Benjamin Black - The Lemur

The day had a bluey-green tinge and the coming of spring was everywhere in evidence. The trees quivered and there were fresh gusts of wind among the budding boughs, and the lake water shone like a knife blade. Glass loved this park, so grand, so generous, and so unexpected. Today, as always, there were joggers everywhere, and young mothers airing their children, or perhaps they were not mothers but minders, and the usual complement of crazy people and shuffling down-and-outs.

“How that book of yours coming along?” Cleaver asked.

“What book?”

Cleaver had a high-pitched, hiccuppy laugh. “Oo, you so coy!” he crowed.

“How do you know me?” Glass asked coldly. “How did you come to have Alison O’Keeffe’s number?”

“I thought it was your number, man. Old Dylan, he liked to think he was real organized but he sure could get his data mixed up.”

“You knew him, then, Dylan Riley?”

“Yeah, I knew him, the poor cracker.”

“What do you do, Mr. Cleaver?”

“I do what you do, Mr. Glass.”

“You’re a journalist?”

“Paid up and bona fidee.”

Glass had understood from the start that the Dixie slang and the cornpone accent were put on. Cleaver was making fun of him.

“You know Riley is dead.”

Cleaver made a gun of a thumb and forefinger and pointed it at his eye. “No great surprise, and he can’t claim he wasn’t warned. Riley, I’d say to him, you not careful, you going to get yourself whacked someday, boy. But would he listen? No sir.”

They came in sight of the Bethesda Fountain with its gilded angel striding aloft. Two little boys were wrestling by the parapet of the fountain, each trying to topple the other into the water, while a bored young woman with an Eastern European pallor looked on listlessly.

“See, what it is,” Cleaver said, as if continuing a topic already opened, “I wrote some things about your Mr. Mulholland for Slash- ” He broke off. “You know that magazine, man, that Slash? No? It’s good. Small, sure, but it’s sharp, like you might guess from the name. Anyways, I got leaned on pretty hard for those things I wrote. Yeah, pretty hard.”

A large dark bird flew down swiftly from the trees on their right and skimmed the footpath with wings outspread.

“What do you mean, leaned on?” Glass asked.

“Oh, you know. Silence all of a sudden from certain quarters that used to be real noisy. Commissions canceled with no reason given. Phone calls at four in the morning with nobody saying anything, only breathing real heavy. You get my drift?”

“And you think Mr. Mulholland was behind these things?”

“It’s a fair bet, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t.”

Cleaver found this funny and did his hee-haw laugh. “Fact,” he said, “I was planning to write a book about him. Ain’t that a coincidence, you and me both on the same track? ’Cept my book would have been different from yours, I’m guessing.”

“You were going to write a biography of Mr. Mulholland?”

“Not exactly. More a expose, you might say. I been real interested in him for a long time. And in Charles Varriker, his guy that died all those years ago. Dylan Riley, he was helping me. I hired him, like you did.” So, Glass thought, that’s how Riley happened to have all those facts at his fingertips about Big Bill. “Yeah, he was in on it with me for a while, until I gave it up, under all that pressure from persons unknown. And now he’s dead. There’s another coincidence.”

They came to the Bow Bridge and set off across it, toward the Ramble.

“What’s your interest in Charles Varriker?” Glass asked.

“Well, he’s the main man in the story of Big Bill’s financial recovery way back then in the bad old eighties, ain’t he? He was the one Big Bill brought in to save Mulholland Cable when Mr. Bankruptcy began to beckon. Now Varriker, what I know of him, wasn’t the kind of man who’d let himself get so low there wasn’t nothing for it but to eat a gun.”

“You think his death wasn’t suicide?”

“What you think?”

They had come to the middle of the bridge, and Cleaver stopped and turned his head to look both ways along the water. “Handsomest spot in all Manhattan,” he said. “You know this bridge was built by the same company that made the dome of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.? That’s the kind of thing I know, see. Useless information that one day suddenly becomes useful. Like knowing, for instance, that on the day before the day that Charles Varriker died-May 17th, 1984, which was a Thursday, case you’re interested-he bought a first-class round-trip ticket to Paris, France. Kind of a odd thing to do for a man contemplating offing himself, don’t you think, Mr. Glass?”

They walked on. A wind was rising and the trees on the bank before them swayed and hissed, swayed and hissed. A bundle of cloud was swelling slowly over the pinnacles of Fifth Avenue.

“Why Bill Mulholland?” Glass asked.

“How’s that?”

“Why were you so interested in him in the first place? Have you met him?”

“Never had that pleasure, no.”

“Probably you’d find he’s not what you think he is.”

“Which would be?”

They turned south, walking under the unquiet trees. The sunlight was fading, and the air had taken on a chill.

“Do you suspect,” Glass asked, “that Mr. Mulholland had a hand in Dylan Riley’s murder?”

Cleaver put on a shocked look and lifted his hands and wagged them from side to side. “Lordy, Mr. Glass,” he said, hamming it up shamelessly, “the things you do ask! And I thought I was bad-minded.”

“But do you?”

Cleaver squinted at the clouding sky. “Well now, let’s consider. I write some less than warm opinions of your Mr. Mulholland, and in particular the much-acclaimed Mulholland Trust, and all sorts of shit starts happening to my professional life. Then you come along and ask my late, lamented colleague Dylan Riley to do a little snooping into your father-in-law’s interesting and highly colorful life, and before you can say ‘dirty linen’ he gets a cap put in his eye. I’d call that suspicious, Mr. Glass, yes, I surely would.”

Glass felt cold suddenly, and buttoned up his jacket and shoved his hands into the pockets. Cleaver, beside him, was humming a tune lightly under his breath and clicking his tongue at intervals.

“Dylan Riley telephoned me,” Glass said, “the day he was killed. He had found out something. He wouldn’t say what it was. He tried to blackmail me.”

Cleaver threw back his head and hooted. “That Riley!” he said delightedly. “He sure was some tease. What did he try to hit you for?”

“Half a million dollars.”

“Whee! You can’t fault him for lack of daring. Half a million bucks! Whatever it was he found out it must have been something. He give you no clue what it was?”

“No.” Glass paused, and then said: “I thought you might know.”

“Me?” Cleaver looked at him wide-eyed, seeming genuinely startled. “How would I know? Dylan and me, we weren’t that close. He was kind of tightfisted on the information front.”

There was a light spatter of rain and they turned back toward the bridge.

“Whatever it was he stumbled on may not have been about Bill Mulholland,” Glass said carefully.

“No?”

“No. It might have been about me.”

Cleaver smoothed his moustache again, drawing down the corners of his mouth. “Well,” he said, “ain’t none of us without a secret of some kind. And Dylan sure was good at rooting out secrets. What you say to him when he tried to shake you down?”

“I said nothing. I haven’t got half a million dollars, and if I had I wouldn’t have given it to him.”