If I Should Die Before I Die (14 page)

“You gotta be strong to use pillows.”

By this time, I'd paid the check at the Roosevelt and we were out on Broadway in the daylight, heading south past a construction site where they were putting up another one of those block-long residential high-rises.

“Well, babe,” said Bobby Derr, “where do we go from here? It's your call.”

I'd been thinking about that too, thinking about the Counselor and what he'd said, and the Counselor's Wife and where the taxi had taken her the night before, and where she might be now.

She'd wanted to call it off.
I'm a hysterical woman who wants to have a baby
, she'd said. But that was before we'd seen the tapes, on McCloy's VCR.

“I want you to keep it up,” I said.

“Really?”

“But narrow it. McCloy.”

“Well, that'll cost you, babe. Or her. Or Camelot. I mean, I didn't know I was working a murder suspect before. That calls for hazard pay.”

I stopped him in the street.

“Cut it out, Bobby. Either that or I'll pull you off the case right this minute. You don't …”

“Hey!” he interrupted. Then he burst out laughing. Then stopped. “Jesus, Philly, have another cigarette, will you? I was only kidding around. Don't you know I'd work for you for expenses if you asked me to? For old times' sake? Besides, I haven't had so much free sex since high school!”

I knew this much about Bobby Derr: that there wasn't any old times' sake between us. As it was, I gave him my upcoming schedule and left him on the Broadway corner while I crossed the street to where I'd parked the Fiero. I had my hand on the driver's door when I heard him call out behind me:

“Hey, babe! I forgot to thank you for breakfast!”

Tribeca.

It stands for Triangle Below Canal Street, and that means a forgotten wedge of west Manhattan, underneath the Holland Tunnel, that up to a few years ago was a mixed bag of warehouses, sweatshops, light manufacturing lofts, and here and there a tenement thrown in. From the outside it still looks pretty much the same, and why anybody over the age of thirty, with a few bucks in his or her pocket, would actually choose to live there escapes me. But people do, a certain kind of radical-chic, I guess you'd say. Sally Magister among them. And to judge from Sally Magister's pad (if that's the word for it), I'd have to reverse myself and say there are few enough under-thirties who could afford the neighborhood now.

Sally Magister, mind you, could have bought the same space on Park Avenue, or Central Park South, or Gramercy Park. Instead she lived on the top two floors, with a roof garden, of a cadaverous, gray-stoned loft building in Tribeca, and she owned the whole building, which was why, I guess, certain features remained unchanged, like the huge gateless elevator, big enough to hold a Sherman tank and slow enough, going up, to make you feel like it was carrying one.

“How'd you like the ride?” she said, not smiling, when she let me in through a people-sized door cut into the enormous sliding panel of her landing. “I keep it that way because it slows people down. We all need that. People are too damn
agitated
in this city. Why do you think we've so many heart attacks, aside from smoking? It's because people are stressed out from noise and speed. The only rule I've got up here is no smoking. Tobacco, anyway.”

To judge from Sally Magister, her theory of the slow elevator didn't always work, although I guess there's no telling what she'd have been like if it went up and down at normal speeds. As is, she was perpetual motion and yak-yak. No beauty either. The features which made the Magister men good-looking in a sort of rawboned way hadn't worked so well on a woman. She was tall, even gawky, with carrot-red hair cropped short, freckles, big teeth, an ostrich neck, and she wore a denim overalls outfit with a sweatshirt underneath and leather sandals on her feet. If I didn't like her at first blush, she, as she made aggressively clear, didn't like me any better. Not that she was singling me out either. It was men, in general.

She might have made an exception for her sons. But that's a tough call.

Her place had a similarly unnerving effect. I guess you'd call it high-tech decor, in that there were exposed pipes and ducts everywhere, most of which looked like they belonged to the original building. The downstairs was really two gigantic rooms with enormous ceilings, one of which—the “office”—had been taken over by a work crew in painter's whites. The other reminded me of an art gallery. Its floors were broad squares of black and white tiles, and it was hung with canvases too large even to get into the normal-sized living room, great splashes of color except for one that looked solid black to me, but for a thin gray line which wandered down from top to bottom. She told me that one was priceless as we passed it on our way to a tubular spiral staircase which took us to the upstairs.

