But she held the road, the old Dart. She held the road for dear life. Her rear tires flew wide. I fought with the wheel, muscled them straight. The Dodge righted herself onto Ninetieth as a little red BMW swung around the corner of Fifth Avenue and headed toward me. The BMW screeched. It lurched toward the line of parked cars to the left. It halted. I kept barreling toward it. I had a quick glimpse of a young executive type sitting behind the windshield. I saw him scream like the girl in a Dracula movie and throw his arms up in front of his face.
I hit the brake. The Dodge didn’t even slow down. It skated over the road toward the BMW. About ten yards from the screaming exec, my faithful jalopy touched down with a sound like an elephant sliding over a chalkboard. I threw the wheel and slid just past the BMW to the right. Came to a stop right beside it, in the center of the road.
I looked at my watch. It was 11:17. I had forty-three minutes. And then that son of a bitch down on Crosby Street would start killing in his not-very-pretty way.
I snapped the Dodge’s door open. It slammed into the side of the BMW, chipping the paint. I slid out fast.
Young Mr. Executive started to come out after me.
“What the fuck’s the matter …”
I slammed his door, forcing him back inside.
“Shut up,” I said.
I went around the Dodge, leapt onto the sidewalk, and headed up the steps to Wexler’s town house.
He was waiting for me. He must have known—or I feared—that this was one of the ways it could go.
As I reached the top of the stoop, the maid in the black uniform opened the door for me. I nearly knocked her down as I pushed past her into the front hall.
In the shadow of the staircase that wound grandly to the second floor, Wexler stood alone. He was wearing a trim, elegant, three-piece suit. One of his hands was perched in its vest pocket. The other dangled down easily at his side. His legs were slightly akimbo so that one of his feet fell on a black marble tile and the other fell on a white one. The pouches of his cheeks turned upward with a slight, welcoming smile. His watery eyes glinted warmly with it. He looked the perfect host.
He started speaking the second I entered. “Well, John,” he said, a little too quickly. “I was rather hoping you hadn’t yet gotten quite this far.”
I wasn’t listening. I was striding toward him over the marble. Almost before he finished, my fingers were curling around his expensive lapels.
“I filed the story, Wexler. Call him off,” I said.
He swiped at my hands. I held on to him. “Let go of me,” he said. There was an edge of panic in his voice. He fought it down, steadied himself. He looked me in the eye. This time it was a threat: “Let go of me.”
I thought of slugging him. Then I thought of Chandler. My hands unclenched. His lapels slipped from them. He dropped away a step.
He dabbed at his suit with his fingers.
I lowered over him like a storm. “You only took her to get to me,” I said. “But it’s too late, man. The story’s in. ‘The editor of the popular newsweekly Globe may have had a motive for the murder of Timothy Colt.’ That’s my lede. Like it?”
He took a breath, drew himself up a bit. The panic was still there, just beneath his damp glare, but he held it at bay. “Very nice,” he said. “‘May have had.’ Very responsible of you.”
“I figured if you were in custody for the late editions I could change it.”
“Another scoop for John Wells, boy reporter.” He sniffed at me. He waved a hand at the maid. “That will be all, Terry,” he said.
Terry was saucer-eyed. For a moment she didn’t react at all. Then her body lowered a little in a sort of curtsy. She backed out of the room.
Wexler gave his full attention back to me. “If you run that story,” he said simply, “your friend will die.”
“What’s the point of that?” I said. “What’s the point of that anymore? It’s over, man. It was all for nothing. It’ll be in the bulldog for everyone to see.”
Donald Wexler turned his back on me. He took two paces away and turned. A rainbow from one of the crystals in the chandelier above us danced on his forehead. It settled. It trembled. So did he.
There was a grandfather clock in the hall’s far corner. I heard it ticking toward the half hour. “I always knew it would happen, you know,” he said. “I never thought I could keep it hidden even as long as this. I even thought … it shows how silly you can be, really. I even thought I would take it gracefully when the end came. Go quietly into obscurity and poverty … even death, if it came to that … and just be thankful for what I’d had.”
