I'll Cry When I Kill You

by Peter Israel

  And then there was Grace. Once the number-one suspect, now at eighteen the bereaved heiress, she gave interviews freely. She remembered the Latham of her childhood—“Uncle Ollie,” she called him, as gentle and generous a man as she’d ever known. He had also been her father’s closest friend. She had never understood what had driven them apart, and certainly, in spite of his confession, she couldn’t begin to imagine what had led such a gentle man to commit murder. Even now with all the evidence in, and his confession, and even though she could never see him again, a part of her couldn’t believe he’d done it.

  Four months to the day after Raul Bashard’s murder, Latham died in a Philadelphia hospital, of emphysema and allied complications, and taking certain secrets with him. He died alone, and his funeral was poorly attended. I know, because I went.

  It was one of those gorgeous fall days in the country, the tree leaves yellowed and some of them red, a strong wind sweeping the meadows down the slope toward the little house Latham had lived in, where the old Beetle still stood, apparently unclaimed. I’d heard he’d bought back the farm, but whether the Babbidges were still in residence I couldn’t tell. And more police, it seemed, than mourners, there and at the cemetery. I saw Deputy Roman at the cemetery, and he told me they’d expected quite a turnout, but only a dozen or so gathered at the graveside.

  The only other person I recognized was Cyn Morgan, the artist. She wore a long, ankle-length velour coat and a little hat with a veil that made her look even shorter than she was. She avoided me like the plague.

  As to why I went, well, you could say I’d developed a predilection for the funerals of the greats of science fiction and leave it at that.

  There was more to it, of course.

  There always is.

  The weekend before, the auction had been held—a funeral of a different kind.…

  But here, too, I’m ahead of the story.

  Oliver Latham confessed on a Friday. The relationship between Grace Bashard and yours truly peaked that weekend.

  As far as Grace was concerned, she was, she said, learning about love for the first time. I guess she was at that, but she was a quick study.

  And as for me? Well, maybe I was old enough to be her father, but seventy-two hours in bed with Grace Bashard kind of reduced the age gap.

  I must have said something to her about it.

  I remember her calling me her dirty old man.

  I remember that turning me on.

  We went at it for a week or more. In between I gave my last depositions concerning the Bashard murders and tried to hold down my job. Grace thought that was stupid. We were going to have all the money in the world, she said. Enough to last us a lifetime. What did I have to work for? We could live in Florida, the Caribbean, Hawaii, anywhere we wanted to, so what did I have to work for? And why did I have to work for that dreary old crumb who did nothing but blow pipe smoke in your face and make you feel like you were two years old?

  For a while—a week, more—she played housewife on the Upper West Side. She shopped, and tried to teach herself to cook. She cleaned up the mess she made in the kitchen and all the other messes. She rearranged the furniture, rearranged my clothes, and there were flowers in bottles on every available surface. Mostly we ordered in Hunan and fed each other in bed, out of cardboard containers.

  Clearly it wasn’t meant to last. But I helped things along. As follows:

  I walked home from work that following Friday, across the park, on what must have been the hottest day of the summer. Even the sailboats in the pond were becalmed in the soggy sunlight, their sails wilted. People wore the scantiest of clothing the law would permit. The few joggers I saw, my onetime companions, had slowed to a walk. There was another drought warning, the fountains had been turned off, and you weren’t supposed to use your air conditioners below seventy degrees, though nobody paid attention.

  I bought cold beer at my local deli, iced white wine at the liquor store, the bottles sweating through the paper bags, and went upstairs out of the inferno. Grace met me at the door, wearing a bandanna in her hair and nothing else. She was bursting with excitement, among other things.

  “Guess what I did today?” she bubbled at me. “You’ll never guess! Guess what I did today?”

  “All right,” I said, shedding my clothes on the way to the shower, “I give up. What did you do today that I can’t guess?”

  “Never mind. If you can’t guess, I’ll tell you in bed.”

