It took Sonny Patterson two hours and seven phone calls to get me out of jail. Most of the time I sat on one of the three bunks in a holding cell watching soundless reruns of Fantasy Island while he wheedled on the phone in the booking office for my release.
The last time I’d been at county was as a public defender the morning I met Hugh Paris. Nothing at the jail had changed, including the inmate population. Several trusties who recognized me from back then drifted past the cell, not saying anything but just to stare. I smiled and said hello and they moved on.
The sheriffs let me keep my own clothes but they did not spare me any other part of the booking process. I was strip- searched, photographed, finger-printed and locked up, all the while thinking, this is unreal. The worst part was the strip search. Until then it had never occurred to me to make the distinction between nudity and nakedness. Now I knew. Nudity was undressing to shower, or sleep, or make love. When you stripped in a hot closet-sized cell that smelled of the previous fifty men and under the indifferent stare of four cops, then you were naked. I still felt that nakedness. It was like a rash; I couldn’t stop rubbing my body.
I made my mind into a blank screen across which flickered the images of the day from Robert Paris’s casket to Aaron Gold’s fingertips dipped in a dark pool of his own blood. These pictures passed through me like a shudder, but it was better than trying to suppress them.
This entire affair began with the murder of one man, Hugh Paris. Now it was assuming the dimensions of a massacre. No one connected with the Paris family seemed safe, including, perhaps, Robert Paris himself. Had the judge’s death been purely coincidental to the fact that I’d begun to develop evidence that implicated him with three murders? Was there a gray eminence in the shadows directing events, or did the dead hand of Robert Paris still control the lethal machinery? Until that afternoon I had believed the investigation into Hugh’s death was closed. The killing of Aaron Gold changed all that. I was back at the starting line, but with this difference: I was exhausted.
I lay back on the bunk and closed my eyes. Maybe it was the ever-present atmosphere of sexual tension in the jail or just my own loneliness, but I thought back to the last time Hugh and I had made love. Once again I saw the elegant torso stretched out beneath me as I lowered my body to his, and felt that body responding, resisting, yielding. The image of his face came to me with such clarity that I could see the fine blond hairs that grew, almost invisibly, between his eyebrows. And I could see his eyes and in those eyes I saw, with more regret than horror, the face of Aaron Gold bathed in blood.
I sat up. Sonny Patterson was watching me from just outside the cell.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, I must have fallen asleep.”
“You look bad, pal.”
“I’ve had better days.” I rose from the bunk and walked to where he was standing. “Well?”
“It didn’t look so good at first. Two shots fired from the gun, and your fingerprints all over the place. Fortunately for you, the same neighbor who called the cops also saw the guy going into the yard, and it wasn’t you.”
“Saw the guy?”
“Well, saw a guy. Blond, about your height. Good build. Good looking. Couldn’t be you.”
“I do what I can.”
He lit a cigarette and offered me one. I hesitated and then accepted it. The last time I smoked I was eighteen.
“Incidentally, does that description sound like anyone you know?”
I shook my head.
“What about the guy you saw on the side of the house?”
I took a puff. It went down pretty smoothly. “It happened too fast. All I really saw was the gun.”
“You’re sounding like a witness for the prosecution. How come your defense witnesses always had such better memories?”
“Clean living, Sonny,” I said, dropping the cigarette to the floor and crushing it with my heel. The second drag had made me want to vomit.
“Well, that’s something I’ll never be accused of.” He smiled. “Hey, Wilson,” he yelled to one of the jailers, “release the gentleman. He owes me a couple of drinks.”
“I owe you a case.”
“No,” he said, suddenly serious. “You owe me an explanation.”
“Did you call Terry Ormes?”
“Yeah, she’s up in my office. That’s where we’re going.”
It was only around ten but if felt like midnight. Sonny brewed a pot of coffee and brought out a fifth of Irish whiskey from the deep recesses of his desk. Terry yawned, accepted coffee but laid her hand across the cup when he started to pour the whiskey in. He shrugged and poured me a half-cup of coffee, a half-cup of whiskey. For himself, he dispensed with the coffee.
