people.

  I asked her again about S.O.W., the Sow Account. She couldn’t help me there. I told her what we now knew about it. The news that a percentage of Raul Bashard’s wealth had gone somewhere else didn’t seem to bother her. Maybe, I thought, with all the millions in his estate coming to her she didn’t have to worry about the one or two that got away.

  She asked me what I thought about the John Jameson murder. Were the two connected? I said I thought they had to be. She disagreed. She knew he was gay, she said. She thought it might be a gay crime. She thought it might be a crime of passion and have nothing to do with her father’s murder.

  Then she said she thought she’d like to take some sandwiches up to her room, if that was okay with me. It was. She got MacGregor to fix them. I asked MacGregor to wake me up at seven the next morning. She said she wanted to come with me the next morning, wherever I was going. I said I didn’t think that would be practical. She didn’t argue. Then MacGregor brought our trays, and she kissed me good night on the second-floor landing sweetly. On the cheek.

  Her best behavior, in sum. Even ladylike.

  Maybe it was Bashard’s absence that kept me awake. The only time I’d stayed there before, he’d been very much in evidence. It was his place; Grace clearly felt the same way. She’d called it a prison. To me, it was more like a tomb, soon to be abandoned. With his ashes scattered outside.

  Shiver city.

  From the second-floor landing, where I stood in the middle of the night, I could make out the closed mahogany door of his study, where I’d met him for the first time. His bedroom suite, I knew, was farther down the hall, and Grace’s opposite. I remembered him standing over his control center, surrounded by his own books, watching her on the lawn. In his sneakers. She in bare feet. She’d been wearing a forest-green sweatshirt, and her blonde hair swirled and coiled around her head when she ran with the dogs. Later, one of them had been poisoned. Jules. In the rush of human murders, everybody had forgotten the dead dog. If she had poisoned the Doberman, would she have been able to call her father a filthy, dirty creep? If he had, why would he have gone through that charade of a funeral? If his murderer had …?

  But why? A warning? Maybe the dead pooch, too, was just a coincidence, like Johnny’s murder?

  Shiver city.

  The last time I’d had insomnia, I’d fallen asleep with my lights on and the door open. I’d been trying to read a book. I’d been drunk, or hung over, or both. And Grace Bashard had slipped into bed with me while I slept. While somebody bashed in her father’s head.

  This time I was cold sober.

  I jumped when I felt her hand slip into mine. The hall must have been dark at that, because I’d neither seen nor heard her coming. She was barefooted. I think I was too. She had on one of those little white nighties that ended mid-thigh and was held together by a lacy tie at the neck.

  She tugged at my hand and led me soundlessly past Bashard’s study. I could hear her breathing in the darkness, my own, and the Victorian pile didn’t so much as creak.

  His bedroom suite on the right side, hers on the left.

  She led me in. Still holding my hand, she pulled the covers from her bed. Then, turning to me, hair swirling gently, she undid the nightie’s tie.

  There was a high correlation, the Counselor’s Wife had said, between insomnia and sexual deprivation.

  Maybe Bashard’s ghost was snickering somewhere.

  Hnnga Hnnga Hnnga.

  Hnnn Hnnn Hnnn.

  CHAPTER

  12

  I missed out on my jogging again the next morning, which was getting to be a habit. Grace hung on to me before, during and after breakfast. And when my “replacements” arrived (as the Counselor had promised they would) and it was time for me to leave for the city, she clung all the harder.

  The main effect her first sex had had on her was to make her babble. She danced and hovered throughout breakfast. She served me plates from the buffet, snatching bites from my plate. She sent the impassive MacGregor out for more coffee, taking the pot from him when he came back and refilling my cup. And all the while she chattered away. About sex first. And her father a close second. Sex had at least liberated her in that sense, because she dumped the whole kitchen sink on him. How he hadn’t touched her in years, not once, not since she was little. How he wouldn’t let anybody else touch her either. It was like he was afraid somebody would break her. Nobody could touch him either, not even his best friends. But
he didn’t have any best friends, he didn’t have any friends at all. He just exploited people, that was all. And gave nothing back. And she was supposed to be grateful to him, was she, because he’d changed his will and left everything to her? If she felt anything, it was sorry for him. Whoever heard of somebody leaving somebody all his money only if they weren’t murdered? Didn’t he know anyway that she never cared about the money? Not really?