  We showered together, went to bed, and sometime later, she told me.

  She’d bought an apartment was what she’d done. It was four rooms, in a building in the sixties, off Park Avenue, and we could move in as soon as the paperwork got done for the financing. The asking price had been a million dollars, but they’d accepted her bid of $825,000. Did I think she’d overpaid? It didn’t matter. She’d have paid a million for it. Wait till I saw it. It was perfect. And I could walk to work, as long as I insisted on working for that crumb. And so on.

  By the way, the crumb—the Counselor, that is—wasn’t representing her anymore. She’d found another lawyer, one who understood what she wanted and didn’t get in the way.

  I guess I didn’t react quickly enough. Or with the right enthusiasm. This was typical of me, typical of men. Whatever she did for herself, on her own, was no good, and I had to dump all over it. Well, she was tired of men who wanted to take care of her, tired of doing what she was told to. She didn’t have to anymore. And if I was satisfied, satisfied with the shitty work I was doing, satisfied with the shitty way I lived, in this shitty apartment, in this shitty neighborhood, maybe that was okay for me, but did I think she had to be satisfied, too? Maybe I was too old for her, except for sex. Even for sex. She hadn’t thought so, she still didn’t think so, but it was up to me. Strictly.

  And so on, and so forth.

  In hindsight, you could say she knew it wasn’t going to happen between us beyond (so to speak) the first blush. In hindsight, you could say this buying the apartment was her way of telling me so. Of telling both of us so.

  But there was more to it. Yes.

  Turn to the middle of the night, one of those middle-of-summer nights when you hear the sirens even through the closed windows, and you wake up sticky in spite of the air-conditioning and, except for the stickiness, you’re not sure whether you’ve been asleep or not.

  She asked me if I was awake. Yes, I said, I was awake.

  I lit up a cigarette in the darkness. I’d started smoking again.

  “Why did you leave the door open for Latham?” I heard myself ask, in the darkness.

  “Why did I what?” came her answer, from next to me in the bed.

  “According to Latham’s confession, the door to the suite was open. The only way it could have been open was for you to have left it open.”

  We’d been sleeping with a sheet over us. She’d been lying on her stomach. Now the sheet went off me and she was sitting up on her knees.

  “Why are you bringing that up again?” she said, her voice startled. “What if I left the door open, how do I know? I was coming to you.”

  “Latham said he had a terrific argument with your father, about the Sow money. This was before the BashCon. He said that he’d planned to kill him then, if he got the chance. He got the chance all right.” I reached over, turned the light on on the bedside table. “He came out into that corridor in the middle of the night, and he didn’t have a key, and he didn’t need one. The door was open. That’s one hell of a coincidence.”

  I heard her intake of air. She brushed her hair away from her eyes, which had that puffy look from sleep.

  “Why are you bringing this up now?” she repeated, punching the words out.

  A good question, maybe.

  “Because I’ve got to know,” I said.

  “Why don’t you ask Ollie?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Well what did he say?”

  “All he said was that the door was open.”
r />   “And that’s not good enough for you?”

  I stubbed out the cigarette, stood up.

  “Not when your grandfather rewrote his will the day before, leaving it all to you no matter what happened to him.”

  “But I told you I didn’t know about that.”

  “Did you?” I said. “Funny, I don’t remember your telling me that.”

  “Well I did. I know I did!”

  “Maybe you did. But that would be a hell of a coincidence, too, wouldn’t it? A man rewrites his will the day before he dies, and doesn’t tell his daughter, who stands to get all the benefit? Then he gets murdered in the night because his daughter just happened to leave the door open for his murderer?”

  She didn’t say anything, I gave her space, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Like she was holding her breath.

  “What’re you getting at, Phil?” she said softly.

