I'll Cry When I Kill You

by Peter Israel

  I guess it helps to be into word games and puzzles. Some people have that mind-set, others don’t. The word around the household was that the Counselor’s Wife polished off the Sunday Times crossword puzzle in fifteen minutes or so. Without working up a sweat. In ink.

  I guess the only reason she never held the solution over our heads was that she’d been wrong, too.

  Anyway, she’d come home just before lunch that day to give the cocker her noontime walk, had stopped in on her husband and, in passing so to speak, had figured out why Bud Fincher and his people and I and everybody else had never been able to locate Leo Mackes and Viola T. Harmel. One of whom was dead in any case, but one very much alive.

  All right, you do it. I’ll give you the names, in block letters:

  LEO MACKES

  VIOLA T. HARMEL

  By way of a hint, I’ll give you a third name, though it didn’t come out till later:

  DASHA BURRAL

  (Burral was what we’d heard at the BashCon banquet, Burral, not Burro.) I’d give you the other three, too, but they were long-since dead and unless you were a science-fiction fan, they wouldn’t mean much to you. But all you need really is one, and if you’ve a mind-set like the Counselor’s Wife or know that all you’re supposed to do is push the letters around till they make new names, then it won’t take you very long to come up with the real ones.

  LEO MACKES. VIOLA T. HARMEL. DASHA BURRAL.

  CLEM OAKES. OLIVER LATHAM. RAUL BASHARD.

  Once there had been six of them, six young hotshots out to write the history of the future. Only nobody was listening, at least not then, and there wasn’t enough money in all six pockets to put potatoes in the stew. Raul Bashard took in typing to feed his family; God knows what the others did. There was even a photograph of the six of them together. I’d seen it myself, at the BashCon banquet. It had been part of Sam Wright’s slide show. Sam Wright, it turned out, had taken the picture himself.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Once there were six. Three of them died young, and that left three. Then Clem Oakes died, and that left two. Oliver Latham. Raul Bashard.

  Viola T. Harmel and Dasha Burral.

  And the money in the Sow Fund, Sam Wright said, had reached significant proportions. And the sole surviving beneficiary?

  Oliver Latham.

  “This alone doesn’t make a murderer,” Sam Wright said, in the Counselor’s office.

  “I don’t believe I claimed it did,” the Counselor replied. “That’s a question for the police to decide, and the courts.”

  “But you’re going to tell them?”

  “It’s my obligation,” the Counselor answered.

  “Ollie Latham wouldn’t kill a flea,” Cyn Morgan blurted out.

  She said it with her head down. I looked at her, trying to measure the degree of her conviction. She glanced up at me, then quickly away. I saw that her eyes were blurry, but whether that expressed conviction or something else was anybody’s guess.

  Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Sam Wright, after dabbing at his forehead again with an oversize handkerchief, said: “If you’re going to call the police the minute we walk out this door, Mr. Camelot, then we’re going to have to warn him.”

  “That could make you both accessories to a crime,” the Counselor observed.

  “We’ll take our chances on that,” Cyn Morgan snapped back.

  “I’m sorry,” the Counselor said to them, fussing with a pipe, “but I must be missing something. What do you propose we do?”

  “He’s a lonely old man,” Sam Wright said by way of answering. “And dignified in his way. A lonely and dignified old man, and a great writer. We don’t want anything to happen that’ll rob him of his dignity.” Then Wright turned to me, and I saw the light dancing off his ruddy pate. “You’ve met him, Revere. Does he strike you as a man capable of bashing in someone’s head?”

  I shrugged.

  “Nobody strikes me as being capable of bashing in someone’s head,” I think I answered. Like a lot of things, it was true and not true. I could as well have said: Everybody strikes me as being capable.

  “Let Phil go,” Cyn Morgan put in, her eyes glistening. “After all, he’s running your investigation, isn’t he? He’s met Ollie. Let him go out there. Let him confront him with what we know. Then …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “Yes?” the Counselor said, pushing her.

  “Then what will happen will happen,” she said, her head down again.

