A week has passed since that fateful night. My life has returned to normal. More or less.
Odd baying sounds no longer come through my walls and the source of this caterwauling, my next door neighbor, has explained why. I ran into her in the street the other day and she let me know that Singletary, whoever that is, doesn’t really work for Jefferson Hospital, and the hospital isn’t really buying up our houses, a possibility about which I was totally ignorant.
MarySue went on to state that in consequence of Singletary being a phony, my vicarious enjoyment of her womanly pleasures is at an end. And by the by, her business is doing just fine, thank you, because a new client is a shoe-in for an important and well-paying position, so I needn’t bother to ask about that either.
None of this, of course, made any sense to me. But at least the stagey neighborly orgasms have stopped and MarySue continues to share.
The crater in front of my place has finally been filled and blacktopped by a crew that did the job with great efficiency and hasn’t been heard from since. My basement is drying out slowly, though the smell of mold has gotten so bad I now do my cooking on the first floor or eat out. Not a major problem. I know I’m just a squatter with an angle. If this place slowly rots from the ground up that’s the mortgage holder’s lookout. They caused the flooding.
Libby seems to like me more than ever. Which is to say the situations I get into keep her well and truly amused. When I pump her for details about her upstairs exploits on the night Pinkman was arrested, she only comments that “It takes a mighty big man to run this city.” And I’m smart enough to leave it at that.
Joe Connors came through on his promise to Jay. America’s only full-time financial poet finally did get his a reading on a Bernstein financial news program. Jay viewed this appearance as a breakthrough, not just for himself, but for the art of poetry generally.
Sadly, this vital breakthrough doesn’t seem destined to have a significant follow-up. The Bernstein people informed him just yesterday that while his work is certainly important and that first reading was very well received, scheduling commitments prevent them from making him a regular. Jay will doubtless take awhile to recover from this cruel act of philistinism. His long experience with rejection and obscurity, however, pretty much guarantee he’ll weather the storm.
All of which should have ended my involvement in the murder of Myron Hamish and my dealings with the Bernstein Financial Broadcasting empire. Except...well... except it doesn’t.
Things still didn’t fit right here and I have this thing, call it an intellectual thing, about making them fit. There’s also the matter of being jerked around by the kind of people who think they have license to do that kind of jerking. The kind of people who don’t understand that just because I can be hired doesn’t mean I can be bought.
And there’s the fact of Myron’s murder itself. Sure, the guy ticked me off in Boston. He added to the ticking off here in Philly. I certainly could have done very nicely without ever hearing from him again after many years of no contact.
With all that, with his low-life character, his chicken shit manipulation, my personal dislike, he was still someone I not only knew for a long time but someone who hired me, or tried to hire me, to save his life. Which I didn’t. So I figure I at least owe him the courtesy of seeing that the right person pays for his death. That’s why I’m sitting in the Swann Lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel again, waiting for the real killer of Myron Hamish to make an appearance.
“Did you hate him?” I ask as we sit at a quiet table in the rear, nursing our six dollar beers.
“Hate Myron? Of course. The guy was a real dickhead. Though I don’t think I hated him much more than anyone else who had to work with him on a regular basis.”
“So why’d you kill him? Just curious. Call it intellectual curiosity.”
Joe Connors looks at me with those big-pouched hound dog eyes that speak of lost sleep and probably many more serious loses. You’d think after being released from the stress involved in the Hamish murder investigation, after finessing his part in that murder so cleverly, he’d seem more rested. I finally understand, though, that he will always be under enormous stress of some kind or other, and that true rest is not an option for the man.
“Don’t know what you mean, Bernie. Cops got their man. I read it in The Inquirer.”
“They got the killer of Lisa Sankerson. That doesn’t mean they got Myron’s killer.”
A very unhound dog look, a very penetrating look, flares across Joe Connor’s face, and is gone in an instant. He’s a big man, bear-like. If he ever really got riled I suspect he could inflict a fair amount of damage. Not to me, maybe. But a guy Myron’s size? No problem. A lot more damage than could be inflicted by a Ron Pinkman.
“Tell me what you know,” he says quietly. “What you think you know.”
“Myron was a threat to your company. He was riding too high. He was the kind of person who loved to have people by the short hairs and do some pulling. He figured he was too valuable for Bernstein to unload, but was behaving in ways that upset a lot of people on your little happy farm. Maybe he could even make a case that he owned the rights to market music. That could hit your bottom line hard.”
“Things are better now that he’s gone,” admits Connors in a voice that gives away nothing. “Some minor uncertainties about ownership issues have also been resolved. So what.”
“You love the company. Maybe you love Mitch Bernstein, too.”
“Oh, please. You think I’m a closet queer with the hots for my boss? You practicing psychiatry on the side?” He laughs. It’s an honest laugh. Maybe.
“I’ve heard things, Joe.”
“Yeah, well.”
“O.K. Here’s what I think. You were the guy who was jollying up Leo Diamond, not knowing that he knew your messages had to be coming from a top company executive. I don’t know why you were toying with poor Leo, but this intranet relationship gave you the opportunity to set up an in-house meeting with Myron in a way you thought nobody would know about or monitor.
“So maybe you just wanted to talk to the guy privately. Corner him. Threaten him. Maybe things just got out of control and there was a handy length of heavy cable. Or maybe you planned to get rid of Myron outside the office, somehow heard he was bringing in an outside bodyguard to watch over him out there. Me. And changed your plans to get the job done inside the Bernstein Building.
“For whatever reason, you did him at Bernstein’s. Then you learn from Clay Mason, and later from your pal Frank Ryman, that the list of suspects was very small. They thought it only consisted of the Fab Four. But you knew that number could just as easily be expanded to include Mitch Bernstein and youself, and that the police will eventually figure this out and start checking you out.”
