If I Should Die Before I Die (26 page)

“That's not true,” he answered. “They just didn't take us very far. We weren't even sure they connected to the Pillow Killer.”

“Until you found out Dr. Saroff had gotten one too?”

“That's right. But that was late in the day. By that time we already had McCloy.”

“Except that you let him walk away,” I said.

Up till then, Martindale had said little, concentrating instead on a double portion of coffee cake.

“Don't be a wise guy with us, Revere,” he said, wiping crumbs from his mouth with a brush of a paper napkin. “If there's one thing we've already got enough of, it's wise guys. Have you got any idea how many threatening letters and phone calls got reported to the Task Force? It ran in the thousands. We ran all of them down. I mean every last one of them. Did you know we had eleven people who tried to confess to the crimes? I said
eleven
. Eleven goddamn wise guys.”

At least I wasn't that kind of wise guy, I thought.

“Let me tell you something,” Martindale said, washing the last of the cake down with light coffee, generously sugared. “The Pillow case is officially closed. Zipped up tight. Now we've got another homicide on our hands, Suzi Lee. I watched Suzi Lee, I liked Suzi Lee. We're going to find out who killed Suzi Lee. But now, along comes a wise guy who says the killer's one and the same …”

“I didn't say that,” I interrupted.

“… and that we must've blown it on the Pillow case,” he went right on. “And what've you got to prove it? A bunch of threatening letters?”

“Plus the videotapes,” I said.

“The videotapes we never found,” Martindale said.

“The videotapes I saw,” I said. “And I wasn't the only one who saw them. Dr. Saroff did too. Somebody in that apartment, either McCloy or Halloran, taped Nora Saroff, Suzi Lee, and the others. Everyone who got one of the letters was on tape there.”

“Why don't you tell us what you know about Halloran?” Intaglio put in.

I took a deep breath and launched in. Most of what I had, in fact, I'd already given Intaglio the night before. That Halloran and McCloy were close friends from way back and part of a gang of well-heeled party boys who went in for the “bridge-and-tunnel bunny” type of playmate, which corresponded to the Pillow Killer's first victims and his last. That some of them, Halloran included, seemed to like to beat up on people. That Halloran was clearly estranged from his mother who, I thought, might know things about him she wasn't telling. Then there was Margie Magister, who was at the least worried about him and maybe, I thought, afraid of him. There was, finally, the question of where Halloran had been the night before while Suzi Lee was having her nipples worked over and when I'd seen him on Fifth Avenue in the rain.

I tried to tiptoe around the Margie part, but that didn't work out too well.

“I bet he's balling Margie Magister, isn't he?” Martindale said with a weather-beaten grin.

“You said it,” I answered sharply, “I didn't.”

“Aren't we touchy?” he said back, still grinning. “What's the matter, you jealous?” Then the grin went away. “So? What else you got?”

The truth was I didn't have much else, except for one thing: my own, please pardon the expression, intuition. Intuition and the proverbial dollar will get you on the subway, I know that, and I've long since learned to distrust people's intuitions, my own included. Which means that I don't have many. Only with Vince Halloran, I did.

“My own conviction,” was how I put it. “I believe he may have committed at least some of the Pillow murders. Him and McCloy probably. And I think he may have killed Suzi Lee.”

“The M.O. is totally different,” Martindale said.

“Maybe so, but the Pillow Killer's wasn't that consistent either.”

“Yeah, and that's what makes you think there wasn't just one killer, right? But what else you got? What's there that makes you so convinced?”

I could, in hindsight, have answered this several ways. “In Memoriam,” for one thing. “In Memoriam” is Latin for “in memory of.” In memory of who if not Carter McCloy? And there was McCloy's white scarf. And Bobby Derr getting the shit kicked out of him in a school playground. And other items, more and less farfetched. But what I saw—all I saw—was Halloran's half-smile.

“I can see it in his face,” I answered.

