I'll Cry When I Kill You Page 5

  End of explanation.

  “You’re lucky,” said Grace, swiveling to face me again and looking up into my eyes. “I hate Grace Bashard. I’d give anything to change my name. Why don’t you marry me?”

  Her face was all of two inches from mine, uptilted, unblinking, her eyes very wide. Maybe she was joking but I also had the unsettling feeling that if I said “Why not?” I could have found myself standing in front of a justice of the peace before dark.

  “Why’d you call him a creep, Grace?” I asked again, a little unsteadily. “I mean, last night when you called me, you were worried, frightened. He was beside himself, you said. But this morning he’s a creep. Is it because of that speech he made?”

  I think she might have told me a lot of things then and maybe saved a lot of trouble. But she didn’t, presumably because she knew we weren’t alone. Instead, she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me flush on the mouth, her lips parted, even as Raul Bashard’s cane pushed open the door of the outbuilding.

  “Excuse me if I’m interrupting,” he said, his head ducking forward a little in the doorway, that ceramic smile on his face. “Luncheon is about to be served on the terrace.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  “Item,” said Raul Bashard crisply. “Jules was killed by cyanide poison. The lab will send us a written report. Item: Both dogs were sent to the same training school. Item: Both were taught not to accept food from strangers. Conclusion: Either the training broke down or the person or persons who left the poisoned meat was no stranger. Any one, or more, of the people who live here could have done the job, alone or in tandem. I prefer to think the dog’s training broke down.”

  (According to Brother Alexander, this would have been impossible for a dog schooled by the Brothers. But Bashard’s Dobermans hadn’t been.)

  We were sitting alone, in white wrought-iron chairs with throne backs and oversize cushions, by the long, glass-topped, wrought-iron table on the rear terrace. A pair of striped parasol umbrellas mounted on stanchions shaded us from the afternoon sun, but it was strong enough to throw dazzles of light off the shimmering surface of the swimming pool. I wore sunglasses, and Bashard a white cap with black beak.

  The luncheon dishes had been cleared. Lunch had consisted of light salads, iced tea, and minimal conversation. Over dessert—fresh fruit in scooped-out melon halves—Bashard asked his daughter what she was going to do that afternoon. Grace shrugged, then said she was going shopping. Who was going to take her shopping? She didn’t know, she thought she’d ask Price. Price couldn’t, Bashard said, he had other duties. Then me, she said, she’d ask me. I couldn’t, Bashard said, he needed to talk to me. Then silence. All this time, she’d had her head down. She’d taken off the jeans jacket and flung it over a chair. The jacket had a multicolored GUESS? printed in large capitals across its lining. She wore a bright pink tank top underneath, which showed off her breasts sensationally. Well, Bashard had said, he guessed she couldn’t go shopping, was there anything she particularly needed? She shook her head. In that case, he said, he would ask her to excuse herself, he had business to attend to. To my surprise, she got up quietly and wandered into the house, trailing her jeans jacket over her shoulder.

  “Item,” Bashard said. “My daughter made that scene at the burial this morning because she believes I poisoned the dog myself.”

  “Why would she believe a thing like that?”

  “My daughter often thinks the worst of me. And Jules Verne, she will tell you, was her dog.”

  He went on with another “item.” At first, I thought, weirdly, that he was reading my mind, until, with a jolt, the truth occurred to me. Clearly he’d been listening in on my phone calls all morning and monitoring my work with the computer.

  “Item,” he said. “Sow, or S.O.W., is a defunct code. It should have been edited out of the system a long time ago. It identified members of a group who played chess by computer hookup. Leo Mackes and Viola T. Harmel belonged to the group, so did I. There were others. I never met either one of them. Viola Harmel was the best woman chess player I ever ran into. Well, the second best. Dasha was the best, of course, but that’s another story. Viola could have held her own in the U.S. Open.”

  “You said you never met them?”

