by Peter Israel
I watched him mop at his forehead with his shirtsleeved upper arm. His complexion had gone pale again. He shook out another cigarette and lit it, his hand trembling a little so that the lighter shook.
The smoking, though, seemed to calm him this time. He sucked smoke in and exhaled it through his nostrils without coughing.
“What about Johnny?” I asked. “John Jameson?”
“There’s scum for you,” he answered.
I gave him room, time to explain, but he fell silent.
“He knew about the fund, didn’t he?” I tried. “We know he knew about it. You used to send him money, you said, but then you stopped. Did he come to the United States to try to shake you down?”
No answer. I knew I was right, though, knew suddenly that that was what had happened.
“And so you had to kill him, too?” I said. “Either that, or pay him off? To keep him from telling?”
I knew I was right, sure, but I also saw I was losing him. He continued to smoke, the ash dropping off without his paying attention. He stared straight ahead, not at me, not at anything. It was like I knew he’d done it, both crimes, and he knew I knew. But also that beyond the Sow Fund there was no evidence, no proof, no witness. Maybe we’d turn some up; maybe we wouldn’t. And maybe the Sow Fund itself was enough to win an indictment, but where was the jury that would convict?
“What about Grace?” I tried. “Suppose Grace was brought to trial for either crime? What would you do? Would you still be sitting there?”
No answer.
It was then that I heard a sound in the living room, followed by Squilletti’s voice.
“Are you in there, Revere? Are you all right?”
I got up abruptly and went to the doorway. My shirt was sticking to my back. I saw Squilletti standing against the back of the couch near the door, looking bewildered in the sudden clutter and darkness. Maybe I looked a little weird, too, because the minute he saw me, his hand started toward his jacket where he wore the holster.
“Get out of here,” I called to him.
“Are you okay, Revere? What’s going on? Is he in there with you?”
“Yes I’m all right! But get the hell out!”
“But it’s getting—”
“I don’t care what it’s getting. Go home if you have to, but get the hell out of here!”
I watched him back out of the house, shaking his head, shielding his eyes from the sun. He spoke to somebody, presumably the deputy, but I couldn’t hear the words. Then he disappeared.
I went back into the kitchen. Latham was still sitting in the leather chair, leaning forward, his head propped up by the palm of his hand. His free hand was doodling with a pencil. I felt dry in the throat again. I shook my beer can. It was empty, even though I didn’t remember drinking any past the first swallow. I put the can down on the side of his desk and stood there until he looked up at me. He stared at me with suddenly tired eyes. Old man’s eyes, rheumy, with blood in the corners.
“You’re a lousy excuse for a cop, Revere,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I’m not a cop,” I answered, but it was as though he didn’t hear.
“You’ve got it all figured out,” he went on, in a scornful, brittle tone, “but you can’t prove a thing. Now you’re stumbling all over yourself. Well, I can’t help you, wouldn’t help you if I could. All I want is the money, don’t you know? I’ve earned it. Now I’m going to get it.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” he said, without hearing. “I was going to get it this afternoon, don’t you know? But you got in the way. Now it’s tomorrow. You can arrest me if you want to. Go ahead, arrest me. I’ll be out on bail next week. Today, tomorrow, next week, what difference does it make when I collect? I’ve waited years for it.”
“You may not get it tomorrow, or next week, or in a month or six months,” I said. “It may take years. In fact, you may never get it.”
“… tomorrow, next week, next month, don’t you know?” he was saying. But then suddenly, what I’d said seemed to dawn on him.
He straightened up, sat back in his chair. His hands slipped back off the desk into his lap, then lifted to grip the arms of the chair. His gaze fixed on me.
“You can’t stop it,” he said, his mouth tight.
“That’s not true,” I answered. “If you’re being held on suspicion of murder, any judge will issue a temporary restraining order against the money being paid out. Then there’ll be injunction proceedings. If you have to stand trial, the money will be held in escrow till a verdict’s been reached. If you’re acquitted, of course, then it would be released to you. But if—”
“Suppose I’m convicted,” he interrupted. “Then what?”