This made Martindale laugh. Rumbly sounds. But his head didn't move, nor did his gray eyes.

“Gee,” he said, “that's great. We sure could use somebody like you on the force, somebody who can tell a killer just by looking at his face. But since we don't have one and you not being a cop, what do you suggest we do?”

“Pull Halloran in,” I said. “Shake him.”

Martindale shook his head.

“No way,” he said.

I glanced at Intaglio. When I first met him, it had been with a cop too, Walters from the DA squad, and Intaglio had clearly been the one in charge. Now he clammed up. Clearly, even though they came from separate areas of law enforcement, Martindale outranked him in somebody's pecking order.

Maybe that was what got me sore.

“Come on,” I said to Martindale. “If he was black or Hispanic, you'd pick him up and throw away the key. I know that and you know that. I thought you guys had quit working the old double standard.”

Which, I guess, is what got Martindale sore in turn.

“I told you I can't stand wise guys,” he said disgustedly. “Do you really think that if you weren't who you were, didn't work for who you work for, that we'd be wasting our time listening to your cockamamie?”

“What I'm hearing,” I retorted, “is that you're going to do nothing about it.”

“I didn't say that.”

“The least you could do is put the women on the hit list under protection.”

“We've already done that.”

“You have? What about Nora Saroff?”

“Her too.”

Oh boy, I thought to myself, remembering the reason for my call to the Counselor the night before.

“Have you told them that you're doing it?”

“No way. There's no need for them to know. They won't feel a thing.”

Sure, I thought, and pigs really do have wings.

“What about Halloran?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“What are you going to do about him?”

“Whatever we're doing about him,” Martindale said, lowering the shutters with a clank, “is our own business.”

I looked at Intaglio, then back at the cop. End of conversation. Or almost.

“Let me tell you something else, Revere,” Martindale said. “We live in a free country, that's the truth. Anybody who wants to go around chasing murderers can go around chasing murderers, and nobody's going to stop him. But if you've got any ideas about this Halloran and you get yourself into trouble, don't go looking to us for help. You'll be on your own. This meeting never took place.”

No, Virginia, pigs don't have wings. By this I mean that the unmarked car parked next to the fire hydrant across the street from our office stuck out like a sore thumb, and so did the plainclothesman sitting behind the wheel reading a newspaper.

“Is she in there?” I said to him as I walked past his half-open window.

“Yeah, she …” Then, looking up at me in surprise: “Hey, who the hell are you?”

“Never mind,” I told him. “I only work here.”

I went straight up to the Counselor's office and reported in. He hadn't noticed the car across the street yet, but he started a slow burn when he learned that the NYPD had put his wife under surveillance without telling him. He didn't know Martindale, but he took notes while I talked. Knowing the Counselor, he'd go in at the top, and I'd have given a week's pay to be there when friend Martindale got called in on the carpet.

I gave the Counselor everything, suppositions as well as facts, and I could feel anger building in him as I went. With him it takes the form of stoniness. His face turns gray, like stone, and the jaws work, and by the time I was done, he looked like he was biting granite.

“We live in a slaughterhouse, Phil,” he said when I'd finished, the eyes lifting in his immobile head to meet mine. “People get murdered every day, and we pay no attention. We either can't, or we don't know them, or it's not our job. That's what we pay the police for. But when it gets this close to home, Jesus Christ Almighty, that's different. I'll tell you what I want from you. I don't know if you're right or wrong about Halloran, but I want you to drop everything else till you find out. You're to pull in whatever resources you need.”

“I'll get Bobby Derr for one,” I said.

“Up to you.”

“He already knows the scene, including Halloran. Also he's got some personal motivation, remember?”

“Up to you,” he repeated. “But I also want protection for Nora for as long as it takes. I don't even want her walking the dog without somebody else out there. Whether that's Fincher's people or another organization is your responsibility.”

“But what about the police?” I said. “It's going to get awfully crowded out there.”

