Free The Lemur by Benjamin Black Page B

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