Free The Lemur by Benjamin Black Page A

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