We emerged into her living room, which had been converted temporarily into the office and where the regular furniture had been pushed back to the walls to make room for drafting tables, stools and other art and photography equipment and where, she told me, the people were working on layouts for
Fem
.
Fem
, the so-called Woman's Magazine of the 21st Century, was Sally Magister's great claim to fame. She stopped to look, comment, and criticize as we walked through to another room, this one walled off from the rest and a little more human in dimension and content.

Oh yes, I forgot to point out that while I was there, I didn't see a person who wasn't female. Including the work crew on the lower floor.

“I heard you were cute,” Sally Magister said, gesturing me to an upholstered couch that had a scrolled wood backing that looked antique.

“Where'd you hear that?” I asked conversationally.

“I've got to tell you I don't like cute people,” she said. “Particularly men. Life's too short and I'm too busy. So why don't you state your business and tell me what you want to know.”

She sat across from me, first on a revolving wood stool that also looked antique, then in a stuffed chair, then back on the stool. Behind her was a massive fireplace with a broad marble mantel crowded with framed photographs, and there were more photographs hung on the walls to either side. To her left, on a pedestal table, was a life-size sculptured head of a young boy, the color of earth. The model, it turned out, had been Sally's oldest son and the artist—a little to my surprise, because it looked to me like a professional piece of work—had been the model's mother.

Which, Sally Magister would likely have said, was too cute a way of putting it.

“I made that,” she said later when she caught me looking at it. “I was trained as a sculptress. That's Vincenzo, age five.” She pronounced the name Italian-style, with a
ch
for the
c
, “Vincenzo the angel. My first-born, no longer the angel.”

As it happened, I never did get a chance to state my business as such. Having told me to, she did it for me. I was there to snoop, pry, dig into her closets.

“I don't like closets,” she said. “I like everything outside where you can see it. I also don't like intermediaries. If …” and she mentioned the Firm's name, “… want to see me, they should come themselves instead of sending a messenger. I'm only seeing you because La Marga wanted me to.” La Marga, it turned out, was what she called Margie Magister. “La Marga thinks you're cute. I'll tell you what I want. I want the magazines. The Magister Magazine Group. That's my life. For the rest of it, I don't give a damn, not as long as it doesn't affect what I'm doing.”

“So you don't care …”

“I didn't say I didn't care. I want La Marga to take control of the company.”

“Why is that?”

“Because she's a woman. I believe in women. Because she's smart, motivated, willing to roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty. The Jerks will run it into the ground. They've already started. The Jerks will end up selling off assets, and the first asset they'll try to sell is the magazine group, and that's mine. I'm not for sale.”

“I take it the Jerks are …”

“That's right. The Jerks are my brothers. They were born Jerks and they still are. Their father's creation. If they hadn't been born to money and power, they'd be selling stamps behind a post office counter.
If
they could pass a civil service test, which is questionable. And I'll tell you something else,” jabbing a large finger at me, “yes, I prefer women to men. I make no bones about it, I affirm it. It took me a long time to recognize that I didn't have to let men ruin my life. That was a long, hard struggle, believe me. And that goes for my sexual preferences too. I prefer women to men. You could have saved your bosses a great deal of money if, instead of paying people to pry into my private life, you'd simply asked me. I've nothing to hide. But do you realize the trouble you've caused some of my friends? Who gave you the right to harass my friends?”

“I'm afraid I …”

“I know,” she interrupted with a dismissing wave, “you were only following orders. That's all you men do: you follow orders.”

There seemed, to say the least, not much point arguing. I wondered, having learned to be suspicious of people who say they've nothing to hide, what she was hiding. I also wondered how the Counselor had known to send me instead of himself, and how he would have reacted if he'd found himself in the bear pit in my place.

