If I Should Die Before I Die Read online

  “In point of fact,” McClintock put in, “the companies aren’t without leadership.”

  “Sure,” I said. “The board’s appointed Young Bob acting chairman.” Robert Worth Magister IV, the oldest son, seemed to be stuck with “Young Bob” even though he was closing in on fifty. “But the board only serves at the whim of the stockholders, and if there’s ever a stockholders’ vote, you, as executor, are going to have to choose.”

  “Unless we resign as executor.”

  “Unless you resign as executor,” I repeated. “But I gather that’s one option you don’t want. It’s too bad Magister named you.”

  “I always advised him against it,” McClintock said, “but he insisted on us taking care of his personal affairs. He told me that if we wanted to keep the companies as our client, we could damn well draft his wills out of our retainer.”

  Maybe, as they say, that’s how the rich get richer: by stiffing their attorneys. I’d have bet the Firm had never once dared bill him for personal services.

  “I see you understand the situation,” McClintock said. “But what we do about it is another question.”

  “The strategy, in other words,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Camelot tells me you want a settlement. Any settlement will do, you don’t care what it is as long as there is one.”

  “I never told him that!” McClintock retorted angrily. “We want a fair and equitable solution. Our position is one of strict neutrality.”

  “Whatever,” I said, getting a small pleasure from his reaction. “But some kind of settlement. Only you can’t go directly to either side, because whichever one you go to will think the others put you up to it. Actually, Mr. Camelot says you already know of a proposition the family’s ready to accept.”

  “Some of the family,” McClintock corrected. “And it’s a range, not a proposition. Did he tell you what it is?”

  “In substance, yes. Mrs. Magister gets to keep all her personal property. She gives up her shares in the companies. She’s guaranteed no less than a million dollars a year. For life.”

  “After tax,” McClintock added.

  And not bad pay, I thought, for three years’ work.

  “Only nobody believes she’ll accept it,” I said.

  “We don’t know that,” McClintock said. “It’s a start, a point of departure for further negotiation.”

  The problem was that nobody was volunteering to take it to Mrs. Magister, not the Firm, not Young Bob’s attorney or any of the others representing the family members.

  And that, the Counselor guessed, was because of Roy Barger.

  McClintock denied this that morning. The Firm wasn’t afraid of Roy Barger. What made everybody cautious was that any offer taken to Mrs. Magister, no matter what restrictions were put on it, was going to be leaked to the media as long as Roy Barger was involved, and once it was known publicly that the children were ready to settle, the psychological tide would start working against them. Roy Barger, at least by reputation, was a master of manipulation.

  Enter Charles Camelot. A like master.

  There was a further problem, though. I knew it; McClintock did too. Before the Counselor could talk settlement with Barger, he needed bargaining chips. Leverage in other words, something that would make Barger think twice before he went the route with the case. As if right then, Barger had nothing to gain by getting his client to settle and nothing to lose by going to trial, which would mean a ton of publicity and a fat fee at the end whether he won or lost. We needed something either on Margie Magister or, less likely, on Barger himself. As of right then we had nothing.

  Which is where I came in.

  A little later, McClintock passed me on to Henry Rand, a tall associate with a prominent Adam’s apple who was in his early thirties and well up the ladder toward success in the Firm. Chances seemed good he’d make it the rest of the way: he’d graduated from the right schools, had the right social connections, and had hitched his career to the right star, meaning Doug McClintock. Meanwhile, while he sweated out his progress toward partner, which would give him a cut in the Firm’s annual profits, he did most of McClintock’s dirty work.

  Hank Rand and I spent much of the day going over the Firm’s files on Margie Magister. We worked in one of the smaller conference rooms, allegedly so that we wouldn’t be interrupted but really, I guessed, because Hank’s office was several notches below McClintock’s in size and appointments. Hank’s secretary, an eager damsel with a big polka-dot bow tie, brought us the papers we needed, plus sandwiches and coffee, plus a Perrier for Hank and a beer for me.

