If I Should Die Before I Die (18 page)

The same dark-haired bartender who'd served me the other time was working my section of the bar, and he came up to me, automatically wiping the dark wood in front of me with a white towel, saying:

“Hi there, what'll it be? Bass Ale, right?”

“Right,” I said, impressed. “Is Alfie Leonard around?”

Alfie Leonard, I knew from Bobby, was Melchiorre's current owner.

“No, he doesn't come around nights much.”

I watched him fill the glass mug, tilting it into the spigot, then expertly flicking off the extra head with a bar stick and refilling without spilling a drop.

“So where is everybody?” I asked him.

“Who're you looking for?”

“I mean Cloy, you know? And Bobby, Booger, Hal, all that gang?”

He eyed me, frowning a little and tilting his chin.

“Say, you're not a cop too, are you?” he asked.

“No, I'm not. How come you ask?”

“Well, you're the second guy who's been in here tonight looking for them. The first one was a cop. I didn't know him, but he flashed me his badge. Actually, he was looking for Hal. Actually, he asked for Vincent Halloran. Say, what's going down with them?”

“Beats me,” I said. “I was just looking for them. They're friends of mine, sort of.”

“Well, I haven't seen them tonight.”

He took the twenty I'd put on the bar, rang it up and put my change in front of me. I let it lie there. He moved off down the bar to serve other customers. I worked the Bass Ale down and signaled to him for a refill, putting a fresh twenty on the bar.

He noticed it all right, even though he counted out the money from my previous pile.

“When's the last time you saw them?” I asked him.

He shrugged.

“I don't know. They're in here most nights. Some of them anyway.”

“What about last night?”

He gave me that quizzical tilt of the head again.

“C'mon,” he said. “If you're not a cop, what are you? A private eye?”

“It so happens I'm not, but what makes you think so?”

He grinned at me.

“Because the cop asked the same questions. He was pretty insistent about it, who was here last night, who wasn't. Say, what's so special about last night? You're not telling me one of them's the Pillow Killer, are you?”

He said it like a joke, laughing at the idea.

“Beats me,” I said. “What did the cop say?”

“I didn't ask him. It didn't occur to me till just now. But you know something? This city's such a sewer, anybody could go crazy, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don't mean your friends. They play a little rough sometimes, but they're okay. The only one I can't figure out is Bobby. You know Bobby?”

I nodded.

“Well, he's not like the others.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He talks different, you know? I mean, not Ivy League. The others talk like Harvard, but Bobby's just regular. I mean, he's okay, but he doesn't talk the same.”

“Was he here last night?” I asked.

“Hey, gimme a break, will you? Yeah, he was here last night. I'll tell you who was here and who wasn't, okay?”

He ran the list through for me then, telling me he'd told the cop the same things. Cloy, Hal, Booger, Sprague, Shrimp, Mike, Bobby. He corroborated what Bobby Derr had reported, that McCloy had left early, angry, and that most, if not all of them, had closed the joint. He thought a couple of them might have wandered off in between, but he wasn't sure which ones. And that was all I got out of him, even though I worked the first twenty all the way down in Bass Ales and added another for him.

I stayed at Melchiorre's for an hour and a half, two at the outside. Nobody tried to pick me up. Nobody I knew showed. There were reasons for that, as it turned out. The Task Force still had Carter McCloy and would hold him overnight, for which there would be hell to pay. A couple of his friends had also been picked up. And meanwhile Bobby Derr was getting beaten to a pulp on a New York street.

As for me, I got home around one, cold, wet, and lonesome, and found Bobby slumped against the door to my apartment.

He didn't look pretty. The rims of his nostrils were caked and his right eye puffed up almost to closing. His clothes were a soggy mess, and one of his ears looked like somebody had tried to take a bite out of it.

I got him inside and helped clean him up. I offered to take him to an emergency room, but he refused. All he wanted was a drink and a cigarette. I gave him both, the cigarette from a pack, still uncracked, that I'd bought at Melchiorre's.