“Let me tell you about the Magisters, Mr. Revere,” she said, changing seats again. “My father was the cruelest man who ever lived. He had no equal when it came to how he treated my mother. Her life was a living hell. People said it was because he was empire-building that he had no time for family, but that's so much nonsense. He married her for breeding purposes, pure and simple. Otherwise he cheated on her every day of her life. Not just with mistresses, he cheated on them too. And she took it, that was the worst part. She never fought back. He'd bought her, that was all. The best thing that happened to her was that she died.”

She paused to stretch herself in the comfortable chair, arching her head back into the cushion as though she was doing some relaxation exercise. Then:

“I've got to hand it to La Marga. Whatever she got out of him, she deserved it. I like to think she did it on behalf of all of us, all of us women whose lives he tried to ruin. What do you think of La Marga? I admire her, don't you?”

No room for an answer, though. It was more like she was interrogating herself. The more she talked, in fact, the more she talked about herself, and the more she talked about herself, the more it seemed like she was talking to herself. She'd dropped out of college, had gone to art school. By then, nobody'd cared. Her first two husbands, she'd realized at long last, had been attempts to marry her father, pure and simple. To make him love her, notice her. It had taken her four children and two marriages to discover that this wasn't going to happen, ever, and that all she'd done was make herself into a replica of her mother. That had been the crisis of her life, and once she'd understood it, she said, she'd been able to get out from under. At great personal cost, mind you. Then she'd browbeaten the Jerks into giving her the magazines, and her father had approved. Then she'd gotten married again, the first time as a mature woman. That it had been a mistake wasn't his fault, the poor darling.

This third husband, I knew from Bud Fincher, had been both younger than she and gay. Presumably that was why he got off as “the poor darling.”

“So there you have it,” she said.

Maybe my mind had wandered, or at least my line of vision. That was when she caught me looking at the head of her son, Vincent, the one-time angel.

“What about your children?” I asked.

“Well, what about them?” she answered sharply.

By this time she was back on the stool, perched, her feet tucked into a rung and her arms hugging her coveralled body. The Counselor had wanted me to focus on the children.

“Mrs. Magister … Margie … said you cared a great deal about them. She said you'd lay down your life for them.”

For the first time, Sally smiled.

“Did she really? What else did she say about them?”

“Nothing much. I got the impression you wanted them to inherit the company.”

“Well, that would be up to them, wouldn't it? How much they wanted it. How hard they worked for it.”

“Well, do they?”

“Do they what?”

“Do they want it?”

I knew, from Bud Fincher's reports, that Sally's oldest child—the one she called Vincenzo—worked in the company. Or had. In fact, he'd been in and out, most recently as circulation manager of one of the other magazines than
Fem
. The three younger ones were still in school.

“If you want to know that, I suppose you'll have to ask them,” she said, looking away from me. “But why is that important?”

I shrugged.

“I guess it isn't,” I said. “But Mrs. Magister … Margie … seemed to think it was.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Well, she said that's what your father would have wanted.”

“Is that what she said?”

“That's what she said.”

For some reason, she seemed to find this funny. She laughed aloud, toothily, then uncoiled her body, got off the stool perch, and, turning toward the pictures behind her, said:

“Well, there they are. My little darlings. Not so little anymore.”

I got up off the couch and looked with her while she gestured and described. The photos spanned a couple of decades and they were snapshots in style, the kind you'd find in any family album except that here they'd been mounted in frames and hung on the wall. There were pictures of babies, of Sally holding them, pictures of the boys in short pants and Sally and her one daughter in a white dress with puffy skirt and petticoats showing, pictures mostly in outdoor summer settings, on sailboats and docks, the kids on water skis or posing on the front steps of a big, Victorian-style mansion. There were a few winter scenes, one of three bundled kids standing next to a snowman wearing a black top hat, and one of a solemn-looking teenager in a school football uniform—that was Andrew, her second son—with the pigskin tucked under his arm. Sally described them with almost total recall as to where they'd been taken, at what age, and who else was there, and you'd have said, well, that's just a typical doting mother. Except for a couple of things.