  “Only I do now, Phil! Don’t you see? I earned it, I deserve it! Oh Phil, I feel so grown-up all of a sudden. It’s really weird. Don’t I seem grown-up?”

  Later, when Bud Fincher’s people showed and it was time for me to go and we’d already said good-bye, she ran after me. I was standing at the door to the Fiero in my shirtsleeves and with my jacket thrown over the passenger’s seat because you could tell already it was going to be another New York summer scorcher. She clung to me all right, and got her body between me and the car.

  I couldn’t leave her there. She had to come with me. She wouldn’t even go in with me, if I didn’t want her to. She’d wait for me in the car. Wouldn’t it be helpful to me if I had her wait in the car? She could drive it around the block, and keep driving it around the block till I …

  Then suddenly she blubbered. The tears flooded out of their ducts and her whole face crumpled, red like a little kid’s.

  “But I can’t drive, Phil!” she wailed. “I don’t even know how! He wouldn’t let me …!”

  I held her, felt her shaking, gave her my handkerchief, calmed her down as best I could.

  Eventually the tears subsided.

  She looked up at me, her cheeks stained.

  “Can’t you stay with me, Phil?” she said softly, staring into my eyes. “Don’t you want to have me again? Wasn’t I good?”

  What’s a guy supposed to answer? Instead I made her a proposition: If she’d stay there and do what she’d come to do and let Bud Fincher’s men drive her into the city, then I’d hook up with her later. She said she didn’t have anything to do there, there wasn’t anything at the house she needed, nothing that money couldn’t buy. Then she’d tricked me, I said. This made her grin. Still, I said, she couldn’t go with me. I promised, again, to call her as soon as I was done. Where? she wanted to know. At my place, I said. I even gave her my keys. As soon as I was done? As soon as I was done.

  She let me go then. As I swung around the driveway, I saw her standing there, waving. And when she saw me looking back, she blew me a kiss.

  All right, call it a mistake.

  Upton Fiduciary was located high enough up in the World Trade Center that you had to switch elevators. You took one of the big ones up to the seventieth-something floor and then transferred to a smaller local one. Up in that World Trade stratosphere, it was hard to tell the men from the women; everybody wore dark suits.

  Upton Fiduciary’s offices were cool, modern, and spacious, with panoramic views of New York Harbor. They were of modular design, meaning that the furnishings of your individual space formed your walls, shoulder-high, which could be shifted, stretched or shrunk, I guessed, depending on how many seven-figure accounts you’d brought in lately. Or hadn’t. And quiet. A mortician’s quiet. There didn’t seem to be much action in the place. I supposed that when you’re in the business of managing estates and trusts in the seven figures and beyond, and taking your comfortable piece off the top in good times and bad, there isn’t a hell of a lot to do except sit back and contemplate the Statue of Liberty.

  I had plenty of time, the way it happened, for these and other thoughts. I’d shown up unannounced, and that’s apparently a no-no in the World Trade stratosphere. The receptionist expressed surprise when I told her I had no appointment. So, a little later, did Ms. Graw’s assistant. As for Ms. Graw, maybe she was doing her nails, talking to her bookmaker, or (for all I knew) hadn’t shown up for work yet. Whatever it was, she kept me cooling my heels for a good forty-five minutes. First in the reception area, then later in an interior miniconference room.

  I was working on my second cup of coffee when Ms. Graw rumbled in behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. I use rumbled advisedly. She was a beefy-faced, no-nonsense type of woman. She wore a navy blue linen suit which fit over her body like a box, and a white shirt with navy cravat. She had blue eyes behind the glasses and iron-gray hair. I put her in her mid-fifties. She wasn’t the type, I thought, to whom I’d entrust my fortune—unless I was dead. Maybe, come to think of it, that was the point.

  We exchanged cards.

  “I believe you spoke to Mr. Camelot—” I started.

  “That’s correct,” Ms. Graw interrupted. “In fact, I don’t know why you’re here this morning. I have nothing to add to what I told him.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But it’s true that you do manage something called the Sow Account, isn’t it?”

  “The S.O.W. Fund, yes.”

  “Fund, then,” I said. “What do the initials stand for?”