“Now that we’re all comfortable,” he began, settling into his armchair and his affected Southern drawl, “why don’t you begin at the beginning?”
Between the two of us, Terry and I told Patterson the history of the Linden-Smith-Paris clan from the end of the nineteen twenties to the burial of Robert Paris that very afternoon. Patterson listened without comment, moving only to lower the level of fluid in the whiskey bottle now and then. There wasn’t a lot left when we finished.
He looked back and forth between us and shrugged. “So,” he said, “what crime has been committed that I can prove?”
Terry looked at him. “How about four murders, a burglary, and conspiracy to obstruct justice?”
“A crime that I can prove,” he repeated. “In the murders of
Christina and Jeremy Paris, the eyewitness is dead, the coroner is dead, and the deaths have the appearance of being an accident. The remaining evidence — the will — is grist for speculation but not nearly enough to make out a murder. And the trail is twenty years old. The officers who wrote these reports might be dead themselves, and you know as well as I do that their reports are inadmissible hearsay. The death of Hugh Paris-” he glanced over at me. I’d told him that Hugh and I were lovers. “Put out of your head how much you liked the guy. Let me put it as crudely as I can — a hype O.D.’s and drowns. No one sees the death, no traces of murder survive except in Ormes’ recollection. So maybe we can impute a motive to the judge, after a lot of circumstantial fandangos, but so what? The judge is dead. Even assuming he arranged Hugh’s murder, I doubt very seriously that he jotted it down in his appointment book.” He looked at us.
“Aaron,” I said.
“Yes, Aaron Gold. After I persuade the cops that you didn’t do it — and you didn’t, did you — ?” I shook my head, “what do you think they’re gonna conclude?”
“A break-in,” Terry said wearily, “that got out of hand.” Contemptuously, she added, “All the pieces fit.”
“Detective,” Patterson said, “cops are like prosecutors in this respect: we have to play the facts we’re dealt. We can’t engage in cosmic theories, because we’re bound by the evidence we gather and the inferences we can draw from it. You can’t expect me to put Robert Paris on trial for a murder that was committed four days after he died. All that the evidence will support in the case of Aaron Gold is a bungled burglary.”
“The perfect crimes,” Terry muttered.
“Exactly,” Patterson said, shaking the last drops of liquor out of the bottle, “the perfect crimes. No witnesses, no evidence. Plenty of motive — if the murders could be connected, but nothing connects them except a few bits of circumstantial evidence and one hell of a lot of conjecture.” He looked at us again and sighed. “Drink up.”
“Drink up? Is that the D.A.’s position on these murders?” “Jesus Christ, Henry, think of this case as a defense lawyer. Wouldn’t you love to be defending Robert Paris? With the case I have against him?”
“Paris didn’t physically kill Hugh, and he didn’t pull the trigger on Aaron,’’ I said. “The murderer is still alive.’’
“Then bring him to me,’’ Patterson said, “and we’ll talk.”
I said, “This is a police matter.’’
Patterson shook his head. “You know as well as I do that the police don’t have the time or interest to pursue this investigation. They’ve got their hands full. And as for you,” he said, turning to Terry, “my advice is that if you place any value on your career on the force, you’ll discontinue your interest in closed cases.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“I mean Hugh Paris,” Patterson said. “I’ve been known to bend elbows with Sam Torres. He knows that you’ve been assisting Rios, and he doesn’t like it. In fact, he considers it a personal affront that his subordinate would use police resources on a case that he closed and on behalf of a civilian.”
“Christ,” I muttered. Terry looked stricken and I knew why. A woman detective, even a good one — no, especially a good one
— would always be walking the line. A misstep could have disastrous consequences on her career. I couldn’t ask her to risk it for me.
“You’re on your own, Henry,” Patterson said. “Take my advice and forget it. Go away until things cool down. You’re not safe.”
“Then you believe the murders are all connected?”
“Of course I do. I believe every word of it. The rich are malignant.” He held out his empty coffee cup to me. “Now what about those drinks?”
