A Shock to the System - Stevenson Richard. Страница 31

I phoned the game farm, a touristy zoo and wild-animal preserve off the thruway, and asked for St. James—I did not slip and call him "Mellors"—and was told that he was not available at the moment, but would I like to leave a message? I said no thanks.

When I'd gotten home Saturday night I found a message on my machine from my credit-check contact. She had informed me, with full particulars, that Larry Bierly's financial situation was stable, that his business financing was stretched to the limit but his cash flow was sufficient to keep him afloat. Paul Haig, on the other hand, had been on the edge of financial collapse when he died. As Bierly had told me truthfully, it was only his personal intercession after Haig's death that had saved Beautiful Thingies from being snatched back by Haig's creditors.

I said to Timmy, "I've got it."

" 'It'?" He was absorbed in the Times crossword puzzle, and I knew I would have access to only about a tenth of his brain until he had either completed the puzzle or, after inner pain, made the mature decision to put the puzzle aside unfinished and resume his life.

"I think I know why Paul died."

He looked at me interestedly across the dining room table, his pencil still poised. "Why?"

"He died because he was trying to blackmail someone to get hold of enough money to save his business. As you theorized, he had gone to his mother for money and she had turned him down. That's why she's alternately guilt-ridden and delusionary over

what deep in her heart she thinks of as Paul's suicide—his suicide over impending financial ruin. But Haig told Bierly a week before he died that his financial troubles were over, that he'd come up with a way to pay off his debt. He didn't tell Bierly how he was raising the cash, because he couldn't—it was illegal."

Timmy put his pencil down.

"The other reason he couldn't tell Bierly was, Bierly probably knew the person Haig was blackmailing and even the guilty secret that made the blackmail possible. Had he been informed of the blackmail attempt, Bierly might have objected—on ethical grounds, or even fear of his own involvement and exposure."

Timmy said, "That's plausible, but where's the evidence of any of it?"

"I haven't found any yet. But get this: Bierly, Crockwell, St. James and St. James's landlord—whose name is Emil Provost, I now know—all seem to have been mixed up in something together none of them wants to talk about. That thing is what Haig was using to blackmail one of them. The next question is, Which one? Bierly, of course, was not a candidate for blackmail, because in March he was still Haig's friend, if no longer lover, and anyway he had no ready cash. St. James is an unlikely target; he drives an old Rabbit and works in a game park with—by the smell of him—farm animals. He's not at all a good blackmailee.

"Crockwell is a possibility. He must have a few bucks in the bank that he's extracted over the years from his bevies of repentant buttfuckers. Though if Crockwell was being blackmailed by Haig, and then killed Haig to shut him up, why would Crockwell hire me and risk my uncovering three ugly truths—the blackmail, the thing that made the blackmail possible, and the murder?"

Timmy said, "That leaves—Provost? That sad old man?"

"Emil Provost is wealthy. There's a lot of oldish money in the family that appears not to have been misspent or otherwise dissipated. He's an ideal blackmail target."

He looked at me skeptically. "Do you really think that decrepit old aristocrat could have killed Paul Haig?"

"Haig wasn't strangled with some goon's bare hands," I said.

"Somebody he obviously knew somehow induced him to start drinking again and got him drunk and then dissolved the Elavil in his Scotch. Anybody of any age or background could have accomplished that."

"Sure—anybody who is completely without morals or human feelings. That old guy didn't strike me that way at all."

"Timothy, not every murderer looks like Charles Manson. You're talking as if you don't own a television set or read a daily newspaper. Dear hearts and gentle people who live and love in your hometown can have murder in their hearts. It happens somewhere every day."

After a moment he said, "That's true, sure. But I don't think that old guy is one of those. For him, murder would be—you know. In poor taste."

"That's exactly my point," I said. "Provost is a pillar of his community. He has everything to lose. As a blackmail target, he's a natural."

"He was cool and condescending to you, so that makes him a murderer? Nah, I don't believe it."

"That's not what I said."

"Anyway, what could they all have been mixed up in that Provost would actually kill somebody over to stop it from coming out?" -

I said, "I don't know."

"You don't have a clue?"

"No."

"That's a problem with your theory."

"It might have something to do with drugs," I said, without much conviction. "Moody and Stover, the low-voltage fetishists, told me Bierly and Haig used to argue about their drug habits in the therapy group—Haig's alcohol dependency and Bierly's penchant for street drugs. I'll have to look into that one some more. Otherwise, I won't know what they're all hiding until one of them decides to tell me. Bierly's a possibility. Once he understands that his and the others' dirty secret may have led to blackmail and Haig's murder, that should loosen him up."

"And if it doesn't?"

"I can try the same approach with both Crockwell and St. James."

"But," Timmy said, "if all of these people were involved in something that made them vulnerable to blackmail, wouldn't they already have speculated on the possibility that Paul had threatened one of the others with exposure and was killed for it? And thinking that, they haven't come forward so far for the same reason they won't in the future: Exposure of the mysterious foul goings-on would ruin their lives too."

"There is that," I said. "But there's another possibility, too, for finding out what Paul Haig might have been mixed up in with Bierly, Crockwell and St. James. There's another person he might have confided in."

"Not Mom?"

"Not a chance, is my guess. According to Bierly, the Haigs not only did not confide in one another, they lied to one another habitually. No, the man Haig may have trusted with the information that was so volatile that it got him killed is the man he went to for relief from the anxiety that that information and other stresses in his life were causing him. That man is Dr. Glen Snyder, the Ballston Spa psychiatrist Haig went to for the month before he died and who prescribed the Elavil that killed him."

"Do you think he'll talk to you? It's hard to imagine he would."

"Not," I said, "if I just walk in off the street. He might open up, however, if he is urged to do so by someone whose good opinion he needs and who is the family member who sent Paul Haig to him in the first place."

"Phyllis Haig. Back to her again. The client from hell."

"Oh, I've got plenty of those. Or did."

19

Sunday afternoon I drove over to Albany Med. I talked my way past the guard and into Bierly's room, but when I got there he refused to speak with me. I told him, "I think Paul was killed by someone he was trying to blackmail. It had to do with whatever you and Paul and Crockwell and St. James and Emil Provost were mixed up in together. If you want Paul's killer brought to justice, you've got to open up about this."