“It might never have happened. They might never have figured it out.”
He smiled. Wistfully, I thought. “Oh, but they would have. Colt would have, anyway. You don’t know what he was like.” He cocked his head to one side. “Or perhaps you do, John. You’re really so much like him.” He swiveled his profile to me. He paced away from the winding stairs, turned, paced back. “And when I saw that it had come, at last, when Paul showed up in the tavern and I realized that the day of reckoning had actually arrived, well, I wasn’t willing to go quite as quietly—to lose all”—he waved vaguely at the grandeur of the place—“to lose all this as serenely as I’d imagined.” He stopped, raised his eyes to me in a speculative glance. “I wonder if you would believe me if I told you that it wasn’t the money. Well, it was: the money, the position, all of that. But mostly … mostly it was Anne. Mostly, it was the thought of losing my wife Anne. I do love her, you know. When Colt and Paul got in that fight … the situation seemed to be tailor-made. I thought the police would just naturally gravitate toward Paul as the suspect.” He shrugged. It was a strangely frivolous gesture. “You know, it probably would have gone just right, too, if you hadn’t happened to be there. I couldn’t have known about that, of course. Even then, if you had just stopped … stopped worrying at it, John. Or if Geoffrey had killed you in the park. Or if you’d figured it out tomorrow instead of today. Then you’d have gone after Miss Burke, wouldn’t you, and … well, everything would be all right.”
I nodded. I didn’t give a damn. I despised him. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation. I didn’t hate him for having Colt killed. I wasn’t angry at him for holding Chandler. I didn’t even condemn him for trying to murder me. I just despised him—despised him for being weak and making other people suffer for it. Colt, Chandler, me. Eleanora. I thought of her screaming, dying for Wexler’s weakness. I felt nothing for him but disdain.
Because he was weak, he had lied. Even before Sentu, he had filed that phony story, pretended to infiltrate a cult when he hadn’t. He’d gotten himself fired, disgraced. He’d had to go to Sentu to redeem himself. But no matter how far he went, he was still the same. When the rebels had broken through the army lines, when they’d headed for the city of Mangrela, Wexler had been in Jacobo with Colt. They’d both planned to return to Mangrela, Colt to rescue Eleanora, Wexler to cover the city’s downfall. Colt returned. He’d been terrified, he’d nearly been killed, but he returned. Wexler had said he would follow. But when Paul arrived in Jacobo with Eleanora a week later, Wexler was still there. By that time, the passage between the two cities was slow and dangerous even for someone with Paul’s connections. Wexler could not have made it to Mangrela and back in such a short time. He must never have returned to the capital.
He must have decided not to risk his life for the story. And that was fine. No one expected him to. No one would have held it against him.
But then he filed the story anyway. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for his series on the fall of Mangrela. He had won the Pulitzer and regained his reputation and come back to a fine job and a marriage to a socialite and the inheritance of millions because he had filed on the fall of Mangrela. Another faked story, like the one on the cult. Only this time, he’d gotten away with it. He’d gotten away with it because, in a way, it wasn’t really faked at all. When Wexler, too frightened to go to Mangrela, got caught in Jacobo, he made hi
s way to Eleanora’s safe house, desperate to escape. There, he found her radio. He heard Robert Collins filing from the falling capital. He promised to pass the dispatches on and took them down. Collins must have kept filing until he died. Wexler must have heard him die….
And, when Collins was dead, Wexler must have begun to think about what he had.
He had a story. A good story. The last dispatches from Mangrela. Filed long after the airlift, long after the other Western journalists had fled. They were all his, no one knew he had them. Now all he had to do was get the hell out of there and file them himself.
That’s when Paul showed up with Eleanora. The minute Wexler heard her name, he must have realized he had a ticket to ride. He went to the rebels who had now taken over the city. He promised to tell them the whereabouts of the leader of the underground in exchange for his freedom. They went for the deal. That’s why they came for her in the dead of night. Wexler had sold her out … and gone free.