  As executors, the Firm had at least formal approval over Margie Magister’s expenditures, and from what Hank Rand showed me, the bereaved widow had been spending as though tomorrow would never come, or just in case it didn’t. Bendel, Gucci, Cartier, Mark Cross, all of them were there, and art dealers, antiques dealers, and many of the watering holes and eateries around town which survive, or don’t, on the largesse of the rich and famous. None of them was going out of business that season, thanks to Margie, and you could say Bob III’s death was the first good thing that had happened to New York’s pleasure merchants since Imelda Marcos lost her credit cards.

  In addition, the Firm controlled Margie’s payroll, or “household staff,” the maids and housekeepers and gardeners and cooks and chauffeurs and “personal secretaries” without whom, you had to assume, the bereaved widow couldn’t so much as get out of bed. There’d been a heavy dosage of young male employees, I noted, plus a lot of turnover; apparently Margie was hard to satisfy. In addition to names and dollars, to which they were entitled, the Firm had a lot more, and I was glad to see my sometimes accomplice, Bud Fincher, had been making an honest living. Bud runs a medium-sized private investigations agency, one of the better ones around town, and as far as I could tell, he’d done a pretty thorough work-up on the Magister staff, past and present.

  “So much for strict neutrality,” I commented to Rand as I went through the paperwork.

  He looked at me with a quizzical expression.

  “That’s what McClintock told me,” I said, quoting: “‘The Firm’s position is one of strict neutrality.’”

  “Well,” he said huffily, “that’s substantially correct. What other position could we take?”

  “In that case,” I said, “why aren’t we going through the same material on the rest of the family? You’ve got it, haven’t you?”

  He hesitated, like he wanted advice on how to answer. But then he thought better of it.

  “Off the record?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “The answer is no,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t develop it if we wanted to.”

  “Of course you could,” I agreed.

  The point, though, was that they hadn’t. Margie Magister, the Firm had clearly decided, was their target and Roy Barger their enemy.

  I took some notes on items I thought could use further investigation, and Rand’s bow-tied secretary photocopied some of the documents for me, but the message I took back uptown that afternoon, clear as it was, was one I knew the Counselor wouldn’t want to hear.

  “Essentially they’ve got nothing,” I told the Counselor. “They know she’s been on a spending spree, that she’s got some good-looking young studs on her payroll, also that she’s been chasing around with a pretty fast-and-loose crowd recently, but that’s about it. Some smoke, but nothing you could light your pipe with.”

  The Counselor was in one of his fouler moods. He sat behind his desk, a massive figure in the usual late-afternoon working costume of shirtsleeves, bow tie, and suspenders. He chewed on an unlit pipe while I gave my report, his jawline gleaming in the light. The air-conditioning unit and his pipe smoke had been fighting for control of the atmosphere when I got there. The unit had won, but only temporarily, because when I finished, he kept me sitting there while he fussed with matches, then, failing to relight the old pipe, discarded it and found another, which he stoked with tobacco, then lit. The usual ritual, I thought, but I noticed one detail that wasn’t: the bow tie and the suspenders didn’t match. In fact, they clashed. The Counselor’s Wife, I thought, would have a fit.

  “What does Fincher say?” he asked, glowering at me.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet.”

  “You haven’t?”

  I caught the accusatory tone all right.

  “No.”

  “Well, and what have they got on the rest of the family?”

  “I asked the same question,” I answered.

  “And …?”

  “Nothing. They haven’t even looked.”

  “Assholes,” he said, pulling the pipe from between his teeth. I didn’t know for sure if he was referring to the Magister children or the Firm or both, but I knew enough not to ask.

  We sat there, eyeing each other. I could feel it mounting in him, call it tension, anger, whatever, but it was par for the course and I was used to it to the extent that I would ever get used to it.

  “We’d better get off our butts, Phil,” he said finally. “What else are you working on?”

  I mentioned one or two matters of no great consequence. Nothing, in fact, that couldn’t wait.

  “Drop them,” the Counselor said. “I want you full time on Magister. And not just the widow. I want them all. Now.”

  “But the Firm …,” I started to say.

  “I don’t give a damn what McClintock wants or says he wants. We want to know who’s going to win.”

  I sat there a moment, waiting, but his head had already turned away, and then he rang for Ms. Shapiro.

  I stood up and crossed her in the doorway.

