If I Should Die Before I Die (6 page)

“What do you mean,” I said, “‘go after the widow'?”

“Find out what she really wants.”

“How? Do you want me to ring her doorbell and ask her? Or should I ask Roy Barger for help?”

An attempt at sarcasm, I guess. I'd already reported that McClintock had been after me to get him to call Barger, also that I'd told McClintock I thought there was no way he'd call Barger till we had some bargaining chips. But the Counselor's pipe had gone out. He rummaged on the desk, looking for something to attack it with, then found a paper clip and worked at unbending it.

“That's up to you,” he said. “But if you want to ask Barger, he'll be here this afternoon. I want you to sit in anyway.”

I looked at Bud Fincher; Bud Fincher looked at me. The Counselor jabbed the straightened paper clip into his pipe bowl.

“Who called who?” I asked.

“Whom,”
the Counselor corrected, banging the pipe bowl into an ashtray. “Barger did. He wants a meeting. Says there's no point our clients running up legal bills if there's a common ground.”

“But how did he know we're invol—?”

“I don't know,” the Counselor interrupted. “But if he's really pushing for a settlement now, it's because he knows something he doesn't want us to find out.”

He stared into the pipe bowl, then, apparently dissatisfied, picked up a substitute, and started to stoke it with tobacco. Then he looked at me, his eyes deep and expressionless in the craggy head.

“Find it out,” he said.

You work for anybody long enough, you learn to pick up even small shifts in mood, and the Counselor and I go a long way back, back in fact to the Firm, in the days when he was a senior partner among other senior partners and I was a paralegal trying to scrounge together a living while I struggled through Torts and Wills. Like I've said, I know he's at his worst in the early stages of a case, when he feels himself at a disadvantage because he has to wing it.
The Law is 95 percent preparation
is one of his dicta. At various times I've heard him put the other 5 percent to luck, brains, or connections. But his mood that week had been blacker than the Magister situation called for, like there was something underneath that drove him to beat up on all of us that had nothing to do with the Magisters or any other legal matters he had pending.

As, in fact, there was.

In addition, I brought something of my own to the party. This wasn't the first time I'd carried out an investigation on my own. Though I'm not licensed to do anything more in New York State than drive a car, I've functioned as a sort of para-PI on more than one occasion, and on my own account. But this was the first time I'd done it, at least in part, on “company time,” and the first time without the Counselor knowing about it.

With the Counselor's Wife's approval, I'd turned over the Carter McCloy legwork to an independent I knew, an ex-cop called Bobby Derr. Bobby was a handsome smoothie still in his twenties. The way he told it, he'd resigned from the NYPD because you couldn't be a New York cop in the 1980s unless you were on the take. Other people, who knew something about what had happened, told other versions. He'd worked for a time for Fincher Associates, which was where I'd met him, but then he'd gone out on his own. He looked equally at home in Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers—one reason I'd picked him for the job. For his part, he assumed he was working for the Counselor even when I asked him to bill me direct, and he'd guessed our clients were McCloy's parents. I hadn't led him to believe that, but I hadn't exactly told him he was wrong either.

“You're going to get billed double-time on this one, Philly,” he'd said when we met for breakfast that morning.

We'd gone up to the Roosevelt, the last of the great West Side cafeterias, where you can sit all morning on one mug of coffee and they serve the best honeybuns in town. My kind of place, in sum.

“I've been up … let's see …,” he said, checking a notebook, “three
A
.
M
. one night, one-thirty another—that was the early bird, last night—and the grand finale, that was on Staten Island: seven-thirty in the morning. He and his buddies picked up three broads at Melchiorre's on Third Avenue, danced the night away, and took them home. Six studs, three broads. They live in a condo over there, the three broads. They're secretaries down on Wall Street. Not bad either. What they did in there is your guess, but two of the studs came out at 6:45, including your boy Carter, and his buddy drove him home. Drives an Alfa. How the rest of them got home I don't know, or if the broads ever made it to the office. D'you know Melchiorre's, Philly?”