  “One question,” the Counselor said to Sam Wright, meanwhile digging into the bowl of his pipe with a pipe tool, stuffing it with tobacco from the bowl, and tamping with his forefinger. “Has the claim been made on the Sow money?”

  “Yes, it’s been made,” Wright answered.

  “But the money hasn’t been paid over yet? Or so I’ve been given to understand?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And your role …?”

  “My role is to verify. Or was.”

  “To verify what?” the Counselor said. “That Harmel and Latham are one and the same person?”

  “That’s correct. I have documents to prove it. I did for all of them.”

  “When was this supposed to happen?”

  “This afternoon,” Sam Wright answered. “But I’ve put it off. After I talked to Revere this morning, I called Ollie.”

  “And told him what?”

  “Nothing,” Sam Wright said. “I made up an excuse, that’s all. The meeting’s been rescheduled for tomorrow morning.”

  “And so you’ve known all along?” the Counselor asked, reaching for his matches.

  Sam Wright didn’t answer at first. The Counselor filled the time, as usual, by lighting his pipe. It took him two tries.

  “Raul Bashard,” Sam Wright said, “was a cruel son of a bitch by any standard.”

  The observation hung out there, in midair, as though waiting for somebody to take a swipe at it. Nobody did.

  Then Sam Wright said: “I wanted Ollie to get his money.”

  The Counselor puffed smoke. It wreathed around his head and floated toward the ceiling.

  “Ms. Morgan said it, Phil,” he said, looking at me through smoke. “It’s your show, your decision. What do you want to do?”

  Of course I didn’t go alone. The Counselor wouldn’t let me. The way he put it, if Latham had already killed at least once, he could do it again. The Counselor wanted to call Anne Garvey and Harmon Waller and send in an army with me, using the situation (incidentally if not coincidentally) to build up credit for the future. But I refused that, and we compromised.

  I arranged to meet Al Squilletti on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware Water Gap Bridge. Call it my own credit system. Squilletti had the shorter distance but I beat him by a good quarter of an hour. So did the deputy from the local sheriff’s office that Squilletti had called. The deputy was Squilletti’s idea, and there was a measure of cover-your-ass in it because Squilletti hadn’t liked the idea of making an arrest, if that’s what it came to, outside his own turf. The deputy was a tall gangly country boy whose name was Roman, and he got there first, so I filled him in on the case, and who I was. By the time Squilletti showed, this deputy Roman had realized that maybe he could be a hero, too, and get on TV, and you could see the light bulb shining inside his country skull.

  The Fiero led the procession, followed by the two law officers in their unmarked cars, down the state road, then the country road, then the narrow turnoff between the overhanging trees and up onto the ridge where the macadam gave way to dirt. The time I’d been there before, it had been in the heat of the morning. Now it was in the heat of the late afternoon, the sun still well up in the sky at that time of year. The bugs and the birds were playing games, and I could feel the sweat starting to rivulet down my back the minute I stepped out of the car.

  I’d had a lot of time to think along the way. I’d thought back over the details of Raul Bashard’s murder, thought back over the bl
ood, the mayhem, and the impression that whoever had killed him had had to have been out of his mind. Yes, everything fit all right; Latham could have done it. What was new was the motive. Money, impatience, greed. The Viola Harmel letters, as I remembered them, corroborated same. So had the Leo Mackes letters, but they’d stopped two years ago, when Clem Oakes died. Leaving Bashard and Latham. Burral and Harmel. Johnny Jameson’s death, though, was something else. Two shots, that was all. Cold, calculated. All I knew about it for sure was that, yes, it would have been physically possible for Latham to have driven up to the city, kill Johnny, and return home long before I showed up that next morning. I thought back to our meeting. Had Latham shown any sign of being fresh from a killing? No. He’d looked tired, old. He’d seemed held back, held in, like I was an intrusion that would go away in a little while. The only time he’d expressed what you’d call emotions were over the cigarettes, for one, and about the house up the hill where the farmers lived. He was going to get that house back, he’d said.

  Money. The Sow Fund. If he could get away with murder, he’d get the house back all right.