  “That’s right. We all subscribed to the same chess magazine. It had a section called Chess by Mail, a kind of clearinghouse for players looking for partners. Little by little, a group of us who had computers found each other. But I stopped playing years ago. Chess is an obsession. A writer can’t afford obsessions. Other than writing, that is.”

  “But they haven’t stopped writing you,” I said. “At least Harmel hasn’t.”

  He waved his hand in the air, a dismissing gesture. A very steady hand, I noticed.

  “People fall on hard times,” he said. “Even chess players. Particularly chess players.”

  “Have you ever sent her any money?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “It sounds like she thinks you owe her some.”

  “I don’t,” he replied. “What’s she classed as now? A Moderate?”

  His grin was genuine enough, not the perpetual ceramic one. He seemed to enjoy my realization that every phone call in the place was recorded, every computer inquiry monitored. For all I know, a camera had recorded Grace’s kissing me.

  “Item,” he said. “Don’t let my daughter’s advances bother you. She tries the same thing on everyone who comes here. Ask Price. Hell, you can ask the cook and the gardener. It stops after a while. Teenage stuff. It’s like a rite of passage into the household.”

  One rite, I thought, I didn’t much want to pass.

  “Unless,” he added, “you’d like to marry her? That would be a different story.”

  The grin again, glinting even in the shadow of his capbill.

  “Why do you keep her a prisoner?” I asked.

  “A prisoner?” he replied, either surprised by the question or doing a good job of feigning surprise. “Is that what she said? Hell, she’s no more a prisoner here than I am. She has everything she wants. Except a car, that’s true. Do you think I’m wrong not to give her a car? She has friends, plenty of friends.” All of whom, I thought, would be in Oscar’s file. “She can have them over anytime she wants.”

  “What about school?” I said.

  “What about it?” he retorted.

  “Well, why doesn’t she go? I think it may even be against the law.”

  His face tightened, his teeth seeming to clench.

  “And I think you’re overstepping yourself a little,” he said abruptly. “It isn’t against the law, not anymore. She’s eighteen now. And I’ve been through it with schools. The ones I’ve seen, they’re not worth the cost of the heads.” This was his only reference that I can recall, if it was one, to his son and Grace’s blood father. “Besides, anything I haven’t been able to teach her we’ve had tutors for. Do you want to know something, with your schools? She took the SAT’s this year. That’s Scholastic Aptitude Tests, if you didn’t know. Do you know how she did? Well, I’ll tell you. Well enough to get into any college in the country, that’s how.”

  “If you’ll let her go,” I said quietly.

  “Let her go!” he shouted hoarsely back at me. “What makes you think I’ll have anything to say about it! I’m not going to be here, it’ll be her decision!”

  His hand had started shaking, and he had to lean it on the tabletop to stop it. Veins stood out on his neck. I half stood, reached forward, saw Price start forward from the French doors of the house. But Bashard waved me off, waved us both off, and by plain force of will—I can think of no other way to describe it—caught hold of himself. Then he sat back, breathing deeply, slowly. He took his cap off and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief taken from the breast pocket of his jacket.

  Bashard’s anger, I thought, was like another rite of passage. It built up fast, edged with scorn; it blasted at you; then it stopped.

  “E
xcuse me,” he said. “Don’t you have work to do now, anyway?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve work to do.” I hesitated, hearing the Counselor’s voice in my head—Hire the track team—but I went ahead and said it anyway: “If you want to know what I think, though, the work won’t add up to anything. Sure, there may be someone who wants to kill you out there, maybe more than one, and if there are, maybe we’ll find them. But I see no evidence of it. Wanting to kill someone isn’t a crime. Trying to kill someone is. Killing a dog, for instance, is, but you don’t seem to want to pursue that one. As it stands, the odds of someone trying to kill you don’t look very good to me.”

  “I wish I could share your confidence,” Bashard replied.

  “If you really feel yourself in danger,” I went on, “then you should stay here. The only way you’re going to die here is by stepping on a cake of soap.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I’d already brought up the subject once and been shot down, but there was no harm trying again.