“By name,” I said.

“Yeah,” Bobby Derr said, chuckling, “you'd stick out like a sore thumb there. Too old. Even me, I just manage to get by. It's kind of a singles joint for the preppy set, y'know what I mean? Most of the customers are under age, ‘specially the broads. That's how I got Alfie to tell me a thing or two.”

“Who's Alfie?”

“Alfie Leonard. Owns the joint, bought it from the Melchiorres a couple of years ago. I know some people he pays, and he knows I know. So even though he made me, he lets me sit around, tells me a thing or two. I've slipped him a few bucks, it's on the bill.”

“What did he tell you about McCloy?”

“Alfie says he's okay. Drinks too much but quiet, nonviolent. No problem. Not like some of his crowd. Alfie thinks he might be gay, closet-fag variety. They use the joint like a kind of club, anywhere from six to a dozen of them.”

“You mean they're there every night?”

“Most nights anyway, according to Alfie. He lets them run tabs. Sometimes they eat there, though Alfie himself says the food's terrible, but anyway, they show up and drink till they pick up some action. Then they hit the discos, Rosebud's mostly. Some nights they close up Melchiorre's, some nights not. D'you know Rosebud's, Philly?”

“No,” I said.

This made Bobby laugh, a white-toothed laugh that could have passed in a toothpaste commercial.

“Shows your age, ole buddy. It's down off the Bowery, used to be a stage theater of some kind. They gutted the insides, put in lights, mirrors, bars, a coat room as long as Grand Central Station, and all the latest electronics shit. Big screens all around. It's a kind of
Rocky Horror Show
environment. The kids lap it up. They're not too particular who they let in, 'cept for the over-thirties. You gotta have an ID proves you're under thirty. I doubt you'd make the cut, Philly.”

He thought that was pretty funny too.

“Any drugs?” I asked him.

“Drugs? You gotta be kidding. The grass is so thick at Rosebud's they gotta be growing it in the johns.”

“I didn't mean Rosebud's. I meant McCloy, his group.”

“Not that I saw. Alfie says the preppy set's back into booze mostly nowadays. Booze and sex. Says they're like rabbits, least that's all they talk about. Even with AIDS. I could've been picked up half a dozen times myself if I hadn't been on the job.”

Bobby Derr looked the part. He might have been up late every night, but sitting at the Roosevelt that morning, clean shaven, in a yellow button-down Oxford shirt open at the neck to show some chest hair, and jeans, and a brown tweed jacket, with his raincoat slung over the back of his chair, you'd never have guessed it. He had the Ivy League look, and though the way he talked didn't say Yale or Harvard exactly, it didn't say not-Yale or not-Harvard either, not in the 1980s.

He had some other stuff for me too, and not bad. He'd greased the super at McCloy's building and had learned that though Carter McCloy lived there, he didn't own the apartment. Some corporation did, the super said. The super had nothing on McCloy in particular, but the apartment, 9B, had been in trouble off and on. Late-night parties, neighbors' complaints, people coming and going at all hours. The police had been called in a couple of times, and the super knew the apartment had been brought up at the co-op board, but nothing had happened. Bobby thought the super knew more than he'd let on, but he wasn't sure.

“You're in twelve hundred bucks so far, Philly,” he said at the Roosevelt Cafeteria. “Round numbers. What do you want me to do next?”

I thought about it. What I really wanted was a rundown on Carter McCloy's whereabouts on certain specific dates stretching back to the spring, but there was no way I could turn Derr loose on that without running the risk of him guessing, and I couldn't do that without the Counselor's Wife's approval. I didn't think she'd approve. I thought of narrowing it just to the night of the last murder, but that was risky too.

“Just keep it going,” I told him.

“You want round the clock?”

“No,” I said. “Just nights.”

“Nights'll cost you double, Philly. I'm not like these guys, I don't get to sleep all day. Besides, if I keep it up, they're gonna make me. A face gets familiar after a while. What do I do then?”

“Let it happen,” I said. “Get in the middle of it. Get to know them.”