  “What I’m getting at is that I think you helped him. I don’t like thinking it, but I think you knew about Latham and the Sow Fund all along. It was on the computer: ‘See Sow Fund.’ It was you who erased the references to Viola T. Harmel, in the hate mail. You thought nobody would notice, and without it nobody would make the connection. I think that was part of your deal with him, that you’d set it up so that he could kill Raul. I think when you came out of the suite that night, you walked down the hall and woke him up before you got into bed with me. I was your alibi. And then you covered it up. If I didn’t notice that the references to the Sow Fund had been erased, we’d never have linked him to it.”

  “Is that what Ollie said?”

  It was my turn to suck air. Latham had already made his confession and signed it, and he’d confessed and signed because it didn’t matter anymore to him. He’d gotten what he wanted. He had nothing to gain now by implicating anybody else. This I knew, and though it occurred to me to have another crack at him, the truth was that when I’d had the chance—the day and the night when we’d traded the Sow Fund for his confession—it simply hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

  And that was because Grace Bashard had gotten to me.

  “It doesn’t matter what he said, baby,” I heard myself answer in the dim light. “I know what happened. What I can’t finally figure out is why you did it. It wasn’t just the money, was it?”

  She seemed to shiver on the bed. She’d been holding herself together as tight as she could, but now, kneeling, the sheet flung back, her head down and hair down over her head, her body gleaming faintly, I saw her rock forward a little onto her fists, then back onto her toes and forward onto her fists, back and forth.

  “You’ll have to beat that out of me, Pablo,” she said. “Come on, why don’t you beat it out of me?”

  Revelation time. She rocked forward onto her fists, and held the position. Her ass was up, her hair hanging, her breasts hanging.

  And yes, it turned me on.

  And yes, clearly, I wasn’t the only one.

  “Is that what he did to you?” I said hoarsely.

  She turned her head back toward me, like an animal looking over its shoulder. Her face was red and puffy and stuck in a bitter grimace.

  “What do you think?” was all she said.

  It didn’t end there, or neatly.

  We went through withdrawal by messy stages, all the way down to the last messages she left on my machine after she’d moved out. I guess she’d realized I wasn’t her answer. Maybe she’d known it all along. Maybe she strung it out so long just to make sure I wasn’t going to tell anybody else what I knew but couldn’t prove.

  Maybe, maybe, and maybe.

  Along the way I learned more about her life with her grandfather than there’s a point in detailing. Suffice it to say that the way she told it she’d been a prisoner of a particular kind, and subject to particular punishments. The one that had finally triggered her, it seemed, had been the poisoning of the Doberman.

  I’ll leave it to the shrinks to state whether Latham had been her instrument of revenge, or liberation, or whatever.

  What I was her instrument of is all too obvious. Call it Bashard’s last laugh. Or next-to-last laugh.

  As for me, I took off.

  The summer’s a quiet time in the legal profession. The courts close, the clients are mostly away, and attorneys with houses in the Hamptons are more there than here, leaving their staffs to man the phones. We open late on summer Mondays, close early on Fridays, and when I told the Counselor I wanted two consecutive weeks in August, he, for once, could think of no reason to turn me down. The way it worked out, I was gone only one week. I pointed the Fiero north, drove up the New England coast as far as the Canadian border, then turned around and came back. Along the way, I did what tourists do mostly. I went to the beach and went shopping. Give it another decade and that whole coast is going to be one long strip of outlet stores and ye olde gift shoppes, but even now there’re more than enough to keep vacationing Americans consuming all summer long. When they’re not baking in the sun or taking lobsters apart.

  Come to think of it, I don’t remember buying anything, and I didn’t go into the water. What I did do was write out various versions of my report to the Counselor, in a string of motels all the way up past Bar Harbor, Maine. When I finally got it right, I turned the Fiero around and did the I-95 home. When I got to my apartment, the tape on my answering machine was empty.

  “Erase it,” the Counselor said. “Erase it, tear it up, do whatever you have to do. I want nothing in our files.”

  This was mid-week, in August. Ms. Shapiro and Roger LeClerc were gone, leaving Charlotte McCullough and me to mind the store. Plus Althea, the housekeeper, and Gorgeous, the cat. The Counselor’s Wife was in the Hamptons, with the cocker bitch.