  “I’m sorry. We at Upton wouldn’t be at liberty to tell you that.”

  “Or who the beneficiaries are?”

  “Of course not.”

  Progress, I could see, was likely to be slow with Ms. Graw, and it was hard to see how to nudge things along.

  “Ms. Graw,” I said, “I don’t know how much Mr. Camelot told you. The fact is that we represent the estate of Raul R. Bashard. Mr. Bashard was recently brutally murdered, and the authorities have yet to identify the killer or killers. I’m sure you’ve heard of the case?”

  No response.

  “We also have discovered,” I went on, “that Mr. Bashard, before his death and for a very considerable time, was a substantial contributor to the S.O.W. Fund.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Ms. Graw replied. “As far as Upton is concerned, contributions have been anonymously made.”

  “And the beneficiaries? Are they anonymous, too?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she snapped.

  “I know you didn’t,” I countered mildly. “But you must also know that there’s been a second murder, that of one John Jameson, Raul Bashard’s son, also unsolved. Both cases are, you could say, very much in the public eye.”

  “That may be,” she answered, “but I don’t see what that has to do with Upton.”

  Slow progress, like I said. All I’d been able to accomplish so far was to get her from her feet into a chair across the conference table from me.

  I decided to take the plunge.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Ms. Graw,” I said. “We have reason to believe the S.O.W. Fund is directly connected to at least one of the murders, and maybe both. Good reason. It may well have been a motive in the Raul Bashard killing. Maybe the motive.”

  “If that’s so,” she asked, “then why are you here and not the police?”

  I smiled at her.

  “Because we haven’t told them yet,” I said.

  No response.

  “Look at it this way, Ms. Graw,” I said. “Of course we’re going to tell the police. We have to, Mr. Camelot being an officer of the court and so forth. And once we tell them, the media are going to have the story, believe you me. But how we tell them can make a big difference. If we tell them Upton Fiduciary is withholding information in the Bashard case, you can bet the media will be swarming all over this office. You’ll never have seen anything like it. You’ll have TV cameras in the ladies’ room and newspapers telling the world what you ate for breakfast. Under a picture of you with curlers in your hair, if you use curlers. And of course, all you’ll have gained for your troubles is a little time. You’ll have to reveal the information in the long run anyway. After a lot of bad publicity.”

  Silence. The only word I can think of to describe how she looked is steel. Steel eyes, steel jaw.

  “Mr. Revere,” she said, sucking a little air, “we at Upton aren’t used to being threatened.”

  “Ms. Graw,” I answered, “we at Camelot aren’t used to threatening people eithe
r. And it’s not a threat, furthermore. I’m only telling you what’s going to happen.”

  Silence. Maybe the muscles tightened another notch in her jaws. Maybe they didn’t.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Revere,” she said, standing. “You’re going to have to excuse me for a moment. You wait here, please.”

  She rumbled out of the conference room. She was gone a while, giving me time to refill my cup and study the market charts on the walls some more. I still couldn’t make head or tail out of them. I figured she’d gone to talk to her boss and, given the time that elapsed, that her boss had had to talk to his boss. And maybe to Upton’s attorneys on the way.

  Progress, maybe.

  She came back. A little less self-assured, I thought, like she was pushing a barge this time, and the current was pushing up against her.

  She sat down, across from me again.

  “Mr. Revere,” she said, “I’m authorized to tell you that the S.O.W. Fund has been terminated.”

  “Terminated?” I said, feeling a jump in my stomach. “What does that mean?”

  “Just what it says,” she answered tartly. “Terminated. Once certain conditions pertaining to the fund have been fulfilled, the fund is dissolved and the proceeds paid over.”

  “Paid over?” I said. “Paid over to whom?”

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you that.”

  “But has it actually been paid? The check written and cashed?”

  “You don’t have to shout at me,” she said coldly.

  I wasn’t aware that I’d been shouting.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, pulling down on the decibels, “but don’t you see? This makes it worse for Upton. If you’ve actually paid over the money, you may have—however innocently—aided and abetted a criminal.”

  Maybe I was overstating the case, but I thought I could feel her running out of oomph.

  “The money hasn’t actually been paid,” she said. “Everything is ready, but there are certain closing formalities …”

  “What kind of formalities?”

  “Documents,” she said.

  “What documents?”