I woke late the next day, having closed a bar with Patterson the night before. Terry had begged off early. Sonny and I remained, getting drunk, swapping trial stories and he complaining about his marriage. Boys’ night out, except that Aaron Gold was dead.
I went out for the papers. The San Francisco Chronicle made no mention of the murder, but the local daily put it on page one. I read it while the coffee brewed — burglary suspect, unidentified man detained and then released, no other suspects, would anyone having any information kindly notify the police.
As I drank my coffee, I wondered who there was to mourn Aaron. His law firm associates? A few ex-girlfriends? He had family in L.A. that he had spoken of maybe twenty times in all the years I’d known him. After all those years and all the people he’d known, I probably was still his closest friend. It disturbed me to think that he’d gone through life so alone. That image of opulent self-worth that he projected to the world was shadow play. My grief was real.
I needed to think, but the effort was painful; all the easy connections between Hugh’s death and Aaron’s led to a dead man, the judge. But there it was. Aaron had information he wanted to share with me about Hugh’s death. The man who broke into my house was also interested in that information — not gaining access to it — but suppressing it. He also had taken the only proof I had linking Robert Paris to his grandson’s death, so I’d assumed that Aaron’s information further implicated the judge. But the judge was dead. What difference would it make to anyone whether his reputation was ruined?
And then it came to me. No one cared about the judge at this point. The break-in and Aaron’s murder were the acts of someone with something left to lose should it become public knowledge that the judge had arranged his grandson’s death. And who was that someone? Hugh’s actual killer — the man or men hired by the judge to carry out the murder. Robert Paris’s death hadn’t really solved the crime. Hugh’s murderer was still at large and I believed that that person was more than a goon employed for the occasion but someone upon whom the judge had relied pretty often. Who would know about the inner workings of Paris’ staff? Only a peer who had frequent dealings with that staff. John Smith.
And who was John Smith?
I had done a little research on Smith, gleaning the few facts I knew about him from the back issues of the Chronicle and my conversations with Grant. He was eighty-one years old, unmarried, a banker by profession, and something of a philanthropist. Four months out of the year he lived in Geneva where he was associated with various banks headquartered there. He was also chairman of the Linden Trust and, by virtue of his control of the disbursements of that fund, was more responsible for the development and course of nuclear research than any other private citizen. He gave money to Catholic charities, had had a rose named in his honor, had never graduated from college. In virtually every respect his life was opposite that of his brother-in- law, Robert Paris. Yet Smith, who lived in relative anonymity, was by birth something that Robert Paris never became, a member of the American aristocracy.
Nor, apparently, did the two men like each other. There was never anything as obvious as a public falling out. As stewards of the Linden fortune, their economic interests frequently converged and were too important to allow personal feelings to stand in the way of greater enrichment. Nonetheless, Grant had spoken as if the enmity between the two ancient tycoons was public knowledge.
All this made Smith a potential ally. Someone in Robert Paris’s retinue had killed Hugh and Aaron. I could not interest the police in pursuing the investigation but Smith, with his money and influence, could. What remained was to make an appeal to him. I needed entree into his world. Once again I would have to rely on Grant Hancock whose family, though perhaps poorer, was as distinguished as Smith’s.
I picked up the phone and dialed Grant’s number.
Grant was at work. I reached his secretary who made it clear to me that unless I was a paying client I could leave a message. Finally, after lengthy negotiation, she agreed to give Mr. Hancock my name. He was on the phone a moment later.
“Henry, I was going to call you. I just heard a very disturbing rumor about Aaron from one of our classmates who was working on a case with him.”
“It’s true, Grant. Aaron’s been murdered.”
“Jesus.”
“And I was arrested for his murder and spent half the night in jail.”
“What?”
“And the same day he was murdered, someone broke into my apartment and stole the letters that Hugh had written to his grandfather. Aaron called my apartment while the break-in was in progress. He said he had information about Hugh’s death. Whoever was in my apartment — and I think it was Hugh’s killer — heard the phone message and tried to erase it. Then the killer went to Aaron’s. When I got to Aaron’s house, he was dead.”
