If I Should Die Before I Die (20 page)

Intaglio (breathing deeply): “We didn't, Carter, I promise you. Now just answer the question.”

McCloy never did get a chance to answer. Not that it would have made much difference, as Intaglio admitted to me later. He said it reminded him of times he'd gone fishing and the fish had played with his bait all day long, poking at it but never taking the hook. From what I saw, I had the impression McCloy actually enjoyed the proceedings, like he knew all along they couldn't hook him but he got some kind of kick out of tempting them. The fish playing the fishermen.

At that point, though, somebody stuck his head in the door and signaled to Intaglio. The assistant DA went out into the hall. He was gone a while. Then he came back and called McCloy out, and a few minutes later he rejoined me.

“Son of a gun,” he said. He was sweating and pale, and, head bowed, he ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. “If there's anything I can't stand, it's high-powered attorneys who like to throw their weight around. Do you know Roy Barger?”

“Barger? Sure I do. But what's he got to do with this?”

“He's just leaving with his client. He's threatening to sue us for harassment, can you beat that? Fat chance, but I had to stand there while he chewed us out. Actually, McCloy didn't seem to like it either.”

“Is Barger McCloy's attorney?” I said.

I wondered in passing if it was just a coincidence and decided it had to be. The other way lay sheer paranoia.

“His stepfather's apparently,” Intaglio said. “Somebody tipped off his stepfather.”

“And you can't hold him anymore?”

“How can we hold him? We're still running down his alibis, but so far everything checks out.”

“Including the last murder?”

“Including the last murder. But you know what I think, Revere? I think he's guilty of something. I can feel it. All that money and nothing to do with it, I can feel it in my bones.”

“What if he just wrote the letters?” I suggested.

Intaglio shook his head.

“Maybe I'm just tired,” he said. “Like played out. Tired of sitting around waiting for the next murder to happen. You don't know how many times we thought we had him. Only this time …” His voice trailed off. Then, as though he'd pulled himself back together: “We're going to watch this one close. Barger or no Barger. I want your help.”

“How?”

“You and Derr know him better than we do, his friends, his habits, where he hangs out. Put it together with Derr, everything you got, then call us. Either me or Jack Walters. And I certainly want to know if Saroff hears from him again.”

“Are you giving her protection?” I asked.

“You bet your sweet ass.”

There was something bothering me when I left the building, like an itch you can't reach, and I was still reaching for it and missing when I all but ran into Roy Barger and his client on the sidewalk. Or his client's stepson. They were having some kind of argument. A limo was waiting at the curb, the back door open, and Barger, in topcoat and fedora hat, looked like he was trying to usher McCloy into it.

McCloy, though, wasn't having any part of it. I saw him knock Barger's arm away, heard a snatch of speech that sounded like “… screw himself.”

Then Barger noticed me.

“Hey, Phil!” he said, stepping away from the limo door and extending his hand. “What a nice coincidence! What mischief brings you down to this unholy place?”

We exchanged handshakes. Barger said he heard I'd been at Sally's. Smiling, he said he heard I'd made a great impression. Smiling back, I told him I didn't know what that meant. Meanwhile I was watching McCloy out of the corner of my eye, and Barger saw it and started to introduce us.

“You don't have to tell me who he is,” McCloy said, waving the lawyer away and eyeing me coldly. “I've already met him. What's your name again?”

“It's Phil Revere,” Barger said before I could answer. “He works for Charles Camelot, the famous attorney? The one who's married to Nora Saroff? But I didn't know you'd already met. Hey, maybe this isn't a coincidence after all, huh, Phil?”

If my connection to the Counselor's Wife came as a revelation to McCloy, he didn't show it. He simply stared at the two of us. Stared down, I should say, and in more ways than one, for he was inches taller than Barger and me.

“It's not a coincidence,” he said in a put-down tone. “It's just that some people can't take a joke.”

I've thought about that line a lot since. I've concluded he was talking about the letters and the Counselor's Wife. If so, that was as close as he ever got to an oral confession of anything.

Roy Barger was in the midst of keeping a conversation going. He didn't know the details of what had happened, he'd only gotten a call at the crack of dawn from Carter's father telling him the police were …

But McCloy wouldn't let him go on.