  “I mean: if you feel the way you do, then cancel the BashCon.”

  He thought about that a moment. Then he drew himself up in his chair, very erect.

  “There’s no way I will do that,” he said, gazing out firmly over the pool. “I’m only going to be eighty once—next week—and never again. My professional colleagues—fellow writers, critics, publishers, editors, booksellers, readers—have seen fit to honor the date. It may well be their last chance. There is no way I am going to let them down.” He paused, as though to let the statement sink in. Then, leaning forward in a more confidential tone: “But I agree with you, Revere. Most likely, that is where the attempt will be made. At BashCon. That is how I see your assignment. Throw all your resources into it. Identify the suspects, observe them, track them.”

  He might be a little paranoid, the Counselor had said, but we all might be a little paranoid in his position. Yes. What he wanted, in any case, seemed do-able. With the help of Bud Fincher’s track team, we could put an arm on the crazy correspondents I’d singled out, could observe and track them, could, if any of them showed at the BashCon, probably deter them. I could also get a line on the “professional colleagues” who would be in attendance.

  It seemed a waste of time, though. From all I’d seen so far, the only one with murder in the eye was the eighteen-year-old bombshell, Grace. You lousy filthy creep. At that particular moment, she’d been capable of anything.

  I wondered if Grace knew about that proviso in his will. I had an idea she did.

  I tried to review the BashCon preparations, but Bashard plainly wasn’t interested. He waved them away. It was all up to me, he said. He’d do whatever I wanted him to do.

  He pleaded fatigue then. He glanced at his watch, said he wanted a nap before dinner. An old man, he said with a chuckle, needed his sack time when he could get it, particularly when he spent most of his nights with his eyes wide open.

  He stood up unsteadily. I handed him his cane and walked slowly with him to the house. There Price took over. I watched the two of them rise up in the small elevator cage, then climbed the stairs, got my things and went back out to the garage where my Fiero was parked among the great foreign machines of Bashard’s fleet.

  No sign of Grace, meanwhile.

  I drove down the driveway, flickered the gates with my headlights in the sequence Price had taught me, then down the winding road through the estates to the tree-lined streets of the town. It was good to be back to where normal people led presumably normal lives. I slugged a tape into the cassette player. It was good, too, a little later, to see the friendly skyline of Manhattan when the Fiero and I got hung up in the pre-rush-hour traffic on the Lincoln Tunnel ramp.

  Bud Fincher was waiting for me in my office when I got there, a cadaverously tall man with a balding dome and rimless glasses that give him a professorial look. He’s no genius, like I said, but thorough and well-organized. We worked through the lists I’d brought back, and he made some phone calls from my desk. It was only after he’d left, when I was emptying out my briefcase, that I discovered Grace’s note.

  I guess she’d intended it that way.

  It read:

  “My Dearest,

  “You’ll be away and safe when you read this. I’m very glad, even though it breaks my heart not to have you close. He would destroy you if you stayed. He destroys everything I care about. He killed Jules or had Jules killed, I know that. He knows I know that.

  “I have so many things to tell you, my heart is bursting, but I have to find a way to get this to you without him finding about it.

  “Love and XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”

  The X’s wound their way around her signature, which wasn’t her name but a cartoon figure of a little girl. Then they continued down to an afterthought scrawled across the bottom of the page:

  “You must stay away from here, Pablo love. Don’t try to come to me either. I’ll find a way of coming to you.”

  “What do you make of it, Nora?” the Counselor asked, handing Grace Bashard’s letter to his wife.

  “I think the electric chair should be brought back for anyone who murders an animal.”

  “I mean the letter. Grace’s letter.”

  We were upstairs in the fifth-floor solarium, watching night fall on the neighborhood. The Counselor sipped his usual drink, pure malt Scotch with a touch of water. The Counselor’s Wife had changed clothes, I guessed. She wore a gauzy, big-sleeved lounging outfit of a color which matched her hair, and she drank some Campari concoction. Her hair, which she mostly wore piled on her head, hung loose and long. Muffin, the cocker bitch, panted quietly in the corner where their love seats met, her curled tongue protruding slightly from her mouth.

