A Shock to the System - Stevenson Richard - Страница 36

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"Maybe," I said, "Crockwell’s reputation was at stake, and that meant more than anything to him, and so Paul knew he was vulnerable."

"That's possible," St. James said. "But Crockwell could have just said to Paul, 'Tell anybody you want. I'll just deny the whole thing. You're just a disgruntled former patient who went over the edge, and you're a drunken sexual pervert nobody will believe.' And anyway, Strachey, where did you get the idea that there are pictures? Nobody was taking pictures, I can tell you that for sure. I know, because I was there."

St. James seemed to be breathing more evenly and sweating a little less now, though his dogs were slobbering up a storm. I felt like getting down on the floor and slobbering too. It seemed as though I had systematically eliminated all useful knowledge pertaining to Paul Haig's death and that I was nearly all the way back to my state of useless innocence of five days earlier.

I said, "Steven, unless you can find it within yourself to be more forthcoming with me on exactly what happened in Crockwell's office that night, I do believe that I'll have no choice but to go to the Albany police and relay to them the admissions you have made to me here tonight."

St. James's fist came down on the end table next to him, causing the lamp on it to jump and the dogs to leap into the air and come down snarling. I left soon after.

21

Late Sunday night, back on Crow Street, barely un-bitten by dogs and still bordering on the desperate, I considered how the precious little I had left to go on was Vernon Crockwell himself. Vengeance had been done to him—"tortured" was one word St. James had used—and it was so awful (so humiliating?) that Crockwell didn't dare report the incident, even though it was a crime, an imprisonable offense.

So Haig had tried to blackmail Crockwell? And Crockwell, whose reputation was everything to him, killed Haig? And tried to kill Bierly? And did that mean St. James was next? I'd forgotten to warn him. Though all that seemed less and less likely now anyway. Approached with a blackmail attempt, Crockwell probably would simply have told Haig to buzz off. And Bierly, of course, had been telling me all along that I was off base and on the wrong track connecting the St. James-Haig-Bierly-Crockwell incident to Haig's death, or even to any blackmail attempt at all. Yet Bierly did try to implicate Crockwell himself in Haig's death. That's what he had tried to hire me to prove.

Timmy was asleep when I climbed into bed, and I wanted to chew it all over with him. But he needed his rest on account of working for a living, unlike me, so I lay for some hours going over it in my mind and awaiting a blinding insight. But by three a.m. , the last time I checked the clock, the only thing I had produced was some drool on the pillow.

Monday morning, first thing, I called Crockwell's machine—I had nowhere else to turn until after I met with Paul Haig's Ballston

Spa psychiatrist that evening—and left this message: "Hi, Vernon, Don Strachey here. I know about your evening with Bierly and Haig and Steven St. James in January. You have my sympathy, but we do need to talk. You talk to me, or I talk to Al Finnerty. Take your choice. Call me."

Timmy, just out of the shower, said, 'You were a little bit abrupt with Group Commander Crockwell. What was that about?"

I described my evening with Steven St. James and its tantalizing, incomplete revelations.

Timmy said, "I wonder what they did to him. Do you think they could have raped him or something? That's what it sounds like."

"St. James says no, they'd never do a vicious thing like that. Anyway, rapists tend to have histories of being violent, and none of these guys do, that I know of."

"I'll bet it had something to do with their being gay, though, and the psychotherapy group. Let the punishment fit the crime."

"Whatever it is, Crockwell is apparently so determined to keep it from coming out that he'll risk being charged with Bierly's shooting, or even Paul Haig's murder."

"You're not still planning on ruining Crockwell, are you? Even if he wasn't mixed up in Haig's death or Bierly's shooting? It does sound as if he may have suffered enough."

"Suffered, yes, but he's still operating his rotten, destructive business. Anyway, no. I'm beginning to suspect that there may be ways other than ruination to remove Vernon T. Crockwell as a social menace."

"Just to be on the safe side, maybe you'd better run those ideas by me first."

He ambled by me, naked, en route to his outfit-of-the-day, nicely laid out the night before across his personal ironing board.

"Maybe I will run my ideas by you, or maybe I'll just run them up your leg. Like this."

He hated being late for work, but once in a while he made an exception. He hopped off the bed half an hour later, reshowered, and sped off to the office of Assemblyman Myron R. Lipshutz

(D-New York City), for whom Timmy was chief legislative aide. And I drifted off and slept till one. It was lucky I woke up then, for I had slept through a call from Vernon Crockwell. His message on my machine said he could see me at three in his office, and I called his machine immediately to confirm the appointment.

"I hope you're not going to mention this perfectly idiotic blackmail business to the police, Donald. It will just fuel their misguided suspicions that I was involved in Larry Bierly's shooting or even Paul Haig's death. My attorney has managed to convince the district attorney that the evidence against me is entirely circumstantial and it's obvious that someone who doesn't care for me or my principles is attempting to frame me. But the blackmail idea will only get the police stirred up again, and that would be to the advantage of no one except the vicious deviant who is behind all of this."

"But Vernon," I said, "what we've finally come up with is a powerful and entirely plausible motive for Paul Haig's murder. Blackmail makes sense. And Paul's mother says he admitted to her—rubbed her nose in it, actually—that that's what he was attempting just before he died: the blackmail of somebody with enough money to pull Paul back from the brink of bankruptcy."

Crockwell sniffed. He was seated across his desk from me before his framed certificates in normalcy studies and his library of sexual normaliana. Both his hands were up within sight, a sign maybe that I had earned a degree of trust.

He said, "But I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. I repeat, I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. Once again: I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. Can you grasp what I am saying, Donald?"

"Yes, Vernon, but the question remains, Were you the person Paul was blackmailing?"

He wasn't used to this, it was obvious. One hand went back down behind his desk, and I doubted he was reaching for his checkbook. He said, "Donald, you obviously have nothing to

offer me in this matter, or to the cause of truth. I agreed to see you today only because you claim to have some information about me that you seem to think I may consider embarrassing. I suppose you think you're blackmailing me. Perhaps that's it—perhaps you are involved in some type of odious blackmail scheme."

"That's a whole new slant, Vernon. Maybe it's me I should be sniffing around. You're a genius."

"Well, you'll not blackmail me."

"What was it like?" I said gravely, and watched him.

He reddened and looked away. After a moment, he said, "Well, what do you think it was like, Donald?"

"They did it right here in your own office?"

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