A Shock to the System - Stevenson Richard. Страница 21

"Of course not! That is perfectly absurd."

"Who is Steven St. James?" I said.

More shallow breathing. Then: "I have no idea. Steven who?"

"Vernon, for someone in your line of work, where sincerity— or at least the impression of sincerity—must count for a lot, you're a terrible liar." When this got no response except what sounded like a little mewing sound, I said, "I take it you have no alibi for last night when Bierly was shot, it being Thursday. Just like the night Paul Haig died."

"That's correct, unfortunately. No, I don't."

"One of three likely conclusions can be drawn from the fact, Vernon, that bad things happen to good people from one of your therapy groups on Thursday nights when you are, you say, alone in your office. One conclusion could be, it's a funny coincidence. A second, more interesting conclusion might be, you did it—

killed Paul Haig, shot Larry Bierly, and tossed the gun used to shoot Paul in the garbage bin behind your building."

"Oh, no. My Lord, how could I ever do such things! And how could I be so stupid that I'd throw the gun away in my own trash?"

"I don't know, Vernon. Psychology is your department. Maybe you were distraught and you panicked. Of course, a third obvious conclusion would be, somebody who knows your schedule is setting you up—committing a crime or crimes on Thursday night and then sending the letter and the tape to the police to implicate you, knowing you're alibiless, and throwing the gun in your dumpster for the police to find."

"Yes, yes, exactly. But who? Before he was shot, Donald, I thought it was probably Larry Bierly who was, as you term it, setting me up. But now it seems to be someone else entirely."

"Why did you think it was Bierly?"

"Well, Larry was—angry with me."

"Oh, that's a good reason."

"I mean," Crockwell said, "Larry was both so angry at himself for continuing treatment for as long as he did, and so angry at me for providing a therapy that he had lost faith in, that eventually he became totally consumed with hatred for me—unhinged, I must say, acting out uncontrollably."

"How do you know that? What did he say or do?"

Crockwell said nothing.

"Vernon?"

After a quarter-minute of labored breathing, he said, "Will you help me or won't you?"

"I don't know. I need to know more before I decide. What's the deal with you and Haig and Bierly? There's something you're not telling me."

No reply.

"You said that until yesterday you thought Bierly might be setting you up. Do you also think he killed Paul Haig?"

"I don't know."

"How does Steven St. James fit into this?"

"I don't know."

"Vernon, for a man on his knees begging for mercy, you're doing little of substance to gain my confidence."

"I'm offering you money," he whined, "and I'm not withholding any information that bears directly on the matter at hand. Can't you grasp that, Donald?"

"No, I can't. How do you know the information you're obviously withholding doesn't bear directly on the matter at hand? If you want me to work for you, I have to be the judge of that."

He let out a little moan of despair and hung up.

I sat for a minute waiting for the phone to ring again, but it didn't.

I called Al Finnerty at Division Two and caught him, he said, on the way out the door after a long but surprisingly productive day.

"Productive how?" I said.

"We think we've got the gun used to shoot Bierly, a mean little Raven MP-25, the weapon of choice for the playground criminals of America. Guess where we found it, Strachey?"

"In Crockwell's dumpster."

"You talked to Crockwell?"

"Just now. He's freaked, Al."

"So, Crockwell is your client? There's no harm done in getting that on the record. It won't change a thing, as far as I'm concerned. I'm just glad to know somebody's paying you a fat fee, Strachey."

"I'm not saying Crockwell is or isn't my client. I'm not saying the Infant of Prague is or isn't my client. I'm not saying because, for now, for a variety of reasons, I can't say. Do the ballistics check out on the gun?"

"Don't know yet. I can't get test results till Monday at the earliest."

"What about prints?"

"The same."

"But you're not charging Crockwell with anything?"

"Not just yet."

"How is Bierly doing?"

"Better. He's conscious. He wants to see you, Strachey."

"Good. I'll drop by. I take it he didn't ID who shot him."

"Nah. The shooter was crouched beside Bierly's car in the dark and fired across the roof of the car as Bierly was opening the door. Bierly thinks he was wearing a ski mask, but it happened so fast, he said, he wasn't even sure of that."

"That's not helpful."

"Bierly asked if we'd check on Vernon Crockwell's whereabouts last night. He said Crockwell ought to be our prime suspect. This was before we searched the dumpster. Bierly didn't know about the gun. Interesting, isn't it?"

"Yeah, interesting. Why did Bierly think it might have been Crockwell? Did he say?"

"He said Crockwell hated him for leaving his therapy group and taking Paul Haig with him. But that sounds weak to me."

"Me too, Al."

"Shrinks must have people coming and going and mad at them all the time. I've never heard of that leading to homicide."

"Me either."

"But Crockwell's still our best bet here. We've got the letter and the tape of him threatening Paul Haig, and he's got no alibi. Even if his prints aren't on the gun, if it's the one that shot Bierly, we'll probably have to charge him. I suppose all you gays will be delighted to hear that."

My grasp tightened on the receiver. I said, "That's not the strongest evidence to present to a jury, Al—a vague threat against a friend of Bierly's, the lack of an alibi, and a gun anybody could have tossed in Crockwell's dumpster. It's awfully circumstantial. Won't the DA need a little more?"

"Oh, we'll put it together," he said. "Especially if the ballistics check out. If Crockwell is your client, Strachey, I hope you got paid up front."

"I hope you're not being overly optimistic, Al." Or overly anything else.

"I want to close this out by the end of the month if I can. The worst that can happen is the DA will charge Crockwell, and

because he's a professional type with no previous record he'll want to deal—plead to aggravated assault instead of attempted murder. And if he didn't do it, that'll come out in the wash too, and the case will be thrown out or he'll be acquitted. I've got a lot of faith in our system, Strachey. However it shakes out, we'll all have done our best, and that's what counts."

I said, "But even if Crockwell is innocent and sooner or later he's cleared, the chances are, once you shove him into the sausage machine he'll come out sausage, in the sense that he'll be ruined professionally."

"Well, I've heard the psychology field is overcrowded," Finnerty said, and I shuddered.

Before I left for my dinner appointment in East Greenbush, I gave Timmy a quick rundown of my conversations with Crockwell and Finnerty.

He said, "So what are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

"Some choices you've got. You can work for Crockwell, who's probably being sandbagged unfairly but who's a social menace who should be put out of business, though not for all the wrong reasons. You can go with Bierly, who's been victimized in all kinds of ways and deserves support, except he's apparently pathologically fixated on Crockwell in a way that clouds rather than clears the air. Or you can sign on with Phyllis Haig and use her money to get to the bottom of this thing, even though Larry Bierly probably didn't kill Paul, and she'd be paying you to prove that he did. Or, of course, you could just back away from the whole thing and let the Albany cops handle it in their inimitable fashion—with lives smashed to pieces in a random and whimsical way, law enforcement as theater of the absurd."