  “Oh, it’s about sex,” the Counselor’s Wife said blithely when she’d finished reading, handing him back the letter. “I don’t mean Phil and Grace, darling. I mean Grace and Raul Bashard. From everything Phil’s said, it’s clear the idea of getting into her pants drives Bashard absolutely crazy. And she, knowing it, plays it for all it’s worth. Writes love notes to other men, et cetera. Bored teenagers, even eighteen-year-old ones, are like that.”

  I usually avoided such moments—when the Counselor’s Wife held forth—like the plague. As for the Counselor, he’d managed to get his pipe stuffed, meanwhile sprinkling some tobacco into his lap, and now he fumbled absent-mindedly for matches.

  “I thought the Oedipus complex,” he said, “tried to explain what happens between parents and children, not grandparents and granddaughters. Aren’t they both a little old for that?”

  “Not if it’s unresolved,” the Counselor’s Wife said. “If it’s unresolved, it can last forever. Where do you think most of my patients come from? Besides, Raul Bashard passes himself off as her father, not her grandfather. Do you think that’s an accident?”

  “But he’s seventy-nine years old, almost eighty. And his health is atrocious.”

  “Sex is much more about mind than body. Men are capable of staying virile far longer than they think they are, darling. Into their eighties, even beyond. Look at the Georgians, they’re still making babies when they’re a hundred. From what Phil says about his life-style, Raul Bashard has had few opportunities for sex in recent years. Imagine that such a man is both virile and frustrated, put him into daily contact with an eighteen-year-old who may also be starved for sex, or at least wants to be, and knows how to tell men she is, including, I would guess, her father, or grandfather … and you have a very powerful combination.”

  Standing up, she handed the Counselor the silver matchbox from the coffee table. Then she took his glass and hers and strode to the bar. Muffin got up, too, wagging her tail, and followed her.

  “Another beer, Phil?”

  I passed.

  “Unless …” she said musingly, still at the bar. Then: “Tell us what you really think, Phil. Do they sleep together?”

  “That’s absurd and unwarranted!” the Counselor
exclaimed.

  “Is it? Hardly. You should see the current incest statistics, darling. They’d shock even you. Why do you think you have to pass laws against it? Besides, you haven’t seen them together in a long time. Phil has.”

  She came back with the two glasses and, tossing her hair, sat down again. The dog followed her back and sat down, too. The Counselor looked for something else to fidget with.

  “I don’t pass the laws, Nora,” he said.

  “Never mind, you know what I mean,” she said. Then she eyed me above her glass. “What do you think, Phil? You’ve seen them. Are they sleeping together?”

  “I saw nothing that says they are,” I answered.

  This was true enough, but untrue too. Maybe the idea had occurred to me and I’d put it aside. “Suppressed” it, the Counselor’s Wife would have said. Or else her theorizing about Bashard and Grace brought certain things to mind that hadn’t quite registered at the time.

  On the other hand, the Counselor’s Wife’s stock-in-trade is to explain the world in terms of sex.

  “Either way,” she went on. “Either way. If they’re having sex, it can be a cause of terrible tension and not just because of the incest taboo. A seventy-nine-year-old man, even a virile one, is probably satisfied by doing it once a week. An eighteen-year-old woman isn’t. Love letters like this”—pointing at Grace’s missive on the coffee table—“could either be expressing a teenage fantasy, and teenage fantasies can be terribly real, or else a very real frustration. On the other hand, if they’re not having sex but only thinking about it—and at the least it has to be latent in their situation—then the tension would be all the greater.”

  “In other words,” the Counselor said, puffing away now at his pipe, “you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But the fact is, my client’s convinced somebody’s going to try to kill him. It’s our role to try to prevent that, not to speculate on his sex life.”