Crack-Up (25 page)
Authors: Eric Christopherson
“This one worked for
Treviso
’s Italian Restaurant in
Georgetown
.
Ever eaten there?”
“Sure, it’s a fine establishment.
But then I’ve eaten in many fine establishments, all over the DC area.
More coffee?”
“Another half cup, thanks.
You might’ve met her at John’s.
Treviso
’s catered parties for him, now and then.”
Jeremy’s pour was sloppy, my saucer catching coffee.
“Oh, what a tragedy,” he said.
“What a horrid tragedy.
But there was just no way to predict that man’s behavior.
Argus Ward’s, I mean.
Of all people, I should understand that.”
“Think carefully, Jeremy.
Were you at any of John’s parties catered by
Treviso
’s?”
“I’m not really the party type.
More the intimate dinner for two, or four, type.
I never went to those things.
Never.”
“What about Argus Ward?
Know him?”
“I think I met him once.
I’m not sure.”
He averted his eyes, then blew his nose with a Kleenex.
“I’m sorry, Detective, but this line of questioning disturbs me greatly, as you might imagine.
I had a strong affection for John, and the way he died, well, that could’ve been me.
I could’ve been the killer.”
“Why?
Because you were also paranoid schizophrenic, also suffering a psychotic break?”
“That and my delusions.
You see, before I’d become obsessed with my thought broadcasting, I’d been obsessed with John Helms.
I kept receiving these dire warnings—or so I believed—that John was planning to kill me, and that I had better kill him first to save my own skin.”
My pulse quickened.
I’d collected some useful information already, I felt, but here was a real potential breakthrough.
I threw my pad and pen on the coffee table.
“Can you check your home telephone messages by remote?
Not the new ones, but the ones stored in memory?”
“Of course,” Jeremy said.
“Would you do so please?”
“Sure, but why?”
He picked up his cell phone.
“You’ll see.”
When Jeremy accessed his machine, I had him skip ahead through the messages until he came to the right one, then I had him listen to the whole thing.
I strained to listen himself.
“What are you waiting for, Jeremy?” said an unidentified caller, a male with a tinny, accusing voice.
“You know what has to happen.
Do it!
Just do it!
Get it over with!”
Click
.
Jeremy shut off the phone.
He looked perfectly dumbfounded.
“How can that be?”
“The caller wanted you to murder John, right?”
He gave a nod.
“But I imagined all that.
Didn’t I?”
Chapter 27
So I had no hidden enemy after all.
All along I’d been a mere pawn in a well-disguised and well-executed assassination plot.
I’d been one of three pawns.
Three that I knew about.
Three paranoid schizophrenics.
Jeremy Crane, Sally Anne Bilchik, and myself.
All driven insane suddenly, somehow, by somebody.
All set in motion to murder the same man.
But why three?
Or possibly more
?
It didn’t take me long to settle on an answer.
I gave my answer to Keisha Fallon that night from a pay phone inside the Pentagon City Mall, after I’d already stunned her with my lab test results and with my three paranoids murder conspiracy theory as well as my visit with Jeremy Crane.
“Driving a paranoid schizophrenic into full psychosis with dummy pills,” I said, “and then leveraging the resulting madness in such a way as to coerce that paranoid schizophrenic to murder someone, some particular one, is—”
“Brilliant,” Keisha said.
“If it’s true.”
“Uh-huh.
In a fiendish kind of way.
And I think you’ll agree it would deflect suspicion away from the guilty party, or a murder conspiracy in general.
But the weak link in the approach is the paranoia itself.”
“How so?”
“The puppet master—or masters—behind the murder of John Helms—had to use multiple assassins because it was too risky to rely totally on one mad person to get the job done.
The approach called for back-up.
Duplication of effort.
With Jeremy Crane, for example, things didn’t take.
However he’d been manipulated, after being driven insane, he never settled on John Helms as his one biggest problem.
When he went mad, he found something else to obsess about, and ended up naked on a beach in
North Carolina
, covered in metallic silver paint, communing with the stars.”
“Too bad the same thing didn’t happen to you.”
“Yeah, too bad.