  But the truth was—and it hit me again—that I didn’t have any idea what a murderer looked like. I mean, sometimes you can look people in the eye and see emotion: fear, excitement, greed, sorrow, boredom, whatever. Often, with a woman, you know if she’s had sex lately. But killing, murder? Either it’s too foreign, or too commonplace. Ever walk down the street and try picking out the murderers?

  I stood on top of the ridge with Squilletti and the deputy, gazing down on the farm. A rural scene in summer, warm, peaceable. No sign of life, human life anyway, all the way down the slope. Squilletti and the deputy wanted to come with me. I didn’t want them to. We made a deal. They could follow me down, keeping out of sight, but they’d stay out of Latham’s house unless there was good reason not to.

  I slung my jacket over my shoulder and walked down the ruts, between the buzzing, growing grass, to the barn and the farmhouse. The pickup truck stood there, but the Buick Riviera I’d noticed the time before was gone. No sign of the Babbidges, but I spotted Latham’s Beetle tucked behind the line of trees below. If I was thinking anything, it was what I’d been thinking all along: that if I were Latham and Phil Revere rode his white charger into my front yard, accusing me of murder, I’d tell him to go scratch. Yes, I was Viola T. Harmel, yes I was now the last surviving heir to the Sow Fund, but that was motive, that wasn’t evidence. Where was the evidence?

  The last thing I expected, I guess, was that he wouldn’t be there. His front door was open. I walked in.

  Evidence. In all that dust and clutter, what kind of evidence would you look for, and where? Murder weapons? Confessions? The poker that had bashed in Bashard’s skull was somewhere in Squilletti’s file of exhibits. The .22 pistol that had shot and killed Johnny Bashard was another question, although if Latham had shot his godson, there were a hundred miles of places between the scene of the crime and here where he could have dumped the gun.

  I went up steps to the unfinished half-attic where he slept. A mattress on the floor, half covered by a sheet. Two lamps and an electric heater, all plugged into the same floorboard outlet. A clothes bar mounted on a wall served as his closet, and a pale blue dresser with the paint flecking off it held some clothes. There were storm windows piled in a corner under the eaves and hunks of that pink insulating material sticking out of the rafters where the Sheetrock that was supposed to hold it in place had given way.

  “Rustic,” you could say, meaning it was pretty much of a rural slum. With a lot of hard work, and a little money, it might have been improved, but Oliver Latham apparently didn’t care. I guess he didn’t do much entertaining.

  I found nothing. No weapons, no incriminating papers. Downstairs, the living room clutter looked undisturbed from my last visit. The kitchen, too, with its musty-smelling linoleum. He seemed to have been working on some kind of script, maybe a movie script. It had characters’ names in capital letters and then lines of dialogue, but I scanned several pages of it and couldn’t make much sense of what was going on.

  I felt thirsty, searched for a clean glass, found none. I picked the likeliest candidate from one of the twin porcelain sinks and was rinsing it with my fingers when suddenly Latham spoke up behind me, “You’re late,” he said.

  I jumped in spite of myself, put the glass down, turned the water off, turned my head.

  He was standing in the doorway into the kitchen, head ducked, shoulders slumped, his hands in the pockets of his dungarees. He was wearing pretty much the same outfit as the other day, without the jacket. Shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His forearms were skin and bones, the veins knotty. If anything, he’d lost weight in the few days since I’d seen him. Bare feet in the dusty rubber-soled sandals.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Water’s cheap. Help yourself.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I answered.

  We stared at each other for a minute. I saw an old man, with an old man’s slump and bony, creased face.

  “I expected you an hour ago,” Latham said. “I got tired of waiting. I went out for a walk. It’s a beautiful day.”

  “Hot,” I said.

  “Yes, hot,” he said. “But you get used to it. It’s worse in the city, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged. He didn’t seem to be sweating, not at all.

  “But you’ve got air-conditioning in the city,” he went on. “No air-conditioning here. Just air. D’you want a beer? I think I’ve got some beer around somewhere.”