“Wait — Hugh’s killer killed Aaron? The judge killed Hugh.”
“No, the judge had Hugh killed. An important distinction, Grant. The man who did the actual killing is still at large and probably in a panic since the death of his employer.”
“Didn’t you also just say you’d been arrested for Aaron’s murder?”
“Yes.”
“How did that happen?”
“I was holding the gun.” I heard Grant make a noise, and I explained how it was I came to be at Aaron’s house when the police arrived. I also told him that the police were treating the case as a burglary and that the district attorney considered any other interpretation of the events leading to Aaron’s death unprovable.
“But you think differently.”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid of that. I take it, then, this is not a social call.”
“Grant, I’ve respected your wish to be left out of this, until now.”
“Is that the sound of chips being cashed I hear?” he said.
“The police are prepared to write off Aaron’s death the same way they wrote off Hugh,” I continued, ignoring his joke. “I want to make contact with John Smith.”
“You’re obsessed with Smith,” Grant said. “He’s just a private citizen — albeit a rich one.”
“Money makes things happen,” I replied, “and if even you feel intimidated by John Smith, imagine his effect on a chief-of- police. Or the mayor.”
There was a thoughtful silence on the line.
“First,” Grant said, “you’ll have to engage his attention.”
“All I want is my foot in the door.”
“I’m going to put you on hold,” Grant said, and the line went blank. Five minutes later he came back on. “Sorry,” he said, “I had to make a call. I want you to call this number and ask for Peter Barron. He’s one of Smith’s aides at Pegasus.”
“At what?”
“Pegasus. Smith’s corporate flagship. A holding company.”
He gave me the number. I thanked him. We hung up.
A company that owns companies. That’s how Terry Ormes had described the corporation that held title to the house in San Francisco that Hugh had leased and was living in at the time of his death. Pegasus Corporation.
I dialed the number Grant had given me.
“Good morning. Mr. Barron’s office,” a woman said.
“Is Mr. Barron in?”
“Yes. Who may I say is calling?”
“Henry Rios.”
“May I tell Mr. Barron what this call is in reference to?”
“Hugh Paris,” I replied.
“One moment.” I was back on hold.
“Good morning, Mr. Rios,” a male voice said. For the briefest moment I thought I recognized the voice.
“Mr. Barron? I’m a friend of Grant Hancock. He gave me your number-”
“How is Grant?”
“He’s fine. Look, I have some information about Hugh Paris’s death that I think might interest your employer, Mr. Smith.”
“Such as?”
“Hugh was murdered at the direction of his grandfather, Robert Paris, and whoever performed the killing is still at large.”
There was a long skeptical pause. “I see,” he said finally. “Have you shared this information with the police?”
“The police take the position that Hugh’s death was accidental.”
“Oh, is that the position the police take?” His tone was mocking. Once again, his voice sounded familiar. “Well, Mr. Rios, I doubt that Mr. Smith is in any position to do what the police can’t or won’t do. He was deeply affected by Hugh’s death, and I think, at his age, he should be spared these speculations which would only make Hugh’s loss harder to accept.”
“It’s not speculation. I have proof.”
“Mr. Rios, give the old man a break. He doesn’t need to hear that members of his family killed each other off. Take your story back to the police or, better yet, keep it to yourself.”
Switching to a different tack I asked, “Who arranged for the lease of Hugh’s house from Pegasus?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hugh leased his house from Pegasus. Who was his contact there?”
“Pegasus isn’t in the real estate business.”
“I saw the lease.”
There was silence on the other end. At last he said, “Can’t be. Look, Henry, I really must go.”
“Have we ever met?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied, sounding, I thought, nervous.
“I know your voice.”
“Well, maybe we’ve met through Grant. Goodbye, Henry.”
The line went dead.
A moment later I was back on the phone to Grant asking him what Peter Barron looked like.
“I’ve only seen him a few times. He’s about our age. Blond. Handsome. Gay.”
Blond, good-looking — that’s how Aaron’s neighbor described the man he saw in Aaron’s yard the night of the murder. Was that also the man I saw? I closed my eyes, but I was unable to picture the face. Still, his hair — it was blond, wasn’t it? And I knew I had seen him somewhere before.