“Do you want to leave this to the police?”

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I. Don't worry about the police, I'll get them off your back.”

“And what do we tell Nora?”

“Nothing,” the Counselor said. “We tell her nothing. She's not to know what's going on.”

“But that's going to make a close surveillance job pretty tricky, isn't it?”

“You heard me,” he said, his jaws working. “We tell her nothing. She's been upset enough lately, I don't want her upset any more.”

I still didn't like it. He didn't care whether I liked it or not. He told me to spend whatever I had to spend.

He was on the verge, I thought, of telling me something else, but maybe that's with the benefit of hindsight. In any case, he didn't. All he said was:

“Get it rolling, Phil. And just one word of advice: If it turns out you're right about Halloran, then you're dealing not only with a crazy but a smart crazy. Whatever you do, be careful.”

Such words of solicitude from the Counselor, needless to say, are rare enough to be underlined.

By the end of that day, I had it rolling all right. Maybe the Counselor's Wife could accidentally slip through the system Bud Fincher and I set up, but it was as good as we could make it, down to the two people we had planted in the studio audience when she did her show that night.

Along the way I tried to get through to Sally Magister and failed. Ditto Margie, who'd called me that morning but was gone when I called back.

She found me, at my desk, late in the afternoon.

“You must be very busy, Philip,” she said. “I've been trying to reach you.”

“Me too.”

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Funny,” I said, “but that calls for another ‘me too.'”

She didn't laugh though.

“As soon as possible,” she said. “Right now if you can.”

She didn't want me to come to her place. She didn't want to come to the office either. We settled on a Madison Avenue saloon I knew, which was about equidistant from the two of us.

Oh yes. When I walked out into the chill dusk, I noticed that the unmarked car was gone from across the street, and I spotted no replacement.

CHAPTER

15

Mostly, when you live in New York, you wear blinkers. You go to work; you go home. You go to the same neighborhood stores, the same eateries and saloons. The garage. The jogging routes in the park. You're hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and sure you know in some vague way that there's an in between from one to the other, but that's the same way you know there are eight million other entries, give or take, in the daily New York rat race. They're there all right; but you don't see them.

That's what happened to October that year. Carter McCloy jumped off his ninth-floor balcony, and Suzi Lee got strangled, and somewhere along the way the leaves on the trees must have turned gold and red and dropped and been blown into piles and carted off on trucks to wherever the trucks take them, and we got an extra hour's sleep on Sunday when the clocks went back to standard time. The World Series happened, but don't ask me who won. The Giants got whipped a couple of times on TV, and the Rangers opened another dreary season at the Garden.

Blinkers.

Only then, in November, looking for Vincent Angus Halloran, the blinkers came off. The rains came long and steady and, certain days, just a few degrees from snow on the thermometer. The holiday season was just around the corner, and everywhere you turned there were people, college kids and tourists adding to the jam. The bars, the restaurants, the nightclubs, the stores. Getting around—morning, noon, and night—was like climbing through mud. The whole town took on the smell of wet wool and the angry sound of car horns, and it was a great season for umbrella peddlers and muggers. The whole world, in sum, seemed to have poured into the city. The whole world, that is, minus Vincent Angus Halloran and his friends.

Bobby Derr and I followed their footprints everywhere we could think of and came up empty-handed. Melchiorre's, the Rosebud, Willy's, plus a number of other joints Bobby knew about. It didn't seem to matter how much green we dropped along the way. A $50 bill to the super of the building in the East Eighties bought us the news that the apartment was empty and, so he'd heard, was going to be put up for sale. The girlfriends we could find hadn't seen Halloran either, though a couple of them seemed to like the idea, and Bobby, who insisted on taking on the friends of Vincent Halloran himself, drew a similar blank. As far as we knew, the only ones who had regular jobs were Sprague Fording and Shrimp Stark, both down on Wall Street. But Messrs. Fording and Stark, Bobby was told, were both on vacation.