“He's not my father,” he said with cold and scornful anger. He looked like there was a lot more in him to say. Instead, though, his jaws clamped shut hard, and he pivoted on his heels and headed up the sidewalk away from us. His hands were jammed into his blazer pockets and the ends of that damned scarf blew out behind him.

Barger made no effort to follow him.

“Strange young man,” he said, unperturbed. “A little confused, I gather, but that doesn't make him a killer, does it? The cops must be desperate.” Then, turning back to me and kicking his head up at the building: “Are you the reason they've had him down here, Phil?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Well, let me give you some advice anyway, as a friend to a friend.” He smiled at me, that ingratiating and polished Southern smile. “I may not know the details yet, and if Carter's in a little trouble, it wouldn't, I gather, be the first time. But Stew Collins, that's Carter's old man … actually Stew's his stepfather … can be one mean and vindictive son of a gun, and I say that even though I'm his attorney and friend. He sounds, to put it mildly, fit to be tied. He wants to go after the police for false arrest and harassment and to sue anybody else in sight. Whether he'll actually insist on going through with it, I've my doubts, but however you're involved, my friendly advice to you is to stay out of the way.”

I thought of a lot of things to answer, but I kept my mouth shut.

Barger offered me a ride uptown. I turned it down. He said he had to call the Counselor anyway to find out how his summit with the Magister boys had gone the day before, and he left room, with a wink and that same Southern smile, for me to comment. I didn't. Then he repeated his offer, that whenever I got tired of working for the Counselor, I had only to pick up the phone.

“Don't you forget it, huh, Phil?” he said, shaking my hand.

I said I wouldn't.

He drove off in the limo. I turned and looked north after Carter McCloy, but he'd disappeared by then.

I never saw him again.

CHAPTER

10

I know at least two people did see him, neither being Bobby Derr nor me. As for us, we did talk to Intaglio and Walters that same day by phone, but otherwise we were effectively out of the hunt. Intaglio always claimed the Task Force stayed on it. In view of what happened, I wonder.

Of the two people who did see him, one wasn't identified till later. The other was Linda Smith.

Linda Smith's real name was Linda Vigliotti. I'd met her on the Bowery, that night after the Rosebud, and I'd never have guessed she was Italian from the freckles on her nose. Anyway, sometime the afternoon of that day, Linda got a call from Carter McCloy. She wasn't home. Either she was still at work or en route home by subway, but he left a message on her answering machine. He wanted to see her again. He was sorry things had turned out badly that night, it was his fault, but he hadn't been able to get her out of his mind ever since. Would she meet him at Melchiorre's? Alternatively he'd come pick her up, but she'd have to give him instructions how to get there.

Linda got home, heard the message, and decided she didn't want to go out that night. She did call Melchiorre's, but McCloy wasn't there. One of the bartenders took down a message for him: tell Cloy Linda called.

McCloy called again. They talked quite a while. She really hadn't wanted to go out that night, she was too tired, but McCloy was very persuasive, very sweet, and she let him talk her into letting him come over.

It was after eleven when he finally showed. He came loaded down with stuff. He had a bunch of flowers and a kind of picnic basket of delicacies. He had to go back out to the car for an ice bucket filled with white wine.

From this point on, Linda's account went blurry. She claimed the struggle started almost immediately, that McCloy attacked her in the living room, but some of the food had been eaten and the police found half a bottle of wine in the pool of water in the ice bucket plus an empty on the floor. No signs of struggle in the living room. Plenty, however, in the bedroom. Then Linda, reversing her story, admitted that she'd agreed to have sex with him. What choice did she have, she said, he was acting so weird. How weird? Well, he told her he loved her more than any woman he'd ever met, but he also threatened her. How threatened? Well, he told her that if she didn't, he'd fix her so she'd never have sex with anybody else. Then they took their clothes off and got into bed where McCloy, according to Linda, couldn't get it up. That was what drove him really crazy, she said. That was when he really started to abuse her, in words and physically, and you could see the physical evidence of it all right, on television late the next day, when she was still in the hospital and they let her give some interviews.

