THE SHEEPFOLD
They
had arranged to meet by the Boathouse in the Park. On the telephone Glass had listened intently to Wilson Cleaver’s voice but had not learned a great deal from it. Black, he thought, from the jivey bounce in the tone and the way he dealt with certain sibilants. Self-confident, too, with an overlay of easy, almost languid, amusement. If he had been a friend of Dylan Riley’s he certainly did not seem to be in mourning. “Good of you to call, Mr. Glass,” he had said, with a lordly, laughing air. “I know your stuff, of course. Been a fan of yours for years.” There had been no mention of Riley or his death. All very businesslike. The Boathouse, noon. “See you there, Mr. Glass. Look forward to it.”
At twelve on the stroke he came striding along by the water, smiling and with a hand thrust out while he was still five yards off. “Mr. Glass, I presume?” he said. “Cleaver. Howdy do?” He was a young man, thin and tall with a sharp face and a big, exaggerated smile. His hair was cut close and he sported a sort of beard that was just two narrow black lines running down past his ears and along the jawline to meet underneath the notched chin. He wore a striped seersucker jacket tightly buttoned and a blue bow tie with red polka dots. Glass noticed his shoes, impossibly long and narrow patent-leather sheaths, the laces knotted into stiff and perfectly formed figure eights. There was something about him of the professional performer, but one from another age, a sixties stand-up comedian, maybe, or even one of those old-time zootsuited jazzmen with a horn in one hand and a reefer in the other. He was all movement, flexing his knees and shooting his cuffs and tugging at his tie, as if he were controlled by an internal clockwork mechanism, oiled and intricate. Having shaken hands with Glass he smoothed the wings of his sleek pencil moustache rapidly downward with the tips of a thumb and forefinger. “Let’s walk,” he said.
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.”
“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?”