“Then you’ll never see it,” I said. “The courts nowadays take a dim view of criminals profiting from their crimes. There are laws on the books to protect the victims of such crimes.”
“What victims?” he said animatedly. “Burral’s dead, there’s nobody else but me!”
“In that case,” I said, “then I guess the money would eventually go to Grace. As the victim’s—or the victims’—sole surviving heir.”
I watched him closely for a reaction, any reaction. All he did, though, was reach for another cigarette and light it. This time his hand didn’t waver. Then he shook his head slowly from side to side.
“The rich get richer,” he said softly. Then, subsiding in his chair, smoking, his eyes seeming to follow the swirl of smoke upward toward the wall and the ceiling: “How much of what you’re saying is true and how much bluff?”
Without looking up the finer legal points, I’d have guessed ninety percent certainty and ten percent hunch. Zero percent bluff. If Grace pressed it, I guessed she could get the Sow Fund. If Latham was convicted, he never would.
“It’s no bluff,” I said.
I watched him in the silent kitchen. His teeth clenched, and then I saw a strange thing. The last thing I would have expected. No sound, no sobbing, just tears, maybe one to each eye, rolling out onto the cheekbones and down, to end in stain.
We sat there.
Latham inhaled and coughed again, and wiped his face with the back of his forearm. Turned his head to me.
“I don’t like you, Revere,” he said, “but I want the money. I want it so badly that if I confess to your murders, will you guarantee me the money?”
“I can’t do that,” I answered.
“Then bring in your cops from outside,” he said. “Let them guarantee it.”
“They can’t either.”
“Well who can? Somebody’s got to be able to.”
I thought about it. Practically, I guessed it could be done. There were at least three people who’d have to give the kind of guarantee Latham wanted. One was Harmon Waller, the second was Anne Garvey. The third was Grace Bashard. In other words, if neither the State of New York nor Bashard’s heir objected, who was there to contest the Sow Fund?
The route to all three went through the Counselor.
“Let me make sure I understand,” I said. “If you can be guaranteed the Sow money, you’ll confess to killing Raul Bashard and his son—a sworn confession, that is. Is that correct?”
“That’s correct,” Latham said.
“But why would you do a thing like that?” I blurted out without thinking.
“Because it’s mine,” he answered. “Because I earned it.”
Because it’s mine.
A seven-figure sum, I thought. How many people were there who would kill, even for seven figures?
Maybe more than you’d think.
“And if you don’t get the money?” I asked.
“If I don’t get the money?” he repeated. He grinned, and his face broke into sharp creases. “Then you’d better arrest me. Call your friends in from outside and arrest me. Prove your case. But let me ask you this: What do you think your chances will be of convicting me without my cooperation?”
I guessed he was b
luffing then, and it turned out I was right, but in a way and for reasons I hadn’t thought of. If so, though, he was bluffing from strength. Unless we found a murder weapon, or a witness who could put Latham at the gay hotel, the best any prosecutor could do with the Jameson case would be circumstantial bits and pieces, mostly having to do with the Sow Fund and Raul Bashard’s own murder. And as far as that first crime went, Latham would produce a parade of character witnesses in court, those very people Bud Fincher and I had traipsed back and forth to interview, and Norman Hermatius would tell the court what a great writer Latham was, and Cyn Morgan would cry on the witness stand, and where was the prosecutor who could break their see-no-evil, hear-no-evil versions of the BashCon night?
The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that they’d all known, all along. Or at least suspected. But not a one had admitted a thing to Bud and me.
What was it Sidney Frankaman had said to me when I sat down at his table, that Sunday of the BashCon?
Maybe Latham had read my mind.
“I’ve waited this long for it,” he said in his kitchen. “I can wait that much longer if I have to.”