I watched him think about it. The money was okay, I figured, and the possibility of getting laid on the job wouldn't bother him either. But something did bother him. Call it pride if you want to, but I think he was looking for an angle.

“What's Camelot after?” Bobby Derr said. “Wouldn't it be easier if you just told me? What's he really after?”

“It's not Mr. Camelot,” I said. “I've told you that before.”

“I know, I know,” he said, grinning, “it's not Camelot's money, it's the client's. But who's the client? McCloy's folks? And what are they after? Drugs? Do they think little Carter knocked somebody up?”

I told him I couldn't answer him on either ground. I was pledged to confidentiality.

“There's something else I don't get,” Bobby Derr said. “You guys always use Bud's outfit on this kind of deal. Why me this time?”

“Two reasons, Bobby,” I answered. “One is that Bud doesn't have anybody for this kind of job, nobody who could get as close as you. The other …?” I hesitated long enough to let him do some speculating on his own. Then: “Well, you know Bud, Bobby. Let's see how it plays. Maybe we'll have some other things to talk about, once this one's over.”

This did the trick. I guess Bobby's no different from most people, in terms of his ego and his dreams, and maybe I'm not much different from people who'd make use of them.

Anyway, I worked through one other idea with him. I wanted somebody I could talk to myself, who knew Carter McCloy. He didn't think that would be easy; from what he'd seen, the broads were mostly one-night stands; besides, hadn't he told me they wouldn't let me in at the Rosebud? But he said he'd keep his eyes open.

Money, I told him, might help.

He seemed to like that suggestion.

Breakfast with Bobby Derr wasn't the only work I did for the Counselor's Wife on “company time.” I could use Bobby up to a point without telling him why, but there was no way I could call any of our regular contacts at the NYPD or the media and not arouse suspicion. Not when a whole task force was, as it was put, “combing the city” for the anonymous killer and every tip, or shred of a tip, was being tracked down and women on the streets and in the stores, blondes as well as brunettes now, were wearing scarves around their heads. The media, of course, had been full of it all that week since the Riverside Drive murder, complete with criticism of the police, scientific explanation of death by suffocation and capsule rundowns of the four previous crimes, and an enterprising reporter on the
Post
had even got hold of, and run, the police file on “open” homicides involving women victims over the last two years. The reporter suggested that the Pillow Killer might have been operating for much longer, only that his modus operandi had changed.

But knowing that the media have a way of changing things over time, dropping this or that detail in order to fit a developing story, I wanted to look at the original reportage, so I put in some time in the Periodical Room at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, and from it I abstracted some interesting facts and discrepancies.

Of the first four murders, the first had taken place the previous winter, then three in the spring and early summer. They had all happened in Brooklyn, the first in Cobble Hill, the second way out in Bensonhurst, the third in Park Slope, the fourth in Brooklyn Heights. The victims had all been white, brunette, single. The oldest had been twenty-seven. All had worked. All but one of them—the last—had lived alone. All but one—the last—had been murdered during the night. All have been called “party girls” by the media, connoting something south of prostitution but north of the straight arrow. None appeared to have known or been linkable to any of the others. All dated frequently. The kind, in sum, who might have been found in places like Melchiorre's on the Upper East Side, or discos like the Rosebud, though neither of these two was mentioned in the accounts.

The third murder, the Park Slope one, was the only one where there'd been signs of violence. The police had found blood traces on the victim's bed. It was their only forensic evidence in all four cases, but they'd never been able to match it with a suspect.

The fourth murder, the one in Brooklyn Heights, differed in several respects. The victim, Annette Costello, had a roommate, and the killing had taken place on a Sunday in broad daylight. The roommate, away for the weekend, had discovered the body when she returned that evening. There was evidence that Annette Costello had been out shopping in the neighborhood before she was killed, possibly in the company of the killer. Witnesses claimed to have seen a young man with her in a local supermarket, but none could agree on what he looked like and that lead too, like all the others the police had uncovered, had apparently evaporated in the course of investigation.