“Gay?” I asked Grant. This, too, seemed significant.
“I’ve run into him at Sutter’s Mill,” he said, naming a bar popular with professionals. “Did he say something to you?”
“No, nothing like that. Is there any chance I might’ve met him through you?”
“I hadn’t seen you in four years until two weeks ago,” Grant said. “Hardly enough time to introduce you to my friends, much less a cocktail party acquaintance. Do you know Peter Barron?” “I’m sure of it, but I can’t figure out where. He knows we’ve met, too. He lied to me about that and about Hugh’s relation to Pegasus. I think I’d better drive up to the city. Where is Pegasus?”
Grant gave me an address on Montgomery Street.
“I’ll call you,” I said and hung up.?
Pegasus Corporation was housed on floors thirty-eight, thirtynine and forty of a Japanese bank building near the Embarcadero freeway. I called up to Barron’s office from the street to make sure he was in, then I entered the building. It was close to noon and I explained to the security guard that I was meeting someone for a lunchtime conference but had misplaced his office number. I gave the guard Peter Barron’s name and he made a call.
“He’s on thirty-nine, sir,” the guard said. “Take one of the elevators to your right.”
On the thirty-ninth floor I played a variation of the same trick with the receptionist, a stern-looking young Chinese woman who sat at a desk beneath a large brass engraving of Pegasus in flight.
“Hello. Do you know if Mr. Barron’s gone out to lunch yet?”
She glanced at a sheet of paper. “No,” she said, reaching for the phone. “You have an appointment?”
“Wait,” I said, briefly laying my hand over hers as she touched the phone. “Peter and I roomed together in college ten years ago and I haven’t seen him since. I’m in town for the week and wanted to surprise him. Understand?”
She nodded.
“Do you know when he goes out to lunch?”
“Any minute now. You can wait here.”
“Okay, but — well, when I saw Peter he still had hair to his shoulders and was as skinny as a pole. I’m not sure I’d recognize him.”
She nodded again as gravely as if I were administering a quiz. Or maybe it was my antiquity that intimidated her. Her own college years could hardly be more than a few months behind her.
“Can you describe him to me?” I asked.
She looked at the wall behind me, thinking. “He’s about six feet,” she began hesitantly, “blond hair and blue eyes. Nice build.” She giggled. “Very handsome.”
Her description added nothing to what Grant had already told me and it fit about ten thousand men in the financial district alone.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll sit here with a magazine pulled up over my face and wait for Peter. You just carry on with your job. All right?”
“All right,” she said and answered a call.
I looked at my watch. It was twelve-five. Six minutes later, behind a flock of secretaries, a blond man stepped into the room from a door beside the receptionist’s desk. I recognized him at once. He informed the receptionist that he would be out for the rest of the day.
She replied loudly, “Thank you, Mr. Barron.”
He started walking out into the corridor. I put my magazine down and fell into step beside him.
“Hello, Peter.”
He glanced at me and stopped. “Henry. I was just going to pay you a visit.”
He spoke in the same soft reasonable tone of voice with which he had addressed me only three weeks earlier, the night he and his three friends abducted me as I was leaving Grant Hancock’s apartment and shot me up with sodium pentothal. Peter was the one who wielded the needle and told me he wanted information for his employer, who I had then thought was Robert Paris.
“You work for Smith,” I said.
“You’re surprised?”
“It doesn’t make sense to me, especially if you also killed Aaron Gold.”
“Killed who?”
“You killed Hugh Paris and you killed Aaron Gold.”
“Henry,” he said with a small, hurt smile. “I have never killed anyone and as for our last meeting, you might at least give me a chance to explain.”
“One doesn’t explain away two murders.”
He sighed impatiently, “Damn it, Henry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. All right, Hugh was murdered, but not by me. This other guy I’ve never even heard of.”
My curiosity overcame me. “Then who killed Hugh?”
He shook his head. “We — Mr. Smith and I — have been trying to find out. I don’t know. That’s why I — what did you call it
— abducted you — that night.”