“Sounds like I could be in trouble if that happened,” says Connors.”
“Could have been,” I continue, “except for an amazing piece of luck. Luck for you, that is, not for Lisa Sankerson. Ron Pinkman was bonking her, and Pinkman knew that if this ever came out he would not only lose his shot at being CEO of Bernstein Financial but lose his job, the prestige that went with it, and maybe face a nasty divorce. Pinkman actually thought he saw an opportunity in Myron’s murder. He figured that since he didn’t do that one, this was a good time to get rid of Lisa Sankerson the same way Myron got killed because than the real killer of Myron would get blamed for both murders. He was playing your game. Only you played it better.”
“Sounds too coincidental,” says Connors, slowly sipping his beer while continuing to scrutinize me closely, wondering what I’m going to do when my analysis finishes. “My friend Frank Ryman also doesn’t believe in coincidences. Told me so himself.”
“It’s still the motive I can’t quite figure,” I say. “God and country I understand. Bernstein and the mayor’s office I find confusing.”
“Mitchell Bernstein is a great man.” Connors says this with no show of emotion but with an undercurrent of absolute conviction.
“No shit.”
“No shit,” he replies. “I know all his quirks. All his games. The way he toys with people, even me, especially me. Under it all is a man with amazing abilities. He’s going further than Philadelphia City Hall, Bernie. Trust me on that. Maybe a lot further.”
“Ed Rendell made it from city hall to the Governor’s mansion,” I say.
“Bellisconi in Italy parlayed a media empire into the presidency of his country,” says Connors. “Lieberman won’t be the first Jewish President. Could be Mitch.
“You think?”
Connors shrugs. “Rocky took a chance.”
He leans across the table and gives me his most probing stare. “What you’re saying is nonsense. The Hamish case is closed. I guarantee it. The police are satisfied. Pinkman will only be tried for Sankerson’s murder and will get the punishment he deserves for that one. If he didn’t kill Hamish, and I’m not saying he didn’t, everyone will assume he did because the double murder theory fits perfectly. I have all this from soon-to-be captain of detectives Frank Ryman. It’s a lock.
“That’s the way it’s going to be, Bernie. Guranteed. The fact that I beat that fucking little Hamish twerp to death is never going to come out. Never.”
Connors looks like he’s having trouble breathing. His face has gone blotchy. It takes him almost a full minute to regain control. To look at me again with his hound dog cool.
“So now let me ask you a question,” he says. “A hypothetical question. How does someone like you feel about someone who kills a person like Myron Hamish?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“You kill my friend, you even hurt my friend, I get you no matter what. Eye for an eye with a few teeth pulled along the way. Someone else gets killed who’s not a friend, I mostly leave it to the authorities.”
“Myron Hamish was a friend of yours?”
“Not so you’d notice,” I answer. “Fact is, I always had him pegged the way you did. A dickhead.”
Connors leans back in his chair and I’m favored with one of his sad little smiles. “You do consulting work?” he asks.
“Who doesn’t.”
“I was impressed by what you did for us with the Fab Four. I think there might be some regular consulting we could throw your way.”.
“I’m listening.”
“Let’s say you had a different company name. Something that doesn’t easily link you to our recent business dealings.”
“Like Chaco International.”
“Chaco what?”
“You know. Like the Chaco War between Paraguay and Chile in the 1930s.”
“Right. That Chaco. You do totally independent research in any field you think might help our company. Something really interesting develops from this research, you call me. Otherwise, just keep working without calling me for, say, five days a month at $500 a day.”
Connors reaches in his pocket and takes out a small note pad. Writes a name and mailing address on a sheet of paper. Tears it out and passes it across the table.
“Send your monthly Chaco bills to this women in our accounting department. I’ll tell her to expect them. We have a fund set aside for special outside consulting projects. I control its budget. Your monthly billing will slide right through.”
Connors, a big roundish man who always slouches and never looks happy, gets up and puts on his coat. He’s the perfect factotum. Smart. Ruthless. Utterly loyal. Willing to do whatever it takes to help his chosen master move ahead.
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again, Bernie. You’re a nice guy and I’ll be sure to put in a word with Frank Ryman to get the police off your butt. But helping with Mitch’s campaign and getting him settled in City Hall means spending a lot of time with important people. And you’re a nobody. No offense.”
“None taken,” I say.
Connors drops a fifty on the table to cover our twelve dollar beer tab and walks away without another word or a handshake. He’s thinking our business is done. He’s wrong.
Pam has set me up with a guy who does body wires. A guy who rigs the listening devices the police use to get evidence, and more frequently these days, that private parties use to record tidbits they want to use against folks who don’t know when to keep their mouths shut. Connors, smart guy that he is, would never make something that sounds like a confession to somebody he respects. But to a nobody, a freelance intellectual he’s putting on his pad, why not?
I’m an easy guy to underestimate. People do it all the time.
So one copy of my little recording goes to Ryman at the Roundhouse and one goes to the city editor of The Inquirer. Ryman will hate getting his copy but will know he has to reopen the Hamish case because the note that comes with the tape says a copy has also been sent to the newspapers.
A more thorough investigation will nail Connors for Myron’s murder. Mitch Bernstein’s dream of becoming mayor will die because one killer among his top executives is excusable but two suggests a schmuck at the top. Ryman’s promotion to capitain will be delayed or may never happen—though I hear through the grapevine that he’s getting married again, which might ease the pain. Libby will get a laugh out of all of this. Pam will raise her flask to a rare triumph of justice in a fundamentally unjust world. Jay will probably turn the tale into a poem.
Me? I’m sorry to not to be taking any more of Connor’s money. Truth be told I’m broke, with no other prospects in sight.
This being so, why do I feel so good? Maybe because this time around, big guys lose, little guy wins.