“I blew it, babe,” he kept saying. “I didn't give them you or Nora, but I blew it. They think I work for his stepfather. Jesus, if I'd only kept my mouth …”

It took a while, but I finally got him calmed down enough to tell it from the beginning.

The Task Force had picked him up shortly after we'd separated on Broadway. They'd questioned him hard about McCloy. They knew he was working for me, but they didn't push the point. Because of that, and after what I'd told him at the cafeteria, he'd figured that Camelot himself had fingered him. He'd told them pretty much all he knew about McCloy, even to the point of where he thought they'd find him. Then they'd let him go.

He'd gone up to McCloy's apartment in the afternoon. Why? Well, he hadn't been able to reach me, and the last instructions he'd had were that I wanted him to stay close to McCloy. He'd found a clean-up party in progress, with a case of beer in a washtub full of ice on the living-room floor. McCloy wasn't there. Nobody seemed to know where he was. Also, they were pretty guarded with him about why, just that day, they'd decided to clean house, but he was used to them being guarded with him sometimes. He'd helped out for a while, had carried a couple of plastic bags down to the garbage room in the basement. Then he'd left, after arranging to meet them at Melchiorre's later.

He'd gone home. He still hadn't been able to get hold of me. Then Shrimp had showed up. Shrimp Stark was one of the regulars in the group. I'd seen him myself that night at the Rosebud, a short, wiry guy with a crew cut. Bobby'd said he claimed to have been a champion wrestler in his prep school days. It wasn't so unusual for him to show up like that, according to Bobby. Melchiorre's, they'd decided, was not happening; they were going to Willy's instead; somebody had remembered telling Bobby Melchiorre's so Shrimp had volunteered to collect him.

I knew Willy's. It's a pub-type joint down in the Gramercy Park area, which dates back to the nineteenth century as does, by reputation, Willy's spaghetti sauce. The cuisine there is only as good as the number of drinks you've had, but the place is always jammed, particularly with the swinging singles set, and there was no reason for Bobby to be surprised at the change.

He and Shrimp had commandeered a booth in Willy's back dining room. When nobody else showed, they'd ordered dinner. Then Hal and Booger had come in, and in a few minutes Bobby had realized he was in deep.

Cloy had been picked up by the cops. Did anybody know why? Nobody knew why. Could anybody guess why? Nobody could guess why. More, the word was out that the cops were looking for other people in the group. In fact, all of them. All of them, in fact, except Bobby. Nobody had heard Bobby's name mentioned. Wasn't that funny?

Bobby had started out playing dumb. He had no idea why the police were after them. But later on he'd told them his name might have been left out because he'd already talked to the cops.

His first mistake, he said, but he figured they already knew.

Why had he gone to the cops?

He hadn't. The cops had pulled him in.

Why would they have done a thing like that?

Because they knew he was a friend of Cloy's.

What did they have on Cloy?

Nothing, he thought. But they suspected him.

Suspected him of what?

Suspected him of being the Pillow Killer.

He remembered that this had cracked them up, the idea that Carter McCloy, wimp of wimps, was the Pillow Killer. It only went to show how desperate the cops were.

Well, what did they have on Cloy to make them suspect him?

He (Bobby) didn't know; it hadn't seemed to him they had much of anything.

Well, what did he (Bobby) think? Was Cloy the Pillow Killer?

He didn't know. He thought he might be.

“You told them you thought he might be?” I interrupted. “What the hell did you do that for?”

He shrugged and tried to grin.

“My second mistake,” he said. “But I wanted to see how they'd react.”

He got a little lost then, recounting it, about what had happened at Willy's and what later. His last mistake, he said, was not making a run for it while they were still in the saloon. But it had all happened so fast. He guessed he didn't believe they'd do what they did. He also guessed, he told me, that he didn't believe they could take him, not even three on one.

Wrong.

They'd taken him all right—to the deserted yard of a small private school somewhere in the teens. He hadn't even known the place existed, but one of them had gone there. Anyway, it was night and raining, and there was nobody around to watch, and there in the school yard, taking turns, they'd systematically beaten him.