  He patted his pants pockets as he spoke, then his shirt pocket, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit up with a red disposable lighter, and inhaled deeply. Then the coughing took him, bending him, driving the smoke out of his chest. His complexion reddened, his eyes watered. Then he straightened, seeming to shake it off, and took a smaller puff, then stubbed the cigarette out in a dish on his desk.

  “What about that beer,” he said, moving past me, “and what about your friends outside? Don’t you want to ask them in? I don’t think they saw me but they look kind of stupid, sitting where they’re sitting. What are they, cops?”

  I accepted the beer. I told him who they were. I told him I wanted to talk to him first.

  “Why’d you bring them then? Did you think I was going to shoot you?” This made him laugh—that dry sound—and the laughter led to more coughing. I watched him recover from it. Then he came back from the old refrigerator with two cans of a brand I’d never heard of. The label said it came from someplace in Pennsylvania. He motioned me to the chair I’d sat in that time before and he took the old leather job by the desk. We popped the cans, drank.

  “When I didn’t find you here,” I said, “I figured you’d taken off.”

  “Why?” he answered. “I live here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “People who are suspected of murder sometimes do.”

  “Am I suspected of murder?” he said mildly.

  There was something different about him, though. A kind of brittleness. The other time I’d been there he’d been composed, remote, gesture-free. I noticed it in his hands mostly. His fingers fiddled with the beer can, papers, pencils. They took the cigarette pack out, fished one out, lit it. One hand held it while he coughed and the other turned the lighter over from end to end when he stopped.

  I told him I thought he’d quit smoking. He said he’d quit smoking a hundred times.

  “We know about the Sow Fund,” I said.

  “I know you do,” he said. “The good old Sow Fund. It’s mine now. I guess I earned it. I waited a long time for it.”

  “What’s it stand for?” I asked.

  “What’s what stand for?”

  “The Sow Fund. S.O.W.”

  “S.O.W.,” he answered. “It started out, officially, as Sons of Wells. H. G. Wells, get it? The so-called Father of Science Fiction? It sounds pretty corny now. I always thought of it as the Sons of Whores anyway.”

  “Tell me about it,” I s
aid.

  “What’s to tell? You know all about it anyway.”

  He did tell me, though. They’d been six at the beginning, six hungry writers writing for nickels and dimes when they got published at all. He’d forgotten which one of them had thought it up, but the idea was that, if they pooled a piece of their earnings, maybe one of them would survive to enjoy it. They’d set it up legally, complete with the anagrammed code names. The joke was that none of them really thought he’d survive. It was a different time. All of them believed nuclear disaster was around the corner, and if one of them did live through the bombs to collect the money, there’d be no place to spend it. The worse joke was that three of them did live through—Oakes and Latham and Bashard—and that the Fund grew to proportions beyond anybody’s expectations. And that two of them at least—Oakes and Latham—could have used the money. Maybe the contributions had been mostly Bashard’s, but the Fund, one-third of it anyway, was rightfully theirs.

  “When Mackes died,” Latham said, “… I saw him just before he died. He’d literally wasted away. Every penny he got his hands on went for drugs, and there was never enough. I wrote Burral. I called, I begged. Can you imagine that? Me? I begged! Let’s dissolve the goddamn fund, I said, get Mackes into a hospital, get him cured, give him a stake. But Burral wouldn’t hear it. The fund was the fund, the bylaws the bylaws. ‘Let’s amend the fucking bylaws!’ I said. Unh-unh. Wouldn’t hear of it. D’you know what? Right then I vowed I’d outlive him. Whatever it took, Viola T. Harmel would outlive Burral.”

  He’d gone stiff in the telling, face carved out of stone and eyes staring straight at me.

  What was weirdest was that he’d used their scrambled names in telling it.

  “Even if it meant killing him?” I said.

  But that was the wrong thing to say. Too soon, too something. He’d been holding his hands together, clasping them, but now they broke loose again. His face creased in laughter, and a new spell of coughing racked him.

  “Are you accu—? Are you accu—?” The coughing again, and then a convulsion of coughing, and he had a handkerchief in his hand and hocked into it, wadding the handkerchief after. Sweat now popped out on his forehead.