  A foul mood all right, but I put it to his gearing up. At the beginning of any case the Counselor feels at a disadvantage, and the feeling communicates itself to the rest of us. Usually, when the Firm calls us in, the feeling is double because nothing irritates the Counselor more than, as he puts it, the Firm’s incompetence at handling its own matters. Even though, needless to say, their incompetence helps pay our bills.

  Anyway, I was used to it like I said, and the foul mood, I expected, would dissipate once we began to get a handle on the case.

  Only this time it didn’t, and I was only partly right in the cause I gave it.

  There was an envelope waiting for me when I got back downstairs. It was marked “By Hand,” and I thought I recognized the writing, but all Roger LeClerc said was that a messenger service had delivered it.

  Strange. The more so since the handwriting was the one I’d thought it was.

  “Phil,” the note inside said, “I need to talk to you in private, to ask your advice, maybe your help. I’d prefer not to do it at home. Could you come over to my office any time between five and seven today? I’ve got to do my show after that, but I’ll be here until seven-thirty. Please try to make it. It’s important.”

  And the signature read: “Nora.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 5:20. I put in a call to Bud Fincher’s office, not to talk to him but to find out where I could reach him later. Then I left the office and walked up Park to the apartment house where the Counselor’s Wife, a.k.a. Nora Saroff, does her shrinking in one of the ground-floor suites.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get Bud Fincher till the next day. And if I thought I found out why the Counselor’s Wife had been crying that morning and why she’d canceled her appointments, well, I turned out only to be partly right there too.

  In other words: you win some, you lose some.

  CHAPTER

  3

  “I find myself in a strange position,” she began. “Strange to me at least. I’ve never had anything like it happen before.”

  I sat across her desk from her in a padded armchair where, I supposed, her patients confessed their secrets when they weren’t lying on the couch behind me. I’d been in the outer area once or twice before, where the receptionist and waiting patients sat, and I knew that the Counselor’s Wife shared the setup with another shrink, but I’d never been in her private office.

  The effect of the room and its furnishings was quiet, neutral, maybe a touch feminine. The Counselor’s Wife used a long white parson’s table for a desk, and there was a large white vase at one end filled with fresh flowers in water, also a tape recorder, a white jar for pencils and pens, a telephone (also white), and very little else. Behind her, framed by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, hung a large oil painting, lit from above, which depicted ballet dancers at rest. A couple of them were holding on to those practice bars, another group was talking in a cluster, and a single girl leaned forward on a bench, head down, like she was trying to relax her neck. The painting was signed, but I couldn’t read the artist’s name. I assumed it was a good one, probably valuable.

  The lighting was indirect and on the dim side. Beige drapes completely masked the two windows which, I figured, gave out onto the Park Avenue sidewalk. The carpeting was of a reddish brown tone and the upholstered furniture, including my chair, was covered in a nubby beige fabric. I had the weird feeling that I’d been there even though I knew I hadn’t, and it wasn’t till later, when I went along with her to the television studio, that I realized why.

  “The professional ethics are muddy,” the Counselor’s Wife was saying. “Of course there’s the confidentiality of the therapeutic situation … that’s what you’re taught in school. Whatever a patient says inside this room is held to be secret and sacrosanct, the same as in a priest’s confessional. Or, if you like, a lawyer’s office. But only up to a point. After that, you’re on your own. Only there’s no one to tell you where that point is, or when you’ve reached it, or what you should do once you have.”

  As though amused by something she’d just said, she smiled, showing her white teeth.

  “God knows it’s not like me to beat around the bush this way,” she said. “It’s also not like me to be the one doing the talking. Here, I mean. In this room. Maybe we ought to switch sides.” She eyed me, crinkles in the corners of her eyes. “I bet that’s what you’re thinking too, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head. Actually I’d been wondering what it was that had choked her up that morning. Whatever it had been, though, I saw no sign of it now. Maybe she felt self-conscious inside, or was beating around the bush, but outwardly she seemed perfectly composed, cool.

  “Here’s the point, Phil,” she said. “I think one of my patients may have committed a crime. Or crimes. A terrible crime, or crimes. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

  She stopped there, eyes on me, head slightly tilted.

