Shock to the system

23

The meeting with Dr. Glen Snyder was underly helpful but not a washout. He had no knowledge of any blackmail attempt by Paul Haig, he said, but he did know from his own sources that Paul's father had once been accused of trying to blackmail a state official and had barely escaped prosecution. Snyder knew too of Paul's desperation over his financial situation and his fear that he might lose his business. In fact, Snyder had prescribed the Elavil to alleviate what he called the "severe anxiety" brought about by Haig's financial crisis and the fact that his personal life was pretty much of a mess.

Snyder said the last time he'd seen Haig, Haig had seemed less stressed out. But Haig had made no mention of his money worries being over, and Snyder just thought the Elavil had begun to do its work. Snyder said he was saddened and surprised to learn in March that Haig had killed himself, and Snyder wondered at the time if either Haig hadn't gone off his medication for a reason unknown to Snyder, or some new crisis hadn't come along that sent Haig tumbling over the edge into hopelessness. The likelihood of murder came as news to Snyder.

I asked him whether Haig had ever discussed the other members of the Crockwell psychotherapy group. He said only in a general way. Haig talked about Larry Bierly, Snyder said, and how wretched Haig had been over losing Bierly, and how he attributed this loss to his alcoholism, which he feared he might never control. Snyder didn't say anything about a Haig family history of untreated alcoholism and I didn't bring it up. Snyder said Haig's bitterness over being subjected to Vernon Crockwell's homosexuality-cure regimen was deep, but Haig's bitterness over, and inability to accept, his own unconventional sexuality ran deep too, and Snyder considered Haig a deeply damaged man.

No doubt he had been, though he needn't have died young. Paul Haig had survived AIDS, and gay bashers in high and low places, and Vernon Crockwell, and to some extent even his family. But in a moment of terrible weakness and probably self-destructive revenge against his mother-Haig had reverted to a despicable practice his father apparently had originated in the family. The second time around, the act's consequences were even more dire than they had been the first time. Trying to blackmail a man hadn't just left an ugly cloud over Paul Haig's life; it had ended it.

Tuesday morning I called my credit-checker friend and said I would pay top dollar if she let me jump the queue in her work day and receive, at the soonest, all the financial dope she could come up with on these people: LeVon Monroe, Walter Tidlow, Eugene Cebulka, Roland Stover, Dean Moody and Grey Oliveira. I said I was most interested in Oliveira. I was told to call back in the early afternoon.

At ten A.M., I walked into Larry Bierly's room and said, "I know about the assault on Crockwell. Phyllis Haig was right when she told me you were a violent man. Paul must have told his mother some half-truths-a family custom among the Haigs whenever they weren't telling bald-faced lies to each other. It sounds like Paul made a habit of badmouthing you around Phyllis because that's what she liked to hear. But when he told her you had assaulted a man, he omitted the fact that he was there at the time and he was involved himself. And of course he left out the part about the electroshocks and the pictures of the Playboy bunnies and the sheep."

Bierly's little red numbers started going crazy, but he didn't call for the nurse. He looked at me big-eyed and said,

"Did you tell the police?"

"No."

"Are you going to?"

"I doubt it. That's up to Crockwell, and he seems disinclined to have word of the episode bruited about the Capital District broadcast-ad market at six and eleven."

"We should never have done it. It was wrong. I know that."

"No, Larry, you should never have done it. Why did you?"

He tugged at the IV tubing leading into his arm and shifted his muscular bulk. "Drugs," he said.

"Right, the devil made you do it."

"I'm really not a violent person," Bierly said, almost plaintively. "It was some kind of bad acid or something that Steven and I got hold of. And of course Paul was drunk. He hardly knew what was going on, I have to admit. I was the one who made it all happen."

"You could serve time for it."

"I know, I know, I know."

"And that's why you tried to dump me from the case, isn't it? You suspected Crockwell had killed Paul and tried to kill you in revenge for the late-night aversion-therapy incident, but you couldn't even fill me in on Crockwell's only genuinely plausible motive, because it would have implicated you in a felonious assault. Then when I stumbled on St. James and started getting close to that unpleasant part of the truth, you wanted me out of the picture-even if it meant Crockwell would get off scot-free."

He nodded and looked away morosely.

I said, "Larry, if you thought Crockwell had killed Paul and shot you, weren't you afraid that Crockwell would go after St. James too? You didn't even warn him."

"But Crockwell didn't know who Steven was."

"Surely he knew Steven's first name from the night he met him," I said. "And I knew a man named Steven St. James was involved, and you knew I knew it, and you knew I was talking to Crockwell."

Bierly sulked guiltily. "Who told you about the-incident? Did Steven tell you?"