Bluff?
Maybe.
“I’ve got a couple of calls to make,” I said finally.
“Go ahead,” he said, with a gesture. “There’s the phone.”
“I’d like to make them alone.”
“That’s all right,” he said, standing up. I heard his joints crack. “I need to stretch my legs anyway. Go ahead.”
He walked into the living room, and I came out of the kitchen behind him.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “You’re not afraid I’m going to make a run for it, are you?”
I was thinking just that in fact, but I said: “No. I just want to make sure the others know what’s going on, when they see you walk out the door alone.”
I accompanied him outside and called out to Squilletti and Roman. The light had begun to fade, even on one of the longest days of the year, but heat still hung in the air.
I watched the deputy and the Catskill cop walk toward us, one tall and gangly, the other sawed-off and looking out of place, his dark pants and shoes powdered with country dust.
I introduced them to Latham, then pulled Squilletti aside.
“What’s going on?” Squilletti asked in low tones.
“I think we’re close,” I said.
“Close to what?”
“I think he’s going to confess,” I said. “I can’t explain now. But the two of you should keep an eye on him.”
Latham had walked toward his VW Beetle, then past it, but instead of heading up the path toward the big house he turned left beyond the stand of trees and into the meadow that stretched upward from the line of trees. A tall, stoop-shouldered figure. Skin and bones.
I watched Squilletti and Roman head after him. Then I went back into the house and called the Counselor.
In the end, we spent the night there.
Oliver Latham himself cooked us dinner—corned-beef hash out of cans with sunnyside-ups, salad with his own lemon dressing, and more of the Pennsylvania beer. The beer got better as it went, and it seemed to loosen him up. He was quite the raconteur when he got going. He talked and gestured all during the meal, his face flushed, not about murder but mostly about what it had been like to grow up in California a long time ago, when the big events were the war that had happened in Europe and the Black Sox scandal in 1919. Another world, in sum, but it made Latham seem almost human. Like the rest of us.
Roman went home after dinner. The Counselor had called back. Squilletti drove his car down the slope from the road and slept in it. Latham went upstairs, after helping me unload one of the couches in the living room that became my bed.
I slept off and on, more off than on. The couch was one of those three-quarter jobs, and either you curled up in it or the arm caught you under the knees. The heat didn’t go away that night. I missed air-conditioning. I missed the familiar sounds of my air conditioner and the trucks rumbling up Amsterdam Avenue. I missed my own city bed where, at least in theory, Grace Bashard was now curled up herself, waiting for me to come home. Instead of the sirens of police cars and ambulances, which you could learn to sleep through, I had the whine of a lone mosquito and other small sounds that grew in menace the more I tried to figure out what they were.
I was also waiting for one of two things to happen. That they hadn’t didn’t mean they wouldn’t.
Once I walked outside. Squilletti was asleep in his backseat, in the moonlight.
Once I walked up the slatted stairs, in my socks. Latham had left one of his lamps on, a squat job that sat on the floor. He was lying on his back in the shadows, on the floor mattress, his face shadowy. He was wearing pajamas. Motionless. While I watched, though, he turned toward me, his gray face toward the light, and as though to tell me he was still alive, started to snore. Half snore, half whistle, and short breathing. I could hear a rattle in his chest. He coughed once, but it didn’t wake him up. Then a pajama-sleeved arm lifted in the air and fell over his eyes, as though to shield them. He still didn’t wake up.
This guy murdered two men, I thought while I stood there, one with a fire poker, one with a gun. This is what a murderer looks like. This is the guy you’ve got to watch like a hawk, for when he dives off the shallow end.
Squilletti woke me in the morning. The sun was already up. I could hear sounds in the bathroom, and a little later Oliver Latham emerged.
Neither of the two things I’d been expecting had happened. Yet. Instead, Oliver Latham was dressed up just like a commuter on a business day.