They'd thought he was a cop himself. Then, from his wallet, they'd found out otherwise. They'd worked him over on that one: Who was paying him to fink on Cloy? But he hadn't told them. Why not, I asked him. He didn't know. He only shrugged and gave me that same broken grin. Besides, some of them had guessed it was Cloy's stepfather, and he hadn't said no to that, and then they'd gotten off on why he thought Cloy was the Pillow Killer, and he'd tried to say he wasn't and not much else because of protecting Nora, and he thought he'd passed out after that.

They'd stripped him clean, right down to his shoes. He'd found one shoe on the sidewalk outside, but not the other one.

How had he gotten up to my place?

He'd walked. In his socks.

Bobby Derr slept in my bed that night, I on the living-room couch. He was still asleep the next morning when I left for the meeting with Walters and Intaglio and probably that was just as well because he'd be hurting like a son of a gun when he woke up.

The meeting took place in the sitting room on the third floor of our building, the first, that is, of the residential stories. The living arrangements the Counselor's Wife designed are worth mentioning because they're a little strange and maybe even unique for New York City. The Camelots' living quarters are on the third floor, meaning mostly the master bedroom, a guest room, and the sitting room. The fourth floor, you could say, is for eating. It's where Althea presides, the Camelots' housekeeper and cook, along with her cat, Gorgeous, and it contains kitchen, pantry, dining room, and Althea's room. Following the theme, the fifth and top floor is for play. Or parties. It's the Counselor's Wife's pride and joy, a combination solarium and living area with plantings inside and out, and if you follow magazines like
Architectural Digest
, you'll have seen pictures of it. It has a hot-tub room, which the Counselor sometimes uses, but otherwise it's mostly for entertaining. The Counselor's Wife, when she's in form, likes nothing better than to throw parties.

That the meeting took place upstairs instead of in the Counselor's office must have been her doing. But the additional presence of Anne Garvey was clearly his, and you'd have to call it pretty even in terms of which one of them was in charge.

Not that anyone could have sensed there'd been trouble between them. In fact, they seemed very much together that morning, even to the point of sitting side by side on the wood-backed couch which, I was pretty sure, the Counselor found uncomfortable as hell. He looked positively natty, in a tweed suit and yellow bow tie—further evidence of her having come home, and she had on one of those jersey wool outfits, sweater and skirt with an oversized shoulder-padded cardigan, all in slightly different but matching shades of olive-khaki. She wore her hair swept up, the way she usually does for her professional day.

The rest of us—Garvey, Intaglio, Walters, and myself—occupied chairs grouped around the oval coffee table of thick, highly polished tiger oak. Althea had brought down coffee in a silver service and a heaping platter of those miniature Danish which Intaglio, Walters, and I largely shared.

Intaglio asked the Counselor's Wife to start from the beginning, from when she first took McCloy on as a patient, and when she began to suspect him, and why. She had a problem with that though: the confidentiality of the therapeutic session. Anne Garvey gave her the necessary assurances: one, that McCloy was already in police custody and certain statements he'd made were under investigation; two, that given the seriousness of the crimes, Dr. Saroff had every legitimate justification for breaking that confidentiality; three, that if their investigation of McCloy led nowhere, every effort would be made to keep Dr. Saroff's connection to the case anonymous.

The Counselor asked if they could be given those assurances in writing. After some debate, Anne Garvey agreed to it.

Then the Counselor's Wife led them back through it pretty much as I've already put it down: about the nature of Carter's psychological problems as she understood them, particularly his trouble with women, about the correlations she thought she'd identified between his states of mind and the earlier murders, then about his most recent bizarre behavior. She cited the no-show appointment and the threatening letter as examples of this. She couldn't be sure, not having seen the patient in several months, but if in fact Carter had written the letter, she thought it could be interpreted two ways: either something had happened in his life outside to make the therapy too threatening for him to continue; or the transference between patient and therapist had reached that key stage when the patient's emotions, particularly the strong ones like love and hate, spill over and become fixated upon the therapist. Nor did one, she said, rule out the other.