“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.”
“But you were worried.”
“Wouldn’t you have been, if Dylan Riley had something on you?”
Cleaver chuckled. “Damn right,” he said. “Our deceased friend was a determined and unrelenting man. But not a blackmailer, I would say.”
They passed by the fountain again and cut away across the Park. The sky was clouded over now and although the rain had not started in earnest it soon would. They quickened their pace. “How you like the climate here, Mr. Glass?” Cleaver asked. “Remind you of the Emerald Isle?” They came to the Tavern on the Green and Cleaver said: “I hear you can get a modest drink of something here for as little as thirty or forty bucks. Want to risk it?”
They went upstairs and sat at a low table and a pretty blond waitress came and inquired with a singsong lilt what-all they would like today. Cleaver asked for a spritzer and Glass said he would have the same.
“You know what this place used to be?” Cleaver said, looking about the dark-timbered room. “A sheepfold. I’m not fooling. There was a flock of sheep here in the Park until the middle of the 1930s, and this was the woolly fellows’ fold, until old man Moses-that’s Robert Moses the master builder-ordered them out to Prospect Park. There was a shepherd and all. This city, man, this city.” Their drinks arrived and Cleaver lifted his. “Departed friends,” he said. They drank the dubious toast and Cleaver leaned back on his seat and contemplated Glass with a mirthful eye. “He was real disappointed in you, you know,” he said, with a playful, lopsided grin, “our pal Riley. Thought you were selling out, agreeing to write up your daddy-in-law’s adventures.”
“So he said. He knew nothing about me.”
“Oh, he did, my friend. He knew plenty about you. He made it his business.”
“Facts are just facts. You know that as well as I do.”
“True, brother, I won’t deny it. A fact is a fact is a fact, as the poet said, or something like it. Unless it’s a fact that somebody wants to keep us from learning about. You know what I mean?”
Glass could hear the faint susurrus of rain outside. He pictured an antique greensward and sheep at graze; it might have been a scene by Winslow Homer. Surely Cleaver had invented the shepherd of Central Park and his flock. He did not know quite how to take the man, with his gleaming grin and vestigial beard and black-and-white minstrel getup. He had the distinct, uneasy feeling that this seemingly rambling conversation in which he had become more and more deeply entangled was about everything except what Cleaver really wanted to say, what he wanted to find out, whatever it might be. He asked: “What did you write about Mr. Mulholland?”
“In Slash? Oh, nothing very terrible. His James Bond days of derring-do, the Mulholland millions and how he made them and what he does with them-that sort of thing.”
“And what did you write about the Mulholland Trust?”
Cleaver hesitated, tapping a fingernail against one of his big front teeth. “I know you have a particular interest there, Mr. Glass, what with Mrs. Glass being the head honcho-ess of the Trust and all. And now her son, Sir Youngblood Sinclair, is taking over the controls, so I hear.” He snickered. “My friend,” he said in his Dixieland croon, “you going to find it tough to write dis-passion-ately about all that. Ain’t that so?”
He gulped down the last of his drink; Glass had hardly touched his.
“Tell me,” Glass said, “tell me who you think killed Dylan Riley.”
Cleaver turned on him a stare of mock startlement, making his eyes pop. “Why, if I knew that I’d go straight to Cap’n Ambrose down there at Po-lice Headquarters and tell him, I sure would.”
“Do you think my father-in-law had a hand in it?”
“Why would I think that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you think that what Riley found out was something about him.”
“Maybe it was-you’re the one Riley spoke to, he give you no idea at all what kind of secret thing he had uncovered?”
Glass shook his head. “I told you, I thought at first it was something to do with me, but now I’m not so sure.”
“You got a secret worth killing for, Mr. Glass?” Cleaver grinned teasingly, showing a pointed pink tongue tip. “You don’t seem the violent type, to me.”