He’d gone free, and he’d taken a couple of refugees with him. A couple of the children. It was his excuse for leaving the others at the safe house, but maybe one of those—the one he’d called Geoffrey—was a fledgling assassin, the kind of murder-man Paul described. Maybe Wexler liked the idea of having a kid like that indebted to him for his life. Anyway, he’d brought them home and they’d become his servants. Maybe one of them was the chauffeur I’d missed at Colt’s funeral. Whatever. He’d saved their lives and they were forever grateful to him. They were willing to do anything for him.
Including kill Tim Colt.
Once Paul showed up, Colt had to die. At least one of them did—Colt or Paul, it didn’t matter which. The only thing that mattered to Wexler was that if the two got together, if they talked, if they realized they’d each seen Wexler in Jacobo, then both of them would have discovered what neither of them knew alone: Wexler could not possibly have written the stories that had won him the Pulitzer.
Wexler would have been disgraced again. Colt would have made sure of that. He would have been disgraced, and with a lot more to lose than the last time. The job, the wife, the money, the reputation. And, if Colt had kept thinking, he might have realized what Wexler had done to Eleanora, too. And then, Wexler might even have lost his life.
So he had to kill one of them. He didn’t know where Paul was. He had to kill one of them, so he sent his faithful servant after Colt, hoping Paul would catch the blame for it.
But I’d gotten drunk and passed out on the sofa. And I became a witness. And now I was more than that.
I fought to keep the disdain out of my voice. “Call him off, Wexler,” I said again. “I filed the story before I left. What have you got to gain now?”
“Time,” he answered immediately. “I still need time.” He faced me fully again. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He stood very erect. “Whatever happens now, I will lose everything. I will lose Anne, when she finds out the truth, and very little else matters. But if I can somehow persuade you to hold the story for one day, one single day, Wells, I will have time to gather whatever … liquid assets are available to me, and make my way out of the country. If I must live in exile, I would like to live comfortably. That’s not too much to ask.”
“If I hold the story, you’ll let Chandler go.”
He nodded. “Correct.”
“Right now.”
“Of course not. If you hold the story, I will call Geoffrey and tell him not to kill her. When I am safely out of the country, he will release her.”
I glanced at my watch. Thirty-five minutes left.
“It’s done,” I said. “Call him.”
“I have your word.”
“Yes. Call him.”
Wexler seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he nodded once. He gestured at me to follow and headed toward the draped entranceway that led to the living room.
He ducked under the drape. I followed. I saw the walls of gilded mirrors reflecting the marble statues back and forth at one another. Wexler was moving among the sofas and chairs with their scrolled legs and arms. Moving toward a little oaken table on which sat an antique telephone. I took two steps toward him and stopped.
Someone had come up behind me and placed a gun barrel against the base of my skull.
I raised my hands. It seemed like the thing to do. Wexler stopped and turned to me. He looked surprised, as if he’d just remembered something.
“Oh … William,” he said. “No, no, there’s no need for that. Mr. Wells and I have come to an understanding.”
“Yeah, William,” I said. “An understanding.”
The gun barrel was pulled away from my head. William came sidling around me into view. He turned out to be the guy who had chased me through F.A.O. Schwarz. He looked jumpy as a moth on a light bulb.
Wexler stood by the phone table waiting for him. William came up beside him. Wexler extended his hand, palm up. William gave him the gun.
“Thank you,” Wexler said. And to me: “I’m sorry. When I saw you coming, I didn’t have much time to prepare. I thought it best to have William in reserve. You understand?”
“Most natural thing in the world,” I said.
Wexler smiled thinly. He turned to the phone. He picked up the handset. I put my hands down. The grandfather clock chimed. Eleven-thirty.
Wexler stuck his dialing finger in the rotator.