He wore an olive-colored poplin summer suit, a blue-and-white striped shirt, and a black string tie like the one he’d worn the night of the BashCon banquet. Maybe the same one, for all I knew. His shaven cheeks glistened from cologne. Put a briefcase in his hand (which, in fact, he produced before we left) and, but for the tie, he could have passed for any old-timer on his way to Wall Street.
After coffee we drove into the city, Latham with me in the Fiero and Squilletti trailing us. It was one of those steaming hot days, a haze of cloud and smog above, and I’d finally grasped that nothing was going to happen after all until Latham got the money.
Sam Wright met us high above the harbor, in the offices of Upton Fiduciary. Ms. Gwen Graw was waiting for us, too, with the relevant paperwork, but in a larger and fancier conference room than the one we’d sparred in the day before. This one had coffee and Danish and china cups and saucers and a large portrait painting of, I assumed, Pierce Upton I.
Whatever he knew or didn’t, Sam Wright looked like he was attending a funeral. But Oliver Latham was in his element. He talked, joked, throughout the paper processing. He even made Ms. Graw smile. Then, finally, he took the check she held out to him, examined it, folded it, put it in his inside jacket pocket, patted his jacket to make sure, then thought better of it and took it out, stuck it in his briefcase, locked the briefcase. And put out his cigarette. And stood, a tall, papery figure, laughed out loud, coughed into a handkerchief, and, recovering, shook hands with Ms. Graw, with Sam Wright. Then he put a long arm around Sam Wright and hugged the short man awkwardly. And then turned to me, and I saw a defiant expression in his rheumy old eyes.
Because it’s mine, I guessed he was saying. Because I earned it.
“Where’re we going now, Revere?” he asked me.
“Uptown,” I said.
We drove slowly. I kept braking in the traffic to make sure Squilletti was behind me but every time the Fiero slowed or stopped I thought now, now’s the time if ever, now that he’s got what he wanted.
But it didn’t come. Not at the farm, no, nor during the night after the Counselor called back, and that much I understood. But not at the World Trade Center either, or coming down in the elevators from Upton Fiduciary, and not in the car, and not at the office, where the Counselor waited with Waller and Garvey and other representatives of the law, local and Catskills, compl
ete with stenographers. And not during the long afternoon while Latham spilled it out for them, crime by crime, detail by detail, patiently.
I had it wrong, you see.
I’d thought one of two things: either he was going to make a run for it or he was going to try to kill himself. I’d expected it at the farm and he hadn’t, but he didn’t have the money yet. It’s mine, he’s said, I earned it, and in hindsight nothing was going to stop him from getting it.
But after …?
Maybe he didn’t run because he had no place to go. Maybe you get too old to run.
I thought he was wacko enough to do something drastic. He’d been wacko enough twice, why not a third time?
The point was, he didn’t have to do anything drastic anymore. Drastic had already happened.
Putting it another way, which never occurred to me until we found it out: The reason he didn’t kill himself—not that day and not in the days that followed—was, simply enough, that he knew he didn’t have to.
CHAPTER
14
Oliver Latham, a.k.a. Viola T. Harmel, never stood trial.
Oliver Latham never so much as spent a night in jail.
With the proceeds of the Sow Fund, he had more than enough money to post a bond. And he enjoyed sufficient prestige and connection to convince two judges to let him out on bail—a rarity in murder cases. He also had enough money to pay attorneys who managed, one way and another, to get the trial dates postponed. It didn’t hurt their endeavors either that he was a dying man.
Furthermore, the media mostly took his side. Somehow the fact that Raul Bashard had refused to permit the Sow Fund to be dissolved got translated into justification, sort of, for murder, while John Jameson, at the hands of the media, became a cheap homosexual blackmailer. At worst, Latham was portrayed as an embittered and possibly crazy old man, but also a great writer who’d never gotten his due. The literary press set about to rediscover him, and his publisher rushed through reprints of books that had been long forgotten.