She fought him as hard as she could, as long as she could—there was evidence to corroborate this too—but he was too strong for her. She started screaming, she screamed her head off, until he stuffed the pillow into her face, crammed it into her face and she couldn't get rid of it no matter how hard she kicked and scratched. She quoted him saying to her: “Time to say your prayers, l'il Linda.”

She thought she was about to die.

Then she thought she actually was dead when the pressure stopped.

It wasn't that though. It was that he'd let go. He must have thought she was dead too.

She saw him stagger out of the bedroom, blood streaming out of his forehead.

She'd tried to scream. Instead she threw up.

She thought she must have passed out then. Not for long, though, because when she managed to get out to her living-room window, she saw him getting into a car in the street below. That's what she claimed. How could she be sure, three flights up, in her condition and when it was dark outside? She didn't know, but she was sure. She was also sure somebody else was driving because she saw McCloy get in on the passenger side. What kind of car was it? She didn't know. Some kind of foreign make, she thought. Sporty. She could tell that much from the taillights.

Then she called 911, and that's where the police found her when they got there, sitting on the floor under her living-room window, wearing a T-shirt and nothing else.

At about 1:45 that morning, after Linda had identified him but before the police could get the word out, Carter McCloy went off the balcony of his ninth-floor apartment on the Upper East Side. The proverbial dive of the swan. Nobody saw him go; nobody saw him land.

The police found the following statement, handwritten, taped to the mirror above the living-room mantel. Most of it looked like some kind of poetry—not much of a poem, I suppose, if that's what it was meant to be. But I give it here in the same form:

I here

Of my own free Will

Confess to the Crimes

You choose to belittle under the Name

Pillow Killer.

Why I did

Is Anybody's Guess

But I did.

I head for the long final Sleep.

Will it be welcome?

Anybody's Guess.

I apologize to

dr. nora saroff.

She did her best but it was irrelevant.

No Apology for my Parents

adrienne douglas mccloy collins and james carter mccloy.

They never did theirs.

As for mr. stewart m. collins, my stepfather, the family and friends of my last victim have him to thank for rescuing me from the Law in time to kill her.

I hope my Friends will hoist a Cup

To me

In time.

Hold them blameless.

Now I lay me down to Sleep

I pray the Law my Soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Law my Soul to take.

Carter Douglas McCloy

As to when exactly it had been written, well, that, to quote McCloy, was anybody's guess.

PART THREE

CHAPTER

11

Mop-up and cover-up.

Most of the mopping up was done in and by the media. Linda Vigliotti and Carter McCloy both had their proverbial fifteen minutes' worth of limelight. Actually a little longer. In and out of the hospital, Linda Vigliotti was the heroine of the day. Without her pluck and guts, (1) she would be dead, and (2) the Pillow Killer might still be roaming the streets. But heroines, I guess, make dull copy, particularly heroines from Queens who aren't very photogenic, and Linda didn't last more than a week or two. I think she sold her life story to
The Enquirer
, but I don't know if it ever ran.

Carter McCloy had more staying power. For one thing, he was rich, or at least of rich and privileged background. And good-looking. And wayward: the broken home, the scandals in school, the shrinks, the suicide, etc. And, last but not least, he was a writer. Well, maybe not a writer, but a creative person. Carter's confession, or poem, or whatever it was, was widely reprinted and discussed. It wasn't that he didn't deserve to die, or that he wasn't psychotic, or crazy, or a psychopathic killer, or sociopathic if not psychopathic, but the more the media pored over his remains, the more you got the impression that somehow the blame for Carter was ours. Society's, with a capital
S
. It may have helped, in this connection, that his parents—mother and stepfather—refused all interviews, refused even to say how Carter's remains were disposed of after it came out that the Catholic Church had refused to bury him. It helped too that Carter's friends, most prominently Vincent Angus Halloran, were much more forthcoming. Vince, or Hal as his buddies called him, was the star, at least the living one, of the segment “60 Minutes” devoted to the case. When asked if Carter McCloy and his friends belonged to a new kind of Lost Generation, he answered: “Yes, I guess we do. Yes, definitely, that's who we are.” It was on this show that somebody, I think it was Diane Sawyer, said: “If F. Scott Fitzgerald were alive and writing crime stories today, he would have created Carter McCloy.”