I looked at him. We were standing in the corridor while people rushed around us. He seemed calm and rational for someone just accused of two murders. I, by contrast, was beginning to sound hysterical even to myself. And he worked for Smith. Smith, in my scheme of things, was a good guy.
Perhaps sensing my uncertainty he said, “There’s a lot I have to tell you about Hugh’s death, Henry, and you have the most urgent right to know. You were his lover.”
“How did you know that?” I demanded.
“We’ve been working the same field. You know about me. I know about you.” He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “I’m gay, too, Henry. I understand.”
I didn’t want to believe him but no one, not even Grant, had acknowledged my right to grieve. The weight of Hugh’s death and the frustration I felt at not knowing who killed him all closed in on me. I brushed aside a tear. Barron tactfully looked away.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
We walked to an elevator and stepped inside.
“What exactly do you do for Smith?” I asked.
He reached his hand into his jacket, pulling out a gun.
“Special assignments,” he replied. “Now, we’re going down to the garage, and then we’ll get off, you first with me following. You behave yourself, Henry, and maybe I’ll let you live.”
I looked into his eyes, felt his breath on my face. He smiled and then stepped behind me, against the wall of the elevator.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “You killed Hugh and Aaron Gold.”
“An interesting thought,” he said. “But why would I’ve done that? Who was I working for?”
“Maybe no one,” I replied. “You might just be a freelance psychopath.”
“Let’s not call names,” he said nudging the nozzle of the gun into the small of my back.
At that moment the elevator stopped. A dozen people crowded on. The gun pressed harder against my back.
I clenched my hands into fists. “This man’s got a gun,” I shouted and jerked away from Barron.
A woman screamed.
“Get him,” someone shouted.
The elevator stopped again. The doors flew open. Barron pushed his way to the front as hands reached out trying to stop him. He broke clean and ran down the corridor. Perhaps aware that he was still armed, no one followed. The elevator door closed.
“Who was he?” a man asked me.
“A nut with a gun,” I replied.
Three hours later I was sitting on the floor in Grant Hancock’s apartment drinking a glass of wine while he went to the door to pay for a delivery of Chinese food. He took the small white cartons from a brown bag and set them on a tea tray between us. We opened them up and ate from them with wooden chopsticks.
I had just told him that after getting the names of the other people on the elevator I’d gone to the police.
“What did they do?”
“What cops always do, they took a report and promised to look into it. By the time that report reaches the appropriate desk, Peter Barron could be in Tierra del Fuego.”
Grant chewed a bit of shrimp.
“I don’t understand why Barron pulled a gun on you. He works for Smith. Smith is supposed to be on our side.”
“Does he work for Smith? I mean, he does, ostensibly, but in actuality I think he was working for Robert Paris.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“But it fits the evidence. What I think happened is that Hugh contacted Smith to let Smith know he was back in town. Maybe he even enlisted Smith’s help in exposing Robert Paris as the murderer of Christina and Nicholas. Smith leased the house for him, probably gave him money. Peter Barron works for the security section of Pegasus — I think Smith might have entrusted him to keep an eye on Hugh and make sure he stayed out of trouble. In fact, I remember that it was Smith who bailed Hugh out of jail when he was arrested in July.”
“Are you positive?”
“Yes, I called the jail and had them check.” I finished my wine and poured another glass. “At the time I thought John Smith was an alias used to avoid notoriety by whoever bailed Hugh out.”
“Well, it is hard to believe there are men in the world actually named John Smith.”
I poked at the carton of rice.
“Anyway,” I continued, “Barron was supposed to protect Hugh but instead he betrayed him to Robert Paris.”
“How would Barron have known about the bad blood between Hugh and Robert Paris?”
“I’m sure Hugh told him,” I said. “It was a subject to which he often returned.”
Grant nodded.
“So Barron went to Robert Paris with the information that Hugh was in the city and that he, Barron, knew where Hugh was. Paris then paid Barron to murder Hugh. And that’s how it was done.”