"No, he refused. I extracted it from Crockwell."

"Oh. So now are you going to be able to nail Crockwell?" Bierly asked, brightening a little.

"He didn't do it," I said. "Crockwell didn't kill Paul, and he didn't shoot you."

"How do you know?" He looked badly disappointed.

"Because I believe I know who did do it. I want you to think about something, Larry. After Paul died, did you mention to anyone that you thought he had been murdered and that Vernon Crockwell had done it?"

He chewed this over. "A couple of people, I guess."

"Who?"

"Dody, my assistant manager."

"Uh-huh."

"Ed Chartrand, who I have running Beautiful Thingies."

"Right."

"Probably a few others."

"What about my involvement? Did you tell anybody that I was looking into Crockwell's possible involvement? Or that the police were?"

"Just Dody. I talk to her about a lot of things."

I said, "What about a member of the Crockwell therapy group you were in? Are you in touch with any of them that you might have mentioned any of this to? Or did you run into one of them?"

"Just Grey Oliveira."

"Uh-huh."

"Grey came into Whisk 'n' Apron one night recently-it was some time soon after I had dinner with you last week, I think- and I got to fuming about Crockwell. I told him a lot of people didn't think Paul had really committed suicide, and both you and the cops were investigating Crockwell. I might have exaggerated the situation a little. Do you think Grey had something to do with Paul's death?"

"Yes, I think Grey murdered Paul. And if he had killed Paul and had learned that the cops and I were investigating Paul's death and we suspected Crockwell, he could have buttressed those suspicions of Crockwell, first by sending the cops the therapy-session tape that shows a nasty conflict between Crockwell and you and Paul, and second by shooting you on a Thursday night, when he knew Crockwell would have no alibi, and then by planting the gun in Crockwell's dumpster."

"Jesus!"

"You played into his hands with your hatred of Crockwell, which blinded you-and me."

"But, God, what would Paul have had on Grey to blackmail him with?"

"I plan to question Oliveira about just that. An excellent possibility is, he's the member of the therapy group who Paul caught in what he described to you as a wild scene in a tearoom. Paul never told you who that was, right?"

"No."

"Did he say where it was?"

"No."

"But it happened during the period Paul was traveling once a week up the Northway to his psychiatrist in Ballston Spa, if my chronology is accurate."

"That sounds right, yeah."

"That's the route Grey takes home to Saratoga every day after work. Did Oliveira have much money that you know of, Larry?"

"I have no idea," Bierly said. "I don't think he ever talked about money in the group. Grey was always just kind of polite and reasonable. He was rather sarcastic sometimes, and I got the idea once in a while he was putting us all on

– especially Crockwell- and that he was just going through the motions of staying in the therapy program because for some reason he had to."

"I've spoken to Grey," I said, "and he admitted to me that that was the case. He went to and stayed with Crockwell because his wife asked him to, he told me, even though he had no hope for, or interest in, succeeding at being zapped straight. He struck me as being an extremely cynical man. In fact, I think he worked hard at portraying himself to me as a cynical and amoral man of a certain not-too-unusual type in order to keep me from suspecting him of being a hard and cynical man of another, rare type a man who kills people in cold blood in order to keep what he wants to have."

Bierly said, "That's absolutely horrible if it's true. Can you keep Grey from getting away with it?"

"I think so," I said. "But first I want you to get out your checkbook. Then I want you to call up Vernon Crockwell and apologize for trying to turn him on to farm animals, and tell him to get out his checkbook too. Then I want you to ring Phyllis Haig, taking care to catch her before noon, and tell her I said I want her to apologize to you for calling you a murderer and a buttfucker, and she had better get out her checkbook too."

Bierly stared at me open-mouthed for a long moment, and then he said, "If you say so."

At one-thirty my credit-check agent confirmed what I had suspected: that none of the former members of the Haig-Bierly-Crockwell psychotherapy group had any net worth to speak of, and that while Grey Oliveira's assets were proving harder to pin down, his cash flow was ample enough to suggest net worth well beyond what one might expect from a state employee who commutes to work every day.

I phoned a friend who grew up in Saratoga and still runs his family's restaurant there and asked if he knew Grey Oliveira. He said sure, Grey was a town fixture. Grey was not originally from Saratoga but had married into an old town family. Annette Dreher, Grey's wife, was a horsey-set Saratoga hostess and benefactress and an heiress of some means.

When I phoned him at his office at the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal, Oliveira flirted with me in his dry, crude way and agreed to meet me for a drink at six at the Broadway bar where we'd met the week before.

Then I dropped by Al Finnerty's office to fill him in and to ask to borrow some police equipment. end user