A Shock to the System - Stevenson Richard. Страница 27

Bierly shut his eyes tight and said nothing. The silence lengthened and I let it. He was thinking hard about something, and his numbers were dancing around wackily again. When after a minute or two he opened his eyes, he looked at me exhaustedly and he said, "I've changed my mind."

"Uh-huh."

"I mean about hiring you."

"Oh?"

"It's really better if you leave this whole situation alone, Strachey. The cops will find out who shot me—and as for Paul, he's dead, so what difference does anything make? It sounds like the cops are going to drag Crockwell through the slime, he'll be ruined. And that's all I care about. So I think you'd just better skip it. Okay?" His medical condition—or something—seemed to overtake him and his eyes fluttered shut.

I said, "What made you change your mind so suddenly?"

Bierly didn't open his eyes, but his face tightened and he said, "I'm too tired for this."

"You'll regain your strength."

"That's my decision. You better go, Strachey. Please. Just go. Please."

"If you say so."

"Thanks for your help."

I said, "I may sign on with Phyllis, or even Crockwell if I think he's innocent and he's being railroaded. So I may see you soon again, Larry."

"No, please don't. I want you to let me alone."

"For now, sure."

"No, this isn't working. Please don't come back. You have to go now. Right now. Go." His eyes opened and they were full of pain.

"Okay. That's plain enough. So long, Larry."

He turned away.

I went out, nodded to the security guard, made my way down to the main floor and outside onto New Scotland Avenue, where the lilacs, some of which weren't lilac at all but creamy white, swayed heavily in the breeze. Why were creamy white lilacs still called lilacs? Why weren't they called creamy whites? Of course, not all roses were rose. Or grapes grape. Or petunias petunia.

I'd done it again. What had I said?

Back on Crow Street, I phoned my machine, on which two messages had been left. Vernon Crockwell's said, "I will not be needing your services after all. I have retained other professional help. Please do not contact me." Phyllis Haig's said, "I never want to speak to you again. You're fired!"

Timmy came downstairs and said, "What's up? Any news? Have you decided who you're going to work for?"

I said, "I'm thinking of a career change. Can you think of any other work I might be suited for?"

He said no.

16

Don't be despondent," Timmy said. "It's ten days till the first of the month. You'll get work And if you don't—so, you'll dip into capital."

"That's not funny." He knew that my "capital" consisted mainly of the six-year-old Mitsubishi I was driving south from Albany down the thruway, Timmy next to me in the tattered front passenger seat. "Anyway, I've got several accounts due. Chances are, somebody will pay me before June first."

"You mean like Alston Appleton?"

"I guess I'd better not count on that one." Appleton was a local venture capitalist whose operations were murky. I'd spent a month successfully tracking down his ex-wife and her coke-addict mother after they'd made off with a safe-deposit box full of Appleton's cash, only to present my bill for $7,100 to Appleton on the morning of the March day the SEC caught up with him and froze his assets. I was informed a month later by an ostentatiously unsympathetic federal official that with luck I might collect three or four cents on the dollar some time in the first quarter of the next century.

"Tell me again," Timmy said, "why Phyllis Haig got mad at you."

"I don't think I know. I thought I was allaying what I perceived to be her guilt over the way she had treated Paul, and over his possible suicide, by connecting his death to his financial problems, which she in no way had caused. Not that she was actually guiltless in Paul's troubles—far from it. But in that one respect,

finances, she wasn't guilty, as far as I know. So I was trying to take some of the onus off her."

"Maybe," Timmy said, "Paul went to his mother for money when he was desperate and she turned him down."

"Mmm."

"So when you told her that financial pressure might have triggered Paul's suicide, or his getting himself murdered, it reminded her of her secret fear: that if she had bailed him out when his assistant manager absconded, he might be alive today. You made her rationalization crumble too—that Larry Bierly had actually killed Paul somehow. In your Chekhovian manner, you destroyed Mrs. Haig's illusions, and she sank into the doldrums and banished you from her estate."

"The literary reference sounds inapt—try Inge, or maybe Bram Stoker. But otherwise what you say sounds plausible."

"That's what it sounds like to me," Timmy said.

We sped past the exit for Saugerties, where plans were under way for a big Woodstock reunion concert. That peculiar era was long gone, and I doubted more than a handful of people would show up.

I said, "I believe now that Paul Haig was murdered, but maybe Phyllis no longer really believes it—thanks to me—and that's why she can't stand the thought of me. Why didn't I think of that?"

"Because you're understandably confused. Everybody in this thing seems to be carrying some guilty secret around that's connected to Paul Haig's death—or at least they think it's connected—and their guilt is making them hold back information you need to grasp the big picture. This is true of Phyllis Haig, and probably Larry Bierly too, and even Crockwell."

"Timothy, if I'm too confused to grasp the big picture, how come you aren't?"

"Probably because I was educated by Jesuits," he said with a chuckle.

His ties to the Mother Church had fallen to all but nil in recent decades, but he still loved to flutter his Georgetown diploma in my face as evidence of both moral and intellectual superiority. He

affected a kidding, sometimes even self-deprecatory, tone, but there was much more to it.

"Too bad you didn't marry a Jesuit priest," I said. "Think of the magnificent offspring from such a union as that."

"Oh, don't think I didn't try. Back in Poughkeepsie, it's the one thing the folks could have accepted and understood."

"So tell me this, then, Mr. Sees-All-Knows-All: Why did Vernon Crockwell fire me today?"

He pondered this. "I'm stuck on that one. Though a better question is, Why did Crockwell want to hire you in the first place?"

"Leave it to a Jesuit to unhelpfully answer a question with a question."

"No, really. It is a more useful question."

"You're right, I know. Crockwell kept telling me he'd chosen me on account of my famous super-competence. But he dropped that line after a while. My guess is, the reason he wanted to hire me and the reason he wants to fire me are similar or the same. Whatever they are or it is."

"He's an enigma. An enigma and a—reprehensible character."

"Bierly is easier, of course. He wants me to have Crockwell dragged through the mud for a crime he may have but probably did not commit. Bierly wants this awfully badly, but not so badly that he'll risk my exposing something that went on involving Bierly, Haig, Crockwell and Steven St. James. I'm still at a loss as to what that might be. But if I'm cleverer and luckier talking to Steven St. James than I was the last time I ran into him, maybe we'll soon find out. Anyway, St. James, not having hired me, can't fire me. At least there's that. I'll only have been fired by three people in one day, not four."