The doorbell rang. Wexler tilted his head like a bird trying to get a look at something.
Goddamn it! Goddamn it, I thought. Not now.
It was the cops. I’d told Cochran to send them, and maybe I should have waited for them to show up. But now the timing was all wrong. They were the last thing I wanted. The last thing in the world.
“Who on earth is that?” Wexler murmured. Absently he began to replace the handset.
“Listen, would you call first,” I said.
“What?” He looked up at me, dazed.
That was all the time it took. The maid was at the door. Good old efficient Terry. I heard the latch click. I heard Gottlieb’s voice, flat and hard and sharp as a knife blade: “Police!”
Wexler heard it, too. For a moment, he seemed not to comprehend. In another, it seemed to wash over him in a great red wave of understanding and anger. He stared at the drapery that hid the hall. He turned and stared at me. Back at the drapery again. And then he panicked.
That, after all, was Wexler’s way: he panicked. He always had. He’d panicked when he faked a story because he thought he might not make it on the up-and-up. He panicked when he was faced with traveling through rebel lines. He panicked when he robbed Collins and sold out Eleanora. And he panicked when he saw Paul and ordered the killing of Colt. That was who he was, that was what he did. He was weak and he panicked. He panicked now.
The drapery was thrown aside. Gottlieb came charging through at the head of a wedge of patrolmen. He was resplendent in his mustard-colored jacket and peach shirt, his stocky shoulders squared, two cops striding on either side of him.
Wexler—his watery eyes wide—raised his pistol at him.
The wedge of cops exploded in all directions. The patrolmen dove for cover. Two dropped to the floor. One went skidding under a sofa. One went flying over a chair, went headfirst into a statue of a young man. The statue began to totter.
Gottlieb stayed on his feet. He stepped to one side, shoving me out of the way with his shoulder. At the same time, his hand shot inside his mustard-colored coat.
Wexler waved the big gun wildly. He fired it. It bucked in his hand. Gottlieb yanked out his detective’s special.
I stumbled against a chair, one of my knees planted in the seat cushion. Beside me, the statue tilted this way and that.
Wexler brought his gun under control. He leveled it at Gottlieb. The detective took aim.
I held my hands up. I screamed crazily. “Don’t fire, don’t fire, don’t fire!”
Gottlieb fired first. A black hole appeared at the dead center of Wexler’s forehead. The rest of his
brow seemed to cave into that hole from either side. Wexler skidded back across the floor on his heels. Then he fell over stiffly. He bounced on the floor stiffly. He was dead.
There was a second of silence. It seemed to go on forever. Wexler’s body seemed to rock, head to toe, as it settled endlessly. William’s mouth seemed to open and open and open on a cry of mourning, but the cry never seemed to come. The tottering statue finally fell with a crash. William cried out. The statue’s head broke off and it rolled across the floor: burrump burrump burrump.
Gottlieb shook his head. “Ooh, I hate things like this,” he said.
“Oh Christ,” I said. “Chandler.”
I started running for the hall.
“John, wait!” Gottlieb shouted.
I couldn’t wait. It was twenty-five minutes to noon.
If there are police, I will kill her.
My old friend, the murder-man. He was out there now, on his own.
I will kill her in my not-very-pretty way.
Without Wexler to call him off, I’d have to go after him alone. One sight of the police and he’d tear her to pieces. He’d said so, and I believed him. I’d seen the man at work.
I was out the town house door. I skittered down the front steps. The street was blocked with cop cars. It would take me fifteen minutes just to get the Dodge out of it.
I started running. Toward Fifth Avenue. Dimly, at my back, I heard a shout: “There he is, Officers! There he is! That’s the man who dented my BMW!” I did not slow down.
I could see as I approached the Avenue that there were cabs everywhere. They were heading downtown toward that gathering mass of Christmas-shopping fares. That mass that would soon have traffic on lower Fifth at a standstill. I reached the corner and held out my hand. Luck was with me. A cab pulled over at once.