  The Counselor sat at his desk in a short-sleeved shirt and bow tie, his jacket draped around the back of his chair. His desk was even more of a clutter than usual, but he seemed to be enjoying it. His gray hair was cut short for the summer, and he had a Hamptons tan that made him look about ten years younger.

  “Why?” I said. “We at least should have a record of it, if nothing else. It’s all true.”

  “And conjecture,” he said.

  “Some,” I said. “But true conjecture.”

  That made him chuckle. He liked the sound of it, he said, repeating the words. A new legal concept, true conjecture.

  I guess I wasn’t in a funny mood, though. I guess he saw that.

  “I thought I told you already, Phil,” he said. “There’s no Grace Bashard file. Besides, there’s no way you could make any charges stick against her, you know that. Unless Latham wanted to, and as you point out, if he wanted to, he would already have done something about it.”

  “Maybe I could convince him,” I said, though I was less than convinced myself.

  “Do you really think so?”

  I shook my head. But I couldn’t let it go at that, not even then. And the business about the file caught me short. I remembered it from the beginning, from when I got back from Bashard’s that first time.

  “Why is there no Grace Bashard file?” I asked. “Why was there never supposed to be one?”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s the way the client wanted it,” he answered.

  “Bashard wanted it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But why?”

  I guessed the answer, though, even as I asked the question. A horrible answer, and maybe if I’d lived inside Raul Bashard’s skin all those years I’d have understood it. But not even then, I thought.

  “I think he expected her to kill him,” the Counselor said, “or try to. I think part of him wanted to make it hard for her. And part of him easy.”

  “But in either case, to protect her if she did?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Because of his guilt toward her, right? Because of what he’d done to her?”

  The Counselor shook his head.

  “I doubt that,” he said. “Whatever he did or didn’t do to
her—and by the way, we’ll never know how much of what she told you is truth and how much a disturbed young woman’s fantasy—he wasn’t a man to feel guilty about anything. No. All I know is that he was afraid of dying. Of dying slowly, that is.”

  “Then why in the hell did he want me there?” I said.

  The Counselor smiled and ran his hand through his hair, front to back.

  “A good question, Phil. Too bad we can’t ask him now. I assume he panicked at the end, and flip-flopped back and forth. People do, you know, once they know they’re going to die. Maybe he thought you’d deflect her. Or protect her, if you couldn’t.”

  Which, I thought, is precisely what I’d done.

  I didn’t altogether buy his version. I felt like I had a dozen other questions to ask, more, and for once he gave me room. But the words wouldn’t come, and we sat and stared at each other in the August quiet. I guess there was nothing more for him than to hand me back my report, in hard-copy form, and say: “Tear it up, Phil. Erase it from the file. The case is closed, let’s be done with it.”

  Which he did, and which I did.

  My last “official” act in the Bashard case was to represent the office at “the disposal at auction of the last worldly goods of Raul R. Bashard.” So it was advertised, and the Counselor had acceded to the auction as the quickest way of moving Bashard’s estate toward liquidation.

  He offered to send someone else if I didn’t want to go.

  Strangely, though, I wanted to.

  The serious, big-bucks part took place in the main hall of the house, where folding chairs had been set up in rows and the auctioneer used a microphone to announce the lots. The hall was full. I recognized Varga, Sam Wright, Sidney Frankaman and Mr. and Mrs. Richard Brinckerhoff among the people I knew. There were bidders pointed out to me from university libraries and collections all over the country, and several from overseas. They sat sedately enough through the disposal of Bashard’s cars, his works of art, furniture, furnishings and other memorabilia, which the auctioneer used as a kind of warm-up to the main event. But when the literary collections—the books, the magazines, the manuscripts—came under the gavel, a kind of crazy fever took them all. People stood on chairs so that their bids would be seen, and it was like a bull market bursting loose on Wall Street.