“And Smith? Don’t you think he was a little suspicious about the circumstances of Hugh’s death?”
“I’m sure he was. He probably had Barron conduct an investigation. You can imagine Barron’s conclusion.”
Grant put down the carton from which he’d been eating. “And Aaron? Why kill Aaron?”
“Aaron worked for the firm that handled Paris’s legal work. He must’ve learned something very damaging that implicated Barron with Hugh’s murder.”
“Such as?”
“Pay-offs, maybe. Reports. I don’t know. Aaron never had a chance to tell me.”
“How much of this do you think Smith knows?” Grant asked, pouring me the last of the wine.
“My impression of Smith from reading the newspapers,” I said, “is that information reaches him through about three dozen intermediaries. Everything is sanitized by the time it touches his desk. He probably knows next to nothing about what really went on.”
“And you’re going to tell him.”
“Yes.” I picked up a bit of chicken with my chopsticks. “It’s strange that Hugh never talked to me about Smith.”
“From everything you’ve said, it doesn’t sound like Hugh told you much about his family.”
“That’s true.”
“He wanted to protect you. Knowing how potentially dangerous the situation was, he wanted to keep you out of it.” After a pause he added, “He loved you.”
Instead of protecting me, Hugh left me ignorant — and vulnerable.”
Grant sighed. When do we ever do the right thing by the people we love?”
When, indeed, I wondered, looking at him from across the room.
The next day I went back to Pegasus, this time to see Smith but I got no closer than his secretary. She, unlike the gullible receptionist, was not inclined to let strange men without appointments loiter in her office, She threatened to have me elected. Taking the hint, I went out into the corridor to ponder my next move. There didn’t seem to be any. Two middle-aged men in dark suits came out of Smith s office and passed. Their jowls quivered with self-importance, I watched them walk to a door at the end of the corridor — what I’d assumed was a freight elevator.
One of the two withdrew a key from his pocket and fit it into a lock on the wall. The door slid open, revealing a small plushly appointed elevator.
The executive elevator. Of course.
It would hardly do for Smith and his retinue to waste expensive time waiting for the public elevator or to endure the indignities of making small talk with file clerks. Smith would have to leave at some point, and, if I couldn’t wait for him in his office, I’d wait here.
So I waited. I waited from ten in the morning to nearly six at night, fending off the occasional security guard with my business card and an explanation that I was meeting a friend from
Pegasus’s legal staff. I thought that Smith might emerge for lunch until I saw a food-laden trolley wheeled off the executive elevator by a red jacketed waiter. About an hour later the waiter reappeared with the now empty trolley and boarded the elevator. Just as the doors closed I saw him finish off the contents of a wine glass.
At about four a few lucky employees began to leave, singly, or in groups of two or three. By five, the corridor was packed. By five-forty-five when it seemed that everyone who could possibly work at Pegasus had left for the day, the doors were pushed open and two beefy bodyguard-types strode out flanking a third man. The third man was tall, thin and old. The blue pinstriped suit he wore fell loosely on his frame and was shabby with many wearings, but he wore it as if it were a prince’s ermine. They walked rapidly past me to the executive elevator. The key went into the lock. I rushed over to where they were standing.
“Mr. Smith.’’
The tall old gentleman turned toward me slowly, examining me without particular interest.
“My name is Henry Rios. I have to talk to you about Hugh Paris.”
At the mention of my name, the old man raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch, indicating, I thought, either recognition or surprise. However, he said nothing. The two men closed ranks in front of him.
“Don’t come any closer,” one of them said, allowing his jacket to fall open, revealing a shoulder holster.
John Smith’s employees, it seemed, were issued sidearms along with their Brooks Brothers charge plates. I stepped back.
“All I want is ten minutes of your time,” I said to Smith.
The elevator door opened and he stepped into it. The bodyguards followed him in. I lunged forward trying to keep the doors open. “Ten minutes,” I shouted.
The same man who’d just spoken to me now lifted a heavy leg and booted me in the chest, throwing me backwards to the floor.
I lifted myself up.
John Smith was staring at me. He opened his mouth to speak just as the doors shut.