  “Do you think it?” I asked. “Or do you know it?”

  “Both,” she answered. “Both think it and know it. And neither. Sometimes I think I’m crazy even to think it; other times I’m dead certain.”

  “Certain enough to tell the police?”

  She shook her head.

  “Hardly,” she said. “You’d have to understand the dynamic of the … damn, excuse the jargon. You’d have to have sat here where I sit to believe it, heard what I’ve heard, felt what was behind the words. Even then. Just hearing myself say it out loud makes me think I’m all wrong, that I might be doing him … someone … a terrible injustice.”

  She paused again, leaving a gap.

  “What does Mr. Camelot think?” I asked.

  “I haven’t told him,” she answered coolly.

  I felt something in her then. Call it a stiffening.

  “Then why me?”

  “I felt the need to talk to someone outside the profession.”

  Another silence. It unnerved me a little, along with the cool, blue-eyed stare that invariably makes me feel like I’m being measured.

  “Look, Nora,” I said, “if you don’t think you should tell me about it, don’t. Not to worry, I’ll forget you ever mentioned it. As far as I’m concerned, I never …”

  “Not to worry?” she repeated harshly, turning it into a question, her eyes now large and fixed on me. “For God’s sake, Phil, I think I may know the one who’s killing those women!”

  “You mean the Killer?”

  “The Pillow Killer,” she said. Then, tossing her head angrily, she repeated it: “The Pillow Killer. That’s typical, isn’t it? Men on the loose, anonymous, so sick and twisted and frightened that they’ll commit horrible crimes, and we don’t know who they are so we give them funny names. We invent their names for them. The Zodiac Killer, the Boston Strangler, the Mad Bomber. Son of Sam. The Pillow Killer. We don’t know who they are, so we make them into celebrities with funny names. Did you ever stop to think why we do it?”

  “I guess we all need our heroes,” I said.

  She laughed quickly.

  “Funny,” she said. “That is, unless you’re a woman. Then it’s not so funny. But that’s the point, isn’t it? After all, isn’t it men who give the funny names to men who prey on women? You ought to try it sometime. I mean: try being us. Try walking in the street, or waiting in the subway, an elevator, at a supermarket checkout, and not knowing whether the man standing behind you is thinking about suffocating you with a pillow. We’re supposed to be hysterical, paranoid, and everybody jokes about the blonde wigs and the scarves. You ought to try it sometime.”

  It would have been hard to be male in the last decade or two and not have heard similar suggestions. Hard too not to have learned that it’s pointless to answer.

  “I’m sorry, Phil,” she said. “I didn’t mean to subject you to Feminism 101. It’s just that I’ve had a tough day as far as the sexes are concerned.”

  She didn’t elaborate. She put her hands on the parson’s table, palms flat, and gazed at me.

  “I want to play you some tapes,” she said. “It won’t take long. I won’t do all of it for you unless you want to hear more, and I didn’t tape every session, far from it. I wish I had now. Or hadn’t taped any of them. You’ll see what I mean.”

  While she fiddled with the machine, she filled me in on the case history, or at least the parts she wanted me to know. She never called the patient by name, only he or him. He was young, twenty-five when he first came to her, which had been about a year before. He came from money, a lot of money, she said. New York money, what she called “your basic poor-little-rich-boy background.” His father and mother had separated when he was a baby; then his father died when he was three. He had no recollection of him. Then his mother—he and his mother—had lived with another man for several years. The man had moved in with them. Then, when the boy was nine, his mother remarried, not to the lover but to another man. The boy had gotten into a lot of trouble. He’d been shipped off to boarding school at twelve and had been kicked out of a number of places through the years—for cheating, stealing, at least once for possession of drugs. He’d never finished college. When he’d first come to the Counselor’s Wife, he’d been between jobs, though after she’d started seeing him, he’d gone to work for a bank. His stepfather had got him the job. It hadn’t lasted. He no longer lived with his parents. He had a trust fund, enough apparently to pay for an Upper East Side apartment where he had a succession of roommates, male and female—“a kind of free-floating living arrangement” she called it—and enough, for that matter, to pay for the Counselor’s Wife.