A chance happening here or there and I might’ve ended up on a bus to Tierra del Fuego, running from the
“You could’ve used one.”
“Skip the ethnic jokes, Keisha, and help me figure out why someone would’ve wanted John Helms dead.”
“But you’re a fugitive, Argus.
You know I can’t—”
“I know I’m putting you in a difficult position, but I’m not crazy—not now, at any rate—and you can verify everything I’ve just told you, if you wish to.
Besides, all I want you to do is go through the records we have on the movements of John Helms over the last six months.
Match that against records of his business dealings at Helms Technology during the same period.”
“Word is we’re about to be axed by them too.”
“So get on it right away.”
“What am I looking for?”
“I don’t know.
Anything odd or surprising.
You knew the man, Keisha.
Better than anyone in our firm.
You were his shadow for the last four years of his life.”
“Hey, you said no ethnic jokes.”
“But whatever you do, Keisha, don’t tell the cops what I’ve just told you.
They know about my blood work, but probably don’t trust the results—like the DA—and I strongly doubt they suspect any murder conspiracy.
After Sally Anne Bilchik made the first assassination attempt, they wrote off my second, successful attempt as being influenced by Sally’s, given my proximity to John Helms and my own insanity.
The cops know absolutely nothing about Jeremy Crane, and I want to keep it that way for now.
For now I want to be the only one out here on the murder conspiracy trail.
Take things as far as I can on my own.”
Keisha agreed, though I had to work on her some more.
It made me feel bad to beg a friend and employee to aid and abet a fugitive from justice.
But I’d do worse things soon enough.
Before we hung up, Keisha changed the subject.
“It’s over, you know.
Argus Ward, Incorporated.”
“I can’t exactly say I’m surprised.”
“Most of us have been sacked already, and anyone lucky enough to still be working has resumes out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Obviously, it’s all my fault.”
I would care deeply one day about the demise of an enterprise I’d spent ten years of my life building, but at that point in time, I wouldn’t let myself care.
“What were you thinking, Argus?
Keeping a secret like that?
For all these years?”
“I was thinking . . . I’m not a monster.”
“Huh?”
“I gotta go, Keisha.”
That night, Darth haunted my dreams again.
I awoke just before sunrise and found myself unable to go back to sleep, due in part to Hideo’s loud snoring.
As I lay on my puny futon mattress, my tailbone aching, I hashed over the murder plot I’d uncovered.
Many questions remained unanswered.
How did anyone ever find out about my illness
? I wondered.
I’d guarded that secret closer than I’d guarded the nuclear codes when the president traveled.
And what about the other two?
How could any one person have learned about all three of us?
Identified all the paranoid schizophrenics who came into regular contact with John Helms?
A waitress, a computer scientist, and a security consultant
?
I had no answers.
The feat, in fact, seemed damn near impossible.
Psychiatric records, I knew, were supposed to be held strictly confidential.
I was fairly certain, moreover, that each of the three paranoid patients involved saw a different psychiatrist.
At least I knew that to be the case between Jeremy Crane and myself.
My thoughts turned to the targeting of John Helms.
How would one try to convince a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic that a particular individual needed murdering
?
There had to be regular contact, I concluded, a series of events like Jeremy Crane’s phone message—repeated verbal and/or visual contact made with each of the paranoids, including me, of course—in order to spark a murderous obsession with John Helms.
So I searched through all the memories of my recent past, starting with the not-so-murky days when I first began to lose my mind.
But I never got as far as my full-blown psychosis.
With a burst of euphoric energy, I threw off my cotton blanket and, with the aid of the new dawn, tip-toed out of the bedroom without stubbing my toe again, or waking Hideo.
In the kitchen, I went through Hideo’s stash of phone books again, but found that none would do this time.
None included the right city.
With a small flashlight that I located in a drawer, I returned to Hideo’s bedroom.
While my host snored on, I booted up a computer in the corner, a pre-millennium Hewlett-Packard, but with a high-speed cable internet connection.
In under two minutes I located a search engine for public telephone numbers throughout the
United States
.
In the search field, I typed in the name, Bernard Alan Simpson, followed by the city of
Columbia
,
Maryland
.
Then I hit the enter key.